On the surface, the city of Vienna is not the most obvious place to search for magic. Though it clearly bleeds history, if you listen you can hear the ghosts of music past echo down its cobbled streets. It is a city that loves its dogs, and perhaps even hears them launch into an occasional conversation. Like Oz, Vienna is a city that hides a mysterious man behind its massive stone buildings, a man who tugs and presses at the levers of the mind. They call Jonathan Carroll a "magical realist" who writes "fairy tales for adults." He won the World Fantasy Award a few years back and his nine novels have subsequently been translated into fifteen different languages. Speaking with the man was very much like reading one of his books: the conversation is very seamless and eloquent, and then he makes something unexpected spring to life. I spoke with Carroll at the Cafe Ritter in Vienna, about his latest book Kissing the Beehive (his first work with the Nan A. Talese imprint of Doubleday), Stephen King, and the state of the art.
J. del Tufo- It seems that capitalism has really caught on in Vienna.
J. Carroll- In the last few years it's become much more modern, much more late 20th Century. You can go to a Pizza Hut. It seems like every time you turn around there's the equivalent of a McDonalds, and something that was there forever has changed. I love this cafe, and one of the things they're talking about is selling it.
J. del Tufo- They really seem to love their dogs here.
J. Carroll- They like dogs more than children here. You seem them everywhere. On buses, in restaurants.
J. del Tufo- You'd never see a dog in an American restaurant.
J. Carroll- Well you have that health code, which is very amusing in its own way. Here it is part of their culture, so they don't even think twice about it. If a dog is obnoxious, they will let you know about it really fast. The funny thing for Americans who visit Vienna is, there are certain things like smoking- people actually smoke here. I like it because I smoke, too. But Americans come here and they say 'this second-hand smoke is killing me,' and people are just say 'then don't go to that cafe, or get used to it.'
J. del Tufo- California just banned smoking in all restaurants and bars.
J. Carroll- It's like a health Nazi thing. It's this new thing Americans are going through- clean the body but you don't have to clean the soul. You have a nice diet and a nice build, but it's OK to be incredibly greedy and ugly.
J. del Tufo- There's a great cutting-edge online magazine called Suck Magazine. They just did an interesting piece on 'The Most Evil Word in the English Language.' They came up with the word 'nigger.' They cited multiple examples, but the one that caught my interest was a pro hockey player who had actually been suspended for using the word. It was the first time in sports history that such a punishment had been levied for using any word. The point of their essay was that we are making such a monumental effort to get rid of this word in our language, but no effort to get rid of the actions that created and maintain the word. The state of black America is in crisis, and we're trying to fix the word.
J. Carroll- I was in California for almost two years writing films and most of the time I was delighted by the whole American experience. I've been in Vienna for twenty years. But at the same time I had no desire to stay in the U.S. I like California, people are nice, but there is a certain kind of superficiality. The serving on the plates were too big, but the food wasn't any good. I kept thinking that I wished my dogs were around, so I could take everything home and feed them for four days.
J. del Tufo- It's kind of the opposite of New York. There they say what's on their mind, and it comes out as 'Fuck you.' In California you knew they were thinking Fuck You, but it never quite comes out that way.
J. Carroll- A big smile. I had that experience dealing with movies. Talk about talking heads. You would go in, have a meeting and think 'we're going to make that movie,' and then you'd never hear from them again. After a while you get used to it. It was truly a surreal experience.
J. del Tufo- You never know who to believe, and there are so many cards changing hands behind the scenes.
J. Carroll- And for the oddest reasons. It would be like 'this thing didn't happen because the guy forgot his pack of chewing gum that day.' One of the things I like about Europe is there is a certain kind of concreteness, whether it be smoke in your face, or history, or a lack of conservatism.
J. del Tufo- A lack of conservatism ?
J. Carroll- Yeah. America is incredibly cutting edge, but at the same time there is a conservatism in the sensibility that is off-putting in a certain way to me. It's like you said, they will try to change the word 'nigger' but they won't do anything to change the situation. And that's a conservatism in terms of the status quo. It's lip service and all that good stuff. It's like my books. For years my books have done much better outside of America because they don't know what to do with it.
J. del Tufo- I believe attitude is 'If we can't easily categorize something, it's too challenging to market it.' I've noticed a similar phenomenon in the music industry: if something is not distinctly rock or pop or alternative, or the current flavor of the month, the marketing people panic.
J. Carroll- Because you're creating trouble. The most simplified explanation is 'Where do we put them on the shelves?' More than that, it's like 'What do we do with this?' Stephen King is Stephen King. Cold Mountain is Cold Mountain. In all the spaces in between, there are a number of wonderful authors. I just read Steve Erickson's new book, Amnesiascope. Here's a writer who is just superb, but he's weird. The market can accept the weirdness of a writer as mundane as T. Coraghesson Boyle, who is a lousy writer. But someone like Erickson is a truly cutting-edge writer. But he's strange, so he consequently gets shuffled from publisher to publisher, and he gets lost in the bins, which is really a shame. Here, certain writers are held in great esteem where in America people are like 'Who?'
J. del Tufo- I just finished Graham Joyce's Requiem and it blew me away. But there is going to be no market for it in the U.S.
J. Carroll- None. What little reaction I've gotten thus far from Kissing the Beehive, and I know it only came out ten minutes ago, has been very, very mixed. Some of them hate it, some of them say 'What is he doing this for, he should be writing magic,' others say 'how interesting, he's doing something completely different and we love it.' There's basically nothing you can do but pull your cap down lower and go back to writing. And you write about what bites you, not about what bites them.
J. del Tufo- And as long as you can continue to do it for you, on your own terms...writing about what bites you is the bottom line.
J. Carroll- You have to. You can get yourself into these strange labyrinths of 'Who am I going to write like' or, 'Who am I going to write for,' which is even more dangerous. You can write a book, and have it be successful, but then you write another book and the audience you created for your first one just isn't there for your second one.
J. del Tufo- It's often the case that someone writes a successful first novel, and them comes out with something that is just like it, with different names and places. It's not going to hit the mark.
J. Carroll- Only sometimes it does hit the mark. Dean Koontz has been writing the same book for the last twenty five books, and he is an enormously successful writer.
