Conversations with Andre Dubus

An Interview with Andre Dubus

107 An Interview with Andre Dubus Stacey A. Chase / 1989 Puerto Del Sol 25 (summer 1990): 108–19. reprinted in Leap of the Heart: Andre Dubus Talking . ed. ross gresham. new orleans: Xavier review Press, 2003. 154–65. reprinted with the permission of Puerto Del Sol. When Andre Dubus and I first met, he gave me three words of advice: Piss on it. The “it” was anything that prevented me from writing—bills, errands, my job; all the annoyances of daily living I complained got in my way. Piss on it—that was Dubus’s encouragement to me. Or, rather, Piss on it was Dubus venting his own frustrations in the form of counsel to a younger writer. We met in December 1986—only five months after Dubus’s left leg was amputated at the knee, and his right leg crushed into uselessness, when he was accidentally run down by a car while assisting two motorists stranded on Massachusetts Interstate-93. (One of the motorists was killed by the car.) Daily living was all Dubus could manage then. And even that was difficult. Two years later, in January 1989, Dubus was missing his family more than his legs. He seemed, in fact, to have traded one tragedy for another or to have combined them into a conglomerate tragedy. But, this time, the thickchested , salty-tongued Southerner and his hard luck looked to be an even match. “If it weren’t for prayer, I’d be fucked,” Dubus said when we met the second time, after his third marriage broke up. “Sometimes I can get the focus that, actually, I’ve got things better than most people in the world. I mean, how many million people would swap places with me, right now, to have this house, with their children and medical care and food and all that? “When you grow up with the Passion of Christ as an example, I mean, you know at least there’s a membership of suffering. And you can get the focus that you’re not the only one in the world who’s got things tough.” 108 conversations with andre dubus But sometimes Dubus (pronounced to rhyme with abuse) loses that focus . “Life’s hard when you’ve got two legs, when things are normally bad,” Dubus also said. “Take away the legs and the kids and there are some days I need to talk to myself a lot to make myself eat.” But the important thing is, the talk works. The talks Dubus has with himself and the ones he has with his God, as was taught him in Christian Brothers Catholic and schools in his native Louisiana. Prayer, and the discipline he learned as a Marine more than twenty-five years ago, have helped Dubus stave off the misery still threatening to consume him. Two recent literary awards have also helped by allaying Dubus’s financial woes. In May 1988, the fifty-two-year-old author received the Jean Stein Award, and its accompanying $5,000 stipend, from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Two months later, he was the recipient of the grandest of grants: a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. “I had insomnia and loose bowels for about three days [after notification],” Dubus said. “I just felt incredibly blessed.” Dubus used the first $1,900 of the $310,000 MacArthur money he’ll receive over five years to buy a state-of-the-art wheelchair, with the brand name Quickie. “All my gimp friends said, ‘You gotta get a Quickie,’” said Dubus , darting his eyes to see if I caught the sexual innuendo. Ironically, Dubus’s injury set off an avalanche of attention that was never his when he was a writer with, what he’s now fond of calling, the “biped advantage .” In February and March 1987, a group of fellow writers led by John Irving teamed up for a series of benefit readings in Cambridge, Massachusetts , to help defray Dubus’s mounting medical bills. They raised $86,000. They also raised public interest in Dubus, already then the author of seven original short-story collections or novellas, six of them brought out by David R. Godine Publisher, Inc. of Boston. Selected Stories, a compilation of twenty stories from Dubus’s six other Godine books, plus two stories never published in book form, made its debut in November 1988. “We wanted to keep him in the public eye while he’s writing slower,” explained Godine publicity director Clare...