Conversations with Andre Dubus

Andre Dubus

133 Andre Dubus Eleanor Wachtel / 1991 in Writers & Company. san diego: harcourt brace & company, 1993, 125–37. interview prepared in collaboration with lisa godfrey. reprinted with the permission of eleanor wachtel. In one of Andre Dubus’s short stories, a mother tells her son, “We don’t have to live great lives, we just have to understand and survive the ones we’ve got.” Pain, vulnerability, and hard-won strength are the veins that run just below the surface of Dubus’s fiction, set in the blue-collar world of waitresses and bartenders, mechanics, and laborers. Infused with compassion, his stories and novellas revolve around relationships between men and women, the Catholic faith, and the loss of permanence. After eight books of fiction, including Adultery and Other Choices (1977), Voices from the Moon (1984), and The Last Worthless Evening (1986), Andre Dubus published his first work of nonfiction, Broken Vessels (1991), a collection of personal essays which is in part about the tragedy that devastated his own life. In the early hours of July 23, 1986, he stopped on the highway to help a stranded motorist, and while flagging down an oncoming car he was hit. Dubus lost one leg and the use of the other, and underwent twelve operations and years of pain and therapy. Then his third wife left him, taking with her their two small daughters. For a while Dubus couldn’t write at all. Finally, he began to write about what had happened, and this became the title piece in Broken Vessels. Here is a man determined to be honest, even when overcome with confusion and despair. Andre Dubus became a MacArthur Fellow (the “genius” award—more than $300,000 over five years, no strings attached) in 1988. He is much admired by other writers and critics. Ellen Lesser, in the Village Voice, wrote that Dubus’s stories “cut deep enough to leave you weeping or gasping for 134 conversations with andre dubus air.” Short-story aficionados always include Dubus in their ten best American writers lists. Dubus was born in Louisiana in 1936 and still has a slight Cajun accent underneath his New England speech. I spoke to him from his home in Haverhill, Massachusetts, just north of Boston. WACHTEL: The American writer Tobias Wolff, in his introduction to your book Broken Vessels, writes that the real possibility of the personal essay is to catch oneself in the act of being human. What does that mean for you? DUBUS: In a personal essay you are writing about yourself and trying to find, not the whole truth, but a truth. Then you learn that truth is something that was happening in your own life. Certainly, in some of these things I wrote, I actually caught myself, as he says, in the act of being human. WACHTEL: Being human seems to me to mean admitting to all sorts of doubts and weaknesses and needs, and not hiding behind the authorial mask of fiction. DUBUS: That’s true. A book of essays, for me, is a very different experience from a book of fiction, because in fiction I’ve always been able to say, “Oh well, that’s what she said in the story, but that has nothing to do with me.” In an essay I can’t say that because there I am. WACHTEL: The personal essay by its very nature makes us feel that we know you, that we know about your life and who you are, but of course even the confessional form is a kind of construct. Were you conscious as you were writing of the kind of persona you wanted to create in this book? DUBUS: No, I wasn’t. Writing is a very strange process: everything you’re talking about is happening while the act of writing is going on. While I’m writing—that’s when I face the exposure, that’s when the right word comes, or the temptation to use the wrong word and duck out, the temptation to skip something. That’s when I always have to bear down and try to write as closely to what is the truth as I can feel with my senses and with my heart. After that’s done and typed up and sent off it begins to feel less like me and more like something I wrote. Does that make sense? WACHTEL: Yes. You often write about what it means to be a man, about masculine values and image. You grew...