Gary Indiana, The Art of Fiction No. 250

In front of his Los Angeles apartment building, 2021. © Laura Owens.

 

Gary Indiana, The Art of Fiction No. 250

Interviewed by Tobi Haslett

Gary Indiana was in his late thirties by the time he began to publish fiction, which may account for his wide array of sidelines. For many years he wrote and performed for theater, cabaret, and arthouse cinema. From 1985 to 1988 he savaged the pretensions of the art world each week as the critic for the Village Voice, and he is now an artist himself: one of his video pieces, Stanley Park (2013), which appeared in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, was shot in the ruins of a prison in Cuba, a country Indiana has visited since the late nineties. The piece, which inflects left-wing politics with black comedy, includes a snippet of Josef von Sternberg’s 1941 melodrama The Shanghai Gesture. In 1951, a group of surrealists riffed on scenes from that film in a game of exquisite corpse that became one of the inspirations for Indiana’s 2009 novel, The Shanghai Gesture. Indiana’s fictions take many forms—true crime, picaresque, noir, lament—but all are driven by the engine of his ruthless sensibility. His characters dash through mazes of deceit and exploitation; cruelty is a central theme.

Indiana’s first novel, Horse Crazy (1989), sets a miserable love affair in a New York wracked by AIDS, and served as a peephole into the seventies and eighties bohemia dubbed “downtown,” which Indiana was a part of and refuses to glamorize; his roman à clef Do Everything in the Dark (2003) is a fractured dirge for that milieu. The past few years have seen a kind of Indiana renaissance. Semiotext(e) has reissued his American crime trilogy, Resentment: A Comedy (1997), Three Month Fever (1999), and Depraved Indifference (2001)—each concerns a famous murder case, but ultimately is about what happens when inner agony collides with mass delusion—and has published a volume of early plays, short fiction, and poems, Last Seen Entering the Biltmore (2010), as well as Vile Days (2018), a thick book of his Voice columns. Seven Stories Press has republished Horse Crazy and Indiana’s second novel, Gone Tomorrow (1993), and will put out a collection of his essays, Fire Season, in 2022. These days he often meets young people who tell him they love his books.

A small man, Indiana makes prodigious use of his hands and arms, slicing the air for emphasis or illustrating an idea with a twirl of the wrist. He can conduct whole conversations in a mode of rich, elaborate irony, yet he’s also insistent in his opinions and extravagant in his disdain—a mix of prince and punk. Language comes blooming out of him without prompting and without reservation, and he delivers even the most offhand joke or anecdote with wicked relish. But he did not enjoy being interviewed. I suspect that the very enterprise—the pressure, the invasiveness, the sacramental grandiosity—smacks of a gilded literary culture to which he’s vigorously opposed. During our conversations he frequently broke off to deplore the way he thought he sounded. On one occasion, he took refuge in a long telephone call with a mutual friend of ours, counseling her about her Ambien dosage.

This interview began at a bistro in Paris, where Indiana made a stop after visiting his friend the painter Laura Owens in Arles. It ended in the sixth-floor walk-up on Eleventh Street where he has lived and worked since the eighties. The basement of the building, where Patti Astor’s Fun Gallery opened in 1981, now houses a psychic. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves dominate every wall in the apartment, except for the kitchen’s; his current reading is on a cocktail trolley by the bed. When I picked up Considerations on the Assassination of Gérard Lebovici by Guy Debord, he said he loved Debord’s “alcoholic style”; I spotted two copies of Amiri Baraka’s The System of Dante’s Hell. More books are always arriving, in packages addressed to Gary Hoisington, the name given to him when he was born, in 1950, in Derry, New Hampshire. He has had cause to regret the pseudonym he chose on a whim. “Oh, hi,” John Ashbery said when they were introduced. “I’m Lowell Massachusetts.”

INTERVIEWER

You belong to the category of writers who have also been actors, which includes Mae West and Sam Shepard. What were your strengths as an actor?

GARY INDIANA

I wasn’t trained, and I certainly didn’t have the technique of a professional. Directors would cast me because of the way I was, not what I could pretend to be. Often the wardrobe does half the work anyway. I was more of a special effect—they wanted my personality, or how I looked at the time. When I performed, I had—and this maybe had something to do with how much I drank—a quality of demonic abandon.

INTERVIEWER

In Valie Export’s The Practice of Love, you’re screaming in a bathrobe.

INDIANA

In Christoph Schlingensief’s Terror 2000, I’m also just screaming, mostly. That was one of my bigger roles. The film was based on real events that took place just after the reunification of Germany. I was a social worker helping Polish refugees get settled, and Udo Kier was the head of a gang of terrorists. They burst onto the train where I’m singing this song of welcome, and he shoots me with a machine gun.

INTERVIEWER

Were you serious about acting?

INDIANA

I liked doing it. It was fun. I got to go to Europe and hang out with a lot of really fabulous people I’d admired my whole life, like Delphine Seyrig. She and I met on the set of Ulrike Ottinger’s film The Image of Dorian Gray in the Yellow Press. I played a spy, always in a kitschy Bavarian costume.

INTERVIEWER

Rent Boy (1994) has an epigraph from Werner Schroeter, and Gone Tomorrow takes place on a film set. Some of your novels remind me of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Did your work in film affect your writing?

