The Leonard Lopate rebroadcast of a late-1990 interview with Spaulding Gray on WNYC was really interesting, and thanks to the miracles of modern technology, you can still hear it via the website in the Leonard Lopate Show Archive. (Note, the audio file probably won’t be posted and unavailable until later today.)
While it is bittersweet hearing Gray speak, this interview is a wonderful window into the artist and writer he was. At one point, Gray says he doesn’t write his monologues, he speaks them. Every performance was different because he would simply sit at that little table with pages of notes in front of him and talk, digressing into any number of tangents when the mood arose. He mentioned that this process is what actually made it harder for him to write a book, because when he speaks in front of an audience, there is so much more going on with his tone and mannerisms than simply his words. He compared himself to Don DeLillo who he had recently seen give a reading from one his novels, and he said that for DeLillo, it was all “in the writing.” DeLillo just read without necessarily adding anything to it.
It was through this segment, early in the interview, that Gray’s own underlying insecurities as an artist start to present themselves. While he certainly never sounds like a depressed and suicidal person during this interview, reflecting upon what has now happened and how his car accident obviously made his negative feelings about himself even stronger, the interview is inspiring, informative and entertaining, but also now heartbreaking — all at the same time.
Out of Focus 