An Interview with Bernie

When did you start reading, and what did you like to read as a kid?

Comic books. I grew up in the fifties in a small Lowcountry town, and I loved all the “superhero” comic books, since naturally my plans were to become one myself. Also Westerns: the Cisco Kid, Red Ryder, Kid Colt, Outlaw. I also wouldn't have minded being Wyatt Earp or Doc Holiday or Lash Larue or Hopalong Cassidy or Gene Autrey or Roy Rogers. I wasn't all that particular. Why should I have been? They were basically all the same characters, with great horses like Trigger and Thunder and interesting sidekicks like Little Beaver and Pancho. Most of my buddies had siblings like I did. Our older brothers would play Thunder and Lightening so they could throw us off and stomp on us and our younger ones we made our sidekicks so they’d worship us and we could tell them what to do. As far as superheroes went, I suppose I did have two preferences: I liked it that Superman could fly and that Aquaman wore green.

Later I moved onto Hardy Boys mysteries and sports books like Fear Strikes Out and The Boy Who Batted 1000. Books inspired my athletic, social and imaginative life, and vice-versa.

By the time I got to high school I fell in love with the stories and paperback novels in my literature classes, particularly the Romantics (Robert Nathan's A Portrait of Jenny, the Bronte sisters, Daphne De Maurier). Poe thrilled me and Coleridge danced in my head. It was odd: Lost academically in school—bored out of my mind—I was lost also in the worlds of stories and novels and poetry, so much so that at times I felt guilty, a bit like I felt after masterbating, because I wasn’t learning, i. e., “working”, “preparing myself for college”. Reading couldn’t have been “learning” because reading was pleasurable; “learning” was schoolwork, unadulterated drudgery, or so my school had taught me over the years. Would I end up The Prisoner of Zenda? I could only hope.

When you were growing up did you have books in your home?

Yes, some, but imaginative play, if not inspired by them, superceded them. Later, when I did poorly in school, which I did all the time, like failing history or science, my mother would supplement my homework, which I lied to her about not having, by having me read from the encyclopedia, since knowing me so well she knew I was lying. From reading the encyclopedia, there is no question, I learned. What did I learn? I learned that facts, by and large, were boring. Even now purely dry, factual books bore me. Now that’s a fact, but I don’t think it’s dry, because it’s personal which to me, makes all the difference in the world. I hated school because it was impersonal. I loved reading poetry and stories because they did seem to me personal. Like lies, they need not be factual or dry, and in retrospect, enhanced the quality of my own.

Thus did imaginative play follow me into adolescence and adulthood.

When did you think about becoming a writer? Was there someone who got you interested in writing?

I was always good in one subject: English. Like I said, I just about failed everything else. I suppose I was what you might call an “F” student. The steady, monotonous drone of The Teacher’s Voice, to this day brings up nightmarish flashbacks of my high school days of interminable boredom and ennui, reducing me to a comatose state that can last for days, weeks, months, years. For all I know, I’m still in one. How would you know otherwise? Such are the effects of P. T. S. D. on veterans, those who fought on the front rows, of American education.

Nevertheless, I did like the stories in Literature classes and I wrote well. Whenever I displayed emotion, however, in my writing, I felt, once again, like I felt after masterbating. This was the fifties and early sixties, and back then emotions in boys, certainly in school, was anti-intellectual and sissified. While I pushed hard for anti-intellectualism since I was a dumbass anyway, I certainly didn’t want to be a sissy. Hell no. So the sneers and guffaws which greeted my grandiose displays of passion in my writing, emotion which was schmaltzy as hell anyway, and consequently of no threat or import to anyone, including myself, stifled subsequent attempts. Until, that is, I met and befriended in high school a young man even more schmaltzy, self-righteous and full of shit than myself: the novelist Pat Conroy and later my wife, the psychologist Martha Schein.

Boy, is Pat crazy. What we were missing, he finally discovered, was TRUE emotion. That, he said, is why we always sounded like idiots. We fly blindly, unruddered by Truth. Me too? I asked. Definitely, he said. You more than me. We both took a long, hard look at ourselves, plunging headlong into the depths. Our conclusions: Pat hated what he saw, and is still clawing his way out of the abyss with each desperate novel he writes. I loved what I saw, thought he had a delightful idea, and am still looking for my first novel. Pat was all instinct. Academia was something to be swatted away like a gnat. Global abstractions sent him into a soporific state. If it wasn’t personal, he wasn’t interested. Everything was subjective.

From Pat, I learned that I was.

And from my wife Martha, as well as from the kids I taught, I learned that whatever wisdom I might have—the great themes of literature and art, the history of the world—were inside me, inside all of us. The world might bring them out, but they were inspired from within.

When I worked at an educational think tank in the early seventies, my boss, a politician on the make disguised as an educator, hired a guy to train teachers whose sole qualification was that he was the governor’s nephew. It undermined everything we were trying to do in education in the state. I was furious, and at home I couldn’t stop talking about it. Finally, my wife, bored silly, told me to write a poem about it. I’d never written a poem, I whined. It’ll write itself, she said, it’s inside you. Where? I asked. Where your anger is, she said.

