May 19, 1991

Dangerous Don DeLillo

By Vince Passaro

Until 1985, when "White Noise," his eighth novel, won the National Book Award, Don DeLillo was something of a cipher. He had for years been the kind of writer whose books commanded front-page reviews but still managed not to sell. He was well known in literary circles, and to a small, devoted following, but the chiselled sentences and prescient terrors of his fiction made him difficult to promote. His work seemed privy to a flow of recent history that had been obscured from the rest of us -- DeLillo had important information about the tenor of our national life, information that we had been feeling in our bones but that he had hardened into words.

Yet, for all DeLillo seemed to know, no one knew much about him. His books, though profoundly political, presented no clear agenda, no comfortably familiar social world or class of characters. Reading his novels in the 70's and early 80's, I started to wonder, Who is this guy? The biographical information at the backs of his books gave only a list of his other titles, with the acknowledgement "He lives in New York City." Occasionally it said "Don DeLillo lives in New York City" first, then gave the other titles -- no writing program he'd attended, no university where he taught, no mention of whether he had kids or a dog. Inside, no epigraphs, no effusive thank-yous to agents or editors, friends or neighbors, librarians or auto mechanics.

Like Bill Gray, the fictional novelist at the center of his newest book, "Mao II" (to be published next month by Viking), DeLillo kept himself aloof from the public ceremonies of authorship. In 1979, he gave a rare interview to a critic, Tom LeClair, in which LeClair questioned him about what was then his intriguing absence from the usual authorial rolls. Why all the mystery? LeClair asked. Why was there so little information extant about him?

DeLillo's answer is illuminating. "Silence, exile, cunning and so on," he said. "It's my nature to keep quiet about most things. Even the ideas in my work. When you try to unravel something you've written, you belittle it in a way. It was created as a mystery, in part. Here is a new map of the world; it is seven shades of blue. If you're able to be straightforward and penetrating about this invention of yours, it's almost as though you're saying it wasn't altogether neccessary. The sources weren't deep enough."

When I came upon this interview in 1985, my sense of how a writer pursues a career had been transformed by the 80's spectacle -- by the young celebrities, the hard-soft deals and movie contracts, the superagents and media wizardry that were the new ritual and clergy of art's true faith. DeLillo's response yanked me back into real time. It evoked the artistic strategy Stephen Dedalus developed in Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" ("I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile and cunning"). More than any other contemporary American writer, DeLillo struck me as fierce and lasting in his importance. His fiction bears down with unnerving humor and unalleviated intelligence and force. As his answer to LeClair makes clear, DeLillo aims to put behind his every lean sentence the power of an extraordinary commitment.

DELILLO IS A STAR NOW, no longer the shrouded, elusive figure he had been when he was interviewed by LeClair. He does appearances and readings from time to time; on rare occasions, he speaks to the press. When I call to make arrangements to discuss "Mao II," he is cheerful and cooperative. He lives in Westchester these days, but he still spends a good deal of time in the city. He suggests we meet at a restaurant just off Columbus Avenue, an establishment that is, as he puts it, "invariably deserted." He means that it will be an appropriate place for taping, but one senses a deeper satisfaction with the idea.

In person he is reserved and quiet, a nice and gentle man. Our talk ranges over a number of literary and cultural topics besides his work, and several times he offers to send me articles and books that I may not be able to find. His hair, once dark, has turned mostly gray. He is one of those people, invariably intelligent, who seem to live in their eyes -- the rest of his face and body don't move much or give anything away. He speaks without inflection, in long and almost perfectly composed sentences. His words issue; you feel he doesn't let them get away without a good deal of relish and a tinge of regret. At the same time, he is friendly and interested, eager to discuss books and questions of sentences and form, generous and admiring of other writers, some of them young and little known.

And yet there is also between us a tangible distance, part of which, no doubt, has to do with the false intimacy that interviews try to force on their participants and that DeLillo will have no part of. He will not spill his guts, you sense, because his guts are reserved for his work. Distance in a writer of DeLillo's acuity is a lifelong habit and need -- what must have been in his youth a painful shyness has become in adulthood a powerful tool, to be nurtured more than it is fought off, one of the reasons he became a writer in the first place.

