Steve Erickson

Interview by Joshua Chaplinsky

I know many of you are already familiar with author Steve Erickson. In fact, it was on the forums here and at Cult sister-site, The Velvet, that I was first introduced to his work. I read The Sea Came in at Midnight and screamed for more like a hungry child. Erickson fills the void, writing the type of mind-bending, genre-less fiction that simultaneously challenges and excites. Less than a year and 10 books later, his is one of the first names mentioned when I'm asked about my favorite authors.

Which is why I was thrilled when, so soon after my initial binge, I discovered Erickson had a new novel, Zeroville, due in November from Europa Editions. Not wanting to wait that long to read it, I selfishly hatched a scheme to score myself an advance reader's copy. I'd masquerade as a journalist and interview him for The Cult! The second the idea crossed my mind I realized how cool that would actually be and suddenly it was about much more than scoring a free book.

Zeroville is a more straightforward effort for Erickson, narratively, but it is also one of his flat out best, so there is no reason for longtime fans to fear. It is the story of Vikar Jerome, a film obsessed ex-seminarian come to LA, fresh off the bus like Axl Rose in Welcome To The Jungle. The story begins in 1969 and spans the entirety of film history itself. Zeroville is a who's who of film references and is truly a treat for anyone who loves the movies. Erickson, who is also a film critique for Los Angeles Magazine, really knows his shit, and it is evident on every page.

It literally took one email and I was put in touch with Erickson, who graciously agreed to the interview. He spoke in great depth about Zeroville, the publishing industry, his love of film and his writing career.

Joshua Chaplinksy: There are a number of films important to the characters and to the storyline of Zeroville. A Place in The Sun and The Passion of Joan of Arc specifically play a major role in the novel. Are these films as significant for you as they are for the characters? What are some other films that are important to you?

Steve Erickson: Well, in the end the movies in the novel had to inform the story and characters. The book couldn't just be a compendium of films I happen to like. Some -- Last Year at Marienbad or, for that matter, Alphaville, where the novel gets its title -- just naturally lent themselves to being part of the book, without necessarily being any more special to me than real favorites -- The Third Man, say, or Jules and Jim -- that are mentioned in passing or barely at all. Most of this was instinctive rather than anything I worked out in a calculated way. I like both A Place in the Sun and The Passion of Joan of Arc but that's not why they're important to the book. They're important because there's something about them that's deeply irrational and even rapturous -- sometimes in a horrific way -- which suited the story and the main character.

JC: I want to ask you about the portrayal of real life people and events in Zeroville. Many of the famous actors and directors you use as characters in the novel either go nameless, or have partial or made-up names. Was this for legal reasons? Because to me, figuring out the references was part of the fun. How much of their portrayal was made up and how much was based on fact, if any?

SE: Legal reasons weren't involved. Maybe they should have been. I'm relying a lot, I guess, on some of the people in question having a sense of humor, and on people recognizing the good faith of my intentions. And I just think the characters have a greater chance of becoming their own characters, and the story-telling has more resonance, when the people in the story are defined in the story's terms rather than explicitly. Sometimes the explicit is more evocative. It's more evocative to, from the outset, identify Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift tattooed on the head of Vikar, the main character. Other times it's more evocative to let the reader fill in the blanks. I took the facts I knew and more or less made up my own versions of these people, but in the end I have no idea how much they resemble the actual people or don't.

JC: Was the character of Vikar in any way based on real life persons or events? I couldn't really place him, or his Oscar nominated film, Your Pale Blue Eyes, other than it possibly being a Velvet Underground reference. I like the bit about him finding The Passion of Joan of Arc in a janitor's closet at an Oslo mental institution, which actually happened in real life.

SE: Vikar is pretty much a whole creation. I certainly don't know of anyone like him in the movie business, or probably anywhere else. It's never clear if he's a savant or socially arrested or maybe just a bit dim. Someone says he's not a cineaste but "cineautistic." He was a good character through whom to look at a decade when a lot was going on in movies, when a lot was going on culturally. I would have to double-check to be sure, but I believe Your Pale Blue Eyes is the only movie in the novel that's made up, and yes, of course you're right, the title comes from the Lou Reed song. Every other movie in the novel is real, including Nightdreams, the porn picture. Also, as you say, The Passion of Joan of Arc really was discovered, long after everyone assumed it was lost, in the early Eighties, in Oslo, in a janitorial closet in a mental hospital. It's just too far-fetched not to be true.

JC: Being both a critic and a fan of film, what are your thoughts on having your own work adapted for the big screen? Have the rights to any of your books been optioned? Are there any directors you would like to see interpret your material?

