T A B L E+T A L K Which sentences from literature do you wish you had written? Discuss your writer's envy in the Books section of Table Talk T O D A Y Untethered ego Mark Leyner talks about how humor is underrated, how no one believes in fiction and how he (and an ape) are the real authors of "Infinite Jest." By Laura Miller (12/08/97) R E C E N T L Y Doris Lessing By Dwight Garner (11/11/97) Gus Van Sant By Cynthia Joyce (10/15/97) Edmund White By Daniel Reitz (10/15/97) Caleb Carr By Dwight Garner (10/04/97) Arundhati Roy By Reena Jana (09/30/97) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - INTERVIEW ARCHIVE R E V I E W S The Tribes of Palos Verdes By Joy Nicholson A tough-minded first novel, narrated by a misfit high school girl who finds solace in surfing the Southern California coast (12/08/97)		T H E_ S A L O N_ I N T E R V I E W ________Allan Gurganus THE NOT-QUITE-OLDEST SURVIVOR OF NEW YORK'S 15-YEAR-LONG GAY PARTY TELLS ALL ABOUT HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH JOHN CHEEVER, LEARNING TO WRITE ON AN AIRCRAFT CARRIER, WHITMAN'S HEROISM AND THE REDEMPTIVE POWER OF LAUGHTER. BY DWIGHT GARNER | Allan Gurganus is one of America's great talkers. The words pour from him. With his erect bearing, handlebar mustache, fly-away hair and dignified tweeds (which he satirizes by wearing black Converse high-tops), Gurganus in mid-sentence often seems like nothing less that a Greenwich Village reincarnation of Mark Twain. He's in constant demand as a lecturer, and he's among the few living writers who can get away with charging -- usually $5 -- for his readings. Over the last two decades, however, the 50-year-old author of "The Oldest Confederate Widow Tells All" has been in demand as a different kind of lecturer. Gurganus recalls that his friends, when dying of AIDS, would often say to him, "'I have one request.' And of course you'd say 'anything.' And they'd say, 'Do the eulogy.' And you can't say, 'Well, that comes at a bad career time for me.' You say, 'I will, honey, and I'll tell the whole truth and nothing but, if you can take it. As long I can talk about your faults as well as your merits.' And they said, 'Dish, dish, dish.'" Giving those dozens of eulogies -- in churches and fellowship halls across the South and the Midwest -- was his great preparation, Gurganus says, for writing his new novel, "Plays Well With Others." The book is a high-spirited comic portrait of a group of young gay artists in New York in the years before and during the onset of the AIDS crisis. The book eulogizes these young men and women without embalming them -- it captures the full-time party that was New York in the late '70s and early '80s. Gurganus rarely resists the urge to dish, dish, dish. Like Hartley Mims Jr., the protagonist of "Plays Well With Others," Gurganus hails from North Carolina. Like Hartley, too, Gurganus sought his fortune in New York City. Gurganus arrived there after a stint in the Navy during the Vietnam War -- he claims he became a writer after falling under the spell of Henry James' books aboard the USS Yorktown -- and after studying with Grace Paley at Sarah Lawrence College and Stanley Elkin and John Cheever at the Iowa Writer's Conference. (Cheever took a romantic interest in his young student; while the two never had a sexual relationship, Gurganus appears in Cheever's published "Journals.") He got his first break as a writer when Cheever, without telling him, sold his short story "Minor Heroism" to the New Yorker. Gurganus was 26. Gurganus' first novel, "The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All," was published to tremendous commercial and critical success in 1989. A book of short stories called "White People" appeared in 1991. Gurganus likes to say that he had to leave North Carolina in order to write "Confederate Widow." In the case of "Plays Well With Others," the reverse is true: He left New York and returned to North Carolina before commencing work. He continues to reside, along with his lover, in a small town of 2,400 people. Gurganus spoke to Salon about subjects ranging from the importance of friends ("I have had notoriously bad taste in men, but I have fabulous taste in friends") to his years in the Navy ("Imagine 4,000 men, ages 18 to 23 ... floating around in the South China sea for 35 days ... the mischief and the energy and the volatility and the testosterone and the erotic swill") to the first time he saw New York. The skyline looked, he says, like "colossal silver dildos standing at attention." Did you bring your address book with you? I don't see it. It's in my head. There's a lot of mileage on it. The protagonist of your new book, Hartley Mims, is a writer who considers his address book to be his greatest work -- the richest, the most complex. Do you feel the same way about yours? In some ways the inspiration for the novel came from this simple act that we've all