Influenced by Thomas Pynchon and William Gaddis, among others, DeLillo in his early books showed himself to be a writer of predominantly post-modern sensibilities; his work leaned toward the angular and ironic depiction of character and place that we associate with writers who intend to be difficult, writers who orient their fiction around its own linguistic and structural imperatives. DeLillo has spoken of creating a work that is difficult because this is one way to show, in an age of easy information, that the real truth is hard to come by. "I've always liked being relatively obscure," he says. "I feel that's where I belong, that's where my work belongs."

In many ways, the obscurity was undeserved. Unlike the writers who have influenced him, DeLillo writes with a vernacular lyricism that is never inaccessible. Unlike them as well, he produces a novel, on average, every couple of years: "Mao II" is his 10th in 20 years. His subjects -- a television network programmer who hits the road in search of the big picture ("Americana," 1971), a college football player with a nose for the apocalypse ("End Zone," 1972), a rock star who walks off the tour ("Great Jones Street," 1973), a teen-age mathematical genius ("Ratner's Star," 1976), Wall Street brokers who get mixed up in a terrorist plot ("Players," 1977), intelligence agents fighting over a rumored porno film from the fuehrerbunker ("Running Dog," 1978), a risk analyst who crosses paths with a cult of assassins in the Middle East ("The Names," 1982) and a professor of Hitler studies who is poisoned in an airborne toxic event ("White Noise," 1985) -- aren't exactly everyday characters. But DeLillo has brought them uncomfortably close. Here are people we know but didn't know we knew, intimate and recognizable characters on the American landscape, silhouetted figures dominated by a sense of invisibility, paranoia and dread. In many respects they are like us, except they live with an unsettling awareness of a world we prefer to ignore.

"Libra" (1988), DeLillo's ninth novel and his only best seller, was a fictional portrayal of Lee Harvey Oswald and the events surrounding the Kennedy assassination. "I don't think my books could have been written in the world that existed before the Kennedy assassination," DeLillo says. "And I think that some of the darkness in my work is a direct result of the confusion and psychic chaos and the sense of randomness that ensued from that moment in Dallas. It's conceivable that this made me the writer I am -- for better or for worse."

DeLillo has also written two plays. "The Engineer of Moonlight," which he wrote in the mid-1970's but never had produced, is a dazzling and mysterious piece featuring a similar set of characters to those in his new novel. "The Day Room," about an acting troupe performing a play set in an asylum, was produced at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., in 1986 and in New York at the Manhattan Theater Club and elsewhere in 1987.

I DON'T GET AROUND TO ASKING DeLillo any biographical questions until our second meeting (same joint, same table -- the comfort of familiar repetitions). Anyone who knows anything about DeLillo knows he has no interest in delving into such matters; his work is without even a trace of the usual autobiographical resonances, and the public record he has allowed to be created about his private life is minimal. When I do ask, his sentences pare down to the short and strictly declarative.

"I was born on Nov. 20, 1936," he begins, leaning an inch or two forward, toward the tape recorder. He sticks to the essential facts. Except for a short stint in Pennsylvania when he was quite young, he was brought up in the Fordham section of the Bronx, a neighborhood comprised mostly of Italian- Americans. He lived near Arthur Avenue, with its popular food shops and restaurants. It was a childhood of sports, family and games. He played "every conceivable form of baseball," basketball and football. "No one had a football around there," he says. "We used to wrap up a bunch of newspaper with tape and use that. That was our football."

He attended Cardinal Hayes High School ("I slept for four years there") and later Fordham College, where, he says, "I didn't study much of anything. I majored in something called communication arts." The year after graduated, he got a job in advertising, as a copywriter, because he couldn't get one in publishing. He quit the job after five years or so and "embarked on my life, my real life."

I ask him what attracted him to writing, whether he studied literature or was stirred by certain authors or books. "No, no," he says, "I didn't do anything. I don't have an explanation, I don't know why I wanted to write. I did some short stories at that time, but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore. I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, and jazz, and Abstract Expressionism."

