Thomas E. Kennedy / Features / Untitled Books

"John Updike once said he writes for the person who will discover an old dusty copy of one of his books on the back shelves of a library. Who knows for whom we write? We sing and hope someone will hear the song and be pleased and moved by it."

Photograph: © Finja Desler

Thomas E. Kennedy

Thomas E. Kennedy is the author of eight novels, as well as several collections of short stories and essays, and has won numerous awards including the 2007 Eric Hoffer Award, the Pushcart Prize, the O. Henry Prize and the National Magazine Award. He can write anywhere as long as his literary partner is in hand.

Where are you right now?

This is a pleasingly mysterious question. Does it mean where am I physically right now - at the instant of your asking or at the instant of my answering? Or where am I metaphorically speaking right now - meaning in the current phase of my life? I will try to respond in all senses: At the instant of your asking the question (in an email yesterday), I was on my way out the door for a planning meeting with the American Women's Club in Denmark which has invited me to do a presentation and reading next February. At the instant of my answering (now), I am in my little east side Copenhagen apartment, sitting on my brick-red sofa where I do much of my writing. Where am I, metaphorically speaking, in the current phase of my life? In a good place, where I am feeling physically and spiritually better than I have in some years, feeling as though I have more control over my life, contemplating future projects, enjoying my work - writing, translating poetry (mostly, some prose) from the Danish, teaching a bit (for the master of fine arts program at Fairleigh Dickinson University), travelling, putting the finishing touches on my new & selected stories, and planning two book-length projects.

Where do you write?
Actually, anywhere. In good weather I love to sit in the sunshine in an outdoor café here in Copenhagen, writing and sipping a pint or two - for example, on Kultorvet (the Coal Square) where Søren Kierkegaard once lived and where the White Lamb pub was shelled by the Duke of Wellington in 1807. This past summer was so sunless, however, that my doctor has me taking vitamin D pills. I also like to write on airplanes, particularly trans-oceanic flights, and on trains or buses. But mostly I write on my red sofa, seated all the way to the right with my pad resting on the wide flat armrest in my tiny, ground-floor apartment on the east side of Copenhagen, surrounded by the paintings hanging on my walls, collected over many years, and from time to time I exchange a glance with the abstract faces in those pictures. The disadvantage to that is there are fewer living external inspirations than there are in an outdoor café; the advantages are there is quiet and access to all my books and the internet and my dictionaries. A mix of all these places is where I write.

How do you write?
The first draft always by hand, sometimes in long hand, sometimes - when the words are coming fast - in short hand (Gregg system, which I learned in the army in the '60s to work in the White House - but that's another story). Around 1994 I was on a trans-Atlantic flight where among the items offered in the 'Sky Shop' was a beautiful Montblanc ballpoint pen. It cost about $300, but as soon as I took pen in hand I knew it was the only pen for me, never again would I write with a Bic or a Cross or a Parker. I purchased it (causing my wife to mutter a bit) but have never regretted that purchase. In 2009, after about 15 books and many scores of stories, essays and translations, that pen broke, literally. The barrel cracked, and it was irreparable. So I went out and bought another just like it. I love that Montblanc. It sits just so in my hand, beautifully balanced, and when the refill is about to run dry, it gets skimpy with the ink for a few words, but then comes in strong again, and you know you have a page or two to go before it runs fully dry. It's a warning system, you see. That Montblanc is my literary partner.

What keeps you writing?
That I'm never done. When I started out, I was particularly inspired by Fyodor Dostoyevsky who, when he was 18 years old, wrote in his journal, "Man is a mystery. This mystery must be solved, and even if you pass your entire life solving it, do not say you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery because I want to be a man." In a slight variation on that, I write because I want to discover what it is to be a human being - or more precisely, what it is to be me. I view that subject through a different angle each time I start writing, and I am beginning to suspect that the number of angles is infinite. Or in any event, less finite than my life. I have been writing for 50 years this year - decided I wanted to write in 1961, the same year that Hemingway shot himself and when I turned 17. At that time I thought, well he had a good long life. He was 61. Now I am 67 and it is 50 years later, and I am far from done. Incidentally, Robert Coover wrote a short story in 1961 titled 'Beginnings', which begins something like, "In order to get started, he went to live on an island and shot himself in the head. His blood, unable to resist a final joke, spattered on the walls, spelling out the words, 'It is important to begin when everything is over.'"

