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CAPEN: Welcome to San Francisco.

THEROUX: Well, thanks very much, Steve, it's wonderful to be here.

CAPEN: The last time we spoke you said you don't read your reviews, and with 31 books and so many opportunities to take a hit from a critic it's understandable. The critic for the New York Times whines about a number of things in My Other Life and then goes on to praise it to the hilt, just as the last reviewer did for the Times about Pillars of Hercules. For example, this critic wonders why you listen to "morally stupid people," as he put it, about what the purpose of their point of view is for the sake of anything.

THEROUX: I don't understand that observation at all, I really don't. Of listening to people who are morally . . . can you repeat that?

CAPEN: He said that you have quite an interest, you're an observer, an eavesdropper by your own account and that he wonders why you listen to the utterings of morally stupid people.

THEROUX: I listen to everybody. I think morally stupid people comprise, I guess, a very large section of the population. What should one do with them? Ignore them? If you ignore them they're not going to go away. I think just in the course of travel, the course of life we see them all the time. The point is not not-listening to them, it's if you do listen to them that you have to write about them and you write about them from a position of strength, of objectivity, with a moral sense yourself. I have no problem with that. In other words, in the same way that I don't ban books I wouldn't ignore people. And I'm not influenced by them, but I do think they may have some bearing on the way people live so that you can't overlook them. I mean morally stupid people are sometimes people in power, they're sometimes people with money, they run businesses, they hire people, they hire your children, they make laws and so I think paying attention to them isn't a bad thing.

CAPEN: Do you consider yourself a likable person? There is a question of whether there is fact or fiction in My Other Life, and discernment among critics that this character Paul Theroux is not a likable person Since he bears such a resemblance to you and his name is Paul Theroux, I wonder.

THEROUX: I have no idea whether I am likable or not. I wish I knew. I hope that I am likable because wouldn't it be terrible if I were dislikeable or despicable. It doesn't worry me a lot, though, and I think that I am somewhat unaware of the impression I make. I am trying to write as honestly as I can, I am trying to write as wittily as I can, I am trying to write as well and as fluently as I can, but the result of it, the effect that my writing has on people is one that I can't gauge myself. It is impossible to know the impression that you make. I think in the same way that you don't know what your voice sounds like you look in the mirror and you hope that that's the person that people see but it may not be. So it's impossible for a writer to know what his or her work actually reads like because writing is done in drips and drabs, you know, 200 words, 500 words, 1,000 words, 100 words over a two year period. But a reader is reading that book perhaps in a day or two or maybe a week and so it's a tremendously overwhelming experience the reading of a book unlike the writing of a book. The writing of a book is very slow and snail-like.

CAPEN: Is your own life a constant blend of traveling and writing all the while, except for I think what you referred to as the inevitable time around Labor Day --I'm not sure where I read this -- where you fall into some sort of solipsistic gorging of junk food and TV and clamstands.

THEROUX: I think my life is composed of long periods of sitting in a room writing a novel and shorter periods of intense outdoor activity which is either sailing, paddling a kayak or traveling in far off places. I have never liked living in cities and I don't like literary circles so I'm either at home working on a book or outside getting fresh air and maybe looking for an idea. I am outside making notes every so often, basically just shaking off the solitude of writing in a room.

I have recently been in Zimbabwe, down the Zambesi. That's a tremendous antidote to writing.

CAPEN: How do you suppose a writer like Wallace Stevens, who was fairly prolific himself, ever managed to do that holding down a day job? He was an insurance salesman all the while.

THEROUX: Wallace Stevens is one of the wonders of American poetry. How he did it, though, I find very, very interesting. One of the ways was that he had a secretary who typed out his poetry. He had a very loyal secretary. He took his work to the office, that's one thing that he did. The other thing was that he did travel, he was very widely read and very widely traveled, widely traveled in the sense of taking vacations in Bermuda, Key West, -- and his insurance company was in Connecticut. So he got away quite a lot.

