Robert Olen Butler
Robert Olen Butler and I sat at a greasy formica table in Miller's Cafe—a bustling soul food restaurant in north Lake Charles, Louisiana, Butler's home for the past nine years—and, over a steaming plate of smothered pork chops and wilted mustard greens, he lamented his seeming inability to break through to any larger audience. None of his previous books—six of them, all novels—had sold particularly well, and it looked as if his first collection of short stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (Henry Holt, 1992)—which at that time had only recently been published—had locked into that by-now familiar trajectory.
"If this doesn't do it," he says, referring to the possibility of Good Scent creating some kind of stir, "I really don't know what will. But I learned long ago that to avoid madness I just have to do my best work every day—and maybe somebody notices." He thinks about this for a moment and then, smiling and gesticulating with a fork, he adds, "And maybe they don't."
Of course, all of that must seem like a very long time ago now, because in the spring of 1993 A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain earned Butler a Pulitzer Prize, an experience he has likened to "taking a warm bath in your own life."
Since then, he has published They Whisper (Henry Holt, 1994), the first book in a projected trilogy examining human intimacy, and Holt has re-issued as OWL paperbacks those six early novels, all of which were long out of print— The Alleys of Eden (Horizon, 1981), Sun Dogs (Horizon, 1982), Countrymen of Bones (Horizon, 1983), On Distant Ground (Knopf, 1985), Wabash (Knopf, 1987), and The Deuce (Simon & Schuster, 1989).
Butler also recently completed the screenplay for A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which was optioned earlier by Oliver Stone's Ixtland Productions, and which Wayne Wang ( Chan Is Missing [1982], The Joy Luck Club [1993] ) is scheduled to direct.
We agreed to meet again, this time at Butler's home. He teaches
creative writing at McNeese State University in Lake
Charles, where he lives with his wife, novelist Elizabeth
Dewberry, in a small house in the Charpentier District, a
historic neighborhood in this Gulf Coast town, where—beneath
a seamless canopy of live oaks—lovely Victorian mansions sit
cheek to jowl with sagging half-timbers and shotgun shacks.
But Butler's street represents neither extreme. Its modest
frame homes rest on raised two-foot piers because the
torrential Louisiana rains—frequent through the spring and
summer months, especially—tend to pool into navigable
sloughs.
Butler met me at the front door with a parrot on
his shoulder, and they both said hello—the parrot,
repeatedly. Inside, there were several more parrots perched
around the front room; one or two broke into rudimentary
English. The others simply bristled, rattling their cages. A
couple of rabbits, huddled together on a throw rug, eyed me
suspiciously, and Butler explains that he'd rescued them
from a roadside stand advertising rabbits "for pets or
meat," and that they'd thus come by their wariness honestly.
Then he showed me to his study, where we sat down and talked
about Vietnam, his years in obscurity, the Pulitzer Prize,
and his latest book, They
Whisper .
Butler grew up in Granite City, Illinois, a steel mill
town outside St. Louis. His father taught in, and at one
time chaired, the St. Louis University theater department,
so it was only natural that Butler's first interest was in
the stage. When he enrolled at Northwestern University in
1963, he majored first in theater, and then in oral
interpretation. He went on to earn an M.A. in Playwriting at
the University of Iowa in 1969.
Fresh out of graduate school, Butler pulled a tour
of duty in Vietnam; following a year in a military language
school, he served in army counter-intelligence as a
Vietnamese linguist. Eventually he served as an
administrative assistant to the U.S. Foreign Service officer
who advised the mayor of Saigon. But by night Butler took to
the streets of the city, roaming the steamy, fragrant back
alleys and spending many, many hours crouching in doorways
with the Vietnamese, talking and listening. He says the
Vietnamese he met were "the most warm and open and
generous-spirited people" he'd ever known.
Following a three year hitch, during which he had
begun to make the transition from drama to fiction, Butler
was discharged from the army in 1972. He returned to the
States and was married—disastrously, as it would turn
out—and he and his wife had a son, Joshua, with whom Butler
maintains a very close relationship. At the time, Butler was
working in Manhattan as editor-in-chief of a business
weekly, but he and his wife and their infant son were living
in Sea Cliff, Long Island, so he commuted everyday by way of
the Long Island Railroad. It was also at this time that
Butler grew serious about writing fiction.
"I was in the midst of a dreadful marriage, and at
home I spent every waking hour trying to buffer and protect
my son in this marriage. And so the only time I had to write
was on the Long Island Railroad, on my lap, on legal pads,
by hand, as I commuted back and forth. And this I did.
