MH: You were always probably a reader and a writer, but before you were published you became a musician. 

PH: I thought of myself as a writer easily ten years before I ever wrote anything. But I was always a reader. My mother, my grandmother, they’re big readers. My grandmother partially because she never had a college education, and she idealized literature and writing. She’d always say, “The Bible is literature and John Updike is pornography.” But she’d still read him. She’d given me [Updike’s] Pigeon Feathers—that early story collection. So I always remember that literary fiction was something to aspire towards being able to read in the first place.

   I went to UMass Amherst. I very vividly remember that my exclusive goal for myself in college was—and there weren’t many goals, I wasn’t an ambitious student—my goal was to become a good enough reader so I could say I’ve read The Sound and the Fury, and I can actually catch a rap about it and not sound like an idiot. I just continued to try to read better books, denser books, longer books, just that ambitious kind of reading. Trying to read Tolstoy, reading Proust. 

   That was like ‘86 to ‘90. I was an undergraduate. So I was really taken up with the magical realists, reading Julio Cortazar and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Carlos Fuentes, all those guys.

 

MH: Did you have particular teachers who really inspired you in that way?

PH: Yeah. It’s a funny thing. This is very circumstantial, so it’s strange. So I came from Wenham, a very small New England village. I went to UMass Amherst, and by the luck of the draw, I ended up roommates with all these really radical dudes from the Upper West Side of New York City whose parents went to Cuba and China and they all went to this radical day camp called Camp Kinderland in Massachusetts. So they all hooked me to radical music, radical literature, and all that sort of stuff. We were so baked all the time and lazy. 

   The building next to the dorm that I lived in with these guys was the Afro-Am department at UMass. At the time, James Baldwin was teaching there, Archie Shepp was teaching there—the saxophone player—Julius Lester. These guys all just took classes there, because it was right there, and it was already their politics and their art. I took a yearlong class with Archie Shepp called Revolutionary Concepts in Afro-American Music, and he just played all that Pharaoh Sanders and all that stuff, and took classes in the Harlem Renaissance, and then in Black and White Southern literature. That’s how the Faulkner I knew got incorporated into Zora Neale Hurston.

So it was a real catalyst. I was wide open to any of these ideas. Yusef Lateef was teaching at Hampshire. Anyway there was a lot of good music—Max Roach was teaching there—a lot of good literature and a lot of art that was leftist, like social justice, racial justice, labor, all that kind of stuff. They blew me away, and it was enlightening and very cathartic.

 

MH: Was music a part of your life at this point?

PH: Yeah, I’d been playing in bands forever, for sure. So I was doing all that kind of stuff. But playing the music that wasn’t like broken or just power-trio kind of stuff. But I remember reading Carlos Fuentes’ book Terra Nostra. That is a big doorstop of a book. Just in the middle of it one day in my apartment in Northampton, I was actually, literally putting the book down, and just saying, “I want to do this. This is what I want to do. It has the whole world, it has history, it has politics, it has music, it has everything. How do you do this? Where do I sign up? How do I get on to that?”

   Still I didn’t write for another seven or eight years. But like a lot of writers, your reading hits a critical mass at a certain point, and you want to almost start—my first impulse is towards fiction, where there’s almost some overlap of the same impulse. There are people who want to write fan letters to their favorite whatever—movie stars, musicians, or whatever. I just wanted to start a dialogue with my favorite books.

   So the first short stories I tried to write all sounded like they were very terrible fourth-rate fiction that had been even more terribly translated from Spanish. I was trying to write Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes and all that sort of stuff. I just took a couple of these really, really shady stories. I’d been in the band for a while. I finally graduated in ‘92, and was touring around with the band I was in early ‘92 to’96 or ‘97.

 

MH: What was the band called?

PH: Cold Water Flat—terrible, whatever. We had fun and we got to tour all around Europe and North America but it was cut cocky power trio stuff but...

 

MH: And you were playing drums the whole time?

PH: I was playing drums the whole time. I was a good enough drummer to know what it took to be a great drummer and just knew that was never going to happen that way. So when the band was on a hiatus that proved to be permanent, I tried to write a couple of these short stories, which were really bad. Then I signed up for the whole month, the whole four weeks, at Skidmore College, in the New York Summer Writer’s Institute.

