 |
fiction | non-fiction | news | about the author |
   | |
| |
|
May/June, 2000 Interview by Jesse Kornbluth Kornbluth: Most writers, as you read them, you think, '"Do I believe in this character? Could this happen?" In Matt Klam stories, it's "Yes, I buy this. But is that the character's viewpoint --- or is it Matt's?' Why is that? Klam: One reply would be, because this sounds so real. Another could be, this isn't fiction, it's just the untinted thoughts of this guy And yet another answer: You'd be surprised how little of what occurs in my stories actually happened in real life. I've been a pathological liar since I was five. Kornbluth: Five. Hmm. In one story, the narrator had his first girlfriend when he was five. In another, he was in the second grade. And in Matt Klam's "real" life? Klam: Love's the only thing that's ever mattered to me. I remember this girl named Jodi, I was five, seriously. She had a blue and white dress, she wore a barrett on the top of her head, she had skinny arms and a deep voice and she talked to me. It's been thirty years and I still remember the heat in my face as she spoke. I didn't care what happened to me after that. Why? I don't know.  I've had every stupid fantasy, I've tried blowing the mind of some girl I
love with these incredible earrings or some view off a mountain I had to show
her, with the perfect booze and perfect sunset; in the end they never see
what you see and they're getting cold. But
I've been in love with love since I could think. I've been flirting since I was in diapers. I remember my first girlfriend, I was four, I remember her underwear, I remember the games we played, the sea green color of her bicycle, I remember when she moved away. I remember a girl in kindergarten named Susan, eyeglasses, terrible lisp, fidgeting when she spoke; I remember the dirt on her legs from the playground. Why the hell did my heart get caught on that? I've had romantic heart attacks about cooking dinner for a girl I love, walking with her under dense clouds, riding her on my Norton motorcycle (I don't have a Norton motorcycle, but I like the idea of it), showing her Sequoia National Forest, feeding her cheese on bread in the mountains of Spain. So, yes, it's true. I'm a big believer in women. I have a good one, now. My wife Lara, I think it was the right choice, but I'm also a sucker for the idea of women. I've got narrators in at least three stories looking back on women they loved. It started with this riff in the story "Sam The Cat." I did it for like ten pages in "Not This," and my New Yorker editor, Linda Asher, cut all but two sentences, lucky for me. I have this old guy do it in the last story in the book, "European Wedding" --- he's at the end of his rope, kind of, and does this long goodbye, a salute to his greatest hits, like goodbye to this one's hair, goodbye to "Katrina's velvet nipples." I had a woman character do that in the same story, she's sitting there with this parade in her head. For her, it's not an indulgence. She's grading them, and they were all good, sort of, and all flunked except her fiancee, who of course, flunks better in more ways, and so wins her heart.. Kornbluth: Matt Klam is happily married. And right there is a huge distinction between the writer and the male narrators of his stories. The generalization is a bit overstated, but....Your men need women. They sure have no trouble finding them and bedding them. Love? That's where the problems begin. As one narrator says, he's up for "a very flawed kind of love...my idea, actually, is the first two weeks, when all you care about it love." S'up with these guys? (We'll get to the women next.)  Klam: That first two weeks when no one is real yet, no one has quirks and
unfixable annoying or enraging contradictions -- and the newness of having
fallen in love is this amazing anti-gravity force field that carries you
around the everyday world. I think love is one way to escape, to get yourself
high, feeling buzzed, off the ground. I've written narrators who imply this
desperate need to get high in a way that's safe, not dangerous, not going to
lead them down the wrong road, but what they're really looking for is to be
cut loose from the intersection of responsibilties that go along with living
in a society that makes demands in exchange for your attendance. Also, the
first two weeks is like monkey love. We're all monkeys, we try not to be, but
we bite our nails, sniff people, shove them when we're angry, fart, and then
turn around and laugh, dry hump the air, eat till we puke. It's a pretty
great time, when we act like the animals we still are. There's not enough of
that in our lives. Too much calculation. There's a fraud-based mentaility
that aims to cover that up. You see it in people's faces in traffic in their
cars in the morning, frought, trying to back away from what they're really
thinking. I hate that. All that one of my guys wants to do is make love to
his wife. She's not into it, she hates her body so much she can't stand the
thought of intimacy, she hates him for how blind he's become, but see, he's
just trying to get back to that regressed bliss moment, not even an orgasm
type bliss but the bliss of knowing that if another person doesn't have you
in her arms, or nearby, she'll just go crazy. That's the first two weeks.
