Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Paul Harding wouldn’t have dreamed of being so described even a year ago. The rock drummer turned Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate spent years attempting to sell his first novel Tinkers. A brief, essayistic work of what Harding’s dubbed “birch bark metaphysics,” Tinkers follows two narratives—the hallucinatory deathbed demise of George Washington Crosby, as well as the life of his estranged, epileptic father, a generation before. The work was finally published by a tiny nonprofit medical school press, Bellevue, who to their honor became one of the least-known publishers to have ever produced a Pulitzer-prize winning novel. Harding corresponded with Wag’s Revue fiction editor William Litton and essays editor Sandra Allen via email.
Sandra Allen and William Litton, Wag’s Revue: Rereading Tinkers, we were struck about how referential the text feels. It’s almost impossible to not be reminded of Faulkner, or Márquez (in the novel’s initial and repeated conceit, “George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died” recalling the opening line of One Hundred Years of Solitude), or Melville, or Whitman (in its depictions of nature), or Emerson (especially in the figure of Howard’s father the sermon-scratching preacher); there’s even the actual appearance of Nathaniel Hawthorne in the text, as he may have been a school chum of the novel’s hermit, Gilbert. Are such appearances subconscious manifestations? Or are you engaging with some rather familiar, even classic, literary consciousness to some end? If so, what?
Paul Harding: You name check a gaggle of my favorite authors, with all of who I consider myself to be in constant, conscious conversation. The so-called magical realists especially instilled the lovely sense that all writers are more or less working on different chapters of The Novel. Márquez, Fuentes, Cortázar all even use one another’s characters in their novels. Horacio Oliveira, from Cortázar’s Hopscotch shows up in Terra Nostra and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Those authors, of course, all revered Faulkner (and Virginia Woolf), so there’s this feeling of camaraderie across cultures and times. I find a strong sense of that kind of superimposition of times and places and souls in the New England transcendentalists as well. It’s a fellowship of the imagination.
WR: Many of these writers are New Englanders, and it seems that one of the central subjects and preoccupations of the text is New England nostalgia (George even makes his living tinkering with old clocks that “North Shore” folks “dreaming of wool mills and slate queries, tickertape and fox hunts” want to maintain). In what ways, as a New England resident, do you feel connected to the place of this novel? And why celebrate a region that produces the most annoying sports fans in the world?
PH: Well, I feel connected to the idea of “New England” because I’m from Massachusetts and the light and the landscape and the language and history are imprinted within every cell of my brain. It’s just my milieu, I guess, or at least the most immediate one. And, I embrace it, which I did not do for a long time. When I first wrote, everything had to be set on Mars or twelfth century England or something like that, out of fear of lapsing into memoir or autobiography, neither of which appeals to me. But then I found that I had a certain kind of aesthetic dexterity with the stuff of the place, which I was able to use as the medium through which I told stories about characters in whom I found myself interested.
As far as New England sports fans, perhaps you’re annoyed by how knowledgeable and sophisticated they are.
WR: Another rather classic, even nostalgic, move that you’re making is to engage with a common family over a series of works. (Your forthcoming second novel, Enon, is to be about George Washington Crosby’s grandson. You’ve in the past mentioned George in a short story you published.) This recalls Faulkner, Joyce, many 19th-Century writers. Do you expect you’ll be married to these characters and this world for a good length of time? Why the infatuation, and what do you think you gain from it as a writer?
PH: I think that the past should be retained in the present, or that it simply is so, in which case, I don’t think of this move as nostalgic. At any rate, such traditions should not be thought of as antiquated fashions out of which we grow, or through which we plow, or of which we dispose like dutiful consumers. The idea of exploring a place or a family or something similar, over time, over the course of a couple or several books is to my thinking simply inherent to art, part of its essence. Artists working in every medium have their themes, the treatments of which hopefully evolve and deepen every time they are reconsidered, rendered again. Only people who don’t like Faulkner groan when he writes another book about a dispossessed son of the South fretting over his sister’s virginity. Everyone else does a jig and tucks in.
WR: Something that distinguishes your work from that of your early twentieth and nineteenth century predecessors is your depictions of women. Though the book’s two protagonists are male, I was struck by how deftly you render the inner life of your female characters, especially on the topic of their marriages (one of my favorite lines occurs when George’s wife is thinking about her bedridden husband’s now wooden-seeming legs: “My husband the table. She felt so bad afterward that she wept.”) When writing a female haracter, are your concerns different than they would be when writing a male?