"Of course, initially it was a very difficult place
to write. There were always people talking or flapping
newspapers, the air-conditioner never worked in the summer
and the heating never worked in the winter, there were
people standing over you in the aisles—it was terrible. But
eventually, because all I ever did on the train was write,
eventually I was able to write 400 words going in and 400
coming home.
"I recognize that phenomenon psychologists call
functional fixedness, which is that if you have a certain
place or certain objects you associate with only one certain
task, eventually, when you go back to that place or engage
those objects, your concentration on that task is greatly
enhanced, facilitated. And I drew on that."
Butler eventually completed five novels on the
train, but even with the help of two different agents he was
unsuccessful in finding a publisher. Those first five novels
were never published. Butler says the agents, who he had
contacted through listings, "were not really fiction agents,
were not influential." And an agent, he says, must have the
confidence of prospective editors, because "editors
inevitably get into a kind of reading mode, no matter how
good their intentions. In order to evaluate a manuscript,
they inevitably try to find a category for it. 'OK, this is
coming out of Updike, or coming out of Bellow, or coming out
of Coover,' or whoever. And that impulse on the part of
editors to categorize has got to be overcome by the young
writer. The irony here is that the better writer you are,
the harder it is to get published, because by definition you
have your own unique voice, so you're not going to be able
to be categorized. "The agent has got to be able to get the
editor out of that mode, to whisper in the editor's ear,
'This is special. Slow down.' I didn't have that."
So with his next book,
The Alleys of Eden—which would eventually become his
first published work—Butler was ready to try a different
approach. By now, Butler and his agent had parted ways.
"After working in utter isolation and getting a lot
of rejections over the transom, I finally got smart enough
to think, well, you've probably got to know somebody—which
is true, I'm afraid." So, in 1979, and with the intention of
getting to "know somebody," Butler signed up for a creative
writing course being taught at the New School by Anatole
Broyard, who was then a daily book critic and occasional
essayist at the New York
Times.
Broyard was impressed with
Alleys , but felt
as if the book weren't finished. He suggested that Butler
follow his characters, an American deserter and his
Vietnamese lover, back to the States—Butler had ended the
book with the fall of Saigon, his lovers being pulled aboard
an evacuating helicopter at the last minute. So Butler got
back to work, finished the book "in a white heat," and
showed it to Broyard again. This time Broyard began to help
Butler shop around for a publisher.
Butler said he went through the usual cycle of
submissions and rejections again—this time with Broyard
doing some of the advance work an agent might otherwise have
been expected to do—before "Methuen took the book on. It
went into galleys, and about two months before the
publication date—in fact it was Halloween day, trick or
treat—they called me and said that they were sorry, but that
they were getting out of the trade book publishing business.
'So here's your book back.'"
Finally Broyard steered Butler—who now had the
imprimatur of Methuen's galleys—to Ben Raeburn at Horizon
Press, who eventually published
The Alleys of Eden
in the fall of 1981. And after that Butler and Broyard, who
died only shortly before his former student won the Pulitzer
Prize, stayed in close touch.
Butler says, "In this obscurity I had been in until
the Pulitzer, Anatole, and his belief in me, was incredibly
important. He was very kind and generous with his praise and
his counsel. He helped me first with the people at Metheun
and then later with Ben Raeburn at Horizon. His death was a
very sad thing for me, and I miss him greatly."
Following The Alleys of
Eden , Horizon also published Butler's next two
novels, Sun Dogs
and Countrymen of Bones
. Understandably, Ben Raeburn and Horizon had
inspired in Butler a certain amount of loyalty, but after
three books he felt as if it were time to move on—ideally,
to an agent and a larger publishing house.
Toward that end, Butler says, "I took my three
books and half of another book to Candida Donadio, and four
days later I was her client. Then she took my three books
and my half-finished manuscript—which would eventually
become On Distant Ground—over
to Knopf, and four days after that I was a Knopf author."
Knopf published
On Distant Ground in 1985 and
Wabash in 1987, but
during his tenure there Butler grew dissatisfied with how
Knopf was handling his work. He knew he wanted a fresh
start, so he signed with a new agency, ICM, where he was
assigned to literary agent Bob Tabian. At about this same
time, Butler (who was by now at work on
The Deuce )
received a friendly note from an editor at Simon & Schuster,
Allen Peacock, saying he had read
Wabash and admired
it. Butler and Peacock had met casually some time before. So
Butler asked Tabian to send the new work over to Peacock,
who liked what he saw and signed Butler to a three book
contract.
Shortly after Simon and Schuster published
The Deuce ,
however, Peacock left Simon & Schuster for Henry Holt, and
Butler soon followed him there. Butler had at least found
his editor. He says that Peacock "is a remarkable reader. He
is able to take on, with great sensitivity, others' vision
of the world, so that the response he offers is from inside
the work. And that's what makes him so good."