Who do you write for?
Well I write for everyone and no one. I write for myself mostly as well as for the pretty girl in first grade who never poured me a smile or a glance. I hope that whoever might read my stuff will respond in their hearts, but who knows how many people even read the work.If I am published in a magazine with, say 5,000 or 10,000 or 20,000 subscribers or in a newspaper with 500,000, who knows how many of the readers of those magazines or papers will actually read my piece, or my book that may have been reviewed in that literary magazine or that newspaper? Yet sometimes one is surprised; I was contacted by a high school speech teacher from the American southwest a couple of years ago to tell me that she had been using a story she read of mine in 1990 as a reading interpretation piece for her students for nearly 20 years.A friend, the writer and artist Gladys Swan, once said that she feels her stories pass through her on their way someplace else.That is how I felt when that teacher contacted me - my story had passed through me to her and to many - maybe hundreds, maybe thousands - of her students and maybe it passed through some of them to even more people. You can kill a singer with violence, but the only way to kill a song is by not singing it until it is forgotten. John Updike once said he writes for the person who will discover an old dusty copy of one of his books on the back shelves of a library. Who knows for whom we write? We sing and hope someone will hear the song and be pleased and moved by it.

Do you discuss your work with anyone?
When I have a draft of a piece that is showable, I will send it to one or two or three trusted writer friends who will respond honestly and with care to me just as I would do for them with their work. Of course, I just want to make sure that the piece will not embarrass me in the world and hope that they will say, "This is brilliant! Don't change a word!". But sometimes they have suggestions, and sometimes those suggestions are good and useful. Sometimes those suggestions indicate to me that they didn't understand what I was trying to do - so I will try again to do it. As Beckett said, "Try. Fail. Try again. Fail better."

How do you know if your work is good?

I don't, really. If my trusted readers say they like it, I feel encouraged. If readers and reviewers and critics like it, I feel encouraged. But even if they don't like it, I know usually that I have done the best I could. For 20 years - between the ages of 17 and 37 - I wrote without getting published. I had encouragement - from teachers, from an agent, hyperbolic editorial praise in rejection letters, a grant for a novel-in-progress - but nothing published for 20 years. I tried to give up, but I couldn't. I even sold all my fiction books to an antiquarian book dealer to rid my life of fiction and its disappointments, but I found myself buying them back for 5 or 10 times the price he gave me for them and then I knew I was in it for life. Strangely, though, when I wrote my next story, after I had written about 4 or 5 pages, I knew that this would be the first story I would get published - and that turned out to be true. And it went much faster then - half a dozen stories a year leading to books leading to a score of books, etc. Does that mean my work is good - because it gets published? I don't know. When Bloomsbury picked me up two years ago, when they put my books on the world market instead of the small press market, I was heartened. I had concluded by then that I was just a small-press writer, but suddenly I was a large-press writer, and I was grateful to have my novels out in the beautiful editions that Bloomsbury produces and available to the whole English-speaking world. Does that make me a better writer than I was earlier? Are novelists who sell far more than I do necessarily better writers than I am? Or those who sell far fewer than I do - are they not as good? Time will tell. Which reminds me of something that Stanley Elkin said about the test of time, "Don't take the test."

Do you have any unwritten characters in mind?

They are legion. But I have not yet discovered the unwritten ones. I don't discover a character until I begin to write him or her. Bernardo Greene or Michela Ibsen in my novel In the Company of Angels did not exist for me until I discovered them by following them in words. The dozen characters in Falling Sideways did not exist for me until I began to shape them into language; then they became my constant companions for the time it took me to write the novel - they were with me, all around me, in the morning when I rose and they were nestled inside my mind when I lay down to sleep at night. I trust that I will meet new characters when I sit to write, and they might be sparked into life by a scrap of conversation I might overhear, by the look in someone's eye, by a smile or a more complex expression on a stranger's face, by a twist of language... In every mote of sunlight is a mood which might become a character.

Which book do you wish you'd written?
So many. Dostoyevsky's The Possessed. Camus' The Stranger. Camus's Caligula (a play) - for that matter, Sophocles' Oedipus Rex. But how can one wish to be a genius who existed 2500 years ago?! I think that those three works are the epitome of what I seek to do in my writing - they are at once so mysterious and so clear. I try to be as clear as I can when I write, but how can you be perfectly lucid about the ambiguity of reality? As the great American poet Jack Gilbert once said, "There is also the danger of making something clearer than it is."

