An Interview with Bruce Olds
By Ramsin Canon
Bruce Olds is the author of three novels: Bucking the Tiger, an ALA Notable Book adapted for the stage a The Confessions of Doc Holliday; and Raising Holy Hell, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and an IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Nominee that was also named Novel of the Year by the Notable Books Council of the American Library Association and winner of the QPB New Voices Award for Fiction, and The Moment’s Lost: A Midwest Pilgrim’s Progress, also a Pulitzer Prize finalist. His nonfiction work has appeared in Granta and American Heritage, among other publications, and has been anthologized by the Modern Library and MIT Press. He lives in Chicago.
All the travails your protagonist goes through—from his farm roots to his journalistic success to his artistic notoriety to his ultimate destruction—do you see that as “progress,” in the traditional sense of advance? Or is it a devolution?
One of the standards that a lot of readers and critics and scholars use to judge whether a novel is a work of art or not—a serious work or not—is whether the characters change. It is my own conviction that, really, people don’t. By and large. And they certainly don’t change like they usually do in novels. Owing to some epiphany or traumatic event. I think people just become more of who they were originally. The older I get, the more I believe that. In a sense, this “story arc” notion of take a character from point A and guide him to point Z and “watch him grow” or “destroy himself” is one that I don’t find instructive of real life. But does the character grow, and change or evolve or regress? I would hope he does all of that simultaneously. But he has a center, and he deviates back to his own norm. All plots, and all people, as in life, all tend towards death, don’t they?
Pretty chipper.
And this is a Bildungsroman, which means it takes a character from childhood—birth really—through his adolescence to his adulthood, that seems pretty natural and fairly real to me. Does he change along the way? Does he become more who he is? That’s really a schematic way of thinking of things, and I write more organically.
So what is your starting point? I know part of it comes from your family history.
It wasn’t necessarily a burning need in me to write my family history, but I wondered if there was a story to be told from my family history. When I started talking to my relatives, they sort of all looked at me cock-eyed, ‘I don’t see where there’s a story here.’ And I told them, there may not be, but I need to find out. Originally, the book was going to be about the strike. It was going to be a strike novel. But as I researched it, I came across this character, Frank Shavs. Franklyn Shavs in the novel. That was really the starting point, this man. But I only had a paragraph of information on him, so there was a lot to fill in. I gave this historical persona a lot—really, a 99% fictional character. But as with any novel, he’s also the author. Any novel is autobiographical to some extent. I don’t care what any author says otherwise is lying.
Can you think of two other authors that have used the word “billingsgate” non-ironically?
[Laughs] No, I can’t. You know, it’s interesting, I’m criticized and praised for my vocabulary. Some people find it pretentious and showy in a negative way; other people find it enriching. As you can tell, I don’t use those words in common conversation. I apparently have a huge, latent vocabulary. And when I sit down to write, these words come out from Gods-knows-where. I mean, I do a lot of reading, and just like tunes stick in some people’s heads, words stick in my head.
I was taking notes as I read, and there were many examples where you purposely used words for the purpose of a string of alliteration.
The question is, do the words exist to be used or not? And how the hell do I know what words people consider a “big” word, or an arcane word, and what they don’t? I don’t know that. In a way, I feel like I’m rescuing these dying words—
Billingsgate is definitely a dying word.
But if I know these words, and they work, I’m going to use them. People say its artificial, it’s mannered, it’s self-conscious. But of course, the novel, any piece of art, is self-conscious. And anyway, the word choice is not self-conscious in my case. What is self-conscious for me, is to write simply. What comes naturally to me is writing in this sort of more baroque, “stained-glass” fashion.
There is a disturbing passage that describes the main character sexually assaulting the gay woman he is in love with.
Technically speaking, I like the notion of writing well, or poetically, or lyrically, about really despicable stuff. I’m not someone who has a problem with someone writing a beautiful novel about, for example, the Holocaust. I don’t think anything is off limits when it comes to subject matter. Just off the top of my head, Sam Peckinpah—the way he filmed violence. So, yes, as far as the reader goes, it’s a challenge to make your character loathsome at moments, and yet keep the reader interested enough in that character that he’ll want to keep reading—and feel some empathy in fact, as he moves past that.
The narrator seems to poke fun at some of the more “reporterly” writers of the time, the early part of the 20th century. Your characters discuss literature quite a bit, and are pretty hard on Theodore Dreiser. Not a fan of Sister Carrie I take it?
I really consider Dreiser unreadable.
And that’s the sort of Chicago tradition of the novel.
I enjoy Sherwood Anderson. But I find Dreiser just unreadable. And a pretty despicable human being. He was on the side of the Gods as far as social justice was concerned, but, I mean, he was just a bad writer, a tin-eared writer. He piles on reporterly detail after reporterly detail, in the hope that they will make his work live—but instead it buries it and makes it, well, unreadable.
He just collects as many facts as possible, and figures eventually he’ll have a story.
