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Tinkers by Paul Harding

Biography

Paul Harding has a B.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ workshop, where he was a Teaching/Writing Fellow.

Harding published his first novel, "Tinkers" (Bellevue Literary Press), in 2009. "Tinkers" was shortlisted for the Mercantile Library First Novel Award. It was named one of the hundred Best Novels of 2009 by Publishers Weekly and Amazon.com and one of the Best Books of 2009 by NPR and by Library Journal.

Before he began writing, Paul was a drummer and recorded two albums and regularly toured North America and Europe with his band, Cold Water Flat.

http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/paul-harding/

A tide of affection for prose that nearly went unpublished
Word of mouth helped propel Mass. novelist to Pulitzer
By Geoff Edgers Boston Globe Staff / April 15, 2010

For three years, Paul Harding’s unpublished novel, “Tinkers,’’ sat in a drawer. The writer, a former Boston rock drummer who grew up in Wenham, had tried selling it, but nobody was interested.


“I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll be a writer who doesn’t publish,’ ’’ Harding, 42, said this week, a day after “Tinkers’’ earned him the Pulitzer Prize for fiction — the first book by a small publisher to do so in nearly three decades.

The author’s unlikely success story is rooted in a series of personal interactions between publishers, booksellers, and reviewers that launched a book the old-fashioned way. There were no media campaigns, Twitter feeds, or 30-city tours. Instead, the success of “Tinkers’’ can be linked to a handful of people who were so moved by the richly lyrical story of an old man facing his final days that they had to tell others about it.

“This wasn’t social media,’’ says Michael Coffey, co-editor of Publishers Weekly and a big booster of “Tinkers.’’ “It was real word of mouth and somebody picking up a lunch check.’’

The journey to success began in 2007, when Harding met a fellow writer who suggested he send the manuscript to Jonathan Rabinowitz, who ran Turtle Point Press. Rabinowitz passed on Harding’s book, though he liked it a lot.

The next year Rabinowitz said he met a colleague, Erika Goldman, for lunch and happened to tell her about “Tinkers.’’ Goldman ran the tiny Bellevue Literary Press, a nonprofit publisher connected to New York University’s School of Medicine. She curled up in bed one night and cracked open the manuscript.

“It was so exquisite that I found myself — and this has never happened — weeping for the beauty of the prose,’’ she said. “Paul is a poet who writes prose, and his ability to evoke nuanced emotions through the images that he creates is remarkable.’’

Goldman called Harding and gave him the good news. She would publish his novel, with an initial run of 3,500 copies. The advance: $1,000.

That’s a tiny fraction of a typical advance, but Harding didn’t complain. He was surviving on unemployment checks and his wife’s salary as a middle school teacher in Georgetown, where the couple now live with their two sons. He drove a battered 1992 Oldsmobile station wagon, a car that had served him well 15 years earlier as drummer of the Boston-based rock band Cold Water Flat.

That May, the galleys arrived, with blurbs from some of the esteemed writers Harding had studied with over the years — Barry Unsworth, Elizabeth McCracken, and Marilynne Robinson. Goldman, a veteran of several major publishers before joining Bellevue, met Publishers Weekly’s Coffey for lunch. She handed him a galley.

The Literary Horologist: Paul Harding “Tinkers” With Time

“… I don’t write the book in any order, I just literally wake up and wonder about whatever immediately strikes me as interesting. Usually I have a question about something: ‘What does she think at that point?’ Or, ‘What does he do?’ Or, ‘What does the cemetery look like in the autumn?’ And I just start writing.

Paul Harding’s prose is like the interior of an antique clock; the copper wires of rhythm bound to sentences like brass gears that control the movement of loss. These marvelous mechanics propel readers through the provinces of memory—the angle of winter light on ankle-deep snow, the clink of metal spoons in wooden drawers, the missing father and his mule-drawn wagon making their way away from the embracing warmth of home.

“God hear me weep as I fill out receipts for tin buckets, and slip hooch into coat pockets for cash, and tell people about my whip-smart sons and beautiful daughters. God know my shame as I push my mule to exhaustion, even after the moon and Venus have risen to preside over the owls and mice, because I am not going back to my family — my wife, my children — because my wife’s silence is not the forbearance of decent, stern people who fear You; it is the quiet of outrage, of bitterness. It is the quiet of biding time. God forgive me. I am leaving.” (Pg. 122)

The movements of departure — of a husband from his family, of time from its timepieces, of a wife from the alliance of marriage — are rendered in language grounded in the precision of words.

“The house was gone. Kathleen stopped walking and looked around. The clouds that had colored the dawn copper had advanced and were now fastened overhead like a lid of stone. Flurries of snow spun in the wind. Kathleen surely stood in the right place and the doctor’s house surely was vanished.” (Pg. 91)

Paul Harding creates an immersive experience in which the present recedes naturally into the past on a journey through the frozen backwoods of New England, where an act of kindness elicits the gift of an American treasure, and the silences that deepen over dinner are the residue of love lost to the void of poverty, to illness, to unanswered prayers. Paul Harding’s steady hand pulls us in and leads us on, turning back the layers of legend to brighten its shadows with the reviving light of beautiful prose.

— Carlin M. Wragg, Editor

Note: This transcript has been slightly modified to enhance readability.

Paul Harding: [Reads from Tinkers, pages 7 – 8.]

Carlin M. Wragg: The story begins inside the mind of George Washington Crosby, who’s the son of Howard Aaron Crosby, in his final days of life. Could you talk about the choice to begin the book inside the mind of a character in his final moments? What did that make possible for you as a writer?

PH: I don’t know… It’s funny because my mode of composition is so scattershot, I just collage things together, so the beginning of the book wasn’t one of the last things I wrote, it was probably something I wrote in the middle of the process. The book actually radiated out from when George’s father originally left the family in northern Maine years and years ago, that becomes the event which George is remembering as he dies. I just had this idea of “stock taking” when you’re dying—you’re at the end of your life and so what you do when you’re facing the end is you turn back and the main thing that he turned back toward was this catastrophic event in his own personal history and his family’s history which was being abandoned by his father. I just had this idea of George having a scrambled mind and slipping away from the world and trying to imagine his way back to his father in order to affect some kind of reunion.

