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Adam Chmielewski: There are four major human feelings that seem to be prime movers of your writing: courage, cowardice, fear and love. They are at the same time great problems of your life. Did you see many heroes during your military service?
William Wharton: No! I did not see too many heroes. Somewhere like ten of them, and that is quite a large number of people that I can actually consider as heroes. Some of them are dead. Some of them died of natural causes, others by being heroic. People are not born heroes but sometimes become heroes; some people do not make much of a thing they did and because of which they are thought to be heroic; they, in their decision-making scheme, were not led by consideration how to become heroic. And maybe only they are the true heroes.
So, what do you think of heroism in general?
My own theory is that it takes a fool to make a hero. If you live long enough you realize that in the situations in which people are heroic, they often sacrifice their own life for someone else's life which maybe was not worth the life they sacrificed.
In your preface to the Pride you wrote that the book was written as a sort of a private exorcism of your personal nightmares that were troubling you ever since your childchood. Would it be a fair description of your writing as a whole?
No! No! In a sense writing for writers is always a matter of taking on subjects which concern them. They are not nightmares, and typically they are not crippling. They are just concerns. I think that without a concern there is death to feeling. I do write about things that concern me. Sometimes they are very topical, related to what is happening in the world, sometimes they are more personal things.
Can one then say that in your writing you perform some sort of auto-therapy on yourself, just like Freud did on himself?
I think that it is very difficult to know. I could be. I do not feel that. I do not do it for that reason. Sometimes, after I have finished writing a book, I do feel that am glad to have the book done, and also I am glad I did find a way to express the feelings I was going to express.
Did you like movies based on your novels?
Not very much. The Midnight Clear, the last one made, was made by very young people with very little money - very little, five million dollars. But they did a very good job. They stay close to the book, though towards the end of the book they made some changes to make it into a better movie. I really appreciated it. So that was a good job. But Dad was a mess, and Birdy had nothing to do with my book, or virtually nothing to do with my book, just the themes were taken from it.
So you did not like the substitution of the World War II by the Vietnam War?
No, that was a horror. I discovered that one when one day we decided to go to search for the crew on the location. There I said: "You cannot do that like this, because there is a palm tree growing behind house". And then I was told: "Oh, that is alright, we are moving it to Vietnam". That was the first time I knew about it.
In your novels you often resort to a technique of a realistic description of dreams of your characters, their inner life; whereas the experience of the avant-garde writers seem to deprive this technique of literary credibility? Do you have any problems with that?
No, I do not have any problem with that. Of course I write in the first person singular, and the present tense, which gives me much more room to manouvre within the mind of the main characters. Now, the difficulty with that of course is that it makes it dufficult to manouvre within the minds of lesser characters. This can give a one-dimensional aspect to the book. Which is why I always use multiple tellers. Some of them tell one part, some tell another part. You will find this going on almost in every book of mine. I
n general you seem not to care much about the pronouncements of the literary theorists or critics. Do you? Not ever since all of them have been proven in time to be false.
You said of your book Birdy that there was a moment at which the book started to write you rather than vice versa. Does it happen often - or always? - to you when you write a novel or paint a painting?
Both in writing and painting. I think it is a dynamic of what I do. I do not dictate to my work. It is becoming a dialogue, a conversation between me and the work, a real dynamic. My work then becomes a reality, and it makes my work really live.
So this is a sign for you that the work is becoming good, that it takes on a life of its own? Yes! Yes, definitely!
You seem to be very devoted to your family. Does you family participate in your creative work? Do you ask your family to express their opinion of your work - painting or books - before they are shown to the public?
I do not have to ask. In painting it is more obvious; they all wander around where I work, they all come along and say: "Dad, that corner there is too dark", or that one. That is alright, and I even agree with them. As to my writing - my son is the one who is most involved in my writing. William has a potential as a good writer himself. He is a slow maturer in his own writing, just like I was. He reads, and reads, and reads, he is a mad reader, he reads everything, in three languages. And he is the one who discusses my books in process, quite well, he is a very good critic.
