AUTHOR of thirteen books, a play, a libretto for a dance opera, and several cut-and-paste novels, Seattle-based Rebecca Brown has been dubbed “the greatest secret of American letters” by literary bad boy Dale Peck, while Sonic Youth singer-guitarist Thurston Moore calls her “America’s only real rock ’n’ roll schoolteacher” in a blurb on the back of Brown’s 2009 collection American Romances. Brown’s most famous work, the 1994 AIDS novel The Gifts of the Body, won the Lambda Literary Award. Her lesser known gems include the 1992 novel-in-stories The Terrible Girls, the prose poems from Woman in Ill-Fitting Wig (2005), and the fictionalized autobiography The End of Youth (2003).
I met Brown in her cozy blue house (decorated with paintings by fellow Seattleite Nancy Kiefer and Belle and Sebastian posters), where the author lives with her wife Chris and their two cats. Out in the backyard, in her writing studio, Brown works among statues and stained-glass images of saints, a Franz Kafka puppet, pictures of her family, heaps of CDs and sheets of paper, as well as many books. “It’s a pit,” Brown comments, “it’s packed with books, and vaguely I can get to them.”
Lies Xhonneux: While your protagonists are mainly out, some characters, like Lady Bountiful in The Terrible Girls, see their sexuality as something private and keep it hidden. Do you feel that one’s sexuality should be public knowledge?
Rebecca Brown: In American Romances, in the story “Invisible,” there is a footnote about Susan Sontag, and I’m taking her to task for actively not coming out for as long as she did—and then, when she finally did, pretending that she hadn’t been “in.” I think people with public positions, like politicians and artists, who are making an active choice to lie, escape their responsibility. Certainly it’s a different one now, but back then it was a big deal, especially in Sontag’s context of fighting for human rights and going to the Balkans to help people “become themselves” and so on. I feel she had been lying and dissing on women and lesbians as thinkers her whole career. You can probably tell I didn’t like her public persona. For many people, coming out is not an option. For instance, if I was in Iraq now, I wouldn’t be out; if I was a public schoolteacher in America in 1980 or a mom with a child, I might not be out. So there are people who really need to stay in the closet, for their health, for the health of their family, for their jobs. But not an artist.
LX: How do you feel about the celebrities who come out as lesbians now, after having spent years in the closet?
RB: A part of me is always thinking, “Where were you twenty years ago?” If someone comes out now, I wish they’d say, “Thank god the world is safe, and I’m really glad I can be out now; other people made it easier for me to do that, and now I’m wealthy and successful; therefore I’m writing a check for $20,000 to the Trevor Project to help gay teens.” Instead they say, “I came out and everyone was so nice.” Well, that’s because other people have been working their asses off for decades. That, clearly, bothers me. It’s like politics “lite.”
LX: In contrast to early queer fiction, your work does not always represent lesbian communities positively, and many of the love relationships between your lesbian characters are extremely unbalanced. Could this be seen as a way of redressing an idealization of lesbian relationships?
RB: I think that could be said of it. But really, when I started encountering such fiction by other lesbians, I thought, “Wow, good for them, but this is not where I’m at!” My works were not Naiad books, they were not mysteries, they were not about how I became a lesbian, then started working in a collective, and how we’re all friends. That was really not happening for me. I think this is one of the reasons why my work wasn’t published in the U.S. in lesbian houses for a long time. The mainstream [presses]wouldn’t publish it because it was gay, and the gays wouldn’t publish it because it did not show positive role models, and it was not straightforwardly realist in style. My first four books were published in England before they were published here, but then things started to shift.
LX: Is LGBT fiction more mainstream, more visible nowadays? Have things become easier for gay and lesbian authors?
RB: This idea that it’s all easy now, I don’t know. Maybe even ten years ago, I was teaching in continuing education for adults, and all the students were being good liberals and saying they’re fine with gays. So we’re critiquing someone’s story and a student said, “It doesn’t actually matter if my characters are gay or lesbian, they’re just characters.” And all these people were raising their hands, saying, “I don’t care about it either when I read things, it doesn’t matter to me if they’re gay or lesbian, people are people.” Then I asked to see a show of hands of anyone who’s read a novel by a lesbian recently. Nobody. Then I asked to see a show of hands of anyone who’s read a novel by a gay man recently. The three gays raised their hands; they had read Henry James. They said they didn’t read other works because they’re not out there. “Well,” I said, “let me give you ten names of gay and lesbian authors to read.” You know, they are out there, but it’s like our culture does not foreground them.
LX: In a lot of your work there is an outspoken interest in historical characters, especially gay and lesbian writers such as Oscar Wilde and Radclyffe Hall. Is there a desire to do justice to their work at last, to combat negative views?
