Robert Glück

DH

Fragments of About Ed appeared in various places over the several years before the book came out, and sections of it were originally published many decades ago. Now that the book is out, does it feel like a kind of conclusion? What had to happen for you to feel comfortable “finishing” the book—or could you have continued?

RG

Yes, even after working on it for so long, or perhaps because of that, the book was a jumble. Time was a problem. The present shifted over decades, so that made before and after a question. The folks at New York Review of Books helped me sort it out, like floofing a blanket.

In the summer of 2018, I became ill, mortally ill, in massive pain. The doctors couldn’t figure it out. Without a diagnosis there is no cure. After two months I could not get out of bed, a turning point. I seemed to be dying. Regrets popped up like PowerPoint. The first was that I had not finished About Ed. The next day, a diagnosis: a bacterium had been eating my spine, Aggregatibacter aphrophilus. Within hours I was on the operating table. After that I worked on the book in earnest.

I know I am near the end when something shifts and I need to show the whole manuscript to friends. Their feedback is the final step. Now that it’s published, I feel a sense of rest, and that the book is on its own. Perhaps I kept it with me for so long to maintain my relationship with Ed. Now that relationship is not so private as it had been.

DH

Who are those friends that you turn to as part of your process? What does their feedback offer that an editor or internal editing process might not?

RG

Each of them offers something of their own. The poet Kathleen Fraser was very good at pointing out tonal mishaps. How one sentence relates to the next. Bruce Boone, on the other hand, said about Margery Kempe, “15% of this book should be deleted.” That was alarming, but he was right—way too many medieval gewgaws. Camille Roy is so smart about narrative, and everything else.

I do like working with a good copy editor. I like to be challenged. I’m not defended at all—anything to improve the book, to improve a sentence.

DH

Has anything about the book’s reception surprised you? It’s been reviewed very widely, and very glowingly.

RG

Of course, that is a happy surprise and exciting. I’m happy for my book and somehow for Ed. Some people say that at last I am receiving the attention “I deserve.” It makes me think of Shakespeare’s “Use every man according to his desert and who should 'scape whipping?” In fact, I did not feel underappreciated before. I am the kind of writer who lives pleasantly in a little valley, in my case the overheated poetry world of the Bay Area and beyond. I think that is basic to my writing and to my life. When we were developing New Narrative, Bruce Boone and I were thinking about court writers, like Chaucer and La Fontaine—poets who knew their audience by name. And “a band of outsiders” like the San Francisco Renaissance poets. And writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer, living resoundingly in his Jewish village on Manhattan’s upper west side.

DH

Something that’s come through strongly in reading about Ed, spending time with his artwork and speaking with those who knew him, is his elusive and self-isolating nature, which manifests in his work. This contrasts with your writing, which is so deeply relational, always informed by the voices and characters who make up your social environment—I think all of your books of fiction have other people’s names in their titles? This difference in your personalities is a big part of the book, and makes him—and you—a very compelling subject, but it seems equally to be about the impossibility of narrating a whole life, and of fully knowing a person in the way that conventions of narrative demand.

RG

Thanks for this question. In the book I often stumble on a new detail that shifts my understanding. Like, Ed was dealing coke in the '80s? Or I re-read a letter and find an articulate charming lover instead of the silent handful I had been describing. Maybe we know people more completely by smell and gesture and other ways that resist articulation. That is, the self is a collaborative hodge-podge that maintains a false sense of coherence. If I can’t know myself, how can I know you?

DH

It’s one of the most thorough and committed studies that I know of the incompleteness at the core of writing about “real” people or events. Would you say that was there in the genesis of the book? Or did Ed’s way of “resisting articulation” increasingly reveal itself over the process of writing it?

RG

Oh, I’d say that most of my books are, at heart, me banging my head against a brick wall. That wall could be my own ignorance and incompetence, the limits of language, the unknowableness of self and world. Ed had his mysteries, like his ability to remember all his dreams, but I don’t think he was less knowable than anyone else. Yet the beloved becomes the proximate example of the world in its mystery and its unwillingness to requite your love.