Holt bought the remainder of what was by now
Butler's two book contract from Simon & Schuster, the first
of which would be A Good
Scent From a Strange Mountain.
Ironically, A Good
Scent from a Strange Mountain was the one book Robert
Olen Butler never thought he'd write. With six novels to his
credit—eleven, actually, counting the five unpublished
novels he wrote prior to
Alleys of Eden —and a handful of published short
stories (most of which he still insists are failures),
Butler was convinced he was not a short story writer, and he
consequently abandoned the form for over a decade. But that
was before Alan Cheuse—who was producing a series for
National Public Radio called
The Sound of Writing
, and who had recently visited McNeese State
University, where he met Butler—telephoned to ask Butler if
he would like to contribute a story for the series.
Feeling himself in sore need of exposure to the
kind of audience NPR could provide, and without taking a
minute to think it through, Butler agreed. "I hung up, and
then I thought, holy shit—what have I done! Because I still
didn't think I could write a decent short story. So I went
back to my early published stories and looked at them, in
hopes of finding something I could deal with. And the
stories were even worse than I remembered."
At the time he was working on his novel
The Deuce, a kind
of watershed experience for Butler.
The Deuce was a
turning point because it marked Butler's initial use of the
first person voice (which he used again in all of
Good Scent's 15
stories, and which was cited in nearly every review as the
locus of that book's startling originality). It was also
Butler's first attempt at rendering a Vietnamese point of
view; and portions of The
Deuce served as source material for some of the
stories that would later make it into
Good Scent. But
first Butler had Alan Cheuse and
The Sound of Writing
.
"When I discovered I couldn't go back to my old
stories, I turned to some material that was kicking around
in The Deuce,"
Butler says, "material that I knew wouldn't survive a final
draft, one piece of which was a bit of Vietnamese folkway
having to do with boys who love to catch, train, and fight
crickets. So that Sunday afternoon I sat down and wrote the
short story 'Crickets.' Within 24 hours of writing that
story, I had two dozen more story ideas. All these
Vietnamese characters' voices began to present themselves to
me. In the next year—and with the support of my editor,
Allen—I wrote one story after another."
Still, how is a failed short story writer
resurrected almost overnight and reborn as an award-winning
short story writer? Butler says that for him the key was in
the transition from third person narrative to first—which
Peacock encouraged—and the way in which a first person voice
circles around, or winds its way toward, a moment of
clarity.
"Suddenly a lot of things that were still important
to me, still really a part of me, part of my early training,
suddenly became functional in my writing—my training as an
actor, my ability to assume a character. And it was the
first person voice that gave me a handle on short stories.
They became for me dramatic monologues, little soliloquies,
and I could get into that narrow range by being in their
voices and focusing on the moment about which their lives
pivot. And I think that was the difference."
Although Butler is generally reluctant to discuss
influences, he does mention an unusual source of inspiration
for Good Scent: a
book by Lawrence Ritter called
The Glory of Their Times
(Collier, 1971), an oral history of professional baseball in
the early part of the century, narrated by the men who
played it then: Rube Marquard, Sam Crawford, Fred Snodgrass.
Butler says that by the time these men spoke with Ritter
they "were exiles. They had once lived in a country of youth
and of baseball, and when they were 35 or 40 years old, they
were exiled from that country, and they then lived for many
years in another country, exiles from their youth.
"When I read that book, I was so touched and moved
by all these men speaking about what I read as exile—well,
that resonated deeply into the voices of the Vietnamese
characters that had been taking shape in me for many years."
From his home in Lake Charles, Butler has continued to
visit with Vietnamese expatriates in communities scattered
along the Gulf coast, from New Orleans to Port Arthur, Texas
(where he says you can get the best Vietnamese food this
side of Saigon). And while it would be reductive to say that
Butler has taken Vietnam as the subject of his fiction, it
is (with the exceptions of
Wabash and
Countrymen of Bones) ever-present, if not as
foreground, then as backdrop, like the barest sliver of a
dark cloud on the far horizon, the last reminder of a storm
that has passed.
I asked Butler if he chafed at the perception that
he's a "Vietnam novelist," and if he thought winning the
Pulitzer Prize—given the subject matter of
Good Scent —would
alleviate or aggravate that perception, such as it exists.
"Yes, that bothers me. It does. To call me a
'Vietnam novelist' is like calling Monet a lily pad painter.
Vietnam is a metaphor, a location, a source of some
concrete, metaphorically rich sensual details. But it is not
the 'subject.' It is not what I am, it is not my vision. My
vision has to do with the human condition.
"As to the Pulitzer, well, that's a good question.
