Issue 194, Fall 2010
Norman and Elsa Rush on a visit to Mount Pleasant, New York, in 1965.
For forty-nine years, Norman Rush and his wife, Elsa, have shared a small farmhouse on New York’s High Tor Mountain, off an unmarked, crumbling road that narrows as you drive up it. Lawns and suburban tidiness have overtaken most of Rockland County since 1961, but the Rushes’ two acres, still largely wooded and bound by a stone wall, feel incorrigibly rural. The eight meetings for this interview included two at the Paris Review offices and two at the Skylark, in Nyack, Norman’s favorite Greek diner. Our four longest and most freewheeling conversations, though, were all taped on his back porch, near a defunct old well, and away from any tidying influence.
Rush was born in San Francisco, in 1933, to an aspiring opera singer and a socialist trade-union organizer. (He was named, in part, after Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party’s recurrent candidate for president.) Today, in his mid-seventies, Rush is an imposing presence, bearish, with iridescent white hair and an almost eerily unwrinkled face. Yet he puts you at ease. He wears jeans and a pocket tee around the house, his reading glasses loose in the pocket. He speaks in a baritone, for the most part seriously, on history and politics as often as on literature. But he also elicits and attends closely to anecdotes, rewarding them with squinting laughter and jolts of empathy that can seem just as helpless. Rush in photos resembles a commanding emeritus professor, and while in person this image never quite vanishes, it can get disheveled, along with his hair, by his open-hearted bursts of grad-student avidity.
The downstairs rooms of the farmhouse, where Elsa works, are bright and very attractive. But Rush writes in his one-room attic, amid clusters of treasures and junk. A basket of ostrich-eggshell water carriers etched by Basarwa shares a corner, up there, with stray parts from a disassembled twelve-harness loom. The papers Rush has saved since 1978 (when he burned all his early writing) fill many cabinets, and also cartons on top of these cabinets, and spaces on top of the cartons. (Rush has diagnosed himself with “incipient Collyer brothers.”) His “desk,” which dominates his attic, is not a desk, exactly, but a large U-shaped assemblage of tables and doors on sawhorses that incorporates, also, a desk. The assemblage supports three manual typewriters, each a gorgeous antique, along with bottles of Wite-Out, pencils, scissors, and glue. Rush rolls his writing chair from one station to another many times in the course of his workday. Rush has written three books in this attic (a fourth is almost complete).The three are all set in Botswana, where he and Elsa worked as Peace Corps co-directors from 1978 to 1983. Rush’s first, Whites, a story collection, appeared in 1986. This slim, eventful book of expatriate intrigues—sexual, political and folk-medicinal—was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Rush’s first novel, Mating, appeared five years later and won the National Book Award. Mating is charged by the voice of its narrator, an antically observant and linguistically stellar female graduate student (she never tells us her name), who crosses the Kalahari alone to find a secretive utopian village—all in pursuit of the village’s founder, the seductive polymath Nelson Denoon. Both an adventure story and a “novel of ideas,” Mating is also a microscopic, Lawrentian examination of an embattled courtship. In a recent poll sponsored by The New York Times Book Review, Rush’s fellow writers voted Mating one of the best American novels of the last quarter century. The votes came entirely from novelists younger than forty. Rush may have begun publishing late, but he has found his fiercest partisans among a younger generation of critics and readers.
Although Mating remains his most widely-known work, Rush’s third book, Mortals (2003), has generated an even more fervid evangelism. Mortals is another hybrid giant, its many moving parts observed and gauged by Ray Finch, an amusingly imperfect forty-seven-year-old CIA operative (and Milton scholar) forced into crisis by the end of the Cold War. Ray is so rigidly and fearfully in love with his wife, Iris, that he schemes to deploy CIA assets against a perceived romantic rival: her shrink. The resulting fiasco unfolds in a succession of tour de force scenes—interrogations, imprisonment, paramilitary battles, and break-up sex—that the critic James Wood has called “some of the most extraordinary pages written by a contemporary American novelist.” It is no longer unusual to hear Rush praised at this pitch.
