On first meeting, Lynne Tillman seems the most personable cipher in Alphabet City. The elegant paradoxes of her character, Madame Realisme, make dressed-down appearances in the writer’s conversation. But even though her talk is rich with insights and language-play, Tillman herself remains as attenuated to her surroundings as a very good guest. There is no imposed mystique to put off the listener.
But that doesn’t mean conversing with Lynne Tillman is uncomplicated or even easy. Every bald statement undergoes a slow, considered reversal. Call her modest, and in your next conversation, she’ll make you question the meaning of the word. Insist on calling an idea by its too-familiar name, and she’ll evoke its antithesis as distant synonym. Entering into a discourse with Tillman is almost as surprising as the experience of reading her.
Her work is so meticulous that one forgets she is also prolific. Tillman is the author of two short-story collections and three perfect novels, including the luminous Cast In Doubt. Her first novel, Haunted Houses, was recently reissued by High Risk Books. Her sixth book, The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965-67 (Thunder’s Mouth Press), is a fertile collaboration with photographer Stephen Shore. Here is a concordance of photographs and text so seductive that its title seems to refer to its style as well as its subject. Tillman is never more herself than when she seems to dissolve into this crowd of sexual émigrés framed by Warhol’s gaze.
RH: How did you conduct the interviews in The Velvet Years?
LT: For The Velvet Years, I interviewed about eighteen people. I had never done a book like that before. It seemed to me that it was a tremendous responsibility: How do you do this kind of cultural history? How do you use pictures as a starting point? To each of the people I carried two-hundred Xeroxes of pictures, to show them, and then from the pictures, we would have a conversation—through identifying other people in the pictures, for example. I would ask similar questions of people, and different questions, too. There were certain things about the Factory I was really interested in. After a while, I learned better how to interview people. Basically, interviewing people is like being an analyst. At a certain point, you have to shut up, and let people talk and go in the direction they want to go. Otherwise, your own agenda is so much on the table, they don’t get to say what they have to say.
RH: (smirking) Are you trying to tell me something?
LT: (laughter) No, I’m not. After all, I’m speaking! No, this was a different kind of thing. I was trying to get from them what it felt like to be there. If I had had a predetermined idea about what it must have felt like to be there, then they’d never have said what their feelings were.
RH: “Warhol was a canny artist, extreme, not a con artist.” Many would disagree with your tolerant view of his career.
LT: Yes, I know. I think the reason I wrote the introductory essay in that way was to make a claim for his importance. He was so much in the world, and all his desires were out there in the world—he was a shopper, he went to a million parties, he wanted to be loved by high society—all these surface things were things he sought. But he was always producing. Making really interesting art. People dismiss him too easily.
RH: Warhol was a notorious collector. He was always archiving chintz and Americana. What else was he doing by archiving these things?
LT: He was transforming that material by making art out of it. He didn’t simply collect it. Americana became American art.
RH: Apart from his role in Interview, did Warhol make any use of his recordings?
LT: He did A: A Novel, which is out of print. That was twenty-four hours in the life of Ondine. He recorded that in 1966. Moe Tucker talks about having been hired by Warhol to type some of the transcripts. She refused to type the f-word. She told Warhol, “I don’t believe in doing this. I don’t like curse words, so you can hire somebody else.” She typed the manuscript and they had to fill it in later with all the fucks and whatever!
RH: As a writer, do you feel an affinity with the way in which Warhol explored unusual people?
LT: That’s a very interesting question. The affinity I feel to him was that the kind of people he found interesting might not be found interesting generally. He was looking at and looking for another kind of person. Someone like Pope Ondine, for instance, who died in the eighties. Everyone talked about how incredibly witty and sharp he was. But his production, his art, was conversation, not unlike Margaret Fuller in the nineteenth century. Because he was very strange in a lot of ways, and very angry, he would not have been somebody who was applauded, or thought to have been really special: He would have been too scary. I think Warhol liked people who scared him, also. And often, you write about what you love and what frightens you—both of those probably being the same.
RH: You write of Warhol, “His work is difficult...if one lets it be, just because it can easily be taken at face value.” Do you think this is true of the text of The Velvet Years?
LT: What I did that’s sort of Warholian in this book was to make myself invisible by taking myself out of the interviews and turning the interviews into stories in the first person. I used my abilities as a writer of characters to be involved with the voice of each speaker, and to try not to change it into my way of speaking, so that each of the interviews, each of the stories that come from the interview of each of the speakers, should seem, I hope, like they came from different characters.
RH: Your books create the illusion that anyone can be fascinating if one is sufficiently observant. This is something that’s true of Warhol too, don’t you think?
LT: I suppose I do think that. Maybe that’s why I was so attracted to him when I was younger. You are sometimes completely overwhelmed when you walk down the street and you know that you are walking down the street and you are seeing through your eyes, and life, in some way, everything around you, is being filtered through this subjectivity of yours. And then you realize that everyone walking down the street, everyone sitting in the movie theater with you, and everyone watching television at the same time you’re watching—everyone has that same feeling: That life is filtered through this subjectivity of theirs. I’m completely fascinated with how people are able to pull their lives together, achieve as much as they achieve, and even if it’s becoming a dealer on the corner, that also might have been a hard thing to accomplish, given that their mother tried to kill them when they were five years old. The way in which people survive, and the way in which they understand the stories in their own lives, is absolutely fascinating—when I’m not too depressed to enjoy it. (laughter)
RH: After meeting Richard Hell recently, a writer friend in her twenties said, “it’s strange how people around here become local legends.” In a sense, the Factory’s cast was like that. They were people who lived in a microcosm and embodied a myth.