INDIANA

All the time I was acting I was also writing. I was always around directors—people I’d interviewed for some publication or done some writing for or whom I knew socially. I derived part of my sensibility from them, especially from Fassbinder. There was a merciless realism to his view of things. If you look at Eight Hours Don’t Make a Day, you can see that he was very energized by a vision of how society could be better arranged. People think his films are cynical, but they’re not—they depict a cynical social order that really enraged him.

I got a lot from Schroeter, too. A truly magical human being. Werner obliged me to read all three volumes of Ernst Bloch’s The Principle of Hope. He also obliged me, less productively, to rehearse The Comedy of Errors in a pre-Schlegel German translation for months. He hired a dialogue coach for me, an embittered actor who was in some detective series on TV, and he really hated me. He would preface every session by demanding, “Why is Werner Schroeter having you, an American, do this play at the Freie Volksbühne when you don’t even speak German?” I was to deliver this really long speech right when the curtain went up. I would tell Werner, “I can’t learn German, I can’t,” and he would say, “Anybody can learn German.” Finally I quit, and he was angry with me for a long time afterward. When I went back to Berlin to watch the production, he’d cut the entire speech down to three lines. I could easily have done it.

INTERVIEWER

You were in West Germany at a critical time. I noticed that there’s a portrait of  Ulrike Meinhof, a member of the Red Army Faction, which carried out bombings, assassinations, and bank robberies targeting the West German state and symbols of U.S. imperialism, in the background of your author photo for Do Everything in the Dark. Why is she important to you?

INDIANA

The people I worked with there were part of that generation, Hitler’s children, and many had known Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Meinhof in the early days, during the anti-theater period in Munich. Meinhof was a well-known writer, a militant investigative journalist, before she joined the RAF. The fiction film she wrote, Bambule, about girls in a reform school in West Berlin, was brilliant. She was involved in the protest against the shah of Iran when he came to Berlin with his consort, the empress Farah Diba, in 1967. A university student, Benno Ohnesorg, was shot and killed by the police at that demonstration, and the incident set off the student revolt that eventually produced the RAF. Meinhof led a very secure, haute bourgeoise life, was married with kids, and sacrificed all of that to take direct action. Sacrificed her life, ultimately. Simone Weil may have been Meinhof’s temperamental opposite, but the two women can be linked very easily.

I have never been able to condemn the RAF. Their tactics were doomed to fail, but I know what that kind of anger is. People forget that the levers of power in Germany didn’t change hands after the war. The heads of the big corporations were all Nazis. Firms that were part of the IG Farben conglomerate, which made Zyklon B for the gas chambers, are still in business. Daimler-Benz, Krupp, Siemens, Bayer—all those companies collaborated with Hitler. The postwar judiciary, too, was full of so-called ex-Nazis.

INTERVIEWER

Did Meinhof’s life teach you something about being an antagonist in the world of letters?

INDIANA

One thing it taught me was that having a million opinions about everything comes cheap and easy, whereas actually doing something can cost you quite a lot. Whenever you think about power, you have to think in terms of symptoms. Meinhof is an example of how you have to look deeply into the causes of a phenomenon like terrorism. Masha Gessen got at something important in their book about the Tsarnaev brothers, showing that what the brothers did had its origin in bad things that other people had done to them, wars that their family had been caught in and displaced by, and so on. That doesn’t excuse the Boston Marathon bombing, but that’s not the point. How far can you push people before they hit back? And people hit back at the wrong targets more often than not. People in the West are way too comfortable with an intolerable reality. At this point, their heads explode over whatever bullshit controversy the mass media is waving in their faces. Meanwhile, they’re fine with the fact that their cell phones work because some six-year-old kid is mining cobalt for them in the fucking Congo. I always try to keep in mind, Where does this power come from? Who gets to decide what people’s lives can and can’t be? I get emotional talking about these kinds of things because I know there’s an element of irrationality in my thinking about it.

INTERVIEWER

Were you always political?

INDIANA

Ferd Eggan and I spent a lot of time together in LA in the early seventies. We both studied Marx and Engels, Kropotkin, Gramsci, Fanon, Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, and the work of the Frankfurt School, and thought there had to be radical change in American society. I still think so. But that only happens when people organize. Years later, Ferd became the AIDS coordinator for the city of Los Angeles, after helping establish ACT UP in Chicago. He pushed to implement needle-exchange programs, got help for crystal meth addicts.

INTERVIEWER

Did Marcuse leave a mark on your early writing?

INDIANA

Nothing I was writing in the seventies was at all political, at least not directly so. I couldn’t write about anything much outside of my own confusion and feelings of inferiority or longings that were completely unrealistic but had to do with this . . . I don’t want to say identity crisis. You have to understand that Ferd and I grew up gay in the fifties and sixties, when being gay was very, very stigmatized. There were all these myths about homosexuals, like, homosexuals never finish anything. Homosexuals are mentally ill. How can you tell a homosexual? He can’t whistle. Creepy stuff like that. You lived in constant danger of real violence. Growing up in a culture where you’re immersed in that kind of bigotry made me insecure. I didn’t have any confidence that I could amount to anything. When I first broached the subject of my sexuality with my parents, they immediately sent me to a psychiatrist in Boston, who insisted over a period of months that I wasn’t gay at all.

