Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife
Author Interview

On Firmin: Sam Savage in conversation with William Baldwin

Q: You preface the novel with the Tao-master Chuang Tzu's parable: A man wakes from dreaming that he's a butterfly. But perhaps he's a butterfly dreaming that he's a man. Why not a butterfly or at least some animal with a bit more poetry in its nature? Why a rat as a protagonist?

A: I didn't set out with that idea. I had written the first few pages of the novel, pretty much as they stand today, I had the complete feeling of the voice before I realized that it was the voice of a rat. You could say I knew who Firmin was before I knew what he was.

            That said, I can see in retrospect all sort of reasons. Firmin is in every respect a human except for his outward form, his diet, and his very short life span. And oh yes, the fact that he cannot speak words, he can only think them. In the figure of this rat-man or man-rat we encounter the ultimate outsider, despised and reviled by nearly every member of the human species to which spiritually he belongs. Not a butterfly, in no way a butterfly.

            A curious thing happens when we endow animals with human traits, whether dancing dogs in tutus or monkeys in little jackets. They become parodies, not ridiculous animals so much as ridiculous humans. Imagine Firmin as a man—still vain, self-centered, self-loathing, hysterical, romantic, lonely, and grandiose—and we have an all-too-human figure. But give those traits to a rat and we have a parody of that figure. Firmin can deliver the most heartbreaking statements, and because he is a rat, they become simultaneously heartbreaking and ludicrous. If the novel succeeds it is because it works within the absurd intersection of tragedy and farce. Firmin's tragic story is farcical. His farcical story is tragic. And the truly terrible and funny thing is that he knows this to be the case.

Q: There's something so frantic about Firmin's attachments to this world, something so very ratlike. If he has to be a rat, why couldn't he have been a more philosophical rat? You have a degree in philosophy. Didn't they teach you detachment at Yale?

A: Well, whatever they taught me at Yale, I can assure you it was not detachment.

            Firmin is attached to the world, but it is often to a world that exists only in his imagination, in books and daydreams. What we call the “real world” is more a subject of terror for him than of longing, with the exception of the Lovelies. His ratlike attachments are, alas, only too human. And sure, you are right: if he could have been satisfied with some stale bread and beer, like the other rats, he would have been a happier creature, as no doubt would we.

            But this is a rat who in his daydreams imagines he is Fred Astaire, who sits at a toy piano and plays Gershwin and Porter, or so he thinks, who has spent much of his life roaming a bookstore as if wandering in paradise, and who, finally, has many months' companionship with Jerry Magoon, the smartest man in the world. Not so bad, as attachments go.

Q: The novel doesn't back away from the big ones: Life, Love, and Death—but your main points of reference are the other Big Ones, the Canon with a big C, the literature that our generation was instructed to revere (and with good reason?). And yet there's such an aloneness to this novel. Does Firmin choose to read because he is alone or is he alone because he chooses to read?

A: You and I belong to the last generation raised on the Canon. We knew what the great books were, and how they stood to each other. Did we have reason to revere them? I think so. Were some Big Ones left out of the Canon? Certainly. But it is the case that some books are incomparably better than others, and a few are better than almost all others. It is an interesting question as to which comes first, Firmin's aloneness or his becoming a reader. He begins to read because he is lonely, and he is lonely because he is puny and shunted from his family, a minor freak from the get-go. As he reads he becomes at once less lonely (he has the companionship of books) and more alone (he grows more human and therefore more freakish and more conscious of his solitude).

Q: When you write, “I must constantly remind myself, sometimes by means of a rap on the head, that Eisenhower is real while Oliver Twist is not,” you have touched on a problem central to modern fiction. Is reality actually becoming more outlandish, or is that just us?

A: Reality, I think, is not an unquestioned given. It only seemed to be such during a rather brief period of modern history. Few of us now believe that we can apprehend something called reality without the mediation of any preexisting frameworks or prejudices. Certainly the sciences, the great arbiters of what counts as real, do not believe this. And what is true of the “reality” of the world is true of other people as well. We never “know” another person as a kind of irreducible fact: we create them out of the slimmest of evidence, out of words and actions that we gather into a shape which we call their personality. But this personality is something that we have at least in part invented for them. And the same holds true of our own personality—or should I say personalities?—pseudo-fictions created through a kind of covert conspiracy between ourselves and others. As a consequence it does not seem possible to draw a hard distinction between the “characters” in a novel and the “characters” in our lives, whether public figures or intimates.

