- - - -
Now available for preorder:
The San Francisco Panorama.
- - - -
- - - - Copyright The Commonwealth Club of California
- - - - 70th Annual Awards
William T. Vollmann, Author of The Royal Family
- - - - William T. Vollmann has earned a reputation as one of the most ambitious - and prolific - writers in the U.S. today. The scale of his work, and the imaginative force of it, are rare in contemporary American letters. LA Book Review editor Steve Wasserman calls him "a monster of talent"; editor and postmodern lit guru Larry McCaffery compares Vollmann's "voracious appetite" to that of Melville, Whitman and Pynchon. Vollmann is not a writer who leaves readers lukewarm. Admirers tend to be amazed at the ride his books take them on; detractors aren't interested in what he's setting out to do in the first place, don't have the patience for it, and won't hesitate to go on an extended screed against it. Recently I reached Vollmann at his home in Sacramento to talk with him about The Royal Family - a book which, in terms of its details on San Francisco, at times seems to set out to do for San Francisco what Joyce did for Dublin in Ulysses. (And, since in The Royal Family Vollmann returns to the subject of prostitution, it might also be helpful to remember that Ulysses, published in 1922, was banned in the U.S. until 1933 because it was deemed obscene.) One aspect which shapes so much of Vollmann's writing is the research he puts into it: scrutinizing people and situations, research from the street. One character at the center of this book, detective Henry Tyler, roams through the Tenderloin and the Inner Mission, as well as throughout the rest of San Francisco, and observes the city with vivid, almost overwhelming, detail. "I consider San Francisco to be my home, even though I don't live there anymore" Vollmann said. "To me it's always been the most special city in the entire world. It's made up of all kinds of very tiny but often very secluded worlds. You can get to know one of these worlds and then five years later that world can be gone and replaced by something else, or it could have changed itself." Vollmann's infatuation with the city shows up in one respect in a couple of prose poems in the novel. "Originally I wanted to make the book much longer and have a prose poem about every district," he said. "But then the book would have become really unmanageable. There's a prose poem about Geary Street and a prose poem about the Financial District. But I didn't want to wear out my readers. I feel sad there isn't more in the book about the area around Terraville. I've always liked that part of town: the sort of cool, foggy silvery feeling of everything. There's something very mysterious and precious about it." As for researching the places Tyler (who lives in the Sunset) haunts in search of the Queen of Prostitutes, Vollmann explained, "I never lived in the Mission or the Tenderloin, but I have spent quite a lot of time there over the years. I've spent a lot of times in bars, slept in lots of the hotels, and I've been close to a lot of prostitutes in those areas. The characters are not necessarily based on a one-to-one correspondence with an individual but are modeled from parts of many, many different individuals and types. I would say they are representative of what's really out there." A Skit and BBC Money This 800-page novel grew out of a story Vollmann was working on some years ago about The Queen of Whores. In the early 1990s, when the BBC was doing a profile on Vollmann, he also had some prostitutes put on a skit about The Queen. "The BBC guy was hiding in the closet with the microphone," Vollmann said. "He didn't feel like being out there. He would just hand out his twenties and we'd go out and bring out enforcers and prospective queens and listen to what they all had to say. The prostitutes were all very much taken with the idea. I was sort of surprised. I was originally just thinking of something to fill in time for the BBC. They were doing a profile on me, and I thought, 'Why not?' Sort of a whimsical idea. Somehow it seemed to really resonate with all the prostitutes. "I also discovered that there were two kinds of queens. One prostitute tended to want to be very loving and nurturing, to give shelter and drugs and so forth to all the other women who would be protected by her. The other type of prostitute seemed to want to be as mean and dominant and cruel as she could, and just lorded over the others. I realized that if I did pursue the idea, there would have to be either a good queen succeeded by a bad queen, or vice versa. As I started writing the book I realized that of course both the good and the bad queens were much more complex than that." Tiny Worlds As for the tiny worlds of San Francisco which Vollmann mentioned - the ones that might appear and disappear - I asked him what he had in mind. "Well, for instance, the SF Nazi Skinheads on Haight Street. They were around in the 1980s and they're pretty much gone. Haight Street itself, for that matter - it constantly changes. You think you have a handle on Haight Street and you go back a year later and the feeling is very, very different. The Tenderloin has been getting - I don't know if I would call it gentrified exactly. More and more families have moved in, particularly Asian families, and it's a lot safer. I sort of like the change. When I first started going to the Tenderloin in the early 1980s it had an extremely frightening feeling about it. "Now parts of the Mission are getting more and more hard. One time I went out with the vice squad and they said, 'Look, you can't really drive this stuff out. All you can do is manage and control it and confine it within certain areas.' Now that there is more pressure on the Tenderloin, a lot of these people are going elsewhere, but it's still there. If there is, say, a smaller area for this kind of activity, then the activity just becomes correspondingly more concentrated." Part of what shapes prostitution in this country is that, save for in Nevada, it's illegal. Having traveled throughout different parts of the world, Vollmann has learned something about prostitution in other countries, too. "The whole business of