Last Thursday, author Don DeLillo received the 2010 Saint Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. “Perhaps the most important thing I learned at Fordham is there is no escape from the Jesuits,” he teased the crowd. Then his mic failed. “Anxiety of technology,” murmured DeLillo, who’s softspoken and famously dry, as English prof Harold Bush maneuvered to fix the sound.)
Here’s an excerpt of their conversation, questions paraphrased for efficiency’s sake.
Harold Bush: What ran through your mind when your first story was accepted?
‘Wait, I was only kidding, I can do better!’
Don DeLillo.: I was two years into my first novel when it occurred to me that I was a writer. It happened, I’m not exaggerating, a little like a revelation. I remember where I was, what street I was on. I knew I would be a writer no matter what.
So what street was it?
It was Second Ave. around 36th St. in Manhattan. There’s a plaque.
What do you see as the purpose of your art?
To write clear, beautiful sentences.
How do you structure a plot?
It’s all a mystery. I think of fiction as a mystery. I wait for answers.
What American writer influenced you first?
Hemingway. He was inescapable back then. In a positive sense. A friend and I used to practice speaking to each other in Hemingwayesque dialogue. It was part parody but it was mostly tribute. This friend could not break himself of the habit. He is now on safari.
What was your most overwhelming literary experience:
Reading Ulysses, the first three chapters. The language seemed to fill the room with sunlight.
Some readers say—
They’re wrong!
That you are a dark and pessimistic writer.
I don’t feel dark and pessimistic. I feel I’m painting a portrait of a world that I know, not one I’m creating out of sheer invention.
I did find myself drawn toward violence. This is because I grew up in New York.
Arguably you're the most successful Italian-American novelist maybe ever, yet you have not really chose to make the Italian-American experience central.
My parents were born in Italy and came to this country for a better life, for another chance, and through a great deal of hard work, they succeeded. New York City and then America became my subjects. I had to discover America just as they had. When my first novel was translated into French, it said “from the American,” and that sounded right to me. I think of myself as writing in the American language.
Your now-iconic novel White Noise—what accounts for its appeal?
I don’t know. I returned from three years in Greece. I needed to get back into this culture. And one of the things I noticed was the sort of dazzle, the brightness, the vividness of an ordinary American supermarket. I was listening to people speak and I felt the urge to start writing. I found myself describing a street in a town and then things began to develop.
A thing becomes reported and then overreported and you get the impression that there is nothing in the world happening except this particular thing, and then they just drop it. This was a period when they were reporting toxic spills.
I put a character in a supermarket, and the rest of it is inexplicable.
What purpose does fiction serve?
There’s something about the mark of history on the internal life of people which a fiction writer can attempt to discover which is outside the limits of journalism.
You once had a reputation as a reclusive writer.
You know, for my first seven books, I didn’t do any interviews. But it was a different era. People weren’t after you to do interviews. I may have turned down three interview requests in 10 years. Nobody wanted to talk to me. But I’ve never been a recluse. Someone writes something, and everyone repeats it without knowing what they are saying.
What do you think of younger writers like David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen?
I think they are two terrific writers, and they happen to be blood brothers; Jonathan Franzen speaks of their relationship as two sides of the same coin. I think they are two of the best writers in the country of any generation, and I wish I could say the best living writers. I think they put enormous energy and vitality and sheer intelligence into the American novel.
What’s your take on the future of publishing:
I still think the best young creative minds move toward the novel, and that encourages me. The question is, in what form will we be reading these novels, electronic or in the traditional format? And the other question is, does language, does poetry, need paper? How will technology change not only the way we write but the way we read?
On the paradox of religion in America…
It doesn’t feel like a spiritual country, does it? It feels like a confused country.