What is your literary guilty pleasure?
The tabloids. The Sun, The Mirror, New York Post, New York Daily News... In Copenhagen, Ekstra Bladet and B.T. These are the contemporary versions of the late medieval ballads of death and treachery and sex and murder. So I feel guilty when I fly back from New York to Copenhagen and reach the newspaper display just as I am climbing into the plane and my hand goes for the New York Post instead of the New York Times and B.T. instead of Politiken, but I read those estimable papers daily - only on crossing the ocean in the sky can I allow myself two tabloids and a double vodka on the rocks! Look at the pictures of scantily clad young women, read the horoscopes ("...your relationship is going through bad weather...") peep at the latest scandals and murders.

Which writer made you want to write?

The writer immediately responsible was Katherine Mansfield. One night when I was 17 years old, I read Mansfield's Miss Brill, and became infuriated at how badly this poor old woman had been treated. I decided to write a letter to the author - who I considered responsible for Miss Brill's unhappiness - chastizing her, but looking at the biographical note on the book, I learned that Katherine Mansfield had died about 40 years before. I was stunned. It was as though she had reached out of the grave to touch my heart. And I decided that I wanted to try to do that, too. From that moment on, I was a writer, wanted more than anything else to be a writer. But this is also due to the fact that I had been reading insatiably since I was 15 and my father gave me a copy of Dostoyevsky's Crime & Punishment. By good fortune, there was nothing on television that night, so I read the book and was instantly hooked on reading serious fiction. I read all of Dostoyevsky, one right after the other, then I turned to - for some reason - most of John Steinbeck, then most of Aldous Huxley, some George Orwell, Dylan Thomas, James Joyce (who made an enormous impact) and kept reading. So all of the writers that I had read in those two years up until my decision that I wanted to try to be a writer also contributed to my decision.

Who's the most exciting author writing today?
This question has to be in plural - authors - because there are so many, and I hesitate to answer it because invariably I will forget to name some of the exciting ones, so I respond with reservations and in no particular order: Duff Brenna, Junot Dìaz, Andre Dubus III, John Barth, Robert Coover, William H. Gass, Kristian Bang Foss, Francois Camoin, Lance Olsen, W. D. Wetherell, Martin Espada, David Daniel, Tim Seibles, Charles Simic, Henrik Nordbrandt, Gladys Swan, Line-Maria Lång, Dorthe Nors... However, there are so many exciting authors in the history of literature who are as exciting as if they just wrote what they wrote today, though they may have written it 100 or a thousand or two thousand years ago. I won't begin to name all my favorites of the past who continue to occupy my heart, soul and brain today.

If you weren't writing you'd be...?
Writing. As mentioned I spent 20 years writing and not getting published but I kept on writing. So even if I wasn't writing, I would be writing. R. M. Rilke in his wonderful book Letters to a Young Poet says you have to look into your heart and ask yourself if you must write. If your answer is no, then you have saved yourself a lot of grief of trying to do something which is not imperative for you. But if your answer is yes, then you have saved yourself the grief of trying not to do what is imperative for you. He also said that a tree in winter appears to be lifeless, but in truth it is gathering its saps and its force to bloom in the spring. Sometimes a writer is like that. In any event, my answer to that question was yes. I had to. I cannot imagine myself not writing.

What next?

Falling Sideways, the second in my Copenhagen Quartet, four independent novels about the souls and seasons of the Danish capital, has been published in London this month (following the paperback of In the Company of Angels which Bloomsbury put out earlier this year). I am in process of completing a CD of myself reading my translations of the Danish cult poet Dan Turèll in a musical cooperation with the Danish movie composer Halfdan E. Later I plan to rewrite a book I published about fifteen years ago in a small press version as The Book of Angels. The rewrite will be titled The Book of Silence. It is a kind of literary horror novel about a black magician who captures and cages an artist in order to employ his imagination in the magician's pursuit of necromancy.

I will continue to travel - many reading and teaching tours every year throughout the U.S. and Europe. Also I want to spend more time with my grandson, Leo Kennedy-Rye, who turned two years old three days before Bloomsbury released the British version of Falling Sideways - the novel is dedicated to him and his parents (and a few others). And I am trying to stay healthy in order to see as much of his young life unfold as I can.

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Falling SIdeways by Thomas E. Kennedy is published by Bloomsbury.
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Monday, 7 November, 2011

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Issue 41 / February 2012

"John Updike once said he writes for the person who will discover an old dusty copy of one of his books on the back shelves of a library. Who knows for whom we write? We sing and hope someone will hear the song and be pleased and moved by it."

Thomas E. Kennedy

In How I write

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