J. del Tufo- I think you could write a computer program that could create Dean Koontz books.
J. Carroll- I think that's the big difference between King and Koontz. King is a very wonderful writer. Takes away King's monsters and you still have a wonderful writer. And this is the thing that people often overlook because of his success, and because of his monsters. Whenever I read negative reviews of King's books, it's always like 'He writes for the guys who wear their baseball caps backwards.' And that's simply not true. The fact is he writes books that those people can relate to. Others can't relate to it because of the monsters. You take the monsters away and he is still very good.
J. del Tufo- Well it's easy to trash Stephen King. He's on top of the mountain, so he's an easy target. Who wants to write a positive review of a King novel?
J. Carroll- He once quoted me a line that someone famous said, 'Dog barks when the parade goes by.' The critics are the dogs, and you're the parade, brother.
J. del Tufo- Let's talk about the new book, Kissing the Beehive. It revolves around the discovery of a dead girl by the protagonist. I read this was based on something that happened to you as a child.
J. Carroll- When I was twelve I lived in a town very much like Crane's View. Basically I described what happened to me. I was down by the Hudson River throwing rocks in the water, and I hit something and it rolled over. It was a body. I jumped in and pulled her out. It's different from what I have in the book, but it's close enough that the similarities are marked. She was a cheerleader from the next town over, and I had never known her. She was reputed to be a very beautiful, very popular girl. Of course all I saw was this frozen face. What we heard later, and something was going on there because people were strangely mum. We heard that her boyfriend had killed her in a way similar to how I portray it in Beehive. Although what happens in Beehive is certainly different than what happened in real life. I think essentially that any kind of writing is organizing your chaos. I had touched on this incident in an earlier book, A Child Across the Sky. There is a small section where someone describes something very similar. I realized I wanted to write more about this, not because it was in any way a profound or traumatic experience in my life. It was just something I wanted to take a closer look at.
J. del Tufo- Similar to the way the short story "Mr. Fiddlehead" expanded into A Child Across the Sky.
J. Carroll- Exactly. When I first started framing Kissing the Beehive, I started being stalked by a mad fan. It was someone in Vienna. Luckily that went away, but not for a while. I was physically followed, 3 AM phone calls, the whole thing. It was a woman, she was clearly bonkers. And you don't know what this is like until you have gone through it. Not much scares me, but some of the things that were said and done were so scary.
J. del Tufo- Like what?
J. Carroll- Likes gifts at your door, how did they get into your house? Really perverse, weird things. Talking to my wife. Luckily she just disappeared, which I'm grateful for. It was not an easy thing. When you're trying to deal with something like this, and what I tried to put in to Kissing the Beehive, is that it doesn't work logically. If I said to you, 'Fuck off,' you'd be offended and go away. But if you say 'Fuck off' to someone like that, they say 'No, you don't understand.' It's like Misery. And I understand very well, I just want you to go away. It was really spooky.
J. del Tufo- So those were the two things that came into play for Kissing the Beehive. Was this woman just a fan or something?
J. Carroll- There are a lot of people who come to the door now, which is nice. They're your fans, they call you and write and discover your email address. 99% of the time it's wonderful- God bless you, I'm happy you're out there. There's always a bad apple. There are two kinds of bad apples in this profession. One is the person who says 'I hate your work, you stink'- including certain critics. And then there are the loonies, and those are the ones who become truly scary.
J. del Tufo- Researching this interview I ran into an old student of yours, Erik Peterson. He said that Kissing the Beehive seemed like an autobiography with a few of the facts changed around.
J. Carroll- Erik's a good man. But it's not fully autobiographical. I'm not successful like Sam Bayer is. And I haven't hit a wall like he does. Here's a guy who has everything that everybody wants.
J. del Tufo- Like King in that sense.
J. Carroll- Not so much King, because King is one of the most well-rounded, decent people I know, with or without his money. It's more other famous people I know, who are really spun like whipped cream by their success and the residuals that complement it. It really does burn a hole in your soul in many respects. Not so much King. King is a solid guy. If you were ever to point a finger at someone and say 'Here is how success is handled well,' it's him. But in other cases, I could quote you chapter and verse from other people I know. In that sense it's not autobiographical because I don't have that success. I did go back to my hometown for the first time in 25 years. And suddenly I got one of the ideas for this book. I realized I wanted to write about this death.
J. del Tufo- What made you go back?
J. Carroll- My brother. He lives in a the town where Edward Durant, the father, lives. I went to visit my brother and he said 'Let's go home.' I was reluctant but I went. It wasn't a revelation, but at one point I was looking out at the Hudson River. I said to my brother 'Drive down to river, I want to look at something.' So we went to the spot where I found the girl. I realized I had to write about this. Again, organizing the chaos. I wanted to bring that out of the file. A lot of this stuff is like soup that is put on the back burner, and you let it bubble for a long time. And you keep tasting it. I just did a short story that I wrote a third of many years ago. For some reason I brought it out the other day and finished it very quickly. There are just some things that need to simmer. In this case, to write in detail about finding a murdered girl had to simmer. I touched on it once some years ago, it wasn't enough, and then it came back when I went home.
J. del Tufo- Do you keep these ideas organized in your head, do you keep them written down somewhere to be expanded on in the future?
J. Carroll- No, I'm very disorganized in that way. I trust my imagination. There are two kinds of writers, I think. There are those who know what they are going to write from the beginning to the end. And there are those who just sit down, put the pen in their hand and, like water-skiing, let the boat pull them. I'm one of the latter. I know I can start a book when I have the title and the first sentence. I knew I could write this book once I had the first line 'I don't like to eat alone, that's why I became famous.' That line made me laugh, and I knew I could begin the book.
J. del Tufo- There's something very revealing about that line, it explains Same Bayer in a lot of detail.
J. Carroll- He's a very lonely man.
J. del Tufo- And full of contradictions. On one hand he says he is not sentimental whatsoever, that he has not returned to his hometown in 25 years, never even thinks about it, etc. On the other hand he has this daughter who has obviously been told these stories in loving detail, to the extent where she virtually sees these memories as her own.
J. Carroll- And he truly loves her.
J. del Tufo- Exactly. It's as if she opens up a part of him that he doesn't have access to himself.
J. Carroll- Even now, and it's been two years since I wrote the book, I don't know if I like him or not. I think he's interesting, and I can respond to him, but I don't know if I like him. But I wouldn't mind spending an evening with him. That to me is always very important. You have to like some aspect of your characters to want to spend time with them. Whether in real life or on the page. When I first started writing, one of the comments my agent made to me was 'You don't like these characters, why are you writing about them?'
