Rick Dahms
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JUST ABOUT THIS TIME of year 24 years ago, I drove my still nearly new VW Superbeetle up to La Conner for a chat with Tom Robbins about a book he'd just written: his second novel, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Last week I hit the road for La Conner again, to talk with Robbins (in the same room of the same house I visited in 1976) on the occasion of his seventh and latest, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, published this week. Tom and I both arrived in Seattle back in the mid-'60s; then I knew him as The Seattle Times' jazz-bo of a visual arts critic, as the host of KRAB-FM's every-Sunday-evening s顮ce of underground rock, as an amiable magus prone to donning Fantasia-style wizard gear to preside over drug-sodden street celebrations of the alternative lifestyle. Somehow it fit that the guy I knew would have written a cult bestseller (Another Roadside Attraction) in his spare time, but another novel? Ol' Tom a Novelist, a Fictioneer, a Molder of Significant Form? I couldn't get used to the idea. A quarter-century and five more books later, I still can't. Fortunately, Robbins hasn't either. Fierce Invalids—episodes from the life of an accident-prone CIA op with a taste for mind-expanding drugs, Finnegan's Wake, and legally untouchable girl-flesh—no more resembles a rule-made contemporary fiction than its six elder siblings did, but it's vintage Robbins in the rich layering of its literary lasagna: plot, preachments, precepts, and prophecy all bubbling merrily together. We hereby celebrate Robbins' Lucky Number Seven with some thoughts on life and art in the Great Northwest composed by the master on the occasion of receiving the Golden Bumbershoot award, plus some extemporaneous observations of life, love, lust, and literature that haven't found their way into the canonical works—yet.
On life
Privacy is essential to me. I'm on the cusp between Cancer and Leo, so I'm actually torn between retiring to the hermit's cave and wanting the spotlight on center stage. But it's very difficult to tap into the eternal sources if you're cavorting in public. Whom the Gods would destroy they first make popular. Being in the spotlight inflates the ego, and I concur wholeheartedly with Joseph Campbell that Hell is a large, stiff ego.
For the first few years after my first two books appeared, I hadn't given many interviews or allowed my picture to be circulated, a lot of people believe that I was a woman. I guess it was my well-developed anima. But mystique is a magnet, and every summer I used to get college students from all over the United States beating a path to my door. Once I started doing readings and book tours that stopped happening: You maintain your privacy by going public. It sort of directs the fire away from who you really are. Like the guy in the old cowboy movie: He would put his hat up on a stick and all the bad guys would shoot at the hat while he snuck around and came at 'em from behind.
On literature
My approach to writing is intuitive, not analytical, which is one of the things that makes it hard to talk about. Because I'm not a formula writer, every time I start a book it's beginning all over again. I don't know how to write a novel, I couldn't tell you how to write a novel, it's a new adventure every time I begin one, and I like it that way. I rarely have even the vaguest sense of plot when I begin a book, what I usually begin with is about three—things, three themes, concepts, ideas, that are completely unrelated. Well, everything is related, but I'm not aware of the relationships, the connections are not present in my mind. And then I hold auditions in the teatro cognito and a character or two will show up, frequently a woman, and I will put that character in a scene, and it's like putting that character in a little boat and pushing it out into the water, and then I literally follow that character out of that scene and into the next, one scene begetting the next.
My books, for all their surface looseness, are actually very, very tight, and they're full of cross-references, and the themes are complex, so to be able to write that way with any degree of artistry and to make these disparate elements come together so smoothly that they appear seamless, that the reader would believe they were there from the beginning, requires not only that I write very, very slowly but maintain an enormous degree of focus and concentration; you have to be able to hold many, many different things in your mind at once, because once you get beyond 50 pages, you can't go back every day and read what you've already written. It takes intense concentration to do that, at the end of my writ-ing day, and my writing days have been get-ting shorter and shorter; you feel like you've been wrestling in radioactive quicksand with Xena the Warrior Princess and her five fat uncles.