And you allow them to your books before they are finished? Most of the writers consider the the creative process as too intimate for that. Anyone in my family can read anything I am doing at any stage. I lack any sense of privacy here. If you are interested in writing and if you are addressing it to the public world, then your family is entitled to read it as anyone else. And if you allow them to read it, the rest can read it too. But it does not mean that my creative process is not intimate. It is intimate, but with whom I am supposed to be intimate except my family? They are the closest people I live with.
What about the books that you wrote first? Are you going to publish them?
Probably, but not until I am closer to death. I am now seventy and am beginning to slow down as a painter. I am not slowing down yet as a writer - and I will be the last to recognize it - but when it happens, when the work will not be so attractive to me anymore, then I will go back to the first books and I will read them, and rewrite them with the current knowledge I have of form and method and the knowledge about other times which I did not know then. I could not write them now because of the time factor.
Do you often think about your reader when you write?
I do not aim my work to any particular reader. I write from the seat of my pants. I have my own ethics and aesthetics, technical systems, and it really comes out effectively. And I never think that, for example, this part I have to change because of the Polish people, or that I should write that I would like Americans to stop being so dominant figure. I am trying to discourage that.
In your new novel, its character, Al, studies life of butterflies. In Birdy we saw Al in his earlier stages, as sort of a caterpillar in a stage of transformation into the butterfly you spoke of yesterday. Do you have a vision of what he eventually will transform into?
That's right. He studies butterflies and that is why he is careful not to live the life of the butterfly.
First, he has to realize that he does not respect human beings. He does not respect human life as a result of war. This is a great loss: he knows it, and he realizes that if you do not respect human beings, you cannot respect yourself. And if you do not respect yourself, you are just asking for trouble in your life. So he is trying to rebuild himself into something he can respect. To be respected, he must be respectful, and respected as Birdy. And that is going to lead to a process in which he will throw himself against the colloquial wisdom of what is right and what is wrong: in academic sense, in painting especially, but even more so in real life: he has to have an ethic and aesthetic for himself. And that is what the book is going to be about. There is a moment in the book in which he actually makes the assertion in which he proves to himself that he wants to be considered by other adults as an adult, and not just a young bright man or just a nice person, and being typically put down by other people.
We talked a bit about aesthetic. Now I would like to move on to the morality that permeates your work and life. Trying to understand you as a person, one can sense a stern morality the rules of which you observe unflinchingly in your life. Firmness, reliability, endurance, a morality expressed in one of your phrases: get this done, go along with it. It this morality self-imposed? Or was it rather imbibed by you within your family-circle and the catholic neighbourhood in Philadelphia?
It is hard to separate. Early on I rejected this foul system and replaced it by a system by which I could live. The morality I was born into was so artificial, so paternalistic, so unreal. And I was too analytical to be able to believe the whole Christian myth. I just could not do it. Then I realized that it was exactly what I was born into, and lived up to12 years old, and where does it lead. And then I begun to construct my own morality. I saw things that were happening in my school and with my friends, my neighbours, my parents and all, and was trying to decide what was right and what was wrong, this behaviour or that behaviour, and through this I evolved a personal morality.
So your personal morality can be understood as a result of the rebelion against the catholic system of ethics, is that correct?
I do not think I ever did anything against it. I just did not go along with it. And in the book Pride - I think it is the only book which can be considered as containing elements of anticatholicism on my part - I wrote about the little boy being very abused, but I mean truly abused by the nun and by the priest. They were treating him like that for doing something over which he had no control. This is this kind of heavy, heavy domination which I reject thoroughly in the Church. The current pope is a perfect example of what I mean. He is saying things which come straight form the eighteen century and have nothing to do with the life we must live and are living. In a sense he is an extreme example. But not the only one. You have the Pope Pius XII who is colluding with the Nazis and helping to get passport to the SS people so they can escape, and so forth. I do not think that is moral.
Well, you are expressing my sentiments exactly, perhaps even more acute since I do live presently in a society dominated by the catholic Church. But being so anticatholic or antichurch person, you are not entirely religious, are you?
