David Vann: Revenging a Suicide

The award winning American writer David Vann, known from 'Caribou Island' and 'Legends of a suicide' tells about the painful struggle between truth and fiction in his work dealing with his father's suicide when he was 13 years old.

Due to suicide, David Vann (b. 1966) lost his father at the age of 13. In this interview he connects his own life-story to his novel 'Legend of a Suicide'. For more than 12 years the book didn't find a publisher, today it is an international bestseller, that has won various prices. Furthermore, Vann speaks about the importance of routine in writing and working with language. Vann compares writing to therapy, though he finds, that true literature is far more than that, in books and stories we might find something, that was formerly looked for in religion.

David Vann was interviewed by Tonny Vorm during the Louisiana Literature festival 2012.

Camera: Jakob Solbakken

Produced by: Jakob Solbakken and Marc-Christoph Wagner, 2012

Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.

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Supported by Nordea-fonden.

I think that if the reader can know the true story and the background, that it changes the reading

and I think it changes the reading for the better because I think that there's something that happens

in writing there's an actual actor transformation that occurs on the page, in the writing.

When I was writing about my father's suicide I worked on the book for 10 years and I didn't know

how to write about it, and I wrote too literally at first. I wrote about the day we found out he died

and so we were all crying and it's impossible to read.

But then I was writing the short novel that's in the middle of the book

and half-way through there is an enormous surprise where everything changes and I didn't see that

moment coming until I was half-way through writing the sentence and so the next day I went back and I

planned to cut that and continue with my plan, but I reread all the pages leading up to that moment

and it was like seeing them for the first time, even though I wrote them, I saw all this pattern in them

for the first time, that was leading to that moment that I hadn't seen

and that changed everything for what I thought about writing, and, and the best pages in the book

are right after that where it's crazy and I have no plan. And so my feeling about telling an

audience about the background of the story is that there is nothing to hide, it's, it's, I want an

audience to know that my father did commit suicide when I was 13, I want them to know that he asked

me to come and spend a year back in Alaska with him and I said no, and soon after is when he killed himself.

Because when I was writing this tale of a boy and his father going homesteading for a year, that was a

second chance to say yes to my father, to spend that year with him, and I didn't understand that when I

was writing, it never occurred to me when I was writing, that I was getting a second chance to go spend that year with him.

And so there's something powerful I think that happens in fiction, at an

unconscious level, where's there's all this pattern, and I think that you can only really see that if you

know what the true story is in the background, and so I'm always happy to say exactly what's true

and not true in the books, because I'm very interested in what the fiction has made out of those past events.

I think there is something in our unconscious that wants to take the very ugly events and wants to turn

them into something beautiful, wants to reshape them, wants to have a kind of redemption.

I thought that I would, that this book would be how I'd get closer to his despair and I would finally

understand him, and I would understand the final moments, and that was what I was trying to do,

because I felt I had been cowardly in all of my other short stories about him,

that they were pretty but that they were cowardly, they didn't get close to that despair,

so I thought this would be a novel that by the end would follow right into his final moments, into the

point where he kills himself, and then I would understand it better when I got there.

But halfway through the boy kills himself, he, the father hands him the gun because the father is

suicidal, the boy looks down at it, and I realised right then he's just going to put it up to his head and fire,

and there's no thought whatsoever, and it was only years afterward that I could try to understand

that moment and what, what happened, you know, and, and I could see partly it was revenge,

that partly it was a psychological revenge, that all these years I've had to carry around my father's

suicide, so in the book the boy kills himself and the father has to literally carry the boy's body all

around, from one island to the next island, so I made him carry my body around for a while, and

I of course was completely unaware of that but it took a few years later to understand that, that partly that was revenge.

In the 2 books, in 'Legend of a suicide' the primary relationship was a father and son and the boy is the main character really.

In the next one 'Caribou island' it's a marriage and Irene is the main character.

But the antagonists, the boy's father and Gary, Irene's husband, you're right are very similar

in the kind of pressure that they put on Irene and the boy, and that acts out in different ways in the books.

But they both have a sense that if they go back into wilderness and they go back into nature

that they'll find some better self, and that they'll find a way, for the boy's father he believes he'll be able

to run away from his problems, that his despair will vanish, he'll find a way out of that despair and

his despair with women in particular, that his second marriage that he's broken up through infidelity

like the first and that he wants back.

And Gary has a little bit different dream which is that he's never actually, he's always felt alone and so

he married and had kids but he actually wanted to be alone also, and he believes that this cabin is, will be

the better shape of himself, it will be the outward shape of a man, and that he'll connect outwards,

sort of aniously into nature. This is a dream that comes from the British romantic poets, through the

American transcendentalists, a dream that our imagination with a capital i connects to nature with a capital n.

That they are actually the same faculty and that we'll find our innocence, our child self, when we go back.