SE: Two of my novels have been optioned, another came close before I pulled the plug for reasons I won't go into here. Until Our Ecstatic Days I always thought my first, Days Between Stations, would best translate to film -- both have core stories that are inherently cinematic. One is a love story; one is about a mother trying to save her kid. Alfonso Cuaron comes to mind for Days Between Stations, because he's a filmmaker who's at once emotional and strongly imagistic, and I can see someone like Jane Campion making Our Ecstatic Days. In either case a studio would have to be willing to put up some money because both would be moderately expensive movies even if the stories are simplified. I think perhaps the most instructive adaptation of a modern literary novel is The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I read Kundera's book before the film was made and like a lot of people thought it wouldn't work as a movie, but the director Phillip Kaufman broke down the material of the story and built his own version, which no longer resembled Kundera so much in form yet completely caught the book's essence. The English Patient is another example. What is it that Minghella told Michael Ondaatje when he bought the rights to the novel? "You realize we're going to fuck up your book." So if you're the novelist selling your story to the movies, you need to let go of it. You need to understand that your novel is your novel and the filmmaker's film is his or her film, and not get too precious about it or too invested. This is why, at least so far, I've resisted invitations to write screenplays of my books. It's better for both me and the movie if someone else does it. If Zeroville ever were made into a movie it's likely to be by either a particularly film-conscious director or an actor who sees a good part in Vikar. Obviously someone like Scorsese would get Zeroville. Whether he would like it, let alone want to make a movie, is another question, but he would understand it. Some Coppola or other -- Francis or Sofia -- would understand. Soderbergh. Tarantino, of course. P. T. Anderson. Right now there's a well known young actor who's interested. We'll see. In Hollywood, "interest" and four bits gets you a morning newspaper.

JC: Zeroville initially appeared as a short story in a McSweeney's anthology. A lot of key elements from the novel were already present in that story. What made you decide to expand the idea into a novel? Was this always your intention?

SE: Actually I think the short story and novel are pretty different. The plots share a similar "secret," if you will, and the main character in both is a film editor, but other than that they're very different characters and the tone of the two things is different. I wrote the story as a bargain with Michael Chabon, or what I thought was a bargain -- I approached him about writing for Black Clock, the literary magazine I edit, and he cannily roped me into writing for McSweeney's, in what I assumed would be a reciprocal arrangement. So I holed myself up at the Rio in Vegas for five days and knocked out the story. Chabon, sneaky bastard, never came through on his end. I wasn't completely satisfied with the short story because I never got a grasp of that central character. It was later when Vikar came so sharply into focus that the novel fell into place.

JC: Similarly, the characters of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson from the political/pop culture hybrid Leap Year resurface in the novel Arc d'X. What was so important about these characters that you felt the need to go back to them?

SE: Jefferson and Hemings are just great characters, and they embody the great contradiction of the country. I wrote Arc d'X six years before science more or less proved the two had a relationship, but the fact of their love affair was always clear to anyone who looked at the historical evidence honestly -- it doesn't say much for supposedly reputable American historians who for two centuries insisted so vehemently otherwise, offering only the argument that Jefferson just wasn't, you know, that kind of guy. So I was fascinated with the people involved and also with a landscape where it was considered more scandalous that Jefferson slept with a black woman than that he owned one.

JC: The idea of the female martyr, both literally and figuratively, seems to be a recurring motif in your work. Joan of Arc and immolation are referenced in Arc d'X as well as Zeroville. The character of Zazi in Zeroville also has that potential. I know this is something you have been criticized for in the past. Yet, despite what your female characters go through, many of them seem to retain a certain amount of power. How do you respond to the criticism of your portrayal of women?

SE: Well, I'll have to take your word for it about the criticism. I'm sure there's no getting around the fact that I see my female characters through the prism of a heterosexual guy even when I try not to, with all the hangups and lack of comprehension that go with it. I think I'm drawn to female characters because generally women are more interesting emotionally and psychologically, whereas with guys the train tends to pull into the station by the time they're thirty -- that's as far as they're going to go. Whatever else is true about the women in my books, they're almost always defiant figures, and up until Zeroville they've increasingly dominated my books, particularly The Sea Came in at Midnight and Our Ecstatic Days. If someone wants to read those two books back to back with an open mind, I'm happy to accept whatever conclusion they reach about the way the women are presented. While you're right that Sally in Arc d'X assumes the role of martyr, I don't see it much in the other books except Rubicon Beach, and I must say I don't see it at all in Zazi in Zeroville. I just don't think martyrdom is in her future. Her mother, Soledad, maybe. But only if self-destruction counts.

