Leonard: I write every day when I’m writing; some Saturdays and Sundays, a few hours each day. Because I want to stay with it. If a day goes by and you haven’t done anything, or a couple of days, it’s difficult to get back into the rhythm of it. I usually start working around nine-thirty and I work until six. I’m lucky to get what I consider four clean pages. They’re clean until the next day, the next morning. The time flies by. I can’t believe it. When I look at the clock and it’s three o’clock and I think, “Good, I’ve got three more hours.” And then I think, “I must have the best job in the world.” I don’t look at this as work. I don’t look at it as any kind of test, any kind of proof of what I can do. I have a good time.
Amis: And it just seems to flow? There are no days when whole hours are spent gazing out of the window, picking your nose, making coffee?
Leonard: Oh yeah, there are whole hours’ work to make one short paragraph work.
Amis: I want to ask about your prose. Your prose makes Raymond Chandler look clumsy. Now the way I do it is: I say the sentence in my head until nothing sticks out, there are no “elbows,” there are no stubbings of toe; it just seems to chime with some tuning fork inside my head. And then I know the sentence is ready. In your work, pages and pages go by without me spotting any “elbows.” Even with the great stylists of modern fiction, you know you’re always going to come across phrases like “Standing on the landing” or “the cook took a look at the book.” There’s always some “elbow” sticking out, there’s some rhyme causing the reader to pause and wonder and think, “That’s not quite right.” With you, it’s all planed flat. How do you plane your prose into this wonderful instrument?
Leonard: First of all, I’m always writing from a point of view. I decide what the purpose of the scene is, and at least begin with some purpose. But, even more important, from whose point of view is this scene seen? Because then the narrative will take on somewhat the sound of the person who is seeing the scene. And from his dialogue, that’s what goes, somewhat, into the narrative. I start to write and I think, “Upon entering the room,” and I know I don’t want to say “Upon entering the room.” I don’t want my writing to sound like the way we were taught to write. Because I don’t want you to be aware of my writing. I don’t have the language. I have to rely upon my characters.
Amis: So, when you say it’s character-driven, do you mean you’re thinking, How would this character see this scene? Because you’re usually third-person. You don’t directly speak through your characters, but there is a kind of third-person that is a first-person in disguise. Is that the way you go at it?
Leonard: It takes on somewhat of a first-person sound, but not really. Because I like third-person. I don’t want to be stuck with one character’s viewpoint, because there are too many viewpoints. And, of course, the bad guys’ viewpoints are a lot more fun. What they do is more fun. A few years ago, a friend of mine in the publishing business called up and said, “Has your good guy decided to do anything yet?” [Laughter]
Or, I think I should start this book with the main character. Or I start a book with who I think is the main character, but a hundred pages into the book I say, “This guy’s not the main character; he’s running out of gas; I don’t even like him anymore, his attitude; he’s changed.” But he’s changed and there’s nothing I could do about it. It’s just the kind of person he is. So then I have to bring somebody along fast. Do you run into that?
Amis: What I do find, and my father Kingsley Amis used to find, is that when you come up against some difficulty, some mechanism in the novel that isn’t working, it fills you with despair and you think, “I’m not going to be able to get around this.” Then you look back at what you’ve done, and you find you already have a mechanism in place to get you through this. A minor character, say, who’s well placed to get the information across that you need to put across. I always used to think (and he agreed) that, thank God writing is much more of an unconscious process than many people think.
I think the guy in the street thinks that the novelist, first of all, decides on his subject, what should be addressed; then he thinks of his theme and his plot and then jots down the various characters that will illustrate these various themes. That sounds like a description of writer’s block to me. I think you’re in a very bad way when that happens. Vladimir Nabokov, when he spoke about Lolita, refers to the “first throb” of Lolita going through him, and I recognize that feeling. All it is is your next book. It’s the next thing that’s there for you to write. Now, do you settle down and map out your plots? I suspect you don’t.