J. del Tufo- The characters from Kissing the Beehive?
J. Carroll- No, twenty years ago. My first tries. It sent shockwaves through me.
J. del Tufo- This is pre-Land of Laughs, books that were never published?
J. Carroll- Yeah, they sit in a drawer. She was right, and I was always enormously grateful to her for saying that. Because then I wrote Land of Laughs, and I really did like the characters. Viola.
J. del Tufo- Do you still look back at that book with pride?
J. Carroll- Hemingway had a great line in Islands in the Stream. The main character has several children and the oldest boy comes to him at one point and says, 'I know you don't love me the most, but that's OK.' And the Hemingway character says 'No I don't love you the most but I've loved you the longest.' And in that sense when I look back on early books like Land of Laughs, it's OK. I'm happy with it. There are a number of people who say it's the best book I ever wrote, which is not a compliment to me. If you read my book Outside the Dog Museum it's what Radcliffe says, 'What do you want carved on your stone?' And what I want carved on my stone is not Land of Laughs. but that's immaterial. If you're willing to spend X hours of your life with a story I told, God bless you- whatever story it is, I'm indebted to you. That's what it's all about in the end. I think it's astonishing in this day and age, when everything is so quick and there's email and everything... that somebody wants to sit down for a number of hours and lose their life in what you do. What a compliment.
J. del Tufo- Speaking of email, the Internet makes it's debut in your universe in Kissing the Beehive. The Ivan character is something of a hacker. Are you online at all?
J. Carroll- I have email, but I'm not on the Web. That was something very interesting to me because I kept a secret name, and within two days people knew who it was.
J. del Tufo- What was the name?
J. Carroll- It was Verz, the magical dog from Dog Museum. Literally within two days I was getting mail from people, and I had no idea how that happened.
J. del Tufo- And they knew who you were?
J. Carroll- They said 'Dear Mr. Carroll...' Talk about instantaneous discovery. And I had held off getting on to this thing because I'm easily distracted. I knew that if I got email I would start getting distracted, and that's why I'm not on the web. Email is nice.
J. del Tufo- How old is your son?
J. Carroll- He'll be 18.
J. del Tufo- That's prime Internet age.
J. Carroll- He's sort of into it, sorta not. He likes video games more than the Internet.
J. del Tufo- We saw that pop up in that dreamy scene with Sam Bayer.
J. Carroll- Yes, where he says his daughter loves it and he hates it. I hate video games. Down to sounds they make. And my son is constantly annoying me by turning the volume up. So you hear Final Fantasy booming through the house. It's the Fourth Circle of Hell.
J. del Tufo- There is a mailing list, Rondua, that focuses on your work. I signed onto it in preparation for this interview. The level of detail of the conversations is astounding.
J. Carroll- Do they talk every day? Once a month?
J. del Tufo- There are a few messages every day. Sometimes more if there is a good thread going.
J. Carroll- What do they talk about?
J. del Tufo- Details. Possibilities. Is he going to do a book tour? Will there be magic again? Many of the good questions I have on this list are pulled from people on the list. I posted that I was going to Vienna to interview Carroll, does anyone have any questions, and I got a mailbox full of them.
J. Carroll- Generally speaking, what were the most common questions? First of all, if you go back on, please say hello to all of them and give my thanks.
J. del Tufo- Actually I printed a few pages from the last week. There's a great section written by Erik Peterson. His honesty was really refreshing, and really generous.
J. Carroll- Erik set up my last computer for me. He's the guy the U.N. calls when they are having a computer crisis. I see him every once in a while, he drifts back into town. He's a very good man. But, what do they generally want to know?
J. del Tufo- It's not usually what they want to know. It's more of a forum, a discussion of interpretations of your books. Kissing the Beehive, for example. Now that it has been released it is a very popular discussion piece.
J. Carroll- How do they like it?
J. del Tufo- It's mixed. Some people want to know where the magic went, what is he trying to say here. Some people like the ending, because it is not as nebulous as previous books. They are very critical and very honest. It's a very good place to get an idea what people really think. There's no reason to hold back, no reason to say 'Well I really like your stuff.'
J. Carroll- The thing about Kissing the Beehive was, I had just finished the sixth book of a sextet, and the last word of the last book was 'Amen.' It's done, it's finished, I don't want to do it anymore. I had to take a break. So I did two things- I went and wrote movies, and then when I came back to write another book I decided to write a realistic novel. You know when you've had too much to drink and you go to brush your teeth at night, you just want to get the film off and leave a minty taste. So I wrote Beehive, which came at a good time, Beehive is the first of a trilogy, all of which will take place in this town of Crane's View. I'm almost finished with the second one, which is called The Marriage of Sticks. In many ways it's as nuts magically as anything I've done. It's kind of a combination of Bones of the Moon and From the Teeth of Angels. It's more grounded than Bones of the Moon, but the premise is as out there as Teeth.
J. del Tufo- Tell me a little more about The Marriage of Sticks.
J. Carroll- It takes place in Crane's View. The narrator is a woman, likes in Bones of the Moon. She's in a mid-life crisis in a different way. She meets the love of her life and something happens, and it throws everything asunder. In Bones of the Moon, the woman meets the love of her life and positive things happen. She gets grounded, finds a life, gets pregnant. This is, in a way, just the opposite of that. It's been a strange experience writing this book. I had one intention at first, and then two or three other things snuck in there somewhat unexpectedly. It's got a lot of stuff flying around in it. It's like a whirling room, that room in Poltergeist. I think it's pretty good- those people who like my magic books will like it a lot.
J. del Tufo- I think that's the majority of the people who are reading your work. People see that as your niche, but it's also the thing that makes you uncharacteristic.
J. Carroll- Except for After Silence. Again, in After Silence I wrote about what was biting me. I didn't intend it to be anything and it ended up being a realistic novel. The interesting thing is After Silence was one of the most successful books I've ever written in terms of selling. It was a psychological 'How am I going to screw up my life in one easy lesson?' It's also something that's not so far from our own experience which is 'You make one wrong choice and everything goes south.'