 

MH: What year was that?

PH: This was ‘96. Just by the luck of a draw the first teacher I ever had for creative writing was Marilynne Robinson. Within ten minutes of her walking into the room it was just like, “That’s it. That’s the life of the mind, the intellectual, the aesthetic, the spiritual, the soulful—the whole thing—there it is. It’s all pulled together in a way that I can completely relate to and I feel like I can aspire towards.”

 

MH: So when you met Marilynne, she encompassed all of that?

PH: Yeah, exactly. When she would lecture, I’d maybe understand 75 percent of what she said, but unlike most of the obscure professors I had, I wasn’t put off by her obscurity; I was inspired by it, because the way that she presented her ideas was so obviously—it was rarefied, but it was also democratic. There was also something that was very much like, “This is all accessible to you; you just have to do the work to get there,” rather than the kind of very familiar cut-rate, obscure, fake intellectualism there’s a lot of in academia, no matter what your favorite subject is. So, yeah. I submitted this short story to her and she incredibly, generously and gently and with the greatest erudition, just dismantled it in front of me.

   Rather than being discouraged by it, it actually doubled down on my determination to try and become a writer at that point. So I just undertook to try to write stories. A couple of years later I was able to go to the Iowa Writers Workshop. I think the reason I got in was because of having been such a serious reader. Fairly quickly out of the gate I was able to put things on paper that sounded or looked like stories. You’d know they weren’t. They were terrible. But at the time, the director at Iowa was a guy named Frank Conroy, who was known for his ferocity and intensity. God bless the guy; he saw something in there and they let me in.

 

MH: Was Marilynne a connecting fiber in the beginning in this way?

PH: Yeah, it’s funny. Because after being inspired by her for those two weeks at that class at Saratoga, the leap I was making was, “This band thing isn’t working out. I really don’t want to have to get a full-time job. I don’t want a career. What should I do? Maybe grad school. I could try writing.” Then I heard that she taught at the University of Iowa. I thought, “State school, man. State school again. Piece of cake.” I get inside and didn’t even know. I just applied in my ignorance and innocence. To this day, it’s one of those things that—the further it recedes in the rear view mirror, the more astonishing it is to me that I got into Iowa and was able to study with her.

 

MH: I’m going to back you up for a second. What’s curious is, when you went to Skidmore, how did you come to even go to Skidmore? 

PH: It was the weirdest thing. I don’t even know, because during those days—I don’t even remember how I found out about it. Probably wasn’t the internet. I don’t think I had the internet in ‘96. I don’t even know. I actually don’t know.

   My grandmother paid for it. It was just this incredible act of generosity on her part to cough up the bread for her unemployed, 28-year-old rock-drummer grandson. Just, “Oh you want to be a writer? What good news! That’s so much better than being a drummer!” 

 

MH: This was the reader grandmother?

PH: Yes, exactly. I don’t know. I don’t even remember where I saw—I don’t remember the source for it, but I remember seeing the list of writers, because it was all the people who had been there, they’re loyal to the voyage. It was this amazing group of people. So it was Michael Ondaatje, Russell Banks, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Pinsky, Frank Podart, Carolyn Forché, Marilyn Robinson, and Bill Kennedy, of course. It’s just a who’s who of American writers. It really was thirty straight nights of hearing the greatest readings I could ever imagine. It was poetry and fiction, and it was just this full immersion.

   I felt like I was in over my head the whole time, and I loved it. I just thought it was really, really great, and unlike being a drummer, the prospect of having to sit by myself and work my chops up was fine. It just was, “I’m willing to do this,  I want to do this. I want to learn how these people put these things together: poems, stories, novels.” As opposed to drumming, where—as a drummer I was always like, “I want to play in a band. I want to get a case of beer and a bottle of whiskey and do Stones covers or try to do our own songs.” But I never was a kind of drummer where I’d just sit by myself for eight hours and just work on woodshed, they used to call it. It’s just woodshed, just work on your wrist, work on your rudiments and all that.

   I just didn’t do that with drums, but with writing I was going to do that. I was really willing to go down into the language, its syntax and the structure of sentences and vocabulary. The project of learning how to and then finding the results of putting aesthetic pressure on language to try to find how far can you push expression. That was how I felt when I read Virginia Wolf and Fuentes and all those people, and the poets of course too.