Kornbluth: The wife hates her body. Or there's a problem with Dad. Or, incredibly, the girl friend's a virgin (and thus destined to need an abortion all too soon). Marriage? As a bride-to-be describes it, marriage is a doom: "We're on the grown-up train, and we don't get off until the graveyard." Even Beauty is no consolation. Do your men just pick the wrong women? Or is your point, as the line from James Tate has it, that "we keep digging a hole that leads away from the door through which we can't get our karma" --- in other words, men, women, no difference: we just can't win? Klam: Well, if you're digging the wrong way, then I guess that is your karma. But I think it's harder to write life-affirming stuff and make it sound true. But I also think that living a decent life takes an enormous amount of discipline at times, and I'm trying to remind the reader to keep his eyes on the road. In "European Wedding," when Gynnie says that thing about how they're on the grown up train and they don't get off until the graveyard -- here they are in France, they haven't even spoken really, since he arrived, where are they? In some Euro garbage fantasy, and then he asks this innocuous question that she misinterprets, and she fires back the line about the graveyard at him as if to say, "We're here for a big reason. Don't forget." Kornbluth: Come to think of it, your stories are dotted with wake-up calls like that.  Klam: Writing can really have an affect on a person -- you know, you can read
something and go, "Wow, the brother dies? How could the author do that? What
a heartless prick." But it's really important to take a step back and wonder
to yourself as the reader, Why is this affecting me so strongly?
Kornbluth: As Noel Coward put it, "Champagne for my sham friends, real pain for my real friends." Klam: I heard this guy, Tom Beller, talking at a funeral about this young writer who died, Rob Bingham. It was unbelievably sad -- he was talking about how dark Rob's message was in his writing, and Tom was saying how much he loved the darker parts because he believed in the homeopathic remedy idea of good writing. You know how homeopathy works? You give a little bit of the bad stuff to activate the immune system. So in writing, don't avoid the disease. Give a small dose of it so your readers can remember how to fight the bigger dose, real life." Kornbluth: If you don't self-destruct, grad students are going to be mining this interview for centuries. Because, in an un-romantic, .com-obsessed time, you are, as I get it, on a major Romantic quest. The disease may be life, but the cure is Love, isn't it? Tough Love, maybe. But Love nonetheless. Seen that way, your writing is less Smart Young Fiction, all cool and calculated, but old-fashioned Compulsion. And in your stories, you really are looking for the door and putting all your chips down on the proposition that the key somehow involves a woman. Klam: Women are the metaphor. I think I'm pretty obsessive about that. But I do think the corny stuff is all we've got, and I think that we're bound in flesh, and are not going to get out any time soon; God in nature made women and men puzzle pieces that fit together. (You know, people walk the world in pairs. Hot dogs go in buns. Hot dog, hot dog, no good. Bun, bun, no good.) I think that good love is a huge resource for helping us get through, satisfy the monkey inside, bring on the next generation. There are good and bad choices in love, though; the universe rewards us for making decent decisions, and you can tell the difference between a good relationship and a bad one because the good one has a little bit of its own intelligence, it leads you, and you follow. The bad one puts you in charge, and oh boy, that's no place to be. Invisible guidance is required for all successful living. But I also think that deep breathing is a key to opening the door. Opening the door is key to opening the door. I think flowering plum trees in February in Washington are pretty key to a good life. Moderation, quality footwear, dark green leafy vegetables, stiff mattress, lots of water, they're important too.  Kornbluth: As long as we're making lists, let's do that thing that fiction
writers never get to do directly: tell people how you think they might live
to get better results in the love department. First off: Cosmetic surgery.
Pro or con?
Klam: I'd like to have my penis reattached to the end of my nose. Seriously, I think it's a crapshoot. Kornbluth: Do blondes have more fun? Klam: Yes, but they're perceived as stupider, and actually are stupider, because they're so busy having fun. Kornbluth: What's the best place to meet: bookstore, bar, chat room? Klam: If you're married or seriously dating, the best place to look first is the end of your arm. If they're not there, I have a lot of luck in the office environment. In the old days, it was school. Flirting is key. Kornbluth: What works best when flirting: sincerity, a line you gleaned from a how-to book, a non-sequitur, or...? Klam: Mind reading, flattery, all-out lust, gifts, servility, offhanded cold slaps in the face. Variety is key to appetite Kornbluth: The most seductive CD? Klam: There's this song by PJ Harvey, she sounds like she's howling in a tornado, being eaten by wolves. I like that song. Bjork's album, "Homogenic," Bruce Springsteen, "The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle," Jane Siberry, "When I was A Boy," Everything but the Girl, an acoustic album. Kornbluth: If you could give a woman only one book.... Klam: Appointment in Samarra, by John O'Hara. The hidden meaning there is, "I'm a dope, but I love you, and I tried and failed and died trying." Kornbluth: Last question: Does your wife know what you do for a living? And if so, does she read you with pleasure? Klam: The first thing she knew about me was a story I'd written, a year before we met. Later, we were housemates for two years before we even started dating, and she once finished a story I wrote, it's maybe the best one, it won an O. Henry award, and when she was finished she lay her head down on the kitchen table and went, "Uhhggh." I wouldn't call it pleasure. But she gets off on it, sort of. |
|