An Interview With James Ellroy
I met James Ellroy at Book Expo America. He was there to talk about his new novel, Perfidia, the first in a quartet. He wore a soft pink shirt patterned with white flags, leaves, and birds.
James Ellroy leans in close. He makes eye contact. He speaks in complete paragraphs. He believes in an afterlife. He is kind and charming, even when he’s saying things like, “I’m a smart fucker, too. I’m not dicking around here.”
Here is our conversation, slightly condensed.
EC: You really are tall.
JE: Thank you. I am tall.
I am too.
I like being tall. Do you like it?
I like it, but it makes me shy. I slump to be on eye level with people sometimes.
Well, I have bad posture, and I’m round-shouldered and I’ve got a little bit of curvature of the spine. But somehow I’ve retained my height, and most men my age haven’t. But I enjoy it.
What do you enjoy about it?
Because it’s more, and it intimidates other men, and I like tall women, and in general it’s just all that male bullshit. Ego. Why be short when you can be tall? I mean, if I had hair, I’d rule the world.
Is it daunting, embarking on a new quartet?
It’s moving, more than anything else. Perfidia, the first novel of the Second L.A. quartet, which comes out September 9 from Alfred A. Knopf, is my Ragtime. And yes, it’s a novel of a horrible occurrence. America’s entrance into World War II, the Pearl Harbor bombing, the grave injustice of the Japanese interment, where innocent Japanese Americans and foreign-born Japanese were imprisoned for the length of the war because they might be fifth-column spies. It was a gross injustice that started—what I call the month of December ’41—the party at the edge of the abyss, and the precipice of America’s ascendance. It was a largely inclusive time; Americans, Los Angelinos were united in common cause. Sex took on an egalitarian tinge. There were brief and passionate love affairs deeply inspired by the war, and this overarching sense that we could be next. They don’t know what hit them in Pearl Harbor, we could be next. And I’m living that right now and it’s both daunting and entirely liberating for me as a writer.
What’s liberating about it?
It’s getting to live the time, assume the attitudes, of the diverse range of people and comport within their souls and their minds.
What do you do when you’re in New York?
I come and I see my beloved colleagues at Alfred A. Knopf. I love these folks. I’ve been at Knopf for 24 years; it’s the biggest thrill in my career. I am a Borzoi-banger of 24 years’ standing. I love it that their colophon in their mascot is a dog. I love that Knopf turns 100 next year. Apparently they’re going to redesign the physical face of the Borzoi. And I brood; I have a beautiful suite at the Lowell Hotel. Have you ever been over there? It’s a cocoon. At 63rd and Madison, and it’s utterly silent. They send food up to your room—and it’s not like they don’t do this at other hotels, but they make a great cheeseburger. I’m going to have one tonight before I go to the Knopf party. Are you going to the Knopf party?
I wasn’t invited. And I have a six-month-old.
Yeah, of course. So I brood. And tomorrow I’m going to brood in the hotel. I like to brood. Do you brood?
No. I’m a terrible brooder. I read constantly to drown out the brooding.
Okay. Have you read Perfidia?
I started it.
Are you digging it?
I’m really digging it. I have to read you so much more slowly than I read anyone else because your sentences are so dense and tight and, I don’t know, musical. You’ve said that you learned a lot from Beethoven about structure—
Yeah, and cadence.
And cadence.
And classical music in general. Do you like classical music?
I do. I’m kind of an ignoramus about it, but I have some little obsessions, like the Brandenburg Concertos. Do you think that your love of classical music has influenced your work on the more granular level of the sentence?
Yeah. I think one of the reasons I can sustain concentration so well is the fact is that I’m a fugitive from the digital age. I’ve never used a computer, I’ve never sent an email, a text message, I don’t have a cell phone, I don’t have a TV set. I rarely go to movies or watch TV. I’m able to isolate my curiosity in the historical periods that I write about. I truly lived, for the length of time that I wrote Perfidia, in L.A., in the month of January in 1941.
I know you don’t read anymore. Did you read poetry as a young man? Because you seem like a poet who writes fiction to me.
>Yes. Thank you. That’s a compliment. The cadence, the beginning, the starting and conclusion points of paragraphs are very important to me. The whole notion of watch works, clockwork, precision, and perfection is crucial. There’s a way I have always read slowly—I say the words aloud to myself as I read anything. As a result of just slowing down the process of my life, I am able to live in period more adroitly and to compose at that granular level that you described.
Do you read your own work aloud?
I read aloud in reading performances, and I will occasionally read it aloud as I rewrite the actual prose.
Let me know if this is a question that you don’t want to address, but have you ever fallen away from your faith? I ask because I’m a lapsed Catholic, and I’m curious about the waxing and waning of your faith.
No, I’ve always been a Christian. And Protestant. And there have been times when my practice has been more assiduous. And it’s assiduous now. I have a prayer practice. I go to church. I believe more deeply than I ever have.
Why is that? Do you know?
I’m older, and I feel both this life, and human beings—and a wider range, more diverse range of human beings—than I ever have, as well as sensing the afterlife.
So you’re sure it’s real?
Yes.
Do you have a visual image of it?
>No. In that sense I think it’s incomprehensible.
I’m glad you think it exists.
Yeah, and I’m a smart fucker, too. I’m not dicking around here.
Is it important to you to attend services with a minister who you consider to be smart? What if the guy sermonizing is not as smart as you?
