You Once Said: An Interview with Jonathan Ames
With Sarah Stodola
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Jonathan Ames is, of course, a writer. However, he is also the kind of writer who has avoided ruts, never settling for what comes easy, or what has worked for him in the past. He has been a columnist for the New York Press, and published several books, including The Extra Man and What's Not To Love? In all of his work, it is evident that he has never been one to shy away from a thorny topic. And Ames isn't always simply a writer, as evidenced by his off-off-Broadway one-man show, Oedipussy, as well as appearances on Letterman and the radio show The Next Big Thing. Some of his other projects, plus info on book tour dates, can be found at www.jonathanames.com.
His latest book, Wake Up, Sir!, is a work that takes influence from P.G. Wodehouse, and will be released next month. Coincidentally or not, he has also given a few interviews recently. Therefore, and in the interest of preventing repetition, when I recently spoke (by email) with Mr. Ames I asked him to expand on some points he has made in previous interviews. Hence, the title of this interview...
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You once said: “People tell me that they really enjoy my work. Some people even say that it helped them. Then, of course, people will say, “I can’t BELIEVE that you said that.” I tend to get less of that now. Maybe because I’ve been doing this for a while.”
Sarah Stodola: Can you think of something specific that you’ve written about that people have been particularly shocked by?
Jonathan Ames: I'm struggling to come up with something specific . . . It's more of a general reaction to some of the things I've written. A reaction in the past. Perhaps, though, people were a bit shocked by a chapter in What's Not to Love? where my non-fiction narrator makes love to a post-op transsexual. That may have shocked people. Or maybe it's me who thinks they should have been shocked by it. Maybe I'm shocked by it. In that same book, the non-fiction narrator has a sexual encounter with a woman nearly forty years his senior. I think that stunned a reader or two. But I just don't know that people are 'shocked' . . . I think 'tickled' might be the better word.
SS: Have you ever shocked yourself, looking back at things you’ve written?
JA: I haven't read the male anal rape scene in my first novel I Pass Like Night for some time, but that might shock me. A woman once told me that it was a very good description of anal sex, which led me to the natural conclusion that she herself had indulged in anal sex.
SS: You seem to do less of this shock-filled writing these days. Do you think there is an element of having grown out of it? Is it a sign of your writing having matured that you no longer need to shock?
JA: Enough with this shock business! I feel like Jack Nicholson in 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'. I think I'm having a problem with the word 'shock'. I will say that I have not outgrown the need to provoke a reaction. All writers have to provoke a reaction. You have to hold the reader's attention. My first goal as a writer is not to bore.
SS: What?! I’m shocked!! But okay, moving on…
You once said (of your son): He hasn’t read my work. I don’t think he is much interested in me as a writer. He’s more interested in me as a dad.SS: I think this is common. Vonnegut’s daughter doesn’t read his work. Hitchens’ kids don’t read his work. Do you think perhaps this is something that will interest your son later in life, when he wants to understand his father better?
JA: I don't think so. I don't think he'll want to understand me better; he already knows me or knows enough. His goal, like all people's goals, is to understand himself. Maybe to understand himself, he might read my books some day . . . But there's something weird about it. It's a gut intuitive feeling: he doesn't need to read my books to know me. And he wouldn't be able to read them as other people might. He'd be getting a glimpse of me that strangers get -- that could be alienating. Why get that weird glimpse? Why peek at me through a window when he's allowed in the house?
SS: I think that when I asked this question I was thinking about that episode of Six Feet Under where Nate discovers a room his father had rented out for years in secret, and when he goes to this room he realizes that his dad had a whole life and person that his family had never known about. He wishes he understood his father better, and it occurred to me that reading a dad’s writing might provide some of this understanding. My father isn’t a writer, but if he were, I think I’d like to read his work.
You once said: “I wrote my first novel, I Pass Like Night, by hand and had a typist type it, though I also typed a few chapters.”
SS: People still do that? I mean, I guess you wrote that novel in the 1980’s. I was just a kid in the 80’s, but I think we had computers, or at least word processors. Or at least we could type things ourselves. Was this antiquated when you did it?