Gerald Howard, DeLillo's editor for "Libra" at Viking and now an editor at W. W. Norton, feels his own background -- boyhood in an ethnic New York world, Roman Catholic schools, above-average intelligence and an interest in literature -- is similar enough to DeLillo's to give him some insight into the private man. "The way I've explained Don's psychology to myself is that here is an absolutely normal guy of the sort that's very familiar to me, attached to a literary genius. And I don't think the two parts neccessarily communicate all that much."

Like "Libra," "Mao II" appropriates certain known facts and legends. It concerns an extremely famous, obsessively reclusive author, a Salinger-Pynchon type, named Bill Gray, who eventually leaves his hermitage and enters the world of political violence. "I called him Bill Gray just as a provisional name," DeLillo says. "I used to say to friends, 'I want to change my name to Bill Gray and disappear.' I've been saying it for 10 years. But he began to fit himself into the name, and I decided to leave it."

Living with Gray in his house deep in the countryside are Scott, Gray's obsessed factotum and weird alter ego, and Scott's girlfriend, Karen, a former disciple of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon who has kind of drifted onto the scene and stuck. There is also Brita, a photographer who shoots only writers. Bill Gray beckons her to his hideout to take his picture, an uncharacteristic exposure that leads him away from his imprisoning mythology of isolation and toward a confrontation with his own death.

DeLillo gave a reading last November in New York at the 92d Street Y, in which he presented the opening passage of "Mao II" with sections from the end of "Libra," making an interesting if subtle structural connection between them. The "Libra" passage is a monologue of half-demented, half-visionary poetry, delivered by Oswald's mother, which DeLillo based, in part, on her testimony before the Warren Commission. The section from "Mao II" is a prologue, almost the first thing DeLillo wrote when embarking on the book; it depicts a mass wedding at Yankee Stadium, performed by Moon, of 13,000 men and women, one of whom is Karen. Her parents are in the stands, with binoculars, searching for their daughter in the sea of indistinguishable faces across the outfield: "There is a strangeness down there that he [ Karen's father ] never thought he'd see in a ballpark. They take a time-honored event and repeat it, repeat it, repeat it until something new enters the world."

The Yankee Stadium prologue is an extaordinary leap of the imagination, into a scene both new and familiar, the pyschic experience of the individual unburdened of selfhood and absorbed by the group, speaking and seeing with the single voice and eye of collective consciousness. The couples stand, thousands deep in the outfield, and watch their master above them: "He wears a white silk robe and a high crown figured with stylized irises. They know him at molecular level. He lives in them like chains of matter that determine who they are. This is a man of chunky build who saw Jesus on a mountainside. . . . The coupled know there are things he must leave unsaid, words whose planetary impact no one could bear. . . . This is a man who lived in a hut made of U.S. Army ration tins and now he is here, in American light, come to lead them to the end of human history."

The prologue ends, and the novel proper begins, with a passage that, in DeLillo's low-pitched and sibilant delivery, stays in the ear like words heard in a dream: "The thousands stand and chant. Around them in the world, people ride escalators going up and sneak secret glances at the faces coming down. People dangle tea bags over hot water in white cups. Cars run silently on the autobahns, streaks of painted light. People sit at desks and stare at office walls. They smell their shirts and drop them in the hamper. People bind themselves into numbered seats and fly across time zones and high cirrus and deep night, knowing there is something they've forgotten to do.

"The future belongs to crowds."

IMAGES, ESPECIALLY photographs, with their insinuating, organizational power, form a narrative line in "Mao II"; they are also a part of its inspiration. "Long before he had written anything," says Nan Graham, his present editor at Viking, "Don told me he had two folders -- one marked 'art' and the other marked 'terror.' "

Eventually the two folders became one. "I saw a photograph of a wedding conducted by Reverend Moon of the Unification Church," DeLillo says, "and it was just lying around for months . . . a wedding in Seoul in a soft-drink warehouse, about 13,000 people. And when I looked at it again, I realized I wanted to understand this event, and the only way to understand it was to write about it. For me, writing is a concentrated form of thinking.

"And I had another photograph -- it was a picture that appeared on the front page of The New York Post, in the summer, I think, of 1988, and it was a photograph of J. D. Salinger. They sent two photographers to New Hampshire, to stalk him. It took them six days, but they found him. And they took his picture. He saw them and they saw him. When they took his picture he came at them. His face is an emblem of shock and rage. It's a frightening photograph. I didn't know it at the time, but these two pictures would represent the polar extremes of "Mao II," the arch individualist and the mass mind, from the mind of the terrorist to the mind of the mass organization. In both cases, it's the death of the individual that has to be accomplished before their aims can be realized."

