AMIS: I want to
ask about your prose. Your prose makes Raymond Chandler look clumsy. Now the way I do it
is: I say the sentence in my head until nothing sticks out, there are no "elbows,
" there are no stubbings of toe; it just seems to chime with some tuning fork inside
my head. And then I know the sentence is ready. In your work, pages and pages go by
without me spotting any "elbows. " Even with the great stylists of modern
fiction, you know you're always going to come across phrases like "Standing on the
landing " or "the cook took a look at the book. " There's always some
"elbow " sticking out, there's some rhyme causing the reader to pause and wonder
and think, "That's not quite right. " With you, it's all planed flat. How do you
plane your prose into this wonderful instrument?LEONARD:
First of all, I'm always writing from a point of view. I decide what the purpose of the
scene is, and at least begin with some purpose. But, even more important, from whose point
of view is this scene seen? Because then the narrative will take on somewhat the sound of
the person who is seeing the scene. And from his dialogue, that's what goes, somewhat,
into the narrative. I start to write and I think, "Upon entering the room, "and
I know I don't want to say "Upon entering the room." I don't want my writing to
sound like the way we were taught to write. Because I don't want you to be aware of my
writing. I don't have the language. I have to rely upon my characters.
AMIS: So, when you say it's
character-driven, do you mean you're thinking: How would this character see this scene?
Because you're usually third person. You don't directly speak through your characters, but
there is a kind of third person that is a first person in disguise. Is that the way you go
at it?
LEONARD: It takes on somewhat of a
first-person sound, but not really. Because I like third person. I don't want to be stuck
with one character's
viewpoint because there are too many viewpoints. And, of course, the bad guys' viewpoints
are a lot more fun. What they do is more fun. A few years ago, a friend of mine in the
publishing business called up and said, "Has your good guy decided to do anything
yet?"
Or, I think I should start this book with the main character. Or I start a book with
who I think is the main character, but a hundred pages into the book, I say "This
guy's not the main character, he's running out of gas; I don't even like him anymore, his
attitude; he's changed." But he's changed and there's nothing I could do about it.
It's just the kind of person he is. So then I have to bring somebody along fast. Do you
run into that?
AMIS: What I do find, and my father
Kingsley Amis used to find, is that when you come up against some difficulty, some
mechanism in the novel that isn't working, it fills you with despair and you think,
"I'm not going to be able to get around this." Then you look back at what you've
done, and you find you already have a mechanism in place to get you through this. A minor
character, say, who's well placed to get the information across that you need to put
across. I always used to think (and he agreed) that: Thank God, writing is much more of an
unconscious process than many people think.
I think the guy in the street thinks that the novelist, first of all, decides on his
subject (what should be addressed), then he thinks of his theme and his plot and then jots
down the various characters that will illustrate these various themes. That sounds like a
description of writer's block to me. I think you're in a very bad way when that happens.
Vladimir Nabokov, when he spoke about Lolita, refers to the "first throb
" of Lolita going through him, and I recognize that feeling. All it is is your next
book. It's the next thing that's there for you to write. Now, do you settle down and map
out your plots? I suspect you don't.
LEONARD: No, I don't. I start with a
character. Let's say I want to write a book about a bail bondsman or a process server or a
bank robber and a woman federal marshal. And they meet and something happens. That's as
much of an idea as I begin with. And then I see him in a situation, and I begin writing it
and one thing leads to another. By Page 100, roughly, I should have my characters
assembled. I should know my characters because they're sort of auditioned in the opening
scenes, and I can find out if they can talk or not. And if they can't talk, they're out.
Or they get a minor role.
But in every book there's a minor character who comes along and pushes his way into the
plot. He's just needed to give some information, but all of a sudden he comes to life for
me. Maybe it's the way he says it. He might not even have a name the first time he
appears. The second time he has a name. The third time he has a few more lines, and away
he goes, and he becomes a plot turn in the book.
When I was writing "Cuba Libre," I was about 250 pages into it and George
Will called up and said, "I want to send out 40 of your books--this was the previous
book--at Christmastime; may I send them to you and a list of names to inscribe? " I
said, "Of course." He said, "What are you doing now?" I said,
"I'm doing Cuba a hundred years ago." And he said, "Oh, crime in Cuba.
" And he hung up the phone. And I thought, "I don't have a crime in this
book." And I'm 250 pages into it. It was a crime that this guy was running guns to
Cuba, but that's not what I really write about. Where's the bag of money that everybody
wants? I didn't have it. So, then I started weaving it into the narrative. I didn't have
to go back far, but just to begin--and I was on my way.
AMIS: I admire the fluidity of your
process because it's meant to be a rule in the highbrow novel that the characters have no
free will at all. E.M. Forster said he used to line up his characters before beginning a
novel, and he would say, "Right, no larks." And Nabokov, when this was
quoted to him, he looked aghast, and he said, "My characters cringe when I come near
them." He said, "I've seen whole avenues of imagined trees lose their leaves
with terror at my approach."