PH: My concerns are not different when writing female characters. There are sometimes different social or cultural circumstances or roles to consider, of course. But I don’t think that, for example, chaffing under the imposed conditions of domestic servitude is necessarily gender specific. That is, I feel like I can imagine pretty vividly what it’d be like to suffer under a regime of chauvinism, because in some respects injustice is injustice. Anyway, I think of characters as human beings whose humanity is refracted through circumstances such as gender, culture, and so forth. It’s a vast subject, of course, as vast as humanity itself. It’s as serious and essential as it is perilous, especially in terms of power and naming and appropriating other people’s lives, of making other people objects rather than subjects—and these are the very things that I think the best art takes as its very themes—but I do generally believe in the idea that, the more different kinds of circumstances you can imagine yourself suffering from or struggling within, the more likely you are to respect other people and be invested in nurturing their integrity. It’s the old, dare I say, nostalgic idea of I and Thou; my humanity is authenticated and confirmed to the extent that I endeavor to authenticate and confirm yours.
WR: Given the detail afforded so many topics—clock-making and early 20th century gadgets, epilepsy, New England flora and fauna—I’m wondering what kind of research—including research into your own family’s history—went into the writing of Tinkers?
PH: I always say that absolutely no research went into the book, but that might not quite be true. It’s true that I did no research on epilepsy, because I was interested in the experience of it, not in its clinical description. I did look at a couple of my old clock books just to make sure I got the typical arrangement of a clock’s works correct, but I also apprenticed repairing clocks for several years with my grandfather. I did, though, deliberately walk around the parts of Maine where I spend a week or two every summer with field guides to flowers and trees and that kind of thing, so that the taxonomy in the book would be precise.
WR: There’s a large amount of interior psychological space in Tinkers. Much of the book’s action is propelled through memory, dream, hallucination, epileptic fit—and it’s done so quite deftly, with an eye toward both the language and the science of the phenomena. To what extent did the fields on psychology and neuroscience influence the form and content of this novel?
PH: I’m not sure what the distinctions and connections between psychology and neuroscience are, precisely, or I think of such things as matters of philosophy, of which there are numerous schools, but I was not at all interested in what I generally think of as psychology—at least in whatever senses that science seeks to explain the human mind. I’m very much interested in neuroscience to the extent that it attempts to describe and explore consciousness. I love the boundaries between ontology and epistemology, between matter and whatever substratum it is out of which it precipitates. I find that there are analogies between, say, quantum mechanics and thought and memory. Memory seems to me not to work, or at least to be experienced in terms of Newtonian physics. I find much contemporary popular materialism to consist of a kind of nostalgia for the determinism of Newtonian physics, speaking of nostalgia, which you’ve got me thinking about now.
WR: Many of these interior moments—the hallucinations and epileptic seizures, especially—are rendered in fairly experimental style, reminiscent of Faulkner’s streams of consciousness. This is another aspect of your work that saves it from being merely a nostalgic work of, say, historical fiction. This text is, without bowling you over, occasionally avant-garde. Now that you’ve been decked-out with a Pulitzer Prize-winning soapbox, what are your thoughts on the need for or role of experimental writing in contemporary fiction?
PH: Any good writing is experimental. In my opinion, formal innovation is a property of a work of art generating its own necessities; it is, as the physicists say, an emergent property. In a way “stream of consciousness” is a kind of stale, ossified description of what should be a living calculus. That kind of writing subsequently becomes stale and mannered to the extent that writers subject their characters’ minds to the conceit, the principle. The subject is the theory, the predicate the mind, the character—the precisely wrong order of things if the writer is interested in achieving fresh, essential, engaging visions of consciousness. I think you could probably go through Tinkers and identify all kinds of literary styles and moves and so forth, but they all emerged over the course of the process of getting each passage down in its own integrity. The mind was always of the essence, the form it took on the page subsequent.
WR: Tinkers is a novella published in an age when “important” works are often gargantuan. That being said, brevity is becoming more and more important, especially among the online generation. What motivated stopping this book where you did? Was this a political move (demonstrating that great works needn’t be epic) or was it simply what the work itself demanded?
