This interview was originally published in The Johns Hopkins News-Letter in 1991, along with a review of The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor. I was a student in the Writing Seminars department at Johns Hopkins (where Barth taught since the ’70s before retiring) and interviewed him in his office in Gilman Hall. The questions to the interview have since been lost.
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On Somebody the Sailor:
The new book keeps one foot in the Here and Now. The main character, Simon William Behler, is a fellow who grew up in the middle decades of the Twentieth Century on the East Coast of the United States, a New Journalist. The book keeps its other foot back in medieval Islam in the world of Sindbad the Sailor and Scheherazade’s stories. So it consists of two alternating series of tales, the six fabulous voyages of Sindbad alternating with the cyclic tales of Behler’s six voyages, literal or figurative. These two series of alternating tales eventually come together and become one story.
On the structure of the novel:
I think of myself as a romantic formalist. As the table of contents, or as Henry Fielding used to call it, the “menu to the feast,” indicates, there is a kind of counter-motion there. The number of interludes is in inverse correlation to the number of the voyages, until it all comes together. That’s really just the formal organizing principal, but it allows the plot to get unfolded in the interstices. This is not meant to be a complicated book at all. I have a reputation for making relatively simple things very complicated, and that can be good clean fun. But it’s my feeling that this book is a perfectly straightforward story. It starts in the middle, but most stories do for that matter, and you’ve got to go back and get caught up on how the guy got there in the first place.
On Somebody’s voyages:
The title suggests, and the beginning and end of the story echo, the possibilities that these voyages have been more or less rites of passage: birth, initiation into sexuality, marriage, parenthood, divorce, remarriage, middle age, peaking of his career, et cetera. And there’s no question that for Behler as for old Sindbad, the next voyage is the last voyage for both of those characters.
On the Gulf War:
Webmaster’s Note: This interview was conducted in January of 1991, in the beginning days of the first Gulf War.
There’s an odd topicality about the novel that wasn’t intended at all. Most of the action takes place in the Persian Gulf, in Baghdad or Basra, names that are coming hauntingly into the news now. Of course, the novel was being planned and written back when Saddam Hussein was our ally and Iran was the enemy. It is ironic, though, to remember that the refrain for Baghdad that runs through this novel is “The City of Peace.” They speak of “sailing down the harmless Persian Gulf.” It’s not until you got out of the Persian Gulf into the ocean that all the monsters and the magic islands and rocs and dragons and so forth came to pass.
On New Journalism:
Webmaster’s Note: About nine months prior to this interview, Harper’s published an article by famed New Journalist Tom Wolfe condemning postmodern literature in general, and Barth in particular. Wolfe came to lecture at Hopkins shortly thereafter, and neatly sidestepped the whole issue of singling out Hopkins’ marquee professor for criticism.
My Simon William Behler was a New Journalist long before Mr. Wolfe sounded off in the pages of Harper’s. Again, like the topicality of the Persian Gulf and Baghdad, “The City of Peace,” these are all just after-the-fact coincidences. I wanted a chap whose presenting problem is that at age 50, he still hasn’t quite figured out who he is. I thought it might be interesting to have him be a New Journalist like Norman Mailer, one who writes about his own adventures in the third person with a nom de plume. The kind of writing I’m not so terribly interested in. Wolfe doesn’t do that either, by the way. His writing has that very personalized style, but it’s never about Mr. Wolfe himself as Mailer’s used to be about Mailer and my man Behler’s is about himself.
On autobiographical fiction:
[My novels are] biographical to this extent: it’s true that as I’ve gone on through the decades, my protagonists, by and large, have not gotten younger. They tend to be about my age, although they’re beginning to lag behind a little bit, I guess. When you reach age sixty, you have a feeling perhaps that your readers might not really be so interested anymore.
On the death of Donald Barthelme:
Webmaster’s Note: Donald Barthelme is the author of Snow White, The Dead Father, and Sixty Stories. He died in July 1989.
We had been cordial colleagues, often bracketed together by critics describing what’s going on in fiction. Donald’s death two years ago struck me very strongly for the obvious reasons. I guess I felt my first experience of genuine “survivor’s guilt,” as they call it. After Donald’s death, here I am perfectly healthy and busy publishing a new novel and drinking wine and eating food and making love and enjoying my friends, and this guy’s dead! At least as good a writer as myself, and many would say better.
On the critics:
When they trash this book, they’re trashing where I was, not where I am. It’s very good for a writer to always be at work on the next project by the time the flak starts coming in. It has so little to do with where literature happens and where stories are. Of course, if you have praises and not trashes, it’s good for business, it’s good for the morale. But I’m used to both. Like flying sorties, you see the flak going off all around you and you become a little faithless. I always deliver my ordnance and get home safely to fly the next sortie.
News-Letter: I should probably warn you, I’m going to be doing a review for this book in the News-Letter.
Barth: Let fire!
On the future:
Who knows what Allah has in store for us, but assuming that no Scud missiles drop on [Johns Hopkins' Baltimore campus] Homewood or home land… I am on work on a new book. It’s too early to talk about it, because I’ve learned not to spook things by talking about them prematurely. I feel okay, I don’t feel depleted. With Allah, Zeus, and the rest cooperating, I hope that I won’t stop telling stories as long as I’m physically able. I certainly don’t feel as though I’ve used up all combinatorial possibilities.
You know, I think most storytellers have a hand of cards. It’s not an unlimited hand of cards and they play them in different combinations. When you look at a writer’s output, you can often see that here’s his Ace of Clubs that he played off against the Queen of Hearts last time, and he’s got a different mix this time. But that number of combinatorial possibilities is not inhibiting. It’s not infinite but a very large possible number of combinations.
Barring failure of the liver or failure of the mind, I presume that after the book in progress there’ll be another one, and then another one, and another one, until the Destroyer of Delights and Severer of Societies comes. What I like about Scheherazade is that she would typically quit in mid-sentence, she would quit at the first light of dawn before the muezzin cried, as I recall. I hope that’s the way the Destroyer of Delights comes to visit me when the time comes, and he’ll catch me right between subject and verb and verb and object. But not until I get a little more done on this book that I’m working on now.
On the next Barth novel:
Webmaster’s Note: Barth’s next novel, Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera, was published three years later in 1994.
I’m experimenting on the work in progress with the idea of a story that defines itself as it goes along. There’s a line of Theodore Roethke’s in one of the great villanelles ever written in the English language called “The Waking.” The line says, “I learn by going where I have to go.” That is the working principle. This is one reason why I can’t talk about the book, I really don’t know where it’s going to go. This is one of the ones where you play this card and you play that card and then you look at the cards that you’ve played, and that might suggest what the next card ought to be. Then you make your mid-course corrections, but without, for a change, any particular destination. We need to keep ourselves from getting bored in the third and fourth decades of our professional career.