Interview by Bruce Benderson

I met Joanna Gunderson, author and publisher of Red Dust books, in the mid 1980s, when she asked my close friend Ursule Molinaro to translate Philippe Sollers' Drame (published as Event, Red Dust, 1987) for her press. Molinaro was a firm believer in collaboration and also feared that Sollers would soon frustrate and annoy her, so she accepted the job on condition that I be drafted to work with her. It turned out to be more a boon for me than for Molinaro,….. Gunderson and I became life-long friends.

Knowing Joanna Gunderson is like following a winding trail through lush overgrowth, getting dazzled by foliage and then suddenly finding that you've lost your way, only to spy the path peeking impatiently through the grass around the curve and up ahead. To others, she may seem circuitous, but this is because she insists on focusing all the time on what she believes to be the traces of the real. She has a soft, hesitant voice that wouldn't tell the mildest untruth, and her manner betrays a somnambulist's absorption in some quest that is only partly indicated to you. Her writing is the same: fragmented, imagistic, rich in associations. It's as finely wrought as a snowflake, yet it seems to battle symmetry at the same time. Or perhaps it merely never seems to finish its grand designs as its patterns reach further for new formations.

Aside from her novels and plays, Gunderson's other great gift to literature is Red Dust. Without it, some of the masterpieces of literature of the second half of the twentieth century probably never would have appeared in English, and if so, probably not in the U.S. This is particularly true of the French nouveau roman, which has had a strong influence on her writing. Gunderson, however, is no one-woman publicity machine or promoter of the talents of other writers at the expense of her own work. Red Dust is, instead, a place where valuable works that have unjustly found no other home can stumble into print, if not into much distribution, and they won't be ballasted by exaggerated press releases, either. Nevertheless, texts are always meticulously translated and books lovingly designed and bound, then made available by mail order, from which a few eventually find their way into the hands of those passionately interested in what they have to say as well as a few powerful reviewers, including John Updike in The New Yorker. The French have appreciated Gunderson's efforts to promote their serious literature, to the point of awarding her the chevalier dans l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres, in 2002.

As well as I know Joanna, it wasn't until this interview that I realized that all her utterances, in print and conversation, are of a piece.

Bruce Benderson: Joanna, I feel that most of your adult life has been devoted to literature, both as an author in your own right and as publisher of many wonderful writers. But since you focus primarily on your writing, let's talk about that first. How did it start?

Joanna Gunderson: My mother and father wanted me to be a writer, I don't know why. And that's what I always wanted, and I wrote each of them a book for each of their birthdays, starting when I was five.

B.B.: Really.

J.G.: Yes, and I dictated it.

B.B.: To whom?

B.B.:My governess. Because they made a big thing out of our giving them something. And it had to be something you did or made.

B.B.: Were the books fictional?

J.G.: Yes. And also, one of the lovely people who looked after me—the loveliest—her husband made leather, and I even made a leather cover for one of them, and it was called Bedlam, about an animal insane asylum ...

B.B.: How did your parents react?

J.G.: Oh, they liked it, they liked books.

B.B.: What then?

J.G.: And then, I think it was as a teenager, just to please myself, I wrote about girls who were very pretty, who played basketball, who were very popular at dances, and I think it was to satisfy my own wishes.

B.B.: Were they conventional stories?

J.G.: Very, very.

B.B.: And then shortly after college you won a prize and were able to publish a story.

J.G.: That was in Mademoiselle. I went to India in "54-'55; it was so different and so interesting that I was able to write outright about it; but in general, I hadn't been able to write, so I had to find some other way of arranging work, so I started by arranging it as sights, not in time, but seen all at once. That seemed to me an alternate to the story, which I just couldn't manage.

B.B.: Oh, so even before you were published in Mademoiselle you had an experimental approach?

J.G.: Well I didn't. I was unable to write the way people write.

B.B.: So the story in Mademoiselle is not a conventional narrative?

J.G.: It is, but the reason I was able to do it was that India kind of hit me, and I was able to write straight out about it.

B.B.: Did your writing change after that ?

J.G.: I looked around for something else, some other way to write, and I went to Paris in 1959. It was July 14, the first celebration of the Fifth Republic, and I was so astounded by the beauty of it that it presented itself to me as a way to arrange events... as sights. And that's the first book I wrote, which was Sights: Three Novellas. Which was part of Red Dust's first collection. The books were ready for publication by '61, but they were published in 1963.

B.B.: How long did this book take ?

J.G.: It was three texts. One was called Paris July 14, 1959, and another was called The Leaf. Now when I started to write The Leaf, my friend, the novelist Lil Halegua, had given me Claude Simon's The Wind, and there I realized that there were all sorts of ways, and he did work with sights—he was a painter, too—and he said all the elements of the text are always present, and that was it, for me.

