Ted Pelton might be best known as the publisher of the fine small-press, Starcherone. However, he is also a writer in his own right. Click here to see his web page. What follows is a 2009 (reprinted from my ExperimentalFictionPoetry.blogspot.com) interview about his first collection of stories, Endorsed by Jack Chapeau (Starcherone) and his novel, Malcolm and Jack (Spuyten Duvel).
ENDORSED BY JACK CHAPEAU 1 had a very different sort of 'endoresment', written by the fictional pseudonym, than did number 2. In number 1 Chapeau discusses 'P's, that's Ted Pelton's, appearance on Larry King Live and his candiddacy for president. In number 2, Chapeau becomes an army general, and he offers a memo that focuses mostly on the interrelationship of war and television. First, what is the purpose behind the ficitonal endorsement? Why did you change the endorsement? Also, #2 featues, in addition to the endorsement, an ad written in a very archaic style. What was your thinking behind this?
Pelton: I wrote the first endorsement. I asked Geoffrey Gatza to write the second, so that accounts for the difference in tone. GG picked up on the war & television theme perhaps to the exclusion of some of the other stuff; I don’t know if he had seen all the later stories when he wrote that. It was kind of a goof. But I guess I then took on another persona myself, having given up being Jack Chapeau – I became the nameless publisher-hawker whom, you are right, gives an advertisement for the text, reminiscent of the early days of the novel. I liked that voice, the fun of writing “in his inimitable stile of address,” etc. Maybe the fun of doing the second version got a little too giddy at that point. Funnily enough, I then felt sheepish about promoting that book – a product of Starcherone, now a nonprofit, as if I shouldn’t be using public funds to promote myself. “Start your own” is how the press got started, but once it became something I felt I directed in the public trust, certified by the IRS, I didn’t want to feel anyone could accuse me of just being out for myself. “Public trust” is also something of an exaggeration – we have been such a small budget operation, and a lot of my own funds have gone into it, for years.
I would like to focus on a few of the stories. "No Thanks, Norton, Mine's Already Lit" is an ingenious story that uses author's names as various other parts of speech, such as a verb, noun, or adjective. The following is just one of a number of examples I could choose from: "He had bunyans on his euripedes and burns on his hobbes and at night he would nashe his keats, menchen about the ferlinghetti days of his youth." This is of course a comic story. I see it as going beyond mere laughs. Do you? Or is it a kind of comic relief without wider significance?
Pelton: Yes, I see it going beyond mere laughs, but I wouldn’t claim a great deal of seriousness for it as literature either. Then, again, maybe literature isn’t all that serious. But truly, I was in some sense imitating forms I’ve seen for years of jokey writing, throw-off magazine or newspaper sports or other kind of journalism, which loves to play with puns. I remember seeing a comic piece in Sports Illustrated, as a kid, that did something similar: a narrative of American history comprised out of sports franchise nicknames, starting with the Dutch founding New York in their Knickerbockers, etc. It’s about love of language, how you can break language open, pulling it away from its normal uses, and find jewels inside. Then there’s all sorts of little puns in there about literary history, like “he could Creeley see the approach of Dorn” (i.e., dawn). It was fun to write – and I actually wrote this piece just as a pure relief. I wrote it while studying for my PhD orals, like blowing off steam.
"Friendly Fire," for me, is quite rich and very moving. In it you collage a number of different discourses (Dr. Seuss, The Lone Ranger, a heterosexual sex scene conveyed using Stein-like repetition, reflections on the American hetero male, Emily Dickinson, personal history, statistics, the repetitive 'soundbite' phrases offered by the T.V., raw capitlist entrenepeurship, to say the least. This story was obviously based on the first Gulf War. How does it transcend that subject?
Pelton: I was worried that it would be dated when Jack Chapeau was published; this was a collage piece about the first Gulf War. Who was going to remember that, I thought, in 2000? And then George the 2nd supplied us with a new Iraq War, so I was relevant again! I was very angry when I wrote that piece, in 1991, and I think the excitement of the form reflects that anger, that bitterness that after all this time, we are still putting stock in war to solve problems. What could be stupider? Really, what? Who can have so much certainty about themselves and their truths as to kill other people, simply for control of resources? And the first Gulf War was the one that changed how we look at wars today, sans reporters on the ground, showing us what’s really going on. Gulf War 1 was about information control, as much as it was about anything – and now we are very far from even remembering to be critical of what we are told is happening in combat areas. In essence, Dubya and his administration gave us a gift in being so stupid and incompetent in how he managed the wars; his father had figured out how to do brutal, illegal, moneymaking things very quietly. Sorry, I realize I’m getting off on a political tangent – but it remains a political story for me. I am a pacifist, and it feels like this position has lost years of progress. Now, even Obama feels it’s OK to launch missile strikes into countries we are not at war with, and kill people we feel are guilty of crimes without charging them or having to produce evidence. And that leaves out the children and neighbors of the bad people, who also die, because missiles are a little less precise than lethal injection. It’s a crime to be in certain neighborhoods, evidently, and the crime is punishable by mass, summary executions, which are sometimes administered mistakenly. Oops!
