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Robert Stone lives in a small frame house on the Connecticut coast. Inside, a long white living room with curving walls suggests Oriental calm, and a pocket kitchen like a ship’s galley offers the comic sight of tame ducks feeding on the water just below. The hesitant phrases of the Modern Jazz Quartet chime from a battered stereo flanked by bookshelves filled with fiction, philosophy, and church history. Over a built-in sofa hangs an unframed poster for Who’ll Stop The Rain?, the film Stone coauthored from his second novel, Dog Soldiers. Stone and his wife Janice moved into this house in the fall of 1981; they have a son and daughter, grown and gone.

The novelist works in an attic room crowded with cardboard boxes and manuscripts and decorated with several brightly colored samples of Spanish religious art. At one end of the long room, a wide window affords a view of a gray October sea; another looks down on the gravel parking lot of a clam bar. Stone writes at a table only a little larger than the word processor it supports. When his office phone rings, it may be an editor on the line begging him to cover a story, a director seeking to interest him in a new part (in the summer of 1982, Stone played Kent in a professional production of King Lear in California), or an interviewer plaguing him with yet another question that he will answer with care and unfailing courtesy.

Although the Stones have lived in many parts of the country, and for four years in London, changes of locale have rarely altered the writer’s routine: “I get up very early, drink a pot of tea, and go for as long as I can.” Stone says he stops only when he has left himself a clear starting point for the following day. For weeks on end he will take few days off if his work is going well. “My imagination will still be functioning,” he says with a laugh, “twelve hours after my brain is dead.”

He lives more quietly now than in his years in the California counterculture as one of Ken Kesey’s “Merry Pranksters”; his free time is given over to milder pleasures, such as the exploration by canoe of the salt lagoon behind his house. But even this quiet coast has its threat: The past summer, Stone told me, a large shark was spotted in the lagoon, just off the docks, importing a frisson of fear into the neighborhood.

Stone is in his late forties, a trim man whose thinning hair and well-barbered beard frame a ruddy, pensive face yet to be done justice by his book jacket photos. His voice, branded by years of Scotch and smoke, was deep and serene as we began our two days of talk. 

 

INTERVIEWER

Was there one book that started you writing?

ROBERT STONE

It was a rereading of The Great Gatsby that made me think about writing a novel. I was living on St. Mark’s Place in New York; it was a different world in those days. I was in my twenties. I decided I knew a few meanings; I understood patterns in life. I figured, I can’t sell this understanding, or smoke it, so I will write a novel. I then started to write A Hall of Mirrors. It must have taken me six years, a dreadful amount of time. I really began work on the novel during my Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, which brought me out to California just about the time that everything was going slightly crazy. So I spent a lot of my time, when I should have been writing, experiencing death and transfiguration and rebirth on LSD in Palo Alto. It wasn’t an atmosphere that was conducive to getting a whole lot of work done.

INTERVIEWER

You once described writing your first novel as a process that paralleled your life.

STONE

A Hall of Mirrors was something I shattered my youth against. All my youth went into it. I put everything I knew into that book. It was written through years of dramatic change, not only for me, but for the country. It covers the sixties from the Kennedy assassination through the civil rights movement to the beginning of acid, the hippies, the war . . .

INTERVIEWER

Does that mean you changed your conception of the book as you were writing it, that you tried to respond to those changes?

STONE

Yes. And to things that were happening with me. One way or another, it all went into the book. And of course it all went very slowly because once my Stegner Fellowship was over, my wife, Janice, and I had to take turns working. I’d work for twenty weeks and then be on unemployment for twenty weeks and so on. So it took me a long, long time to finish it.

INTERVIEWER

You mention responding to national as well as personal change. Do you consciously try to write about America? 

STONE

Yes, I do. That is my subject. America and Americans.

INTERVIEWER

You have been cited as a writer who addresses larger social issues. Do you start with those in mind, or do you simply start out with the characters and because you have political concerns these issues naturally come out?

STONE

It is very natural. You construct characters and set them going in their own interior landscape, and what they find to talk about and what confronts them are, of course, things that concern you most.

INTERVIEWER

Is writing easy for you? Does it flow smoothly? 

STONE

It’s goddamn hard. Nobody really cares whether you do it or not. You have to make yourself do it. I’m very lazy and I suffer as a result. Of course, when it’s going well there’s nothing in the world like it. But it’s also very lonely. If you do something you’re really pleased with, you’re in the crazy position of being exhilarated all by yourself. I remember finishing one section of Dog Soldiers—the end of Hicks’s walk—in the basement of a college library, working at night, while the rest of the place was closed down, and I staggered out in tears, talking to myself, and ran into a security guard. It’s hard to come down from a high in your work—it’s one of the reasons writers drink. The exhilaration of your work turns into the daily depression of the aftermath. But if you heal that with a lot of Scotch you’re not fit for duty the next day. When I was younger I was able to use hangovers, but now I have to go to bed early.

INTERVIEWER

You really think of yourself as lazy?

STONE

Well, my books aren’t lazy books, but I have a lazy way of working. I do a very rough first draft and then a second and sometimes I have to do a third because I didn’t take the trouble to really organize the first. And I take breaks between drafts. And I do altogether too much traveling.

INTERVIEWER

You have gone for relatively long periods of time between books. Seven years between A Hall of Mirrors and Dog Soldiers, and then another seven before A Flag For Sunrise. Are you writing all that time?

STONE

It seems to me that I am. I was working all those years on A Flag For Sunrise. I could probably have gotten six books out of my three if I’d wanted to do smaller themes. Twice as many books and they would have been half as good. Six so-so books. I don’t need that. I like big novels; I really admire the grand slam.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any special requirements, conditions necessary for your working environment?

STONE

Well, of course, I find ways to delay the day as much as possible, but there are no particular rituals connected with that for me, like having a special coffee cup or sharpening six pencils. I do need physical order, because I’m addressing the insubstantiality of structures—that’s where the blank page starts. No top, no bottom, no sides. I find it hard to sit still. I pace a lot. I’ve got to have a pen in my hand when I’m not actually typing.

INTERVIEWER

You mostly type?

STONE

Yes, until something becomes elusive. Then I write in longhand in order to be precise. On a typewriter or word processor you can rush something that shouldn’t be rushed—you can lose nuance, richness, lucidity. The pen compels lucidity.