DH

Does this mean you consider love, or the beloved object, to be fundamentally impossible to bring to a final, lasting sense of fruition?

RG

Yes. I have a calm and beautiful relationship with my husband Xavi, for which I am grateful, believe me. But lasting—whatever that can mean—comes from within, if it comes at all, right? Still, the more love the better. When my son was born, I said to my mother, "Now I know why people have children."

DH

Were you thinking, while writing the book and preparing its publication, about what it might do in terms of interest in Ed’s own work as an artist?

RG

Yes, indeed. I asked the journals who took excerpts from About Ed—like Frieze, Granta, and The Paris Review—to include some of Ed’s art, which they were happy to do. Daniel, Ed’s husband, engaged KunstWorks, a business that places deceased artists’ work, and they did a great job. Now his work is in the Berkeley Art Museum, the Leslie-Lohman Museum in New York, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Washington State Historical Museum, and elsewhere. There have been shows centered on his work. This means that we don’t belong to each other as we somehow did before.

DH

The last section of the book is dedicated to Ed’s dream journals. I heard you refer somewhere to the process of condensing these to fifty pages as one of the hardest things you ever did. How so?

RG

In the first place, it was a task. I read decades of dreams, copied out hundreds of pages, and boiled them down to fifty. When I say boiled down, I mean condensed, rewrote, rearranged, while keeping true to Ed. Reading so many dreams is hard work! And emotionally hard: the psychic life of my dear dead friend. But my main idea, which was to stage Ed’s psyche inside the reader, seemed to need an expanse, a landscape in which to lose oneself. I worried that this long plotless section would be awkward or boring, would cast the reader out of the book, and in fact it does not please everyone. How to make this section work—whatever that means? In the end I kept putting pressure on the prose, throwing myself at it, haunting it, eliminating what I could, and I willed it into a lyrical inevitability, at least in my mind.

DH

It also, maybe paradoxically given a lot of the dreams’ fantastical nature, anchors the book in documentary evidence—roots its kaleidoscopic portrayal of your relationship in real, tangible, surviving traces of Ed’s own subjectivity, even if refracted through your arrangements and rewritings of it. The emotional—even perhaps ethical—difficulty of that section feels like the book’s center to me, somehow.

RG

Thanks for this observation. Yes, I am attempting to install Ed in the reader’s psyche, so that sets up a nonfiction relationship, to put it mildly. I want the irreversible. In this experiment, have I gone past what is allowed? In my attempt to turn the reader into Ed’s tomb, do I exploit Ed?

DH

Did you feel his voice seeping into your own dream life as a result of being so immersed in his accounts?

RG

Interesting question. I’ll have to pay attention to this.

DH

The profile of New Narrative, as a group, or movement, or moment, or style—what do you call it?—has risen significantly over the last decade or so. How do you square the kinds of ways people respond to the work today with your lived experience of being there at the time, in what I sense was a very live social environment: sharing ideas, passing texts around, incorporating them into your writings and pedagogy, in a highly specific geographical and historical context?

RG

Well, we were certainly a group, and a movement, and we had a moment. I’m not sure about style. In fact, I don’t know what that means. Let’s say we shared an attitude. I feel that a deep commitment to a particular life or place or moment is best, because the reader responds to that commitment. I suppose it could also be a commitment to a certain form. It translates into the kind of consolation art can offer—that is, that life has some kind of value. We also learned from some of our elders and enjoyed a feeling of continuity with them. It’s my impression that the younger writers who find something in our work are doing what we did—inhabiting a live social environment, sharing ideas, passing texts around.

DH

Do you have a sense of your earlier work, and New Narrative more widely, gaining an increased... I don’t know what to call it, iconicity? The artist Jamie Crewe incorporated Ed’s drawing of your torso on the cover of Gay Sunshine into a recent collage work.