J. del Tufo- I remember reading that story with the horrible son and knowing you had a son of your own around that age. I wondered how much that was based on your experiences or worst fears.
J. Carroll- After Silence is more based on my experience as a teacher because I would often have parents come to me and they would have absolutely horrible kids. Just terrible children. And it would seem that the parents were very nice. They would look at me and say 'What did we do wrong?' And I would say 'You didn't do anything wrong, it's them.'
J. del Tufo- Are you still teaching?
J. Carroll- On and off. I have a very bad tendency to be reclusive. Sometimes it gets too much and, as a result a little red bell goes off in my head that says 'You have to get out again.' Then I teach a little bit. Creative writing. I have a very good agreement with the American International School here. That's where Erik went, it's kind of a high school for smart kids. I can say to them 'I need some years off,' they say fine. When I want to work again they say fine. I can come and go as I please.
J. del Tufo- Are you currently teaching now?
J. Carroll- Very little. A couple hours a week. It's good therapy for me. I like to teach, get that interplay, enthusiasm. See the light bulbs going off above the kids' heads. It's funny the way they deal with me. On one hand, I'm a teacher, but also they know that I'm known.
J. del Tufo- What does 'kissing the beehive' mean to you?
J. Carroll- The title is provocative, sexy, dangerous. I think it's all the things that are part of her. The funny thing is, like I said, I usually have the title in mind as I'm writing. My editor knew what I was writing about and I expressed to her that I wanted to call it Kissing the Beehive. She said 'What does that mean?' I said 'Well, her nickname is Beehive..." and even when she knew what the story was about she was taken aback because it is an oxymoron. You don't kiss beehives. In this context anyone who kisses the beehive gets stung.
J. del Tufo- What about The Marriage of Sticks?
J. Carroll- That title is very much implicit in the book. It's spelled out.
J. del Tufo- In Kissing the Beehive the Veronica Lake and Pauline Ostrova characters mirror each other. This a convention that you have used many times in your work. Do you believe personalities are recycled or conserved in some way? Does this belief have spiritual or socio-genetic basis?
J. Carroll- I think we either accidentally or purposely end up pursuing the same kind of people. We get ourselves in the same kind of situations. The Germans have a nice phrase for it, they say 'Don't cross your shadow.' In that context I think this is often the case. It takes Bayer half the book to realize what he's doing. He says 'I've always wondered what Pauline would be like if she had grown up' and he realizes -boink- that it's Veronica. It's like people who continually fall in love with the same person. It may be a blonde or a brunette, but they fall for the same kind of person again and again. Reincarnation I know nothing about, but I do know we follow the same pattern and lead ourselves to the same kind of dangers. And usually we are not aware of it until we've made the mistake. In that context Bayer is, on one hand, great with his daughter in a certain way- he's a good friend but not a good partner.
J. del Tufo- Why did you decide to use the name Veronica Lake?
J. Carroll- I just love her, she's my favorite movie actress. I thought it was weird and perverse. That first sight that he has of her, it becomes the perfect name. Ice blonde, her name is Veronica Lake...why not? As layers get unpeeled of who she is in the book, hopefully the reader keeps waiting to hear that her name is really something like Joan Scmidlack. But no, it's Veronica Lake. It's one of the true things about her.
J. del Tufo- There is a great line in Kissing the Beehive, actually it's a punch line. 'Nothing's real unless there's an audience.' It's very poignant.
J. Carroll- It's true. So true. Somebody told me that joke in Hollywood, and it couldn't have been more appropriate.
J. del Tufo- Did any of the films you worked on get released?
J. Carroll- A couple of the films I did here have. They start production in the spring of one I wrote last year. But when I was in California, no. It's a typical Hollywood story. You go out there, they give you a lot of money, you do a lot of nothing, and then they don't make anything. And then the guys who do get stuff made stop becoming writers and become screenwriters. That's the danger. Some very good novelists have, and I don't mean this meanly, given up the ghost to become screenwriters. My father was a screenwriter. There's something vampiric about it. They hand you these enormous checks. Anyone who has written a novel knows writing a screenplay is not as much work. You have a lot of leisure time, nice digs. I fell for it, it was nice. But, there's also something quite insidious about it.
J. del Tufo- It must have been something of a culture shock, going from twenty years in Vienna to L.A.
J. Carroll- And it wasn't the greatest part of L.A. It was right on the border between safe and scary. It's the area I describe in Kissing the Beehive- the Chick-A-Licious area. Right where the riots happened. Every night, and this is no exaggeration, every night I would hear gunfire. And not just shots. Streams of automatic weapons pouring into the night. You'd come home and the block would be closed off and there would be helicopters everywhere. The next day I would ask one of my neighbors what happened and they would be like 'What happened where?' But mostly my experience there was a positive one. There was this one time I was walking down the street and this basketball bounced to my feet. I picked it up and was going to return it to the kids who has lost it. They looked at me with such absolute hatred, told me to drop the fucking ball. I was like 'What have I done to you?' I didn't expect to be thanked, but I didn't expect to get spat on either. And I think it's reaching a dangerous point, and I think there is going to be a backlash. These militant groups and, more scary, these skinhead groups are popping up everywhere. And they are a reaction to this. Have you seen the documentary Blood in the Face? It is extraordinary. And scary. These are the guys you need to watch out for.
But Vienna, this is the safest place on the planet. When there is a murder here it is big, big news. Front page. My wife walks the dog at midnight every night and I don't even think about it. It's great. And because Vienna has one of the greatest transportation systems in the world, my son can get to wherever he wants to go without needing to drive. Try that in Los Angeles. In many parts of the U.S. you have to get in your car if you want a gallon of milk. That's amazing to me.
J. del Tufo- Both in Outside the Dog Museum and From the Teeth of Angels, the main characters flee the U.S following their obsessions. Are you obsessive by nature? You are also very fond of using obsessions to drive your protagonists. Why so?
J. Carroll- I'm a completely obsessive person. I think obsession, passion, is the only thing that makes life tick. I was once very much in love with a woman, and the worst thing I ever said to her was 'You haven't found your passion yet.' I didn't mean it in any physical way. The person who has no passion is drinking thin soup. The passion could be stocks and bonds or raising dogs, I don't care. I find obsessive people passionate people- much more alive, much more running on all cylinders. I've always been obsessive. When I was a kid it was autographs or wrestlers or horror movies- there was always something obsessive in me. It got me through my days and I've always been glad to have them.