JC: In addition to the aforementioned martyrdom, certain other motifs show up throughout your body of work: the apocalypse, fetishism, punk rock, film, Los Angeles. These recurring themes make it feel as if your characters all inhabit the same world, that they could almost all be a part of the same story. Is this purposeful or unavoidable? Do you feel you are trying to tell variations of the same story, or are using familiar themes to express different ideas?

SE: The recurrence of characters and themes began by accident, or what seemed an accident. It's certainly true that these characters all inhabit the world in my head, and often it's been true that one book would grow out of something that later felt to me incomplete about an earlier book. You're not the first to suggest its all one book, and to the extent it's a single story I think of it as a round one, where any entry point is good as the other.

JC: You are known for your non-linear narrative style. Seemingly disparate storylines that share certain characters and ideas, stories which overlap and circle back on themselves. Yet, Zeroville is one of your most linear novels to date. Was this a conscious effort on your part? Do you generally share Vikar's lack of need for narrative continuity?

SE: I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them. It's not particularly conscious or unconscious. I never try to be difficult, and rather naively I'm always surprised when some people find the books hard. Sometimes I think people give me too much credit. In the case of a novel about the movies, and I mean a novel that's really about the Movies, rather than a "Hollywood" novel about the business of making movies, it just seemed it should have the pop energy and momentum of a movie, and follow a movie's narrative laws, if you will -- linear, told in the present tense and in the externals of action and dialogue and movie references, short scenes that cut from one to the next, with some Godardian numbers thrown in just to make you think I'm smarter than I am.

JC: Most of your novels up until now have been published by major publishers or imprints of majors. Europa is a true independent. How did you wind up at Europa? Were the other publishers finally fed up with you? I find it ironic that coming off the dreamlike narrative of Our Ecstatic Days (Simon and Schuster), your first novel at an independent seems to be your most accessible.

SE: Here's the situation. The novel is submitted to a handful of publishers -- a couple of the usual corporate behemoths, a couple of the more mid-level places that you would know, and one independent that's only been around a year or so but already has a reputation for really getting behind their books. The bigger publishers say, yes, the novel is great, we'll make an offer next week, and the next week turns into two or three or four, because one of the things that's happened to publishing in the last decade is that no editor has autonomy to buy anything anymore. A decade ago certain editors had that autonomy -- it might be limited by what they could pay, but still they could pretty much buy a book on their own that they were excited about. Now even someone as high up in the company as the publisher has to get his paperback guy to sign off on it. So the book works its way through the food chain and as it does the enthusiasm for it gets whittled away by people whose job it is to whittle away enthusiasm -- the paperback department, the marketing department, publicity department -- and a month later the companies are still dragging their heels because none of them knows anymore how to publish fiction, and all of them are desperate to find reasons to turn books down. In the meantime, while these people are trying to muster up the will just to make a decision, the independent, Europa, is saying, we want it. We want it, we love it, we've already thought about how we're going to publish it. Moreover, the head of Europa here in the States, Kent Carroll, has a very interesting publishing history -- before he started Carroll & Graf he was at Grove Press back when they were the vanguard of American literature, and he's published and worked with Beckett and Mailer, Henry Miller, John O'Hara and Alice Munro and Philip Dick. Not bad company. So no sooner does Europa sign the book than it's got out a press release about it, because for them it's a Big Deal, and for three novels and ten years I've been telling myself I'm going to stop worrying about my advances, even if I really can't afford to, and go with someone who acts as though publishing my book is a Big Deal. I remember when my first novel was published, it was around the time of White Noise and my editor at the time told me, "See, this is how it works -- DeLillo had to write nine novels before he broke through." Well, now they don't give you nine novels to break through (Zeroville is my eighth). They give you maybe three. The publishing business has become like the movie business -- the behemoths like Simon & Schuster, Random House, Doubleday are the big studios that only know how to make blockbusters, with the occasional Oscar-season prestige item thrown in, while the indies, the true indies, are the guys who care about fiction. I can understand it seems ironic but, counterintuitive though it may have been, it was precisely because this novel might find a larger readership that it made all the more sense to go with a publisher that was passionate about it even if they don't have the resources that the big publishers have but never use anyway. So I don't know if the big publishers are fed up with me or I'm fed up with them or, most likely, of course, it's a bit of both. I should add that with Our Ecstatic Days, which wasn't the easiest book to publish from a production standpoint, there were certain things that Simon & Schuster did well. There was a terrific woman there in production named Gypsy who was more conscientious about getting the text right than I was, which I wouldn't have thought possible. Was the decision to go with Europa a gamble? Maybe. So far I haven't been sorry.