A Conversation with Charles Baxter

Figure 1.

photo provided by Random House

Charles Baxter is the author of four short-story collections, three collections of poetry, two essay collections (Burning Down the House and The Art of Subtext), and five novels, including Saul and Patsy, The Feast of Love and, most recently, The Soul Thief. His accolades include a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grants and finalist status for the 2000 National Book Award for The Feast of Love. A dedicated teacher, Baxter is the Edelstein-Keller Professor of creative writing at the University of Minnesota. He sat down October 29, 2007 at the Galloway Mansion in Memphis to discuss the changing nature of craft and the state of story.

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Interviewer: What inspired you to write The Soul Thief?

Baxter: The novel is about identity theft, a subject I've been thinking about for twenty-five years. Someone once tried to become me, and I wanted to write about it.

Interviewer: Why did it take so long for you to tell the story?

Baxter: Disbelief. Why would anyone want my life? Besides, you can't take actual people whom you've known and move them wholesale into a story. It won't work. You need to figure out the variations, figure out where the art is. I couldn't use exactly what happened because it would be both flat and implausible. What I was after was the way someone latches on to you and takes something from you that is unsolid, something that melts into air. Still, it's a 100 percent American story, the hijacking of an identity. Our country is full of con artists, after all. It took me twenty-five years to figure out how to structure this book and how to write the ending so that I wasn't cheating.

Interviewer: Who was the figure this story was based on?

Baxter: He has a reputation of sorts now, but he's really not the center of the story anymore. I took it away from him. Some religions speak of "hungry ghosts." The slipperiness of identity was a great subject for the Romantics; Melville, Dostoyevsky, and, in a very different way, Patricia Highsmith have all been concerned with it. Nigel Dennis wrote a wonderful novel called Cards of Identity. Poe and Coleridge wrote about it. Do you know that great poem "Lamia"? Or "Christabel"? Identity theft is about more than someone stealing your Visa card, believe me. It's soul thievery; your soul gets eaten.

Interviewer: Coolberg in The Soul Thief and Xavier in "Xavier Speaking" both have similar levels of charisma. Is this charisma one of your fascinations? Where does that come from?

Baxter: You should read Philip Rieff's book about charisma, published this year. He traces charisma back to the revelation of Christ's divinity, the divine aura and the subsequent misuse of the aura in the modern age. The aura—we all know this—becomes merchandized, commercialized. Charisma gets attached to such people as movie stars and politicians. When I was younger, I wrote a story, "Xavier Speaking" where the title character possessed a kind of evil charm. These days, evil charm is ubiquitous. Charm is spell-casting. The charismatic gets people to do what he wants them to do. Think of Ahab or Gatsby.

Does that kind of charm still exist? Just look at our current political setup. Our country lies in ruins, thanks in part to charisma. I'm curious about characters who cast a spell over other people and how they go about it. It's all about manipulation, isn't it? I've written intermittently about it all my adult life. It isn't just personal. It's political. How do people get themselves elected? Why do we have the mostly awful legislators we have? People tore off Robert Kennedy's shoes from his feet. The anarchic power of charisma constitutes a large part of American life.

Interviewer: Could you talk about verb tense and the structure of The Soul Thief?

Baxter: I wrote...