RG

Oh, a little bit. For example, in reviews of About Ed—in Publishers Weekly and elsewhere—they use the term New Narrative without supplying an explanation, as though readers understand what it means. Ten years ago that could not have happened. I doubt most readers know about New Narrative, but it did make me wonder.

DH

Do you think this has to do with what readers look to “queer” writing for? I’m reminded of a line in "Long Note on New Narrative" where you write of how that group emerged directly from gay identity’s “heroic period [...] [before it] settled into just another nationalism.”

RG

By heroic, I meant we were aware of our identity’s constructedness and its arrival on the stage of history. When I was a child, homosexuality was only a crime and a disease. Now some of us have the luxury of living like most heterosexuals, that is, unaware of the constructedness of our sexual identity and our place on the stage of history. But this does not cancel our civil rights struggles—around trans rights for example. Or the fears of a queer child on the playground.

To answer your question, I still think we look to queer writing to make a picture of ourselves that we recognize, however that is achieved.

DH

San Francisco is so vivid, a constant in your writing. I have to ask, how has your relationship to the place has changed over the years? Do you sense that the kind of environment that New Narrative grew out of, that contemporary readers perhaps look to seeking continuity, is possible there now?

RG

The San Francisco I first encountered in 1970 was still partly a working-class city, and the great events of its past revolved around labor struggles. One reason it’s beautiful is that it could not afford to tear down its buildings, so it has lovely vernacular architecture. Every city was a Victorian city at one point. Creative people lived here because it was beautiful, left, socially liberal, and cheap. During the AIDS crisis, city leaders in all fields stepped up, a model for the rest of the country. Now with the homeless and the addicted, we have mediocre leadership and citizens mostly supporting them.

It’s still beautiful. Creative people have spread out over the whole Bay Area. We don’t have hundreds of readings every month as we used to, but of course there is always plenty happening. Small Press Traffic is still the most exciting venue for readings and events, and I see lots of young folks there. Obviously, life is not so simple as it was in the '70s, when my monthly rent never exceeded $100, which is about $800 in today’s dollars.

DH

I’d be interested in hearing you speak about your involvement with Enola Gay, the “faggot affinity group” which prefigured ACT UP and the explosion of performative queer direct action that came with it.

RG

Enola Gay, A Faggot Affinity Group, began in 1982, to protest the development of nuclear weapons. It was part of the fluorescence of progressive groups in the Bay Area at that time—Trots, Maoists, New Left, Old Left, Gay Lib, Lesbian Separatism and so on. We organized in the queer community, joined the picket lines of labor disputes, performed guerrilla theater, protested apartheid, and more.

I decided to join this group instead of a group protesting AIDS policy because San Francisco did very well on the various HIV fronts. We didn’t have a Cardinal O’Connor or an Ed Koch or the FDA in our backyard. We did have a local organization building weapons of mass destruction.

DH

You were incarcerated at one point?

RG

We often went to jail, mostly for stopping traffic. We spent two weeks in jail in Livermore. And we were the first to use gay blood, the "Money for AIDS, Not for War" ritual/protest at Livermore National Laboratory in 1984. I read that we were the first group to engage in direct action to bring attention to the AIDS crisis.

Enola Gay used a consensus process to come to a decision, like affinity groups did during the Spanish Civil War. This was difficult and illuminating. We were a diverse group and we had to negotiate our differences. I was not going to burry a crystal at the beach to stop nuclear proliferation, for example. But these men were valiant warriors—their work and their spirit still amaze me.

DH

You’ve spoken elsewhere about how György Lukács gave you, “the ability to see [yourself] as a subject of history” early on in your writing career. Do you still experience those kinds of epiphanic encounters with literature, whether fiction, poetry or theory?