Let's talk about "Cuba Libre," which is an amazing departure in my view. When
I was reading it, I had to keep turning to the front cover to check that it was a book by
you. How did it get started? I gather that you've been wanting to write this book for 30
years. It has a kind of charge of long-suppressed desire.
LEONARD: In 1957, I borrowed a book from
a friend called "The Splendid Little War." It was a picture book, a coffee-table
book of photographs of the Spanish-American War: photographs of the Maine, before and
after; photographs of the troops on San Juan Hill; newspaper headlines leading up to the
war; a lot of shots of Havana. I was writing westerns at the time, and I thought, "I
could drop a cowboy into this place and get away with it." But I didn't. A couple of
years ago, I was trying to think of a sequel to "Get Shorty." And I was trying
to work Chili Palmer into the dress business. I don't know why except that I love runway
shows. I gave up on that. And I saw that book again, "The Splendid Little War,"
because I hadn't returned it to my friend in '57. And I thought, "I'm going to do
that." Yeah, the time has come. So, I did.
AMIS: In a famous essay, Tom Wolfe said
that the writers were missing all the real stories that were out there. And that they
spent too much time searching for inspiration and should spend 95% of their time sweating
over research. The result was a tremendously readable book, "The Bonfire of the
Vanities." Now you, sir, have a full-time researcher.
LEONARD: Yes, Greg Sutter. He can answer
any of your questions that I don't know.
AMIS: Were you inspired by the research
you put into this book?
LEONARD: He got me everything I needed to
know. I asked him to see if he could find out how much it cost to transport horses from
Arizona to east Texas and then to Havana. And he did. He found a cattle company that had
been in business over 100 years ago and was shipping cattle then. He found an old ledger
book and copied it and faxed it to me.
AMIS: Among the differences from your
earlier books, this book is more discursive, less dialogue-driven and, till the end, less
action-driven. Toward the end, you get a familiar Leonard scenario where there's a chunk
of money sitting around, and various people are after it and you're pretty confident that
it's going to go to the least-undeserving people present. And it's not hard-bitten; it's a
much more romantic book than we're used to from you. Could your westerns have had such
romance?
LEONARD: No. In my westerns there was
little romance except in "Valdez Is Coming," which is my favorite of the
westerns. No, I just wanted to make this a romantic adventure story.
AMIS: And there's a kind of political
romanticism, too. You've always sided with the underdog, imaginatively; one can sense
that. And who could be more of an underdog than a criminal? And your criminals have always
been rather implausibly likable and gentle creatures. What is your view about crime in
America?
LEONARD: I don't have a view about crime
in America. There isn't anything I can say that would be interesting at all. When I'm
fashioning my bad guys, though (and sometimes a good guy has had a criminal past and then
he can go either way; to me, he's the best kind of character to have), I don't think of
them as bad guys. I just think of them as, for the most part, normal people who get up in
the morning and they wonder what they're going to have for breakfast, and they sneeze, and
they wonder if they should call their mother, and then they rob a bank. Because that's the
way they are. Except for real hard-core guys.
AMIS: The really bad guys.
LEONARD: Yeah, the really bad guys.
AMIS: I certainly feel that. I never
really judge my characters. I always feel I've made them the product of their origins, and
there was really no choice for them anywhere along the line.
LEONARD: I wanted to ask you: I noticed
in your new book, "Night Train, " which is first person, there are several
third-person lines in it.
AMIS: Oh? You better point them out to
me.
LEONARD: There's one in one of the first
paragraphs.
AMIS: A third-person line?
LEONARD: Uh-huh. She da-da-da-duh.
AMIS: (pause) Not that I recall. I'm sure
I would have caught that. Anyway, we'll sort this out afterward.
LEONARD: I'm surprised. I thought you did
it on purpose and it was OK.
AMIS: I better take another look at that
and change it for the paperback perhaps.
Before we end, I'd just like to ask you about why you keep writing. I just read my
father's collected letters, which are going to be published in a year or two. It was with
some dread that I realized that the writer's life never pauses. You can never sit back and
rest on what you've done. You are driven on remorselessly by something, whether it's
dedication or desire to defeat time. What is it that drives you? Is it just pure enjoyment
that makes you settle down every morning to carry out this other life that you live?
LEONARD: It's the most satisfying thing I
can imagine doing. To write that scene and then read it and it works. I love the sound of
it. There's nothing better than that. The notoriety that comes later doesn't compare to
the doing of it. I've been doing it for almost 47 years, and I'm still trying to make it
better. Even though I know my limitations; I know what I can't do. I know that if I tried
to write, say, as an omniscient author, it would be so mediocre. You can do more forms of
writing than I can, including essays. My essay would sound, at best, like a college paper.
AMIS: Well: why isn't there
a MARTIN AMIS Day? Because Jan. 16, 1998, was Elmore Leonard Day in the state of Michigan,
and it seems that here, in Los Angeles, it's been Elmore Leonard Day for the last decade.