The pastor at my church is a man named Dan Bomgardener. And I don’t really know him; I introduced myself to him once. He’s very smart and knowledgeable about Scripture, about the world at large. He has great sermons, he has off mornings, and he’s on much more than he’s off.
Do you read the Bible?
Yes.
Is it important to you as literary inspiration as well as a religious text?
It’s more important as a religious text. And I think this is a question of faith more than imagination. I’m not reading it to pick up pointers on L.A. ’41, which was a sin-soaked metropolis.
There’s plenty of sin in the Bible.
There’s a great deal of sin in the Bible, and properly catalogued and described as such. But this is the first time, in Perfidia, that I used an epigraph from the Bible. It’s from Proverbs 3:31: “Envy thou not the oppressor, and choose none of his ways.”
Are we the oppressor in this metaphor? We, Americans?
I’m going to leave that up to what will hopefully be the many readers of this book. More than anything else, it’s oppress not. Just don’t do this. Don’t hurt anybody; it’s wrong.
Do you think it’s possible to decide to be happy?
Yes, I do. And faith has been a constant comfort for me in that regard. Pastor Dan at my church draws a distinction between joy and happiness, joyousness and happiness. I think he might—I’ve never discussed it with him—equate happy with slap-happy and stupidity, and he’s nothing if not a bright man. And I’m here to dig this journey, sister. I’ll tell ya. I’m not dragging my ass frowning by you. I’m here to spread the love and let it ride.
Are you optimistic about the future of publishing?
Yes.
Why?
Because books will always be here and people will always want to hold the book. And because—and I have to come back to Perfidia—take Perfidia, for example. It’s a beautiful Alfred A. Knopf, Chip Kidd-covered, Cathy Horrigan-designed, 701-page hardcover. That’s twenty-nine bucks. I haven’t been to a movie in a while, but aren’t they fourteen bucks now? Holy shit, you’re out the door, you have to rub elbows with a bunch of popcorn-chomping fools, texting. Now there’s a half an hour of trailers where they tell you the whole story, you might or might not like the movie, they kick you out in two hours, and you don’t have that 700-page Knopf hardcover to come home to, that you can keep on your shelf and reread. It’s a bargain.
Do you get cover approval?
Yes.
Do you participate actively in the process of design?
Chip Kidd is a close friend of mine—the genius graphic designer. Arguably, to those who know, the great American graphic designer of this era. And this is my favorite Chip Kidd cover. So he sent it to me and I just said one word: Yes. With ten exclamation points.
How would you characterize New Yorkers versus Angelinos?
It’s a more conservative place, it’s a more compressed place. It’s humanity on a hotplate as opposed to humanity dispersed over a bunch of griddles—that is Los Angeles. I couldn’t live here; it’s too much for me. I need more breathing room. I’m happy to come here for a period of time.
Do you have the entire quartet mapped out?
Largely. Yeah. Largely. And you’ll see as you read Perfidia, you’ll start to grasp who the big players are.
Are you anxious to get to the actual writing, or is the structure and the planning enjoyable?
The structure and the planning is essential. It’s primal for me. The outline for Perfidia was 700 pages. I know everywhere the book has to go, down to the minute detail. And what this allows me to do is live immediately in the individual sense and to densify them ad hoc because the overall structure is inviolate. It adds eight months to the process of writing a novel for me. But you can’t write a book as richly plotted and as dense and complex as Perfidia without having an outline. That’s why it’s essential.
Does the language in your outlines at all resemble the language in the finished product, or is it looser?
The dialogue that I include in the outline is only an expositional device to get across the physical action and the exposition that has to occur. I also want for my book agent, Nat Sobel, and my editor, Sonny Mehta of Boston Knopf, I want to give them, if they’re going to read 700 pages of outline, a pleasurable and engaging experience. So I tack on eight months to the delivery date of any book of mine.
What is your editorial experience like with Mr. Mehta? I guess I can’t really imagine anyone editing you.
It goes first to my book agent, Nat Sobel. We’ve been working together 33 years. He offers suggestions, I make the edits, I agree, I disagree, I make some, I decline to make some. It goes to Sonny. He reads it twice. He comes up with line ideas and occasionally an overall idea, a conceptual idea. “I want you to make some cuts to make this a more effective length.” I did that with Perfidia, I cut 40,000 words. And he was right, the book reads faster, reads more cohesively as a result. We talk on the telephone; I generally come to New York and meet with Sunny either at his office or his apartment.
In your interview with ShortList, you said you had no sympathy for the underclass.
I have some sympathy for the underclass. What happened in the ShortList interview is that I allowed myself to be baited on current events. And for the record—and it’s the tack I’m taking for Perfidia—the fact that I immerse myself in long-ago times and places and historical events has inured me to modern-day, contemporary America. I’m not a pundit, I’m not a political commentator, and so I’m going to refrain from the whole issue of the topical relevance of this book. As far as I’m concerned, 2014 does not exist. It’s only December 1941.
That sounds so lonely.
Miss Chastain, I live in my imagination. I have friends. I’m very close with my ex-wife. We talk every night. She lives in Denver. I don’t have kids or family. I have marvelous colleagues. I have men friends; I have women friends. I brood—to great effect. And I spend a lot of time alone and I enjoy it. It’s just that I don’t partake of the culture, or consider it germane to my life. And as long as it proves second to me and I can write books like Perfidia and enjoy my life contemporaneously, c’est la guerre.
New Yorkers, James Ellroy will read from his new novel on Thursday, September 18th at 7 p.m. in the Union Square Barnes & Noble. Don’t miss it.