INTERVIEWER

He saw that you could whistle.

INDIANA

The guy was a sadist.

 

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At home in Derry, New Hampshire, 1963. Photograph courtesy of Gary Indiana.

INTERVIEWER

What was your relationship with your parents like?

INDIANA

You want to know why I smoke? I grew up watching these two grown-ups fill ashtrays. They were incredibly fretful people. They were overwrought about everything. My parents had scrabbled into the lower middle class. My father was deaf with Ménière’s disease, and a functioning alcoholic, and of course the more he drank the less he could hear. My parents were good-hearted, and protective of me, but they didn’t know, by any means, what to do with a gay son. I was attacked by two swimming instructors when I was eight or nine, severely abused by two people I had trusted. My mother always said that I changed completely after that. It destroyed my ability to trust anyone. My parents didn’t understand me, and I didn’t really understand them until it was too late. I didn’t know what it had been like to grow up in the Depression, to go through the Second World War. And as per the Philip Larkin poem, both my parents had been fucked up by their parents. I always think of their parents sort of as witches.

INTERVIEWER

How did your people end up in Derry, New Hampshire?

INDIANA

My mother’s family came from Canada to Lowell, Massachusetts, to work in the textile mills on the Merrimack River. My father’s family were kind of gentlemen farmers. His people were Welsh and Scottish, his parents had come from Vermont. When I was growing up, we lived with my grandparents, who owned their house, and then my father built a house for us across the street. My grandparents grew all our vegetables and were self-sufficient, foodwise. That was an Episcopalian element, maybe.

INTERVIEWER

Were your parents readers? Did they encourage your writing?

INDIANA

Well, I guess they were. We had all these books in the house that real readers would read, but I never saw them reading. My parents were working stiffs. They’d work all day, come home, and, you know, have a few drinks. They watched TV. A lot. My mother was addicted to Perry Mason and she wanted me to go to law school. I guess she thought I was going to fill out like Raymond Burr when I got older. I was very precocious, a really smart kid, and my family, especially my mother, fetishized my intelligence. But all they knew about being a writer was that you don’t make any money unless you’re really lucky.

INTERVIEWER

You treat your parents obliquely in your memoir, I Can Give You Anything but Love (2015), which you describe as “a decoupage of defective memory.” Did the fragmented form of that book serve a psychological function, a way of circling very difficult events?

INDIANA

I knew I had to write about my childhood but I didn’t want to deal with all that, so when I’d finished the rest of the book I wrote that section very quickly, almost in a single night, as certain fragments of memories came to me. After the book came out, I realized that I hadn’t touched on the effects of being raped, twice, when I was about nineteen. I’d always told myself that it hadn’t really damaged me, although I’m sure it did. I’m allergic to the idea of myself as the subject of any of my books. I don’t write them as self-revelation, in the contemporary sense. Even when I write what appears to be very personal material, I am writing about a character, one who is sometimes traveling by my name.

INTERVIEWER

In your American crime trilogy, you capture a very specific kind of suburban yearning, but you bring a high Modernist sensibility to it. Where does that come from?

INDIANA

I grew up in a cultural sewer. There was no culture whatsoever in Derry. I knew from an early age what I didn’t want, and it was pretty much everything I grew up with. I wanted a world of people who were serious about ideas and politics and art. I wanted that desperately. I never found any value in school. My education came from reading hundreds of books, from studying things on my own. There was this one store in town—we called it the paper store—which had paperback racks that were like messages from the outside world. I found Jean Genet’s novels there. I first read Mary McCarthy when I was thirteen, and she knocked me over. Of course, a lot of my literary models grew up in privileged situations. Mary McCarthy had an education that I did not have, but even though I didn’t go to Vassar or get to read Greek and Latin, I aspired to that kind of continuous learning. I felt this commonality with her and sympathy for her. You can tell in the letter she wrote to Hannah Arendt about nobody coming to her defense when The Group was attacked that she felt that there was something wrong with her.

INTERVIEWER

She said, “I am . . . indefensible, at least for my friends. They are fond of me but with reservations.”

INDIANA

I’ve always felt that way. I was not a popular kid in school. In fact, I was the opposite. Later, even, until I actually did something that people had to acknowledge in some way, I was never liked. Even among homosexuals, even among art people, I always had this fear that if people said, “Oh, meet us at nine o’clock” and I wasn’t there exactly at nine, they would leave without me.

INTERVIEWER

You went to UC Berkeley at sixteen, around 1967. That time in the Bay Area is now mythic. Did you find what you were looking for there?

INDIANA

When I got to California, I had no idea what I wanted to do with myself. I dropped out of Berkeley after a couple of weeks. It was a really incredible period. I wish I could remember more of it, but I took so much LSD at the time that much of it is sort of occluded now. I was always going to these things in the park and running into people like Janis Joplin. I crossed paths with a lot of well-known musicians and writers, but it wasn’t like you’d go out of your way to meet anybody. They were just there, in the Haight-Ashbury or in North Beach. Also the Trotskyites and anarchists, the Diggers. We all lived outdoors. I migrated from group to group to group to group, but I was interested in all of them. I knew that there was stuff going on underneath everything somehow. I was just this little skinny kid hanging out, often in drag. I dressed demurely, like a legal secretary—pleated skirts and stuff. Soon after I stopped going to classes, I met Ferd on the set of a porn movie he was directing, The Straight Banana. A nurse from the commune I was living in on Seventeenth Street was in the movie, and I was enlisted as, I think, script girl. I learned a lot of technical skills working on porn movies. I would hold reflectors and sometimes do the boom mic. I learned how to use an Arriflex camera. I got to know a lot of people in that business—hippies who were doing it to get some cash and because they liked fucking.

