William T. Vollmann is the author of seven novels, three collections of stories, and one work of nonfiction. His literary awards include a PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction and a 1988 Whiting Writers Award. His journalism and fiction have been published in The New Yorker, Esquire, Spin, Gear, Granta, Grand Street, and Outside Magazine. A few weeks after the interview in this magazine was conducted, he won the 2005 National Book Award for Europe Central.
Michelle Simotas: In your early work, most of your research was done by experiencing people and places first-person. How has that changed since you have moved into the more historical novel?
Well, I still try to experience whatever I can. For World War II, talking to survivors, visiting archives, visiting the actual places where these things were happening and trying to pick up the energy of that particular place, whatever is still there. For instance, even now in Berlin, there are three or four official Third Reich buildings that survived. A lot of them were torn down by the British or Americans after the war, but there are some that are just so solid that they have kept them and used them for something else. So you can go there and get the feeling of what the monumental architecture was like, and then you can look at the landscapes and imagine what it was like, look at a lot of maps, look at old photographs until they just seem to come alive, and constantly read until you start seeing patterns. Of course, it’s easier if you can go directly somewhere and experience, but if you can’t then you just have to research and look and think and repeat until it comes alive.
MS: And how do you choose the books that you want to use for your research?
I guess it’s just that there is a story or a topic or something that kind of haunts me. Those things are a dime a dozen; there are so many of those and most of them will never come to fruition in my lifetime. One of the things I would love to do is an oral history of the Iran-Iraq war, but I’m sure I will never get to it. That’s the kind of thing where I’m going to need so much money, lots of interpreters, and back and forth all the time. It would be fantastic. It was one of the most titanic wars of the last century, but I won’t get to do it. My books about prostitutes, for instance. That was a more manageable subject.
MS: Did you approach the prostitutes as if you were soliciting them?
Yes, absolutely, that’s right. I began my interest in prostitutes as a customer. I was in a relationship, I was engaged to be married, and then the woman I loved decided she didn’t want me anymore. I was really unhappy. I tried for a couple of years to find somebody else, but because I was so sad, of course, nobody wanted me. Finally, I got desperate, so I hired a call girl and had sex with her. She was really nice to me. I felt like it was an okay experience for her, and then I started thinking about what it all meant: When was it okay to have sex for money? What made it exploitation, if it did? And who exploits women? The more I looked into it the more complicated it got. I became a friend to a lot of prostitutes. Sometimes, I would just pay them for stories. Sometimes, I would let them crash in my hotel room.
There was one prostitute I knew for a number of years in San Francisco. She was a grandmother; she was still working. She started as a runaway, and, in the end, she was strangled. Very, very fine person. She was not pretty anymore, she didn’t smell very good, and she couldn’t really get any work, but she would go out all night. About five or six in the morning, she would come and give up. I would always just let her stay in my hotel room; I’d give her the bed, and I’d sleep on the floor. Sometimes I would do watercolors of her. She’d tell me stories. She would often steal my Cadmium Red and use it as lipstick. I told her, ‘You know, this stuff is really bad for you; it’s worse than lead.’ She said, ‘The kind of life I live I’m not worried about it.’ And she was right. She was strangled. But she was always really nice; she told me a lot of things. In other parts of the world, the whole prostitution experience is completely different. In our country, there is a lot of shame attached to the body, but in Southeast Asia, for the most part, there is no shame. And Japan also, not much. In Catholic countries, there is probably more shame than here.
Nina LaCour: Was your visual art inspired by the prostitutes you worked with?
Well, for me writing and drawing are both expressions of love. I think that it is a wonderful thing to be able to save reality from loss. The picture up there on the top is my little girl’s Algerian babysitter. She is just the nicest, sweetest woman, and I really care about her, so it was a lot of fun to make a woodcut of her. Every time I look at her, that picture of her, it makes me think of her and it makes me happy. And I feel that way in my writing. If there is a scene that I have gotten right, even if it’s an imaginary character or historical character, if I did it right, I feel happy. ‘Oh yeah, I remember him or her.’
MS: Your early work with prostitutes and your more recent, historical work all deal with huge moral issues. Was that something you set out to do? Was that your ambition or did that just evolve?
I think that is just me. I would like to understand these questions, come up with some provisional answers, and often these things are just unanswerable. That is just the way my mind works.
MS: Is the moral issue usually the seed?
Well, often, yes. With Europe Central, those are stories about people trying to make an ethical decision. Often, whatever they chose was going to be awful, but they were human beings and they had the right and the obligation to choose.
Right now I am working on a book about poor people. So the more I look into it the more questions I have. If you see someone who looks very poor, and who is begging on the street who says ‘I’m happy I’m not poor.’ Is that person poor or not? The UN says that if you make less than four dollars a day you are poor. That’s not a bad starting point for poverty. I’ve met people who make a lot more who consider themselves poor. It seems like there is an aspect of poverty that can be measured by the financial aspect, but then what about somebody like Thoreau who lived on almost nothing. When he would meet poor people he would say, ‘Look: all you have to do is live like me—build your own house, live in the woods, live on beans—and you can get by for pennies a day.’ And they couldn’t accept his advice; that didn’t sound too great to them. So, was he poor? This stuff is baffling. Those are the kinds of things my mind turns on.