Any account of Rush’s working life should acknowledge Elsa’s role, or roles. She is his most significant editor, and character model, as well as his daily muse and companion. She was born Elsa Scheidt, to an FBI special agent, whose career took his family from North Carolina to New York City but did not prevent him from blessing her marriage to the professed radical she had met at Swarthmore College. Along with her Peace Corps directorship, she has worked as a handweaver, designer, and teacher of design, and as the director of a program for “dependent and neglected” children. She is slightly taller than Norman and looks younger, with striking blue eyes. She speaks rapidly, with the “unsettling directness” her husband gave to Iris Finch and the wit he gave to the narrator of Mating. In the comically Rushian gestation of this interview—three years, over five hundred transcript pages—among the most addictive pleasures were the days-long e-mail chains with Elsa. And, to be sure, with Norman as well. Who sent which e-mail was not always apparent, at first, since both wrote from the same address, often on the same topics, and with comparable vitality and casual precision.
Elsa’s involvement in Norman’s writing was a running topic in our conversations. Though she tirelessly plays down her part, it seemed natural to include her in the interview. The final revisions of the edited transcripts were, just as naturally, a three-way effort.
INTERVIEWER
You didn’t publish your first book, Whites, until you were fifty-three. What were you writing all those years?
RUSH
It depends on where you want to start. Not, certainly, with my comic book series, Mac of Mars, circa 1945, or my faux Father Brown detective stories, featuring Dr. Orion Curme, circa 1947. My brother printed a manifesto of mine, Papers Against the State, on a handpress, when I was seventeen. I wrote a novel at eighteen, when I was in prison. At Swarthmore I published some gnomic poems based on little-known events in the tragic history of the democratic Left. I began the typical march through the literary quarterlies, via a string of short stories, some of them picked up for anthologies. I wrote another novel, also never published. James Joyce was a wondrous and calamitous influence on me. Interspersed along the way—having a family, running a book business, too much reading and drinking, and too much perfectionism. And then, chiefly and for much too long, I wrote agonizingly experimental stories that simply baffled editors.
INTERVIEWER
What were the editors’ complaints?
RUSH
That the work was too dense, too complex for the medium.
INTERVIEWER
Was it?
RUSH
Well, for instance, I once wrote this extremely abstract story called “Stupor Vincit,” in which all four characters fall asleep in their chairs, apparently rendered unconscious by the nullity of modern life. Elsa didn’t love it. She said to me, Consider maybe that there are some very smart people out there who are not interested in stories that require a seminar. So I took that under advisement, and produced a novella which—I presented this to Elsa very proudly—took place at a cocktail party populated by representatives of every branch of American radicalism. There were eight kinds of Trotskyites, five kinds of Communists, two factions dedicated to an obscure Dutch Communist, Pannekoek. There was one man representing an Italian, named Bordiga, who had exactly one follower in the United States. All there. The party’s host—I forget his political affiliation, but he had a son with his own cult, dedicated to H. P. Lovecraft. They had a terrarium, for instance. I was so interested in the human project of trying to reshape the world, in all its particular guises and methods.
INTERVIEWER
And Elsa was skeptical of that kind of writing?
RUSH
She wasn’t skeptical. She appreciated it, as writing. She noted that I wasn’t happy with the kinds of responses I was getting, but was entirely supportive for decades. She didn’t think I could change, and felt bad for me.
But I’ll tell you, her patience with my arcane fiction was part of a greater patience, over a sort of battle we waged for years. Some couples don’t ask much of one another after they’ve worked out the fundamentals of jobs and children. Some live separate intellectual and cultural lives, and survive, but the most intense, most fulfilling marriages need, I think, to struggle toward some kind of ideological convergence. I was a sectarian leftist when we met. Radicalism was essential to my self-definition. So there had to be a long period of argument and discussion before I developed, let’s say, a less immanentist view of social change. Also—and this is relevant to Mortals—I was sort of a stage atheist when we first got together. I just couldn’t believe religion was still happening. She had a much more humane view of the whole business.
INTERVIEWER
A view that won you over?
RUSH
In part.
INTERVIEWER
Were you trying to reshape the world politically, at the time?
RUSH
That would be comically overstating it. I was active in the pacifist movement—demonstrations, marches, the usual. I was for years on the boards of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors and the War Resisters League, and was active in CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality.
INTERVIEWER
How did you end up in prison?
RUSH
That was earlier, during the Korean War. I was in college, and had committed myself to what was then called absolutist pacifism. When I got my draft notice, I wrote a letter to Eisenhower saying I wasn’t going to go.