CMW: Is that then how the structure came to be? Because the structure isn’t linear; there are circles within circles within circles of voices.

PH: Yes. I guess that’s a function of the way the canals of my own brain work; I think that way so the fiction comes to me in that way, and that worked organically with the fact that the story is so interior, that it’s in George’s brain. I had this idea that the present is what he’s running out of, he’s running out of time in the present, and so the whole narrative just keeps dropping deeper and deeper into the past.

CMW: Is that something you discovered as you were writing or had you set the plot out in advance?

PH: No—no plot set out whatsoever. In terms of process, it’s all what I would call “interrogative writing,” you write in order to find out what the case is in any given sentence. You just sort of discover what’s true.

The first thing I ever thought of for the novel, the first line or image that came to me, was the instant after the character Howard Crosby, the “tinker” of the title, has left his family and he’s realized it for the first time. I thought, “What would it be like to realize that you’ve just abandoned your own family?” Then I wrote the next sentence and the next sentence and the next sentence and eventually you think, “How does that radiate out over time? What are the consequences of that? What’s the wake that’s left behind?” And it naturally included his children and his legacy and all of that.

CMW: Were you interested very much in mortality, or did the theme of mortality come to you organically?

PH: It came organically. I’m not particularly morbid by nature but yes, it is mortality, and also the idea of time. I think that if a character doesn’t really have much time left in the present then, again, it all falls back into the past. I was also working with the idea that you can be in any number of times at once — it can be atemporal in some ways — so the book works toward this reunion that occurs in nothing but George’s imagination.

CMW: So the book is almost challenging the necessity of locating a story in the physical world or in physical action?

PH: Yes, and I think as a writer, particularly as a fiction writer, that poses all sorts of interesting technical and compositional challenges. I teach fiction writing and I’m always pounding the table saying, “You have to write in scene, you have to write in scene, things have to happen,” and then I write a novel that’s almost entirely interior. [Laughter.] But that’s one of the joys of being an artist; the material presents its terms “…that’s one of the joys of being an artist; the material presents its terms to you and you have to figure out a way, technically, to be equal to them.”to you and you have to figure out a way, technically, to be equal to them. In this case I realized that if the book was going to be interior it was in danger of being very abstract, in some ways the book is very abstract, so to me the natural counterbalance to that is to write incredibly concrete prose. To do that I just set this general rule of thumb that was literally as mundane as it sounds, that if you flip through the book and put your finger down anywhere you would put your finger down on a concrete noun or a verb.

CMW: Which is one of the things when I was reading Tinkers that I found so exciting—I was in this interior world and it was whirling around me, this story, but there were so many images and specific nouns and specific aspects of the scene or the scenario that kept me really rooted in place.

PH: I was always surprised at what ended up on the page in terms of these very abstract premises. I’d write about them as if they were literally, physically true and so I got this very, very strange twilight world. It was gratifying to see that happen.

CMW: You refer to a great work of art in a really charming way in your book, Tinkers. I wonder if you would read us that section?

PH: Oh sure, yes.

CMW: Before you do, could you tell us who Gilbert is? We know Howard; who is Gilbert?

PH: Howard is the tinker of the title and he travels around the backwoods of Maine selling mops and brushes and buckets and stuff like that to people. Gilbert is a hermit, he’s a semi-legendary figure in this area of Maine, who lives in the woods, nobody’s quite sure where he lives and how he survives and there are rumors about him having been a graduate of Bowdoin College and having been a classmate of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s but in the chronology of the book people realize that he would have to be something like 120 or 130 years old in order to have actually been one of Hawthorne’s classmates; Howard supplies Gilbert. Gilbert needs a little bit of tobacco and a little bit of coffee and that sort of thing, so once a year Howard and Gilbert meet up in the woods and Howard gives him his supplies. This section is about the last time they meet in the woods. I should also say that part of their relationship is that they never actually speak to one another, they just nod and smoke a pipe together, that’s it, so this little bit is about the last time they meet and about the fact that they do actually have to have some kind of verbal exchange.

PH: [Reads from Tinkers, pages 40 — 43.]

CMW: Where did this episode come from? It has a magic quality that is really unique to the book, I think.

PH: I think that this whole scene arose out of the need for variation. I felt like I needed an episodic scene that was slightly humorous but was consistent with the rest of the story.

This is funny because now I can’t remember what’s factual and what’s imagined but I seem to remember that up in northern Maine — my grandparents are from northern Maine and a lot of the book is set in the landscape that I’m familiar with from going up fishing with my grandfather since I was a kid — and it seemed to me that there had been rumors of a local hermit back in the Twenties living in the woods. It’s so far north that the summer’s maybe six weeks long “I think that a lot of things, whether something’s sad or happy, or light or dark, in a book, whatever its main qualities are are usually more effectively brought out by virtue of being set in relief against something else.”and then it’s winter again, and one day I was thinking about Howard and who he’d know and who he’d run into out in the woods and I remembered these little scraps about a hermit, wondered how in the world somebody could live out in those woods, and thought, “Well wait a minute, my character is a tinker who supplies household goods, and even a hermit might need a needle and a thread or some tobacco once in a while,” so I just decided that Howard supplied this guy. Then I thought, “If he supplies him how do they meet? What does he need? What are their interactions like?” and I came up with this episode.

CMW: Was there any significance to the choice of the book that was the gift?

PH: No, [laughter] — absolutely none! Other then that where I went up fishing with my grandfather is so remote that there are no towns, there are just grids that are numbered by the U.S. Geological Survey, and where we fish originally—I don’t know if Bowdoin College owns it but on the maps it says “Bowdoin Grant” so it might be land that has been granted to Bowdoin—Nathaniel Hawthorne famously went to Bowdoin—and so it’s an orchestration of these weird coincidental details: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bowdoin College, this hermit.

