Brotherhood Is Going to the Dogs: An Interview
with D. Travers Scott by Kevin Killian
Kevin
Killian: Your book takes place all over the USA, as if to answer
our longing for a novel that would encompass the whole American experience;
but where are you from, Travers?
D. Travers Scott: I’m from Texas, irrevocably
and inescapably, and it has a huge effect on my work. Texas was the
setting of my first
book and for a long chapter in this one. Regionalisms from jackalopes
to Frito Pie make frequent appearances, but beyond these King-of-the-Hill-isms,
growing up in Texas, especially in a family of multiple generations
of native Texans, is really about growing up steeped in mythology.
You have pop culture from John Wayne to J.R. Ewing, then you have all
the Texas history you’re taught in school, then you have your
own family tales: My great-grandmother’s family were covered-wagon
settlers. My birth mother did research on TexMex conjunto music and
curandera faith healers. My paternal grandfather was a small-town preacher
in West Texas. This all gives you an incredible sense of belonging
that I think people from most other states can’t comprehend.
Texans, even ex-pats like me, always seem to find each other; we bond
together on vacations and stuff.
I think coming from a place so saturated in myth, history, dream,
and legend, then leaving that place, gives you this acute awareness
of the layers of narrative that weave through a place. It really made
me see things like location and identity as fabrics woven from the
stories others tell us and we tell ourselves. This, combined with the
multiple spiritualities and belief systems I was raised with, not to
mention being a big ole ‘mo, made me real suspicious of absolutes,
fixed points, short answers, simple binaries. I don’t see both
sides of a coin, I see a hexoctahedron existing in multiple fluid dimensions.
So, basically, growing up in Texas made me feel like I’m permanently
trapped in some sort of psychedelic sci-fi movie.
I was actually born in Waco, and when I moved to the Pacific Northwest
right after the Branch Davidian episode, I had to use my birth certificate
as ID at my new bank or the DMV or something, the employee raised an
eyebrow and nervously asked me, “So you just moved here…from
Waco?”
Killian: What keeps you in Seattle? What is it like to live there?
Scott: Seattle is nice. Verrrrrrrry nice. When I go to my neighborhood
coffee shop, I walk along the crest of Capitol Hill, and if I look
left I see the Space Needle, Puget Sound, and the Olympic Mountains.
To my right I can see the Cascade Mountains and Lake Washington. It
is almost always lush and green with no extremes in weather. Occasional
drama from volcanoes and earthquakes, but that’s about it. Bus
drivers will wait while you stand in the door saying goodbye to someone;
you can chat with the grocery checker while people wait patiently in
line behind you. When I cross the street I wait with everyone else
for the lights to change. If there’s no stoplight, the cars stop
to let me pass. When I get to the coffee shop, everyone’s plugged
into their laptops and there’s a man in his 70s wearing knickers
and a straw hat playing old Tin Pan Alley standards on a piano. Everyone
is nice to me: the various populations (Scandinavian, Native American,
Asian, high-tech workers) share a pleasant facade and emotional reserve.
It’s very hard to get to know people, but no one shouts at you.
And if you want tranny new-wave cover bands, amputee drag queens,
pomo burlesque, art exhibits of fisting and afterbirth photos, well
it’s all here, too, if not as common in San Francisco, Los Angeles,
or New York.
The upshot of all this, and perhaps why I’ve been in the Pacific
Northwest for twelve years now, is that it is a low-impact place to
live, with a culture that values quality of life. It’s a big,
comfy, if somewhat aloof and distant, couch. I’m not quite the
paragon of emotional stability, so it’s been good for me. My
friends in the bigger cities think it’s totally provincial and
wonder how I can stand it—but I just say, ‘Let’s
compare therapy bills.’
That being said, I travel a lot, and I’m moving to L.A. in the
fall, to start a doctoral program at the USC Annenberg School for Communication.
So obviously there hasn’t been enough to keep me in Seattle exclusively…
Killian: One of my students was musing about you and suggested The
Brothers Karamazov as an important precursor to your book. Were
you influenced
by Dostoevsky?
