October 10, 1982

A TALK WITH DON DELILLO

By Robert R. Harris

DURING the last 11 years Don DeLillo has published seven novels of wit and intelligence. He has examined advertising (''Americana,'' 1971), football (''End Zone,'' 1972), the rock music scene (''Great Jones Street,'' 1973), science and mathematics (''Ratner's Star,'' 1976), terrorism (''Players,'' 1977), the conventional espionage thriller (''Running Dog,'' 1978) and, in his new novel, ''The Names,'' Americans living abroad.

Yet despite his unusual versatility and inventiveness, it seems that relatively few readers other than the critics clamor for Mr. DeLillo's work. He is able to earn a living from his writing, but he has not had a large commercial success.

''I don't know what happens out there,'' he says. ''I don't know how the machinery works or what curious chemical change has to take place before that sort of thing happens. I wouldn't speculate. I've always tried to maintain a certain detachment. I put everything into the book and very little into what happens after I've finished it.''

Mr. DeLillo lives with his wife on a modest residential street in a suburb of New York City. One recent afternoon, Mr. DeLillo sat in his living room wearing a plaid shirt, blue jeans and moccasins, and discussed his past and present concerns as a writer.

Born in the Bronx in 1936, Mr. DeLillo attended Fordham University, where, he says, ''the Jesuits taught me to be a failed ascetic.'' He hated school but readily reels off a list of early influences. ''I think New York itself was an enormous influence,'' he says. ''The paintings in the Museum of Modern Art, the music at the Jazz Gallery and the Village Vanguard, the movies of Fellini and Godard and Howard Hawks. And there was a comic anarchy in the writing of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and others. Although I didn't necessarily want to write like them, to someone who's 20 years old that kind of work suggests freedom and possibility. It can make you see not only writing but the world itself in a completely different way.''

Mr. DeLillo's new novel explores how Americans work and live abroad. The protagonist, James Axton, a ''risk analyst'' for a company with C.I.A. ties, becomes obsessed with a bizarre murderous cult whose members select their victims by their initials. Mr. DeLillo describes ''The Names,'' along with ''Ratner's Star,'' as a book that was especially difficult for him to write.

''The main character,'' he says, ''resisted realization for a longer time than other characters have. It wasn't until I went away for five or six months without doing any work on the book that James Axton came alive for me. Before that, he seemed to resist entering the sentences I was writing. And every time I began to write about the cult I seemed to enter a period of anxiety. I'm not sure whether this was because I was having trouble bringing the cult members to life or whether I simply didn't want to face the reality of what they did. I wasn't sure I could be equal to the mysteriousness of the murders they committed.

''A writer can be perfectly happy with the character he creates who happens to be a mass murderer if the writer feels that his creation has been successful. But in this case, it simply didn't work that way. The characters themselves made me wish I'd decided to do a simpler novel.''

Like ''Ratner's Star,'' a book in which Mr. DeLillo says he tried to ''produce a piece of mathematics,'' ''The Names'' is complexly structured and layered. It concludes with an excerpt from a novel in progress by Axton's 9-year-old son, Tap. Inspiration for the ending came from Atticus Lish, the young son of Mr. DeLillo's friend Gordon Lish, an editor.

''At first,'' Mr. DeLillo says, ''I had no intention of using excerpts from Tap's novel. But as the novel drew to a close I simply could not resist. It seemed to insist on being used. Rather than totally invent a piece of writing that a 9-year-old boy might do, I looked at some of the work that Atticus had done when he was 9. And I used it. I used half a dozen sentences from Atticus's work. More important, the simple exuberance of his work helped me to do the last pages of the novel. In other words, I stole from a kid.''

Young Atticus is given ample credit in the book's acknowledgments, but creative borrowing from life is not a new technique for Mr. DeLillo, who has been praised for his ear for dialogue. ''The interesting thing about trying to set down dialogue realistically,'' he says, ''is that if you get it right it sounds stylized. Why is it so difficult to see clearly and to hear clearly? I don't know. But it is, and in 'Players' I listened very carefully to people around me. People in buses. People in the street. And in many parts of the book I used sentences that I heard literally, word for word. Yet it didn't sound as realistic as one might expect. It sounded over-refined even.''

FOR three years while writing ''The Names'' Mr. DeLillo lived in Greece and traveled through the Middle East and India. ''What I found,'' he says, ''was that all this traveling taught me how to see and hear all over again. Whatever ideas about language may be in 'The Names,' I think the most important thing is what I felt in hearing people and watching them gesture - in listening to the sound of Greek and Arabic and Hindi and Urdu. The simple fact that I was confronting new landscapes and fresh languages made me feel almost duty bound to get it right. I would see and hear more clearly than I could in more familiar places.''

Living abroad also gave Mr. DeLillo a fresh perspective on the United States. ''The thing that's interesting about living in another country,'' he says, ''is that it's difficult to forget you're an American. The actions of the American Government won't let you. They make you self-conscious, make you aware of yourself as an American. You find yourself mixed up in world politics in more subtle ways than you're accustomed to. On the one hand, you're aware of America's blundering in country after country. And on the other hand, you're aware of the way in which people in other countries have created the myth of America, of the way in which they use America to relieve their own fears and guilt by blaming America automatically for anything that goes wrong.''

Critic Diane Johnson has written that Mr. DeLillo's books have gone unread because ''they deal with deeply shocking things about America that people would rather not face.''

''I do try to confront realities,'' Mr. DeLillo responds. ''But people would rather read about their own marriages and separations and trips to Tanglewood. There's an entire school of American fiction which might be called around-the-house-and-in-the-yard. And I think people like to read this kind of work because it adds a certain luster, a certain significance to their own lives.''

THE writer to whom Mr. DeLillo has most often been likened and for whom he has great respect is Thomas Pynchon. ''Somebody quoted Norman Mailer as saying that he wasn't a better writer because his contemporaries weren't better,'' he says. ''I don't know whether he really said that or not, but the point I want to make is that no one in Pynchon's generation can make that statement. If we're not as good as we should be it's not because there isn't a standard. And I think Pynchon, more than any other writer, has set the standard. He's raised the stakes.''

Mr. DeLillo also praises William Gaddis for extending the possibilities of the novel by taking huge risks and making great demands on his readers. Yet many readers complain about the abstruseness of much contemporary writing.

''A lot of characters,'' Mr. DeLillo says, ''have become pure act. The whole point in certain kinds of modern writing is that characters simply do what they do. There isn't a great deal of thought or sentiment or literary history tied up in the actions of characters. Randomness is always hard to absorb.''

Mr. DeLillo believes that it is vital that readers make the effort. ''The best reader,'' he says, ''is one who is most open to human possibility, to understanding the great range of plausibility in human actions. It's not true that modern life is too fantastic to be written about successfully. It's that the most successful work is so demanding.'' It is, he adds, as though our better writers ''feel that the novel's vitality requires risks not only by them but by readers as well. Maybe it's not writers alone who keep the novel alive but a more serious kind of reader.''