I am very religious. I believe that there is a reason for life, that it is biggest one, and that it is probably some kind of unknown power. But I think that it is residing in all of us and not in any particular entity. It is some kind of a concern, but not just the current concern that if you pray to something, it will help to pay your bills. That is the moonies, that is how they go by it.
I believe that we constantly have to keep our ear to the ground, our ground, and all the rest of it, in order to know what seems to fit the morality and the persona of what we usually call "God". But the very word "God" is meaningless. The word itself does not mean anything to me, I do not care for the word itself, it is just the word "dog" spelled backwards.
There is a Greek term , which means competition. We surely live in an agonistic, competitive culture. You often preach against it, saying that competitive society is a failure. What do you consider to be greatest evils of the competitive society and competitive way of life?
You lose control of your life. You find yourself doing things or not doing things which please other people, you are trying to gain points, like in the football of baseball game. And I think, again, that it leads to abandoning the responsibility for your own self-development. That is good only as sports-ethic. But in real life it does not work like that. For example you have a job and there are other people in the same job. Some people are doing their job the best they can, but other persons are spending their time having the boss see that they do their work best. In a sense it is becoming a competition, but the truly hard-working people are not in the competition at all. We have to protect these men because they do their work, they do the work done, whereas the others just talk about it, trying to show off, trying to make themselves visible, trying to score points all the time. That is the trouble with the competitive society.
What do we lose by engaging into this kind of competition?
Self-evolvement, self-revelation.
You also said that you discovered that by engaging into this kind of life you have been losing compantionship, family life, and so on. Is perhaps the artistic work a way to save one's life from the evils of competitive society?
Art is one of the ways, although the way it is functioning in our society, in the whole west, is also much too competitive. Look at what is going on in the media: they turn the art into the competition. They constantly ask questions like: who is the better painter? who is your favourite artist? who is your favourite writer? who is your favourite musician? You can turn everything into the competition...
...and after so much of such an indoctrination you feel that you are obliged to like this painter, that writer, and so on...
...That is right. So you read your magazine in order to know which which one you are supposed to like. That is a competition.
Now a related problem. You often say or imply in your novels that when faced with an all to frequent choice: fight or flight, we should rather flee. Interestingly, you suggested a flight - a flight into phantasy, into creative work. It is very much against our Nietzschean culture of power, winning, will to power, domination. Is it not that engaging into phantasy is a way of turning one's back on reality, an escapism?
I am not saying - take a flight into phantasy, I am saying, rather, phantasy in itself is a power. There is a little difference there. Albert Camus said - cherish your illusion, that is all you get. That is anti-Kafkaesque message, it is also anti-Nietzschean one. Camus gave a truly humanistic, livable, respect-yourself version of the human ideal. So I would not use the word "escape" here. Cherish your illusions as a way of coping with the irresolvable problems regarding which you are becoming panically or hysterically convinced that you have either to flee or fight. There is an another way: just to stay who you are, and have the confidence in your own capacity to deal with the problems. You do not have to fight or flee. You can create, create the situation.
You have already mentioned some names. You approve of Camus, but neither Kafka nor Nietzsche. Could you name other authors, writers, intellectuals, painters that influenced you most, whom do you like?
Heidegger, Schopenhauer, a whole bunch of philosophical German writers generally, though I do not owe much to any of them because they are too often unhappy men and they create unhappy work. Kafka is a perfect example of this. I like Dostoievsky as a writer but he is unhappy man and it shows as a weakness in his work. I like Tolstoy because he had an upbeat, optimistic viewpoint which has revealed itself in part in his characters: in André and in Pierre; in them he presented his own attitude. Pierre used phantasy as a way of dealing with life. André would go out and fight, and André became in the end far lesser character, although of great capacity.
How about the painters? Whom do you consider important to you?
Depending on a day. I like painters who respect the world the way it is. Who are not dominated by the world the way it is, but participate in the world the way it is, and try to paint it with those things in mind. They make a link between so-called reality and their personal reality. I think it is the same as with writers, not much difference, because that is exactly what they do too. And that is what I think good painters do. Goya is a perfect example: very distorted figures, but very much related to what was going on in his time and in the life of his times, and there was nothing very artificial about his work.