been through -- and certainly all of us who've lived through New York in the past 16 years have been through -- of sitting down with a new address book and trying to salvage your loved ones. You feel this tremendous hesitancy to leave out the names of your dead loved ones. And you try to come up with a system wherein they can stand as living monuments to themselves and have their own right to the alphabet, without taking the place of the new friends that we all have to make if we're going to stay sane and keep living. That was for me the beginning of the book. I first wrote a piece called "On Whether to Purge the Dead from One's Address Book," and that became this spinning out of the memories of all the loss and all the separation. In the course of the past 15 years, and certainly in the course of the novel, people who came to New York thinking only of "I" and only of "my work" and "my immortality" were forced to reckon very, very early in the natural course of things with our community and our mortality. And that record, that address book, that sense of collective experience that's somehow larger than a single experience, the sense that one lives through one's friends and one is only as good as one's friends are, is very important. I have had notoriously bad taste in men, but I have fabulous taste in friends. It's those friends who got me through, and it's friendship that I am really celebrating in the novel. I think it's an underestimated form of love. We're all culturally set up to look for that one other beloved object who will complete us and satisfy us and sate us and make us look good. But while we're looking for that chimera, that unicorn that will never appear, it's damn good to have lots of friends to console you and to support you and literally to carry you down the steps when you can't walk. You are very mindful of friends. It seems like you're always thanking someone. Nearly all of the stories in your collection "White People" are, individually, dedicated to someone. Is this kind of graciousness a Southern trait? I'm lucky in many, many ways. One way is that I'm alive, which is the ultimate miracle. It's a daily miracle to me -- having survived the great shipwreck. But I'm also lucky in that I love to thank people. I was brought up to say "please" and "thank you" the way all middle-class Southern kids are. I'm a lucky person in that, when good things happen to my friends, even fellow writers, I don't feel diminished. I feel elated, if the work is good. And I think that's a minority vision. I think to be happy for and in one's friends is the beginning of contentment. And they feed me, and they tell me jokes on the answering machine, and that's my world. Given the deaths of so many of your friends, I imagine that coming back to New York can feel like coming back to a ghost town. It's full of ghosts. But ghosts are presences, too. And I can ride past an address where something magical happened -- erotically or personally -- and relive it in a flash. Or ride past the Salvation Army store that was my Emporio Armani in the early days. The town has tremendous associations. I'm never away for more than a month or five weeks. I come up and carbo feed, and then go back to my village of 2,400. It's the perfect balance for me. I think New York is perfect when you're in your 20s and 30s and have some skill that you're looking to sell or have acknowledged. It's harder when you get to be 40, 45 and you've been to every party and the parties are "Type 25A," with the variation. I want to be able to sit alone in a room contentedly, and like all writers I think my life is this weird swing between the consolations of solitude and the rewards of gregariousness and crowds and entertainment. At one point you said you had to leave North Carolina to write "The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All." Now it seems like the reverse is true; you had to leave New York to write "Plays Well with Others." Absolutely. There was some joy in writing this book, writing what I think of as a comic novel about HIV, which is I think the thing that's most original and useful in the book. There's been so much solemnity, and understandably, about that moment. And there have been so many books that begin with the hero diagnosed on Page 1 and dying on Page 350 and frequently you thought he'd never get there. What I really wanted to do was replicate the party. And the party, perversely enough, included the hospital stays. The party, 1980, had so much momentum -- it's like 1920 and the parallels are marked. And "Gatsby" was a real inspiration for this book. The party somehow continued to animate the hospital visits, the balloons, the confetti, the dressing up in silk gowns and trying to make an event of it. And the funerals were the last of the parties; those too were kind of festivals and celebrations. N E X T+P A G E +| "A novelist begins life at 40"