An Interview with Tom McGuane

AN INTERVIEW WITH TOM MCGUANE Tom McGuane Photo by Paul Dix Tom McGuane, is the author of several novels including Ninety-Two in the Shade, Panama, Nobody's Angel, and The Bushwacked Piano. He currently lives on a horse farm in Montana where this interview was conducted by Kay Bonetti for the American Audio Prose Library Series. An Interview with Tom McGuane / Kay Bonetti Interviewer: Can you tell us a little about your life and upbringing? McGuane: I was raised in the middle west, in Michigan, but my parents were both Boston area Irish. Except when we were in school, we were always back there in Massachusetts in the big kind of noisy, Irish households of the 40s and 50s. My parents were upward-striving, lower middle class people who had a facility for English. They both were English majors in college. My father was a scholarship student at Harvard; my mother went to a little school called Regis. Books and talk and language in general were a big part of growing up for me. My family was not excited about me wanting to be a writer; they thought that was very unrealistic. Interviewer: It is difficult to support yourself as a serious writer. McGuane: I think any writer, even an unserious writer, has a bad time of it; a pulp writer or a sold-out writer or a hack has a hard time making a living. To understand the economics of writing is to know that writing and publishing and acquiring some kind of esteem in your community of peers is merely a key to your finances. For example, prestigious writers whose reputations are confined to the literary all live pretty well. They are getting grants, and teaching jobs. I would say the people I've seen who teach writing are underworked. Other writers, like me, have been able to find work in film or journalism. There's always a way to get along. I think it's inevitable for writers to sort of feel sorry for themselves and to feel sorrier the more serious they perceive themselves to be. Interviewer: In the introduction to last year's summer fiction edition of Esquire, Rust Hills claimed that the academy has become the patronage system for writers . . . and was defending it, moreover. What did you think of that? McGuane: I thought it was silly. I think patronage, especially homogenous patronage of the kind that academic writers receive, is exceedingly dangerous and leads to trafficking in reputations. The Missouri Review · 75 Interviewer: What do you mean by homogenous? McGuane: The colleges are, to a great degree, alike in their form of protection. I think it's good for writers to be in the world, not talking to the converted in English departments day after day—scrambling for survival, having to talk to illiterate neighbors. Obviously mine is a minority voice; this point of view is going to lose. The camp that Rust Hills describes is obviously the camp of sweeping victory. Interviewer: Because the writers who teach are living pretty well . . . financially? McGuane: When I've been on campus I notice that everybody seems to be getting along better than ranchers in Montana are. There is great security there, the kind of security that the civil service or the post office provides, and it goes hand in hand with complacency. Interviewer: I take it you feel that this situation has a measurable impact on the kind of writing that is being done. McGuane: Well, you get these books like the latest Alison Lurie book that is built around sabbaticals. I think John Barth has suffered from being around colleges. To me the most interesting work that Barth did was the earliest work, before he knew what was going to happen to him—the Floating Opera and The End ofthe Road—books which I think he now kind of repudiates. His stuff lately has been less lifelike, less exciting. Interviewer: So you disagree with Hills' notion. McGuane: I think Rust Hills needed to make a case for the situation now and I think that he felt he needed to overstate it. I think Rust and Esquire are excited about making categories, the...