4-part Hob Broun Interview: Tape 1 | tape 2 | tape 3 | tape 4 |

The above is the 1st tape of an audio interview of Hob Broun by Schuyler Ingle, recorded on cassette in September of 1985. The interview was never made public, except some of the material was used in this obituary in the LA Times. The recordings were intended to be used as reference only, so the quality is not great, and at times it was in inaudible or unintelligible, despite best efforts to clean it up. There were also gaps in Hob Broun's speech, being that he was on a respirator (which you can hear in the background), so a lot of these long gaps and small talk were edited out to make it easier for the listener (in this 1st tape, 47 minutes were reduced to 19). On this tape, he talks about working on Wild Coast (an unfinished novel, forthcoming from Calamari Archive) and also Inner Tube, amongst other things. The following is a written transcript of tape 1. We will post the other tapes as we transcribe them.

Schuyler Ingle: What is your general routine, do you have one?

Hob Broun: Yah, I usually get up around noon and uh, write sometimes until 8.

SI: Just straight through?

HB: Uh-huh. Sometimes spend a whole day, you know, noon to midnight, just writing.

SI: At this point you're working on something about Suriname?

HB: Yah, it has two parallel stories, 1880 and 1980, But I'm getting more and more into the period part of it.

SI: Have you ever done anything like that?

HB: No, never. I've never done anything that required research before. And I spent a lot of time doing that. This a country nobody knows where it is or what it is. It's on the northern coast of South America, one of the Guyanas. But people think it's in Asia. They think they speak Spanish there, they don't know anything about it.

SI: What is the language?

HB: Dutch, that's the colonial language, but the population is almost half Hindustani.

SI: When did they come in?

HB: Around the 1870's as contract workers. Also Chinese, Javanese. There only resource is bauxite. And huge tracts of undeveloped jungle. Which they haven't yet chosen to bulldoze to graze cattle. You know, other than the coast. There's very little development in the interior.

SI: Have you been there?

HB: No, never been there.

SI: But you've been to South America?

HB: To Peru and to Venezuela.

SI: When was that?

HB: You know, Freda and I were going to go, but since nobody goes where the air fare is $600, so we went to Haiti instead which was cheaper. But palatably less interesting.

SI: Did you tour the baseball factory while you were there?

HB: We stayed at the resort. We went one day up to Cape— which is at one end of the island, and one day we went to Port au Prince. but it was so depressing that we left immediately with headaches.

SI: How long ago?

HB: 1980, I guess.

SI: When did you have your surgery, was that '83?

HB: Yah, April 1983, or '82, god, i can't remember. Yah, it was just before my 33rd birthday, that's right.

SI: You mentioned driving across the country 53 times?

HB: No, only 23 times. [Laughs]

SI: 23 times. 23 round trips?

HB: Yah.

SI: And the fastest was in?

HB: 52 hours.

SI: What others cities did you live in, in the country?

HB: Philadelphia, Los Angeles, I was in Seattle for 6 months, does that count? Uh, San Francisco, and of course Portland.

SI: Why Portland?

HB: Because I went to school here and always liked it.

SI: You went to Reed?

HB: And I'd been back a couple of times to visit. And it's just about the right speed for a city. They're starting to fuck up the downtown, like everywhere else, but it's still just about the right speed.

SI: Did you graduate from Reed?

HB: No, I did a 2-year stretch, and that was my last education. I hated school from day 1, from kindergarten on I hated it.

SI: Did you go through public schools?

HB: No, the best private education.

SI: But of course. Which schools did you go to? The famous, uh...

HB: The famous Dalton School in Manhattan where the beautiful Brooke Adams also went. ... Those poor bees, they can't get into that hummingbird feeder. They know there's sugar in there, but they just can't get at it. Uh, Riverdale High School. Carly Simon went there. That was a strange, umm—it wanted to be a New England prep school, except it had almost all day students who were mostly Jewish. And still they went through the ritual of having a non-denominational Protestant chapel. We sang "A Mighty Fortress is our God," stuff like that. And all these rich Jewish kids were there, though it was sort of like Horace Mann.

SI: So you grew up in Manhattan?

HB: Right across from the Natural History Museum. West 81st Street. And left, kinda just in time, just as the city became insane and unlivable. Around 1974 or '75, that's when I left. Or actually '76, I went to Philadelphia with Freda.

SI: What's Philadelphia like?

HB: Um, it's curious, it's very large. It used to be the 2nd largest city in America. But all those jokes have a certain germ of truth. There's just something sort of dead about it. There's all these distinguished people from there, but they always leave. All these great black musicians, they're always somewhere else, they're from there. But they never stay. It's a very racist city. The most racist place I've ever spent any time in. It's just in the air, everywhere you go.

SI: Freda's family is from Philly?