LT: Warhol had his studio—the Factory—and it was an extension of himself. Or you could think of him as a film director, which he was, and this was his cast. They were always there to do different things and had different roles and talents. There was a changing group. But Warhol became such an international figure that everything associated with him had attention. That’s somewhat different from being a local celebrity.
RH: Warhol’s mix of high and low culture bordered on dadaism. But his superstar was also a parody of the ordinary celebrity.
LT: Certainly, the Factory was a kind of parody of the Hollywood studio. The studio system had faded by the time the Factory came along. Then suddenly, you have Warhol’s studio, where a lot of films are being generated, perhaps one every week. In fact, Warhol was influenced by silent films, was extremely interested in silent films, and those early films were deeply silent: still portraits, or figures moving in the frame.
RH: I find parallels between Warhol’s use of the soup can and your use of the cliché. But there are also a lot of differences. In Warhol’s case, it isn’t clear whether this is a Zen koan of emptiness or if there really is a hidden referent.
LT: I tend to give Warhol the benefit of every doubt. However he arrived at what he did, what he did was revelatory—at that time. It’s interesting, your saying this about my approach. Larry McCaffery, and his wife, Cynda, after looking at The Velvet Years, both said that my work had some relationship to Warhol’s. I imagine that Warhol became useful to me when I was a kid looking at his stuff. He must have affected me in an almost unconscious way. I was completely blown away, seeing the Campbell’s Soup cans, looking at those movies. The way in which he seemed to push everything else away and then bring forward the so-called ordinary. I have a fascination with what’s supposedly ordinary, and that’s also a sort of rejection of the cult of genius. I remember another writer coming up to me after Haunted Houses came out, he had read it, and saying to me, “I really liked Haunted Houses, and it was so interesting because the girls weren’t geniuses, they were ordinary.”
RH: Do Warhol’s images reject any kind of tacked-on statement? In one way, he avoids the obvious message, the cue, in his silk-screens. In another, the entire series carries one simple message.
LT: Very simply, he’s pointing out that what you see has value. What’s interesting about Warhol was that he did this so boldly. Many artists, many people who are visually acute, will be extremely aware of the environment around them. I remember going to a cafe one time with Richard Prince. And he said, “you know, if the lighting in here is bad, I won’t be able to stand it.” The whole physical environment for him, the lighting, how it would reflect on the walls, would be something that drove him crazy, and we’d go to another cafe. Warhol made that something that was in the work, for everyone to see: This is your environment. I’ve written about him elsewhere as being like Rembrandt. In the same way that Rembrandt pictured the details of the bourgeois life, Warhol, later on in his career, did pictures of many middle and upper class people, made that sort of portrait. I think the irony was always there. I think that Rembrandt was a much more ironic painter than people give him credit for.
The thing about Warhol and Rembrandt was that Warhol, in his time, pictured things and made special the things that are normally taken for granted, like the design of a can. To have done the Disaster Series, to have done the Electric Chair Series, was really a wonderful and terrifying trope. They said: These are just many elements in our world and I’m going to put them out in front of you in a way that you can very easily see them. And yet he made a problem out of seeing. Because you can look at these objects, and if you just say, Oh, it’s a Campbell’s Soup can, then you can walk away from it. But a friend of mine years ago said of Warhol, What you expect to see there is just as stupid. Warhol really questioned the idea of what should be in a picture. Many modern artists have done that. I think Warhol did it for American society.
LT: Somebody’s grandiosity is so much evidence of their sense of insecurity. If you “act modest,” you’re already saying, “I’ve beaten you.” That’s absolutely a strategy: If other people think you’re important, you don’t have to think you’re important. Maybe the striving to make is to arrive at a point where other people say, “Ah! You have a right to live!” (laughter)
RH: On Stephen’s pictures, you said: “The frame is an embrace, a lover’s decision.” You consistently find heat in what many people find to be cold art: Art produced inside and by a Factory.
LT: I don’t think Blue Movie is cold at all. I think it doesn’t tell you from what point of view to look at it. I think that can be scary, but I don’t think that’s cold. I think when things aren’t set up for you, when the camera angle is wide open, when you could be there or you could not be there, that’s sort of scary. What I mean by the frame is a lover’s decision is this: If you think of the frame as a sort of parenthesis, it holds in the stuff that you’re looking at, but you know at the same time that it’s also holding out, it’s keeping away other stuff. So the fact that you choose to make love with this person rather than that person is a decision of some sort. How conscious that decision is, sometimes you may question much later (laughter)...
RH: Especially then.
LT: Or even then. Why this one and not that one? Why am I in bed here and not there? Stephen’s pictures also made me think about that.