INTERVIEWER

What kind of porn were they making?

INDIANA

It was the dawn of the era of narrative porn, of, “Oh, I’m here to fix the washing machine . . .” The Straight Banana was about a nymphomaniac and an exhibitionist who meet in the rooftop parking lot at Macy’s.

INTERVIEWER

Were you into the Beats?

INDIANA

The Beats didn’t do much for me. Doris Lessing’s parody in The Golden Notebook really nailed what was awful about them. Burroughs was an exception, because he was brazenly queer, and violated so many conventions of the novel. In my teens, I was more interested in the surrealists, in European literature—in Sartre, always, and, back then, Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and Michel Butor—than in the literature that was, let’s say, in the air. Norman Mailer was a big deal then, and I never understood why. His was a very clotted, narcissistic kind of literature I hated. I liked Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Eudora Welty. And Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin. I think there is only one perfect modern American novel—Jane Bowles’s Two Serious Ladies. White, straight American males tend to be better filmmakers than writers. Making films forces them to at least tolerate the existence of other people. I loved the noir period. I went to the movies four times a day. I would run from one end of the city to the other seeing films.

INTERVIEWER

Your fiction can be very cinematic—I mean how the prose moves through scenes.

INDIANA

Unlike literature, cinema you can take a bath in—it’s an entirely passive experience, you can just have it wash over you. I’m sure that decades of watching movies instilled my sense of how and when to change the scenery. Godard’s early movies were important to me, the films of Bresson, Bergman, Melville, Losey. Buñuel, whose humor is sometimes almost slapstick but is usually textured and complex—it’s turned just right. I loved Death in the Garden, the one that was supposed to be in the Brazilian jungle, with Michel Piccoli and Simone Signoret—that moment when the soldiers are riding into town. Signoret runs a whorehouse and she’s in the middle of buying some soap at the general store, and she says, “I need two bars of soap.” Then she hears the soldiers’ horses coming and says, “Four bars.” I love the Mexican films of Buñuel more than anything. Los olvidados is a very funny film in a really brutal and cruel way.

INTERVIEWER

You could draw a line connecting the sensibility of Los olvidados and a novel like Rent Boy.

 

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Performance on the place des Vosges, Paris, 1983. Photograph courtesy of Gary Indiana.

INDIANA

Certainly. Except that that’s not the film I was thinking of when I was writing Rent Boy. I was thinking of Shampoo. Because the protagonist of Shampoo, Warren Beatty’s character, can’t stop moving. He’s in constant motion on that motorcycle. If he stops for one minute, he’ll have to reflect on what his life really is. I wanted to write a character like that, who is racing from one job to another, just compulsively busy, going crazy.

INTERVIEWER

Whenever I’m passing the Port Authority, I remember how the narrator’s friend in Rent Boy refers to it as the Port of Authority. Were you thinking of the Susan Sontag story “Debriefing,” in which somebody tells a cabbie, “I’m going to the Port of Authority, please”?

INDIANA

That is a really good story by Susan. I may have gotten that from her. I used to go to this bar behind the Port Authority that was directly across the street from the parole office, and that’s where I met a lot of my boyfriends for a few years. No one will ever love you as good as somebody who just got out of prison, believe me.

INTERVIEWER

What precipitated your move from LA to New York in 1978?

INDIANA

I went out to LA with the idea of becoming nothing. I thought of LA as the burnout capital of the country. You’re never going to amount to anything, so just go and be burnt out. I published a few things in LA—I interviewed David Lynch and some punk bands, did some writing for fly-by-night underground magazines. I was working in Watts at Legal Aid during the day and at the Westland Twins cinema in Westwood at night, selling popcorn. Then I had a bad car accident. The car flipped over several times. The accident just shook something loose in my head. I sensed that being nothing is fine when you’re young and extremely fuckable and in perfect health, but as a long-term project is not so wonderful. I thought, You know what? If you go to New York, you can’t be nothing. You’ve got to become something. Also, I didn’t want to take the bus to Watts to go to work every day. It took an hour to get there, at least.

INTERVIEWER

So you moved to New York to become a writer?

INDIANA

I wanted to be part of a milieu where I could try different things and figure out what I was able to write. I wrote a lot of film reviews, poetry, little observational essays. There were tons of teeny-tiny magazines that literally paid nothing. There were poetry readings in nightclubs and galleries. I knew a few people, and I knew whom I wanted to meet—basically everybody who had contributed to X Magazine, the precursor of BOMB. Betsy Sussler and a bunch of other people had put it together. There was Kathy Acker. John Giorno. Lynne Tillman. Ann Rower. Sarah Charlesworth. Those were the people I needed to be with.