 

MH: Where did the music intersect? Was the music more of an aside, or did it inform the writing?

PH: It totally informed it, because I still write intuitively. I think of first drafts as improvisation. The privilege you have as a writer is that you can improvise the first draft, but then you can go back and revise. Which, I actually think musicians can do. When you read about Bach, Beethoven and Mozart, a lot of that was improvisation. But they went back and refined and were able to sharpen into the ideal version of the vision that the initial inspiration came from. But I think of first-draft writing—that’s when I started to realize the necessity of technical sophistication as a writer.

   When I went to Iowa, I was very naïve, and I just thought, “Don’t slow me down with grammar or punctuation or any of that sort of stuff. Man, I just don’t fire, baby,” which is a very romantic, but also a very common view about writing. Still that is the source of why people ask, “Can you teach writing? Should you go to school for writing?” Nobody says, “Should you go to school for acting, painting, dancing?” Of course you do, it’s fine arts. You have to know the technical side. 

   Marilynne Robinson, the last day I was at Iowa, after my exit interview with her, said, “One more thing.” I said, “Yes ma’am?” She said, “You really need to learn how to write grammatically correct prose.” That goes back to the musician thing, which is the idea that you need to know your scales. You need to know your rudiments. You need work your chops up so that you’re constantly evolving the level, the depth, and the sophistication of your first drafts. So when the stuff first comes over the wire, you get better and better and better and more, more aesthetically refined versions of what it is.

That ties into it because I write a particular kind of fiction,  which I think of as interrogative. I write in order to learn—

it’s a process of revelation. As the prose precipitates onto the page, you’re realizing what it is you’re writing about. So I don’t have anything ahead of time. It’s all just an innocent of what it is that I’m writing. You just improvise and learn how to be right in the moment, right now what is the sentence—what are the nouns, what are the verbs and all that sort of stuff.

 

MH: It’s that quality you hope will stay with the final draft?

PH: Absolutely, yeah. Because I think that if it’s interrogative fiction as opposed to, say, declarative fiction or whatever, that’s the way that you make sure that the writing is not pedantic. What you hope is that as you’re putting pressure on the language and on the subject, the vapor trail, the prose that you’re leaving behind as a result of that process when the reader follows you and reads that, will reproduce the experience of revelation rather than be something trivial like, “I’m so smart; I’m this smarty pants.”

 

MH: Do you have, when you’re revising and you now know the answer to the interrogation, how do you maintain that freshness to it? How do you avoid becoming didactic, I guess?

PH: It’s all a process.

 

MH: Are you conscious of that?

PH: Yeah, I’m conscious of the fact that the first draft is more and more important to me. That’s such a subjective and particular way to write. Any type of writing you do comes with very, very predictable pitfalls, as predictably as it comes with predictable virtues. You understand when you write that way you can end up being language-drunk. You can end up with June, moon, spoon kind of bullshit. You can end up doing cartwheels for the reader without having realized that you’ve lapsed into showing off or whatever. So one of the ways I revise is that, because I work on longer narratives, you go for months and months on end without reading your own stuff. I just flip open the laptop, scroll through on page 63, and I just start reading.

   One of the things that I listen for is my own voice. The second I can hear my own voice, something’s gone wrong. So I’m looking for a total transparency—I forget what the Latin is, but art conceals art. When I teach, I always open up and evolve the idea with the students of trusting your subjects, which is the idea that, if you’re writing about subjects that are truly worth writing about—they’re inexhaustible and they are their own best witnesses. So, your job—it’s not like I’m the artist and I come and sprinkle fairy dust over the subject and then it’s art.

   If the integrity and the aesthetic value and all that sort of stuff is already in the subject and the subject is inexhaustible, then my job is to be selfless and to just be… my goal is utter transparency, absolute precision with language. Because if the subject is worth writing about, it’s already worth writing about before I’ve come to it. Therefore, all of the integrity lies in the subject. So my job is just to become the amanuensis. My job is just to write as precisely and without any personal inflection about description. Precision of description, total lucidity, total transparency. Now all of this is coming out of my own brain. It’s all sort of very subjective, too.