CMW: Where did “The Reasonable Horologist” come from? Because that’s a different voice.

PH: Within the book one of the characters trades and repairs antique clocks, and interspersed throughout his story are quotes from a book that does not exist, that I wholly made up, called The Reasonable Horologist, which is supposed to be an Eighteenth Century clock repair manual. But I also — because it was the Eighteenth Century and I thought about Enlightenment and the Age of Reason and the Clockwork Universe and Determinism — all the implications kept opening out into all these other neat themes and ideas that I could run with. So I got to play around with all those themes but then also, again, on the most mundane practical level, as I got deeper into the book I felt like the book was very funereal and twilit, it was very somber, and I felt like I needed something to alleviate that, literally to change the tone so the book wouldn’t be monotoned. You need different textures, just a different palate. I think that a lot of things, whether something’s sad or happy, or light or dark, in a book, whatever its main qualities are are usually more effectively brought out by virtue of being set in relief against something else. So it was fun to write it and it was also good to juxtapose those passages with the more serious-sounding passages.

CMW: Did you set up any particular writing challenge when you were working on those sections?

PH: No, not really. My grandfather in real life repaired and traded antique clocks and I apprenticed with him for several years so I spent a lot of time fooling around with clocks and trying to repair them. My grandfather had an incredible library of clock books, books about clocks, and books about repairing clocks, so I was familiar with this genre of books about time and about timekeeping. It’s an interesting blend of genres. A lot of it is just very practical mechanical prose and material, but then it also invariably slips into philosophical ideas about what it means to quantify time. I’m a junkie for time and narrative so I love that idea of taking time and marking it off with instruments when really those are just human products.

CMW: Why was it important to you that Howard was epileptic?

PH: It wasn’t. That’s one of those funny things where the dramatic premises of the novel were given to me, in that, as my grandfather was a clock repairman, his father was epileptic and left my grandfather’s family when my grandfather was twelve years old. So to that extent I think of them as dramatic lynchpins; they’re factual, but my grandfather and grandmother, my maternal grandparents, both grew up in northern Maine and had very difficult, very impoverished lives, and even though I always went back up there with my grandfather fly fishing and all this sort of stuff subsequently, they were just — I don’t know, was it generational, whatever combination of things it was they would not elaborate, they would not talk about their lives.

I was very, very close with both my grandparents, particularly my grandfather, and he told me: “Oh my father had epilepsy and he left the family when we were twelve because he got wind of his wife’s intentions of having him committed to an asylum,” which happens in the book, and I would ask my grandfather to elaborate and he just said, “Nope, those days are over. Those are the facts and I don’t like to think about them, I don’t like to talk about them.” Then my grandfather died and you realize that link to the past is not there anymore. So I took those little factual tidbits and started writing my way out from them. I just imagined it.

It was a process where I had to do enough writing so that the imagined truth hit its own critical mass, got its own integrity, took on its own momentum so that this could become the version that I imagined, I didn’t want to do any research or anything like that.

CMW: I want to move to a very simple question: Why did you set the book in New England?

PH: The short answer is because that’s where I’m from. The slightly longer answer has to do with, for some reason, before I started writing, I was very, very enchanted with the so-called magical realists. I loved García Márquez, I loved Cortázar, all those guys, and I remember that I was reading Carlos Fuentes’s novel Terra Nostra and in the middle of it I just said, “I want to do this.”

But those guys — their fiction is so far-flung and cosmologically spread out all over the universe and all over history, so just circumstantially, at first I had this idea that everything I was going to write was going to be set in very exotic times and places. So I worked on a novel for three years, before grad school and through grad school, that was about a twelve-year-old girl who disguises herself as a boy so that she can work in a silver mine in Mexico in the Sixteenth Century. At the time I was thinking it was a combination of my two favorite books, Fuentes’s Terra Nostra and Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain.

The problem I had is that it got so that I couldn’t write a sentence without having to do research, and I couldn’t figure out how to write it without turning it into costume drama. You know, “What would the pre-Columbian miner say to the German mining engineer about the…?” And, “Would he be wearing a silver belt buckle?” I got lost in the props. One morning I woke up and looked at the novel and the whole thing collapsed — I looked at it from one degree different angle and the whole thing collapsed — then fewer than twelve hours later I started writing Tinkers.

So this is the very, very paraphrastic way of answering your original question, which was just that I decided that I was going to use a setting and milieu that I had immediately at my fingertips so that as characterological ideas, themes, and scenes came to me I wouldn’t have to stop for a second to wonder what the light would be like, what the landscape would look like, what the flora and fauna would be like, what the voices would sound like, because all that stuff, it’s a beautiful paradox — what is it? That there are no ninety degree angles in art — that beautiful paradox where all that stuff is of the upmost importance because it’s the stuff out of which the novel ends up being composed, but in another way it’s totally circumstantial.

CMW: It sounds like you had to go through the process of the failed novel to get to this one because you had to know that about yourself.

PH: Yes, because then I know what I know, and I know why I know it. It’s still constantly happening. I’m working on a second novel now and that’s interesting because you find out what was just a function of writing your first successful — as opposed to the novel that I just abandoned — writing the novel that I actually saw to completion, and what’s actually the way that you write that will be the same for all the different books.

CMW: What are you noticing? What’s different?

PH: That I totally collage things together. I don’t write the book in any order, I just literally wake up and wonder about whatever immediately strikes me as interesting. Usually I’m wondering, I have a question about something. “What does she think at that point?” Or, “What does he do?” Or, “What does the cemetery look like in the autumn?” And I just start writing. Eventually, I have to have faith in the process, it happened with Tinkers so I’m hoping it will happen again, eventually everything ends up overlapping.

