The 8763 Wonderland Interview: Joseph Mailander, Writer O’Fiction

As some of you may recall. Joseph Mailander, editor and founder of Martini Republic, announced in late March that he was temporarily hanging up his reins at MR in order to, well, get his head together.

Joe has been in a funk lately. His 49th birthday had a lot to do with that. And a certain lack of recognition was a mitigating factor as well. When I wrote, once again, about our mutual friend, novelist Diana Wagman, Joe got in a bit of a snit, sending the following e-mail missive to me:

I’m utterly depressed that nobody ever talks about my fiction, they only talk about me as a blogger. I’ve written four novels and a collection of short stories and I’ve never been reviewed once, neither by print reviewer or blog reviewer, after thirty years of writing fiction. But it’s good of you to keep mentioning Diana’s books; keep up the good work.

I then invited Joe to sit down for an interview with 8763 Wonderland, an interview that would focus solely on his remarkable — or less than remarkable — career slinging words of a fictional nature.

Joseph replied:

As for an interview, I’m game to be interviewed, but … I’m not in a good place right now (which I suppose makes for a good interview—I don’t know). But I am a really bitter man—be forewarned if you want to interview me that I am not full of bubbles.

Since when has a little bitterness held us back here at Wonderland? So here it is. The 8763 Wonderland literary chit-chat with a man who describes himself as “contemptuous, withdrawn, ever indignant”, a writer who steadfastly refuses to surrender to “the sewer of commerce.”

WONDERLAND: How did you come to writing, Joe? Did it happen at a young age?

JOSEPH MAILANDER: I came to writing mostly because people identified talent at an extremely early age and I received enormous encouragement to do it. Yet I had something in me too—an unusually sedentary and private childhood. I don’t know that I had more talent than others in truth, but I had better stories to tell than most suburban kids, as my parents were unusual people, and I was unusually close to them as an only child.

To my high school, writing talent meant packing me into journalism and Latin classes and then shipping me off to Columbia, which was thought of as the best place for journalism at the time. And I some great profs there, like Fred Friendly, as well as some newsmakers, like George McGovern—this was five years after running against Nixon. But my heart has never been in journalism. It was always in fiction, even then.

W: So when did you first start getting very serious about fiction?

JM: Fiction happened when I was about nineteen. I started writing my first novel at that age. I had already read much literature, fairly comprehensively. I dropped out of school to work on my book and to take on all the adventure that might come with it. Then I went back to Columbia, then I dropped out again, for the same pursuit.

That was before computers. I didn’t finish that novel until 1984—seven years. With a computer, It took me seven months to write the next one.

Most parents don’t really indulge their children much as writers. But my mother did. After I finished my second novel, I had to sell my Mac to make rent. I was living on Formosa at the time. This was 1987—I was 30, not working, not doing anything but writing. My mother heard about it and she contacted a former girlfriend of mine and had a new Mac shipped to me the next day. There aren’t a lot of moms out there who will buy their thirty-year-old only child a Mac after he’s just spent seven months not making money and writing away. My circumstances in relation to writing were always unusual.

W: That was your first serious touch with the world of fiction?

JM: Yes. The novel I had written, “Salsipuedes,” is a satire about Latino immigration in which the Anglo protagonist has a very ironic and insensitive relationship to the Latinos in Los Angeles, and finally comes to a degree of sensitivity by novel’s end. It was also a very picaresque romp though Southern California. My agent sent it to Ashbel Green at Knopf first—he liked it, but Gordon Lish didn’t. They gave it to a third editor to read, and they ended up passing. My agent sent it off to twelve other publishers, but nothing happened. I was very upset—my parents were starting their long downward spiral–indeed, they would both die four years later—and I knew I was running out of time for them to see me end up certain. As an only child, I was intimately involved with their caretaking, which was very demanding, as neither could drive any longer—in fact my mother, very much an Old World woman, never drove in her life.

So I wrote short stories when I could. I was sending short stories to the New Yorker, mostly to Linda Asher there. This went on for seven years. I’d get comments and occasionally ask for rewrites, but they never bought a single story. Mostly, Linda would criticize me for being “elliptical” but to me me American life was inescapably elliptical. My short stories are probably in truth filled with too many ideas. I feel like in a novel I can stretch out but a short story my writing is densely-packed, unstable, and probably radioactive. She suddenly left the magazine in 1996, and after all that time, I was left without anyone interested there.

W: What mistakes, personal and professional, do you feel that you may have made that impeded your success as a writer of serious, commercially viable fiction?

JM: If you wonder about mistakes I’ve made, I’d say my biggest mistake to date has been expecting the precise people whom I mean to attack with my fiction to publish it. Not editors per se, but people who are comfortably settled into a diabolically frozen, haut-bourgeois life. And probably you could throw in most readers as well; readers are generally just as settled, reading novels on their two-week vacations or to pass time on a plane. I hate the whole “sewer of commerce” element of publishing. There was a writer in France, Guy DeBord, who covered one of his books with sandpaper, so it would deface other books against which it might be placed. I feel good about that. My biggest “mistake” is being me: contemptuous, withdrawn, ever indignant at the prospect of twining a vocation with money.

But I don’t think I’ve really made many mistakes—for me. Somehow I have made it to this point, which is an accomplishment all by itself. Simply sitting here being 49 with my life and self-destructive attitude has been a tremendous athletic achievement all by itself. I couldn’t muster any self-respect, even any will to live, were I to write more to market, were I to be kinder to myself.

W: Your work is clearly informed by French writers and philosophers. How does this affect the commercial viability of your work?

JM: My novels are most hindered commercially by the complexity of the ideas they embrace, I think. They are always especially filled with a lot of French ideas, as I’ve read a lot of French philosophers with great respect—and much as I would like to imagine that they should be commercially viable, they probably are not. I look at French modern thought in a way that most do not.

Even my very first novel, the one I began when I was nineteen, ended up being shaped very much by Roland Barthes’s autobiography, which is arranged by subject in alphabetical order. My most recent one, The Plasma of Terror, has French thought all over it, from the nomadism of Anti-Oedipus to the social thought of Baudrillard. It’s an LA novel but it starts out in Paris and the pivotal events happen there.

As a reader, I’m very intellectually ambitious, and as a writer, I suppose even more so. Again, this works in France but not so much here anymore. You look at a novel like The Elementary Particles and there’s really nothing like it in America, or at least there hasn’t been for some time. (And yet they sell well here when translated from another language). Too many writers here are writing to market, even to two markets. I hate that. I hate the sewer of commerce, all book fairs, all conventions (and I’ve been to the BEA at least a dozen times over the past twenty-five years). I’ve been writing fiction, all the way; that’s what I do in life, it’s a vocation, a calling. I write for myself, not for this crummy, slummy marketplace.

Immediately on finishing this last novel, I thought, Jesus Christ, why do I bother at all? I knew I would be obliged to just save myself the time and heartbreak and publish it myself. An exercise reducing 9/11 into terms of Baudrillardian hyperrealty is not exactly what commercial publishers or American readers are looking for.

W: What’s next for Joseph Mailander as a writer?

Of late I’ve toyed with the idea of keeping my writing entirely private—of just continuing to write my novels until I die, and not even trying to sell them or to send them anywhere—just printing them out for my own use, slamming them away in my hanging files, and letting fate have at them after I’m gone. I’ve made it this far, I don’t have half as far to go—why bother with the publishing side at all? I know I’m a writer; what should it matter if people read now, or forty years from now, or not at all?

For more information on Joe and his books visit St. Genevieve Press