It was. I’ve been hooked on writing ever since. And it was all because of one line, the last line of the poem. In the poem I charge into his office, rant, rave, hurl priceless objects (those are the best kind) about the room, call him a treasonous jerk, which he was. And you know what he does? He leans back in his swivel chair, his feet propped up on his desk, lights up a Pall Mall, inhales exquisitely, then “issues a thin line of smoke like a silent directive.”

Martha was right. Where in hell did that line come from? Rant and rave all you want, then shut the hell up.

Anger, frustration, betrayal produced poetry?

To this novice, that was—and still is—something.

How do you write? Do you have a daily routine? What's good about it? What do you hate about it?

What I love is when the story takes over and writes itself and I’m totally surrendering to the characters and all control is given up. It’s like great sex, in that way. Total trust in a higher power, something bigger than me, something more profound, more comical perhaps, and more beautiful. Whether fiction or nonfiction, I write first to discover, and second, to share. To discover and share what? Simple wisdom, a good story something that might help someone.

Also, I love rewriting, because then I get to to play with language, and that to me is like making music.

If I’m lost in my writing, in what basketball players call “the zone”, it’s because the inspiraton is there. When it isn’t, it’s usually because there’s a voice I’m wary of hearing, an emotion I’m wary of feeling. I can’t force it: in writing that’s the law of diminishing returns; I have to do something else entirely and wait for whatever truth I’m keeping at bay to reveal itself. Still, when I’m working on a story or book, I do have a daily routine, and try to write seven hours a day. Actually, that’s no true anymore. Probably about four or five hours a day since I’ve gotten a bit older. A regular schedule, I think, is important. Inspiration, like Chance, favors the prepared—or at least the ready--mind.

Any particular story to tell concerning the writing of this book?

It was rejected by every publisher in New York, on just about every continent, and by 99.9% of those in North America. It was getting to the point where I thought my best shot might be publishers in non-english-speaking countries. Pluto and Saturn beamed rejections from outer space. They followed me everywhere.

Initially, I was flattered, because praise for it was great and universal. Editors wrote that they couldn’t put it down, that it was remarkable, that it could change the world, that Yours Truly was a genius, which naturally I agreed with…so, why didn’t they publish it?

I wasn’t a celebrity.

Such is the state of our culture. It’s like middle school: if you’re not in the “popular” group…

Here’s another story…

A slander case in which one girl files charges (in our class government and court system) against another for telling classmates she wore a padded bra runs thru IF HOLDEN CAULFIELD WERE IN MY CLASSROOM. At a recent gathering of alumni, now grown, one of them brought up the case, which was generally referred to as “The Case of the Padded Bra”. “Oh, I remember that,” said one former student. “Weren’t we awful?” “Yeah,” chimed in another, “but wasn’t it fun being awful?” Still another: “Asher was hilarious.” “Asher? I don’t remember him.” Others jumped in. “Are you talking about ‘the Case of the Padded Bra’?” “Yeah, you remember..” “How could I forget? Faye presented a hell of a case.” “Faye? Faye’s five years ahead of me.” Without going into detail, each of these alumni remembered different plaintiffs, defendants, witnesses, etc, which was only natural, since they represented different generations of classes. What I couldn’t help but register, however, was how often “The Case of the Padded Bra” came up over the years. Apparently some things, in the lives of pre-and early teens, never change. But Breast Envy?

What some good advice that you've received concerning writing? What's some advice that you could offer young writers?

Your genuine feelings, no m ore easily arrived at than the solution to a complex algebra problem, is the source of your inspiration and material and style. Be only yourself. Let your imagination take wing and fly. It’ll take you places, as will your memory, once unearthed and unraveled, you’ve never been before. Don't imitate. Don't fake it. Don't write just to get published, or you won’t be. Write only because you need to, not necessarily because you want to.

What to write? Pat’s answer: write what”pushes’, what’s working to come out. One more thing: the more your characters other than yourself come out, the more you will. Be generous: learn from them; give them the last word.

How did you find the publisher for this book? What has you experience as a publisher been like?

John Holt's HOW CHILDREN FAIL is the best, most original work in education I’ve ever read. I saw that Sentient Publications published his works. So I contacted the publisher, Connie Shaw. She’s the best. I’m her favorite author because I’m funny.

What are you working on at the moment?

This interview. Plus, I’ve recently completed a multigenerational novel about the interrelationships of three families—one military, one Black, and one multicultural--in the Lowcountry of South Carolina.

What are you reading?

What am I wearing? Oh, I'm sorry, what am I reading at this moment? The manuscript of Pat's new novel, which is nothing short of great, Seldon Edward's The Little Book, in galley form, which is simply magical and pure wizardry, and Jonathan Saffron Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a book which introduces me to an unbelievably poetic and imaginative writer, a true original, who I think could end up one of the greatest writers of our time. Like Pat’s, his work is so much larger than life. I also return to poetry—the classics mostly—which I read daily and which I can’t seem to get enough of. Most modern poetry, like much modern fiction, leaves me wanting. The Minimalists seem to me, well, minimal. I prefer passion and depth and scope, great tragedy and great humor. Have a nice day! Buy my book!!!