The Rolling Stone interviews - Jann Wenner [167]
Not entirely sober.
That’s not your best way to go—a stolen gun, a pound of weed. There was this big bulletin board on the edge of Las Vegas: attention, twenty years—for marijuana.
For me, the key moment of the paranoia was the enormous, frightening sign outside the hotel window. Oscar wants to shoot it. But you say, “No, let’s study its habits first.”
We’re feeding off each other. There’s a knock on the door, and somebody says, “Well, it must be the manager ready to shoot our heads off.” And the response from the other person is to immediately get a knife, open the door and slit the [guy’s] throat.
But can you be productive on drugs? I mean, we know that drugs definitely give you different viewpoints, looking at the world through a fly’s eye and so on.
Without the drugs, we would not have gone to Las Vegas. Well, we would have had completely different experiences. The logic of the whole thing was drug logic, and it was the right thought. But drugs get to be a problem when the actual writing time comes, except just as a continuation of the mood.
What do you tell people who say they want to become writers?
Ye gods, that’s a tough one. I think that one of the things I stumbled on early, as really a self-defense mechanism of some kind, was typing other writers. Typing a page of Hemingway or a page of Faulkner. Three pages. I learned a tremendous amount about rhythm in that way. I see writing really as music. And I see my work as essentially music. That’s why I like to hear it read out loud by other people. I like to hear what they’re getting out of it. It tells me what you see. I like to have women read it. If it fits musically, it will go to almost any ear. It could be that that’s why children relate to it.
And also you know if you’re getting your reader to hear it the way you want it heard.
I like to hear them getting it. Boy, that’s when you know you’re on the same fucking frequency. Without the music it would be just a mess of pottage.
Did anybody read aloud to you as a kid?
Yeah, my mother did. We were big on stories in the family—fables, bedtime stories. The house was full of books.
There was no wall in the house that didn’t have bookshelves. It’s like this house [points to rows of shelves]. The library, to me, was every bit as much a refuge as a crack house might be to some gang kid today. You know, a library card was a ticket to ride. I read every one of those fucking things. My mother was a librarian for the Louisville [Kentucky] Public Library.
John Updike’s mother told him that the whole Rabbit series read like an A student’s idea of what a high-school athlete’s life is like. . . .
Wow. To have his mother say it: “I knew there was a reason I was always disappointed in you, my son.” Imagine the struggle that my mother had to go through.
How did she feel about your writing?
For ten years, the fact that I was a writer had little to do with the fact that I was seen merely as a criminal on a hell-bound train. My mother had to be down there on Fourth Street, at the main desk of the library, and had to have people come in asking for my book before she was convinced that I had a job.
What was the first book, the first whole book, you read?
Good lord, man—anybody who would remember that is probably in some kind of trouble or lying.
No, they say that drug addicts always remember the very first time they had the drug, or alcoholics remember the first drink.
[Pauses] Jesus, I think you’re right.
I think I am, too.
Well, in my grandmother’s bookcase there was a book called The Goops. I was maybe six, seven. It was a rhymed thing about people who have no manners—people who drooled. The Goops, they use the left hand; they chew all their soup. The Goops were always being punished for rudeness. My grandmother pulled it out for me to