RB: That is interesting to me. In “Invisible” in American Romances, I talk about the High Modernist bias in terms of formal invention and style rather than much of a sense of content or people’s lives. That was certainly how I responded to Hall’s work when I first encountered it as a graduate student. I still think her style is not good, really, but it has also been important to get away from the exclusivity of æsthetics as literary discourse and to take pleasure in a more close-to-the-ground relationship to those texts and those writers. It’s a similar thing with Willa Cather: she was not “interesting” when I was a graduate student. I’m mortified by that now. But having said all that, I continue to worship Virginia Woolf, and I continue to see more and more in T. S. Eliot all the time.
LX: Do you find that writing comes naturally to you?
RB: The actual writing is difficult for me. It takes me a long time to get a draft out. When I have a little article assignment, I can get through it okay, but it takes me many, many drafts to do something of my own. It takes me a long time to figure out what the voice is going to be of a certain piece. And a lot of times I think I’m done, but I’m still not done. There’s the æsthetic and formal things such as the number of paragraphs you can put in a story, and then there’s the other stuff, like realizing, “Man, I am really obsessed with this!” That’s embarrassing; I’m glad no one else can see it. And you hope that by the time it gets out—if it gets anywhere else—it will be not as stupid as it started from. Writing is really embarrassing.
LX: As compared to your first book, The Evolution of Darkness (1984), certain stories from later collections have been rendered more minimalist. Does this say anything about your writing process?
RB: A lot of my revising is about throwing things away. You work so hard on something and you make it the way you want it, and still it’s like it doesn’t belong—and then I tear it out. I work on the computer, and I print things out, and then I do a lot of revision by pencil, then allegedly I input the revision, because there are things I can see on the page that I can’t see on the screen. I just love spreading things out on the floor.
LX: Several of your works ask the reader to actively fill in the blanks in constructing the chronology and even the plot of a story, as in The Terrible Girls. How important is reader participation to you? Is this something you deliberately try to cultivate?
RB: “Deliberate” is tricky word. For me, writing is really emotional and mysterious. It’s also really careful, in terms of counting syllables, repeating words or a fragment and a string of “ands.” So it’s very considered in shape and detail. When a reader says to me, “That story broke my heart,” or “I was laughing,” or “I want to give that to my friend who’s just been through this or that,” it’s really satisfying to me. It’s satisfying to me to feel like I’m read carefully, that my work has had some effect on somebody. But I don’t think I do things for what I would consider a conscious emotional manipulation. In terms of æsthetics, I do think about where to end a paragraph, or where to take the reader, and I want to create some kind of experiential or almost physical effect on the reader sometimes. A lot of the work also reads out loud really well. The oral process has a whole different physicality to it, obviously, in pacing. Those things are all important in the process.
LX: At times your work is characterized by a certain minimalist, stripped-down rhetoric, while at other times the same work contains very rich, figurative language. Do you experience these two styles as contrasting, and do you use them to this effect?
RB: I’m really aware of the differences, and sometimes I like it when they come together. Like Hemingway—I’m a huge fan of his style. I’m also really interested in what he took from Gertrude Stein, and what he didn’t take from Stein, the different kinds of rhythms they have. His monosyllabic, terse American English—that is a voice that I can go to and that means something. The other gothic or baroque style is more claustrophobic. It’s like it is going around inside your head, and it just gets louder and bigger. To have that followed by these terse Hemingway sentences, there’s a real effect there. I’ve been reading Beckett again lately and experienced the delight of some of those paragraphs, the humor and the delight of his long and short sentences, and his inflation and undercutting. The sounds and the shapes of sentences can just be hilarious. So I’m very aware of those two different kinds.
LX: You also like to experiment with different genres.
RB: The book of mine that’s probably done the best and is sort of mainstream is The Gifts of the Body, and I’ve had readers say that they loved that book. But then my next book came out in 1996, What Keeps Me Here, and the local reviewer here—he loved my previous book—was almost angry: “These aren’t really stories, are they?” And you know, they are not, that was a good observation. He said, “There aren’t really characters, and some of these sentences, they don’t really mean anything.” And I thought, “That’s correct.” So am I supposed to do the same book all the time? I mean, there is an “I,” but in terms of theme and style, my works vary a lot.
LX: You frequently express distrust at the capacity of language to communicate anything. How do you deal with this linguistic skepticism as a writer and a teacher?
RB: Well, it’s almost all we’ve got. You try to communicate [using]language or you don’t. In my undergraduate thesis, I wrote about Virginia Woolf and communication, and if anybody can use words, she’s the one. But so often in her books there’d be this butting up against silence or inexpressibleness. And if there are things even she can’t express. … And then, of course, the Christian narrative, which is a hugely important story to me, contains the idea that there was something that a word needs to become: the word became flesh. We don’t get the word in itself, so let’s make it into a human. The mistrust of words is in there as well: Jesus often says, “he’s healed, but don’t go tell anybody”—the messianic secret. Or, as I have written in the essay “God without Words” in American Romances, if you know, you can’t tell, if you tell, you don’t know. Quoted from the Tao. We distrust authenticity and veracity, but then our whole life is about the endeavor to understand or to be truthful or to communicate. It’s about longing to say, and not quite being able to do it. That is the big picture.
