The book of 191 pages had been rejected several times before the Bellevue Literary Press, part of New York University’s School of Medicine (specializing in books based on science and arts), published it. [break]
Tinkers made a quiet but steady mark in the American independent bookstore circuit and received rave reviews from most reviewers even though some big reviewers such as the New York Times missed it.
Set in a small town in New England, Tinkers is about a father and son who learn new ways to perceive the world and mortality. The Pulitzer Committee called it “a powerful celebration of life.” Paul Harding, himself a New Englander, based the protagonist, George Washington Crosby, on his grandfather who was also a clock mender and with whom Harding apprenticed.
Before he decided to take up writing, Harding was a drummer for Cold Water Flat. He and his friends toured the United States and Europe until the band members split. Harding, who received his BA in English from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, went on to get his MFA degree from University of Iowa where he later taught fiction.
Tinkers is small book but it can’t and shouldn’t be read in one sitting. It may not have many pages but each page is deep, each sentence and paragraph crafted to perfection. Many of its readers will tell you that it is perhaps the most beautifully written book they’ve come across.
In an interview with Abha Eli Phoboo, Harding talks about being a writer, winning the Pulitzer, and future projects. Excerpts:
Did you miss the energy of performing live as opposed to the solitary life of a writer?
I do miss performing music live. I love playing with other musicians. But it’s not so much opposed to writing. Writing itself is, of course, solitary, but once the book is published, there are book tours, which consist of public performances, which I like for reasons similar to those I had as a musician. I like the social, communal aspects of people coming together to listen to and discuss art.
How do you make time for writing on an everyday basis? Do you find yourself struggling with procrastination and discipline?
I don’t write everyday. I go through long periods of apparent dormancy when I sort of lie on the couch, in a pile of books, reading, dozing, and letting my imagination simmer on low heat. Then, at some point, the, er, stew is ready and I feast on writing for a month or so; a thousand words a day for a month, something
like that.
In terms of discipline, I don’t really consciously have to discipline myself much anymore. I know the cycle I run on and just let it happen. I have, though, succeeded in being able to trick myself into never thinking that I’m Writing, with a capital “W,” because that makes me freeze up. I just tell myself I’m fiddling around with the sentence, sometimes the single word – the right noun, the right verb – at hand.
When Tinkers was rejected several times by publishers, did it ever dishearten you? Did you put it away, or keep revising it?
The number of rejections has been a bit exaggerated over time. Sure, it was disheartening. I had to reconcile myself to possibly, maybe, even probably, being a writer who didn’t publish. It was discouraging, then, in a worldly sort of way, but freeing in other ways. You certainly write just what you want when you’re not concerned with being published.
I constantly revised the manuscript. Constantly. I still do, while I’m giving readings, even. To me, there’s a kind of ideal, perfect version of the novel that exists formally, somewhere out there, and I could spend the rest of my life trying to get it down just right. It’s probably good that I don’t have time or opportunity to do that.
What differences do you find in your process of writing a short story versus a novel?
I can’t really write short stories. The couple I’ve published looks like excerpts from novels.
In Tinkers, character and language are so essential to the story that the plot takes a back seat. Do you think plot might have been needed if the story exceeded its current page length?
Possibly. I think a lot about page depth when I write. I realize that it makes for a density a lot of people aren’t used to, and are surprised and sometimes irritated at if they expect some by-the-numbers narrative. But I’m interested in character, not plot. Plot emerges out of character as far as I’m concerned. If you like that, you like it, and you’ll be all the gladder for a longer treatment of it, so long as the quality remains high. Think of late Henry James. Think of Thomas Mann.
In 191 pages, Tinkers forces the reader to slow down and give in willingly to the magic of the language. Did you have an audience in mind while you were writing or the kind of effect you wanted the words to have?
I didn’t have much of an audience in mind, except maybe some vague, incredibly sophisticated, world-class reader who knows what the high watermarks of the art are, what the art can achieve, and has no patience for work that doesn’t aspire to that level of accomplishment. That’s not to say such a level is achievable, but it’s the ideal for which to shoot, the real stakes that are on the table, every time I sit down to write.
The effects I want the words to have are some combination of recognition and direct experience. I want people to recognize what’s in the book. My favorite experiences as a reader are those moments when you read passages and simultaneously recognize that they are true, that you’ve always known they are true, and that you’ve never seen anyone put what’s in them into words before. I also want the language to be so precise and exact that it feels as if you’re not reading language, that there’s no medium between you and the direct experience of the content. Those are ideals as well.
Do you read aloud while writing? Where do you write? What conditions, if any, are essential?
I read aloud while revising. I guess I probably mutter out loud to myself when I’m writing, too, though.
I can write pretty much anywhere. I had to write Tinkers while working fulltime and a half and raising two little kids, so I had to be able to write wherever, whenever, and however.
How important has living in New England and traveling away from it been to your writing?