J. del Tufo- So what's your passion now?
J. Carroll- My writing becomes more passionate as I grow older. There's a distinct urgency to tell certain stories. A lot of times the stories aren't even there yet. It's like boxcars on a train, and you hear them click. As soon as that click is there, you're ready. I got the idea for my next novel about two weeks ago, the final part of the trilogy. I really want to write it. I've got a couple of months to go on this one, not that I'm not giving this my all. But I know what I want to do next.
J. del Tufo- When you start writing, letting the boxcars click in place, do the characters take over?
J. Carroll- Someone once wrote a review of my work saying 'Whether you like Carroll's books or not, very often the characters in the books are people you'd like to know.' When I begin work, and get to know these characters, I'm interested to see what's going to happen to them. I do not know from day to day what will happen. In what I am currently writing, the main character is on the run from something, and I literally don't know what's going to happen.
J. del Tufo- So you don't have the plot worked out already?
J. Carroll- I have no plot. I have nothing. But I trust my instincts.
J. del Tufo- So you let the characters dictate the plot?
J. Carroll- Sometimes. To get into the house sometimes I have to cross the doorframe, at other times they could say 'I don't want to go in that house.' John Fowles said that 'At a certain point in every novel, characters tell him what they want to do.' I kind of agree with that. When you set up a character to be courageous or cowardly, you can't have them suddenly turn around with some extraordinary revelatory event.
J. del Tufo- Which you did in Kissing the Beehive.
J. Carroll- Yes, because his daughter is in danger. He had to do something. One of the things that someone noted about my books, which is a very good point, is very often the characters act when it's too late. And I think that's very often the case in life. 'Now I want- too late.' That's at least part of the tragedy of life. The French have a phrase for it 'l'esprit d'escalier,' or 'the spirit of the staircase.' It's the perfect phrase I came up with five minutes after you insult me. In life, that's what happens, and it has tragic consequences. There's no way that Bayer could have saved Veronica, but he might have done something to effect something in a way that could have changed what happened. He's scared by her, and rightly so. He pulls back, she goes forward and ka-bam!
J. del Tufo- Kissing the Beehive is preceded by a William Stafford quote "If you don't know the kind of person I am and I don't know the kind of person you are a pattern that others made may prevail in the world and following the wrong god home we may miss our star." What does this mean in the context of Kissing the Beehive?
J. Carroll- Everything he discovers about the women who matter to him keep changing his attitude towards who they are. He loves Edward Durant, and Edward Durant is the guy. And Frannie McCabe looks like a criminal, but actually he's a great guy. He's wrong about everybody, including his daughter.
J. del Tufo- Given that, if Veronica had survived being shot, do you think Sam would have rethought his relationship with her? In the end, even though she was disturbingly obsessive, she was doing good things for him from the heart.
J. Carroll- Absolutely. I'll tell you something interesting. My British publisher said 'You've got to add more. It's not enough, we don't like it.' I told them that the Americans were going to publish it as is and they said that was fine, but they wanted an epilogue or something.
J. del Tufo- Similar to the Bones of the Moon situation.
J. Carroll- Yes but Bones of the Moon was a paragraph. The British wanted several pages. So here's what I did. It's two years later and Bayer is working on something and his daughter discovers what it is. She becomes thrilled and excited and it turns out he has written the biography of Veronica Lake. And that turns out to be his Great Book. Not the book about Pauline. And the British loved it. So when the British edition comes out in May, there will be another ten pages or so of a conversation between Bayer and his daughter talking about this book. In a certain way it's like Land of Laughs. At the end of that book he says 'I miss her more than I ever loved her.' In Beehive it's better that she's dead, but in the end you pay her homage. He's sorry that she's dead, but he's better off.
J. del Tufo- Regret is one of the few guaranteed certainties.
J. Carroll- The greatest thing in life is anticipation. Because when whatever it is fulfills itself it's always slightly disappointing, wrong, not the right direction, better but in a funny way, you get the girl but she's got bad breath. It's the anticipation that's great, and there is regret in everything. The more important thing is to live in such a way that you can consciously avoid later regretting. Because in the end all that's left are memories. So when you are looking back, if you can regret that much less, you are that much better off. A lot of us act in unconscious ways to cause regret. We swipe our hand out and we say the cool word, or we don't do the thing we know we should have. In a lot of cases we can avoid it, and do the right thing. I don't mean that morally. You can have the affair, and then not think about it later, or regret that you didn't have the affair. It's always something.
J. del Tufo- I first heard of your work in the same breath as Neil Gaiman, who also has a wonderful new book out.
J. Carroll- Yes, Neil has his hands in a lot of things.
J. del Tufo- He actually had one series in Sandman that was very similar to your work.
J. Carroll- Yes, he had much the same idea for A Game of You, but it doesn't matter because in the end they're two very different stories. At the time he called me and said he had his own story but then he read Bones of the Moon and decided he'd rather use that one instead. I told him he should use his own story. But in the end he based it on Bones and dedicated it to me and Tori Amos. I was like 'What's this with Tori Amos?' He just said that 'You were both very important parts of this.' Neil is an interesting guy, he has a lot of angles.
J. del Tufo- Will you do a U.S. book tour?
J. Carroll- At this point no. I went out for the last three books. Doubleday wants me to go out for the next, because it will be the middle of the trilogy, and paperbacks will be out. They are going to reissue Land of Laughs and Voice of Our Shadow. It's all very involved.
J. del Tufo- At least people won't have to shell out $100 to get a copy of those books.
J. Carroll- But I'll tell you something. From what little Internet exposure I've had, people have said they've paid so many million dollars for a book, but I've started looking around and you can find my books. You can find all of my books for around $20 or $30. I've been telling people to just go on the Internet and look hard.
J. del Tufo- Someone is actually printing Land of Laughs out in California.
J. Carroll- I don't think they can legally do it. My agent got so furious.
J. del Tufo- Some things just end up being difficult to find. I've been trying not terribly hard to get a copy of Chris Fowler's Spanky for around three years now.
J. Carroll- It's out in paperback in London. Have you heard of Andromeda Books? They have everything.
J. del Tufo- From an outsider's point of view, it seems to me the web is the kind of thing that can finally break Jonathan Carroll in the United States. It's the kind of dedicated, grass-roots support that just feeds off itself.