I am angry about similar things in Malcolm & Jack, which examines the 1940s and the roots of American Empire by looking at drop-outs from it. The arrogance of how we have come to look at the world; more specifically, how our narratives have come to be powerful, persuasive, and deadly.
Repetition here becomes almost diabolical— "Support the Troops, "Another Hitler," "Saddam Hussein". Is it fair to say that you've used some of the repetitive techniques of Gertrude Stein not to put them in the service of a type of knowlege, as she sometimes does, but as a techological trap?
Pelton: Yes, most definitely. Stein was an American after all. I was touched by how, as I say in the story, Stein died just as television was being introduced. Both used repetition – and Stein was very conscious of how words created strange effetcs on the mind through repetition – and isn’t this what advertising strives for, that irrational response conditioned by repetition. I’m not suggesting Stein used her power to nefarious advantage, but she anticipating this kind of use of language – I mean, “scrubbing bubbles, scrubbing bubbles, scrubbing bubbles” – is that Stein or TV; or how about “we baked pearls made of denture material in this blueberry pie." "I’m Dan Rather I’ll see you tomorrow night. I’m Dan Rather I’ll see you tomorrow night.” It also rang consistent with Dr. Seuss, who was the poet of my childhood; Stein’s rhymes are also frequently child-like. It all became a kind of nexus of seductive, repetitious language for me.
The juxtaposition between the woman who wanted to volunteer her time to get yellow ribbons out and the entrepreuner who profited from it is fascinating.
Pelton: Thanks. Yeah, you know, the people who just make a living, or do things to find meaning in their lives. They pick up roles in the master narratives.
I don't view your work this simply, but I know some might. It seems useful to get your response to this objection to these two stories: in both of them you assume an audience familiar with the English canon and the workings of academia. In the latter case, you discuss 'going to a conference to deliver a paper'. Many people would not understand exactly what you are talking about. Do you think you are limiting your audience? What are your thoughts on this matter?
Pelton: I remember Ron Sukenick saying to us in a workshop when I was at Colorado-Boulder, you shouldn’t feel a need to disguise who you are. Why not write about who you are, exactly where you are? Now I’m not writing academic satires, mind you – not engaging in an already frequented form. But I’m much more offended by, for instance, a kind of realism that was very big when I began writing fiction in the 1980s, minimalist realism, which in some ways has never lost its hegemony as the dominant type of fiction – I’m more offended by people who affect a familiarity with characters in settings they don’t really know. There’s something downright cruel in the grad-school-educated writer’s story about the failings of working class characters; I very much dislike writers who deal with characters for whom they don’t have respect.
As far as limiting my audience, I actually try not to limit my audience – I have long tried to keep writing for an audience that isn’t just specialists. I was actually the first in my family to go to college – the first on my father’s side, and the third, perhaps, on my mother’s side, extending it out to cousins, aunts and uncles. I try to remain aware of that. I think that’s why I am a fiction writer instead of a poet, too – it seems more approachable, at least from where I come from. I also think that why in my most recent work (Woodchuck stories, mostly in Brooklyn Rail, to date) I’ve been drawn to folktales, the most elemental forms of narrative. I really want to have these things be very basic, intelligible on the street, as it were. But this is probably somewhat disingenuous – I do go in for a fair amount of difficulty, and I am a PhD, after all. But I still try to keep a writer like Kurt Vonnegut in mind, someone who was able to do terrific, inventive things with form, yet stay democratic and in the common vernacular.
"From Combaria" is a series of vignettes or, perhaps, parables. One, 'On the Danger of Knowing,' struck me because in it a government scientist's findings are completely altered in the name of public relations and politics. This appeared in the first edition of Chapeau, published in 2000. I take it that you wrote the 'parable' before the second Bush presidency. When you wrote it did you think that it could be more than satire, that it could actually be predicting real events?