   There are certain stages in making a work of art, particularly with a longer narrative—with any work of art, any, whether medium, short or long—where there’s a time for being willful and there is a time for being selfless. I feel more and more like in that first draft, where you are improvising, you are trying to achieve utter precision, you are trying not to refract the subject too much through your own personal desires for it, or trying to be self-aggrandizing or whatever it is or trying grand access or whatever. There’s a kind of transparency where I’m just taking dictation; I’m just trying to bear witness to the subject. Hopefully through that process, when you go back and revise things, quality control is already built into the first draft.

 

MH: Do you have tricks? I know some people put a note card of a word or sentence to keep themselves on track or to remember what they were feeling in the initial...

PH: I am so inefficient as a writer. I totally over-write. I think that’s a consequence: personally what I do is I over-write. In both Tinkers and Enon, the original first drafts are twice as long as the books and just keep pulling things, “So here it is; there is this cloud,” and you just keep pulling...

 

MH: Are you refining your language or refining your vision?

PH: Yeah. It is language, but they’re inseparable at certain points. Because I write impressionistically, I write very non-linear, very pointillistic, whatever. Tinkers is very non-linear, but Enon is much more straightforward. But I wrote Enon as non-linear always as I wrote Tinkers. Usually what it is, is stripping out. If you’re writing that impressionistically, what ends up happening is you have two or three versions of what prove to be the same thing, and there’s one that’s clearly better than the other two. However much you might like certain particular sentences in any given version of a larger passage or paragraph, that’s when you just have to be objective, and say, “There’s three versions of this. This is the best one. The other two just have to get stripped out.”

MH: Do these characters come out of people you knew, or these people you knew or these are pure--?

PH: Absolutely, yeah. I was very, very self-conscious when I started to write, partially just because of all the very international quality of my favorite writers, and that kind of cosmopolitan 20th century writing. The first novel, which I worked on for three years, was supposed to be an homage to—at the time my two favorite novels—The Magic Mountain and Carlos Fuentes’ Terra Nostra. It was just this crappy, historical costume. It was historical, and I wanted to try to figure out how to write, but I was not a good enough writer to do anything other than make it a costume drama.

   I had this irrational and very, very preventative reflex about using anything from my own personal experience, partially because in the ‘80s and ‘90s, I was just hyper-aware of all sorts of cheesy, confessional memoirs. Not like Augustinian confessions, but like, “I wanted to fuck my dog.” What are you going to do with that? It was that kind of stuff that made the Protestant in me. I don’t know.  It was the author just throwing everything in the reader’s lap and not doing anything artful or intellectual or interesting with it.

   For years, I wouldn’t admit any personal experience. So as a consequence, my writing was terrible. It was just really, really bad, stilted, self-conscious junk. Then I started trying to write Tinkers. I started to just write nonfiction. I found that when I tried to write about my grandfather’s life, because he was very, very reluctant to talk about his life—those are my begats; that was the book of Genesis. It was like he was my guy, my maternal grandfather. I found that when I tried to write about it in nonfiction, I lacked the ability to assign relative value in the subjects, everything was important, because that’s family, that’s my grandpa.

   So then, when I went to the generational level of his father, about whom I knew that he had been. I’d made him a tinker and tinker was what he was. In fact, he was a Fuller Brush salesman and had actually left my grandfather’s family when my grandfather was 12, because he had epilepsy and my grandfather’s mother was going to have him sent to an asylum, because they were so poor and she had no other resources. So it’s third generation away from me, so I was able to fictionalize it, because I knew a few facts.

   But Henry James talks about this a lot, actually, very brilliantly in The New York Edition: you know how he went back to The New York Edition with all those great introductions? In The Aspern Papers he talked about your source being you having just enough for it to aesthetically “Open Sesame” to your imagination, but not so much fact that it’s over-determined for you, and you can’t imagine enough of it. So I just finally found that degree of separation where it’s based in fact, but it’s not so over-determined that I don’t know how.

 

MH: The great scene with the grandfather’s seizure, was that family lore?