I mean, concrete detail is key. Absolutely. Specificity. But, good Lord, you have to be selective. In historical fiction especially, you have things you need in there, and things you don’t. I understand that in historical context, he was beyond important in literary history. I just don’t admire his sentences.
Tom Wolfe is in his tradition.
Well.
Don’t want to pick a fight with Tom Wolfe?
I’m not looking to pick a fight with anyone. I cut my teeth as a writer by imitating people. We all begin imitating those we admire. And eventually, hopefully, you find your own voice and your sensibility and what-not. One of those people I imitated and admired, possibly because, given his style, he was easy to imitate, was Tom Wolfe. I admire him tremendously as a reporter.
Would you say the New Journalism has its own place? Would you say it leaves too much on the table for what a novel can be?
Tom Wolfe, in my opinion, writes satire and parody—cartoon characters. And insofar as satire and parody have a place, Tom Wolfe has a place. He loves literary feuds—Updike, Irving and Mailer. He called them the Three Stooges. Moe, Larry, and Curly. Maybe I’ll be Shemp. I mean, look, he was very important to my evolution.
And that shows in your attention to detail and a desire to recreate a world.
And, I would hope, although I think it’s my own, in a certain flamboyance of style. Mailer is another one. Mailer is really someone I was reading early on in my development. Early in high school. And he is the one, I think, that planted something in my mind about the possibility that writing was something that could be important.
Talk about your attraction to historical fiction.
Philosophically, the thing that draws me to the history is that it’s not the present. The present is confusing, chaotic, and seemingly meaningless, or absurd. And, so, I probably will never write a “contemporary” novel. And science fiction doesn’t appeal to me at all. The past is where I always hung out as a kid—as opposed to the playground. That’s where I found my friends. I majored in history in college, and it’s just something that’s always been there for me. I know that almost sounds like I’m writing historical fiction as a form of escape. If I am, then the place I’m escaping to is inside myself, in order to bring these things out.
When you write historical fiction—you have a disclaimer at the end of the book that there are several things that anachronistic and fiction—but you’re constrained by the fact that there are things that happened in history.
It’s pretty complicated. Historical fiction can be thought of as a continuum. And far to the right would be “reconstructionist” historical fiction, where you are constrained by what you think you know—the so-called “facts.” And if the historical record says “Joe’s eyes were blue,” then you make his eyes blue. Far to the left is what some fancy types call historiographic metafiction. It simply says that those types of constraints not only don’t apply, but are there to be subverted and disregarded or perverted, toyed with, and if Joe’s eyes are blue on the historical record, this type of novelist would say, “Prove it!” And if they come back with, “Well, I have this article from the Chicago Tribune in 1874 that says Joe’s eyes are blue.” Well, that proves nothing. All that says is that the reporter thought, at that moment, to write that Joe’s are blue. That doesn’t prove anything. It’ s a much grander and much more subversive approach—it’s about defamiliarizing history as much as refamiliarizing history. I exist somewhere in the middle. I feel free to mix and match. I will ignore certain facts, I will contradict certain facts, if I want to contradict them. Where the historical record says nothing, I will create certain facts. And, I have all of those different aspects working through this novel.
You just do whatever you want, more or less.
You get a sense of what you can get away with and what you can’t, and there have to be good aesthetic reasons. I mean, I’m not random about it. In my first novel about John Brown, there are certain passages where I quote verbatim, for example, Thomas Jefferson, and I felt constrained in those sections. I didn’t feel free to have Thomas Jefferson say something he wouldn’t say.
It’s not fundamentally problematic Floyd Dell said a certain thing he didn’t say, but it would be problematic to say he believed something he didn’t believe.
Well, for example, I write that the Chicago Tribune was the most anti-labor paper of the time. It turns out it wasn’t, but I wasn’t really concerned with that. I needed it to be to make the novel work, and I put a disclaimer in at the end of the novel. I had Big Bill Haywood playing a critical role in the strike in the Upper Peninsula, when Big Bill wasn’t there—it was someone else. But I thought it would be to the benefit of the novel to have Big Bill there rather than introduce a new character.
The disclaimer was good because it kept me from thinking I was smarter than you, because when I thought I caught you in a mistake, it turned out you did it on purpose.
There are a number of historical novelists who will tell you, I only researched as far as I needed to before my imagination was triggered by what I read. But if I could be accused of anything, it would be for over-researching. Because if I’m going to violate the history, I want to know what I get wrong.
When you have a lot that’s very accurate, when you have something that’s not, you notice it. You think to yourself, “Okay, well he obviously knows what actually happened, so why did he pick this fact to ignore or change?” Do you feel there is something readers should take away from this book?
If the book draws attention to that time and place of American history, then I think it would have been worth it to write it. It sounds corny to say, that as I researched and wrote this book, one thing that kept me going was not only to shed some light on this time period, but also to honor my ancestors. As corny as that sounds. But I want, of course, people to be entertained. And maybe make some people run to a dictionary and look up some words they didn’t know—but only when they get to the end.