J. Carroll- Somebody told me they went online recently and there were over a thousand things on my work. I said, that's good and it's bad. From what I've seen, a good many of my fans are tenacious, and they pass the books around like mad. But your average reader picks these things up, especially the magical ones, and says 'What? Talking dogs? Forget it.'
J. del Tufo- But that's the difference between those books and Kissing the Beehive. I can give that book to my mother and she will enjoy it.
J. Carroll- I hope you're right. But the other side of that is, if they like that then they'll go to one of the magical books and say 'What's this?' I have the feeling that I will be remembered as 'The Guy Who Wrote the Magic Books.' That's all right. You can carve that on my stone, too.
J. del Tufo- But that's OK. Writing realistic work doesn't discount your magic works, it is still part of your repertoire and presumably something you are very proud of.
J. Carroll- Very much so. I feel more comfortable writing magic. When you write a realistic book there are rules. With a magical book they are your rules. You want to have your bottle talk, let it talk. It's funny, a lot of fantasy and science fiction and horror readers hate my stuff. They say I'm not following any of the rules. So in that sense I fall down between the cracks. Bones of the Moon was chosen by the Science Fiction Book Club as their lead title. My editor at the time, David Hartwell, said 'This is it, this is it.' But they got a big backlash from readers, 'What is this? This is a realistic love story.'
J. del Tufo- Then you had the whole abortion controversy with that book. Some piece of that came up again in Kissing the Beehive, with the militant feminist verbally attacking Bayer for a piece like Bones of the Moon.
J. Carroll- I had a fist fight about Bones of the Moon. I gave a reading and a guy tried to punch me out. Luckily I love to fight, and it was over in about 8 seconds. Yeah, that one caused the most vicious, rabid, insane responses from people. I once got a letter addressed to 'Dear Mother-Fucking Son-of-a-Bitch,' and then it just got worse.
J. del Tufo- That's actually a good first line.
J. Carroll- I don't think I'll write that one. The letter was enough. The funny thing is my books are extremely popular in odd places in the world. The Japanese sell tens of thousands of each book. Poland is insane, amazing. I gave a reading in Poland at the Warsaw National Theatre which is like Lincoln Center. There were thousands of people there, and it just went on and on. The whole book tour was like being Sting or something. It was nuts.
J. del Tufo- How would you like that to happen everywhere? If you could achieve fame on the level and scope of the United States, Stephen King fame, would that be a blessing or a curse?
J. Carroll- Real fame in the people I know, in most cases hasn't done them well. It has effected both their work and their life. And I tend to be private. It's kind of fun to be hugged and kissed for a while. That's why I don't go to conventions anymore, you just get stroked and all this stuff. A lot of these fantasy writers spend an awful lot of time at these things, and I'm thinking, when do they work? They're always at the bar. I was invited to a pretty important convention recently and I declined, which is not a very good way to endear yourself to these people. In the end, it's the work that you do. It may be nice to shake your hand, but in the end spending a few hours with one of your stories is going to be a lot more fulfilling.
J. del Tufo- And appropriate. In the end you are not selling Jonathan Carroll, you are selling the creations of Jonathan Carroll.
J. Carroll- We live in a society that is so 'face out front' that we forget the work. I would much rather see X number more books published in a certain period of time, than have been on book tours and attended these cons.
J. del Tufo- It's like a band who releases a wonderful album and they find themselves trapped in four years of touring, radio shows, promotions, etc. When they finally come out of it they have to idea who they are or what got them there.
J. Carroll- That stuff is very ambrosial at the same time. Beautiful women, nice meals. It was the same thing in California for me. You are treated so well, and get paid so much money, that you have to have an amazing character to get through it. I left California for two reasons. First I was in that big January earthquake. Second, one day I was sitting on the deck of my very beautiful house, smoking and admiring the yard, and I said to myself 'I'm not working!' I had just been given a very large check for work that took me ten minutes to do, and it was cool. I got on the phone and got a ticket back to Vienna.
J. del Tufo- Was your family out there with you?
J. Carroll- No, my wife teaches at the American school here and my son goes to school here. I said I'm going to go out there and if it is Wonderful, then we can talk about changing our life. Because we have a wonderful life here. I need to think about everything, because it would be insane to give what we have up for a possibility. I think I commuted like ten times when I was out there. And you know how long a trip it is. But it's good- I got it out of my system. And since I came back I've been doing a lot more European film work with the connections I made. And that's good because it's easier, a lot less money though. And a lot of times the work turns out goofy, which is why I don't put my name on it. If nothing else, a lot of times it's not mine- I was hired to patch up somebody's script. I'm just a plumber, the pipe needs to be straightened. It's his sink.
J. del Tufo- Speaking of European film, have you ever heard of Philip Ridley, or The Reflecting Skin?
J. Carroll- Of course. He disappeared, what happened to him? I thought he was going to be the next Neil Jordan. There are a bunch of those guys who are very talented and very capable but again they are niched and it doesn't happen. I was always incredibly surprised with what happened to David Lynch. That he got as far as he did with that kind of warped vision, and then it caught up with him. This last film he did, Lost Highway, was horrible. I think he had this kind of desperate vision, knowing that something was coming to an end. He also got that Barry Gifford to write the script, and he was barely able to write Wild At Heart. Lost Highway was just self-indulgent. It's like Tim Burton, who I thought was going to be great. After I saw Beetlejuice I though wow, then I saw Edward Scissorhands and thought uh-oh, it was just a repeat but milder. Then he did Batman and I said goodbye. And this last one Mars Attacks was just an embarrassment. It wasn't funny and didn't have that celery snap that he early work had. Have you ever seem Frankenweenie? It's genius. When Burton was in film school he made a short for Disney about a bull terrier- God bless him- that gets killed and his owner brings him back to life. It's complete Tim Burton a la Beetlejuice and Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. It was like 30 minutes long. And this was the old Disney, before Eisner, and they said they would not release it because it was too dark. So it's like a cult thing. It's wonderful. The problem with Tim Burton is they started throwing money at him around the time of Batman, and he went out and bought a catcher's mitt.