Leonard: No, I don’t. I start with a character. Let’s say I want to write a book about a bail bondsman or a process server or a bank robber and a woman federal marshal. And they meet and something happens. That’s as much of an idea as I begin with. And then I see him in a situation, and I begin writing it and one thing leads to another. By page 100, roughly, I should have my characters assembled. I should know my characters because they’ve sort of auditioned in the opening scenes, and I can find out if they can talk or not. And if they can’t talk, they’re out. Or they get a minor role.
But in every book there’s a minor character who comes along and pushes his way into the plot. He’s just needed to give some information, but all of a sudden he comes to life for me. Maybe it’s the way he says it. He might not even have a name the first time he appears. The second time he has a name. The third time he has a few more lines, and away he goes, and he becomes a plot turn in the book.
When I was writing Cuba Libre, I was about 250 pages into it and George Will called up and said, “I want to send out forty of your books” — this was the previous book [Out of Sight] — “at Christmastime. May I send them to you and a list of names to inscribe?” I said, “Of course.” He said, “What are you doing now?” I said, “I’m doing Cuba a hundred years ago.” And he said, “Oh, crime in Cuba.” And he hung up the phone. And I thought, “I don’t have a crime in this book.” And I’m 250 pages into it. [Laughter] It was a crime that this guy was running guns to Cuba, but that’s not what I really write about. Where’s the bag of money that everybody wants? I didn’t have it. So, then I started weaving it into the narrative. I didn’t have to go back far, and I was on my way.
Amis: I admire the fluidity of your process because it’s meant to be a rule in the highbrow novel that the characters have no free will at all. E.M. Forster said he used to line up his characters before beginning a novel, and he would say, “Right, no larks.” [Laughter] And Nabokov, when this was quoted to him, he looked aghast, and he said, “My characters cringe when I come near them.” He said, “I’ve seen whole avenues of imagined trees lose their leaves with terror at my approach.” [Laughter]
Let’s talk about Cuba Libre, which is an amazing departure in my view. When I was reading it, I had to keep turning to the front cover to check that it was a book by you. How did it get started? I gather that you’ve been wanting to write this book for thirty years. It has a kind of charge of long-suppressed desire.
Leonard: In 1957, I borrowed a book from a friend called The Splendid Little War. It was a picture book, a coffee-table book of photographs of the Spanish-American War — photographs of the Maine, before and after; photographs of the troops on San Juan Hill; newspaper headlines leading up to the war; a lot of shots of Havana. I was writing Westerns at the time, and I thought, I could drop a cowboy into this place and get away with it. But I didn’t. A couple of years ago, I was trying to think of a sequel to Get Shorty. And I was trying to work Chili Palmer into the dress business. I don’t know why except that I love runway shows. I gave up on that. And I saw that book again, The Splendid Little War, because I hadn’t returned it to my friend in ’57. And I thought, “I’m going to do that.” Yeah, the time has come. So, I did.
Amis: In a famous essay, Tom Wolfe said that the writers were missing all the real stories that were out there. And that they spent too much time searching for inspiration and should spend
ninety-five percent of their time sweating over research. The result was a tremendously readable book, The Bonfire of the Vanities. Now you, sir, have a full-time researcher.
Leonard: Yes, Gregg Sutter. He can answer any of your questions that I don’t know.
Amis: Were you inspired by the research he put into this book?
Leonard: He got me everything I needed to know. I asked him to see if he could find out how much it cost to transport horses from Arizona to East Texas and then to Havana. And he did. He found a cattle company that had been in business over 100 years ago and was shipping cattle then. He found an old ledger book and copied it and faxed it to me.
Amis: Among the differences from your earlier books, this book is more discursive, less dialogue-driven and, till the end, less action-driven. Toward the end, you get a familiar Leonard scenario where there’s a chunk of money sitting around, and various people are after it and you’re pretty confident that it’s going to go to the least-undeserving people present. And it’s not hard-bitten; it’s a much more romantic book than we’re used to from you. Could your Westerns have had such romance?