New England is just the center of the universe for me. I’m unabashedly parochial. I love everything about the landscape, the culture, etc. I think that being so loyal to the place actually makes it easier to travel. None of my travels is motivated by the impulse to flee, for example, or to get anything as foolish as “culture” or sophistication or whatever. I know any number of incredibly cosmopolitan dolts. As Emerson writes somewhere, those not wise at home are unlikely to be so abroad. So, I can just enjoy traveling without any ulterior motives. I don’t know how it affects the writing. The writing itself, so far, makes use of New England’s light and landscape and manners as its milieu.
What was your first reaction when you heard that you’d won the Pulitzer? How has it affected you as a writer? As an individual?
My first and continued reaction was and remains a kind of disbelief. The odds are ridiculous in even what could be called the most likely cases and exponentially more so in a case such as my own. To me, it’s just an even more serious fiat to be humble in the face of the art and redouble my efforts to be equal to it. Aspects of the writing world make it like a rowdy, spectator sport, not unlike music; so, whereas before, the book’s readership was more or less self-selected, now it’s pronounced upon by a vastly wider and varied audience, and any number of whom are motivated simply because they adore hearing themselves make pronouncements, right or wrong, well considered or not, on “art.” So, like everyone else, I take my lumps. It’s all sort of fun and keeps the adrenaline up.
What do you think of MFA in Creative Writing programs? How has attending one helped you?
MFA programs have the same virtues and liabilities as any other fine arts programs. They are as vulnerable to bad teaching and bad students as any other subject, which is to say, very. Yet, no one ever questions going to school to learn other arts, like acting, dancing, painting. So why the hullabaloo over writing programs? My opinion is that the attitude is somehow connected to a residual and naïve, romantic idea of writing as something “pure” that will be ruined by book learning. You’re supposed to knock back a bottle of whiskey, jump on your motorcycle and burn, baby. You can’t teach someone to have a vision or an imagination, but you surely can teach them how to handle scene and dialogue and how to compose rock-solid sentences and find the perfect verb or noun. Writing is technically incredibly difficult, and the process of the interrogation of a work – be it a poem, story, or novel – is a teachable, learnable thing.
Since Tinkers is based on your family history, have you had to explain things to your family?
No. I don’t write anything, shall we say, evaluative, about any living family members.
How important is the sentence to you? What do you think of quotation marks and when did you consciously decide to do away with them?
The sentence is of supreme importance. It’s the basic unit of meaning in prose. I have a troubled relationship with quotation marks. I dislike them for no reason beyond aesthetics. So, it’s not reasonable but it’s as deeply rooted as it can get. In Tinkers, their absence is justified because the book is so interior and seamless, and they’d have ruptured the seal upon its world. I’m still not using them, but the current novel is full of dialog and not as dependent upon such a hermetic container. Still, I think that there’s a legitimate discipline placed on composing sentences without quotation marks – the rhythm and tone and cadence and syntax must be perfectly calibrated so that the demarcation between narrative and dialog indicated by quotes is infused into the prose itself. So, I’ll split the difference; yes, I’m a bit eccentric about it, but there are also plenty of lazy readers who want their steak cut up for them before they eat it, too.
How do you think your study of theology affected your writing Tinkers?
Deeply. I grew up atheist, but with no personal or familial ill will toward religion, and only a kind of circumstantial association with more, shall we say, fundamentalist or doctrinaire strains of atheism. And of course, the strains of religious fundamentalism held up for mockery are rightly mocked. But they are also not representative, and are used in a way that obscures an almost mind-boggling amount of our and most of the world’s intellectual life, for most of human history. I see the current atheism as arising out of precisely the same, ugly, all too human substratum out of which the kind of religion it purports to banish does, namely, authoritarianism. Religion, so called, is not the problem, just as science, so called, is not the solution. It’s what people do with them is the problem, or the solution.
I prefer to be oppressed by neither religious authority nor materialist authority. I prefer to think for myself. It might be that, now, so-called science has become the opiate of the masses. Anyway, for example, I’ve found more to marvel at, ponder, wrestle with, lose sleep over, and just be challenged at the deepest intellectual, aesthetic, and, yes, spiritual levels (if those things can be separated) in Karl Barth than in nearly any other writer’s work. And, I find myself a bit irritated that the current, trendy, middlebrow intellectual culture has done such a good job of obscuring this type of thought from general and thoughtful consideration. Religion is bad for you, etc. People lose sight of the fact, too, that religion and atheism share one main thing in common; they are both utterly dependent on faith.
The kind of counter factualism upon which a lot of current atheism is justified is anachronistic, deterministic, Newtonian physics. It is, I’d say, in fact, much to its partisans’ horror, strictly just another metaphysics dressed up in the latest plumage. For my money, the best thinking in both realms tends to be focused on immanence, on the importance and consequences, and the real elusive value of the experience of right here, right now, and not on the bankrupt pleasures of looking forward to heaven or evolving into super computers.
Do you have any current on future writing projects planned?
I’m working on a second novel, titled Enon, which, if all goes according to my good intentions, will be published in 2012 by Random House.
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