B.B.: What does that mean?

J.G.: It means no development, it's there. And he said that his book—I think it was The Wind, my favorite—Was a "tentative de restitution d'un retable baroque" -an attempt to bring it together from the parts, it was probably torn, and he put it together until it came into view, and that really got me.

B.B.: You mean it was a reconstitution of a moment in consciousness?

J.G.: No, a retable is a baroque tapestry that they use in the Church.

B.B.: So now you're heavily influenced by Claude Simon, and that opens up the nouveau roman.

J.G.: Yes!

B.B.: What gave you the idea to create your own press?

J.G.: I felt convinced that the work of my friends and my own work would not receive much attention. And I thought, Why spend your entire life trying to get a publisher.

B.B.: So once you started your press, how were you able to distribute the books?

J.G.: I went to Library Journal, and there was a wonderful woman there who reviewed every single book I published. When she retired they didn't review a single one.

B.B.: How were the books distributed?

J.G.: I printed a thousand copies, and then I sold them.

B.B.: You mean that people would order them directly from you? They weren't sold in stores.

J.G.: I also took them to stores, and my mother actually went to these stores and asked for them.

B.B.: Then some stores actually did carry them?

J.G.: Oh, yes, they did! I drove around. I went around to college bookstores, and I remember waiting to see the legendary Igor Kropotkin, at Scribner's, and he just waved away the man in front of me and sat talking with me, and he ordered them.

B.B.: So you never relied upon a distributor...

J.G.: No, but I did send to many, many reviewers, and I got some very good reviews, and one of the reasons, I think, was that some of the writers might not have been known here but were well known in their countries. And they won more interest for Red Dust.

B.B.: When I met you, which must have been in till mid 80s, you had a very close relationship with a translator and a writer. You were publishing most of the books of Robert Pinget and working with the translator Barbara Wright,

J.G.: Yes. I used to go to the Frankfurt Book Fair. Emmy Jacobins ran Academia Book Exhibit. Since they had a house near Frankfurt at the time, she and her husband Arnold ran the Exhibit at the Fair. I got her flyer through the mail, and 1 thought it would be a good way for me to attend and show the first books. She'd only take about 5 books, but it gave me a sort of entry. I spent time wandering around, and I immediately found John Calder's table, which in my opinion basically had the great contemporary writers of Europe.

B.B.: I think a huge percentage of the greatest books of the mid-twentieth century were only published in English by you and Calder,

J.G.: That may be... And immediately, I saw Pinget's books there, but the year before I'd seen Le Parc (The Park, Red Dust, 1986) by Philippe Sollers, and Sentimental Talks by Daniel Castelain (1970); and at the same time Grove Press had decided not to publish Law and Order (Red Dust, 1971; Le maintien de L'ordre), so that was an opening.

B.B.: Law and Order by Claude Oilier had already been translated by Ursule Molinaro

J.G.: That's right, and they dropped it!

B.B.: Did they give it to you for free or did they charge you?

J.G.: I don't remember but this is something you should write: I never spent more than $300 on any book—to get the rights. Now maybe I shouldn't be proud of that. The basic idea was, if someone else wants it, let them do it, and I thought that was what Red Dust was for, to do what no one else would do.

B.B.: On the other hand, you can't say that to an author.

J.G.: No, no. But I did. (laughter) To me that's complimentary. I don't think most people recognize good writing. If the book could get more money, I knew it belonged somewhere else.

B.B.: Getting back to your writing, I'd say it developed pretty quickly into a collage of sensory elements.

J.G.: mm... well...

B.B.: Jill Magi, who runs Sona Books, which published your Lullaby (2006), once said during lecture: "If there's an absence of the "I” in your writing, how do you remove it?"

J.G.: I never removed it. It wasn't there. I'm not able decide to do anything, I never write that way.

B.B.: So your experimental style is not really a conscious decision, it's —

J.G.: It's imposed.

B.B.: Imposed ?

J.G.: Imposed by my lack of ability to arrange things.

B.B.: Then what's the justification for it. If you think that it comes out of a lack of ability... then why does it have value? I think it has value, but I would never describe it as you've just described it. But actually it's very original... and very beautiful, and beauty has some kind of superior order, among other things.

J.G.: Well, it happened to work that way.

B.B.: It is very arranged, your writing, actually.

J.G.: I'm always looking for a way to arrange it, other than the normal way. But it's not because I wish to.

B.B.: But the story in Mademoiselle was "arranged" in a fairly normal way.

