You have been working on your story in this week’s issue, “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden,” for seven or eight years. Why so long? The story is subdivided into chapters—did you write those separately, one at a time?
For me, seven years is fast. Most of my pieces have taken ten to twelve years from the time of the initial impulse to the day I abandon them, and I’ve gone as long as twenty-five years. This one started as an assignment I gave some students in the autumn of ’06: write a two-page story. I wrote the part called “Silences.” Several other such pieces came along, and eventually I realized they all had the same narrator.
The story includes a scene in which a wealthy man destroys a valuable Marsden Hartley painting, just because he can—to prove his ownership. Have you ever seen someone do that?
No, but I seem to remember the poet Mark Strand describing a similar experience back in the nineteen-eighties or nineties. I believe that particular painting survived the night. Mark may deny telling me this; he might even claim he’s never met me.
The story seems to me a vision of late middle age: perfused with tensions and regrets, fatigue and resignation, but also the occasional overwhelming joy, and openness. Do you think of Whit as a kind of average everyman?
Wow, no—I hope the average everyman’s having more fun.
You don’t actually tell us his name until the penultimate page of the story. Was that a calculated delay?
Nothing’s calculated like—calculated. It’s accumulated. Then I consider the material, and turn it every possible way over a period of years, and then, one day, it’s over. T. S. Eliot spoke of making “quasi-musical decisions.” That’s how I’d put it, too. Do you know the Billy Strayhorn composition “Lush Life”? The way this story unstrings itself reminds me of “Lush Life.”
Can you tell us anything about the title of the story, “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden”? Is the sea maiden perhaps a synecdoche for all those moments of mystery in the story, or in life?
I ran across the phrase in a book of fairy tales, and it stayed with me. I think about halfway along in the evolution of this piece, I felt the mermaid working her way in, and I recalled this scene I’d tinkered with years before—the lounge singer—and now I realize the initial impulse came from that tinkering, which actually happened in the mid-seventies. So I recalculate—this piece developed over a period of thirty-eight years. I should charge you extra.
While working on this story, you’ve also written a new novel. Could you tell us anything about it?
It’s called “The Laughing Monsters,” and it’s due out from Farrar, Straus & Giroux next fall, if somebody would only finish writing it. It’s set in Sierra Leone, Congo, and Uganda. I believe it falls into the category of “literary thriller.”