When I wrote Tinkers, I don’t remember the last scene I wrote but I do remember the phenomenon of finishing one particular day’s writing and as I typed “I remember the phenomenon of finishing one particular day’s writing and as I typed the last period on the last sentence realizing, ‘Oh, I’m done. I’ve got the whole book here.’”the last period on the last sentence realizing, “Oh, I’m done. I’ve got the whole book here.” Then, because everything is so scattered on notebooks and computers and on the backs of receipts from bookstores and stuff like that, I printed everything up and literally took scissors and tape and staplers and cut it all up; it was like a puzzle. I spread it all out on my living room floor and I put the whole novel into order, and it turned out that there was a chronological order and it all worked.

CMW: One of the things I’ve been thinking about in learning the style of your sentences is that they have a great rhythm, so it makes sense to me that you were a drummer.

PH: Yes, absolutely. Having just, from as early as I can remember, always listened to music, so generally music but then more particularly drums because that’s what I played for many years, I think of sentences as having rhythms and I write by ear. Sometimes you get the rhythm before you get the meaning of the sentence, the rhythm leads you to the meaning of the sentence and it feels simultaneously subjective but also objective. You know when there’s a beat too long in that sentence somewhere, where is it? Then you drop it and get the rhythm right and suddenly the meaning is revealed.

In terms of when I switched over from being a musician to being a writer, to me there’s that wonderful paradox where it’s circumstantial — I mean, I feel like I’m just taking dictation, so to me it doesn’t matter whether I have a pair of drumsticks in my hands or whether, as it were, I have a pen in my hand; when the stuff starts coming through, if I have drumsticks I just start playing what comes through, and if I have a pen I just start writing it.

CMW: If you feel you’re taking dictation can you talk about your revision process? Because one would think that maybe it comes whole to you.

PH: No, it’s funny because it certainly doesn’t. This is another reason why I’m fascinated with time and being in time, because I feel that if the ideal novel exists “supra-temporally,” when I’m taking dictation I don’t always hear it right the first time. I like to think that if it’s always there I can go back to it subsequently and revise it and listen again, that the thing is still there for me to channel — it gets a little bit weird to talk in those terms — but just the idea that I’m taking observations down from something that exists outside of my perception of it so I can always go back and re-perceive it.

You’re constantly trying to orchestrate so many things in any given sentence. The sentence almost has strata to it and you might get two or three of the strata right the first shot, but then you have to go back “I feel like I’m just taking dictation, so to me it doesn’t matter whether I have a pair of drumsticks in my hands or whether, as it were, I have a pen in my hand; when the stuff starts coming through, if I have drumsticks I just start playing what comes through, and if I have a pen I just start writing it.”and find the layers inside. It’s this process of exploring and re-exploring, because I’m an obsessive rewriter—I just rewrite and rewrite and rewrite.

CMW: One of the things we talked about on the phone was your friendship with Marilynne Robinson, who’s been really influential on many writers, but you actually know her. One of the things you were talking to me about was her revision process and I wonder if you could describe that because it’s very interesting in relation to what you’ve just said.

PH: To the extent that I don’t want to betray any of Marilynne’s confidences, but I don’t think this is doing that because she talks about this in her own interviews and in class when she teaches, she doesn’t really revise. I think she spends time composing in her mind and then by the time she writes it down all the revision has been done mentally ahead of time. If she feels like she didn’t get it right she just starts it again; she just starts with a clean sheet of paper.

To me that’s interesting for a number of reasons, partly because I admire it so much and could never do it. As a writer, so many times, particularly young writers, when you’re teaching writing or you’re learning writing you’re always looking for normative aspects of process that you can rely on, that you can cling to, so there are these vérités. The problem with that is you can take as normative things which are actually very subjective, that are highly subjective functions of say, for example, your own teacher’s process. So in the case of this process with Marilynne Robinson, you have to really pay attention to how you do it best. When I would look at Marilynne Robinson’s prose for example, that’s quality control — that’s what English prose can do. It’s the same with my other teachers, Elizabeth McCracken, Barry Unsworth, they’re such amazing writers. Then you have to think, “That’s the end that I want to get to, that level.” That’s what you want to aspire toward but the means for getting there is something nobody can hand to you; nobody can tell you how you get to your own best writing.

CMW: I like the idea of combining the openness, which we were just talking about, with what you were describing, which is the rigor, the practice, the craft. It sounds like it’s the responsibility of the writer, in being the recipient of what comes through this strange imaginative process, to really work out — you have to work out those skills and make them continue to be strong, those muscles have to be there.

PH: Absolutely. They atrophy if you don’t keep using them, so you do. I’m a habitual reader of the dictionary. Not to have exotic vocabulary, but to have correct vocabulary. To me, the experience I want a reader of anything I write to have is immediacy. I don’t want them to feel like there’s any distance between, or as little distance as “…what you want to aspire toward but the means for getting there is something nobody can hand to you; nobody can tell you how you get to your own best writing.”possible, between the reader and the experience itself. I want the language to be as precise as possible to get the reader as close to the actual experience as I can without relying on hearsay or received opinion or off-the-rack prefabricated writing.

I think a great work of art is an experience in itself. I think it happens with paintings, it happens with movies, it happens with music, where at a certain point you feel like you’re not reading words anymore, you’re actually having the experience — you’re listening to music and you’re just no longer aware of John Coltrane playing the saxophone, it’s just pure aesthetic experience. In some ways there’s that weird transcendence through imminence kind of thing — at a certain point it becomes incidental or circumstantial that John Coltrane is playing a saxophone.

CMW: I want to ask one final question: I wonder if you’re done with these characters?

PH: Nope. The second novel is about one of George’s grandsons.

CMW: The link between fathers and sons, I know you’re a father yourself, is that a theme that’s fascinating to you?

