Peter Straub: 2010 National Book Festival

1979-- 1979, I'm sorry. I wrote one in '59-- in '79.

Thank you. It's nice to see you all here. No matter whom you came to see, it's great to see you. Anyhow, it's a great group. I'm seeing all the very, very terrific writers. It's a pleasure just to look at Martha Grimes. The instructions we had were-- A, not to read from our work that is, no, yes? We're kind of guided in that direction. And we're told really just to kind of speak in an informal way about ourselves. So believe me that is actually what I absolutely intend to do. But the bit my kind introducer gave you is from my website, and I never intended that to stand as a general introduction of my life though it is very accurate. My father did expect me for as long as possible, he held to the belief that it was possible for me to be an athlete. He looked at me and he saw a Green Bay Packer. He always did have a very rich fantasy life, my father. My mother knew that I had zero interest in football. All she wanted desperately was that I would somehow turn out to be a good person. There are so many little clues as though maybe I might not be absolutely good but when I married this wonderful woman I am married to and I settled then I actually had a kind of a career for myself. She was really relieved.

And actually, you know, I'd gone on through schools in the nicest most regular possible fashion. But there was always this question, when I was a kid of what I'll be good for or good at. I always did really well in school and I always really, really loved reading. And my parents got really behind that. My parents read to me immensely when I was a child. I remember being on their laps and then pointing at the comic strips in the newspaper, the Sunday comics and going through those. Reading books to me out loud. And that must have fit into the real hunger that I had to read as a small child. I remember the immense frustration-- what I did experience as the immense frustration of not being able to read. I remember pointing at street signs and saying, 'What does that say,' and they would say, the word is A-U-E-R, and they would say, Auer, and I would say, 'hour' like you know, an hour on a clock. You know like our house? It didn't make any sense. I did the same with billboards. So what does that say, you know. And very kindly and as sweetly as possible, they always read these things to me to a point where they read the same comic books to me over and over, so that I had them memorized. And then, I pretended to read these comic books to other children, to my friends. And one day, the most miraculous thing happened to me. I was about five years old. I was looking along, pretending to read, and I realized that I was reading. That I was reading the words, I was speaking the words that were right in front of me. And by that time, I saw them so often that I could recognize them. So, there I was, you know, launched.

I wanted it very much. I couldn't wait to go to school. Because I thought, surely in school, it's where they just give you book after book after book and you read better and better books as you go along. And then you read more and more interesting stuff. So I went along and I went to kindergarten. And I was really bummed because in kindergarten, what they mainly had us do is take construction paper and little baby scissors and cut out things like elephants. Then, I remember going home and telling my mother, I just hated it. There wasn't any point, you know. I never have to cut out elephants in my real life. I didn't like doing it. I want to read books so I read them at home. When I got to first grade, and I thought, okay now this. At last, we're going to have some relief here. We're going to get real books and we did. But the books we got were Dick and Jane. Anybody here remember? Great books weren't they? Thrilling plots, amazing style but it killed me-- I mean, I think I've fairly spent a lot of time being really angry as a kid but it was because of stuff like this-- I looked at Dick and Jane which we were told to read in school and I opened it up it said-- 'Run, Dick run.' Exactly! Yes! Run, Dick run. And then, there's see Spot run and the next page was the page that really killed me. There's a picture of Spot, the dog running and it said, See, see, see. And I thought, nobody ever said that. That's the dumbest, most insulting thing I've ever seen in my life. And fortunately I discovered the school library, and then I was off. In every school I went to I ripped through their library like it was the gateway to heaven, which of course, it was.

There's a description that Charles Dickens wrote of himself in middle life, about his childhood. And remember, Dickens had a very unhappy-- I mean because he was Charles Dickens, it was a very unhappy childhood. For someone else, it might have been a very ordinary, almost satisfying childhood. His father did go to debtors' prison. But when you go to a debtors' prison, the whole family moved in with you. You know, they ordered meals out. A lot of conversation, there wasn't any work to do. You just languish there until somebody manages to get enough money so you pay your debts and then you got out. But what killed Dickens was that, because he knew himself to be something other than the perfectly ordinary product of Victorian London. What killed him was he had to leave school or wasn't allowed to go there and was put to work in a blacking factory where they made like shoe polish, Warren's Blacking. It really hurt him and it really made him, but in mid life, he was talking about this era in his life and he spoke of himself of getting home from the blacking factory and reading as if for life, reading to save his life. I think, when I read that, I felt this recognition, not that I'm comparing myself with Dickens, but I certainly recognized that impulse and that mood and that kind of rapture. There is no doubt that I read and learned about the world. I read to learn about what adults were actually up to but I also read to escape. So, I could go somewhere else, somewhere where I would be led along through a series of episodes and the scenes and the ballrooms and dining rooms and living rooms, and on ships and through jungles, you know, all that sort of things. It was still not clear. It's clear I was very good at that and I was also good at talking about books. But what was that good for. It seemed, really that my only hope for a successful adult life was to go to graduate school and become an English professor which didn't sound so bad to me. And when I got to college, I noticed, I liked English professors. And I thought they were cool. They were different from the science people. They are different from the business people. I guess it just occurred to me what I really liked was that it was evident that they had inner lives. That inside themselves, they were-- inside those people are different worlds, very well inhabited, well upholstered and interesting. I loved that. So, I did-- I majored in English.

