DM: Wait. Listen. Under the circumstances, would another Vonnegut recollection or two be out of place here?
LS: Of course not. Do, yes.
DM: Both anecdotes that come to mind involve me anyhow. The first goes back to when I was trying to find a publisher for Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Or rather when my agent was. Elaine, my ex-wife.
LS: And you had fifty-four rejections. For the work most people consider your most important. It’s still beyond belief.
DM: The most dismal part of it wasn’t the number of turn-downs, but rather the reasoning behind them. Editors who truly admired the thing, but then announced that it was too intellectual or too offbeat for most readers to handle. Or worse, places where the editor was, in fact, willing to take a chance, but then the sales clucks vetoed it. Trust me, it got to be pretty draining, after a while. This was back in the mid-1980s, by the way. And in any case, somewhere back along in there, there was this major international PEN conference here in New York, writers from all over the world. In recent years I’ve pretty much ceased to be a PEN member, but at that time I went uptown to sit in on some of the sessions. And at one juncture I was wandering down a corridor in the hotel — I forget which hotel it was — and out of the corner of my eye I spotted Kurt, backed against a sort of cul-de-sac wall, and literally surrounded by admirers — at least twenty or more. You know, probably younger writers from everywhere to hell and gone, getting a chance to exchange a word or two with someone they had previously only been able to admire from a distance. Anyhow, I just kept on walking. But then after half a minute, no more, Kurt caught up to me and led me on down the hall — urgently, almost. I don’t know what sort of excuse he’d made, to bolt that way. And what did he want? As soon as he found us a quiet alcove—“David, tell me what’s happening with that manuscript?” I didn’t even remember having spoken to him about the problems. But there he was, that concerned. Now maybe he’d been famous for long enough so that basking in all that adulation was something he could easily wave aside — but still, I found it extraordinary. Who the hell was I? Practically nobody at that entire convention had ever heard my name, at that juncture. But this was Kurt, who he was.
LS: All of us should have friends like that.
DM: But that’s part of the point there too. He and I weren’t even ever that close, though it would turn out that I’d see a good deal more of him in subsequent years. He was always that way. That second incident I had in mind was only three years ago or so. He was doing a gig at that enormous Barnes and Noble in Union Square. And the place was just mobbed, I mean to the extent that they’d actually had to lock the front doors some hours before it started. I was sitting a little behind and to the side of him, with a couple of others, waiting to go to dinner afterward, and I had a classic view of the kids lined up to get books signed, and it was utterly astonishing. They were being rushed through by the security people, guards snatching their books and slapping them down for Kurt to autograph, no conversation permitted, no requesting please make it “For Evelyn,” just snatch, slap, accept it back, and down the nearby escalator you go. But I kept gauging their faces. As I said, again relatively young people, most of them. And it wasn’t the predictable look of excitement or admiration you’d see with virtually any other famous author, or even awe, but I swear, there was something almost religious-seeming in it. Is that a ridiculous exaggeration? The more reasonable word I’m looking for is “devotion,” maybe. Which probably comes closest to what they felt for him. At any rate, this had been going on for an eternity, and with Kurt eventually in a state of near exhaustion, when a voice came wafting back up from the escalator well, one of the women who’d been shunted down by security: “God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut!” It was unimaginably moving. Not just the sentiment, but the allusion to that title of Kurt’s also. Then a while later, when we ourselves were finally leaving — in our case, via an elevator — I asked Kurt if he’d heard it. And when he said he hadn’t, and I started to tell him about it, he immediately cut me off. “Wait, listen, that reminds me—“ and he commenced to tell me about something kind he’d heard someone say about one of my books. How do you match that? Believe me, there may have been better writers in his time than Kurt — well, we know there were — but surely there couldn’t have been many more generous human beings.
LS: I’ll indicate a short pause here, in the transcript. But let me praise Markson for a moment, too. Why are you so good at portraying women? Not just the two in Going Down, or all three in Springer—his wife, the one he has the affair with, the old girlfriend who dies — and not even just Kate, whose monologue comprises the sum total of Wittgenstein’s Mistress. I noticed it even when rereading your so-called “entertainments” recently, more than one in each book.
DM: Thank you. You’re sweet too.
LS: Come on, an answer.
DM: I don’t have one. I’m pretty sure I was asked that in an interview once before. And all I could say was, could it be because I simply like women? Which would mean, I guess, that I pay attention to them. But the gal in my life at the present moment would probably burst out laughing at the notion. She’s convinced I no longer pay attention to much of anything.
LS: Don’t you? Because that brings me to another question I’d had in mind. You’ve been quoted as saying you no longer read fiction. Is that still true? And if so, why?
DM: Still, yes. To a great extent. And here again, no answer. Undeniably, some of the most memorable aesthetic experiences in my life have had to do with novels. To make a bad joke, I’m not even sure I ever responded to a woman at the same depths to which I responded to Ulysses or to Under the Volcano. Or The Possessed. But somehow in recent years they just stopped evoking that older sort of resonance for me. Is it age? Is it possible to have simply read too damned many of the things? And a more subtle question here, that equally troubles me. What has my inability to read novels had to do with the way I myself have been writing over that same period, these books in which I leave out so much of the traditional stuff of fiction — plot, background, incident, description, whatever? Again, I’m a blank.
LS: Not to mention you’re forgetting an even more critical dimension that you’ve eliminated.
DM: Meaning?
LS: Meaning character. Wait, here, let me quote. In Vanishing Point, you say that you’re experimenting — or your protagonist, Author, is doing so—“to see how little of his own presence he can get away with throughout.” Why does Author want to remove as much of himself as possible from the book? Or why do Reader, and Writer, and Novelist, in the other volumes?
DM: But isn’t the answer in the question itself there, in just the way it’s written? Experimenting to see how little of himself “he can get away with”? Or put the emphasis on the word “experimenting.” Look, when I wrote Reader’s Block, the passages about Reader — well, about Reader and/or the character he calls Protagonist, who he’s thinking of writing about, but who’s obviously an alter ego — that stuff takes up only approximately twenty percent of the book. And the other eighty percent is composed of those intellectual odds and ends we’ve spoken about, the material from the index cards. That itself was obviously an experiment. But then, exactly as I phrased it — to see what I could get away with — in each of the next three books I held down the references to my central figures to no more than one-and-a-half percent. Honestly, that little. Leaving roughly ninety-eight-and-a-half percent for the odds and ends. But so then what’s the ultimate experiment, the thrust of it all? To see if, in spite of that, I can still manage to make Writer and Author and Novelist nonetheless actually exist, for whoever’s reading me. And apparently they do — the experiment works. Apparently I not only manage to convey a sense of character in each case, but even some dramatic impact at the end as well. And this, again, in spite of there being only that meager one-and-a-half percent that deals with them directly.