"Mao II" (the title comes from an Andy Warhol pencil drawing that appears briefly in the story) orients itself around certain other contemporary scenes, other photos from the art and terror folders: the ramshackle city of homeless living in Tompkins Square Park in New York, the Sheffield, England, soccer tragedy, the frenzied mourners in Teheran following the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the massacre at Tiananmen Square. These events come into the novel via Karen, who sees most of them on television; they form a coherent narrative of images within the larger story, images in which the individual has been crushed by the primitive and lethal instincts of mob culture. Like all of DeLillo's work, "Mao II" deals forcibly and uncannily with the ionic fears of the moment -- trampling crowds, psychic unraveling, organized terror and, as always with DeLillo, isolation and death. As always too, despite how grim those descriptions may sound, there is a barbed wit, a laugh-out-loud comic grid through which his darker concerns must move.

DeLillo's early religious life, his upbringing as a Roman Catholic, has had a tangible though indirect effect on his work; a number of his characters yearn for the horror and invigoration of ancient religious spectacle. Brita, the photographer in "Mao II," is such a character. As DeLillo says: "She needs to know that people out there believe in all the old verities, the old gods. These things keep the planet warm. But she herself is not a believer. I think there is a sense of last things in my work that probably comes from a Catholic childhood. For a Catholic, nothing is too important to discuss or think about, because he's raised with the idea that he will die any minute now and that if he doesn't live his life in a certain way this death is simply an introduction to an eternity of pain. This removes a hesitation that a writer might otherwise feel when he's approaching important subjects, eternal subjects. I think for a Catholic these things are part of ordinary life."

The rest of DeLillo's sketchy biography, to employ a phrase he uses to describe a recurring situation of his fiction, is the story of a man in small rooms. Until he was married -- in 1975, to Barbara Bennett, then a banker and now a landscape designer -- DeLillo lived in a studio apartment in the Murray Hill section of New York. "A small apartment with no stove and a refrigerator in the bathroom," as he put it to LeClair. (In other words, as Gerald Howard told me, and as a few others also said, "DeLillo's a monk.") Relying on savings and the intermittent income of freelance copywriting assignments, he began his first novel, "Americana." It took him about four years to finish, and the first publisher he sent it to, Houghton Mifflin, brought it out in 1971.

There is a sense, which DeLillo talks about, that he has lived his life inside his books. During our discussion, when the first side of my tape runs out and I turn it over and begin the second, he asks me, with a sly look, "Are you sure it's working?" I immediately begin fiddling with the machine, trying to assure myself it is. "You're making me paranoid," I say, perhaps the most appropriate statement one can make to DeLillo.

"Ah, you're in the world of 'White Noise' now," he says cheerfully. "There's a connection between the advances that are made in technology and the sense of primitive fear people develop in response to it. In the face of technology everything becomes a little . . . atavistic."

DeLillo equates writing with "living and breathing"; he calls working on his novels "a life and death stuggle." He talks about his pleasure in "the construction of sentences and the juxtaposition of words -- not just how they sound or what they mean, but even what they look like." He works on a manual typewriter, which lends to writing an almost sculptural feeling of pressing new words into blank paper. Mastering sentences, DeLillo intimates, produces its own kind of self-knowledge. Bill Gray in "Mao II" says at one point: "I'm a sentence maker. Like a donut maker, only slower." Elsewhere, he declares: "Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I've always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live."

This is one of the rare moments, it is safe to guess, when DeLillo is writing about himself.

DELILLO'S BOOKS ARE not friendly; they don't "flatter the reader's prejudices," as Howard puts it. But if there is any comfort to be found in them, it is in that "moral force" of sentences coming out right. The architecture of DeLillo's fiction -- its formal harmonies, parallel devices and symmetries and the machine-tooled precision and conviction of its language -- brings an odd pleasure no matter how unsettling the world it illumines. Everyone to whom I spoke about DeLillo noted this effect. Frank Lentricchia, a prominent critic and English professor at Duke University, has written about DeLillo and taught his novels in courses. He is the editor of a recent collection of essays about the author's work called "Introducing Don DeLillo." DeLillo's writing, he says, "represents a rare achievement in American literature -- the perfect weave of novelistic imagination and cultural criticism."