Scott: Texas public schools, then art school, and an abiding dislike for MFA
writing programs have left serious gaps in my edjicayshun,
so I’ve never read Dostoevsky. (Although I love Chekhov, and
have pilfered a few lines from him over the years, and I have read
every novel all the Brontë sisters ever wrote.) In terms of literature,
One of These Things... is a reworking of Hemingway’s The
Sun Also Rises. Whereas Hemingway’s Jake Barnes forms his identity
in contrast to things and places around him (women, Europeans, Jews,
fags, athletes, previous generations), I wanted to invert things: my
Jake Barnes is surrounded by mirrors. I’m also influenced by
the writing of literary couples: the Fitzgeralds, Paul and Jane Bowles,
you and Dodie [Bellamy]. (Sounds like a dinner party!) I think it goes
back to what I was saying about Texas and seeing reality, or narrative(s),
as a conflux of multiple intersecting subjectivities.
While researching OTT, I looked at things like Mesopotamian creation
myths, folklore around multiple births, and of course a hanged man’s
erection appears everywhere from Billy Budd to Waiting for Godot. Oh,
there’s also a blatant Dante ripoff in OTT. I’ll buy a
drink for the first person who calls me out on my Dante ripoff. There’s
also a huge amount of masculine violence and affection in there that
draws on things like skinheads, porn, and mixed martial arts fighting;
I’ve got a list on Amazon called Books
of Violent Brotherhood and Dark Male Affection.
Killian: Reading your book I flash on all the
movies that involve multiple births and mixed identities: Cronenberg’s Dead
Ringers,
or De Palma’s Sisters, where poor Margot Kidder spends
most of the movie haunted by the personality of the Siamese twin sister
who
was
sacrificed early on so that Margot could live unimpeded.
Scott: I have another Amazon list called Creepy
Twins in Movies. In
addition to the films you mentioned, I’d add A Zed and Two
Noughts,
The Brood, Liquid Sky, and Basket Case. And I love movies about monster
children: both the Damned movies—even the remake with Kirstie
Alley and Christopher Reeve—the It’s Alive films, The
Children,
Children of the Corn, and all the great possession/reincarnation flicks
from the ‘70s. This book definitely sticks its feet in the horror
genre, and it draws more from horror movies than horror literature.
Those movies are so much about the monstrous and alien, that sublime
tension of fearing and empathizing with the monster. But in OTT the
monster(ous) is really hard to pin down. Is it the father? The brothers?
Society? The mother? Incest? Killing? Texas?
I guess part of what I was trying to do was to write a horror-type
narrative in which the hero and the monster(s) are never fixed, but
appear in multiple, simultaneous, contradictory places and persons.
Killian: The borg-like mind of the twin is truly scary and an important
opening into your novel.
Scott: That’s perfect! I hadn’t thought of the Borg but
of course I love them, and Brett Ashley in this book is sort of the
Borg Queen drawing all her long-lost drones home to her. The Borg are
the best Star Trek villain because they’re the most fearsome
and the sexiest—their existence is very appealing. I wasn’t
consciously drawing on them, but that’s very much the same feeling
I have toward my Jakes.
Killian: As your readers approach the end of the book the full horror
dawns on us. You have written something which rips the carapace off
of the
human heart and reveals the ugly programming that comes from within
and without.
Scott: Thank you! And, hey, thanks for making me
run to the dictionary for ‘carapace’—what a great
word! Did you see this crab
tattoo I just got YESTERDAY!?!
It’s totally about “the carapace of the human heart.”
When I was very young, I saw a midnight double-feature of Texas
Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes at a drive-in outside Galveston, in
the front cab of a pickup truck with my mom and her boyfriend at the
time, freaking on a contact high. Those films weren’t about twins
and brothers specifically, but they definitely both were about family,
which is certainly a frequent obsession in my work and this book.
Killian: Your heroine, Brett Ashley, speaks in
the elevated diction of a Henry James novel. She is a woman of a
certain class, and her
wealth
and social position have protected her from much. Is it difficult finding
a way to write about the very rich? Fitzgerald’s nose was always
pressed up against the window, stiff with longing, but you seem to
work around Brett Ashley with a different sort of regard.
Scott: I honestly don’t know any of the very rich. Brett is
more a fantasy character, the Meta-Mother the little Jakes are spawning
back to. Her Jamesian vibe is more to align her strongly with New England—the
Jakes are not only going back to their possibly biological womb but
to the cultural womb of the (white, colonized) United States—in
a town ironically named ‘Gravesend.”