prostitution being illegal is just so cruel and stupid," he said. "If they were only to legalize it and regulate it and health inspect it and tax it, everybody would be better off. In my opinion, prostitutes in America are some of the worst off in the whole world. We Americans are ashamed of sexuality and of our bodies, so that when a prostitute enters that life she is really degrading herself and she is associated with dirty, dangerous and depressing criminal activity. A woman who is a prostitute here, especially a street prostitute, is very, very likely to have at least a nodding acquaintance with drugs and theft, and to not get a good diet - all kinds of really sad things." Imperial Near the end of The Royal Family, detective Henry Tyler visits California's Imperial County. I had heard that Vollmann was at work on a nonfiction book about the Imperial Valley, and so I asked him what was happening with that project. "I first started going down to the Imperial Valley at the end of 1996," he said. "It's really a fascinating place. I'm interested in a lot of things; the main one is seeing how Mexicans, illegal and legal, become Mexican Americans, and sometimes become Americans without the Mexican any more. The whole border thing is kind of tragic but very fascinating. To me there's an entity, a region that I call Imperial, which contains Imperial County, but extends into Mexico and along the California-Mexico border to San Diego and goes a bit north of Imperial County to include the entire Salton Sea, the Colorado Desert, and some other areas. "There's a certain feeling about that region, and for a long time I couldn't figure out what it was. Then I started looking at ecological descriptions of the area, and I read some stuff about the Indians who used to be based there and realized that the boundaries of certain types of material cultures tended to correspond to this thing I called Imperial. Where people were conducting a certain kind of agriculture using a certain kind of tool, that was because the land encouraged them to do it that way." The Imperial book will be a pictorial exploration as well as a place for Vollmann to explore in writing the area he's been coming to know. "I do a lot of 8x10 stuff," he said. "I want there to be lots of pictures. Maybe the book will get wrapped up in another year, another couple of years. It's nice to let it take a while so that I can describe Imperial changing over time." Intoxication For those who have followed Vollmann's career since his first book was published in 1987, they've seen the pace of his writing - or at least of his publication - slow since the beginning. What else, I wondered, has he seen change in his writing, or the process of writing, in that time? "When I first began, it was more of an intoxicating feeling. I would just get so excited sitting in front of the typewriter or the word processor and watching these beautiful phrases come out of my fingertips. I didn't really feel that I was responsible for them. I would just sit there and type like mad, and it was really, really exciting. When I was finished I would let them sit for a while, then I would go back and start organizing them and creating something from them. That was a wonderful time. "That time has long since gone, and it feels more like a craft. It's because I have things that I want to say and things that I want to do, so writing is not so much of this overwhelming experience for me now. But I would say I'm a better writer. I think that I will always be interested in describing the way things look, and feel, and smell, and so forth. I think those kinds of things are wonderful. Reality is so interesting. At the same time, I'm more and more interested in understanding people and bringing people alive. As a journalist I've been fortunate enough to go to lots and lots of parts of the world and see different kinds of people. I have also learned to create capsule biographies of people. Those are useful exercises for me. I think my writing benefits from those. I don't really know where the writing will go, but the longer I live, the more complex it seems to me people are, and so the more I feel I have to say." Dreambooks & Shostakovich In an interview several years ago, Vollmann mentioned his admiration for Eastern European writers in the past. Since I've lived in Ukraine and the Czech Republic, this was something I was especially curious to hear more about. "When I was in high school," he said, "the Penguin Writers from the Other Europe series started coming out. I don't think there was a single one that I didn't really, really like. The two that I would say that really stand out, even above the others, is Tadeusz Kondwicki's A Dreambook for Our Time. Probably an even greater book than that, which Dalkey Archive just reissued - and actually, it was very flattering that they wanted me to write the afterword to that, because I've always loved that book - is Danilo Kis's The Tomb for Boris Davidovich. To me that's one of the great books of the last century." Vollmann is revisiting Eastern Europe in his own fiction these days. In addition to the nonfiction project, he's at work on a collection of short stories about Russia, Germany and Eastern Europe during World War II. Some of those stories have already been published: one about Nadezhda Krupskaya (a Bolshevik revolutionary who married Lenin, and who survived after his death until 1939) has appeared in The New Yorker. And the journal Conjunctions has published one about Hitler. Another main character in a couple of the stories is Dmitri Shostakovich. "I was just in St. Petersburg in December," Vollmann said. "I was doing a story on Kazakhstan. When I finished I wanted to take three or four days there to get some notes for Shostakovich. I'd never been there. I had a wonderful time, and they just happened to be showing Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District in the opera house. Since I was a foreigner I had to pay for a high-priced seat, and I got to sit next to all these mafiosos and their high-priced whores with their cell phones. It was certainly a fun experience." - - - -
|
Red dot denotes content that is new today.
Black dot denotes newish content.