MS: You have written something like fifteen books. How do you feel your writing process has changed from your early work to Europe Central?
It used to be more inspiration. I could feel the words coming out of my fingertips. I would be typing away like mad. And I could still do that if I wanted to, but my early work like You Bright and Risen Angels was mostly about things going on in my head. I’ve gotten more interested lately in past and present reality, such as World War II or prostitution or whatever. I probably could have made up a lot of the stuff about prostitutes and many of the people who read my books wouldn’t have known the difference, but I thought that wouldn’t be respectful to the prostitutes. So, in the beginning, I tried to use their real stories and not change anything, I felt that that was my obligation. After years and years of working with them I started to feel like I could create a character of a prostitute who was real, or very similar, and actually had the virtues and failings of that particular class of people—so I could do it with accuracy and respect. But that sort of writing involves a lot of detail work as opposed to just letting it all kind of flow. They are both great. When I write poetry it is really nice to let it all flow.
NL: Michelle and I were talking about how in your early work the stories were smaller; they covered less geography. Europe Central covers World War II and a much larger geography but, still, each story centers around an individual, so we were wondering if it’s just a larger number of individual stories in Europe Central that make up a portrait of a place and time.
Yes, maybe that is true. I think that it is important to try to experience the events that surround the individual. And so if somebody asks me who’s right or who’s wrong in the Middle East, I can’t really say because I’ve spent very little time there. I was in Israel for a week, and I was in Egypt for a week, and I’ve spent a little time in Jordan coming back from Iraq but I don’t feel that I have a handle on it. On the other hand, if someone says, ‘Are we right or wrong, what we’re doing down in Iraq,’ I can feel pretty certain to say that we are wrong because I was there and when I was there I asked a lot of ordinary people and officials what was going down, and I feel like I have some understanding. No matter what the newspaper says or the television says I have my opinion. So in a way, it would be nice if I didn’t have to just perceive things in my own way. It would save me a lot of time and trouble, but that is just how I am. When I write these books, it’s the same kind of thing—how can I really say what World War II was about or how people experienced it except by creating characters, such as Shostakovich, and say this is probably what would have filtered through the lenses of their particular personalities. After we tell all their stories, is there some sort of overarching thing.
MS: How do you feel being a father has impacted your work, or has it?
It makes me appreciate even more what Tolstoy has done or John Dos Passos, where you see characters started off as kids and gradually developing and growing all the way to old age. It makes me think that if I keep watching my little girl and paying a lot of attention to her then I will be able to do that too someday. I’ll just be able to add to my repertoire more characters and more stages of life, so that’s my hope.
NL: How long does it usually take you from the generation of an idea for a project to when you actually send it out to your publisher?
With the writing, sometimes things go on for years. Rising Up and Rising Down was a twenty-one-year project or twenty-three, something like that. I didn’t think it would go on that long, but the most important thing to me is to give the work the time that it needs, however long that is. If that means I don’t finish it, that is better than rushing it out before it’s finished.
MS: Rising Up and Rising Down started out as an essay, is that right?
That’s right, yes. It was going to be about environmental terrorism, and that is one chapter, but it is about 1,500 pages into the book.
MS: Rising Up and Rising Down is structured in terms of the justification of different forms of violence. Is that how the book was conceived in your mind, or did you write the book and then later decide to organize it in that way?
I was a part of the anti-nuclear movement. I was involved in an occupation blockade attempt of a reactor in Seabrook, New Hampshire. It was not effective because the National Guard and the police used violence and we were non-violent. The whole justification for this occupation attempt had been that nuclear power was inherently dangerous and that sooner or later—this was before Three Mile Island and Chernobyl—there was going to be an accident and many, many people were going to be killed. So if that’s the case . . . let’s say that we can be pretty sure that 10,000 people were going to be killed. In that case, would it be a good thing or a bad thing to kill, if necessary, 9,000 people in order to shut down the reactor? Suppose you dropped some kind of conventional bomb on it, blew it up, and killed everybody that was inside the reactor. The end result is that you saved all the people around, but would that be good or reprehensible? Because an accident is an accident, but you’re killing people on purpose. I started with that, thinking how in general do you figure this stuff out? When Hitler says, it is okay to attack Poland to defend the German homeland, that doesn’t sound right. Is there something similar in the wrongness of that to the failure of some other kind of justification? In the end, I thought I better figure out what all the different justifications are and see what I can come up with from there.
MS: The New York Times calls Europe Central your most welcoming work. What do you think about that?
I think it is kind of grim myself. If they think it is welcoming, more power to them. I’m happy that a lot of people seem to like this book. I don’t really know why. I don’t think it is any better or any worse than any of my other books. Maybe it’s because it says a lot of unpleasant things about Europeans instead of Americans. I know that a lot of people have been offended by my works about prostitution, for instance. Offended by the fact that I am not ashamed of sex, I am not ashamed of sex for money, and that people who are drug addicts or homeless don’t bother me. They seem to bother a lot of people so maybe people don’t like some of my work for those reasons, I don’t really know. People are free to like my books or hate my books or whatever they want to do.
MS: Do you have a favorite book?
Whatever book I am working on at the moment is usually my favorite.
NL: How do you feel about being nominated for the National Book Award?
I’m flattered. I figure that with a little luck I can sell my next book for a little bit more, whether I win or whether I lose.
