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| Boyle in Santa Barbara, 2003. Photograph by Spencer Boyle |
Where to start to learn about T.C. Boyle? First, let's see what the T.C. stands for. His full name: Tom Coraghessan Boyle. (His middle name is pronounced cor-RAG-a-sen) ) He grew up in upstate New York, earned his B.A. at State University of New York at Potsdam (1968), an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (1974) and Ph.D. in English (1977), both at the University of Iowa. He has published over a dozen novels and about ten short story collections. His work has been very well-received (granted over 40 awards and honors), and he has taught creative writing at the University of Southern California since 1978. You can learn more about him at his official website. There is the usual stuff like a biography, list of his books, and photographs of book jackets and him.
A unexpected treat can be found at his multimedia page with him and his former bandmates covering classic songs by Chuck Berry, Screamin' Jay Hawkins and others. His band, called The Ventilators (not to be confused with the ska/reggae group of the same name), played in the 1980s. The New York Times, "Sometimes, alone and stone drunk, Boyle cranks Bruce Springsteen or plays his saxophone at neighbor-vexing volume, recalling the glory days a few years ago when he sang for a band called the Ventilators, his voice vaguely reminiscent of the Animals' Eric Burdon. Very vaguely." A favorite for me, his version of The Animals' "I'm Crying." Is it punk rock? Garage rock? You decide. You tell me. I don't trust my "friends" on Facebook. More information about Boyle--his life as a writer, can be found at All About T. Coraghessan Boyle Resource Center. At this site he also talks about his love of music. Here's what he had to say:
"I always listen to music while working, and that working music is either classical or jazz. When I'm not working I listen to rock and roll, which has been the most informative music of my life. Classical: my heroes are Puccini, J.S. Bach, Borodin, Wagner, Shostakovich, Copland, et al. (there are so many). I'm not a great lover of symphonic music--I prefer chamber music, moody cello concerti, etc. As for jazz, it's primarily Coltrane, the first great artist I was able to recognize as consciousness began to arise in my feeble brain. As for rock: I love current bands, as well as the Blues and rock of the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties and oughts. Many are referenced in my various stories and novels [Lou Reed, Springsteen, Robert Johnson., etc]."
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| Boyle with an unidentified young lady in 1973. Photograph by Alan Arkawy in Garrison, New York. |
T.C. Boyle influences
Boyle ranks Flannery O'Connor and Gabriel García Márquez among the most influential writers on his work. Regarding O'Connor: "[L]et us not forget Flannery O'Connor. I discovered her as an undergraduate (for an adjective-rich description of your not-so-humble narrator at the time, see above). I was in a literature class--the Contemporary Short Story or some such. And she, the most remarkable American writer of the '50s, was where she so assuredly deserved to be--enshrined in a fat anthology. The story was 'A Good Man is Hard to Find', and it remains my favorite of all time, though certain pieces by the Three Cs (Cheever, Carver, and Coover) give it a run for the money. This story seems to me perfect in its radical synthesis of the horrific and the hilarious. I've read it a hundred times and I still laugh aloud at the scheming and senile grandmother, the howling brats, and the henpecked Bailey, and find the scene in which the grandmother's cat (Pitty Sing) attaches itself to the back of Bailey's neck, thus fomenting the accident, both chilling and (yes) wickedly funny. What ensues is a morality play that chills me right down to the black pit of my black heart. Accident rules the world, accident and depravity, and I don't have O'Connor's faith to save me from all that. " (Source: Reinhard Donat's webpage.)
A visit with Boyle. He talks about his books, readers,
and living in a Frank Lloyd Wright home.