Lentricchia speaks of the frustration that readers will feel if they are looking for an easily discernable moral center in DeLillo's work. "DeLillo is conducting cultural anatomies of what makes us unhappy," he says. At the same time, "the anatomist himself is full of love of language and sentences and words. There is real brio in the ways he depicts different voices and in his wit. The books have a kind of literary joy that is countervailed by the vision -- so that the final prospect is both terrifying and beautiful."

The novelist and editor Gordon Lish is possibly DeLillo's closest friend -- "Mao II" is dedicated to him. I ask him about a kind of emotional coldness one feels in certain of DeLillo characters, a chilliness of effect that alienates some readers. "DeLillo is a tough guy," he says. "He has no patience for what doesn't apply. It is cold, but it is a coldness one delights in. It's part of what gives you the frisson you are reading for in DeLillo. That chilling knowing becomes a comfort in itself. One is warmed by the absolute correctness of it. In this respect he is our most visionary writer."

The idea of a dangerous fiction, which one might bring to an analysis of DeLillo's novels, has in "Mao II" become an expressed element of his plot. Bill Gray sees the novelist as both dangerous and threatened. Charles Everson, Gray's former editor, tells him: "You have a twisted sense of the writer's place in society. You think the writer belongs at the far margin, doing dangerous things. In Central America, writers carry guns. They have to. And this has always been your idea of the way it ought to be. The state should want to kill all writers. Every government, every group that holds power or aspires to power should feel so threatened by writers that they hunt them down, everywhere."

"On the grubby commercial level," says Gerald Howard, "there is going to be a lot of buzz about Bill Gray and who he's meant to be, what parts of him ahve been taken from Pynchon and Salinger and so on. But I think this is a book that's about Salman Rushdie in a way. Don was very upset about the Rushdie business, and I think that you can sense that feeling of threat all the way through 'Mao II."'

In fact, DeLillo was one of the authors who read at the Columns Gallery in New York City, an occasion of support for Rushdie organized by the Authors' Guild, PEN American Center and Article 19. The reading, which took place under heavy security, has a close parallel in "Mao II." The big difference is that, in the book, the violence that everyone is afraid of actually occurs.

Interestingly, Nan Graham is also Rushdie's American editor, and Rushdie, like DeLillo, also worked as an advertising copywriter for the same firm DeLillo worked for, Oglivy & Mather. I ask DeLillo about the connection of the book to Rushdie's situation. "I don't know how deep it is,' he says, "but it's there. It's the connection between the writer as the champion of the self, and those forces that are threatened by this. Such totalitarian movements can be seen in miniature in the very kind of situation Rushdie is in. He's a hostage."

The threat to the writer comes in the dramatic form of violence, but it is also present in its more mundane disguises. There's a passage in the book where Bill Gray grumbles about the publishing industry, its quick fashions and hot new excitements. "The more books they publish, the weaker we become," he says. "The secret force that drives the industry is the compulsion to make writers harmless."

"I don't know if I agree with him," DeLillo remarks. "But I do think we can connect novelists and terrorists here. In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act. People who are in power make their arrangements in secret, largely as a way of maintaining and furthering that power. People who are powerless make an open theater of violence. True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to."

The implication is that, should writers aspire to do so again, they too will be among the nationless, the outcast and the hunted. DeLillo tells the story of a friend of his, living in Athens: "Somebody fired a shot through his window recently. And this guy is writing fiction for the first time in his life. He's in his 40's; he's writing a novel. Of course, he told the police that he assumed the shot had been fired at him because he's an American. And so I wrote him a note and I said, 'They're not shooting at you because you're an American, they're shooting at you because you're a novelist.' "

And then he laughs. It is a moment of mischievous pleasure in the darker workings of his imagination: bombs making blossoms of plate-glass windows, bullets pocking the plasterwork. Nasty images, certainly, but images of the day -- and terrifying evidence of the real power of art.