J. del Tufo- Of all of your published work, what piece and character are you proudest of?
J. Carroll- If I had to say two books that mattered the most to me, I'd say Outside the Dog Museum and From the Teeth of Angels. Dog Museum because it was the easiest to write, and it was closest to my own vision of life. From the Teeth of Angels because of what it is. When I was in Poland I did a radio talk show. A woman called up said 'I have to tell you a story. I was going to kill myself. I had the gun, and I had loaded the gun, and it was on the table next to my bed. I trying to decide when. A friend of mine who was a big reader handed me From the Teeth of Angels and said to read it, that I would like it. One day I had decided that it was the day I would kill myself. But I just happened to pick up your book. And now I don't want to kill myself anymore.' And I've gotten a lot of stuff like that. The thing is, that was my intention when I wrote that book. Either comforting someone who had lost someone or someone who is very, very ill. Maybe this can help. At the end of the book, the chant 'I'll cook you soup and hold your hand' and the little girl playing with the windmill, to me that's the vision that when my time comes I hope I can carry with me. So those are the books that mean most to me.
Of the characters, of course Radcliffe is very close to me. I like Cullen from Bones of the Moon a lot. She's tough and courageous.
J. del Tufo- Was it a challenge writing from a woman's point of view?
J. Carroll- Not at all. I've had arguments with people about that. You are a story-teller. You do it well and it doesn't matter what your biology is. I think the human experience transcends gender. Yes, it's difficult for a man to write about experiencing a period or an abortion. Basically the other stuff is human being.
J. del Tufo- What about Venasque?
J. Carroll- He's funny because he's the only character I've ever created who would say things and I would go 'Whoa!' There's a famous story about Charlie Chaplain. There's a scene when Chaplain goes up a staircase on rollerskates. He does this very famous choreography. Chaplain wrote his scripts and directed them. At that point the script said 'He goes to staircase, does bit with skates, and then moves on.' In that sense whenever Venasque would come into a story, I would just sit back and let him do what he wants. I'm not exaggerating. He would say things and I would have no idea where they came from. I think sometimes as a writer you create characters that are smarter than you. You become the tail of the kite and you let them go. What Venasque says is true, whether it comes from me or synchronicity or whatever. If he works than it works, and that's what matters. A lot of people like Venasque. Someone one asked me if I would write a Venasque book. I think that would be kind of difficult. He's too big, it's too much. He's sort of like God; we can get little snippets, but what does he do when he gets up in the morning? Following through would be very hard.
J. del Tufo- What do you think of the Oprah book phenomenon?
J. Carroll- On the one hand, Oprah's club is great because it gets thousands of new readers into bookstores, but on the other it's too biased toward either favorite writers of Oprah like Toni Morrison, or simply towards women and their stories. It's too slanted. Books like Don DeLillo's great new novel should be read by everyone, but Oprah would never choose something like that and it's a shame.
J. del Tufo- You mentioned earlier that you just finished a short story, have you been a lot of short pieces?
J. Carroll- I write stories like you get an itch on your back. Suddenly you're working and you have this crazy itch so you drop everything you're doing and reach back, and then you feel better. I'll be writing a novel and suddenly this idea comes to me, and I have to do it. The editor of Interzone asked me to write a story and then Time Out magazine in Britain is doing an anthology of New York stories, and they asked me to contribute to that. I wrote this one that I'd put aside for years, and Playboy will be publishing that.
J. del Tufo- That's a first for you.
J. Carroll- Yes, that's the first time I've been published in Playboy. Alice Turner and I have talked for years. Sometimes I've submitted pieces and she's said it's not really a Playboy story, so I send it to Omni or Fantasy and Science Fiction. But this one is a sexy story, and that's part of the reason.
J. del Tufo- Do you think teaching makes you a better writer or vice-versa?
J. Carroll- You get certain stories when you are teaching. Kids will relay stories either consciously or unconsciously, and you steal them. But teaching, if you teach well, is a very exhausting job. It depletes you more than it fills you, but it can very satisfying. It's a toss-up. I don't think teaching creative writing makes me a better writer. I'm very skeptical of these writing schools, whether it be the University of Iowa or these other places. The work always comes out as very academic and pale. What a lot of those students do is emulate the people who are teaching them. If Lucius Sheperd is teaching a science fiction course, then a lot of the students will write Lucius stories instead of writing their own stories. Students are so eager to be there, they forget they have to create the voice that will give them the ticket. Their voice.
J. del Tufo- I did a course like that with Stephen Dobyns.
J. Carroll- Was he a good teacher?
J. del Tufo- I thought he was excellent. He never let you get comfortable.
J. Carroll- Did you like his new book?
J. del Tufo- Church of the Dead Girls, the horror novel? I thought it was a great story, different for him. It made me think of King, actually.
J. Carroll- My favorite is the Two Deaths of Senora Puccini. He's one of those guys who keep pumping them out. And he has never really been recognized.
J. del Tufo- That may change with the success of Dead Girls and Senora Puccini is a major film release.
J. Carroll- He writes poetry, mysteries, really good mainstream novels. He's great.
J. del Tufo- What's the biggest misnomer about your work?
J. Carroll- That it's horror. That it's fantasy. I'm so tired of having this agreement/ disagreement with people. They say it's horror because you have horror in it, but does that mean that Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a fantasy writer because he's got old men with wings? They say no, he's a magic realist. So I say OK, I'm a magic realist too, and they say 'No, your stuff has more horror in it.' It's like one of those circular arguments that you have with your wife or your lover that never go anywhere. After a while you have to either grow beyond them or be eaten by them. Right now I realize they were taking my energy. I would see a book or review in the horror section and it would anger me. But you only have so much energy and, if you spend it here, you cannot spend it there. If you ask me that question I would say that I'm not a horror or science fiction or fantasy writer. What's more important is that you have an intelligent reader. One thing about the fantasy/ science fiction/ horror readers is they are the most devout and the most steadfast. Much more so than anyone else. They are the ones who hand the book to twenty of their friends. When I sold three copies of Land of Laughs, they were the ones who came to me ten years later saying 'Twenty-six people have read this book.' And I can only embrace them. In that respect I'm very grateful for them.
J. del Tufo- The ending of Sleeping in Flame, with Red Riding Hood coming to Walker's door and saying "All of us have heard what you did. We don't like it. You're dangerous." Then Walker says "Our Son." First of all Red Riding Hood's dialogue is not in quotes, implying that perhaps Walker is imagining this. Second, if he is not, it opens the whole cycle back up again. I know it was designed to be ambiguous, but could you please comment a little about the possibilities.