He had this to say about Gabriel García Márquez: "The book that spoke to me then was imagined by my enduring hero, Gabriel García Márquez, and it is One Hundred Years of Solitude. Many before me have spoken of its magisterial blend of magic, humor, and history, so I will let all that slide and address one of García Márquez's short stories that appeared around that time in the New American Review, "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings." This is the story of a decrepit angel coming for a sick child in a storm on the Caribbean coast of Cólombia. The storm drives him down out of the sky to land in a very unangelic heap in the backyard of the child's parents, where he is confined in a chicken house, amongst the other winged and feathered creatures. The story is a sly (and yes, wicked) satire of the forms and strictures of the Catholic church, and it places the miraculous in the context of the ordinary--again, just as in real life. And oh yes, when I think of that story and that book, I can't help recalling the doggy smell of the stone gatehouse--we had three magnificent and magnificently stinking dogs at the time--and of the great leaping blazes we would build nightly in the old fireplace to keep the frost at bay." (Source: Reinhard Donat's webpage.)
Boyle, his "Balto," and the Balto
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| Balto, celebrity Husky |
Sled Dogs: An Alaskan Epic
Balto
"In 1925, a life-or-death race to rescue the children of Nome, AK, from disease made an international hero of one sled dog — and eventually led to the creation of Alaska’s Iditarod sled dog race, the subject of Nature's Sled Dogs: An Alaskan Epic.
You can learn more about Balto at the episode's site.
Binh Nguyen of our Summer 2014 English 1B made a great find.
It's a History Channel video called "Four Legged Heroes: Togo & Balto,"
all about the heroic Husky. What a pleasure it is to watch! Thanks, Binh, for sharing this with us.
There is also a documentary, "The Making of 'Balto',"that came out in 1995 in conjunction with the animated film. The documentary, which appears above, includes selected animation from the film, interviews with the animators, and remembrances of those who knew of the epidemic or Balto, the lead dog of the dog sled that delivered the serum. One musher working today, Joe Garnie, describes in the documentary (at 20:35) the necessary characteristics of a lead dog. The most important trait for the dog to have, he believes, "is honesty. . . . Your life depends on your lead dog and for that it is having that connection with the animal. It is having that love for each other, and you trust each other. And it is just being honest."
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| Boyle in Santa Barbara, 2000. Photograph by Michael Montfort. |
Boyle was interviewed by The Paris Review for their Art of Fiction series, Number 161, Summer 2000. In it he repeats his affection for García Márquez. He, Boyle asserts, "is one of the best writers alive." Here's an excerpt from the interview with Boyle's thoughts about his family and the autobiographical in his writing:
INTERVIEWER: Was your family supportive of your writing?
BOYLE: My father and mother were both working class, my mother educated through high school, my father through the eighth grade. I went to school in Westchester County, New York, with people whose parents were educated and wealthy in comparison to us, but my parents always gave me all the advantages the wealthier students had. My parents made me feel the equal of anyone; they were very supportive no matter what I wanted to do. I will say that my mother never understood, I don’t think, really, what I wrote—she was very bright, well-read, but it’s just that parents have a difficult time understanding their children’s art. I read her the Lassie story, which I think is one of the funniest stories I’ve ever written, and she never cracked a smile. When I finished, she said, That was very moving.
INTERVIEWER: What about your father? You dedicated World’s End “in memory of my own lost father.” Can you talk about that?
BOYLE: My father died at fifty-four of alcoholism. A suicide, actually. A slow suicide. He had been raised in an orphanage. I never really knew him very well, although he lived with us until he died. He was very morose. My mother tells me that his personality had been a lot like mine—that is, antic and playful, with a rich appreciation for the absurd—but something happened to him during the war (he drove a tank in the Seventh Armored Division during the Normandy Invasion) that made him very depressed. I was an extremely rebellious and disaffected adolescent, and I never really had a chance to come to that rapprochement with your parents that you can have when you get a little older. He was dead before anything like that could happen. So I dedicated the novel (which involves a search for a father, not in an autobiographical sense, but in a metaphorical sense) to him.
INTERVIEWER: How old were you when your father died?
BOYLE: Twenty-five.
INTERVIEWER: Is your mother still alive?
BOYLE: No, she’s dead too. Alcohol also claimed her.
INTERVIEWER: How autobiographical is your writing? And in what way?