Q: And while I'm there, Is Dickens a writer of the first rank? A Big One? Instead of beginning “This is the saddest story I've ever heard,” why couldn't you have begun with “Will I be the hero of my own life?”

A: Dickens is definitely a Big One, and your suggestion is interestingly appropriate. Firmin is faced with what he can only regard as an utterly meaningless life. Many of us are these days, to the point that despair has become a marketable cliché. But this was not always the case. At one time most people lived inside an overarching myth, a story, a novel as big as the world. Christianity was once such a novel, and every person had a part to play in it, however minor. The revolutionary movement of the past two centuries was such a story and actions within it seemed significant, whether distributing leaflets in New York or falling on the barricades in Chile. Stories are more powerful than nations. In fact they are the creators of nations, which don't perish until their story dies, is forgotten, or grows incomprehensible. If the Jews have survived for so long against so much it is because of the greatness of their stories.

            Firmin is aware of the relation between a meaningful life and some sort of encompassing narrative. We see this in his mention of Lenny in Of Mice and Men, in his assertion that apart from a story, a life like Lenny's, whose only real happiness is to dream of a rabbit farm he will never see and who dies as a consequence of a senseless murder he didn't even know he had committed, would be the epitome of meaninglessness, a blank absurdity, but in the novel, as a character, he acquires a place and a reference. He is given meaning. Very early on in my own life I came to see literature as a transfiguring power, able to endow lives with significance, able to rescue us from silence, and at the same time I saw it as a betrayal, as a disfiguring force in that it left the meaningless out precisely because it did transform it into something meaningful. I think some modern fiction from Beckett on, writers as diverse as Günter Grass and Gilbert Sorrentino, have attempted to create art works that escape this dilemma, in which the absurdity is preserved, and I suppose in some sense transfigured, but is not rescued from itself.

            Firmin's life project, if I may speak of such, is to become a character in a story. This is the reason for the book titles scattered throughout the novel. Through literature he hopes to rescue himself from his rat life. He goes so far as to walk into novels that others have written, dancing with Natasha Rostova from War and Peace, for example. He wants, not exactly to be the hero of his own life, but to be the protagonist of his own story. In the end I suppose he succeeds. After all, we have the book.

Q: Another quote: “If there is one thing a literary education is good for it is to fill you with a sense of doom.” I realize the “if” of the sentence qualifies it to the point of negation, but is there anything else, any second thing, that a literary education is good for?

A: I suppose I could say it is good for everything, for opening the world and enabling imagination. Does it make one a better person? I suppose it can in some cases. It probably makes one a more interesting and amusing person. Is it a moral good? Insofar as much of what people call evil is really a failure of imagination, then, yes, it is a moral good.

Q: And a few pages over you add, “You laugh. You are right to laugh. I was once—despite my unpleasant mien—a hopeless romantic, that most ridiculous of creatures. And a humanist too, equally hopeless.” But, of course, you and your rat are still those things.

A: Oh, we are indeed. I drank romanticism with my mother's milk. I was brought up to believe that Shelley and Millay embodied the soul of poetry, and that art had to do with emotional expression. At fourteen I fell in love with Berlioz. Though I later learned to place a higher value on Joyce and the Marx Brothers, I still catch myself longing for grand sentiments and full phrases. Romanticism for me is present like an old wound or a memory of childhood. I suppose we could attribute the ironies and grotesqueries of Firmin to the bitterness of a disappointed lover.

Q: Can you imagine a literature that's free of these delusions? Wouldn't it be an awfully short read?

A: I can imagine a literature free of those delusions. I think Joyce and his children are pretty much free of it, from Beckett to Sorrentino. I think Nabokov was free of it, as are Kundera and Grass. Other delusions, perhaps, but not those.

Q: The pornographic movies showing at the Rialto, the salacious novels kept in the book-store safe, seem awfully tame compared to what's come along in the last twenty or so years—the move to an above-board view of sexuality, one not liberated but commercialized. Do you see that as an improvement? Or does it suggest that Firmin's statement on such longings, “Unrequited love is bad, but inequitable love can really get you down,” can now be applied to a much broader audience?

A: That depends on what you mean by “tame.” I personally think that in a sense what we are seeing today is as much a sad desexualization of life as it is a liberation. Which of these scenes contains more sexual frisson and excitement: a beach in Cannes where bored men stroll indifferently past the nearly naked bodies of gorgeous women, or a Victorian drawing room in which a suitor catches a forbidden glimpse of an ankle or shoulder? We find the old “naughty” postcards of women in corsets and garter belts comic in the extreme. But I don't think that those who once found them “salacious” and “titillating” were in any way our inferiors when it comes to knowledge of sexual pleasures.