INTERVIEWER

Did you feel an aesthetic affinity with other downtown writers?

INDIANA

I don’t think any of us had much in common stylistically, but maybe we had a common interest in destroying the vapid bourgeois narratives that have always dominated American writing.

INTERVIEWER

How did you begin writing plays?

INDIANA

I started going to a gay bar on Fourth Street and Second Avenue. That’s where I met Bill Rice. Bill was an extraordinary painter and a cherished actor of the underground. He looked like Buster Keaton’s next of kin. There was a scene around Bill, and around John Vaccaro, who ran the Play-House of the Ridiculous. Bill had a ground-floor apartment at 13 East Third Street, with a big backyard adjacent to a community garden, and a doorless doorway connecting the two spaces. And at the end of the yard were the roof and the fire escapes of La MaMa theater. It looked like a Tennessee Williams set that would cost two million dollars to build, and it was ours! I decided that I would write a play we could perform there, so I wrote Red Tide, which was like a mash-up of I Walked with a Zombie and Persona. Then we wanted to do more plays, so I wrote more plays. For the earliest ones, I didn’t name the characters or even distinguish between one part and another—I just wrote lines and let the actors decide which ones they wanted to speak. One night Steve Mass came to a reading of the first pages of my play Alligator Girls Go to College (1979) and approached me to do it at the Mudd Club. That became a very elaborate production with props and alligator costumes. What we did wasn’t any sort of professionalized theater. We were not the Wooster Group, it was enough to get people to hit their marks when they were supposed to.

INTERVIEWER

In Last Seen Entering the Biltmore, you describe Jack Smith as a tyrant.

INDIANA

Not a tyrant, a hypnotist. He wanted to put the entire world into a trance. We hired him to act in Curse of the Dog People (1980), as Inspector Bidet, and he would take twenty minutes to make an entrance. One night as we left the theater, Cookie Mueller said, “This can’t go on.” And I said, “Yeah, but how can we fire Jack Smith?” She said, “Write a play that he’ll hate, and we’ll say we’re going to do that instead.” That night Cookie and I went to Peppermint Lounge, and John Heys, an actor who performed a lot with Ethyl Eichelberger and Agosto Machado, walked in, and we thought he looked just like Roman Polanski. Cookie said, “Hey, John, Gary’s written this incredible play, the life story of Roman Polanski, and we’d like you to be Polanski.” He said, “When can I see it?” And she said, “Tomorrow!” So I went home and took a Captagon and wrote most of the play that night, at least up to the Cielo Drive massacre. The rest took a few more days. So that was how The Roman Polanski Story (1981) was born.

INTERVIEWER

And did Smith hate it?

INDIANA

He did. Especially after we told him that he was playing Charlie Manson.

INTERVIEWER

Were the plays recorded?

INDIANA

We didn’t have the money to document anything. I liked the ephemerality of it all.

One thing you don’t know about is that later on I started doing these cabaret things.

INTERVIEWER

In your drag persona?

INDIANA

No, I was the impresario. We did some nights at Gavin Brown’s, when he had Passerby, a performance space, over on the West Side. Little Annie would come and sing. Flawless Sabrina read her stories. I had a guy who juggled Ginsu knives, balanced five chairs on his nose, and did incredible fire effects in the street outside. My boyfriend during that period was a fakir who slept on a bed of nails, and he could also eat light bulbs. He’d put down a blanket, cover it with glass shards, lie naked, facedown, and then have some two-hundred-and-fifty-pound person walk on top of him, and he’d get up without a scratch. So that was something.

INTERVIEWER

How did you conceive of your role as art critic for the Village Voice?

INDIANA

To be honest, every week I tried to startle people in some way. It was basically an experiment in how many different ways you can carry out an inherently narrow task. I wasn’t programmatic about the columns, because most of them were written at eleven o’clock on Sunday night to be turned in on Monday morning, but I had a bit more confidence by then, and I felt that much of art criticism was very flabby and rote. Why not make it something people would actually enjoy reading? I had to cover all kinds of art being shown, but I was mostly interested in the work that was coming out of the intersection of the original Conceptual art movement—you know, Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth and so on—and a consciousness about how art functioned, how images functioned in society. I don’t like to use jargony language, but there was what one might call a feminist revision of Conceptual art going on. People like Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger and Sarah Charlesworth, Gretchen Bender, Jennifer Bolande. I was attracted to the kinds of art that I could connect to philosophically. I understood Louise Bourgeois’s work right away.

 

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With Ashley Bickerton at Spring Street Bar in New York, ca. 1986. Photograph courtesy of Larry Johnson.

INTERVIEWER

Did you know that you wanted to be a novelist when you were writing for the Voice?

INDIANA

I was desperate to write a novel, but I didn’t have a story. Whenever I tried to write fiction it was all about my own inner bullshit. Writing about films and architecture and books was never the end point of what I wanted to do, but it forced me to get outside my own head, to describe physical objects and action. And then somebody handed me a story. I fell in love with a very comely young man who was trying to be an artist and was being a junkie without trying at all. I didn’t understand him, I didn’t understand his behavior, and I didn’t understand my behavior either. Francesco Clemente told me once that when you’re in love, the economy goes out the window. And that was my experience—he was all-consuming to me. A lot of what’s in Horse Crazy is pretty much how it went.