BOYLE: To me, a story is an exercise of the imagination, and most of my work comes out of that spirit of game-playing or puzzle-solving, as I said earlier. I was and still am very taken with the playful work of writers like Borges, Nabokov, Calvino. So the short answer is, very little is autobiographical. But because I try to keep myself open to all the possibilities, I exclude no form or mode. Some of my best-known stories have autobiographical elements—“Greasy Lake,” “If the River Was Whisky,” “Back in the Eocene”—but they are inventions in which the autobiographical elements have been radically transformed.
INTERVIEWER: How does having a family affect your writing habits?
BOYLE: Having a family has been very good for me (and I hope good for them too). It gave me the stability I needed to begin and pursue a career as a writer. People tend to romanticize the picture of a writer—they want it to be easy, something a genius can just knock off between debauches, because if it is, if it doesn’t require talent, discipline and a lifelong commitment, then maybe there’s a hope that they, too, someday can knock out their own great and stirring work. We have the devastating example before us of the overwhelming numbers of American writers destroyed by dope and booze—Tom Dardis’s The Thirsty Muse is a real eye-opener—and people tend to think that chemically altering one’s mind is the way to inspiration. Maybe it is. But for me it seems counterproductive. I have never written a sentence—or even thought of writing a sentence—without being in the clearest state of mind. This is my life’s work. This is what I’m meant to do, and why screw with it? I think the way to be a writer is to experience things, certainly, and be open to things, but at some point to become dedicated to the craft of writing and to create a stable environment for that writing to occur in. At least in my case that’s true. So having a family and leading a stable life is absolutely essential to any writing I’ve ever done. When I did my earliest writing, I led a pretty wild life, and the writing was fairly spotty. I would write occasionally. Now I write every day, seven days a week, all year long. And it is my life.
To read all of the Boyle interview click here.
A Boyle interview: "I Don't Give Talks, I Give Perfomances."
Published by The Guardian, Aug. 17, 2011
T. C. Boyle in The New York Times
The profile mentions one of his his awards. "World's End, which considered the ill-omened strivings of three Dutch and American Indian families across 300 years, was an ambitious attempt to do for Boyle's native Hudson River Valley in one novel what Faulkner did for his fictional Yoknapatawpha County in 14, and it won the PEN/Faulkner award for American Fiction in 1988. Says the novelist Russell Banks, one of the PEN/ Faulkner-prize judges: "'What knocked me out was the book's ambition. It took him out of the category of witty, clever social satire and put him in another league. He reached for the moon, and maybe he didn't get it all, but he risked the talent, and that's a scary thing to do.'"
Boyle and Frank Lloyd Wright
Boyle and his family live in a home designed by the celebrated architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) and built near Santa Barbara in 1909. CBS Sunday Morning reported on Boyle and his house, as have Architect's Newspaper and the Los Angeles Times. Boyle's home also inspired him to learn more about Wright and make the architect central to his novel, The Women, which was published in 2009. A reporter for The Guardian visited Boyle at his home in Montecito, just outside of Santa Barbara. More about Boyle and his Wright home, with pictures, at The Wall Street Journal.
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| Boyle's Frank Lloyd Wright home. Photo by S. Micke |
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| Interior of Boyle's Wright home. Photo: Los Angeles Times |
"Architecture is touched on in The Women, but the novel's main concern is Wright's scandal-racked love life and how it was experienced by the four women involved. 'All the events in the book are taken from the newspaper accounts and biographies, and I really put my soul into trying to keep the details accurate,' Boyle says. 'Where the fictional process is at work is when I enter the heads of the characters and imagine what they were thinking, and why they did what they did.' He based his main narrator, a Japanese apprentice called Tadashi Sato, on the many international architecture students that Wright charged for the privilege of doing his cooking and cleaning, and who were required to obey all his commands without question."
T.C. Boyle nonfiction
Inspiration at the doorstep of his Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house
by T.C. Boyle
Smithonsian Magazine, February 2011
Apologia
from the preface to T. C. Boyle Stories II
by T.C. Boyle
The New Yorker, Oct. 3, 2013
Waiting for the Apocalypse
Fire Season in California
by T.C. Boyle
The New York Times, October 29, 2003
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| Boyle in Santa Barbara, 2013. Photograph by Jamieson Fry. |
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