Q: When Firmin's first love, the bookstore owner Norman Shine, finally catches sight of “the rat,” he sets out the rat poison. You take some trouble to connect literature to the scents and taste that would be all-important to a rat (who happened to also read). When you say the rat poison tastes like a combination of “Velveeta cheese, hot asphalt, and Proust” aren't you being kind of hard on Velveeta cheese?

A: No.

Q: After this incident Firmin soon directs his love to the science-fiction writer Jerry Magoon. Jerry reminds me an awful lot of Kilgore Trout, Kurt Vonnegut's failed and failing science fiction writer. Though you refer more often to Finnegans Wake, doesn't this novel owe more to The Breakfast of Champions?

A: Though Finnegans Wake plays an important role in the novel, the novel does not owe anything to it. With Vonnegut, though, there's clearly a kinship and perhaps a debt. I am very fond of Vonnegut at his best. Besides the similarities between Trout and Jerry which you mention, there is the huge difference that Trout is a fierce and deeply bitter character while Jerry Magoon is a prince of gentleness.

            I am disappointed that you missed the real antecedent of the novel—Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground. I even thought of using “Notes from Underground” as a subtitle, and maybe I should have. That narrator's hysteria, his vanity, his self-loathing, his antagonistic relationship to an imaginary reader, all reappear in Firmin, where the “underground” is quite literally that.

Q: A parody?

A: I wouldn't want to say that. A homage maybe.

Q: I remember an earlier draft of this novel had at least a paragraph-long reference to an actual flesh and blood girlfriend or wife. (Or did I dream that?) Weren't you tempted to move in that direction, have a metaphor that wasn't quite so unrelenting? You do have your character capable of going into a bar, but that's not the same.

A: Yes, in an earlier draft Firmin was adopted by a young stripper instead of by an old writer. That first version ended with them driving off to Miami together in her convertible. While not a funnier book, it was perhaps a happier one. It got lonelier and sadder. I don't know why. That's just the way it wanted to go, the fault, I suppose, of outlandish reality.

Q: What were the circumstances surrounding the writing of the novel and how long did it take you?

A: I was living alone the winter I wrote it, while my family was in Madison. Once I had begun, I worked at it almost every waking hour for four months. It was essentially finished then, though I spent another year and a half on revisions, almost all relating to style. The substance did not change.

Q: Were some parts more difficult than others?

A: Oh, sure. The character of Jerry Magoon gave me some trouble. He kept trying to be too much like me. When I write I try not to look too far ahead. I think if we plan ahead too far we are likely to get trapped in our own presuppositions and miss the unexpected turns that make a novel live. I didn't know until I was actually writing the last chapter how the story was going to end.

Q: And by the way, what are you reading these days?

A: I don't read the way I used to. I read much more slowly, and I often turn to books I have read before rather than seek out new ones. I have just finished rereading The Good Soldier Svejk for, I think, the third time. It still makes me laugh out loud. Before that I read Nabokov's Bend Sinister for the first time. I always have some poetry at hand. These days it's Frank O'Hara's collected poems.

Q: I said I was going to ask you why there weren't any women writers in your Canon? Why all your Big Ones were males? But I'm not going to.

A: You could, and you have. But you must have missed the references to George Eliot (Middlemarch is in the list of great books whose very titles break the heart), to Emily Brontë (where Firmin imagines himself as Heathcliff).

Q: Toward the end, there's so much happening, so much of importance, I really don't know what to ask. Intensely poignant. Surprisingly so. I thought I glimpsed bits of Fellini and Midnight Cowboy stuck in there with Joyce. And I was reminded a bit of The White Hotel by D.M. Thomas (which I doubt you read), though I'm not sure that's a good analogy. That novel dealt with the Holocaust and your own suggests a more self-imposed confinement. A self-indulgent one, but powerful nonetheless. We all die. And death is not self imposed. Still, it worries me how little hope you hold out for love. In real life you love your wife and children and you've been an excellent friend to me for many years. In creating a rat so totally self-centered maybe you haven't been fair to yourself—or to literature. Or have I dreamed that? Great book. Congratulations.

A: I have not read The White Hotel, so can't comment on that. It's possible you glimpsed Fellini—god knows I love him. As for the rest, what can I say?

William Baldwin is the author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the novel A Gentleman in Charleston and the Manner of his Death.