INTERVIEWER

Did you start writing the novel while you were still in the relationship?

INDIANA

No, and it didn’t occur to me immediately to write about it, but I soon realized that it was a real story, with a beginning, middle, and end. It was so devastating that I had to write about it eventually and get all of that autobiographical impulse out of my system. It took a long time to figure out how to arrange it, how much to fictionalize.

INTERVIEWER

AIDS exerts a narrative pressure in your novels, even when it’s not in the foreground. How did you feel about fictionalizing the crisis?

INDIANA

That was the poisoned sea we were swimming in during the eighties. It was something that could drive you insane, to be surrounded by death all the time and to be terrified that you were going to die in the same horrific manner in which you saw other people die. See, this is why I have so much trouble with this nostalgia for the eighties. It wasn’t an interesting period, it was a horrifying period. You couldn’t walk out the door without somebody telling you that someone you knew had just died the night before. It happened every week, over and over and over again. People you liked, people you didn’t like, it didn’t matter. And you’d hear these stories of how they’d died. Horse Crazy was written in the spirit of the time, with that cloud over everything. Part of the weird energy in that book has to do with this omnipresent desire for intimacy, and at the same time the terror of it.

Gone Tomorrow is a more pointed response to AIDS in the sense that a whole literature had been springing up around the epidemic, one that was completely sentimentalized and bathetic. Every person dying of AIDS was suddenly a saint, an incredibly virtuous person. I wanted to eliminate the idea that a virus has any morality to it. It’s just as unfair when shitty people die from a virus. I felt that we really didn’t need to relive the operatic canon of the nineteenth century in writing about this illness. It was not La bohème. It was uglier than that.

INTERVIEWER

What do you need to begin a novel?

INDIANA

You don’t need the whole story, but you have to at least have a notion of a character you want to find out more about. With Rent Boy, I was at dinner, and somebody told me about a guy who woke up in Central Park without a kidney. He’d been drugged by a woman he was trying to pick up. That appealed to me as a premise. So I started writing about this rent boy who falls into the clutches of an organ-snatching ring. And I found a voice for that character in which I could be much more flippant about certain things, more cavalier. I loved writing those sentences. I didn’t feel any inhibitions about what I was doing, because this narrator was somebody that I was making up out of my own head, with no model, really. I remember Burroughs said to me, after reading it, “Well, you finally found a voice, and it isn’t yours.” The mad doctor in the book was totally modeled on Burroughs. He liked that. Do Everything in the Dark came about in a completely different way—a friend of mine, the artist Billy Sullivan, had been approached by a publisher who was making fancy art books. Billy wanted me to collaborate with him—I had to make up stories to go with some paintings he had done of people we both knew. These weren’t stories about the actual people but stories the figures in the paintings might have inhabited, like they were actors. I had already written fifty pages when the publisher decided that he wasn’t going to do these books anymore, and I had reached what Kafka called the point of no return. So I just kept going.

I’ve had many abortions in the literary sense—getting to page fifty or even a hundred and realizing, This is not going to work. Almost all the short stories in my first book, Scar Tissue (1987), were the first chapters of novels that I found I couldn’t finish.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have early readers, people to whom you always show your work?

INDIANA

I’m a little superstitious about telling people what I’m working on, even, but I usually think it’s safe once you’re so immersed that you don’t really have a choice but to finish. I often show things to a friend I trust who’s not a writer. I don’t always take his notes, but I always consider them. They sometimes open up other possible  directions for what I’m working on. I don’t think I would show drafts to another writer.

INTERVIEWER

Why not?

INDIANA

Well, I think it’s obvious. I don’t want people stealing my ideas.

INTERVIEWER

You often use that phrase, “the point of no return,” when you describe composing a novel.

INDIANA

To continue with something you have to take a leap of faith. But there does come a point with a novel when you know you’re going to get to the end. When you see how you can make it work despite there being elements of it that make you afraid, then you are really in it. After that, the fear that you’ll croak before you finish sets in.

INTERVIEWER

Do you write in longhand?

INDIANA

Fiction I write in longhand, and sometimes long nonfiction. Reviews and things like that I do on the computer—I used to do them on a typewriter.

INTERVIEWER

What are your notes like?

INDIANA

For the novel I’m working on now, I must have three of these Rhodia notebooks—no, more than that—full of scattered things that aren’t necessarily going to end up in the book. I have notes like this, for example—“She was all crumpled-looking, rubbery, the effect of all the heavy salts and other excessive minerals she’d taken in over the course of a long and anguished lifetime.”

INTERVIEWER

That sounds great.

INDIANA

Yeah. But I have absolutely no idea who she is or anything. Let’s see. “I don’t hate you. I honestly don’t. I despise you. There’s a world of difference.”

Here’s another one. “ ‘You have to stay hydrated,’ she kept saying, until it sounded like some insane mantra.”

INTERVIEWER

The overall shapes of your novels vary dramatically, but you have a very consistent prose style. Were there any writers—contemporaries or people who came before you—whose style taught you how to put a sentence together?