Pelton: Like I said, the way Bush followed what I wrote about politics in this book is scary. Actually, I wrote the parables in “From Combaria” in the 1980s, originally, watching the long-forgotten horrors of the Reagan administration in Nicaragua and El Salvador. The control of information, the programmatic lying, the invention of astonishing pretexts for violence – so incredible you more or less had to believe them – it was all there well before Bush. But Bush was spectacular vindication of these observations. I think what also gives them their prescient quality is the strange, denatured, matter-of-fact tone of these, “We’ve come to expect the various projects of governments to be lies. This is especially true of militaristic governments…,” where it slowly becomes clear that YOUR government is the militaristic government being discussed. That is a sense one finds in Kafka, in his parables, whose tone I picked up from in these.
But the one you mention, about the government scientist – it’s almost word-for-word what I heard a scientist say on a radio news report one day. I thought, what must it be like to be him? To know something and then when you have reported it, to see it deliberately made to mean something else, in fact, its opposite. The main thing I changed was to make what was actually a male scientist into a woman.
You write a lot of political satire. What are some of the sub-genre's purposes and uses?
Pelton: I don’t really like the term “satire” because it feels like a discrediting formal designation – oh, it’s just satire, we don’t have to take its claims seriously. I’m writing about life and death in these pieces. I guess that’s all I really have to say about that.
The story that haunts me the most is "Geek," and it happens to be the one rendered with the details associated with realism, with delineated characters, and clear, classic plotline. It follows the lives of three people from their high school years into young adulthood and parenting. Two are a couple — the star football player Ken and the beautiful cheerleader Karen. They actually call their friend "geek." The story traces the way cruelty — subtle and prolonged — can make the sufferer deluded about the pain they cause others. It is about clashing belief systems. And this is just the beginning. What does the realist story allow you to do as a writer that various types of experimental narrative structures do not?
Pelton: I don’t know that a realist story allows me anything that experimental narratives don’t, though I appreciate the good things you have to say about that piece. There’s so many varieties of experiment, and I keep trying to do different things in my writing, I think I felt when I wrote “Geek” almost as if I was experimenting with writing a realist story. I did resist it for a long time, like I wanted to fuck it up in some way. And some would say I did fuck it up – that ending, with Geek becoming a spokesman for one of those fringe interest groups that frequently gets time on TV talk shows, with the ridiculous 1-800 number, 1-800-SPERM-OK – that was not liked by a lot of people who read the story. I just go with what seems organically to make sense, with any piece of fiction, with any character. I don’t want to lapse into cliché, and that’s what kills realism for me most of the time, the feeling I’ve seen something before, or heard a particular way of introducing a character, or a type of descriptive sentence a million times. I frequently will pick up a book and not be able to get past the first few sentences.
Stories with three characters are good structures, because they can naturally lead to a very interesting kind of conflict, where each is looking for something from the others, and they all misunderstand each other; it’s always wedges, two against one, and one against two. Another story like that is my more recent Woodchuck story, “Elk Sleeps with his Own Wife by Mistake.” So I’m not saying that you are wrong, but just that I didn’t look at it that way, that I was enabled by realism. I think realism is really hard to do – it’s such a frequented mode, how do not sound like everybody else?
In "Republicans and Erectile Dysfunction" you have a sentence that I must quote: "Like Bush with Iraq, the man suffering from erectile dysfunction does not want to talk about it, but has the most urgent with to simply be able to act in a direct and uncomplicated way. In this way, President Bush's preemptive war policy enacts every flaccid man's most dearly held fantasy." Do want to add anything to that?
Pelton: What I was trying to do in that piece was take the idea of war as virile and peace as somehow effeminate and stand it on its head. And watch football yourself, there’s a lot of erectile dysfunction commercials. It’s all there – football, war, beer, and not being able to get it up. The piece practically wrote itself.
And Abu Ghraib showed that Iraq was about sexual humiliation, and President Bush so liked to dress up in the early days of that war that he was practically his own Village People. I just drew some lines from absurdity to absurdity. Nothing I said was more astonishing than the stupidity of that war itself.
Part 2
This part focuses on the novel Malcolm and Jack.Here are the reviews posted on Amazon:
"An audaciously entertaining and insightful creation myth about the genesis of the late 20th century's counterculture and political liberation movements in the so-called birth of the cool in New York City jazz clubs at the end of World War II and dawn of the bebop era.... The overwhelming strength of this novel lies in its ability to dramatize the precise moments in consciousness when both Malcolm Little and Jack Kerouac cease to be criminals and become visionaries instead." --The Buffalo News
"At all times Pelton's work is filled with political saavy, an empathy for societies' outcasts, and a frustrated awareness of the writer's limited ability to effect change upon the events he or she records.Malcolm & Jack is not the book you might expect it to be.... Instead, with immense talent, Pelton has attempted to weave implicit cultural critique, reflective internal monologue, three love stories, and a whole bunch of well-wrought character sketches into a series of progressing narratives that harmonize as much as they juxtapose." --Jacket Magazine (Australia)
"Malcolm & Jack is a moving, hip, and complex journey into not only American cultural, social, and political history, but also into the meaning of history itself." --American Book Review
1. I respect your determination to assert the power of the novelistic imagination over rigid identity markings. Nonetheless, were you nervous as a white male speaking in the first person voice of Billie Holiday? of assigning feelings and words to Malcolm X, one of the great voices of black liberation?
