LT: That “not indicating the way you’re supposed to feel about it” is why I think of you in relation to Jane Bowles. How would you describe Cigarettes to somebody who hadn’t yet read it, or what would you say your project was when you started it?
HM: I had several things I wanted to do. For one thing, I promised myself not to do anything I’d already done in my earlier books. No erudition, no language games. The texture is very clear and if you took each chapter by itself, it would seem very conventional in style. I also wanted the book to be both traditional and modern. I had, almost from the very start, a desire to portray a passionate friendship between two middle-aged women — the friendship between Elizabeth and Maud at the end of the book. In a way, the whole book leads to that.
LT: The portrait painted of Elizabeth by Walter Trale, another character, is so important in the novel. She is at the center and her portrait is a kind of centerpiece.
HM: Actually, the painted portrait doesn’t turn out to be very significant.
LT: But it has meaning in relation to people’s lives.
HM: It does but it’s just a thing ultimately and it’s the characters who lay a lot of significance on it. I think it’s tempting for readers to do that too. Some people who have written about the book are tempted to see in the portrait a symbol of something mysterious. I think it’s symbolic of an object just being an object.
LT: In the novel it seems to be important not because it’s essentially important, but because different people desire it, copy it, try to destroy it. It floats through the text as a kind of signifier.
HM: That’s true. It’s a signifier without any signified beyond itself. It has no metaphysical significance of any kind at all. It plays an important role in terms of the narrative. It’s a kind of bait for the expectation, for the desire to find significance. In the end it’s just hanging on the terrace being a painting, we recognize its role to be purely narrative and nothing more than that. In a way the portrait is like the huge cultural constructs in my early books, you know in musicology or in art history or theology — they all turn out to be so much hot air. Of course between the opening chapters and the final chapter the portrait serves to remind us of Elizabeth herself, whom we’ve only known through her effect on three of the male characters. The reader, whether admitting it or not, has probably read the table of contents and seen that the last chapter is called “Maud and Elizabeth.” The reader knows after Elizabeth disappears that she’s going to come back.
LT: All of the chapters present characters in pairs; each one gets paired with others in different chapters. You date some chapters 1936, and some 1963, which is the reverse of 36. I liked the structure very much; it underscores what things mean in relation to each other and in time.
HM: That’s very good. I had general ideas about what I wanted to do, but I had no idea what the book was going to look like. I had invented a design that amounted to a series of empty spaces to fill up. I stared at these empty spaces for two years, watching them fill up, watching them turn into a whole. The story gets told, but it is never told. Whatever it may be, the story of the novel isn’t told, just these other stories of the particular relationships.
LT: Cigarettes is not only about relationships in a very direct way, but things that have tremendous impact on relationships, like money. Money moves through the text and interrupts lives in very different and fascinating ways. Who inherits it? Do you give it away? Do you squander it? Do you invest it? This too reminded me of The Conversions—the hero’s quest for the immense fortune. So I wanted to talk about money.
HM: Oh dear, really? I don’t have much to say about money that isn’t in the book. I guess if I had to say something general about money, it would be that it’s completely empty, it has no meaning in it itself, no significance. It’s simply in reactions people have to it that it acquires an apparent role. It has no inherent power.
LT: It’s used that way in your novel, Maud giving it to her daughter and then taking it back and then giving it again.
HM: And the father giving it to the daughter, giving it and taking it back. Elizabeth, who’s obviously been through her share of thin spells (she’s broke at the time she meets Maud), finds it totally silly that Maud should get so upset about this. “You’re making a problem out of a million dollars”—a million pre-war dollars. For somebody like Elizabeth, and Irene too, money’s just something to get when you need it and use for what you need. For the others, money matters to them in some way, it’s involved in how they define life as having value or not. Maud isn’t a bad person at all, she’s a gentle, generous and warm person whom Elizabeth manages to bring out of her state of perpetual reluctance. She’s not mean, but nevertheless, she does things which she then bitterly regrets.
LT: I thought that the way in which money figured in people’s lives, people with money worrying about money in some way.
HM: It’s an American hang up, I think.
LT: This is your most American novel, I thought.
HM: It’s not the point of the novel at all. But I suppose socially that’s true, in so far as it’s a depiction of a social milieu.
LT: The novel talks about the meanness, cruelty of people. For instance, Owen is going to discover Allan’s insurance fraud. For pleasure. It’s a game to him. In your earlier books it looks like games play people, and in Cigarettes it’s people who play games.
HM: They think they are. It’s interesting what happens in connection with Owen’s game. It actually cures Allan of his criminality, not because it frightens him, but because he’d finally been caught — appreciated. Owen may turn out to be smarter than Allan is, but at least Owen has gone to a lot of trouble to untangle these very smart frauds that Allan set up and that he’s never been able to tell anybody about. Owen acts like a tough macho knocking off another guy and showing him who’s boss, but he ends up doing Allan a great favor. Allan gives up this whole secret fraudulent career that he’s been pursuing for totally inadequate reasons. At least the reasons he gives sound unconvincing.
LT: Characters in Cigarettes are motivated to do things but there’s no explanation as to why they’re doing these things.
HM: They certainly don’t seem to know why they’re doing them.
LT: Maybe Allan wants to be discovered, wants attention, needs to be bad, those kinds of things, and yet that’s too reductive, really.
HM: To go back to your very first question: How does allowing the reader to be the creator work? I could say that the reader has to bring his or her experience to bear to supply an explanation, has to invent some way of accepting these characters and their behavior.