PH: I just totally made that up. I absolutely made it up. I remember when my grandfather was dying. Tinkers has the basic dramatic setting there of the grandfather being brought home to die in his living room, which is true. It’s very strange, because as I was the oldest grandson, my grandmother said, “This is your show; you have to orchestrate your grandfather’s death.” The whole family came in and actually I had to tone things down because people actually acted a lot worse that they do in the book. But I remember there is one moment before he was brought home that my mother asked him,  “Did you ever see your father have seizure?” He just lost it. He just choked up, burst into the tears.

   Suddenly it was like he was eight years old again, watching his parent just completely come apart at the seams, the rivets and the bolts. I didn’t deliberately think about it, but that was actually the scene around which I was dancing a lot of the composition of the book. I think probably by the time that Erika Goldman from Bellevue Literary Press saw it, she was like, “What’s missing is that you have to have the seizure.” I think the very literal, practical reason I was avoiding that was that if it hadn’t been the case that my great grandfather hadn’t had epilepsy, I’d never have written epilepsy, because it was easy to romanticize and all.

   What I just decided was, I was going to write about it subjectively. I wasn’t going to write about it clinically or pathologically, that sort of thing. It was just going to be moment-by-moment, blow-by-blow, “This is literally what is happening,” and not do any kind of symbolic or interpretative or whatever stuff. It worked out well. It was very strange that I was writing it. To me, it was like digging a ditch, like heavy lifting. I was like, “This is so awful. It’s very difficult to write this prose.” You just go back to this book and say, “What happens next, what happens next, what happens next?”

   It’s just that fascinating thing about why you’re writing this is just blow-by-blow, boring, terrible stuff? Now, I can actually still go back and read that scene and say, “That worked. I don’t object to…” But it took a lot—I had to write a lot of the other stuff to be able to get to a point where it’s like, “This is a dramatic hub in the story. I have to just write it…” So much of the other book is experiential, just impressionistic. It’s that consciousness, just elaborating itself, whereas that was suddenly stark—there’s no room for processing it. It’s just “boom, boom, boom,” just the brute, physical sort of thing. That worked just on the principle of counterpoint. So much of the rest of the novel is just discursive, the updrafts of consciousness. So you needed that physical, “no place to hide” kind of thing that anchors everything else down.

 

MH: You worked on it at Iowa?

PH: No, I actually wrote the short story version of Tinkers before I went to Iowa. It’s like 15 pages. While I was at Iowa, I worked on this other thing that was set in 16th-century Mexico that was supposed to be about the magic man on the ship. The day I left Iowa, that first novel that I was trying to write collapsed. I just turned back to Tinkers, and actually if you look at Tinkers, you could almost literally take the first five pages, the middle five pages, and the last five pages of Tinkers and that’s the original story.

 

MH: So it was in your head for quite a while?

PH: Oh, yeah.

 

MH: So how did that translate to Enon?

PH: One of the interesting things was, “Here I am now. I’m a writer. I’ve got to write another book in three years. Can I fit the experience of writing Tinkers over ten years into three? Can I compress the density of experience? It worked, but now I can look at Enon in a way and look at Tinkers and think, “It would have been nice to have ten or fifteen years to just process.”

 

MH: Was there something about the three years that maybe made it better?

PH: Possibly, I just didn’t know there was no time to be precious about it. You just had to get to it, you’ve got to hit it. You’ve just got to wake up and every day and—a thousand words a day, you do, and you are actually writing it. You’ve just got to nail it. What I had with Tinkers was I had the whole book, and I couldn’t get it published. So it was basically that I had years to hang with what I would have published, if I had been able to. Enon is the book I wrote in those three years that I wrote it, published it, and went on to the next thing.

 

MH: Was Enon in your head at all prior to that?

PH: No definitely not, absolutely not. Enon came to me as a weird visual image. Kara Walker did that big sculpture in sugar called “Sugar Baby.” She started off doing silhouettes. She did paper-cut out silhouettes, Antebellum silhouettes that when you first look at them, it looks like it’s Gone With The Wind and you look closer and it’s all like rape, miscegenation, whatever: just all the taboos and shit. So the first idea for Enon came to me like a visual image of a black-paper cutout or just a silhouette of a hill studded with gravestones, and there was a figure at the top of the hill, and the moon.

