Books That Saved My Life

Stranger Things Have Happened

Cover art from Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar

On October 30, 2008 I sat down with author Anthony Swofford (Jarhead, Exit A) to talk about the books that have been influential to him as a writer and some that could even be life saving.  Art Bar, where the following interview took place, was festooned that day with orange lights, pumpkin-shaped garlands  and other Halloween decorations.  At the bar, the waitress offered us happy hour drinks and Tootsie Rolls.  We sat in an empty back room where the bespoke art glowed under red light and The Doors played on the stereo.  Every time I looked up another group of people–some in masks or full costumes–seemed to have materialized in the gloom.  By the time we finished up the Doors album had run its course and the room was full.

Montana Wojczuk:  So the first time I heard you read- it was in Portland, OR and Jarhead had just come out-I remember you saying that when you were in the Marines you carried Shakespeare in your pack, is that right?

Anthony Swofford:  When I went to the Gulf I asked my mom to send me Shakespeare and The Stranger by Camus.  The Shakespeare plays she chose, I’m not sure why, were Othello and the Merchant of Venice.

MW:  No comedies?

AS:  No comedies, though I should have had some.  The Stranger was the book that I read and re-read the most in high-school because it’s so sexy and dark, and any 16-year-old likes a book that’s sexy and dark.  I often think about the scene when they’re bathing and she’s kind of floating in his arms…

MW: I’ve never read it, I should.

AS:  You should read it if just for that scene.  There’s that great William Gass quote: “Sex is the first reason we read and the only reason we write.”   Though maybe that’s a little hyperbolic.

I always think about that scene in The Stranger, and that book, about being in that war in a really absurdist situation where I had no control whatsoever over my own being, only my own thoughts.  Strangely enough that book gave me some kind of hope-of having an intellectual life or creative life once I left.

On the way over I was thinking about books that saved my life.  I couldn’t give you just one but if forced to I think there are three that I’d say were important in terms of my development as a writer. The Stranger would be in the middle and there’d be two bookends.  The first bookend would be Cannery Row by Steinbeck.

Here I was this 14yr old kid growing up in Sacramento and here was this book talking about tough men and loose women and living a kind of wild life on the fringes of society.  People on the fringe attracted me even then.

Then my family took this trip to the real Cannery Row of circa 1984 in Monterey.  It was by then already an amusement park-cotton candy and merry-go-rounds and hotels-and I realized that the Cannery Row that Steinbeck had written about in his book was way more attractive to me than this Cannery Row that I’d walked into.  And that was maybe the first time that I saw the power of a book to transform a place, or to transport me somewhere different, somewhere I actually preferred to be.

The third book, if forced to make a loose survey of my life, would be Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch. I discovered it a couple years into college, and it really made me realize that anything was possible in literature.  The way he made that book and the way he created that world made me think if it works, then you can do it.  The question of what is a novel is not really that important-a novel is what you make it, and how you make it and whether or not what you render is successful and whether or not it creates this world that readers can inhabit.

This was a time when I really needed to do more reading than I had done.  I had this great mentor, along with William Gass-

MW:  This was pre-Iowa?

AS:  Pre-Iowa.  This was at a community college in Sacramento, and he’s still the best teacher I ever had, this guy named Raoul Schneider [TK] who just really cared about writers and really cared about books.  He gave me this great reading list.

MW:  Do you still have it?

AS:  I do still have it somewhere.  He said read Cortazar, read William Gass, read Beckett, and stop writing for a while.

MW:  What was it that attracted you to Hopscotch?

AS:  It opened me up to different ways of seeing, of making the world make sense through metaphor.  I was kind of a day dreamer and a loner and someone who in my own life made up fictions.  I really latched on to what Cortazar was doing with metaphor and meaning. It opened up lived experience and history and memory. Aesthetically it taught me that anything is possible with words and that how you tell the story is as important as what you’re telling-sometimes more important.

MW:  It seems like you read these books at crossroads in your life, Steinbeck when you were younger, etc…do you think that made a difference?

AS:  Yes, Steinbeck was at 14, Camus at 17.  Camus I discovered in high school and then had it with me at the age of 21, 22 in the Marine Corps, and Cortazar and William Gass in ’96, so I was around 26.  I was at a point that without that kind of reading I might have lost my way for a few more years in terms of a writing life and the discipline to pursue it.