PH: It is fascinating to me, but I didn’t deliberately choose it. It arose, again, as a consequence of those dramatic premises. It just happened to be father, son, father, son. In fact, when I first wrote Tinkers there was a seventy-five or eighty page section that’s about the mother, Kathleen. She’s fascinating to me and I just… in some ways I felt like she was the main character of the book because I just could never figure her out. I wanted to do her justice. Sometimes people say, “Why aren’t there any women in the book?” It wasn’t deliberate, I just knew about the emotional lives and the connections of these men and this woman remained inscrutable to me.

When I cut out this other section of the novel I tried to write a long short story or a novella that was just about her. The problem with her that I just couldn’t — coming up on my own limitations to imagine her — was that she is embittered and the problem with that, in terms of writing about somebody who is embittered, is that it is a very, in the most technical sense of the word, monotonous state of mind. There’s not much variation, there’s little humor, there’s not much levity; she’s really been cashed in by her experience, so I figured the kindest thing I could do for her was to let her be.

http://www.openlooppress.org/interviews/paul-harding/

Interview published: Dec 2009 / Jan 2010

Julian Arni: An Interview with Paul Harding Published February 15, 2011
FEBRUARY 15, 2011

Tinkers by Paul Harding

In Paul Harding’s acclaimed debut, clock repairman George Washington Crosby unravels in a series of poignant memories as he lies dying in his living room. The undersong of George’s delirium is his distant father, an epileptic traveling salesman who leaves his family after biting, in one of his seizures, his son’s hand. Flitting through the porous characters of three generations of New England paterfamilias, Harding’s slim novel assembles an array of elegiac images and incisive observations into a mosaic of life’s staggering beauty.

HBR: “Tinkers” begins with “George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died,” and ends eight days later with George dying (with numerous temporal signposts in between). What made you deliberately surrender this natural source of narrative tension right in the first line?

PH: I think that the natural source you’re talking about is “plot,” something in which I’m not all that interested. If you have a good character, you don’t need much plot. Plot emerges as a function of character. I also have a stylistic habit of laying the story out in full, right away, so that I can’t resort to any kind of trickery, or what Thomas Mann called “mere effect” later on (e.g., “but his mother was really a HORSE!” etc.). The story is in the telling. I also strongly believe that knowing what’s going to happen actually creates wonderful dramatic tension; it’s just sourced in a different stratus of the writing. There’s a tension that is created by what is inevitable. The more you become implicated in the character, the more you start to dig your heels in against his inevitable and clearly declared demise. Tinkers is structured as a kind of countdown to the protagonist’s death. The eight days it takes for him to die are also analogous to how long a standard wall clock will run before it stops and must be rewound, which dovetails with certain thematic variations in the book.

HBR: The premise of the novel — a man on his deathbed — lends itself easily to a certain type of abstract reflection. But the substance of the book isn’t vague regret, or nostalgia; it’s instead a set of very concrete memories.

PH: That’s exactly right. All fiction participates in one or another kind of storytelling tradition. Every tradition has predictable dangers (as well as virtues). Abstract reflection is a danger inherent to interior, retrospective material. So, I simply made it a normative rule with this book that, if you fanned through the pages, stopped randomly, and stuck your finger down on a word, the word would be a precise, fully immanent, concrete noun or verb. It proved to be a fun challenge and I think it helped discipline the prose. I naturally tend towards fairly static, interior settings — the life of the mind, as it were — so keeping things in the physical world is very important.

It’s simply the case that fiction comes to me in suspended moments, like photographs or paintings or tapestries, even, rather than in a series of events, and so a large part of what I spend my time doing when I write is parsing out significant instants. The lack of action, so to speak, needs to be compensated for with an emphasis on the tension, the drama inside the given moment.

This concrete writing is usually precipitated onto the page as description. I’ve found that if description is pursed to the most precise degrees of exactitude, an interesting, kind of paradoxical, phenomenon occurs, where the given passage opens up onto the realm of metaphor and symbol. It seems counterintuitive, that penetrating deeper into immanence leads to a kind of transcendence, at least these days, maybe, but that’s been my experience, and it has been a very gratifying aesthetic revelation.

HBR: The word ‘tinkers’ would seem to apply, in its different senses (itinerant metal mender and salesman; repairman), not only to George and Howard’s work, but also to your own: it feels as if most of the writing must have been rewriting — ‘tinkering’ with the novel till it was perfect. Was that really how it went?

PH: Absolutely. It was inevitable, given the various premises of the story. What you hope for is that the book embodies its own meaning, as my teacher Marilynne Robinson used to say. That is, the book itself becomes an example of its own subject. In the case of Tinkers, it’s a case of one of those happy, incidental harmonies or overtones that just end up unfolding out of the overall process of composition. I rewrite endlessly. There’s not a sentence in the book I didn’t rewrite at least a dozen times. And even now, when I do events, I sometimes get distracted editing sentences as I read them out loud. My reading copy of the book is covered in edits that I’ll make if I ever get a crack at a second edition of the book.

HBR: Was there a non-fictional source?

PH: The barest dramatic premises were based on scraps of old family stories that my maternal grandparents told me, but upon which they would not elaborate. For instance, my great-grandfather did have epilepsy and left the family when he found out that my great-grandmother intended to have him committed to an asylum. But that is all my grandfather ever told me about it. So I imagined my way outward from that fact until the fiction achieved its own sort of critical mass.

HBR: There’s a lot that’s reminiscent of American Transcendentalism here, in particular the sense that isolation or solitude is, ultimately, spiritually redeeming. It seems that in this way it is paradoxically Howard and George’s uncommunicativeness that finally reveals their profound similarities.

PH: Yes, I think that there’s a kind of connection made in terms of the characters understanding and being solicitous of one another’s solitude. I think it’s due to my natural disposition that the novel shows signs of transcendentalist thought, rather than anything deliberate. I have an abiding love for those thinkers, but it comes more from a deep, pretty intuitive sense of recognition when I read them, rather than having consciously learned a system of thought. That’s just to say that, when I write, this kind of thing just more or less arises as a natural preoccupation, rather than as an intentional exposition of a philosophy.