J.G.: Yes, but that was India. India was so beautiful and exciting that I was able to break out of that feeling.

B.B.: For most of your writing life you've been in that feeling?

J.G.: Well, when I started to write Sights, I began to organize things by sight. I was looking for other ways to organize.

B.B.: Did you find any?

J.G.: I spent a great deal of time at the Filmmakers' Cinemathéque, and that was when I wrote Kaleidoscope 1969 .I was fascinated by the people. Jonas Mekas was one of them. Not that I knew them. I just knew their work, I was sitting there on the bleachers almost every night. This stopped dead, though, when my husband Warren and I got married.

B.B.: Why?

J.G.: Because he couldn't bear the flickering.

B.B.: He didn't have epilepsy, did he?

J.G.: He couldn't bear it.

B.B.: How did the experimental films influence you, exactly?

J.G.: Ken Kelman was a key person. He did the history of film, and he brought all these Russian films, and he also told about them. And for some reason I thought it was a time of revolution here, too, I don't know if it was, but I thought it was and I was fascinated by this group of people.

B.B.: Was the book itself trying to create an effect similar to that created by those films? Or was it a mosaic of what you learned and your own sensations?

J.G.: Actually, it was inspired by a Museum of Modern Art show and something I read. I saw this picture of a huge family, and it was "taken from no particular place, at no particular time”. It was taken from the air. Otherwise you couldn't have seen all of that. That liberated me to do what I thought I could do, which was tell about these very interesting people.

B.B.: Ah, so it was the personalities involved in the Cinematheque,

J.G.: And my friends. And also the reaction of people to these films. One of the films was Warhol's Kiss, and also Sleep, and I think I found those films boring. But it was really interesting to hear people's comments.

B.B.:Were you translating cinema into writing in any way?

J.G.: Probably. But it was more like an urge. To write about those people.

B.B.: At the time that you were finishing Kaleidoscope, what was Red Dust doing?

J.G.: Probably Pinget. Seventy-nine was his book Libera me domine. Some of the years before that were very low years, but there were a few books published.

B.B.: Would you say that the press began to take on a specific identity, as a publisher of a certain kind of books?

J.G.: Yes, and I think a lot of it had to do with seeing John Calder's table. There I also saw Alan Ross's Peru: The New Poetry, and there was Costas Taktsis' The Third Wedding, and I think he's accepted as being part of the nouveau roman. Sotiris Spatharis is another, he was a famous shadow puppeteer. He wrote his life story, Behind the White Screen, on a kitchen scroll, and he learned to read off gravestones, and this affected me greatly.

B.B.: What was your relationship with John Calder during this period?

J.G.: We weren't friends.

B.B.: Were you in competition for the same title?

J.G.: Oh, no.

B.B.: Well, how did it work?

J.G.: He sold me some books, but then he actually started his own press, River Run, in the U.S. and put the books he had sold me on sale.

B.B.: You mean he was selling books whose rights no longer belonged to him?

J.G.: No, they did, he had sold me the rights for the U.S. But then he brought his company here and sold British editions of the same books, too. It wasn't fair.

B.B.: No. So your press was taking shape from '63 and through the '70s. It was beginning to publish a certain kind of work, and that work centered around the nouveau roman and European experimental literature. Did you develop a relationship with any of those authors?

J.G.: With Pinget a bit. He came to dinner, and I saw him when he appeared with Sarraute and some other writers around '82.

B.B.: How would you describe him?

J.G.: He appeared to be very modest.

B.B.: But maybe not really that modest. There was an evening when he was on the same reading program with me and I didn't experience him as particularly modest. Oh, no. Were any of the writers whom you published interested in your writing?

J.G.: Of course not.

B.B.: I'm the only one?

J.G.: Except for a few others.

B.B.: Some people were passionate. Ursule Molinaro, my close friend, the novelist, she was interested in it.

J.G.: Yes

My husband once asked me how I thought authors felt about my work. "Shut up and keep publishing me " was what I thought the answer to that was (laughter)

B.B.: Which must make it frustrating for you to be a publisher and a writer at the same time

J.G.: Well I'm not a good publisher. I don't feel that it is my job to sustain people. Only to publish them

B.B.: So why have you continued to do this?

J.G.: Because I liked the work and thought it should be published. I thought they were really good.

B.B.: Did you feel that Red Dust would help your own career as a writer

J.G.: Well I thought I could go on publishing myself and I have.

B.B.: How do you see your own work now? Has it changed a lot since its inception?

J.G.: I think it has I don't think of sights as much I don't arrange things visually.

B.B.: Your work has a lot of oral elements.

J.G.: There's sound.