J. Carroll- I'm loathe to do that. I feel that when I finish a book, there is some sort of umbilical cord that snapped and I become a reader like anybody else. Unfortunately, even intelligent readers will ask me 'What did you mean by that?' For better or worse, if I tell them, it will either influence them as 'Oh, that's what it means,' or they will say 'That's not what I thought' and them become defensive. When I was growing up there was a little doll figure drawn by a cartoon writer called 'The Nebish.' The Nebish was this little kind of bloopy guy without a specific shape. When people ask me questions like that I conjure the Nebish, because your interpretation is as important as mine. What's the end of Sleeping in Flame? I think it's that nobody gets out of here alive. When you open up a Pandora's box, you're not going to be able to close it that simply. We've got to protect our son, because if it's not over who knows what the next step will be. I had originally ended the book very happily, with something like 'The magic's over, Maris and I are together, and everything is peachy.' Then I thought no, it's not that simple. If you're going to enter a world like this, our rules don't apply. They don't have happy ending over there. You may not have unhappy ending, but you will have question mark endings. I'm sure you know that people have complained about my endings forever. That is something that I grow rather belligerent about. I think this is one of the problems of genre readers. 'It's gotta end.' Because that's what a fantasy novel does, it ends. Night returns, or someone dies, or the dragon is slayed, or the Hollywood movie fades. You know, life doesn't end that way. You put your girlfriend on the bus and the doors close, but there's one more thing you've got to say, and that thing you were going to say doesn't get said, and then you forget it, and then you break up with her, and then three years later you remember, if I'd only said it- that's how life works. It's not 'Maris and I are happy now and the baby is fat and joyous and voila.' If you read my other books you know that child does come into the world and it has magical powers, and it goes on and on.
J. del Tufo- If you had not become a writer what do you think you'd be doing now?
J. Carroll- I probably would have directed films. I was offered that once, and it was interesting to me, but it wasn't the right thing at the time. I've always loved film, but not enough to pursue that. I spent a lot of time around film because of my father when I was younger. I had a lot of connections. Clive Barker offered me a film to direct once.
J. del Tufo- Is there a possibility that you might do that in the future?
J. Carroll- It would depend on what came up.
J. del Tufo- Are any of your book being made into films?
J. Carroll- So many of them are optioned, but there is nothing currently happening. One of them is locked down forever. Land of Laughs. It was bought when it first came out and last year the guy who bought was offered $3,000,000 for the rights. $3,000,000. And he wouldn't sell it. It's a true Hollywood story, you know why? He'll never make the film. He's a player in California. If he sells the rights and someone makes a Ghost out of Land of Laughs, he would be humiliated. He would The Guy Who Sold The Rights to The Hit Film. This is how it works. The guy who produced Natural Born Killers has this new film based on a Stephen King story, directed by the guy who did The Usual Suspects. This guy told me that he would love to do Land of Laughs. I've always thought that Voice of Our Shadow would make a wonderful movie. Wendy Feinerman, who did Forrest Gump was very interested in Outside the Dog Museum. Somebody very famous once said to me, 'One day someone is going to make one of the films, it's going to be a success, and then everything will be made. Until that kind of person with those kind of nuts does it, it will float. Elmore Leonard is a perfect example. Right now he could spit and they would put it on celluloid. And rightly so, he's a wonderful writer. I think his breakout book was Glitter, which was his 23rd. And if you've read Leonard, his 7th and 15th and 18th were very much like Glitter. But it was it. There is no rhyme or reason. The English Patient. Did you read The English Patient? It is unreadable. Some guy saw it, said 'I can do this,' viola.
J. del Tufo- I know a lot of people tried to read it.
J. Carroll- When you know that wonderful story in Britain. The Booker Prize does a short list of seven books they consider the year's best. I think Time Out or Punch or one of the funny magazines over there printed up a thousand little pieces of paper that says 'If you find this piece of paper, call this number and we'll give you 20 pounds.' They went into 50 bookstores and inserted these slips in the last hundred pages of all the Booker Prize short lists. 1000 books, they got three calls. So there you go. Actually I think Ondaatje's great book was the one before The English Patient called In the Skin of a Lion. That's a great novel. The English Patient was unreadable, but some guy had a vision and- viola. I think that's what it's all about. All the time you hear these stories about some guy who found a book that is X number of years old and he took it and made it into Ghost.
J. del Tufo- I'm familiar with the multiple religious backgrounds that you come from. You were born into a Jewish family and raised as a Christian Scientist. You have a brother who is an Orthodox Jew and another who is Sufi. What do you tell your son about God and religion?
J. Carroll- I tell me son that, as far as I'm concerned there certainly is a God, that he has an enormous sense of humor, and he gives us the compliment of thinking that we're rather intelligent. Whether he made us or not, or whether we're just part of a spin-off, I don't know. I don't think that he's directly involved in our day to day, but he keeps an eye on us. My brother, the Sufi, told me something that has always send a chill down my spine. He was a student of religion for years. He said 'In all of my studying of religion there is basically one thing that all religions have in common, which is a final judgment.' In that respect it may be pitchforks or someone gently saying 'Have a look.' There is a wonderful line that is 'You know there's a light, you know where it is. Try and walk in it.' And it's hard. I'm not talking about miracles or crosses, but you know where the light is- try and walk in it.
J. del Tufo- Where do you find magic?
J. Carroll- In love. It is the constant magic. And love could be the love of a dog, love of an idea or love of a person. Magic is essentially surprise, and love is the only constantly surprising thing that I know of in life. Usually in a good way. You can be surprised in an ugly way, and that ain't magic. Magic renews itself in love, and this is why I love obsession. Renewal, surprise, magic, all of those words are in a sense synonymous with each other.
This was a little under half of our conversation from the first day, but it is the most relevant and revelatory conversation. We later spoke in detail about the Web, especially the possibility of me doing an Official Jonathan Carroll web site (I have a design company called Mobius New Media that does a lot of that work). I have decided to do this site in the spring, and Carroll will give his input and help bring it to life. We spoke more about Vienna, what it means to him and why he loves it so much. We also spoke for about an hour on Carroll's design background, what and who we liked or disliked for various reasons, etc.
