One day in the Spring of 1970 a friend named David Keyser handed me the typescript of an interview that another undergraduate had conducted with the writer William H. Gass. I read the interview and was frankly awed that another 19-year-old could be so conversant, glib and in his depth with Gass and the entire terrain of contemporary American fiction.
During the same week I met that otherundergraduate, Ned Stuckey-French. He had come to Harvard from Indiana and occasionally seemed to be picking bits of hay out of his hair, but he was every bit the man of literature that his interview had revealed. I continued to be amazed by his grasp of an entire world populated by Gass, Coover, Pynchon and Donald Barthelme. Here I had been reading every word by Mailer, Roth, Malamud and Updike, layered on a nice bed of Joyce, Lawrence and Hemingway, and seasoning it all with the work of international writers like Robbe-Grillet, Duras and Nabokov, only to find that there was another, edgier level of American literature about which I knew nothing! Alas!
In spite of that, Ned and I became good friends, and I learned that he was a great drinker, running companion, and conversationalist on a wide range of matters from politics to music to popular culture to the challenges of being men and of appreciating women. We hung out at the Advocate, the Forest Café, the South House pinball machine and other haunts together.
Each of us had our demons, and we saw each other only occasionally between 1974 and 2007. We've connected again now through this blog, and this is one of several blessings that blogging had brought my way.
Things have come full circle, as they so often do. One of my favorite fiction writers is Richard Ford, and wouldn't you know, Ned has published a thoughtful andaccessible interview with Richard in a book entitledConversations With Richard Ford. I've read only the few pages excerpted at Google Books, but what comes through right away is Ned's capacity to move through the shared experience of both participants to get at elemental things in the way a writer approaches and does his work. Having read Ned's interviews with Gass and Hawkes so many years ago, I am not surprise to find this interview so valuable.
For writers and serious readers, this is the kind of interview that illuminates the process of creating good work. It has nothing to do with celebrity, and everything to do with the troublesome but wonderful interplay between living and writing. I'm ordering the book from Amazon.
(Can't help but add the comment that the picture of Ned up above seems, well, more than a few weeks old, unless he has run into Ponce de Leon down there in Florida where he lives now).
During the same week I met that otherundergraduate, Ned Stuckey-French. He had come to Harvard from Indiana and occasionally seemed to be picking bits of hay out of his hair, but he was every bit the man of literature that his interview had revealed. I continued to be amazed by his grasp of an entire world populated by Gass, Coover, Pynchon and Donald Barthelme. Here I had been reading every word by Mailer, Roth, Malamud and Updike, layered on a nice bed of Joyce, Lawrence and Hemingway, and seasoning it all with the work of international writers like Robbe-Grillet, Duras and Nabokov, only to find that there was another, edgier level of American literature about which I knew nothing! Alas! In spite of that, Ned and I became good friends, and I learned that he was a great drinker, running companion, and conversationalist on a wide range of matters from politics to music to popular culture to the challenges of being men and of appreciating women. We hung out at the Advocate, the Forest Café, the South House pinball machine and other haunts together.
Each of us had our demons, and we saw each other only occasionally between 1974 and 2007. We've connected again now through this blog, and this is one of several blessings that blogging had brought my way.
Things have come full circle, as they so often do. One of my favorite fiction writers is Richard Ford, and wouldn't you know, Ned has published a thoughtful andaccessible interview with Richard in a book entitledConversations With Richard Ford. I've read only the few pages excerpted at Google Books, but what comes through right away is Ned's capacity to move through the shared experience of both participants to get at elemental things in the way a writer approaches and does his work. Having read Ned's interviews with Gass and Hawkes so many years ago, I am not surprise to find this interview so valuable.For writers and serious readers, this is the kind of interview that illuminates the process of creating good work. It has nothing to do with celebrity, and everything to do with the troublesome but wonderful interplay between living and writing. I'm ordering the book from Amazon.
(Can't help but add the comment that the picture of Ned up above seems, well, more than a few weeks old, unless he has run into Ponce de Leon down there in Florida where he lives now).
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