Van Gogh also. Wonderful, wonderful example. He used colour as colour, form as form, and he used his feelings which to a great extend he integrated into his work, and I think his works will survive a long time, except that he did not do them technically in a way as to enable their survival, and they are suffering for it. I am not a Matisse fan, for example. Matisse is to me too decorative and I am becoming jumpy about the decorative painting. I would rather prefer to do the wall-papers.
How about the music. Does it play an important part in your work?
Some forty-five years ago I did a series of paintings of my most favourite works of music. There were pieces by Beethoven, Schumann, Mozart...
Any Russian composers?
Not particularly: I do not care for Tschaikovsky, for example. I did not do any Russians in this collection. At that time I was living in Germany. As to the relation of music and my work: to me the sound of words is like music. You have to follow them hard, they are vague, but they are also as strict as the words the composer of music uses.
What composers do you like most?
Mozart. Almost everything he did.
Any Polish ones?
Chopin, of course, that is the obvious one. But Polish composers are not getting enough play in the western world for my taste. What I have heard of music of Polish composers is good, though I do not even know their names. But as for a writer and an artist, my participation in culture is definitely passive.
Apparently Polish composers are not competitive enough to attract the due attention of the western public.
That is right! Exactly!
Let us talk about women. You said of women that they usually serve as go-betweens by men. Without women men begin to fight between themselves.
My book Dad is about it. That men and sons can only relate by going through the woman, the mother for one, and the wife for another, etc. When men have a really strong relationship, it is always like that - through the woman.
In an another context you said that you like women very much. Do you?
I do! And also, as I said in one of my novels, I would rather be a woman that a man.
I am coming to that one. You also said that you are envious of women.
I am envious.
Why?
Because they have the best in our society. It is not so in Africa, for example. But in our society a woman stays at home and is her own boss. She does something what is really important to do: she has children, keeps up the nest in a god condition, has a good man close to her whom she can teach love. (Though men do not learn love too well.) They are the most important things to do in life! This is my point of view, so I guess I love them for all that.
Do these statements add up into a kind of a general view of women? Are you going to write about women?
I do write about women. The book I am writing now, it is called Hard Place, has a whole chapter which is told by women - there are two women in the book - and there are others chapters, told by their men. It is a long book, I will write it for ever. Writing in a voice of a woman can be quite difficult for man. Flaubert did it in Madame Bovary. Tolstoy did it well in the Anna Karenina, for example.
But at the same time Tolstoy was terrible to his wife.
That is right, and yet he wrote so good about women.
Are you terrible to your women? No, I am very easy. I come from a tradition in which a boy never hits a girl, which goes into a rule that a man never strikes a woman. I could never have any respect to a man who could do it, nor I can believe that there are men who could do it. One has to be sick to strike a woman.
Are you a feminist in any sense, then?
I am for women but I think that what is happening to the feminist movement is unfortunate. I believe it is due to a certain number of women who would really like to be men and who are trying to make other women to feel uncomfortable by being women, and they are trying to transform themselves into men. That is generality that is happening to the feminist movement and I think it is unfortunate to women.
So, how much of a woman there is in you?
Quite a good, big part, oh yes. I think I am a very caring person and that is very womanly. I try to avoid direct confrontation and direct conflict, which is the way women manage to solve problems: by listening and trying to come to some kind of an accomodation. I have many of these characteristics.
Let us return for a while to your morality. You seem to be living according to a set of moral rules resembling quite closely the private morality invented for himself by an another great citizen of Philadelphia...
...Ben Franklin!
Yes, that is the one I meant...
... He is my hero!
Really? I discovered some afinities between you and him only yesterday...
You were right! He is my hero! So far I never mentioned it to anyone, I never wrote about it, so you are perceptive!