Reading Camus I was certainly attracted to the philosophy and romanticism of that kind of bleak philosophy-it’s certainly less appealing at 38 then it was at 17, though I still admire it.

I was thinking about talking to you and I was thinking of talking about those books in terms of mile-markers in my life, in my book life and my writing life, and there’s a real physical pull to them almost as though they’re studs along the shore that I’m able to tie to and pull myself along, to pull myself in.

I discovered them all through teachers.  I’ve been lucky enough to have mentors to guide my reading.

MW:  Where are the three books on your bookshelf?

AS:  I have three copies of Hopscotch floating around.  There’s one in my house and two in my office.  I always keep one on hand that I can give away. Writers always want to talk about covers, but the paperback cover of the Vintage edition of that book is so fucking sexy it’ll just kill you.

I kept the books my mother sent me when I was in the Marine Corps in the Gulf all together in my office. They’re in the part of my bookshelf that’s for war literature.  They wouldn’t seem to fit in, but thematically they do.

The Steinbeck book is in my office as well, a sort of miscellany small paperback-this early ’80s paperback, really brown and faded.

MW:  Not so sexy.

AS:  No, not the sexiest cover.  It’s brown and dark and there’s this Jesus-like figure suffering on the front.

MW:  So these books are nearby while you’re writing?

AS:  They’re all nearby, but unless I’m really sentimental and melancholy I don’t reach for the Steinbeck.  I pick up the Cortazar often, probably weekly, to thumb through and read a chapter, read a page, look at my notes and see how they’ve changed over the years.

MW:  Is that to remind yourself of the narrative or is it more of a musical thing?

AS:  It’s all about music, and sound and meaning.  When I read a few pages I’m reminded of the story, which binds everything up, but I remember the characters even more.

MW:  That seems like also something you can get from Shakespeare, the musicality of the language, but you wouldn’t necessarily want to write like him.

AS:  Right, Hopscotch was written in ’66.  Cortazar was avant-garde at the time, would probably still be considered avant-garde.  The book is in two parts and you can hop around a bit or read it all the way through.

MW:  In terms of life-saving books-it feels kind of overly earnest to call them that, they can’t all be like Teddy Roosevelt’s speech and stop a bullet-do you think books can be life saving?

AS:  As a teenager I found meaning and worth in my reading, and now as a somewhat grown man and writer I find meaning and worth in the act of writing, as well as in reading.  The misery of being human can be held at bay in a book, even if the misery of being human is very much a part of the book-and I think it’s very much a part of the best books.  With reading that we care about we can go back and inhabit that world, a world that’s been made, a world that is a piece of art.  I don’t think it’s stretching it to say that it’s life saving.  You know, it’s not going to stop you from getting stabbed in a bad neighborhood, but it has a lot of value.

MW:  I’m thinking back to that first time I heard you read.  Here were all these Portland, OR liberals and military guys, and I remember there was an older guy who fainted because of the heat and had to go to the hospital. During the book signing I was standing in line behind these two young military guys and a sort of quiet middle-aged woman and they were talking about how much they liked the book.  Are you ever surprised at how people respond to your work?  Do you think it’s changed people?

AS:  When Jarhead came out I’d sometimes have women come up to me who had sons who were in the Gulf, women my mother’s age who come up to me  say, “my son came back from that war and he’d changed, but I never understood why because he wouldn’t tell me, and then I read your book and now I know why-now I feel like I know part of him too.”  Hearing that from a reader is the most value I could ever get from my work.

I remember specifically a reading I did at Cody’s in Berkeley and this guy came up to me, he was all suited up and about my age and he said “yeah, I’ve never talked about the war before and I never wanted to I never thought it had any value until you gave me a way to talk about it.”

But first you just hope you’ll be read, and second that you’ll be someone’s Hopscotch, that they’ll hand off to their friends and say “you must read this book.”

You were talking earlier about your love-affair with Shakespeare when you were a young girl.  There will always be mothers who encourage their daughters to read Shakespeare, who light a fire in them.

I think there’s still this human biological imperative to sit around a campfire and listen to stories.  That’s why books will survive-holding something in your hand and spending ten hours with it, versus 28 minutes for a sitcom, or an hour for a drama.  Whatever happens the readers will remain. And readers breed readers.

//

Paintings, in order of appearance: Madonna and The Kiss by Edvard Munch