Conversations with Andre Dubus

Interview with Andre Dubus

63 Interview with Andre Dubus Robert Dahlin / 1984 Publishers Weekly 12 october 1984: 56–57. reprinted in Leap of the Heart: Andre Dubus Talking . ed. ross gresham. new orleans: Xavier review Press, 2003. 72–78. reprinted with the permission of Publishers Weekly. When Andre Dubus laughs, the sound comes from the back of his mouth, not from his bearded throat or his rounded belly. A self-consciousness sounds in this rather shallow bark of amusement, and an edge of wariness shows in his eyes. It’s not that Dubus is shy, far from it. He is happily loquacious and confidently tosses writers’ names from Cyril Connelly to Tolstoy into the conversation, stirring them into a verbal bouillabaisse of literary allusions. It’s simply that Dubus seems more at ease with talking than listening , and sometimes he’d rather not be interrupted. He teaches four classes in writing and literature at Bradford College in Bradford, Massachusetts, and his own accomplishments are a string of short stories and novellas lauded, sometimes lionized, in a growing number of publications—the New Yorker, Harper’s, Playboy, and more. In these stories, Dubus writes of the everyday folks with whom most of us are acquainted. Sometimes they even seem to have parts of ourselves within them. His characters are frequently undone by the complexities and pitfalls that can put satisfactory male-female relationships out of reach, and the pursuit of these unions sometimes leads his people down twisting paths that offer sidetrips into adultery and violence. The two latest books treading into this sensitive territory under Dubus’s name are We Don’t Live Here Anymore, published in July by Crown, four novellas previously contained within other collections of his work by David R. Godine; and Voices from the Moon, a longish novella (or a shortish novel) published this month by Godine. In writing and in speech, Dubus has a flavorful vocabulary, and some of the words he uses don’t ordinarily find their way into the pages of such mag- 64 conversations with andre dubus azines as Publishers Weekly. He dresses in an assertively masculine fashion: jeans and a Western-inspired blue shirt, white snaps down the shirt front and on pocket flaps, its sleeves rolled up. He is rarely without a cigarette. Dubus is that sort of manly figure that baldly emphasizes a tough gender, but he confounds expectations by using salty language to muse on the troubling puzzles in the man-woman bonds that he portrays so movingly in his stories. Born in 1936, Dubus grew up in Louisiana and attended McNeese State in Lake Charles, studying journalism until he realized that he was writing backward, starting with the most dramatic aspect of a story and then shoring that up with background. He switched to English, where he learned vital facts like “Lord Byron had a club foot and all that kind of crap.” Matter-of-factly Dubus says, “I’d been a sissy all my life. I never played any sports. and I didn’t have any self-confidence.” He joined ROTC and after college went into the Marines. “Man, in those days, it was the normal thing to do, and a lot of people in my generation did it. I wanted to feel like a man, and they do make a man out of you. They make you confident. You meet a lot of English majors in the Marines wanting the same thing.” To Dubus, the marine experience is translatable to the young civilians in his charge today. There’s something in the acquisition of self-esteem that he is impelled to pass on to his students. “You’ve got to unteach them many things,” he says. “I think a lot of English teachers don’t teach well. They teach literature as if it’s a thing to acquire. They go a little crazy symbol hunting. I don’t let my students say symbol. I tell them, ‘Say dramatic statement of theme.’ “Maybe it’s because English teachers sometimes feel that their work is not enough, that they have to put their personal stamp on what they’re teaching, like a jazz musician playing with a melody. To me, the most important task is to get students confident enough to follow their own instincts. Their instincts are usually right. They’re usually afraid to articulate what they think, so they tell you what they think you want and give you a lot of bullshit.” The last noun is one fundament...