Conversations with Robert Stone

By William Heath

Ever since A Hall of Mirrors depicted the wild side of New Orleans in the 1960s, Robert Stone (1937-2015) has situated novels where America has shattered and the action is at a pitch. In Dog Soldiers, he covered the Vietnam War and drug smuggling. A Flag for Sunrise captured revolutionary discontent in Central America. Children of Light exposed the crass values of Hollywood. Outerbridge Reach depicted how existential angst can lead to a longing for heroic transcendence. The clash of religions in Jerusalem drove Damascus Gate. Traditional town-gown tensions amid twenty-first-century culture wars propelled Death of the Black-Haired Girl.

Stone's reputation rests on his mastery of the craft of fiction. These interviews are replete with insights about the creative process as he responds with disarming honesty to probing questions about his major works. Stone also has fascinating things to say about his remarkable life--a schizophrenic mother, a stint in the navy, his involvement with Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, and his presence at the creation of the counterculture. From the publication of A Hall of Mirrors until his death in 2015, Stone was a major figure in American literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Nov 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781496808929

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An Interview with Robert Stone

William Heath and Michael Berryhill / 1975

Printed by permission.

At my request and for an absurdly low fee, Robert Stone came to Vassar College and met with students from classes in American literature and creative writing taught by Michael Berryhill and myself. Stone was remarkably poised and gracious as he fielded a wide variety of questions about both A Hall of Mirrors and Dog Soldiers, as well as his early life, the craft of fiction, and his experiences in the sixties.

Heath: Would you give us the background on how you became a writer?

Stone: I went into the service. I started out in the Navy as a radio operator, and then I became a journalist third class, which is what I was officially called. Then I became a petty officer, and I went to Antarctica on Operation Deep Freeze. I wrote a series of official reports about that operation. I got out of the service in my early twenties, and I went to work as a reporter for the Daily News. I started going to NYU, but I dropped out, left the News, and then went South and worked at a lot of different jobs in and around New Orleans. I continued that and wandered around for a while until it seemed to me that I had a sense of what the beginnings of a novel should be like and, on the basis of this beginning, got a fellowship to Stanford. When I got to Stanford there were an awful lot of curious things going on that made it much more fun to do almost anything else than write. So the novel was a long-delayed process. It was finally published in ’67. So as far as my relationship to writing goes, that’s it. It took me about five years on and off to write because I quit writing it a lot and then would begin again. I’ve published a couple of stories and the most recent novel [Dog Soldiers]. In the meantime I’ve done certain journalistic gigs on and off, and I’m now writing a third [novel].

Heath: How did you go about researching Dog Soldiers?

Stone: I didn’t really research it. I didn’t know what I was doing when I began it. I knew I had experienced certain people’s lives around me, some of whom were fairly close to me, some people not. But what the moral of the damn thing was I didn’t know. At a certain point I got the opportunity to go to Vietnam, and I had been sort of messing around with these people, with their story, and what their lives were like. It occurred to me when I got there that I was seeing the other side of American reality in the sixties, but this suddenly forced me into a recognition of what things were actually about. Now that may be a literary conceit, and how much it could be experienced in terms of reality, I’m not sure, but that was the sense I had. When I came back from there I had worked out whatever the moral was, whatever the direction was, and in the course of working it out, I think it changed my politics a lot. It changed a lot of my attitudes. I wasn’t really sure what it was up to until I came to the end of that book. I was finally satisfied at the end that what was there was a true thing, that those people were true, and that what attached to them was true. So it wasn’t exactly a matter of research beyond trying to figure out exactly what I’d seen, once I got back, in terms of the nomenclature of weaponry and so forth. It wasn’t the kind of book that you have to research.

Heath: What about the sequence at the end, where Hicks gets up on the mountain with Dieter and so forth? What are the origins of some of those people?