RG

I can’t say I am in the throes of Lukács or Bataille or Benjamin as I was in the past, though I am the result of those encounters. There are a few ceramic artists that have changed my world, like Gertrud Vasegaard. Her understanding of form and pattern and the meditative nature of her work, reorient my understanding of history. Form and pattern go deeply into the past. The sheer aptness of her decoration creates feeling of justice, that meaning exists in the world.

DH

Who do you envision as the ideal audience for, or community around, your two most recent books? Do they differ?

RG

I suppose I write in the first place to put into words something that engages me for whatever reason, like anyone else. After that, I often write for friends quite literally: this will please Kathleen, Bruce will get a kick out of this. Both books are very queer, so there’s that. And since they experiment with form, they will be read by people interested in such writing. I, Boombox portrays my unreachable inner life, image replacing image, and About Ed concludes with Ed’s dreamscape, image replacing image. I could have borrowed Baudelaire’s title for either of them: My Heart Laid Bare. But a long innovative poem must stand with other such poems. That’s one reason I choose Roof Books, which has a noble history of publishing challenging work.

DH

You also exhibit your ceramic work quite widely, which circulates in a very different system. How would you describe the relationship between your writing and your work in that form?

RG

My last show [at Treize Galerie in Paris, France] was a combination of writing and ceramics. The curators asked me to write about the relation between the two. At first, I thought there was no relation at all, but I found plenty—of course!—scholarship and research, engagement with the past, the desire to animate, the desire to create risk, to tell stories, to bring my friends into it, to haunt. Here’s a sampling of my artist statement: Making a bowl, a hollow form, is the creation or the acknowledgement of emptiness. Most of the objects in this show assert this emptiness – they are closed forms without access to the inside: rattles, genie bottles, and lingams. I want emptiness in writing as well, I want emptiness to travel along with the story as a kind of potential. I tell myself that clay takes me in directions I don’t allow myself in writing, more sacred (for lack of a better word), but they may not be so different. I’ve fashioned quite a few urns and containers for people’s ashes – is there a better thing to do? I often make a chaotic ground with an orderly pattern on top. I confect this ground in a rather complicated process, with brush, underglaze, sponge, and sandpaper. It’s like the poetry of my first hero, John Keats, an enameled surface over a welter of feeling. I am moved by the smooth surface and the chaos of feeling below. This may not be an exact description of each work, but more a feeling I have about words and clay.

DH

I’ve spent a lot of the last few months deep inside your sentences, and a lot of the other books I’ve read I’ve only discovered, or been compelled to move up my to-read list, from seeing you recommend them. I’ve become a big fan of Ida Marie Hede—thank you. Who are the authors exciting you right now?

RG

There are a few memoirs and novels that I like a lot. One is by Nate Lippens, My Dead Book. Now I’m reading his new book, Ripcord, with great pleasure. It’s mordant, take-no-prisoners writing. Pilot Press publishes both. Love, Leda, is a novel by Mark Hyatt discovered and published by Peninsula Press, also UK. It’s about youthful anguish, living on the edge in 60’s London, a poet’s novel. Another book I love is K. Patrick’s Mrs S., a shimmering lesbian romance in cool prose—K. lives on an island off the west coast of Scotland. Oh, and Furniture Music by the great Montreal writer Gail Scott. It’s a New York book of poets’ deep gossip refracted through the Obama years and many other lenses, like Gertrude Stein and Walter Benjamin.

DH

What’s occupying your writing life now that About Ed is out in the world—now that your relationship with the book, and with Ed, is not so private, as you say. It’s difficult to imagine there’s another project which requires such a specific devotion over such a long period of time.

RG

Mostly I am writing blurbs! I am 77, so I don’t think I will have a long period of time, but do I have two books in mind, which is suppose is a way of being occupied. One is a collection of collaborations I have done over the years, mostly with visual artists. For example, I made a bible with a Cuban artist, Toirac, with Fidel as Jesus. And I would like to write a book of short essays—some I have already written. Eventually I will publish another section of I, Boombox, though I am thinking of calling it I, Streaming.