PH: I wrote the story and it was that long. I know it can sound a bit easy for me to say this now, after all of the worldly success of the book, but I honestly don’t care about the online generation’s supposed lack of attention span. Or, I should put it another way. To the extent that people have attention spans that are short as well as shallow, it is a great human tragedy. It is also largely consensual, I believe. We allow ourselves to indulge in the superficial use of our brains by convincing ourselves that such a thing is inevitable because technology has run amok and gone beyond our capacity to control it. If it has, it is to some very real extent because we have allowed our capacities to atrophy. Anyway. To the extent that a bunch of people seem to enjoy Tinkers, because of or despite its density (I think of it as brief in length but substantial in depth, ideally), I think it contradicts these backhandedly comforting ideas we have about our own idiocy. People are just as thoughtful and just as hungry for art and ideas and substance as they ever were. People experience themselves as deeply as ever, despite all efforts not to, perhaps, and there is a deep, authentic datum in that experience, not in any bullshit, new age, narcissistic way, but in a way having to do with fundamental fact of having and sharing such and such a general sort of physiology. I’m drifting very close to Kant, aren’t I? So be it! I like Kant.
WR: The circumstances of your winning the Pulitzer being what they were—Tinkers was a first novel, published by a tiny nonprofit press for a miniscule advance, so forth—there’s a desire to understand this book as a zeitgeist, of ushering in some revolution in literature or the world of publishing. Do you feel that Tinkers does, or would you want Tinkers’ win to represent something greater?
PH: I hope that the geist of Tinkers is that people will always want to make and to consider art, regardless of the fashions or woes of any particular zeit. The problem with the zeitgeist is that, standing in the middle of it, it can be taken as normative, which it is not. We’ve cultivated the habit of exchanging one zeitgeist for the next without thinking much or at all about this. We rush from one crummy enthusiasm to the next, always self-conscious about how foolish it was to have so wholeheartedly believed in what we did, never self-conscious about how foolish it is to be doing so wholeheartedly again. It’s a fascinating paradox, because in a sense it is preventable, but in other senses it is inimical to how we are in time. Another mystery to ponder if not solve.
WR: A rather strange aspect of being a Pulitzer Prize winner is that while you become a celebrity in the literary culture, you’re also acknowledged by the non-literary culture, and you’re asked to interview with USA Today or on FOX News. Was that experience of what could be called cultural ambassadorship heartening or depressing?
PH: It’s sometimes circumstantially depressing, but overall it’s heartening. To the extent that I get to talk about beauty and art and aesthetics and thoughtfulness and soulfulness in public, I think that it’s a good thing.
WR: It’s our understanding that you finished writing Tinkers several years ago after having written it over the course of several years prior to that. Is it bizarre to spend so much time speaking about something from which you’ve likely grown apart?
PH: Absolutely, yes. It is true that once you finish a work and cut the umbilical, it takes on a life of its own. Often, when I’m asked about specific scenes or ideas or images in the book, I don’t even remember them, or the circumstances of their geneses. Right now, I’m trying to write Enon, so it feels very retrograde to keep thinking about Tinkers in some senses. But those are wholly personal, artistic senses. I’m very loyal to Tinkers and I’m delighted at its worldly career and it would be unforgivably coy and disingenuous to act in any other way. The fact that I get to go all over the world and read from it and talk about it with people is a pure joy, and the aesthetic attitude I need to take to evolve the next piece of work does not preclude the worldly pleasures I derive from doing the grand tour with it.
WR: A wag is a witty, droll jokester. Who is your favorite wag and why? It could be a historical figure, a fictional character, or even just a friend of yours.
PH: My current favorite wag is Ivan Severyanich, from Nickolai Leskov’s short novel, The Enchanted Wanderer. That book is a masterpiece. I half idly assigned it in the seminar I taught last semester at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, having read and enjoyed it several years ago. But when the students and I really drilled down into the thing and studied its depths, it revealed itself as a kind of cosmological magnum opus. It’s very funny, very soulful, very despairing, very affirmative.
Another favorite wag is Thomas Mann’s character Settembrini, from The Magic Mountain. His waggishness takes the form of repeatedly calling the decidedly unwaggish protagonist, Hans Castorp, a wag himself. It’s a sustained if lesser instance of the kind of spooky sort of devilry with and by which Mann was equally delighted and disgusted.