HBR: Epileptic seizures, and death, occasion the mystical experiences so central to the novel. But from the outside, they’re ugly, incomprehensible, and unromanticizable.

PH: Yes, if it had been up to me, I’d never have written about a character with epilepsy, because it’s so vulnerable to all kinds of suspect, figurative treatments. I tried to keep the epilepsy pretty clinical, and the character himself a mystic. The two inevitably become enmeshed, but hopefully in a manner that doesn’t seem too romantic. I mean, I’m interested in the history of, say, the weird ways in which death and illness are aestheticized, as it were, in art — Thomas Mann’s novels, like The Magic Mountain, or his Doctor Faustus are great examples — but at the same time, I wanted to avoid getting tangled up with that as a theme. In fact, I tried to deliberately make the epilepsy as unromantic as possible; Howard, the character who suffers from it, experiences it pretty straightforwardly as electrocution. There’s nothing romantic about it from his perspective. It just cooks him.

HBR: In the novel itself, there’s very little dialogue and no quotation marks. Is there a particular reason for that?

PH: I just don’t like the way quotation marks look. Or dashes. And I think the relative lack of dialogue is just a matter of disposition. When fictional moments present themselves to me, they just don’t happen to arrive in the form of people chatting with one another. I suppose I just always find myself drawn to the inner life, the drama of consciousness. I find the state of consciousness to be pretty dramatic!

HBR: What about the different texts and voices?

PH: My writing process might be described as one of collage and juxtaposition. In the case of Tinkers, I guess I was concerned, too, with the pretty funereal palette of the material, and wanted to find ways to get different tones and textures on the page, so that there’d be some contrast, some variation, some depth, and, in the case of, for example, the fictional book-within-the-book, The Reasonable Horologist, some levity, even while that text hopefully also evolves the themes of the book.

HBR: You are also a musician. Are there palpable ways in which you see this fact influencing your writing?

PH: Well, I was a drummer, so I do write by rhythm a lot. But mostly, I think of it as a matter of method of transcription. I think of myself as an amanuensis, and I can take dictation with a pair of drumsticks or a pen. It’s all the same stuff coming over the wire, as far as I’m concerned, and in a lovely way it’s almost incidental whether you dance it out, paint it out, write it out, or honk it out on a horn. The best art has a way of making the medium incidental. When I get totally immersed in, say, one of Coltrane or Bill Evan’s solos, the sax or the piano almost becomes irrelevant, or transparent, and you experience something like pure music. That’s the sort of ideal I always shoot for with my prose. In the best cases, the language will convey meaning so precisely that the writing will almost fall away; it won’t feel like you’re reading, just absorbing experience directly. Of course, that sensation evaporates the moment you become aware of it occurring, but that’s pretty fascinating, too. And here we are, back at the drama of consciousness …

HBR: A debut, published by a small press, that was so quickly and so widely noticed — a particularly rewarding turn of events, I imagine?

PH: It’s odd how the whole experience of getting this book published reads like an anecdote made up for the talk-show circuit or something. But, yes, I had the thing written and couldn’t get any commercial houses or agents interested. So, it sat in a drawer for two or three years, until I mentioned it in passing to a friend, who suggested I query a friend, who read it and passed it along to Erika Goldman, the publisher of Bellevue Literary Press, etc. It’s heartening, because it means to me that there are tons of people out there who love to read and who will find the books they want, somehow, and who will tell one another about those books and pass them on to one another, and it’s just this great kind of human process that persists almost despite the great efforts being made to turn it all into the same thing as selling toothpaste and flat-screen televisions. I mean, the NYU School of Medicine is publishing me. It sounds kind of weird on paper, but it’s worked out beautifully! Really, I cannot imagine a better first experience of being published.

HBR: Are you currently working on anything?

PH: I’m working on a second novel, about the next generation of the same family in Tinkers..

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A Conversation With Paul Harding

ByTony Perez|January 10th, 2011–01:54 pm

Paul Harding’s Tinkers is one of my favorite novels of the last couple years (I love it when the Pulitzer committee gets it right),so when the opportunity arose to interview him for the Portland Mercury a few months back, I jumped at it. I guess I haven’t mastered the precise-questions-for-concise-answers thing (or I just couldn’t help but sit back and listen to someone wax intelligently about Reformed-Protestant theology and quantum mechanics…and how they relate to fiction writing) because what was supposed to be a 550-word piece came in at about 5000. Needless to say, I had to do significant trimming. Thankfully, the Internet knows no column inches. Below is the director’s cut of that interview.

Tony Perez: From what I’ve heard, you received a lot of rejection letters before Bellevue agreed to publish Tinkers. Now that you’ve got a Pulitzer and a major PEN award, anyone in particular you’d like tell, “I told you so”?

Paul Harding: No. I’ve got people in my mind, and I figure they know who they are. Personally, it’s very frustrating to be rejected like that; you work your tail off on your novel or your stories or your poems, and then you’re met with that kind of apathy from the world of publishing. But that’s a fairly common lot for writers. I look back on it as my fair share of that sort of business. Short story writers in particular…they have to keep Excel charts of magazines and rejection letters. There are all these stories of people wallpapering their studies with rejection letters, so I think I just got my fair share of the writer’s lot.

TP: Tinkers didn’t take the typical route to success. It was published by a tiny press and, at least initially, flew under the radar of most big media outlets. It seems like the book really took off through word of mouth. Can you talk about the book’s momentum, and when you realized readers were connecting with it?

PH: Yes. So Bellevue Literary Press is in Bellevue hospital—the infamous Bellevue Hospital—and it’s actually a not-for-profit imprint that’s put out by the NYU school of medicine. So that’s my publisher: the NYU School of Medicine. As the editor there said, the advance was a token advance. They really didn’t have much of a marketing budget or anything. But luckily they did some advanced reader’s copies and there was, in particular, a sales rep named Lise Solomon out in San Francisco who read the book and really took it under her wing—became an advocate for it, really talking it up before it came out. She kind of got a buzz going out on the West Coast before anything happened here. But word of mouth started a little bit before it was published—Publisher’s Weekly gave it a good review. As soon as the advanced copies came out it made visible the fact that there is this real independent bookstore, hand-sold, word-of-mouth network of passionate readers. What’s so heartening to me about it is that there are still those networks out there. If you put out a book, even through a small publishing house, it can find it’s readers.

