With his
novels more popular in Europe than in the U.S., this
expatriate author describes himself as an 'odd duck'
By Michelle Field
Jonathan Carroll fought for years against having his photograph on his book jackets. He even resisted a biography. "'Jonathan Carroll lives in Vienna"--that's it," he says grimly. "Eventually the publishers got mad and told me, 'You're not J.D. Salinger'"--and so he found himself giving this interview.
"I think too often people buty the guy instead of the work," Carroll says. His definition of "buying" the work is a perfectly sober one: it is the reader's coming to terms with the truth the novel has to tell, not just raking through the pages for the funny bits or the sexy bits or--as in Carroll's case especially--the neat aphorism. The novelist, for his part, has to concentrate on the important business of truth-dispensing and not on the frivolous side of entertainment.
"I fell that writers nowadays don't have any courage. They have cleverness but they are clevering themselves to death. 'Do you mean this?' is what I want to ask. With these wiseguys--Martin Amis is a wiseguy; Douglas Adams is--well, you feel the way a woman does when she is given a line in a bar: 'Does this guy really mean this?' Writing, I think, has never been less serious. But Outside the Dog Museum is 100% serious."
Outside the Dog Museum, out from Doubleday next month (Fiction Forecasts Nov. 15, 1991), is Carroll's seventh book. A literary, fast-moving comeday/thriller/surrealist fantasy, its protaganist narrator is an American architect commissioned by the sultan of a Middle Eastern, Muslim country to build a memorial to the dogs who saved his life. The improbable plot, the cast--which includes a talking dog, an angel and a Eurpean guru--the bits of heavy irony and the portentousness, are likely to remind reades of Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving and perhaps the Hitchhiker novels of Douglas Adams--although these are all analogies that Carroll dislikes. He would prefer comparisons with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Hermann Hesse and other writers of what Carroll calls "fairy tales for adults."
Carroll writes about mystical experiences as ordinary parts of life. One character lies on the bottom of the swimming pool and sees God's music written on the surface of the waater, for instance. But Carroll insists he has never had a mystical experience of his own. "I am very boring in my life. I don't live on a mountaintop; I live in a worker's district in Vieena."
Carroll has taken his spiritual orientation from a wide range of European authors whose spercus pepper his pages. He was born, however, into a Jewish family and raised a Christian Scientist. His mother and sister have remained Christian Scientists; his older half-brother, the composer Steve Reich, is an Orthodox Jew; his other brother is devout Sufi. "Table conversation is interesting," say Carroll wryly.
Carroll's father was the screenwriter Sidney Carroll, whose most famous film was The Hustler, with Paul Newman. His mother is June Carroll, a musical comedy star who appeared in New Faces of 1952 and now lives in Los Angeles. Carroll has "followed" in their footsteps in the sense he does what he calls "gardener's work," rewriting scripts on Hollywood movies. "I never put my name on a credit because I don't think it's my work," he says, and he is reluctant even to name the films to which he has contributed, commenting tersely, "It pays the bills."
Carroll's primary "other job", almost steadily for 19 years, has been teachig at the American Internation School in Vienna. He quit for a while when he took on more film work, but recently, realizing that he was growing too reclusive, returned to teaching. he has remained at the same school since 1974; his wife has been teaching there almost as long. It was not only the first job he chose after graduating from Rutgers and the University of Virginia, it also occasioned his first experience of Europe. He says the inital six months in Vienna were a culture shock, but--he clicks his fingers-- "one day I liked it." He has never changed his mind.
All this contentment in a relatively bourgeois place like Vienna seems odd for someone with so quirky an imagination. In fact, given Carroll's somewhat bohemian upbringing in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., and his record of juvenille delinquency until his worried parents packed him off to Loomis, the Hartford, Conn., prep school, Carroll would appear to be an unlikely candidate for polite, middle-class Viennese society. His physical appearance, however, suggests otherwise. He is very tall and very tidily dressed. His face has sharp, almost aristocratic features, which seem never to relax into a grin. His voice still carries all the American inflections, but his manner is so decorous as to suggest other antecedents.
For biographical clues to his rowdy early life, he says the young misfits in Black Cocktail, a novella published by St. Martin's Press in 1991, and 1983's Voice of Our Shadow are based on his own youth. "I was a delinquent because everybody else in my family was such a glowworm." About halfway through college he realized that he wanted to be a writer and that what had been stopping him before was following a "glowworm" like his father. He was bent on attending the University of Virginia because his mentors were there--Peter Taylor in particular, who accepted him as an M.A. student in the creative writing program, and visitng writers like Paul Theroux and John Casey, who gave him professional advice.
"I went about getting an agent in a back-assward way: I asked Taylor, Theroux and Casey--all of them--who were the best agents, and then I wrote letters saying, 'Hi, will you represent me?' You just don't do it that way. But Phyllis Westberg at Harold Ober in New York wrote back asking to see my stuff, and form the beginning she understood what I waas doing. We were together for six years before I published my first novel. She tried to sell the first three novels I wrote, but they were never published."
