Interview with Thomas Fuller: Part 2: "unable to imagine a more unpopular writer than me"

Our conversation with Thomas Fuller continues, covering a wide range of topics--artistic influences, femininity, sports, current events--including his forthcoming novel, The Classical World.

Q: You've been coy in the past regarding those writers who may have affected your own writing.

A: I wouldn't call it coy, I'd call it not being asked the question. My mother, a journalist; Mr. Cohn, my English teacher, grade 11, who handed me back a paper I'd written on J.D.Salinger saying, "did you really write this?"; the late Jean Burden, poet, whose workshop I attended in the early 1970's and who published several early poems of mine. All through grade school and high school I was a lousy student, kind of a jock/beatnik/hipppie, and writing was the only place I encountered any sort of intellectual encouragement or recognition. I'll never forget the look on teacher Cohn's face, handing back my Salinger report with an A+ at the top of it, looking at me as if I'd plagarized the thing.

Q: So early encouragement led to authorial ambition?

A: It led to high school graduation, barely, and then to poetry when my mother gave me The Oxford Guide to English Poetry as a graduation gift. I went right from Chaucer to Philip Larkin, covering about 500 years in a flash and thought, 'I can write this'. Ha! Well I did write some poems, and then some chapbooks and books of poems, publishing here and there, a working man who wrote poems between 10 p.m. and 1 a.m. because that was the time he had. I only started writing novels in my late 50's, a poet more or less tired of writing poetry. And here I am after almost fifty years of writing, unable to imagine a more unpopular writer than me.

Q: Robert Frost had that notion that one is either born a writer or not...

A: Well, I think Frost applied that notion to poetry and I agree--there's really no teaching it, though there are no shortage of workshops, classes, institutes and so forth that claim to teach it. I have a good friend and fine poet who has an MFA in Poetry. I've belonged to several workshops comprised of other poets that I've found nutritious--we each bring a poem, read it out loud, and let the criticism begin. I've come to realize that the major benefits of such an exercise are the rising to the occasion of writing the poem to bring to the workshop and the lively exercise of providing cogent criticism to fellow poets. Thinking this through right now, I suppose I'd have to say that I was first born as a reader and then a writer.

Q: So what did you read that made you want to write?

A: Baseball cards. I had a superb collection which, had they not disappeared in one of my many moves during adolescence, would be worth a fortune today. I had Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Warren Spahn, Hank Aaron, the Joe Adcock card in which he posed as a left-handed hitter, Stan Musial, Yogi Berra, Ted Kluszewski, the golden age. There was always a little narrative bio on the back of each card; I'd make up my own players, provide the bio.

Q: You love sports, you played...?

A: O yes, I still do. The most deplorable aspect of aging, in my case, is that I can no longer play basketball, and competitive tennis in now a no-go. I can stand on the baseline or at the net but really moving around the court is out of the question. So I play golf, aptly called "the last sport", ride my bicycle, and exercise at the local YMCA, though I use the word 'exercise' lightly. 

Q: The Classical World is quite kinetic.

A: It's intended as a sort of work-out. My hope is that the language matches the pace of the narrator's exploration, a traveler who's not on the package tour but is instead mostly devising his own itinerary. One has to be on one's toes when traveling this way.

Q: You're very critical of mass tourism!

A: It deserves critcism, but it's such an easy target. 

Q: Several chapters in The Classical World find the narrator taking a bike trip with a small group through Sicily, which is certainly an organized, semi-mass touristic enterprise. 

A: Yeah, and I think the reader will notice a definite shift in tone and perspective in the book as this occurs. When our hero joins 'the group' he becomes much less curious--it's almost as if he's caged--and is much more critical of his surroundings, as if they don't meet his expectations. His experience is far less satisfying to him than it was when he was on his own, making his way from place to place as his spirit led him, having much more of an authentic adventure. All great travel literature--I'm thinking here of Dr. Johnson's A Journey to the Hebrides, for instance--has the force of exploration behind it.

Q: Your first novel, Monsieur Ambivalence, a Post-Literate Fable, had a noble, some would say idealistic female character, Helena who complemented the major male character more often than not by amusing or accomodating him. The Classical World has Jane who's pretty salty, often at odds with the narrator, who's sometimes with him and just as often not.

A: Well, this book is partially an exploration of late middle-age or early old-age, that point in a normal life's timespan where there's far less looking forward and far more looking back. At this stage retrospection overwhelms any consideration of a possible future. Jane's the kind of woman who says what she thinks and feels at the moment she's thinking and feeling, with all the energy of her past chiming in as support. I'm finding in my own marriage that this phenomena holds true on both sides of the equation--not only are there fewer feelings to tramp down but those feelings that do still exist tend to respond to honesty, forthrightness, total individuation...

Q: Both of your novels are set primarily in Europe--Monsieur Ambivalence in France and The Classical World in Italy--and yet the main characters are American. This suggests some disenchantment with the USA: yes or no?

A: I'm old enough now to know the present political moment--as vulgar as it is, as truly horrible, dismaying, wretched, ugly, mean-spirited, (and really no adjectival response is adequate)--will pass and we'll go on to some other horrible, dismaying, wretched political moment. In this respect I'm optimistic, since there have been tremendous strides made in our situation, despite politics. So to answer your question, yes I'm disenchanted but my disenchantment is positive and will remain so.

To be continued.