It was actually on the bestseller list in San Francisco right when it came out for a couple of weeks. I went out there and did some book touring, then came back to the East Coast and it was like the thing had never been published. But it just kept puttering along, which we thought was a good sign—it wasn’t just some big spike at the beginning because of a marketing campaign or anything like that. It just kind of kept selling. It got reviewed in a lot of major city newspapers, and the New Yorker did a review, but not the New York Times. It caught people’s attention as it worked its way around. So well before the Pulitzer we felt like it was a success. It was getting respectable reviews around the country and it was selling steadily—I thought that was fantastic and so much more than I ever imagined would happen. Three or four weeks before the Pulitzer was announced, I got word that I’d received a Guggenheim. I figured that was the jewel in the crown right there. Then the Pulitzer happened, and the Pen thing, and it just kind of snowballed. To me, again, as soon as there were fifty copies in print, it was all gravy from there. The fact that it had been so tough to publish, I had more-or-less reconciled myself to not getting it published, just doing art for art’s sake. So everything subsequent to that, really, was just gravy.

TP: As someone who works for a small press, I’m so encouraged to see something like this happen. Indies around the country were so happy to see the Pulitzer short list come out, with not just Tinkers, but Lydia Millet’s collection from Soft Skull as well [Love in Infant Monkeys].

PH: Absolutely, as I tour around, it’s such a surreal thing to be the protagonist in this can’t-get-published-to-the-Pulitzer kind of thing. But to me, the most important aspect of it, the realistic aspect of it, is just that idea there are places out there, indie presses, that can still get their books out to people who want to find them. And with stuff like the Pulitzer, the fix isn’t in. Small presses get their hats in the ring. Not everything is this big, giant corporate juggernaut. It seems, too, from my experience, that independent presses are where mid-list authors are these days. Which is cool. Maybe you have to supplement your income with teaching or whatever, but it’s still a viable choice to be an artist.

TP: I’m very interested in the structure of Tinkers. It’s hallucinatory, and as such, isn’t beholden to a strict timeline or event point of view. As George lies on his deathbed, we get scattered moments, not only from his life, but also from his father and grandfather’s lives. Was the structure something you imposed on the text from the beginning, or did it only become clear later on?

PH: It was a little bit of both. Part of it just comes from how I write fiction. I sort of collage things; I write in shorter episodic passages—set pieces. I find that when I write fiction it comes to me not quite in episodes but in instances. The instant when Howard realizes he’s leaving his family. The instant when George realizes he’s going to die. Then I spend a lot of time exploding those moments. You know when you buy a lawnmower, and you look at the instruction manual and it has those exploded views: the nuts and bolts and little parts of the wheels. That’s basically what I do. I just explode those moments, parse them out, and look for character.

But also, to an extent, the subject lent itself to an associative rather than linear architecture. Not only because of the hallucination and disillusion of his consciousness, but also because so much of the novel is interior—I thought of it as moving around associatively, like a mind does. When we look at the life that we live in our minds, it is not linear. We organize it into linear patterns because we all have to put on shoes, and get to work, but your mind moves around very associatively. So my writing method and the subject matter, in that way, complemented one another.

TP: I don’t always put a lot of stock in jacket blurbs, but Elizabeth McCracken wrote something that really resonated with me. She called the book an “instruction manual on how to look at nearly everything.” You seem obsessed with the minute detail—whether it’s landscape, or animals, or clocks, or a peddler’s merchandise—and your descriptions veer more toward poetic language than what we see in a lot of contemporary fiction. When you read fiction, are you more drawn to language and description than plot?

PH: As a reader, absolutely. But observation and description refracted through character—to me, plot is a predicate of character. So when I describe in great detail a landscape or an artifact or whatever, it’s all telescoped through an individual. It’s never just a landscape described in detail; it’s the landscape as apprehended by a mind. Particularly when it comes to the landscape stuff and some of the density of the language, one of the patron saints of the book, and my writing, is Wallace Stevens. The way he describes weather—the auroras of autumn and the transports of summer; the weather and the seasons as occasions for the mind communing with itself; the drama of consciousness. Because Tinkers is so interior, I felt a kind of consequential necessity to be all the more concrete with the language. Leaning too much on the abstract and conceptual, it’s easy to drift off into the ether. With Tinkers, this guy is basically lying in bed thinking, so all the scenes and things he thinks about had to have their correlating literal and concrete images, even just so it stayed imminent and physical and didn’t just dissolve into pure idea.

TP: One thing that really impressed me about Tinkers is that you managed to channel a tradition that harkens back to a lot of 19th century writers, but there’s nothing archaic about the style or language. Can you talk to me a little bit about your influences, and how you were able to make transcendentalist writing feel so contemporary?

PH: Yeah, maybe I think of it from a slightly different angle, but I dig the spirit of it. I adore the transcendentalists. Emerson is right at the top of my list. Thoreau is not too far behind. I also think of Hawthorne, Melville . . . even Wallace Stevens kind of comes out of that tradition. Emily Dickenson—Writers like that. Some people do think Tinkers has sort of an archaic feel, maybe just because it’s set 90 to 100 years ago, and goes even further back. Some of that has to do with the fact that I like the idea of stripping away some of the more prominent distractions of current material culture, which I think can set up sort of a veil of white noise—It’s difficult to see or hear somebody’s mind. Also, I was very conscious when I was writing of the danger, that because I was doing those things and had those affinities, I was self conscious that it could lapse into overly archaic-sounding prose, which would then come off as sounding mannered. I think there’s a kind of formality to the writing, which kind of makes it sound archaic, but I tried deliberately not to use archaic diction or syntax—except in very, very deliberate places, mostly in the quotes from The Reasonable Horologist [A fictional book from 1783 that is quoted throughout the novel]. I tried to use that contrast; the prose in the rest of Tinkers doesn’t seem all that archaic because it’s put next to stuff that deliberately is. Going back to an earlier question, when I write prose I think of myself as writing unlineated poetry. It’s lyric, it’s pastoral—I guess because of the transcendental milieu—but I’m unabashedly going for a kind of maximum density of language, and image, and meaning in every sentence, without it collapsing on itself and becoming turgid or impenetrable. I think maybe if you toss all those things together, and shoot for the ideal of precision and accuracy, that stops it from sounding archaic.