B.B.: That's probably why we should discuss the performance of your work. At a certain point, starting in the mid or late 80s, you began presenting your work as plays, and in fact, I directed a couple of them.

J.G.: Simone Weil had something to do with that. I met her mother in 1959. And we went over some of her work, just two or three times. Weil really got under my skin. Then I thought of writing this text called She, which I'm quite proud of. It's a novel, it's a short play. I put her in it, and my mother, grandmother, everyone in my family. One person was all the women in our family. Then there was Simone Weil, the Singer, and then there was La Passionaria. She was someone I thought I was very interested in, but I didn't like her when I got to know her better.

B.B.: But my question is how you came to the idea to perform your work as plays?

J.G.: Because everything was conversation, and that had started way back with Kaleidoscope, with only people's words. It's all people's words. I've never included description, because I felt it was untrue. The words were like a found object.

B.B.: But how did these words, these sounds, become a play?

J.G.: I think the idea was that since I was using only what people said, maybe it would be clearer if you could see the people on stage. However, The Field (Red dust 1999) isn't a play it's a novel so I do go back and forth.

B.B.: Perhaps I come from a New Criticism background because of when I was educated, but I feel that anything that isn't in the text shouldn't be brought up. In other words if the writer was thinking of something that led to certain words, but the same words don't necessarily create the same image in the readers brain , then there should be no control of the reader's perception, no information outside the text. And that's a conflict we had when I was directing your plays. You were always trying to explain to me, Well this line was about this, and that was about that, etc. always giving me the "back story” And I felt that your text had to stand on its own as if you didn't exist, as if it were two hundred years from now and there were not writer to tell us about it.

J.G.: Well I hate it if people think I don't want them to understand, so now, for each fragment, to show that it is not just arbitrary, I include the explanation in small print.

B.B.: You do?

J.G.: Oh, yes.

B.B.: And you publish it that way?

J.G.: I want to.

B.B.: I never thought those fragments were arbitrary, but I think that actors and audience and readers form their own interpretation of them. And you seem to object to that.

J.G.: I don't object to it, but I do want everybody to know that there was a background.

B.B.: Then part of your work is also the explanation of your work.

J.G.: Oh, yes.

B.B.: That's a change. The explanation wasn't there before.

J.G.: That's true, but the fragments are becoming smaller and smaller, you see. And I remember when you directed Fire, you made me put all of those fragments into a sentence, each one.

B.B.: That wasn't me. Or what I mean is, I was just using that as a rehearsal technique, so that the fragment sounded like it was part of something longer, but unheard. But I remember that when I read the play, it brought up certain associations, I heard it said in certain ways, and I thought I had a right to have it said exactly as I heard it, regardless of how you intended it.

J.G.: I see. Have you ever read Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?

B.B.: Yes.

J.G.: Well, beside the poem you'll see this tiny type.

B.B.: Oh, but those are just resumes of the action so if the reader stops he'll know where he is. Those are just summing it up not giving information that's not in the poem.

J.G.: No. Look at it again. But my main text comes from an impulse. I get very excited and put words down. When the excitement is gone, I stop. But of course something in me is anxious for people for people to know that I'm not doing this as some kind of gimmick. It's just that that is where the words stop

B.B.: I think that an unnecessary anxiety. People don't think of it as a gimmick. They try to understand it and they come up with their own interpretation.

J.G.: Or they just think: what is this shit?

B.B.: Well that can happen to anybody.

J.G.: Yes, if they went to the play instead, however, they wouldn't hear any of those explanations.

B.B.:True, but in that case the director would have been controlled- by the explanations in smaller typeface and told how to direct it. Which would lead me to give you the same answer you give other publishers: then why not direct it yourself if that's the way you want it?.. But regardless of this issue, your work shimmers with meaning, the fragments, too, and it's full of the influences of other writers. We've spo¬ken about Claude Simon, Pinget. What about de Quincey?

J.G.: I also had every book written by Virginia Woolf, even her letters, everything that I could get, and she wrote about de Quincey. One of her essays had this phrase: ".Oxford Street ran turbulent with men and women when de Quincey walked with Ann." And I wanted so much to find out about him. So I bought the only two books: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets. On a plane I opened the first book right on the page where Ann is described, and the whole story ended up in my piece Hieroglyphics. Then I wrote a big play called Color, based on Isaac Newton's optics, and I love his writing. And another writer whom I've never used but love is Charles Darwin. And I love Coleridge. Warren, my husband, gave me a biography of him. I thought I hated him because he left his wife. Every time she had a baby he walked off, but I found out that I love him.

(Joanna Gunderson's new book, Night, is now available through Red Dust.)

Blatt Issue 3 volume 2