INTERVIEWER
How did you accomplish it?
FRANZEN
I was a skinny, scared kid trying to write a big novel. The mask I donned was that of a rhetorically airtight, extremely smart, extremely knowledgeable middle-aged writer. To write about what was really going on in me with respect to my parents, with respect to my wife, with respect to my sense of self, with respect to my masculinity — there was just no way I could bring that to the surface. I’d tried writing about it directly in short stories before I got going with The Twenty-Seventh City, and I just hadn’t had the chops to get at it, didn’t have enough distance on it, didn’t understand it well enough. So I put on the mask of a middle-aged postmodern writer.
Looking back now, I see a twenty-five-year-old with a very compromised sense of masculinity, of his own maleness. There was a direct transfer of libido to the brain — this was my way of leaving the penis out of the equation and going with what I knew I had, which was that I was smarter than most people. It had been drummed into me by my dad: “You are smarter than most people.” He felt himself to be smarter than most people, probably rightly so. He felt that it had taken him too long to figure this out, and he said to me, many times, “Don’t make the mistake I made.” So I set a lot of store in being brainy. And satire was particularly appealing, because, first, it was funny, and I always liked to be funny, and, second, you didn’t have to take responsibility for generating your own faith, your own core beliefs. You could simply expose the mendacity and falseness of others. It was a way for the baby of his family — who’d been surrounded, as a kid, by three powerful male presences — to exercise some kind of mastery and cut other people down to size. And, no less important, it was a way to ignore the maternal side of the equation. During those amazing winter weeks of 1980 and 1981, my mother had literally been made sick, seriously ill, by news about the sex life of one of my brothers. I’d seen firsthand that the mere expression of overt masculine sexuality could put a woman in the hospital! So it’s really no wonder that intellect presented itself as a safer alternative in The Twenty-Seventh City.
In the later books, as I began to put the worst of my own Sons and Lovers psychodramas behind me, I reached for different kinds of masks. The reason it took so long to do Freedom was that the masks not only had to be extremely lifelike but also had to be invented out of whole cloth, because, again, after much trying and failing, I’d seen that there was no way I could write directly about certain central parts of my own experience, my experience with my mom and my experience in my marriage. What made direct revelation impossible was partly my sense of shame and partly a wish to protect third parties, but it was mostly because the material was so hot that it deformed the writing whenever I came at it directly. And so, layer by layer, I built up the masks. Like with papier-mâché, strip after strip, molding ever more lifelike features, in order to perform the otherwise unperformable personal drama.
INTERVIEWER
The mask is a way to convey truth, rather than to conceal it.
FRANZEN
Yes. But also recognizing, crucially, that the amorphous, unconscious, naked soul is a horror. The most terrifying scene in Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge is the one in which Malte, as a boy, starts putting on party masks from a trunk in his family’s attic, one after another, until finally one of them takes control of him. He sees his masked self in the mirror and goes momentarily insane with terror that there is no him, there’s only the mask. Years later, as an adult, walking around in Paris, he sees a woman on a park bench who puts her face in her hands and then looks up with a naked face, a horrifying Nothing, having left the mask in her hands. Malte is essentially the story of a young writer working through a fear of masks to a recognition of their necessity.
Rilke anticipated the postmodern insight that there is no personality, there are just these various intersecting fields: that personality is socially constructed, genetically constructed, linguistically constructed, constructed by upbringing. Where the postmoderns go wrong is in positing a nullity behind all that. It’s not a nullity, it’s something raw and frightening and bottomless. It’s what Murakami goes looking for in the well in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. To ignore it is to deny your humanity.
INTERVIEWER
The development of the American writer today most typically takes place within the university, in creative-writing programs. Did you consider that route?
FRANZEN
I got married instead to a tough reader with great taste. We had our own little round-the-clock M.F.A. program. This phase of our marriage went on for about six years, which is three times longer than the usual program. Plus, we didn’t have to deal with all the stupid responses to writing that workshops generate.
We did actually apply to some programs one year, in hopes of getting a university to support us financially, and we were both accepted at Brown. But the money Brown offered wasn’t good enough. In hindsight, I’m glad I didn’t go, because it might have smoothed some kinks out of the work that were better not smoothed out. As a journalist, I’m always striving to become more professional, but as a fiction writer I’d rather remain an amateur.
INTERVIEWER
Did you devise another kind of program for yourselves? Did you go to readings?
FRANZEN
No, we didn’t want to be around other writers. In some semiconscious way, we recognized that we weren’t good yet, and we needed to protect ourselves from depressing exposure to people who’d already gotten to be good.
INTERVIEWER
What books were you reading in those years?
FRANZEN
Everything. I read fiction four or five hours a night every night for five years. Worked through Dickens, the Russians, the French, the moderns, the postmoderns. It was like a return to the long reading summers of my youth, but now I was reading literature, getting a sense of all the ways a story could be made.
But the primal books for me remained the ones I’d encountered in the fall of 1980: Malte, Berlin Alexanderplatz, The Magic Mountain, and, above all, The Trial. In each of these books the fundamental story is the same. There are these superficial arrangements; there is the life we think we have, this very much socially constructed life that is comfortable or uncomfortable but nonetheless what we think of as “our life.” And there’s something else underneath it, which was represented by all of those German-language writers as Death. There’s this awful truth, this maskless self, underlying everything. And what was striking about all four of those great books was that each of them found the drama in blowing the cover off a life. You start with an individual who is in some way defended, and you strip away or just explode the surface and force that character into confrontation with what’s underneath. This was very straightforwardly and explicitly the program with The Twenty-Seventh City, to take the well-defended Probst and strip away and strip away.
INTERVIEWER
And you saw Martin Probst as a parallel to Joseph K.?
FRANZEN
Yes, in my own vulgar reading of Kafka, I did. Suddenly one day, for no reason, there were a bunch of Indians in St. Louis, and they were conspiring to ruin Probst’s life.