TP: There’s a quiet spirituality to your work that I think is lacking in a lot of contemporary fiction (your old teacher Marilynne Robinson being an obvious exception) and I’ve heard you’re a big reader of theology. I wonder if you could talk about how your work or your thinking is influenced by people like Karl Barth, or Martin Luther. Or even someone like William James?

PH: All the people you’ve just described I think you can sort of line up in parade formation, they all come out of the same tradition—reformed Protestant thinking. I grew up here in Boston kind of a neutral atheist. I read my Nietzsche and what not, but I wasn’t a dogmatic atheist—I wasn’t doctrinaire; I didn’t have anything against religion. And then after having studied with Marilynne Robinson for a number of years, it occurred to me that if I asked her where the source of her aesthetic, and intellectual, and soulful kind of integrity and sophistication came from, she would tell me that it was her religion. She would tell me that it came out of her reading in this tradition. Given that I respect her so much, I would be inclined to respect her answer, her own accounting of herself. So I just started to read these things and I found them to be incredibly beautiful— deeply concerned with narrative and cosmology. It was so much more than the popular sand kicking you hear in the press between Richard Dawkins and Creationists—the crummy little cartoon versions of these things. The more deeply I read into them, the more I realize that if you isolate yourself from these traditions of thinking, you’re isolating yourself from most of Western intellectual history, up until, almost post-World War II thinking. It almost feels like a type of censorship, like “religion’s bad for you, don’t bother looking at theology.” I read someone like Karl Barth and it’s just the most beautiful, aesthetically pleasing human thought I’ve encountered. In Tinkers, since it’s fiction, I’m not under the obligation to engage in apologetics or offer proof, but I can explore things. I can play around with them dramatically and aesthetically, and sort of see how these people account for themselves in terms of spiritual conceptions of who they are in the Universe.

If you look at Emerson, he was a Unitarian minister and he left the church. The common rap about that is, you know, he left the church for greener pastures. But if you look at the tradition out of which he came, there’s a strong argument to be made that he left the church to find God. That’s the Protestant tradition—at least the writing and thinking with which I’m familiar. There’s a built-in anti-authoritarianism, the presumption that the institutional church is a human construction; it’s always going to ossify, and it’s antithetical to truly pious thinking. For them, really what it comes down to, is you and scripture. The Unitarians broke away from the Calvinists; the Calvinists broke away from the Lutherans; the Lutherans broke away from the Catholics; the Catholics broke away from the Jews; the Jews broke away from the Babylonians. That’s a beautiful tradition, and seems hardwired into this understanding of what pursuing religion and that kind of thinking is. The best theologians, for example Karl Barth, view the Bible as a work of literature, and that does not demean its normative or holy authority. He’s a close reader of a text. It’s a much more sophisticated use of the imagination and the intellect, and just makes you think about what we talk about when we talk about God. When you go back to someone like Dawkins, he just perverts all that stuff by saying, “if you believe in God, you believe in an old man with a white beard sitting on a throne.” Of course that’s ridiculous. But then you realize that people like Dawkins have never read a word of theology, they rely on popular prejudice—or all this material positivism that they misheard in their, you know, Wittgenstein 101 class. If everything is made of matter, and there is no such thing as the spirit, then all that means is that we have no idea what the nature of matter is. I’m perfectly willing to grant that everything is made out of stuff, but that just means that we don’t really know what stuff is. To me, theology and poetry and art go hand-in-hand with physics. That version of materialism is totally antiquated, out-dated, Newtonian mechanics. They’re always complaining that it’s not testable, it’s not falsifiable, but the most sophisticated quantum mechanical experiments only make the nature of matter more ambiguous than it ever was before—it’s all observer dependent. If you’re a writer, there’s a very cool anti-realist strain in quantum mechanics. Supraluminal influence and observer dependent reality—all of that speaks to the experiential and participatory nature of human consciousness. When translated into fiction, it’s part of character. There’s a passage in Tinkers where Howard is walking through the woods, and when he turns around to look at his wagon, he’s certain that every time he turns his head, everything behind him disappears or changes. In a way, that’s just fooling around with quantum physics, just in a narrative sense.

TP: The New York Times mentioned that the first book you worked on took place in a 16th-century Mexican silver mine. Will the next book we see from you be such a radical departure from Tinkers? Or is this material you’re still interested in working with?

PH: I’m probably 75% done with the first draft of the next novel. The title of it is Enon, which is the town in Massachusetts in which George Crosby dies. In his mind, to where he escaped from his youth in Maine. It’s the original colonial name for Wenham, the town I grew up in, just a little bit north of Boston. So this next novel is about one of George’s grandsons. His name is Charlie Crosby, and he actually makes about a one-sentence cameo in Tinkers. So it’s about him and his daughter, Kate. The action is subsequent to that in Tinkers, and set in the same location, but it’s not a sequel per se. As Charlie makes his way through the plot or the circumstances of the novel, George will show up as part of Charlie’s sort of reservoir of memories and reference points, but it’s not a continuation of the action of Tinkers. I have some idea that I’ll go back and a third book will be connected with the same family, so I might be coming up with my own little New England Yoknapatawpha one of these days.

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