You talk about how prolific he was. I don't think he was that prolific, but his poetry is very complex, very interesting, very elusive. It's wonderful, it's music. Sometimes I can't make head or tails of what he's talking about. "Call the roared a big cigar a muscular one and bid him whip in kitchen cops and concupiscent curds." You don't know: are the king concupiscent curds those people who are in Iraq or are they little curds and whey, I don't know. He's a marvel. He did hold down a job, it's true, but I think he managed to combine them.

CAPEN: Some of your most outrageous and hilarious scenes are based on dreams, I have noticed, such as the one of the Queen with your head nestled in her breasts, feeling her cold nipple. Have you had any significant dreams lately that you might write about some day?

THEROUX: Just to correct that particular dream, my head was nestled between her breasts and her cool nipples were against my ears. That was it and she was clutching them and I was sobbing. I thought, this is a great privilege for an American. Dreaming is part of life and it is part of my work. I've gotten good ideas in dreams. I love sleep. I hated giving up smoking but smoking started to affect my sleep patterns and anything that affects sleep, smoking or drinking or in my case, heavy drinking, heavy smoking, I had to cut down a lot just so that I could sleep more because I felt that my sleep was being affected and consequently my dream time. I needed my dreams. Without sleep, without dreaming, I really wouldn't be able to work.

CAPEN: So they are very important to you.

THEROUX: Tremendously important.

CAPEN: Has there been one recently that was extraordinarily visionary or had an impact on you that was exceptional?

THEROUX: Yes, as a matter of fact, you've just reminded me. I had a dream when I was in Africa, this was only about two weeks ago. I dreamed that I was home and my father was there and my wife and a child, one of my children. Except it wasn't my father, it wasn't my wife, and that child wasn't my child although at the time I felt they were and I was dealing with them as though they were. But it wasn't my father. My father passed away over a year ago. I find it quite interesting that I had this dream of domesticity and it wasn't about who they were and yet it wasn't them. And I thought this is really interesting. I have invented a new father, a new wife, and a new child.

CAPEN: Are you at ease in the world? What is your feeling as you go through it? It seems that you spend an inordinate amount of time at street level, in the thick of it. I wonder how you feel as you go through it, with a critical eye, feeling any sort of extraordinary difficulty or a threat from the world in dealing with it.

THEROUX: In some places I feel, I suppose, somewhat apprehensive, but I haven't lately. As I said I was in Africa recently and a lot of people are really paranoid about Africa. I don't feel that way at all. I was very happy there. African cities can be a little nightmarish. I was in Zimbabwe and Zambia and South Africa and I didn't feel it. There are places that I avoid. I don't like cities generally not because I feel threatened but because I feel confined. You talk about being at street level, I think that's a good expression. I like being able to be at street level and look out and watch the sun set. The idea of a sun setting behind a lot of buildings I find unsatisfying because why should it set just behind a lot of concrete? There is still some sunshine there. I think that's why I avoid cities. But in general I feel at ease in the world.

CAPEN: As a sidelight, I know that you are from the Boston area, as I am. There is this perception of the Boston area that it is an extraordinarily mean area of the country. Would you agree with that assessment?

THEROUX: That the Boston area is a very mean . . . ?

CAPEN: Boston and environs has a certain meanness attached to it.

THEROUX: I don't think that it has a meanness, I think that New Englanders seem very suspicious of outsiders. They are very cold or cool toward outsiders and sometimes takes the form of meanness. The south is not that way. The west generally isn't that way. There's a lot of hypocrisy in the west, though, a kind of bon aimee which is false. This kind of ludicrous friendliness which is not friendliness at all, it's just kind of mannered noise that people make and insincerity. New England is a place where . . . people don't seem to gravitate to New England, they leave New England. California and the Northwest are places where people come and they are here because they want to be here. A lot of people in New England are there kind of grudgingly. They don't want to be in New York City, but there's a lot of work there, there's money there. They don't really want to be in Bangor, Maine but they were born there.

Whereas I suppose most of the people in California that one meets, many of them anyway, are there because they chose to be there and so they are happy, they like it. I think what we're talking about is just how happy people are where they are. Whether it's mean or not in New England, I think it's a bit unfair but I think there's a grain of truth in it.