Stone: I don’t think there is any personal origin in any one person I know for Dieter. It certainly is not Ken Kesey, which has been suggested. Dieter isn’t anything like Kesey at all. True enough Kesey had a house out in the woods with a lot of curious things that was wired, so possibly there were some physical origins for what the plan of that place was like, but certainly Dieter was not Kesey or anything like him. There were a lot of people in various places in the late sixties who were trying to organize what everyone else was trying to find out. Dieter is meant to be one of those people. There was a sense at a certain time that traditions were crumbling and that people would have to develop centers to stay in and work within, like the ninth-century monks. That somehow things would have to be renewed through the spiritual efforts of a number of dedicated bands of people. That sounds rather fatuous now, but didn’t at the time for a lot of people. Dieter has seen that it’s a failure. It’s a failed experiment, and Dieter is a failed experimenter. I mean for him to be, I suppose, rather pathetic, but I also mean for him to have a certain kind of nobility, a certain kind of basic humanity.

Berryhill: You mentioned that you started with the characters and then you found a moral center for the novel. I was wondering is the moral center in any of the characters? We start with Converse, and then our attention is switched to Hicks, something as basic as that. How do you conceive of those two men in terms of moral attitude?

Stone: To have a common situation that involves three people, through a sequence of events, three people say, and by changing the center of the palimpsest you change the consideration on the balances totally. If you don’t get then the total experience, you get a kind of dead reckoning sense of what the moral center of the situation is. I think that it is literally true in the novel that character is fate. The people are what happens. It is a very different thing in life to figure out what is going on. And sometimes it is even a difficult thing in life to figure out who anyone is, even who you are yourself. In working out a novel you are kind of recapitulating the problems that go on in real life, or life that is as real as it gets. This sense of action carrying a certain moral weight. Moral gets to be a curious word, and you say, What do you mean by that? I mean people acting on each other in situations that are in extremis, or even situations that are not in extremis. This strange charge is being raised. People are putting promises to each other in certain possibly inchoate ways. People are representing themselves to other people in some kind of performance. This process that we don’t exactly understand goes on, and we can see this in life. That is what the novel’s about. It is an inquiry into that process so that all of these people take on a certain responsibility for their own actions. And the general effect of that is what the novel is about. It’s not so much to say, What is the moral center of these events and to these people, and is there such a thing as a moral center? It gets down to questions that are very difficult to answer, so it’s a thrust in the direction of an answer or answers.

Berryhill: There’s a series of confrontations, Converse and Marge, a series of moral actions. Right from the beginning, when Converse propositions the missionary and going on down the line. So that finally what comes about is that they are going out into the desert on what they know is a kind of hopeless mission.

Stone: They suspect, although they are never sure, any of them, that what they are doing is not merely a gesture. In a way Converse and Hicks are opposites. If you can postulate three directions, rather than four, Hicks and Converse, at least, are opposites. Because Converse is like a great many people now. He is thoroughly conversant with the moral language of the time. One of the strange things about the last ten years is that there has never been so much consciousness of what is right to do, so much outrage against injustice, so much sense of the moral priorities, and so much total disregard of them. There has been a tremendous seeming increase in moral awareness, and at the same time there’s been this abandonment of moral principles, that I think you can actually experience in reality. So Converse is a guy like a lot of people who really speaks the language of moral awareness and knows how the game is played and is thoroughly outside of it. Hicks has a much simpler basis in it. He buys a whole lot of myths in toto. In a way he’s sounder. But he’s accepted the acting out of this mythological structure that was given to him, which is a fairly primitive one, as a moral base. And for him it works. Converse is outside his own moral tradition. He practically has none at all. He ends up in a way being led. These people are doing things, and they’re not even convinced of the reality or meaningfulness of what they are doing. They’re making gestures, or for all they know they’re making gestures. So that both Converse and Marge in their respective ways are cooled out. They can only make gestures. And Hicks knows only gestures to start with.

Berryhill: A lot of the gestures, the heroic gestures, come out of things that you quite pointedly refer to. What I mean is literary and cinematic motifs. For instance, it’s no accident that the one film quotation is from Hawks. Only Angels Have Wings is on TV while the two agents are torturing Converse, and the other one is John Wayne in The Searchers—the lonely hero, isolated from the community, and things of that type. And the Hawks thing is Are you any good? Support your buddy, or you never cry over your buddy’s death because he wasn’t good enough. There are these kinds of literary motifs built into it, and I was wondering how conscious you were when you started the novel. I mean, Are my obligations to Joseph Conrad? What kind of impulse is there? Could you talk a little bit about these motifs?