I went to graduate school at Columbia. I got an MA. Then I ran out of money. I wanted to get married. So, I married, thank God, the right person. And I taught at my old boy's school for three years until we made enough money. Then we made our big break. And we moved from Milwaukee to Ireland where I was a graduate student at UCD, University College Dublin, a great place. Ireland itself is a great place. Dublin was a great place. This was 1969. The minute we got off our crappy student boat, which was called the MS Aurelia, the only ship of the Cogedar line. If you ever signed up for an ocean crossing and you see the boat belongs to the Cogedar line, I advise you to go look elsewhere. It was dandy if you're 20, but otherwise not. Anyhow, we fell into a world that was-- that didn't exist in Milwaukee or if it did it was not accessible to us. It would've been, it would certainly-- it would have existed in New York, but it would not have been accessible to us. It was a world composed of painters and poets and writers of elite kinds, of sculptors, this intense hive of people all working very, very inaudible way at making art. And so, we're the most natural thing in the world. One problem with my childhood was that, it was implicit in it that if you called yourself an artist, you were by virtue of that, insanely self-deluded and self-important and ridiculous, you know, 'He calls himself an artist.' You know, my father thought that was just like the worst thing you could do. Anyhow, here we were with these people who were just-- who were rooted in their own talents. This was extraordinary helpful to me.

I was publishing. I was writing a lot of poetry with which I was obsessed. And I published a good deal of poetry in Ireland. And I worked away with my thesis, but it wasn't that good, my thesis, my dissertation. And when I brought 200 pages of it, my thesis-- my dissertation adviser, a wonderful scholar and a brilliant man, named Denis Donoghue, who's still with us. Denis Donoghue took about three weeks and he called me in his office. And he said, 'Mr. Straub, this work has no connection with the subject that you said you were going to write about. And also, I must say, although it's very well written, it's written like a book. It's not written like a dissertation. This won't do. You have to go back and,' and oh boy that's it. Now, fortunately, this was a-- I mean-- I must have been really arrogant to think I can convince Denis Donoghue that my 200 pages about Anthony Trollope were really about D.H. Lawrence which was what I told him I read about but I couldn't fool him. So what I did was I took out from my desk a novel that I've written in the previous summer. I'd written this novel because, although, I was deeply interested in poetry, I also-- I always had and you would understand I could not really mention this to my parents, because they would have taken this as a sign of self delusion and self aggrandizement. I have always really secretly thought of myself as a novelist. And it seemed to me that novels represented a sort of territory that I half understood. They represented a kind of version of home territory for me. I could not have expressed this to my parents. I could barely express it to anybody because I didn't exactly know what I meant but that is very much what I felt. So, one summer, instead of writing yet more doomed words about Anthony Trollope. I wrote a novel according to Graham Greene Principle that I read about in the End of the Affair. The narrator at the End of the Affair, is a novelist named Maurice Bendrix. Maurice Bendrix says writing a novel is easy. You just write 500 words a day, drip, drip, drip. And at the end of the year, you have a novel. I thought, well, I'm going learn. I'm going to take Graham Greene's word and I went off to the same place where I did my doomed work on Trollope, the National Library of Dublin. And I brought along bound notebooks that is-- account books as it were with lined numbered pages. And I wrote until I figured I had about 500 words. And then I counted them to make sure I had at least 500 words. If I had 550, I'd say, that was a good day. If I was having a really good day I may write 600 but then, I thought, no I don't get to count that extra 100 for tomorrow's work. It doesn't take very long to write 500 words. Anyhow, I did this and I got to the end of the novel in like six months. And I didn't know what to do with it. So, I typed it up. And I sorted it away thinking there might be something in there and there might not be. When Denis Donoghue lowered the boom on me, I asked a friend of mine. I asked a person I know, he wasn't even a friend if I could send the book to his publisher. The publisher I like because they published John Updike, the novelist, with whom I was at that time, more or less in love. And so, I mailed it off. And they took it. Thereby, saving my life, resolving my doubts about my own future. The funny thing about this book was it was called Marriages. Over there at the signing sections, I must have signed six copies of this book. It was published in 1973 in an edition, in the American edition of maybe 2000. At least half of those went to libraries. The other half should have disappeared but some people, some people have them. Some people read them. One person even told me, they liked it. This was a novel which I was following with my nose but went to the deepest fog. I had no idea how really to do what I most wanted to do.