Leonard: No. In my Westerns there was little romance except in Valdez Is Coming, which is my favorite of the Westerns. No, I just wanted to make this a romantic adventure story.
Amis: And there’s a kind of political romanticism, too. You’ve always sided with the underdog, imaginatively; one can sense that. And who could be more of an underdog than a criminal? And your criminals have always been rather implausibly likable and gentle creatures. What is your view about crime in America?
Leonard: I don’t have a view about crime in America. There isn’t anything I can say that would be interesting at all. When I’m fashioning my bad guys, though (and sometimes a good guy has had a criminal past and then he can go either way; to me, he’s the best kind of character to have), I don’t think of them as bad guys. I just think of them as, for the most part, normal people who get up in the morning and they wonder what they’re going to have for breakfast, and they sneeze, and they wonder if they should call their mother, and then they rob a bank. Because that’s the way they are. Except for real hard-core guys.
Amis: The really bad guys.
Leonard: Yeah, the really bad guys. . . .
Amis: Before we end, I’d just like to ask you about why you keep writing. I just read my father’s collected letters, which are going to be published in a year or two. It was with some dread that I realized that the writer’s life never pauses. You can never sit back and rest on what you’ve done. You are driven on remorselessly by something, whether it’s dedication or desire to defeat time. What is it that drives you? Is it just pure enjoyment that makes you settle down every morning to carry out this other life that you live?
Leonard: It’s the most satisfying thing I can imagine doing. To write that scene and then read it and it works. I love the sound of it. There’s nothing better than that. The notoriety that comes later doesn’t compare to the doing of it. I’ve been doing it for almost forty-seven years, and I’m still trying to make it better. Even though I know my limitations; I know what I can’t do. I know that if I tried to write, say, as an omniscient author, it would be so mediocre. You can do more forms of writing than I can, including essays. My essay would sound, at best, like a college paper.
Amis: Well, why isn’t there a Martin Amis Day? Because January 16, 1998, was Elmore Leonard Day in the state of Michigan, and it seems that here, in Los Angeles, it’s been Elmore Leonard Day for the last decade. [Laughter]
[Applause]
Editor’s note: Martin Amis is the author of many novels — including Money: A Suicide Note; London Fields; and Night Train — and many works of nonfiction, including a collection of essays and criticism, The War Against Cliché, in which may be found other interesting observations on the work of Elmore Leonard.
1
* * *
MICKEY SAID, “I’ll drive. I’d really like to.”
Frank, holding the door open, said, “Get in the car, okay?” He wasn’t going to say anything else. He handed her his golf trophy to hold, walked around and tipped the club parking boy a dollar. Mickey buckled the seat belt—something she seldom did—and lit a cigarette. Frank got in and turned on the radio.
They passed the Bloomfield Hills Police Department on Telegraph, south of Long Lake Road, going 85 miles an hour. Someone at the club that evening had said that anybody coming from Deep Run after a Saturday night party, anybody at all, would blow at least a twenty on the breathalizer. Frank had said his lawyer carried a couple $100 bills in his penny loafers at all times just to bail out friends. Frank, with his little-rascal grin, had never been stopped.
The white Mark V—washed daily—turned left onto Quarton Road. Mickey held her body rigid as the pale hood followed the headlight beams through the curves, at 70 miles an hour, conservatively straddling the double lines down the middle of the road, the Mark V swaying slightly, leaning—WJZZ-FM pouring out of the rear speakers—leaning harder, Mickey feeling herself pressed against the door and hearing the tires squeal and the bump-bump-bump jolting along the shoulder of the road, then through the red light at Lahser, up the hill and a mile to Covington, tires squealing again on the quick turn into the street, then coasting—“See? What’s the problem?”—turning into the drive of the big brown and white Tudor home, grazing the high hedge and coming to an abrupt stop. In the paved turn-around area of the backyard, Frank twisted to look through the rear window, moved in reverse, maneuvered forward again, cranking the wheel, reverse again, gunning it, and slammed the Mark V into the garage, ripping the side molding from Mickey’s Grand Prix as metal scraped against metal and white paint was laid in streaks over dark blue.