I don't actually believe this, I think that when we go into nature we just find a mirror,

and it's a mirror that amplifies, so if what's happening inside of us is terrifying what we find in

nature is even more terrifying, it's amplified back.

So I don't have the dream anymore, I can't believe it, but the funny thing is my life is still arranged

so that I'm constantly going for the dream. I live in New Zealand on a ridge overlooking the ocean and

hills, and I go hiking and go windsurfing, and I spend part of the rest of the year on a boat in Turkey,

along the coast, in beautiful little coves, and so I'm constantly seeking out a kind of solace and comfort

in nature, and a lot of it, a lot of time spent by myself there, and yet I don't believe the dream at all.

I had a dream for a long time that I'd be some sort of mountain man, that I would head off into the hills,

and I would live out in a cavern and all that, and I loved backpacking as such, but what I realised

after a while was that I can't really be alone for more than 2 or 3 days, and then I just start to feel

so lonely, and I need other people, and I'm just not cut out for it, I can't really be the kind of loner out in nature.

I did actually build a boat to sail non-stop solo around the world, which is going to be 5 months

alone, and I was committed to it, and I had all the food on board and everything, but the crossbeams

weren't strong enough between the halls, and so I had to turn back.

So I had planned to set out but I have to admit that although I felt some excitement about it,

and I love sailing, what I felt mostly was despair and dread.

The idea of being alone for that long actually was something that felt terribly wrong.

My writing is very unconscious and my life has been led very unconsciously too, and I've had

repetitive disasters, I have an ability to repeat the same mistake 2 or 3 times, and partly it's

because of not having any idea why I'm really doing what I'm doing.

I went to sea for years as a captain when I couldn't get 'Legend of a suicide' published, I couldn't get published for 12 years,

and so I went to sea and became a captain on sail boats, and I was repeating my fathers life,

he was a dentist who didn't like being a dentist, so he went to sea, he became a commercial fisherman in Alsaka,

and he loved it, but it was also disastrous for him, it didn't work out in the end.

And so when I went to sea I was repeating his life, but I wasn't really aware of that when I

was doing it, so I've sort of lived the method you know, I've gone out there unconsciously and

experienced the disasters and train wrecks, just like my characters do in the novels.

What I like about writing is it feels like a religious practice to me, where it's every morning,

just a couple of hours, and it's a time of meditation in a way, of reading through the 20 or 30 pages

up to the point where I'm going to add a new page.

Then for the next hour it just comes in kind of brief, like quick flashes that are my page or two for that day,

and there's a kind of immersion in that, and a kind of unconsciousness, and although I'm an atheist and

I don't have any religious beliefs, I feel like writing satisfies that desire that we have,

I think we probably all have, some need or desire for something like religion.

So it's been tremendously satisfying in that way.

I'm not thinking about what the shape of the sentences will be when I'm actually writing them,

they just come very quickly, and I type as fast as I can think, so it's very fast, and the books

are published the way that they came out in the first draft, so I don't think about it then,

but I actually study language every day, I've been translating Beowolf every day from old English,

seeing that part of our language, the old part from a thousand years ago before it was combined with French,

and, so I'm thinking about meter and syntax in my teaching also, I teach from lingusitics in the history

of the English language, when I'm teaching style in fiction, so I think about it a lot

but when I'm actually writing I don't think about it, but to me it's very rythmic, I mean the whole, the text

is put together through vision of landscape and through a rythym in the prose,

and that's what I'm looking for, and that's why I read through the previous 20 pages before I start to write

is so that I'll feel that rhythm to it.

Writing is really therapeutic, it has to be more than therapy, writing and therapy are both about truth,

but writing is also about the beautiful, it also has an aesthetic goal that therapy doesn't have.

And writing that doesn't have that aesthetic goal is just crap, it's just therapy, and,

not to say therapy isn't valuable, but it doesn't have that artistic or aesthetic aim.

So one thing I was surprised by in spending all these years thinking about my father and writing about him

is to realise that I don't really understand the final moments of his suicide any better than I ever did

right from the beginning. I understand all the patterns in his life and what led to suicide

becoming possible, what could have put him to that final moment, but then I can never make it inevitable,

I can never say "Oh, this is why he had to do it".

He always could have at the last moment, he always could have decided not to,

and I can never erase that, I can never get rid of that.

I also wrote a book about a school shooting, a mass murderer, I profiled him,

and I had access to all of his mental health history, all of his emails, everything, 1500 pages of files,

and even with all that information I could not get to the point where I could make his shooting and suicide inevitable either.

I could see where it was possible, there are half a dozen narratives leading to that moment,

but I could not get it to where he had to do it. He could have not done it at the end.

And that's interesting to me, that in fiction there's a kind of open endedness,

we can't ever actually make it to where our character had to do the final act that they do.

We can only get close to where it becomes plausible, where we can see that it makes sense,

that it could have gone that way.