So this was my system, apart from the 500 words a day. I thought because I loved the work of the poet John Ashbery, I thought I could write a novel that would be the equivalent of an Ashbery poem. I thought narrative was old fashioned and old hat and obsolete. I wanted to write a book of glittering fragments all lined up. That would make its effects through a sort of associational poetry. I wasn't that good, but what I did was, I wrote a kind of conventional imitation of Fitzgerald, let's say. A very good model, if you want to steal from somebody or you want to imitate somebody, you can't do better than that style. It had one exciting part, in which a guy seated at a cafe table in the South of France, sees a man from his hometown, walking down the main street of this little town, inaudible. And he's riveted because he knows-- actually that man is dead. That man was a neighbor of his, but who was killed in prison after having shot another man in their hometown. So he says to his girlfriend, I'm sorry, I-- this is very interesting but I have to-- I have to follow that guide. The most interesting part of that book, it had to do with the narrator of the novel Marriages, following this man, he knows to be dead, down a long, long, long spooky road into the amphitheater alley. Then into the amphitheater and into a little blind alley, into a little room carved out from a stone on the inside of the amphitheater where he doesn't see the man at all. It's just a piece of paper with some enigmatic words on it. Now, I should have known from that, that my directions in life where, would be more narrative than I wanted to be, more about story, about mystery, about matters like that. And before long, they were. I see-- I have less than 10 minutes now to go, and if you want any questions, we have about five-- four or five minutes. If you have any questions, I'm here to answer.

Oh, sure. If I had more time, I would have spoken endlessly about Stephen King. He was a fascinating brilliant guy. Back when we were both largely unknown, and had published just like two books, Stephen King was sent my first supernatural book, a ghost story called-- a sort of Henry James type of a story called Julia. And he wrote a wonderful blurb for it. Different from all the other blurbs in that he saw-- he actually understood what I was about. A year and a half later, I published another book, he wrote a two-page letter to my publisher that showed absolutely he understood what I was talking about. So, I went into a bookstore in London. I bought a book by him. It was called Salem's Lot. When it was first being published, I had no idea what it was about. And it-- it blew me off my chair. It was so good. So, I wrote him. He wrote me, we lived London at that time. The King's moved to England. We got together. Well Stephen likes-- even I-- we liked each other very much. The only problem would be this thing, with Stephen King is that he talks too much and he talks so fast and he says so much. And he has so much energy. It was a little tiring sometimes. Anyhow, but a week after week, we've gotten to know each other. He said to me, look we could have some fun if we write a book together. Let's do that. I said, sure! Let's do it. I agree. And we looked at our schedules and we saw that we couldn't begin to work for another four years. It was because he owed four books and I owed two. This is the difference in our methods. But anyhow, four years later, we got together. We'd-- by that time already worked out quite a program for our book and we launched them together and we finished it together, a very rare experience for any novelist. You know, to work side by side with another one. Especially another one who is loved. It was a great, great experience. And we continued to be friends. Yes.

Good.

Oh, okay.

There's a very good writer named John Langdon, who wrote a knockout novel. It's like a really, really brilliant literary horror novel called House of Windows.

Oh, one of my books?

Oh.

I would read Mystery. It's not a horror story at all, but it's got all the feelings. It's a very complex novel. It's a novel about a very complex crime that touches the characters of the people who are involved in it. And it's an odd book but I'm very, very pleased that I thought I think I did something different and kind of new there and I recommend it very highly.

Okay. Thanks.

No I just-- do we have another hour or another week?

Mostly, to the extent that I have ideas. They begin with a kind of a lousy little idea that could come from like a stock pot of any novels. Oh, somebody is missing and his parents have to go find him. That's the-- I wrote a novel, the third it was called Koko and it's one of my best books. What happens is a long process of stewing and evolution in which, but-- when I think about it for a long time, I eventually think about all the characters for a good time and I set off on a little road that goes somewhere I suppose I know of, but in fact that I don't. Almost always, the little road takes me elsewhere and the story changes. Whatever is underneath the story finally comes up at a certain point in almost every book. After I've been working for about a year, I say to myself, 'That's why I wanted to write this book.' You know, I recognize some-- something that has been on my mind, some-- some deep inner matter. That's one of my two or three themes, you know, like I keep returning to that always surprise me anew. It's a real evolutionary process.

Oh, wow, fabulous.

That-that is very-- there are some people who can do that. The only one I know who is really infallible is Neil Gaiman. Neil Gaiman once startled me by proving that he knew who wrote what in our books. But Stephen and I in Talisman especially did a dirty trick on everybody. At a certain-- certain points, we imitated each other's styles.

And that made it fun.

Also, Steve put on jazz allusions so to make people think I wrote them and so, then I wrote in allusions that kind of rock and roll I knew he likes. Because we didn't want people to know who wrote what. We didn't want people to divide the book up. The only really funny thing that ever happened was one of those like reviewer sites long before Amazon wrote that they knew which part I wrote because the parts I wrote sucked. So he said, so every time I came to the part that sucked, I know that Peter wrote that.

That's about it. Thank you very much.