If you asked me who would be the person I would like to be with on a desert island I would say: Ben Franklin! It is fascinating. He is a fascinating person. Did you know that when the American Civil War begun in 1776, Ben Franklin was seventy years old - my age now - and if it were not for him, they would have never won that war? The first battle was won by him and it was won not by combat, but by getting all the materials neccesary to the soldiers. And Ben Franklin did it. It is fascinating. Think of all the inventions he did, of everything he has done.
You asked me about women. Ben Franklin loved women. He loved them very much. He was a lover and was loved. He had a child when he was very young man, he was twenty-three years old then, I believe, and when the woman abandoned the child, he took it and brought it up all by himself, without help. A very caring person. Then he took his son to England and his son did the same thing there. And Ben adopted his son's son too and took care of both the young boys as a father. And that is a great man. All women loved him because they could feel he was not a typical man.
He was impressive. And he would take it, too. I mean he knew how to suffer and endure. When the English decided that he should be brought to the court, and duressed him down, he came, he listened, he nodded, and he withstood all - he just took it. He did not fight, he did not struggle, he did not even gave a sign that he disagreed - he just took it. And that is a great man.
I am very glad indeed that I discovered a Benjamin Franklin in you.
I can recommend to you a very good biography of Franklin, by Marc Van Doren. In general, Benjamin Franklin is widely recognized as the first American author too. So as you see, he had a lot of successes.
Now I have to ask you about your view of your country which Benjamin Franklin, as one of its Founding Fathers, helped to establish.
Ben Franklin left it. So did I. We both did it for similar reasons. And that was because the way the country was going was not the way we wanted it to go. I am not about to pretend be a politician or that I know what to do about American problems. But I do not want to be there. I want to be somewhere else. I want to be in a neutral ground somewhere.
I would not want to be in Africa nor in South America, Uruguay, for example, where we have spent four years with my wife. I am expatriate but I am nor ex-patriot. I feel myself very much American, I am proud of my American citizenship and I hope never to lose it. But I am expatriate, and I do not intend to live there as long as it is like that there, and as long as I can manage that. The way it is now there is not for me, it is not good for my wife, not good for my children, nor good for those whom I love.
One of the characters in the Dad, Jack, says some harsh words about Bob Dylan, one of the men thought of as spiritual leaders of the transformation of the society of the '60-ties in US. What is your view of the movement which started then in Europe and in America, as a whole?
Oh, as a whole... Well, it was a flowering. It was breaking the constraint that had to be broken anyway. Some people carried it too far, as it is usual in situations like that. Think of Danton, Robespierre. And this one too went further than it was necessary, and it gave a bad name to it. I do not think Dylan was particularly serious example of this kind of abuse. I think that he was just hypocritical: he talks like a southern hick, whereas he is just a California sunshine boy, living on a beach with all due prerequisites and advantages of that kind of life, and talks all this nonsense - I think it is just hypocritical
But at the same time he is seen as one of the leaders of the revolution... Yes.
Have you witnessed some of the stages of the revolution of the 60-ties? Where have you been then?
I was in Paris at that time. I had there very many young friends who were Vietnam war refugees and they were very much involved in the revolution. I was very much a part of it. The political aspect of the revolution convinced me very much. I could not believe when the information came out that my country - the U. S. of A! - would do this to a poor little country in South East Asia. The people there convinced me very much. They gave me all materials, they convinced me and very early on I was against this war. And it was this attitude towards the war that was at the very bottom of the youth revolution - they lave lost their confidence in their elders, and in their society. I was with them. I was in it. Very much a part.
You said that you settled in Europe in order to save your children from the evils of the American TV-culture. You did not want them to have pea-size brains. Why should that happen? By the very exposure to the American culture? Are you not satisfied with the American culture?
As it is now, with the readership it has now, with the ideals America has now, I am not happy with it, no!
Do you consider yourself successful in raising your children the way you wanted? Have you managed to save them from the TV culture by moving with your family to France?
Oh yes! They are now in their 30's and 40's and they do not have TV-sets in their houses. They are readers. And they are good friends of mine. I tried never to be an authoritarian figure, I advise them only when they ask for my opinion, and I give them my opinion honestly, without trying to put them down. They have the confidence in themselves and from the earliest tiny infanthood they were not slapped around nor were attempted to be mentally overwhelmed. Paternalism has no place in love.