    I just knew all at once that it was Charlie at the Enon cemetery, and that his daughter had died, and he was sneaking behind her grave. It was the strangest thing, and there it was. Then I just started to write about it. At first I thought it was great, because I thought, “I’ve got a Hawthorne. I’ve got a New England ghost story.” Then it just turned into “He’s lost his child. This is incredibly tragic. It’s that strange thing where the writer’s first impulse was to not write it, because it’s the danger of cliché, the danger of being maudlin, of sentimentality, of bathos. It’s the razor’s edge. Then you think that’s why you should try to write it. That’s too hard. How can you pull that off?

   That’s what I tried to do. I tried to discipline the writing, because this happens to people. That’s one of the things that—I became loyal to him because I was loyal to a number of friends who have lost children. Actually, while I was writing the book, two fairly close friends lost only children. Even then you just think, “Oh, no, I should really stop writing this, but at the same time, I really can’t fuck this up, because if my friends who have lost only children read this and they detect one false note, one bit of bullshit...” To me I can think about it theoretically, which is the idea of, “Why bother trying to make anything less than everything that’s at stake?” I’d rather fuck Enon up than say, “I’m going to try something safer than to write Tinkers 2.” 

   Artistically, there’s something reassuring when I feel like whatever project I’m working on is too difficult for me to write, then I’m not a good enough writer to do it. Because that’s the cool things about art. The only way you can become a good enough artist is to actually try the thing. You can’t learn how to write the book theoretically. You just have to do it. You have to try it, see what happens. So then the circumstances of Tinkers doing so well, and then the big follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize. You just think, “Whatever.” I’m lucky that’s my problem in life. Just do it. Just try it. Just try this thing, see what happens. You have to be optimistic in the sense of, “If a piano doesn’t fall on my head someday, there’ll be four or five other books. All of these things will be together in this larger project or this larger life lived trying to make books.

 

MH: Do you remember the interview with Michael Cunningham after he won for The Hours? They asked him what the best thing about winning the Pulitzer was, and he said it was the only time that he has ever been able to write the next book exactly how he wants to write.

PH: There you go. You’re like, “This is it. Here it is.”

   The only time he said he had complete freedom without anybody telling him, whispering in his ear what he should be writing.

Because you have the Pulitzer; you know what you’re doing. It was different for me because it was the first book. It’s almost like, “Paul Who?” So you come out, you’re supposed to be in the bag of proverbial chips. It’s been strange, because I’m not a famous author; Tinkers is a famous book. So I’m this anonymous guy behind this book. 

 

MH: Did you work with the editor of Random House?

PH: Yeah, Susan Kamil.

 

MH: Did you work with the editors quite a bit there?

PH: I did. She was great. She’s a really, really good editor. 

 

MH: How was that different than say, Tinkers, where you’re probably much more on your own most of the time?

PH: Erika Goldman at Bellevue was a very hands-on editor. With good editors, I feel like what they do is they’re empathetic readers of the manuscript. So they just read the manuscript. They don’t tell you, “I think she should have a cat.” They just asked you questions. Susan Kamil is running Random House and, whatever those other capacities, as an editor she was very similar, at least in terms of approach, to Erika Goldman. She’d point out places and she’d say, “You know those ten pages where this is…there’s something funky. It’s off by a half tone.”

 

MH: It’s been a journey.

PH: I can almost step back and look at it and say, “Wow, it’s really cool that I get to do this for my life.” I’m very fortunate. Right before Bellevue accepted Tinkers, it literally came down to two weeks; I was leaving Harvard. Harvard wouldn’t let me teach there anymore because I taught for seven years as a preceptor. I tried to be a writer, and couldn’t get anything published. I tried to get Tinkers published for six or seven years. My job at Harvard was ending. I was like, “I really guess I’m not going to be a writer.” It was that kind of...

Then Tinkers got accepted. I was like, “Oh, something good.” When I couldn’t get Tinkers published, I just decided I’m going to make art just for art’s sake. It was very liberating, because I was like, “If I’m just going to make art just for art’s sake, what am I going to write?” You write whatever you want. So I had habituated myself to just writing whatever I wanted. Then when Tinkers did what it did, I felt like, “Good. Just keep doing that. Something is working.”