Killian: That’s clever, Travers.
Scott: Ha ha, isn’t that so clever you could just shit? Someone
should smack me.
Killian: When I see you I will. I promise.
Scott: Really, please, someone should. If anything it was a challenge
to make Brett real; she was much more mythic in earlier drafts. There
are also very few women in the book, and she’s the only character
in the book besides the Jakes who gets a name, in my nod to Daphne
Du Maurier, whose novel Rebecca features a narrator whose name we never
learn.
Killian: I don’t want to give away any spoilers, but I must say the
climax of your book is astounding and unlike anything I’ve read
in eons. After you put it down, it comes back up behind you and tussles
you to the ground all over again. Do you work out the whole plot ahead
of time, or do you let these surprises develop as you think of them
(or—as they think of you—which is how it often works).
Scott: Wonderful! I’m so flattered to hear you say that! The
book went through several very different endings, including one that
involved
a Jake literally fashioning new golem Jakes out of clay from a riverbed.
And the prologue, which now much more clearly relates to the climax,
was rewritten just a couple of months ago when we were doing final
proofreading of the manuscript. Greg and Ian have been very patient
with me!
OTT was my big attempt at plotting in advance and, boy what a waste
of time that was! I have all these bulging folders of detailed plot
outlines and charts and notes that bear no resemblance to the final
book. I wanted to try the opposite of my usual personal-collage writing
style, but of course the characters had their own ideas. There are
a few journal entries still buried in OTT, but overall it was very
much more about rewriting over and over and, as you said, the surprises
revealing themselves. I initially thought the book didn’t have
any gay content! And I had no idea that poor boy was going to be fed
to the sled dogs. (Actually that scene is inspired by a visit I made
to this rural Alaskan family who I think wanted to feed me to their
dogs when they figured out I was queer!)
Killian: “There’s a lot of stuff that
just doesn’t click
for me, you know? World’s so full of stuff that just don’t
make sense to us. Things everyone else is real passionate about. Rituals.
I don’t even try to understand any more. I smile or frown like
I’m supposed to, go along to make folks happy. Yeah, church.
Birthdays. Super Bowl. Arguing about silly songs on the radio or shows
on TV. Not walking under ladders or stepping on sidewalk cracks.” That’s
Jake talking to his waitress informant about the way he and his brothers
see the world. “It’s funny—the outside world or whatever,
everyone thinks they’re so unique, so individual. But they all
live by all these habits and patterns. People always thought we were
such identical freaks, but they spend most of their waking hours running
around doing great big group things. They march all around in all these
elaborate formations, and they pretend not to see them. They may look all
different, but they act just the same.”
Elsewhere the brothers call those of us who aren’t linked by
twinship “Indies,” for “Individuals,” and it
isn’t a compliment, is it? Travers, how did you come upon this
weird way of looking at human life, human society?
Scott: First off, the brothers are bitter: they were raised to distrust
and dislike anyone outside their family, which of course made them
desire outsiders all the more. All the Jakes are xenophobic, yet desperately
want outsider acceptance, but feel rejected by Indies—that cycle.
They’re in their early 20s, so they’re still fighting that
battle between group acceptance and individual integrity. They talk
about it in terms of Indies, but that’s a stand-in for all the
individual and collective identities in the book: gender, sexuality,
faith, family, nationalism, region, generations. But the boys’ mistake
is thinking of all this in such either/or terms.
Second, going back to the idea of the monstrous, the Jakes’ dialectic
of longing and hostility is very classic horror, Frankenstein’s
monster and all the rest. Wanting to be accepted by the ones you want
to destroy. I think the Alien movies have done an amazing job of this
narrative arc over four films, although in reverse, as Ripley starts
out wanting to destroy the monsters but ends up becoming one with them.
If they do a fifth movie (I’m not counting that Predator thing),
what she really needs to do is destroy Winona Ryder.
In this book I’m railing at the American cult of constrained
individuality, our rhetoric of “Be original! Be outrageous! Be
yourself!” that’s fenced in by this rigid, reactionary
conservatism and fear of outsiders. The nationalism, unilateralism,
and hostility towards every other country in the world during the war
have just been horrifying. “Freedom Fries” will definitely
go down in infamy as a moment of supreme American idiocy.
