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ShareKANSAS CITY, Mo. — Evan S. Connell spoke with The Kansas City Star recently by phone from his home in Santa Fe, N.M. The Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. Last year marked the 50th anniversary of “Mrs. Bridge.” Have your feelings about the novel changed over the years?
A. It was the 50th year, and I can’t believe it. If I look at “Mrs. Bridge” now, I find sentences I would have revised or eliminated. Occasionally, I think of something that belongs in the book that I didn’t think of at the time, but I think it reads pretty well.
Just about the only book I’m completely satisfied with is the book I did about General Custer, “Son of the Morning Star.” I can open that book and read almost any page without flinching.
Q. What role has travel played in your writing life?
A. I’ve done quite a bit of traveling. I made a couple trips around the world. Strangely enough it’s true, if you keep going the same direction, you end up where you started.
I have written some things about various countries I’ve been in. I’ve written several stories that take place mostly in Spain. In fact, the last story I wrote was in a collection of stories called “Lost in Uttar Pradesh,” which is a state in northern India, and I was there back in the ‘60s. I’d been wondering how to write about that for a long time, because India is such an extraordinary place. So, yes, I have occasionally used places I’ve been and seen.
Q. Your work has been so varied throughout your career, fiction and non-fiction, long and short, and poetry as well. Do you find that all forms of writing present similar challenges, or does each project come with its own obstacles?
A. I don’t regard myself as a poet. The things that appear to be poetry, “Notes From a Bottle” and that sort of thing, I regard those as collections of fragments. I think of them more as mosaics. Poetry is a specialized thing, and I’ve never felt qualified to present myself as a poet.
If I find a subject that interests me, then I try to decide how best to write about it. Some things seem better suited for non-fiction, and others seem to be fiction in content or nature. A friend of mine once asked me how I could switch from one to another. I don’t regard it as switching; it’s just whatever subject happens to interest me, and then I decide how I can best tell the story.
Q. How would you say the writing world has changed since you first started out? Is it different for young writers today than it was in the 1950s?
A. It’s never been easy, and I understood quite early that I was in for a lot of rejections. I did what a lot of young people do when they start writing: I pasted the rejection slips on the wall. I got up to something like 115 and thought, “This is going to go on forever,” and so I stopped.
You have to resign yourself. If you know how to manufacture things that are commercially successful, then you keep doing the same thing over and over. I think that’s what most of the commercially successful writers do; they hit on a subject or some characters that are popular with the public, and so the tendency is to do one more, and then do one more, and so on. If you don’t know how to do that sort of thing, then you’re probably in trouble.
Q. Each of the three Bridge children chose very separate lives. I was curious if you ever considered giving one of them their own book?
A. I did. After I finished the two books about the parents, I kept considering that, and I decided the eldest of the three, Ruth, would be a good subject. I started writing a novel about her in the same pattern, the same form, a collection of very brief chapters, but then it began to seem contrived or manufactured somewhat. I didn’t want to do that, so I stopped. I guess I’d written most of what I knew about that family, and so I decided to let it go.
Q. Early in your career, was there a specific writer whom you looked toward as a model, someone you greatly admired and perhaps wanted to emulate?
A. I’ve been most interested in the 19th- and 20th-century Russian, English and French fiction writers. With short stories in particular, there’s Chekhov, and Tolstoy wrote some beautiful stories, and the same with Flaubert and Maupassant.
There have been some pretty good American stories, too. I studied for a while with Walter Van Tilburg Clark, whose best-known book is “The Ox-Bow Incident,” and I think Clark wrote one of the best short stories we have, “The Wind and the Snow of Winter,” about the Old West. Cheever wrote some good stories, and Updike, too.
Q. The hot topic in the book world right now is the rise of e-books and digital publishing. Does it bother you to think your books will be read on a screen instead of on the page? Does the presentation matter as long as the content remains the same?
A. It’s probably inevitable. I’m strictly low-tech myself. I use two Olympia typewriters that were made sometime in the ‘50s. They last forever, those things. They don’t break down, and I don’t have to fool around with digital stuff.
I can’t believe I’m so far behind the times, but that’s where I’m most comfortable. I don’t like all this electronic gadgetry, but it’s the present and the future; there’s no doubt about that. I guess it doesn’t matter, as long as the content’s the same.