“Jesus Christ, you parked right in the middle of the garage!”
Mickey didn’t say anything. Her shoulders were still hunched against the walled-in sound of scraping metal. After a moment she unbuckled and got out, leaving Frank’s golf trophy on the seat.
It was cold in Bo’s room. The window air-conditioner hummed and groaned as though it might build to a breaking point. Mickey turned the dial to low and the hum became soothing. In the strip of light from the door she could see Bo, his coarse blond hair on the pillow, his bare shoulders. His body lay twisted, the sheet pulled tightly against the hard narrow curve of his fanny. Mickey’s word. Part of a thought. Practically no fanny at all, running it off six hours a day on tennis courts and developing the farmer tan—she kidded him about it—brown face and arms, white body. He didn’t think it was funny. It was a tennis tan and the legs were brown, hard-muscled. He didn’t think many things were funny. He would scowl and push his hair from his face. Now his face was slack, his mouth partly open. She kissed his cheek and could hear his breathing, her little boy who seemed to fill the twin bed. Bo would be fourteen in a month. “Going on thirty-five,” she said to Frank. Only once. Frank had given her a tired but patient head-shake that was for women who didn’t know about the concentration, the psyching up, the single-purpose will to win that a talented athlete must develop to become a champion. (Sometimes he sounded like a Wheaties commercial.)
She said, again only once, “What difference does it make if he wins or loses, if he’s having fun?” Knowing it was a mistake as she said it. Frank said, “If you don’t play to win, why keep score?” (Did that follow?) He then gave an example from the world of golf that drew only a vague parallel. Something about his second-shot lie on the 5-par 17th—the dogleg to the right?—where he could chip out past the trees, play it safe; or he could take a wedge and if he stroked it just right, to get his loft and a little kick, he’d be sitting pin high. “You know how I played it?” Mickey, showing interest: “How?”
An unspoken house rule: Never talk about Bo if it’s anything that might upset Frank. When the lines from his nose to his jaw tightened, stop. Switch to Bo’s overpowering forehand. Or let Frank describe his day’s round of golf, the entire eighteen, stroke by stroke. Keep the peace. Though the
tiny voice in her mind was beginning to ask, louder each time, Why?
It was a pleasure watching Bo sleep. It was a pleasure watching him eat. It was a pleasure watching him play tennis when he was winning. But it was not a pleasure simply to be with him and talk. Frank said, “He’s thirteen years old, for Christ sake. What do you want him to talk about?”
Coming into the bedroom with a drink and his golf trophy, Frank said, “You know, it’s funny, after fifteen years I still have to explain to you this is work, winning this thing. You make remarks like it’s a piece of shit.”
Mickey was already in bed in her long white pajama top, her face scrubbed clean of eye-liner and lipstick; but he’d caught her. The bed lamp was still on.
“What’d I say this time?”
“You made some remarks at the table; I heard you.”
“I said it looks like the Empire State Building with a golfer on top.”
“That’s very funny.”
“Well—” Mickey thought about it a moment. “How about the City National Bank Building?”
No, that was wrong; she should keep quiet. Frank was glaring at her, those little glassy eyes glaring away, the lines in his face drawing tight. Now he would either blow up or hold back and sound solemn.
“I’ll tell you something,” Frank said. He held the trophy high with one hand, showing her his strength as well as his reverence for the award. “Winning the club championship, bringing this home every year if I can do it, and I mean it takes work, is as important to my business as anything I do.” He was having trouble holding it up.
Mickey said, “And the blazer with the club crest—”
Frank tensed. “You want to make fun of that too?”
“All I meant, it’s another prize, something important to you.”