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PARTISAN REVIEW
ground. I don't think Dahlberg ever said what he really wanted to
say. He spent his whole life scolding you, which is ground clearing.
Americans come very late, if at all. They're always writing against
the grain. They have to battle everything, not only their own time,
but their past as well. They have to battle against all that masquer–
ades as fine writing. You battle all your life against the sensibility
that presents Norman Mailer to you as an important figure.
If
an American publisher knew beforehand that a book would
sell a thousand copies, he wouldn't publish it.
If
a first novel in this
country doesn't sell five thousand copies, it's a bust. The publisher
will never take you on again. Dahl berg is the great case in point:
every book he wrote was published by a different house. American
writers have a terrible time. A man from the
Times Book Review
was
telling me the other day that
a
writer who has a "track record" –
abominable phrase-of writing good books that make no money has
progressively greater difficulties in getting published despite the
quality of his work-in fact, as his work gets better he has less and
less chance of being published by a trade house.
Barone:
How did Williams come to appear in
Neon?
Sorrentino:
While I was in the army from '51 to '53, I wrote a very
impressionistic piece on a Mexican border town named Nuevo
Laredo. When I got out of the army I began reading Williams
seriously, for the first time, and I read his poem called " Desert
Music," which is about a visit to a Mexican border town. I was struck
by the fact that he had felt moved enough to write a poem about his
visit and I sent him this short piece telling him that I had just read
his "Desert Music." To my astonishment (later I realized I shouldn't
have been astonished because Williams was like that with everybody;
he was a completely avai lable man), he wrote back. He liked the
piece and he thought that although it was rough it showed talent
and promise. We began to correspond and then he asked me out to
his house for dinner. I went out and we became friends- "friends" in
an odd sense: I was in my twenties and he was a man of almost
seventy. H e could have been my grandfather. I began this magazine
in '56 and asked him if he had any work. He didn't give me anything
for the first issue because he said it was not a good idea: you're just
using me as a crutch for the issue, a name to put in the magazine so
people will buy it.
Barone:
Speaking of names, why did you pick
Neon?
Sorrentino:
Well ,
Neon!
Because it was a magazine, you know, out"of
New York, neon lights being an emblem of New York, and also, as I
