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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press
I got to know Stephen Wright twenty-some years ago when both of us lived in Iowa City and Gravity's Rainbow was the biggest thing since Moby-Dick. Wright was in the Workshop, writing a novel with the working title "Gooks," and I was writing my dissertation--on Pynchon. I don't know that we saw each other that often, but when we did, GR was usually the topic, some passage to roar about, some arcana to explore, or some piercing subversion to admire in the idiom of the post-Nixon days. Wright went on to publish "Gooks" as Meditations in Green (Scribner's, 1983), then a second novel, M31: A Family Romance (HarmonyCrown, 1988). Both books earned positive--in places, glowing--critical notice. His most recent novel is Going Native (Farrar, 1994), a book admired by reviewers for its "absolutely maximalist prose," which the Village Voice described as "dark and rapturous neon reflections of the society of spectacle," at once "hilarious" and "mordant." Giving the book a tradition, Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times praised Going Native as "an uncompromising 1990's version of On the Road that gives us an alarming picture of a country pitched on the edge of an emotional and social abyss."
For several years, Wright has taught at Princeton, and he is now living in New York City. In February 1996, Stephen Wright was a keynote speaker for the Twentieth-Century Literature Conference held every year on the campus of the University of Louisville. When Tom Byers on the faculty at Louisville and Pat O'Donnell (then) of Purdue suggested we interview Wright for Contemporary Literature, I saw the opportunity to check on my memories of Wright's scathing laughter, his volubility and fevered imagination. I remembered thinking years back that there was something gothic--unhealthy, at least for one's own health--about seeing so clearly and without respite the failings of one's culture.
Over the interval of time, the most noticeable fact about Wright was his becoming a published writer, a man with talent who had demonstrated his ability to give his vision form and structure--but at a cost. The coruscating humor is still there, and his sense of a nation too "gutless" to admit its failures, but Wright's manner is also that of a man made wise by the struggle to find language adequate to his obsessions. Our interview with Wright took place in the Brown Hotel, in downtown Louisville.
Q. How long were you in Vietnam?
A. The normal tour of one year. Unless you were someone who wanted to get his ticket punched several times, everybody was there one year. Then you could volunteer for more if you wanted to, and there were some people who did that. I didn't have a very bad time of it, though. I mean, I'm really very, very fortunate that I did not have to spend the rest of my life being a Vietnam veteran, because there are way too many people doing that. That's their life. From the moment they got sucked into that, that has been their whole life. And it is so pathetic and depressing. There are still guys living out in trees, in California--
Q. Gone native.
A. --and in upstate New York, who just can't deal with anything.
Q. You were in special services.
A. Yes. I was in intelligence. I got drafted, so it's just two years. And what they do is they immediately try to get you to sign up for another year, so you would be what was called the regular army--you'd be an enlisted person then. I got inducted out of Illinois, so I went through Chicago and then was flown to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, which I think is right on the border between Kentucky and Tennessee. They put you down there, and you have a first week--I think it was called "reception" or something like that--where you're still in civilian clothes, and you're being processed, tested, given shots. The army tests to see what you'd be good at, issues uniforms--stuff like that. That goes on for four or five days. So you're in these barracks--I'll remember it as long as I live. You'd sit out there in the morning, and everyone is still kind of in an easygoing mood, because you're in it, but you're not really in it yet. And all the sergeants who are in charge don't give a shit. They've all been to Vietnam, come back, and been given this dick job, just hanging out and dealing with the inductees. Of course, what they all loved to do was to start talking about Vietnam or pull off their shirts and show huge scars--the raised flesh from the wounds. They were all having a pretty good time, and it wasn't that bad a time, but you knew that this was going to end in five or six days, and then it was up the road to where basic training really was.
In the morning we would see inductees coming down from basic training, marching down the road past us and going out to the rifle ranges, all in uniform and all carrying guns. I remember sitting out there on those steps, and, you know, I didn't consider myself necessarily a stupid person. I mean, I knew what was going on. I had watched numerous accounts of this war on television. And so you think you know the reality; you think you understand. But no. Even watching on television is still--this is really a kind of revelation I had about levels of reality. Intellectually, you know it. You think you understand it. This war is awful; it's being prosecuted for terrible reasons; people are getting hurt and killed. You know all that. But those are just words. When you are sitting down there at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, about to be sucked into the reality beyond the words, it's a whole different matter. Things start going by, and you start thinking, "Those are real guns." It's no longer a TV image--it's no longer something being put on to amaze, horrify, and ultimately entertain you--because even the horror is entertaining, which is something that I don't think is acknowledged enough. Everything that's put on TV is for entertainment purposes, no matter how horrible it is--car crashes, whatever.
At Fort Campbell, the entertainment value had completely fallen out of it, now that we were no longer dealing with the imagery but with the real thing. It was a mind-opener--that there was a false bottom to understanding this whole situation, and the false bottom had dropped out. I started apprehending on a primal level the true reality of all of this: that you could conceivably really get killed, and that death is really real, and that you're really dead. So I started becoming a little more amenable to hearing the army's suggestions for getting out of it. What they do is take you in a big group, put you in a huge lecture hall, and start talking about all of the wonderful opportunities the military offers you. You know, chances for education, et cetera. And of course half of us are just laughing. All this stuff you can learn, like being a helicopter door gunner, and you can take that back with you to civilian life and have a nice career. This is the stuff they were selling. They had a Green Beret come in and try to talk people into volunteering for that. And finally one guy who was kind of interested in it said, "What did you do in the Green Berets?" And this guy said, "Well, six months ago to the day I was fifty yards from a North Vietnamese Army headquarters in Laos. You know, hiding in the bushes observing this NVA battalion headquarters." The guy says, "Oh, thanks a lot," his interest completely demolished. "I don't want to hear any more about the Green Berets."
Q. But they have nice hats.
A. That's right. And they walk around with a very straight carriage, and they look...
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