Yes, I was nervous. My first drafts of the book had long defenses of and discussions of the politics of representation, because you’re right, here I am, this white guy, starting sentences in 1st person, “Brothers and sisters…” this or that, in mimicry of black religious discourse, to give one example. I’m clearly pulling from a tradition or traditions or voices that belong to someone else. But the defenses, while important for me to write, to understand my own ideas about the subject, weren’t good fiction; various readers that I trusted told me I should remove them from the book. They were preachy and lengthy and belabored. So I did remove them from the final version.
Basically, to give you this defense, I see it in two ways. First, while Malcolm X and Billie Holiday are identified with so-called black folks, and especially in the case of Malcolm, would almost belong to black people, I thought that in a certain sense I had some claim on them too. These are people who have inspired me, who are fellow citizens of my country, who describe to me parts of what I feel to be my own identity. I feel that my representations of them are respectful, on the whole even worshipping (although they are also both rendered in unflattering ways at moments in the book). I saw what I was doing as something that’s seemingly much more of a problem in literature than it is in, say, music. The Rolling Stones played Howlin’ Wolf; it wasn’t their lives particularly; but then, in a way, it does become about their lives, the Stones, that is. As a line in the old PBS History of Rock and Roll has it, someone says something to the effect of “The Rolling Stones wanted to honor Howlin’ Wolf, and would have loved nothing better than to sound like Howlin’ Wolf, but when they played Howlin’ Wolf, they sounded like The Rolling Stones.” To me, that’s art, of any sort – pulling from the materials of the world you find and in doing so reflecting who you are, even if it’s by the vehicle of some other tradition. Then, secondly, it occurred to me that I could hardly do otherwise and be a fiction writer. Fiction writing is an art form predicated on representation. You can’t NOT represent, as a fiction writer. The question then becomes, are your representations fair or are they abusive? I cannot say that what I have written cannot be accused of some sort of abuse, and I am always very interested in how my work is read and if someone sees that in there. But as a blanket prohibition, I didn’t think I could swear off using anything as material or point-of-view by its very nature. That seems to me antithetical to what fiction in fact does.
2. Were you also nervous addressing both male and female homosexuality?
Less so. “What else can I say / Everyone is gay,” sang Kurt Cobain. This is probably just as true ultimately of cultural significances, but certainly it seems to me anyone can imagine what it’s like to be same-sex oriented, even if it’s not in them to act upon it, or they aren’t hard-wired in such a way. Besides in a “Beat” book, which it seemed to me I was writing, there’s going to be a certain fluidity to the sexuality. I very much wanted the novel to be one of voices which at the same time privileged no particular perspective – so there’s narrator’s in the book who are gay and straight, black and white, male and female. I am interested in a fiction that’s more complicated than the identity-based fiction of the present moment, which it seems to me is largely market-driven
3. One 44 page chapter is in the form of a play. Why did you choose this, and what did it open up for you (or for your supposed reader)?
I wanted to get a kind of camp sense into this very gay-themed plotline, the story of David Kammerer’s stalking of Lucien Carr, and Carr’s retaliatory murder. I couldn’t really get the entirety of the stage musical I had in mind into the book (I had themes composed in my head for the songs in the final musical number), but it just struck me as a kind of play. And as I worked in that form, I was able to do things that I liked – character asides, monologues of characters walking into and out of scenes, scenes (like in the bar) where dialogue was foregrounded, etc.
4. This book examines the relationships between biography, history, fiction, voice and literary genre / form. Why do these relationships interest you and what did you discover about them in the course of writing this book?