CAPEN: In My Other Life this fellow Uncle Hal, who could be seen wearing Mickey Mouse and singing "my name is Annette Funicello," or doing the bunny hop across Route 28 and stopping traffic--those outside the Cape area not familiar don't know what a cardinal sin that might be--was known for his disappearances and sending letters saying "you have all the qualities of a maggot except the vitality. " You write that people thought he was half Indian, that he "had that look, dark and unpredictable as though he would fly into a fit of sudden anger." But then he has a book published that is a "masterpiece of sanity and elegance," after carrying on like a lunatic in the community. What are you saying here about the difference between the lived life and the pen and page?

THEROUX: I'm saying I think that if you look at a writer he may appear a grubby, paranoid eccentric wearing bunny ears or Mickey Mouse ears and doing the bunny hop, just a nut case, someone who's peculiar, someone who's eccentric, someone that you're slightly embarrassed about. Meet the writer of most books and who are you meeting? You're meeting a very odd individual. But the work itself is brilliant, seamless, harmonious, unified, something that you just want to clutch to your bosom. What I'm saying I think is that the human smell of a person doesn't really translate to the writing, that a person can be very grubby and do the Sistine Chapel or they can be a very unhappy, undersized, rather reclusive person and write Moby Dick, which is what Melville was. Melville was very depressive and eventually kind of abandoned it. When he died only about two people came to his funeral and I think his name was misspelled (sotto voce) in the New York Times.

I think that we are all like that. People become writers not because they are powerful and well-read, but because they are deficient and screwed up. I think people who want to become writers should understand that. It's not a question of going to a creative writing class. You have to be thoroughly messed up and dysfunctional. If you have a truly dysfunctional family -- and a literary bent helps -- and feel unfulfilled, feel that you're being ignored, feel that you have some conceit that wants to be heard, then you become a writer. Yeah. You're like Uncle Hal. That's why I made that the first episode in the book because I thought that was the touchstone of it. Here's a man who's the oddest, craziest, funniest black sheep of any family, and at the end of it he writes this brilliant book. That's, I suppose, the lesson.

CAPEN: Joseph Campbell said of James Joyce that his trick was seeing a sign in everything. Do you possess this sort of vision where life is rich with these signs that give you direction or illumination?

THEROUX: Not a sign, but I suppose a relationship, a wish to understand and a desire to embroider on it. I see something. I hear a name and I think, there's a name I want to use. There's a character in The Winter's Tale, Autolocus, "a snapper up of unconsidered trifles." That's what a lot of writers are, snappers up of unconsidered trifles, but they consider them, they see something in them. It's true James Joyce did see signs in things, but in order to do that you have to see yourself as Joyce did, in a way that you give yourself the authority to do that. Joyce saw himself as a priestlike figure and he saw writers in that way. I don't see myself as a priestlike figure but I see myself as certainly a snapper up of unconsidered trifles.

CAPEN: If you had it to do all over again would you pursue the same sort of existence? Being that all of this is a trade, you must have had to sacrifice things along the way to pursue the life of a writer.

THEROUX: Well, you see, if I "had to do it over again," but I do have it to do over again. I could not only do it over again this coming year and relive my life in a book, I could do it next year and the year after and the year after that. I could have as many lives as I'd ever want to lead. In a sense that's the essence of what a writer does, it's having the possibility to relive in fiction or to live in fiction the lost opportunities that life denied you. So I can have revenge on my enemies, I can marry a wealthy and beautiful woman, I can have a sex change operation. I can do anything, I can be anyone only within limits of my imagination. That's the wonderful thing about writing.

In actual fact I wanted to become a doctor. I always saw myself running some rural health clinic in Africa and I greatly envy people with medical knowledge, people who are able to pull teeth, set bones, take out an appendix or whatever. I can't do that. If I had it do over again I am sure I would become a writer but with the same regret that I wasn't a doctor. And yet if I wanted to be a doctor in a novel I could do it, I could have that life, too.

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