HB: Her bother worked in a bar and one of the colleague bartenders was a black guy. He used to walk this white waitress home because it was late, you know, 3-4 in the morning, so he'd walk her home so she would be safe. They were walking down Chestnut Street in the middle of downtown, a police car pulled over behind them, and they kept walking and he heard the hammer cock on the pistol. And they just kept walking, nothing was said. That's the kind of town it is.

HB: We lived in Manayunk. It's Indian, it means "Place Where We Went to Drink." Which looked like some kind of a 1920s George Orwell industrial town. I really liked it there actually, that particular neighborhood. I didn't much care for the city.

SI: Was that before or after Reed?

HB: That was 1976, well after.

SI: What years did you go to Reed?

HB: '68 to '70.

SI: So you basically graduated high school in '68?

HB: Yah. I worked, I'm afraid to say, for B. Dalton's there. [audio drops out, becomes in audible] I mean, they're one of the chains that are just trying the bes—it's not nearly as pernicious. It's not like all their other stores, which are in shopping malls, which I kept trying to explain that it's the city, you're in the center of downtown. And they're wondering why aren't these car repair manuals moving. They just didn't get it.

SI: You worked at a racetrack for a while too, didn't you?

HB: Miles Park, now gone, in Louisville. They had night races. The worst. Nerved horses who ran 40 times a year, stuff like that. There were broken legs at least once a week. But it was fun.

SI: How did you end up in Louisville?

HB: Uh, through the late Chick Anderson, who was a friend of my father's, he got me the job.

SI: What'd you do?

HB: Oh, worked in the press box. I was just a general gopher type. You know, I wrote some publicity stuff.

SI: Did you ever work with writing that much, besides that, or did you stick pretty much too—?

HB: I did movie reviews for a living for a while. For a trade paper in New York City. In '72, I got to see everything. Nice comfortable screening rooms where you could smoke. Rex Reed would show up with cum in his hair.

SI: How did you know it was cum?

HB: Oh, I didn't, it just looked that way.

SI: Though your writing has been primarily been, aimed at fiction?

HB: Oh yah.

SI: Have you always—

HB: I've been tempted to try the other, but never uh, ... I don't know. It's not private enough. Actually, the last thing I did before the surgery was go with my friend Chuck out there to a survivalist convention in Los Angeles. And he took pictures and I wrote a piece about it, all on spec. Which we never sold, and I sort of liked it, I might have gotten into it, I don't know. I mean, that was certainly a fascinating subject.

SI: It showed up in your fiction. On the other hand, you've got people like Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. And you read their nonfiction as that goes along and then you pick up their novels and it's basically rehashing everything.

HB: Their journalism is a lot better. True Confessions is okay, I like that. Yah, I think her journalism is a lot better than her fiction. I thought Slouching Towards Bethlehem was pretty impressive.

HB: You know, people have offered me things, you know, journalism things, which I just turn down. Because I just didn't feel prepared up to do it. Either because I wasn't familiar enough with the subject, or it just didn't feel right. Bob Christgau offered me a couple of things, I guess when he was first starting out at The [Village] Voice, I knew him from Cal Arts academy.

SI: Did you go to Cal Arts?

HB: Can I have some of that tea? No, I just hung around, took their money at the poker table.

SI: Do you play poker?

HB: I'm a very good poker player, but I don't play anymore.

SI: Where did you learn to play poker?

HB: At college, it was one of the few things I learned. Sex, cards, drinking—things like that. We played table stakes at Reed. [Audio becomes inaudible, mostly unintelligible small talk]

HB: I'm reading a lot of 19th century stuff now. [...] I've been reading Mark Twain again.

SI: Is fiction writing something, you pretty much just found your own way?

HB: It was just something I could do, like, being good at golf. I always loved to read, from the moment I learned how. So I guess, it's just sort of an emulation of that. I did it in school, in high school. There were long periods where I didn't do anything at all. But I always knew that was what I'd end up doing. Because it was the only serious thing I could really do well. And nothing else particularly interested me, that I wanted to learn how to do. I've had lots of different dumb jobs, but they were just to get through to the next point. I never had a career. I inherited money from my grandparents.

SI: Did you know your grandparents?

HB: On my mother's side, yah. They were both dead by 1940. But that's really what made all that stuff possible. For me not to have jobs when I didn't feel like having jobs. To travel around and live where I wanted to and how I wanted to. I was very careful how I parceled out that $40,000. And I planned to keep going on it for a while. It took me a lot of time to use it up. I bought that car with that. $3,000 cash and it was all mine. Spitfire Triumph. Which I later drove into the woods in Woodstock. Broke out some teeth.

[unintelligible portion]

HB: I'm very interested in insects. I have Edward L. Wilson's definitive work over there. The Insect Societies. I don't have the depth to tackle it. It's like an 800-page text book. I read Sociobiology cover to cover, another textbook. It was quite interesting.

SI: Do you feel a sense of connectiveness with your dad's father's work as a writer?