JA: I wrote that book from 1986 to 1988. I wasn't a great typist then . . . Also, I did a lot of rewriting, which I found easier to do by hand; to cross out as I went along . . . Most of my peers had already started using computers of some sort, but I was very slow to get computerized. I didn't get a laptop until 1994. Back to writing at hand: I was more careful back then and more youthfully passionate. It was like each sentence was coming from my heart, so I think writing by hand made sense -- it was the way I had learned how to write, and so it was the most direct, the most honest, the most natural. There was no interference from a machine or the appearance of perfectly formed typed letters to throw me off; they were my own real words. Now I'm all false and weird, so I can write books on a laptop.
You once said (of time spent at writing colonies): “So I don’t know how it works out percentage wise – I’m not very good at math – but I’ll give it a shot. 33% of the time is spent drinking and recovering and about 17% is spent writing, another 33% is spent sleeping, and the remaining 17% is probably spent reading.”
SS: This doesn’t make the idea of the writer’s colony seem very convincing. Do you defend the concept? Do you feel that attending writer’s colonies has helped your writing?
JA: I don't know the exact question on MaudNewton.com that this was lifted from, but I don't propose that this is what life is like at a colony. The question was something along the lines of whether or not it's possible to drink heavily at a colony and get work done, so I was trying to be silly coming up with a mathematical answer. So we won't address this percentage nonsense in your first question, but I can address the second question: Attending art colonies has helped my writing. It gave me time to work without having to worry about food shopping and this was a great boon.
SS: I promise that you came up with those percentages, not me. I swear. Ask Maud.
You once said: “…I want my next novel to be an academic/comedic novel, like that great book Kingsley Amis wrote, the title of which I can’t recall.”
SS: Okay then, what exactly makes a novel qualify as an academic novel? Furthermore, how do you distinguish an academic/comedic novel from a regular comedic novel?
JA: A novel qualifies, I think, though it's not something I really know or have considered, as an academic novel if it's set at an academy/university. The academic-comedic novel is, I imagine, a subset of the comedic novel.
SS: I like that definition much better than the one I was expecting, which was that an academic novel is one that incorporates ideas and issues from the world of academia, or one that is written in academic prose, which is just about the worst thing I can think of.
You once said: “All my main fictional characters (narrators) are me and also my non-fiction narrator, but, and this is boring, not me. And they’re probably not me, because who can capture one’s self?”
SS: This speaks to an extremely pervasive trend in literature these days. It’s very postmodern/metafictional. And it could also explain why writers like Neal Pollack and Jonathan Safran Foer go so far as to offer eponymous fictional characters in their work – a move that completely blurs the line between who is the author and who is the fictional character and who is the narrator (or author, implied author, and narrator). Do you consciously perpetuate this literary style?
JA: I think it's always been around, this blurring of author and fictional characters. Not quite speaking to what you're discussing, but in the second book of Don Quixote, Don Quixote confronts people who have read a false account of his adventures. This was referring to a sequel to Don Quixote that was not written by Cervantes, which, naturally, greatly upset Cervantes. I don't think he was able to sue for copyright infringement, suing and copyright infringement weren't big back then, so he wrote his own sequel -- book two. Thus, it was kind of good that there was the false sequel because it provoked Cervantes to write a second book.
Anyway, this blurring of what the hell is going on is not new. It just always seems new for some reason. Personally, I don't consciously perpetuate this literary style. I wrote essays about myself; the character was really me, but distorted because I was not capable of truly capturing myself. And my fictional narrators, since I write in the first person, share a lot of my genes, but I'm not willfully playing literary games . . . I'm not clever enough for that. I just want to entertain the reader.
SS: And also, why are there so many male novelists named Jonathan these days (in addition to you and Foer, Lethem also comes immediately to mind, and Franzen)?
JA: I once addressed this in an essay for Bookforum and I wrote that I was like the weird brother in this family of brothers named Jonathan, that I was the pin-headed one who would go missing but then would be found in the woods screwing sap-holes in trees. I somehow saw this as a Medieval family of brothers named Jonathan. But I had to cut that paragraph because of the word-count. I don't know where that paragraph might be. And I forget the exact topic of the essay, but it was something about how I screwed up my literary career by choosing the wrong subtitle for my memoir, What's Not to Love? The subtitle was/is: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer. At the time I thought it would be catchy, but the result has been to see the word pervert associated repeatedly with my name. And so I had come to realize (in the Bookforum essay) that I was bad at marketing -- that using the word 'genius' as Dave Eggers had done was a much better idea.