Carroll married his wife, Beverly, on the day he graduated from Rutgers, and a little more than a year later, in 1971, he acquired Westberg as an agent. (Both women are still with him, which again, is the kind of relationship you won't find among Carroll's fictional characters.) The Land of Laughs (1980), his first published novel was accepted by Alan Williams, then at Viking, now at Grove Weidenfeld. His second book, Voice of Our Shadow, was also Viking but his next novel, Bones of the Moon (1988), which he says was "too experimental for most tastes," was published by Arbor House. For Sleeping In Flame (1989) he moved to Doubleday, which also published A Child Across the Sky (1990) and has also contracted for his next work, After Silence. Carroll's British publisher, which edits his novels (because the British take the initiative and provide the substantial advance), is currently Macdonald, the troubled house once owned by Robert Maxwell.
But the more unusual part of Carroll's publishing career is his success in Germany and France: his sales in translation have always outstripped those in Britain and America. A few years ago an upscale German magazine, Tempo, named Land of Laughs No. 4 on a list of the 100 best books of the 1980s. He is regularly profiled (often with cover stories) in European magazines, and he also has a cult following in Japan and Sweden. Carroll ascribes the difference in reception to the fact that American and Britsh booksellers and readers catagorize fiction into genres and continental Europeans don't. "This is 'romance,' that is 'horror'--other countries don't do that. Booksellers have to learn to resist the desire to put a book on a certain shelf. They also have to read it themselves. I think fewer and fewer booksellers are reading these days-- they're being force to 'just sell them.' This endangers odd ducks like me more than it does the big genre writers like Ken Follett."
Carroll did not arrive in Vienna speaking German, and his German publishing career has remained in the hands of his New York agent and her sub-agents. The break came when the Polish science-fiction writer Stanislav Lem took an intrest in Carroll's work and gave it to his own German publisher in the late '70s. In France, the decisive moment occurred when The Land of Laughs won the Prix Apollo for fantasy literature in 1987. In fact, Carroll's European career has moved so far ahead of his American one that his three-year-old collection of short stories called The Panic Hand is available in translation but not yet published anywhere in English.
One can't imagine the same imbalance arising in the literary career of an American writer who lives in the U.S. In fact, Carroll, thinks that having taken Vienna as a base has put him at a disadvantage. "I know that if I'd stayed in America all these years and had been talking to the right people and going to the right parties, etc., my career would be a lot further than it is. But I have had 20 years in Vienna and most writers can't claim such a quality of life. Books are an enormous part of my life, but they aren't the only thing."
Carroll's wife is a painter who does all the book jackets for his German editions. Their 11-year-old son is more taken with trendy media than books or art, but that is fine by Carroll, who wants to spare him the "glitter and glam" of having the kind of celebrity father he himself had. "I am well known in Vienna, and my son like and hates it at the same time. The Land of Laughs is about this problem: the character is the son of 'somebody,' the situation has made him 'known.' I don't want my kid to make that connetion."
Carroll says he has no hobbies, no politics, nothing besides raising his son and walking the dog. Actually, "walking the dog" is a phrase which comes with a little nudge if you are a Carroll fan, because Carroll's novels give dogs and pigs all the best lines. In Outside the Dog Museum there is a talking bull terrier called Big Top who embodies the spiriet of the guru who once owned him. "I like bull terriers. The first book I ever wrote contains a bull terrier called Nails--because my dog was named Nails. But the beloved Nails died last year, age 17, and we immediately went oout and bought a little girl whose name is Beehive." He quickly adds, "The next question people always ask me is, 'Does Beehive talk? And my answer is, 'To me.'"
Carroll's eccentricities do not stop at talking dogs. "Everyone laughs at the way I work. I first write a book very fast by computer, then I write it by hand as fast as I can, and then I buy these rare expensive notebooks thata look like something from the old dyas and I get a beautiful pen--and I rewrite the novel very, very slowly. To me, 'fast', 'less fast' and 'very slow' are the three stages, and by the time it is finished I go back to the computer and make changes."
Carroll has already written a sequel to Outside the Dog Museum, a short story which will be published in Omni magazine later this year. In it the Dog Museum narrator, Harry Radcliffe, bumps into an old friend who is, Carroll says, "a guy who used to be an incorrigible liar and can't lie anymore. It is a story about good and evil because every time he lies something terrible happens to him." Though it bears some resemblance to Pinocchio, the tale also sounds like a fable about a fiction writer who is fixed, as Carroll is himself, on avoiding simple cleverness and invention--and who often returns to the idea that his novels are bearing the Truth. It is a discomforting idea, and in an interview Carroll can be rather discomforting, too. But it is also a peverse pleasure to watch an American writer run so against the grain.