What I love about America is our frontier, populist spirit of self-determination—but
the way it conflicts with our Puritan fear of the body, pleasure, sensuality,
and our—uh, I don’t know a fancy name for this one—Midwestern
self-effacement? That aw-shucksy, I-ain’t-nothing-special shit
that becomes fear of anyone who might be a little too special, and
the need to mow them down—the Aussies call it Tall Poppy Syndrome—THAT
pisses me off!
I guess the short answer to your question is: I’ve always felt
way “special” in lotsa different ways, and so I resent
the crushing of ‘special-ness’ in our culture.
Killian: You’ve written a Montessori horror novel! In this critique
of “elaborate formations,” is there a hint of the protests
of Gay Shame? That gay men and women are supposed to be living radical
lives and yet often enough we are indistinguishable in affect from
the heterosexual oligarchy we are supposed to be rebelling against?
Scott: Mmmmm sorta maybe kinda? I mean, the book definitely bristles
at the notion that happiness is found in cuddling up into any neat
and tidy identity. But, much as I love what Gay Shame does, I’m
innately suspicious of any tight binaries of insider/outsider, mainstream/alternative,
conservative/radical, etc. Things just aren’t that simple, and
reinforcing those kind of simple binaries just perpetuates them. I
mean, that kind of black-and-white thinking is the core of fundamentalism:
good/bad, saved/not saved, holy/infidel, etc. Maybe that’s getting
kinda heady, but I’m working on this queer fundamentalism essay
right now, so it’s on my mind. And one of my advisors at school,
David Domke, just wrote this great book on political fundamentalist
thinking, so it’s all whirling around my head.
I guess in OTT, the Jakes are journeying through this kaleidoscope
of identities and trying them on, sorting through them, but they haven’t
yet figured out that their thinking about identity is all wrong. Their
insistence on clear definitions is part of their downfall. I don’t
want to give too much away, but the Sheriff’s bisexuality is
key, so is the mother’s final decision about “there are
some things a mother just knows.” And the question as to how
much power the father really has.
Craig Lucas said it was like a slide down a banister that turns into
a razor blade. I guess the boys’ thinking about identities is
too banister-oriented.
Killian: It’s a sexy book and the gay brother
in particular has an eye-opening sex encounter with an unexpected
older man. How did you
manage to write up the inner sex lives of four such different men?
Four men who have spent their whole lives trying to vary themselves
from each other so that they are driven to extremes in every sense.
Did you make up a chart, as Joyce is said to have done?
Scott: Thanks! It’s all about Photoshop, baby! I took a picture
of one of my favorite porn actors and photoshopped it into versions
for each brother and the father; I had these tacked up with notes about
each of them all over my apartment, along with pictures of bloody Brazilian
wrestlers and pages of The Sun Also Rises. The whole book germinated
from a graphical idea, actually: I had this image of five separate
lines that eventually came together at a single point, and each chapter
would be a segment from a different line. I wanted to do a story without
an individual protagonist…the Jakes ended up being the solution.
Actually there were originally five brothers. There was this crystal-addicted
cyberpunk hippie brother in Brazil who got cut because there was just
too much going on, and four brothers felt a lot more—geometrically
pleasing—than five, which felt too much like the Village People.
I miss that brother! I’m trying to figure out if I can rewrite
his chapter into something new or if I should put it online as a bonus
deleted scene or something.
Killian: Do you have three brothers in real life? Have they read your book?
What about your dad, how creepy is he?
Scott: I have no brothers. I always wanted them.
I have two half-sisters who are probably very grateful I don’t
write about them. My dad is nothing like Jake, Sr. in this book. After
Execution, Texas: 1987
(God, Kevin please remind me to use a short and simple title next time!),
I’ve been trying to reassure my folks that OTT is not about them
or autobiographical in any way.
For more information on One of These Things Is Not Like The Other or
Suspect Thoughts Press, visit: suspectthoughtspress.com.
For more information about D. Travers Scott,
visit him online at: One
Of These Things Is Not Like The Other
Read an excerpt from One Of These
Things Is Not Like The Other in
Issue 15
Kevin Killian is a poet, novelist, critic and playwright. He has written
a book of poetry, Argento Series, two novels, Shy and Arctic Summer,
a book of memoirs, Bedrooms Have Windows, and two books of short stories,
Little Men and I Cry Like a Baby.