SS: Yeah, I don’t think anyone who would like to remain sane should try to compete with Eggers in the arena of marketing…
JA: Not trying to compete. I admire D. Eggers. He's remarkable in many different ways.
SS: Of course. I admire him, too.
You once said: “Well, at that time, I was at Indiana University…”
SS: Did you go to Indiana University? Because I did.
JA: Didn't go. Was a visiting professor of creative writing 2000/2001.
You once said: “I think I’m proudest of The Extra Man. That I sustained a story for a ‘long’ book; that I had a singleness of purpose for four years to write that book and it happened.
SS: But you worked on other things during these four years, right?
JA: Not too much. Though I did produce numerous unwritten oral stories for my second career as a monologist. Those stories are never written out, only outlined with what I call 'headlines'. I wrote The Extra Man from December 1992 to September 1996, with a revision in the spring of 1997. During that time, I wrote a few little articles, but hardly anything other than the novel. Between September 1996 and the spring of 1997, I did start writing some essays for the New York Press.
SS: Once when I heard Norman Mailer speak, he was also asked which of his works he was most proud of. He refused to name one, because he feared that doing so would immediately skew perceptions of it. Do you worry about that?
JA: Not until this moment.
You once said (of your forthcoming novel): It’s a comic novel; it’s an homage to the novels of PG Wodehouse. It is titled, Wake Up, Sir!SS: Ah yes, the new novel…Can you talk about it a bit? How it got started?
JA: In January/February of 1999, I read all this Wodehouse to cure myself of a depression and I think the seed was planted to write a book that gave me the kind of pleasure that the Wodehouse books had given me . . . I then started the book in September of 2000, in Bloomington, Indiana . . .
SS: Even though it is in a sense an ode to Wodehouse, there are elements of it that make it your own. What have you taken from Wodehouse and how have you departed from him?
JA: I mimicked the structure and arc of a Wodehouse Wooster/Jeeves novel, in which Bertie Wooster ends up at a country estate and has to 'pinch' something. My character goes to an artist colony, the closest I could come to an estate, and he has to pinch something. Also, I have a character named Jeeves. But he is a wholly different Jeeves. It's just coincidence (in the book) that the character is named Jeeves. My narrator reads too much Wodehouse to cure himself of a depression and gets it in his head that he should have a valet in much the same way that Don Quixote reads too many books of chivalry and thinks he's a Knight. So my narrator, Alan Blair, hires a valet and rather freakishly the valet's name is Jeeves.
SS: More than just the plot, Alan Blair also mimicks the lingo and Briticism of Bertie Wooster, which is interesting for a character from New Jersey, and I think adds to the humor.
JA: Have you read the book? I think so since you mention the lingo and Briticism thing . . . That is a link to Wodehouse, but also a carry-over from my novel The Extra Man, where the narrator, Louis Ives, was obsessed with English novels and being a 'young gentleman' -- the kind of young gentleman he had observed in the novels he loved. So Wake Up, Sir! is a thematic sequel to The Extra Man, though one needn't have read The Extra Man to read Wake Up, Sir!
SS: I have not read the book, but my friend Mark is reading it and he told me all about it. Speaking of, he said that he thinks it a perfect book for a youngish male audience, because every aspiring male writer wants nothing more in life than to hire a valet and spend all his time writing and drinking and not having a day job. He also found it interesting that although this is something he aspires to, there is also something tragic in the character of Alan Blair. Is this a response that you anticipated?
JA: I did not anticipate Mark's response. I don't think I anticipated any response, except to hope that the book would give people pleasure. I am a little concerned about his response, this business about a youngish male audience . . . Will women like the book?
SS: I’ve heard people say that Wodehouse is guy’s stuff. I disagree, and I suspect I will feel the same way about Wake Up, Sir!
Wodehouse wrote book after book on the same characters. Any chance of some sequels?
JA: I don't think so.
SS: Have you read Douglas Adams, who also takes influence from Wodehouse?
JA: I read Douglas Adams so long ago that I remember the cover but not the content.
