Dubus Andre - Conversations with Andre Dubus

Literary Conversations Series
Peggy Whitman Prenshaw
General Editor

Edited by Olivia Carr Edenfield

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of American University Presses.

Copyright 2013 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2013

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dubus, Andre, 1959

Conversations with Andre Dubus / edited by Olivia Carr Edenfield.

pages cm. (Literary Conversations Series)

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-61703-785-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-61703-786-3 (ebook) 1. Dubus,

Andre, 1959- 2. Authors, American20th centuryInterviews. 3. FictionAuthorship. I. Edenfield, Olivia Carr, editor of compilation. II. Title.

PS3554.U2652Z46 2013

813.54dc23

[B]

2013003147

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Works by Andre Dubus

Collections of Short Fiction and Novellas

Separate Flights. Boston: David R. Godine, 1975.

Adultery and Other Choices. Boston: David R. Godine, 1977.

Finding a Girl in America: A Novella and Seven Short Stories. Boston:

David R. Godine, 1980. The Times Are Never So Bad: A Novella and Eight Short Stories. Boston:

David R. Godine, 1983. We Dont Live Here Anymore: The Novellas of Andre Dubus. New York:

Crown Publishers, 1984. The Last Worthless Evening: Four Novellas and Two Stories. Boston: David

R. Godine, 1986. Selected Stories. Boston: David R. Godine, 1988. Dancing After Hours. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. In the Bedroom. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 2002.

Novella

Land Where My Fathers Died. Winston-Salem: Palaemon Press, 1985 (limited edition).

Novels

The Lieutenant. New York: Dial Press, 1967.

Voices from the Moon. Boston: David R. Godine, 1984.

Collections of Essays

Broken Vessels. Boston: David R. Godine, 1992.

Meditations from a Movable Chair. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

Edited Work

Into the Silence. Cambridge: Green Street Press, 1988.

Corinne Peace / 1970

Christopher Caldwell and Adam Cherson / 1982

Dev Hathaway / 1983

Kay Bonetti / 1984

Mimi Read / 1984

Robert Dahlin / 1984

Jesse Kornbluth / 1985

Amy Schildhouse / 1986

Patrick Samway, S.J. / 1986

Stacey A. Chase / 1986

Stacey A. Chase / 1989

Regina Hackett / 1990

Tim McCarthy / 1990

Susan Larson / 1991

Eleanor Wachtel / 1991

Olivia Carr Edenfield / 1993

Lori Ambacher / 1993

John Smolens / 1994

Tom Grimes / 1997

Jennifer Levasseur and Kevin Rabalais / 1998

Greg Garrett / 1999

Andre Dubus was a generous man. He enjoyed people and good conversation. He was warm, gregarious, engaging, and smart. He liked to tell stories and to talk about the art of telling stories. He liked to write and to talk about the art of writing. For these reasons and because peoplestudents, journalists, other short-fiction writersfound him approachable, he gave forty-two interviews (thirty-six print and six audio) over the course of his writing career, half of which are collected here. Andre was easy to be with, perhaps because he showed an interest in the person before him. He was curious about where folks came from, how they saw things, what their angle was. And he was happy to tell you his opinion on his various characters or his politics or his taste in music. He was happy to share, happy to help along the various and many people who came to visit and to write down what he had to say about the American short story and his place in that great genre. Andre Dubus was a generous man.

Generosity of spirit, a willingness to help, is what led him to stop along I-93 in Wilmington, Massachusetts, just after midnight on July 23, 1986, to aid Luz Santiago and her brother, Luis, who were stranded after running over an abandoned motorcycle. While assisting the two across the highway, he and Luis were struck by a car driven by Nancy Anthony, a young woman from Woburn, who he was eventually able to forgive through prayer, as he would later tell Stacey Chase (Interview). In early January of 1997, Dubus spoke frankly of this night in an interview with Chase, reporter for the Lowell Sun. As he recalled the events, he explained that he had no memory of the impact and he expected that he never would. Luis had died instantly while Dubus would go on to suffer great pain and a long rehabilitation as he learned to navigate without the use of his legs. The impact of the car going fifty-eight miles per hour crushed his right leg and necessitated the removal of his left leg above the knee. He would never be able to support his weight and so could not master the prosthetic he hoped for.

When Chase met with him only five months after the accident, however, his inability to walk was not what was worrying him. What had him in a state of despair that led to tears was his struggle to write. He shared with Chase that there was no energy and that he could not get into it. As he explained, They say I am just concentrating on getting well and have no energy left to write. I dont know why I cant write. The fact that he could not was a heavyweight, and when the tears came, he admitted, I get the blues a lot. I am crying because I cant walk and I cant work (Accident). When the two would meet again two years later, Dubus was still suffering, only this pain was from a separate tragedy, related, of course, but new. His wife Peggy Rambach had left and taken their two young daughters, Madeline and Cadence, with her. Dubus was learning to live alone in the wake of learning to live with daily pain and a frustrating disability that robbed him of his physical energy and temporarily stole his ability to write the fiction that he and his readers depended upon. If it werent for prayer, Id be fucked, Dubus would tell Chase. When you grow up with the Passion of Christ as an example, I mean, you know at least theres a membership of suffering. And you get the focus that youre not the only one in the world whos got things rough (Interview) Stacey would write that while Dubus was clearly grieving over this loss of his family, the man she spoke with that day compared to the man she had met two years prior was a very different person, as this time, the thick-chested, salty-tongued Southerner and his hard luck looked to be an even match. Dubus had recently received the $5,000 Jean Stein Award and a $310,000 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, news which, he admitted, left him with insomnia and loose bowels for about three days but feeling incredibly blessed (Interview). These blessings continued to come with the publication of essays and stories as Dubus found his writing voice again.

It is impossible to pick up a recent article regarding Dubuss fiction and not find a lengthy reference to the accident. Scholars and interviewers both remark on the significance that night had on Andres life. However, prior to that January 1986 evening, Dubus had already published eight booksfour collections of short stories, two novels, a collection of novellas, and a novella published separately. While formidable, the experience would come in the latter half of his career. By the time he was injured, Dubus was already recognized as one of the masters of the genre and was generally compared to other contemporary giants in the field such as Raymond Carver. Vivian Gornick linked Dubus to Carver and Richard Ford, tracing each back to Ernest Hemingway: Just behind the leanness and coolness of the prose lies the openbut doomedexpectation that romantic love saves. Settings vary and regional idioms intrude, but almost always it is men and women together that is being written about (1). Gornick concludes that Dubus is the the most complex and least well known, but the most articulate in the matter of men and women together (32). Likewise, other critics and reviewers found connections to Hemingway, in both style and spirit, in the emphasis on ritual and redemption, in the importance of the sacrament and the everlasting peace that comes from grace. Andre, too, would acknowledge his debt to Hemingway in many of the interviews that he gave over the years. He discussed Hemingways objectivity and clarity of voice, his descriptive language. And he remarked as well on the importance of ritual in writing, another similarity to Hemingway.