Stone: I think the motifs come right out of the writing. Hawks has done more than describe the situation of men acting in terms of a code. To some extent the code may not have existed before Hawks. As naïve or strange as it sounds, or as naïve an attitude of mind as this may seem to reflect, Hawks has really told a lot of people how they are supposed to behave. And they do. People do act on the basis of what they see in movies. Certainly people of a certain age, they actually do. It’s true. And a lot of what Hicks is acting out is trivial, but in a way it’s also rather moving. A lot of things that compel a guy like Hicks is the romanticism of a certain kind of film, which is just as sound a cultural tradition from his point of view as any other. But still the tradition has to be in touch with something real. It’s not just to say that the guy is acting in a way he’s seen people act in movies. But he’s kept in touch with a certain tradition of behavior that he’s seen referred to in film. It gets referred to because it is a part of his cultural equipment. It’s part of what’s operating in the underworld of the book. I don’t think there are any similarities between the kind of writing I do and Conrad’s. But I certainly do feel that something about the writing of the novel I learned from Conrad. I have a feeling that I know more about writing novels from having read Conrad, who is a favorite writer of mine, than from almost any other novelist I can think of. I learned something about how novels are supposed to go, or at least what I like about novels, what I like about the novel, from reading Conrad.

Berryhill: You’ve got the same situations, like rapacity in the jungle. Conrad’s Marlowe had a constant fever like Converse, little things that are just part and parcel of writing about the same world. But also Marlow’s old aunt who sends him off, and the old woman knitting in front of the door. I think of Charmian and the missionary woman—foils of each other, kind of guardians of the portal as Converse goes for his trip into hell. They’re a kind of signpost.

Stone: Yeah, I think that’s true. Their respective attitudes toward women are significant because Converse’s sexuality is indulgent and generally directed. His attitude toward women is totally different from Hicks’s. Hicks is looking at women as a kind of prize, as a possession, in a very old fashioned primitive way. Well that’s what he thinks, or so he thinks. Because in fact his relation toward Marge or his attitude toward women are somewhat different to that. There are a whole lot of things that it seems to me that I know about Hicks and how he thinks about women that are not exactly in the book, that have to do with Hicks’s mother. It’s not out there, but I believe it. It’s not in the book, but I believe it. I profess to know about it.

Berryhill: Could you say something about how you create a character?

Stone: I could say something about it, but I may be just making it up on the spot. Obviously, I think you have to know a lot more about a character than you put in the book. I think you have to believe in a character completely. I certainly believe in these characters. I believe in the characters in A Hall of Mirrors to the point where I got very upset when one of them committed suicide, and I’m not kidding. I really did. I believed in them. I have to get a certain investment in them in order to work with them at all, because they really dominate my world while I’m doing it. And I have to believe in them and know a lot about them. I have to know them as intimately as I can know them and persuade myself that they’re not fiction, but almost at a certain point that they are some kind of spirits, as though they have some kind of reality in the universe. I know they haven’t, but I have to persuade myself that they have. And sometimes I can. I think you have to be able to answer a lot of questions necessarily to yourself about how these people are, and what their origins are. You must know them as thoroughly as they can be known, being the ephemeral creatures that they are, finally.

Berryhill: How do you know what to leave out when you know a lot about a character?

Stone: It’s hard to know what to leave out. I think it’s a matter of balancing. It’s a matter of balancing passages, because I like to do the sections or the chapters or whatever in a certain kind of relationship to each other. You get to a point where you feel that you’ve gone on too long, that somehow less is better. If one has a heavier weight than the one following it, or the one before, I think there’s an impulse toward symmetry, to just sort of cut that out, to say, All right, you don’t need it, that it’s going to work better against the other section or that other chapter if you leave just that much out. I think it’s always a necessity to be as precise as you possibly can be. Because past a certain point you are just parading attributes in front of your reader. You’re decking out a character with a whole lot of history and equipment, and it becomes obtrusive. Or it becomes obtrusive to me at any rate when I am at the point of establishing the credentials of such and such a person as a real person. I feel that I’m going beyond the necessities of story-telling at a certain point, so I’ll just strike it out. I think it’s a very important thing to know what you should have out there and when you should stop. But I don’t know how the process really works. I think it’s fairly