Interview with Charles Baxter by Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais Page 1 of 4 Charles Baxter is a master of the mundane. His writing often explores the everyday events that ordinary people face: the emotional consequences a man experiences throughout his life because of a childhood promise; the inability of a person to feel at home or at peace in a new setting; the daily struggle of a single mother. Though Baxter is best known for his short stories, novels and essays on fiction, he began his writing career as a poet. Born in Minneapolis in 1947, he published his first book of poetry, Chameleon, in 1970. Another collection, The South Dakota Guidebook, quickly followed. From the first appearances of his fiction, Baxter received praise for his eloquent voice and wise, truthful rendering of characters. His books of stories include Harmony of the World, Through the Safety Net, A Relative Stranger and Believers. He first wrote Burning Down the House, essays on fiction, as a series of lectures for his M.F.A. students at Warren Wilson College. Baxter has also published three novels: First Light, Shadow Play and, most recently, The Feast of Love, a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award. Recognized as one of America's premier short story writers, his work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and The Pushcart Prize anthologies. Baxter teaches creative writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he lives with his wife, Martha. Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais interviewed Charles Baxter in his home on June 23, 2000. Jennifer Levasseur/Kevin Rabalais: You have said that you began to write fiction when you lost the knowledge of how to write poetry. What were you not able to do in verse that you thought you could achieve in prose? Baxter: When I started to write fiction, I wasn't interested in character or characterization the way I was in verbal textures. As a graduate student, I studied modernist novels, like Djuna Barnes's Nightwood and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, which are sentence-driven at least as much as they are character-driven. Those were the books that I emulated, but the fiction that I wrote as a result didn't do what I wanted, and I couldn't figure out why. It may seem as if I moved from poetry to fiction because there wasn't room for the expansion of characterization in poetry, but that's not true because I wasn't working with characterization in fiction in those days, either. Between 1974 and 1984, when Harmony of the World appeared, I discovered that I couldn't write fiction without learning some basic rules of characterization. Purely language-driven fiction did not work for me. I thought the fiction I first wrote had characters in it, but when I look at it now—on those days when I can bear to look at it—the first thing I see is that there are none. JL/KR: What do you find in your early fiction when you look back at it? CB: There's a visionary world powered by great anxiety and a manic exuberance. There are nightmarish features. Pasteboard figures wander through a world of excluded middles in cartoonish ways. When I wrote those stories, I thought I had many wonderful sentences that stood on their own. None of my fiction from this time is in print, except for "Verdi in America," a Donald Barthelme pastiche that appeared in Making a Break: Volume 2, edited by Robert Bonazzi. It was never reprinted in a collection. JL/KR: What moved you from language-driven to character-driven fiction? CB: My first ambition in this regard was to be less ambitious. I thought that since these grand schemes I had for brilliant visionary writing had turned out to be neither brilliant nor visionary, I had better do something else. The stories that I wrote as a consequence, those collected in Harmony of the World, are closely observed stories of the sort of characters whom I knew, people I had met in my twenties and early thirties in Minnesota, Michigan and western New York. When I sat down at the typewriter, I thought, "I'm not going to try to storm the heavens with this." I tried to put recognizable people onto the page: old Polish-American piano teachers; young women with unhappy love lives. I set myself a goal of what I call "recognizability," and that means simply that I paid more attention to visual detail and the actions a character takes under conditions of stress. I also was attentive to the ways people talked, which I had never spent a minute on before. I tried to write prose that was not grand, but serviceable. JL/KR: Do the stories and novels now begin for you with character? CB: All of it is character-driven now. I start with the characters and have some fairly clear intuitions about what the plot will be, but that's secondary. JL/KR: Before you begin to write, how long do you spend getting to know your characters? CB: I spend months on that, mostly daydreaming my way through it. It varies, depending on who shows up in the story. For instance, when I started writing The Feast of Love, I thought Chloé would be comic relief, that she would serve as a minor character who brightens things up when the reader has gotten tired of Bradley, Diana, Harry Ginsberg and the rest of that crew. But she had so much energy that, almost from the moment she came in, she hijacked the novel. Her voice caught me completely by surprise. It was a happy occasion for me. The first sentence of her first chapter came into my head and I thought, "Who is this person?" JL/KR: All the first-person voices in The Feast of Love are distinct and immediately recognizable. CB: I thought that if I did my job, the reader would know almost immediately who is speaking, just the way that if the phone rings late at night and you answer it and it's someone you know, you recognize the person's voice usually within the first few words. I didn't want to head each chapter with the narrator's name. That would be a failure of craft. JL/KR: How did you manage the multiple first-person voices while you were writing? CB: When I'm in the dreamworld of the book, these people are as real to me as people in my own life. When I finished one chapter, let's say a chapter with Chloé, and I was moving over to Harry or Bradley, I thought, "OK, what's Harry saying today? What's Bradley worrying about this time?" I would go into it. I can't explain to you exactly how I kept them distinct, but I never forgot them or how they talked. If I needed a reminder, I would go back to an earlier chapter and read it as a refresher. That was all I had to do, except in the early parts of the book when I first started to write in Bradley's voice. I had made him too acidic, too gruff. As I wrote more of him, I looked back at earlier material and thought, "That's not Bradley; he wouldn't say that." I toned him down in the revisions. JL/KR: Did it seem in some ways as if you were writing several different first-person novels? CB: In my final revision of The Feast of Love, the first one I sent to my editor, I wrote a note to the reader that said there are two ways to read it, either linearly or in a "hopscotch" method, which is to say that you could read all of Bradley's chapters, all of Harry Ginsberg's, all of Chloé's and all of Diana's. David's chapter and Kathryn's chapter would be free radicals. My editors persuaded me to drop that instruction. They thought it would be confounding to readers. But I still think you could read the book in the style of Durrell's Alexandria Quartet. I don't know quite what that experience would be. Some of the emotional impact might be lost. The book was not more difficult to write because of all the first-person narrators. It is the first novel I wrote using first person, and I loved—just loved—doing that. It felt like a great liberation. I didn't have any particular difficulty holding either the plot or the characters' voices in my head. From a technical point of view, it was not any more difficult to write than First Light or Shadow Play. The only difficulty I had was getting the voices and the tone of the novel right in the first place. I thought Diana and David would be the main characters. What I assembled with those two was something very dark, obsessive, erotic and serious. But that was not the novel that I actually wanted to write. And so I got stuck, and I didn't actually get free of that until I was in New Mexico at Robert Boswell and Antonya Nelson's house. One Saturday morning I was reading a magazine, and Bradley's voice came to me in this phrase, which now serves as the opening of chapter nine of the novel: "Sometimes I feel as if my life is a murder mystery, only I haven't been murdered yet, and I don't plan on being murdered at all, of course." That's what the novel needed, something that was comic and serious at the same time. The novel was never easy—it took five years to write—but once I had that, I could write it. Click to continue