INDIANA

When you’re groping around trying to figure out how to be a writer, you look to many different models to approximate or derive something from. I learned a lot from reading Beckett, naturally, and Thomas Bernhard—that peculiar tension between misanthropy and compassion that always lands in the right place. I like sentences that express more than one thing. I oscillate between trying for one kind of effect and almost its complete opposite. I used to think that one half of my brain was Patricia Highsmith and the other half was William Faulkner, but neither of those people was much of a model for me at all. I often have Robert Walser in mind when I’m writing, his freedom and the sense that you could end up in a place you never expected. At the same time, I often read Alexander Kluge to find that tone, that sense of control and ironic detachment. I think that, in my writing, I usually try to introduce a feeling of distance from the event, whatever it is, so that when I drop that distance it becomes very intense—particularly in moments of violence. I don’t like killing people in books, but I have had to do it sometimes.

INTERVIEWER

Horse Crazy is a first-person aria of complaint. Do Everything in the Dark is composed of tiny fragments, all organized by a central consciousness named Gary Indiana. And each novel in your American crime trilogy has a distinct attitude, voice, tone. Do you arrive at each new project and think, I need to go in a completely different direction this time? Or does that just happen naturally?

INDIANA

I have always been aware that I don’t want to do the next book the way I did the previous one. But most of my books have just come out of some odd circumstance. Resentment, for instance, came from sitting in a wine bar in Saint-Germain waiting for Jean-Jacques Schuhl, who was keeping me waiting and keeping me waiting and keeping me waiting, and for good reason, because he has a bad hip, but I was resenting him so much, and I had just bought these yellow legal pads, and I started writing about how much I resented sitting there waiting for Jean-Jacques Schuhl. And that led into my writing about a recent argument I’d had on the phone with my brother, whom I’ve resented from all the way back in our childhood. I had also been watching the Menendez case on Court TV every day, and so the novel became about these other two brothers who kill their parents. I suppose it’s similar to the way some of Conrad’s novels are structured—like how Marlow is sitting around smoking and telling the story of Lord Jim, or the shifting perspective of Axel Heyst in Victory. The narrator of Resentment doesn’t ever appear. He just says, “My friend Seth arrives,” and then the novel goes into the third person.

For Three Month Fever, which was putatively a nonfiction book, I felt I had to go and live in the places where Andrew Cunanan grew up, like San Diego, and the places where he killed people—New Jersey and Minneapolis and Miami and Chicago—and interview the police detectives, spend time with the coroners. I went drinking every night with the Minneapolis homicide squad. The Chicago PD were completely unhelpful with the Lee Miglin case. Miglin, Cunanan’s third victim, was like the Trump of Chicago. He probably was a marginally nicer person than Trump, and an actual real estate magus rather than a Ponzi artist. At any rate, the Chicago cops wouldn’t give me a thing. I had to get stuff from the FBI instead, with a FOIA. The book was thoroughly researched. None of it was fiction in the sense that I made up any of these events—I just dramatized them. With Depraved Indifference, I went to the Kimes trial every day, but I didn’t use the trial at all, and apart from the actual crimes the Kimeses committed, I made everything up. The trial wasn’t the interesting thing, it was this bizarre family dynamic.

INTERVIEWER

Your fiction can feel like Dickens or Zola, the way a plot moves with a kind of hydraulic ease between different classes, different scales of analysis. The effect is to capture how American life has been made and remade by capital.

INDIANA

I was aware at an early age that this country is rotten to the core, but it took years to begin to understand why it was rotten, what produces the rot. America was built on genocide and slavery, and the spirits of the slain inhabit this country almost more palpably than the living do. I saw the American pathology on display every day of the Menendez trial. José Menendez was a Cuban émigré who’d come to America after the revolution, and he’d swallowed the whole deal—I’m going to succeed and become rich, my sons are going to be everything I want them to be, they’re going to be tennis champions, they’re going to be business parasites like me. The trial revealed something fundamental about this country—the insane worship of money and success that American society drills into people. Also, the cavalier abuse of children. I suppose my view of it all, by the late nineties, was informed by how unfair it was that so many young people had been carried off—not just killed by an epidemic but rejected by their families, their bodies refused by funeral homes and cemeteries, because they weren’t somebody else’s image of perfection.

The counternarrative to the Menendez defense sickened me because it presumed that boys couldn’t be raped, boys couldn’t be sexually victimized. I think that if you revisited that case now, the take on it would be much different. I never doubted that the sons had been molested. I didn’t credit everything the defense said—but it was clear to me that given the composition of the juries, if you had presented the incest and abuse as anything less than a nightly event, the jurors wouldn’t have given any weight to it at all.

 

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In his New York apartment, February 2002. © Sylvia Plachy.

INTERVIEWER

When did you realize that you were writing a trilogy?

INDIANA

Actually, never. The crime novels followed one another in some fortuitously logical way. I was trying to understand something about the pathology of families. Resentment led quite naturally to the next book because it was about a guy—unlike the Menendez brothers, a gay guy—who was, also unlike them, from a family lower in the class system. A lot of Filipino families came over by joining the U.S. Navy, and they formed the underclass of San Diego, basically. Andrew Cunanan was an amazing example of how you have to dissemble yourself in order to fit into bourgeois society. When he got to Bishop’s, which is a very high-class school, he lied about everything. He said that his family was Jewish, that they owned car lots. And I understood him, his anger—at standing out in the wrong way, at having to lie about his background just to be marginally accepted. I mean, it isn’t that I thought what he did was anything good. It’s just that I could see the counternarrative in that situation. The outpouring of media blather over Versace—calling his murder an “assassination” as if he were some monarch from the nineteenth century—combined with the utter indifference to the murders of four other, nonfamous people, said tons about the vapidity of American values. Looking at things in a completely different way than how they were being written about in Vanity Fair provided me with a lot of energy.