The novel has always interested me as the great catch-all narrative form, where you can include all manner of discourses – history, monologues, as you say biography, etc. I think the postmodern novel is commonly misunderstood these days in being seen to be experimenting just for form’s sake. Form is an extension of content, as we know, when it’s done right and integrally, and postmodern fiction’s play with discourses is a strategy for reflecting upon how language is used and misused in all manner of ways, in public and political life, in constructing fantasies about history, etc. This is a notion I’ve heard expressed by critic Marcel Cornis-Pope, among others, that postmodern fiction foregrounds the problematics of history that depend on narrative, and therefore should not be said, as it often is, to be merely formalist or concerned with aesthetics alone. My book is about the 1940s, which we have been told for years was “America’s Greatest Generation.” Well, they were also Jim Crow racists who exported racism to England during the war, suppressed stories of racial oppression at home as dangerous to the war effort, tolerated lynching, oppressed women with severe double-standards, allowed California produce growers to profit from internment of Japanese-American competitors, etc. So all of these things in the end are competing stories; fiction, at its best, rids the world of the lies of assumed objectivity, which are dangerous and oppressive. That “Greatest Generation” myth has been the underpinning of every failed American war effort ever after, Reagan, Bush I & II, you name it.
At the same time, I think what I discovered anew was the seductiveness of voice. I’d be reading a lot of Malcolm X or Kerouac and after a while I’d start to speak like them, hear their voices in my head. Narrative is extraordinarily powerful because it can act upon you in ways that you believe are yourself behaving independently. Nor is there any way entirely out of this. Self-consciousness is your best bet, being aware of the echoes behind your words or the words of others. But seductions are always occurring, where you get taken with narratives you find sexy and go along unwittingly with unexamined forms of oppression.
5. I really enjoyed the comedy of Kerouac being stuck with his preppy wife in suburban Detroit living in the home of his society mother-in-law.
Thanks, it was fun to write, once I got Edie’s voice down. I hadn’t really known all of the Kerouac biography stuff until I started into the book, from the basic premise of two drop-outs in the popular 1940s war, Malcolm Little and Jack Kerouac, later becoming iconic rebels, larger than life in their embodiments of freedom. But Kerouac lived this bizarre life, all by his mid-20s – football player, accessory to murder, unsuccessful husband. It was fun, too, to play historical characters like Kerouac against characters I’d entirely made up, like Edie’s mother, who I make into this Phyllis Schlafly conservative matron kind of character.
6. The last section deals with the Kinsey Report. It is fascinating the way you were able to intertwine the clinical and the carnal.
Kinsey is fascinating, and it wasn’t until the 1990s, when I was starting this book, that this stuff started to really come out. I didn’t exaggerate any of that, and in fact probably underplayed some of it. Can you imagine having paid employee orgies, as a part of the research agenda of a major university – and in Indiana, of all places!
Part of what the novel is about is the roots of the 1960s liberal and even libertine society being nascent in the 1940s. Kinsey, like Malcolm and like Kerouac, was ahead of his time in imagining freedoms that didn’t yet exist in American society. Imperfectly, to be sure, in all three cases, but heroically, to my mind.
7. Each chapter of this book examines a different aspect of 50's America: jazz, drugs, beatniks, suburbia, prison, race, sex, celebrity. What about the 50's fascinates you? What does this book show us about the 50's?
I always cast it in my mind as the 1940s and the 1960s, as I’ve described it above. The 1950s were that period of transition and error and experiment in between. Malcolm and Jack is also about American Empire, and the 50s is the first decade of true American Empire. American Imperialism, of course, had begun in the late 19th century. But the we-can-do-no-wrong superpower mentality, which reached its psychotic apotheosis in the Guantanamo-Abu Ghraib Bush years, began in the 1940s. It’s something of a parable of why war is so dangerous and insidious. Hitler obviously was someone who had to be resisted and defeated. But the narrative it spawned was too intoxicating, so much so that the son of a combatant of those days, Bush Jr., was entirely absorbed by it to such an extent he felt it as a vision, stronger than facts themselves, the “reality-based community” he felt free to disregard, so possessed by glory did he feel himself to be. The national euphoria of war victory created that; anxieties persisted throughout the fifties and a full-scale rebellion tried to resist it in the sixties, but the narrative stuck around.
Maybe it’s a pathetic kind of fantasy in itself to think that a novel can oppose the most powerful people in the world. But you use what you have. And as fantasies go, it’s not a particularly harmful one.
But why the 50s also has the answer that children are drawn to correcting the mistakes of their parents’ generation. I grew up in the late 60s and 70s. My wife and I are about to have our first child, who will probably someday construct stories of my own wrongheaded, dangerous, misguided ways.
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A story by Pelton will appear in Altered Scale 2.
Ted Pelton is the
author of 4 books, all fiction, including Malcolm & Jack and Bartleby,
the Sportscaster. He's received National Endowment for the Arts and
Isherwood Foundation fellowships, among other honors. He is also the
founder and publisher of Starcherone Books. He lives in Buffalo, NY.
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