You once said: “I was and still am a huge Wodehouse fan, and during a depression in 2000 – I think it was ’00 – I read a lot of Wodehouse as an attempted cure, a sort (of) books-instead-of-Prozac approach…And so then in the book, I give the narrator, Alan Blair, this same cure, an overdose of Wodehouse, which did work for both of us. And so the Jeeves character was also born out of this massive Wodehouse absorption on my part…"
SS: What is it about Wodehouse’s writing that has this effect?
JA: Let's see: it's the levity of the work. The beauty and silliness of the prose. It makes you laugh and laughter cures depression.
SS: So Wodehouse makes people feel good. Is he valuable in any other way? (I ask this question because so many critics say he isn’t, that he is comedy and that’s all).
JA: Well, if you can make people feel good, what other value is there? Make people feel bad? I guess that's a value. Martin Amis does that, right? Though I haven't read him; just glanced at his work, and my utterly surface judgment is that he makes us feel bad for being idiots, which is probably a good thing, a wake-up call or something . . . Anyway, Wodehouse being comedic and making people feel good is about the best value there is . . . I do think his prose is exquisite, so he has artistic prose value, for what that's worth . . . I want to say that Wodehouse makes you think about life . . . About the silliness. That must be instructive. And by thinking about the silliness you think about the darkness . . . the old yin/yang of everything.
SS: Wodehouse generally refuses to take things seriously and displays an irreverence to many elitist literary figures in his work, and in doing so undermines the idea of “high culture.” Do you agree with this, and do you think this makes him a cultural critic of sorts, in addition to simply making people feel good?
JA: I don't think so. He quotes Shakespeare and famous poetry with respect in the Wooster novels . . . I didn't detect irreverence there . . . Hmmm . . . So I don't think of him as a cultural critic, and it's not just about making people feel good: He entertained. There's something about 'entertaining' that is higher than simply making feel good. He was a brilliant prose comedian. That's my take. Shakespeare wrote comedies. Comedy is just as important as tragedy. If not more so. It makes tragedy bearable.
You once said: “I love so many writers; they’ve all kept me going. I love books. I think every writer is a book lover. But the writers I reread…let’s see: Raymond Chandler, Bukowski, PG Wodehouse…recently I reread John Barth’s End of the Road. Some day I hope to reread Cervantes’ Don Quixote, which I think is the greatest book I’ve ever read.”
SS: That is quite an eclectic list. How do you think this diversity of influences impacts your own writing, or does it? Clearly, the Wodehouse influence is present in your forthcoming novel, but I mean just in your writing in general.
JA: I steal from all the writers I love. It probably doesn't show since I'm a slug and they're gods, but I steal from them . . .
SS: A lot of people don’t think Bukowski is to be taken seriously. How do you respond to that?
JA: I respond by thinking: Who cares. I take him seriously. A number of friends with average IQ's take him seriously. That's good enough for me. Actually, I don't take him seriously; I just enjoy the hell out of him. Well, maybe I do take him seriously. I try to figure out how he did what he did . . . And I'm fascinated by him. By his perseverance. His mad life.
SS: So do you not put much stock in the academic approach to literary criticism, where many of the writers we have mentioned here are dismissed for not adhering to highbrow standards of literature?
JA: The only ones perhaps dismissed are Bukowski and Wodehouse, but they certainly get a lot of attention from the academy, perhaps for not getting attention from the academy. Anyway, I was an English major in college but I never read any literary criticism. I couldn't make any sense of it; to me it was like science or philosophy -- beyond me. I'm a simple thinker. So somehow I avoided the courses where they were reading Lit Crit. Maybe it was intuitive. It's probably not good for a writer to read that stuff. Will gum up the works. But gum can be removed or maybe it can add something. Who knows. So if you've read a lot of Foucault or Derrida or whomever (I've heard of Foucault, Derrida, and Whomever, but I haven't read them) and you want to write fiction, I think you'll be all right. It's probably an obstacle, but obstacles are good for a writer, even intellectual abstract obstacles.
SS: End of the Road is such a great little novel. Right?
JA: I think so. It does end rather brutally. That shocked me both times I read it. I didn't remember the ending the second time I read it, which was ten years later, and then when the bad ending came, I did recall being saddened by the ending the first time. Maybe that ending is too harsh. I don't know. I sort of hate it that women often get the short end of the stick, so to speak, in life and literature.
SS: Yeah, me too.
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