INTERVIEWER

Horse Crazy and Do Everything in the Dark are my two favorite novels of yours. They are also the ones in which the narrator is quite clearly you. Do you think of them as a pair in any way?

INDIANA

Those novels do bookend each other, though not deliberately, because they are concerned with pretty much the same group of people. Not exactly the same characters, but the same kind of milieu. There are parts of me in a lot of the characters in Do Everything in the Dark. I had a very strong autumnal sense of a whole universe of people that I’d known forever—what had happened to them over time, how things had changed for them. You know in Renata Adler’s Pitch Dark when the narrator asks an old friend she runs into on a train, “How has it been in your life with unhappiness, did it come in days, months, decades, years?” and her friend says, “Quanta”? I wanted to show how people’s lives—and, by extension, my own—had or hadn’t worked out in the late middle years. I guess it was a way of slamming the door shut.

INTERVIEWER

Your novels often capture the way New York City has changed. Is that intentional?

INDIANA

I like to write things that are set in the moment in which I’m writing them, because that way you pull in all this information, all these details from around you, that you’d usually filter out. I was maybe sixty or seventy pages into Do Everything in the Dark when 9/11 happened, and then I made the decision to stop the novel before it caught up to that event, because I didn’t want to take that on, I didn’t want to capitalize on it. Certain things need time to sediment.

INTERVIEWER

Do you revise your books very much?

INDIANA

I do a lot of cutting after I’ve drafted something. Really drastic cutting. With the memoir, I think I cut at least three hundred pages. I need to be in control of the material. I don’t want an editor to come back to me and say, We think you need to do this or that. I don’t like too many fingerprints on my work. In the case of Do Everything in the Dark, I remember getting almost to the end and thinking, Something’s missing. So I wrote the narrative about the two women who move to Albuquerque, and then dropped those pieces in where I thought they’d fit. Looking back, I think what was originally missing from the draft was the depiction of intimacy and of how overwhelming the dissociative states of depression are. It doesn’t matter if you have a partner who loves you, who’s there for you. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t save you. It’s like the world implodes. The women were loosely modeled after two friends for whom I felt tremendous love and affection, although I didn’t know what had happened between them, because they’d left town. Later, I was informed—and this happens a lot when you write fiction—that what I had written was almost exactly what had come to pass.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve mentioned how much you dislike nostalgia—nostalgia for downtown, for a particular cultural moment that you’re taken to be an emblem of. I’ve heard you refer to it as necrophilia.

INDIANA

This reification of downtown—I don’t get it. I came to New York at the end of 1978, at the tail end of a nightclub-and-bar scene that all but evaporated by 1983. Why focus on those particular years? Many of us went on to do things that were infinitely more interesting and complex than what we were doing then. What I think is necrophiliac is to fetishize these moments in time that represent how things were then, rather than focus on how things are now. A lot of what I did back then, or involved myself in, embarrasses me now, times I behaved badly or messed up. I don’t want to have those moments turned into landmark events.

INTERVIEWER

How did you avoid a nostalgia for downtown in your memoir?

INDIANA

Well, I didn’t have any. I did write a lot of chapters about people who were well known, in New York at least, but I took most of them out, because I knew they would be read in the wrong way, for gossip value. Remember that the New York Post ran a skeleton key to Resentment—and got everything wrong. And a lot of people would say that Do Everything in the Dark is much closer to the real lives of well-known people than it should have been, although it’s quite removed from any documentary reality. Unfortunately, I left a few parts about Susan Sontag and Kathy Acker in the memoir. They’re a tiny fraction of the book, but what do you suppose every reviewer pounced on?

INTERVIEWER

The memoir, like Do Everything in the Dark, is written in little pieces and portraits. Were they based on diaries from the time?

INDIANA

No. I wish I had kept a journal, but I always thought—and now that I’m old I realize I was mistaken—that if something was important I would be able to remember it. I wrote most of the memoir on a terrace in Havana under really ideal circumstances to recall things and note them down, no internet, no TV unless you wanted to watch a ten-hour speech by Fidel Castro. No cell phones until the past couple of times I’ve gone down to the island. And no advertising, no billboards, no neon, no nothing. You mostly just have face-to-face conversations and direct encounters with people. It’s so different from the social world that we inhabit here, where people will text you instead of calling because even a phone call is too intimate. Being in Havana was very productive for me, as a writer and as a human. And, you know, you can always describe things better from a distance. It was in Havana that I realized I had to try to write my memoir as if it were a novel, to freely go back and forth in time—to focus on early youth and the cusp of old age, and to leave out the middle.

INTERVIEWER

The middle was when you wrote many of your books.

INDIANA

Yes.

INTERVIEWER

You didn’t want to dramatize the writing process?

INDIANA

Well, how can you?


Source Link: the paris review, Issue 238, Winter 2021