HB: I never read any of my grandfather's stuff for years and years. I had a certain hostility towards him since he wasn't very much of a father to my father. And then one day I picked up one of his books. I was spending the winter in somebody else's house in Woodstock and started reading it, and I thought, hey, this guy was really good. There was some real snappy stuff in there. But I was in my middle 20s by then.

SI: Did you ever talk to your dad about him?

HB: What, about his writing? A lot about him, but not his work, much.

SI: You're an only child. And your dad was.

HB: And so is my mother. I don't think it's a bad deal at all. Well, in my case at least, I learned how to be by myself, which seems to be a skill a lot people don't have. It seems to be a real problem.

HB: And my dad and grandfather never wrote fiction. Well, my grandfather wrote two novels that were failures. My dad was an actor all the time I was growing up. Making very little money.

[unintelligible part, but the following is from Schuyler Ingle's notes:] HB: I was 15 or 16 when he started doing the TV sports stuff. He wrote his book when I was 14, after I was born my mom didn't work that much. She couldn't take the pounding of the acting life. The constant rejection and anxiety and all of that. So she was probably just as glad to get out of it. She worked some, but not that much, A lot of summers at Woodstock. That's where they met. The Woodstock Playhouse. From a pure craft point of view, fiction and non-fiction writing are the same, it's just putting the words down so they sound nice, so they say what you mean in some sharp way. But as far as an approach or a way of being or whatever, I've only observed the other. Fiction seems more private to me. Writing is groping blind all the way. The story isn't there in complete form. Inner Tube started with that first sentence.

HB: ... and the idea of somebody plunging their head through a televsion. And the idea of writing on television. That's all I have. It's like feeling your way down a hallway or something. Obviously, the more material you get the more shape there is. You know, things become clearer, but uh... Joyce Carol Oates claims that, she gets a whole book in her head and then sits down and just transcribes. That seems just unbelievable to me. This new thing I'm working on now. I have a couple of ideas for things that are ahead. But it's mostly just as I go along. You know, one idea will click another. But I don't where it's gonna end up, or how it will end up.

SI: Do you have a sense of where the more actual writing you do, the more control you have, over what you're doing?

HB: Oh, definitely. Control is real important. I read a couple of William Kennedy's books recently and I thought he had real admirable control over what he was doing. There weren't...it's like a movie. I really admire a movie where there aren't any mistakes.

SI: Like what?

HB: Oh, let's see...Body Heat has only one mistake in it.

SI: Which one?

HB: Oh, just a shot that, it doesn't belong, it doesn't work. It's a long, sorta arty, overhead shot, of the guy's office. And if you cut that out, there aren't any mistakes.

HB: On the other hand, I like big messy books, that are full of mistakes and need editing, and sometimes make you want to skip but take a lot of risks, that aren't, you know, gem-like. Maybe that's what this new book will be, a big mess. It's long, it's going to be long.

SI: The books that I find that I don't care for are the ones that, uh, in the first few pages you know the guy, or the woman, has gone through the University of Iowa and has written short stories and is now writing novels, there's just kind of a tone and smell to them. Or the Raymond Carver read-alike types.

HB: He's one of my real pet peeves. All that sort of minimalist stuff, I just can't be bothered with it at all. And you're right, you can tell right away. I don't know quite what the giveaways are. Yah, I really don't like him at all. He's a big favorite of my editor's.

HB: Well, I guess people will think Inner Tube is bleak, but I think that minimalist stuff is a lot more bleak, it's just bloodless and drained, colorless, what could be more bleak than that? In my book, also it's that, shit happens. People have violent and perhaps unpleasant emotions, but it's not that, uh—

SI: How long do you think the character is, alive in the book, is it a matter of months? Because I had a feeling by the time I got to the end that maybe months or a year may have passed, but everything is headed towards that, that ending. And I didn't have the feeling that the book was so much bleak as it becomes more and more crystalline, and glass clear, and—

HB: Well, as I was groping along, patching all those chapters together, because I had no idea what sequence I would put them in, I just knew I was heading for a white out. That was my only guiding principle. It wasn't until I was, quite near the end by the time I decided in what sequence they were going to go.

SI: So it's conceivable you could shuffle that book in a different order—

HB: Oh, like, Hopscotch [by Julio Cortazar], yah, I thought of that. But I couldn't—Cortazar had done already done that and you can't do it twice. Unfortunately.

SI: Do you have favorite passages in there?

HB: Um, you know, I have chapters that I like, a lot better than others. And there are others that other people have responded to, that to me are just sort of, you know, wheels spinning, getting to the next one. A lot of times the stuff you like, you like best for private reasons. But that, other people are just not going to respond to. And it might have nothing to do with how the actual words...there are a couple of chapters in there that, that you know, I wrote 5 and 6 time that I like. Just because I put so much effort into them.

SI: Do you do a lot of rewriting?

HB: Um, well, with this new production method, I sort of do it as I go along. I go back up to the top and start— [tapes cut out]

[continued osn cassette 2]