But at the same time you managed to remain an authority to them. Yes. If they ask me, I tell them what I think, but I am not trying to impose my opinion on them. I am trying to tell it to them as straight as I can, my inner feelings.
In general, you do not seem to believe much in authorities.
No, I do not. I believe that authority is a good and wonderful thing. But vested authority - I mean the one someone gave you - is bad, and most dangers of all times is caused by the vested authorities. Whether they are vested by an archbishop, or whether they are vested by a president, or whoever, whether they are vested by a lot of money, they are not good to the human condition. Authority is natural only if it is internal, self-developed.
In one of the interviews you gave in Poland last year you said that you have never seen so many shy journalists. Have you noticed any change ever since.
Yes, I did, a very nice change. I enjoyed it very much. Though the press conference I went to yesterday looked very much the way it did before. Nobody would speak up, everybody would sit there staring at their feet, and there were just three people asking all the questions for almost an hour. And I initially thought - well that did not change. But then I noticed an evolution in the quality of the people I have been interviewed by. And maybe something evolved in me too.
You said your visits to Poland changed you in some way. Are you already able to express how you were changed by them?
What I feel as happening in me is an awareness that the way I am, the way my opinions are, is partly due to the Polish condition. The nation could survive through all those things that were happening to it throughout its history: this was the country in which the poor were knocked down to the ground and the wealthy became even more elevated, the nation was persecuted by all sorts of enemies, Austro-Hungarians, Russians, Germans, and was nearly destroyed by Nazis. And still, when I look at those faces of people who come to see me, I see that they are very young, I see their eager eyes. And that is something that has changed me.
Do you have any Polish friends in France?
Well, let me think who of my friends is Polish. I do not remember, honestly. Most of the time I do not pay attention to the nationality my friends. But most of my Polish friends are Jewish. Or maybe the other way round, most of my Jewish friends are Polish.
Your arrival to Poland was one of the main news in news-bulletins on the radio and TV. This fact in itself tells a lot about the power of your fame in Poland. You said that you already know the reasons for your immense popularity amongst Polish young readers. In fact a cult, a frenzy, or a craze, would be a fairer description of the "Wharton phenomenon" in Poland. So what do you think are the reasons for your being so famous here?
I think it is because I have working class background and catholic background, and that I am rebellious - not looking for a fight but rebellious, in order to protect myself, my ego. I noticed the same about people in Poland. They do not like to change their mind too easily, and I do not either. I want to be convinced first. And I do not like to change my mind just because someone has the power over me. I think that this has been redeveloped in me and was enhanced by the Polish experience.
An important part of the explanation of your popularity is the fact that your writing is appealing to the people here, that you write in way which is highy understandable to them.
I make the point of writing with a light hand about difficult things. It can be difficult to achieve. It is so easy to be didactic, or to get into entertainment. Neither of those things are worth doing. You have to state samehow your opinion, to formulate you position, but you have to do it in such a way that the reader will not say, "No, I do not believe that!", that the dialogue between the reader and you is possible, that you can make the reader think.
You sell an incredible amount of books - well above a million in Poland alone - without going into explicit sex descriptions and other similar devices ensuring usually the popularity of a book. Is it not amazing?
It is amazing. But I am very glad that I do not have to do anything sensational and that the people like my books. When I wrote the last book in which the main characters are stumbling to fit two boats together, I thought myself then: maybe Poles will like that one. And I expect that they will, because it is almost a symbol of Poland - a metal whole and a wooden whole, being fit together. Is it not a typical Polish situation - two kinds of viewpoints blended together to make a success?
Every book of yours is a success in Poland, so I am sure you do not need to worry about that one.
Let us hope it will continue.
Rozmowa odbyła się we Wrocławiu, dnia 9 maja 1996 roku.
Została opublikowana w: Odra: 2, 1997, ss. 75-81.
W przygotowaniu rozmowy uczestniczył Tomasz Majeran.