I don't know. But I think if
Good Scent were
another combat novel, it would be difficult for me to be
seen as anything but a Vietnam writer. However, given the
conception of Good Scent—that
I got out of myself and into the Vietnamese—that may help.
And let's not forget that the Pulitzer charter says that
preference will be given to books about American life,
American culture. So the Pulitzer selection committee saw
the book as being about America, which it is."
Butler's characters are frequently obsessed with—or
haunted by—some event or image that they then endlessly
circle and sift and re-imagine, hoping to arrive at some
deeper understanding of a moment that has become so central
to their existence. But what they must face is the fact that
there are no rational interpretations of experience, no neat
exegeses, and that abstraction and analysis are worse than
useless, because they only add another layer of opacity
between the subject and the object of his or her
contemplation. It is only by focusing attention on the
sensual properties of a moment that one can reasonably
expect to tease any deeper resonance from it, or begin to
detect its true design.
"Certainly the most powerful mechanism for control
that we have in our daily lives," Butler says, "is our
rational faculty, our minds. And our minds try to give
pattern and meaning and order to the emotional, sensual
self. We have identified ourselves with our minds, and we
have oftentimes drawn our sense of personal worth from our
minds and our ability to analyze. But to be good writers, we
have to tell our minds to fuck off."
Ira Holloway, the narrator of
They Whisper
—"whose narrative compulsion," as Butler puts it, "is to
understand the nature of physical intimacy between men and
women"—explains at the outset of the novel how he perceives
his own continuing existence in the world, and why he
refuses to abstract that experience:
"I remain forever in this place inside me where a smell of leather or a glimpse of a lovely elbow or shoulder or earlobe or some movement of air or cast of light thrills me in ways that I cannot put into the safe terms of the mind. I can't analyze these things in ways that separate them from the ravishment of my senses, because that is how I live, and all the rest—the labels for my feelings, the ways of understanding through my head—all these come later and are grave distortions. Lies, really . . . But more important than anything for me now is to tell the truth about my life in this body of mine, and I have to tell it in the ways that it really happens, through my senses." (They Whisper)
"Our encounter with the world," Butler says, "is at its heart inescapably sensual, and all the things we then do to cope with, control, or deny that encounter—well, those things are secondary, and for the fiction writer are absolutely inferior to that sensual connection. When we analyze and rationalize and abstract our experiences, we become disconnected from our deepest sensual, emotional selves.
"So it's the artist's prime task to recreate that direct, sensual encounter. To put it on the page so that art can do its ultimate, most important work, which is to suggest that we are not alone on the planet Earth."
Butler is presently juggling several projects at once.
Besides having just completed the screenplay for
A Good Scent from a
Strange Mountain —which will be filmed as a series of
interlinking vignettes—Butler is also working on a novel,
the second in his projected trilogy, as well as two books of
short stories.
He describes the novel as, "essentially,
Oedipus Rex in
Saigon. It's about an American soldier who goes to Vietnam
in 1966, returns to America, and then, in January of 1994 he
returns to Vietnam. There he meets, and falls deeply in love
with, a Vietnamese woman in her late 20s, and they
passionately consummate that love. Then they begin to seek
the bureaucratic ways in which they can marry and return to
America, and in this process they discover that she is his
daughter."
One of the books of short stories will be a
"companion volume to Good
Scent," Butler says, "a book of first person voices
of Vietnamese who were shaped, altered, twisted, or uplifted
by American culture, but who, instead of coming to America,
remained in Vietnam."
The other book of short stories has the working
title Tabloid Dreams
, and all of its stories will be based on, and take
their titles from, actual tabloid headlines. The first
story, "Boy Born with Tattoo of Elvis," appeared in
Conjunctions (no.
22) and was selected for inclusion in
Best American Short
Stories 1994 (Houghton Mifflin, 1994).
Finally, I asked Butler how his life had changed
since he'd won a Pulitzer.
"Well, as I said, I've just finished the screenplay
for A Good Scent from a
Strange Mountain , and it looks more and more as if
this will actually be a movie. The people at Ixtland are
very keen on it, and it is apparently on the fast track, so
things look very good there. I think all of that is
happening with the impetus that it is because of the
Pulitzer.
"And I've just seen off to the airport a French
journalist who flew in from Paris—his newspaper,
Liberacion, sent
him over here specifically to interview me. And in the wake
of a rave review in Le
Monde, Good Scent
has gone back for a second French printing just a
couple of weeks after publication.
"But the thing that the Pulitzer brought me—what it
brings is a sense of the public awareness of you. It's
remarkable in a number of ways. It brings your readership to
you. And they come up after a reading or a book signing, and
it's clear that they've been reading you and that they're
responding to your work. And that's a wonderful thing. I
cannot deny it."
