Writers Respond: An Interview with J. C. Hallman

J. C. Hallman is the author of The Chess Artist (St. Martin's, 2004), The Devil Is a Gentleman (Random House, 2006), and the recently published collection of stories, The Hospital for Bad Poets (Milkweed, 2009). This fall, Tin House Books will release The Story About the Story, a Hallman-edited anthology about writing that boasts an impressive array of writers—from Oscar Wilde to Susan Sontag, D.H. Lawrence to Milan Kundera. And another book, In Eutopia, which explores the history of utopian thought and literature, is forthcoming from St. Martin's Press in 2010.

J. C. has been kind enough to take time out from his busy schedule to answer a few questions.

MOLLY GAUDRY: Hi J. C., thanks for agreeing to this interview. I'd like to begin by asking about "Ethan: A Love Story," which is my favorite story in The Hospital for Bad Poets. The emotional core of this piece centers around the narrator and his six-year-old nephew. Their relationship begins when, home for the holidays, the narrator accidentally shrinks a sweater in the dryer and gives it to Ethan: "I tugged the collar over his head and told him the sweater had come from a lovely girl. The boy's eyes tested this, and he decided to take a chance. 'I like pretty girls,' he said. 'They make my eyes turn to hearts.' Ethan and I fell in love." My question, then, is this: How does this story define, or redefine, the love story?

J.C. HALLMAN: Well, traditionally, we probably think of the "love story" as being limited to those stories among people—among adults—in which there is at least the possibility of romantic/intimate/sexual love. This story plays off that, but I hope that play enables it to get at other things. The backdrop of the story is the buildup to our invasion of Iraq, and something I wanted to depict was the way in which families suffered as a result of the war—not always because someone went off to fight, but because the fight was right there in the living room as the debate over the wisdom of the war waged here. To some extent, the love of a family can fall casualty to that, and that, I think, can be a love story too, a sad one.

MG: There is so much more going on in this story: it comments on the isolation one feels when home for a family gathering, surrounded by relatives who do not share his political beliefs; and by exploring the violence of children's video games asks us to rethink the violence in our adult worlds, both abroad and domestic. What is this story about, to you, and what can you tell us about its genesis?

JCH: This is a pretty autobiographical story—a lot of it actually happened, except for a fairly fabulist turn the piece takes toward the end (and even then the action describes feelings I actually had). It would probably be easier to go through the story and pull out the invented bits than it would be to document the fictionalizations . . . but all that, I think, is neither here nor there: stories must prove their worth not because they've actually happened, but because they matter regardless of whether they happened. As to what it means—well, for me, it's an attempt to understand how our society could have made such a profound mistake, operating off such fundamental hypocrisy. That meant using this family situation to demonstrate that everything from video games to a media without a fairness doctrine helped to create a climate where something very bad was capable of happening. At the same time, love is inside there, trying to survive, trying to weather it all.

MG: Wow, that is lovely. Which is your favorite from the collection and why?

JCH: I don't think I have a favorite. I don't think that one can think about one's own work the way readers do. That is, as readers, we are discriminating, choosy—maybe even kind of provincial. As writers, though, you have to sign on wholeheartedly to everything you do. Some stories, you might be able to acknowledge, are more successful than others, but you can't really disown them. They are as important to the creation of the ongoing collage of yourself as any of the others. That said, I think the more recent stories in the collection are probably stronger . . . but even that has been shot down by some readers who have felt the best work was material that is quite old. Who knows? Robert Hass once said that the whole business of favorite poems was impossible—and he was speaking as a reader. As a writer, it's even more difficult.

MG: Do you consider yourself a short story writer?

JCH: Sure. And a nonfiction writer. The line between those things blurs sometimes, obviously. It's all just writing in the end—the medium, or the genre, or whatever, doesn't matter as long as you're engaged in literary endeavors. The only thing I don't consider myself is a poet—which is a compliment to poetry.

MG: Well, now that is very interesting, considering the collection's title: The Hospital for Bad Poets . . .

JCH: Yeah, I guess it's possible for poets to bristle at the title. It's not meant that way. The secret of that story is that I was dating a poet and taking an EMT-Basic class at the same time—I finished the class, but not the poet. The phrase itself comes from Nietzsche, which the poet had recommended to me, and when the relationship fell apart, it occurred to me to take Nietzsche more literally than he surely intended, and write the story as I did. That said, I feel like the story itself is a defense of poetry—a defense of the literary, in general. One wants, I think, to set out to be ambitious, even intellectual, but if you simply indulge in the obscure you launch literature on a trajectory toward silence.

MG: What advice do you have for younger writers?

JCH: Aspire to truth. Indulge in detail. Trust your curiosity. Invest in yourself.

MG: What question have you always wanted to answer but never been asked in an interview? And the answer?

JCH: Q: Why write? A: I think this is actually answerable—at least for me. Because the world, or civilization, as it stands, creates a pressure of deceit and propaganda, fools itself into a cycle of tepid progress punctuated with horrific cataclysm and backsliding, and people of good conscience, in viewing this, step back and respond to it, offer up some kind of observation and critique, and thereby serve as a sort of correction, a conscience, that makes the world a little less bad and sustains at least the possibility of the good.

Please check out this favorable NYT Book Review of The Hospital for Bad Poets, and visit J. C. Hallman's website for more.