Robert B. Parker: same old, same old

But this new interview at the Dumpster Bust blog (part 1 here, part 2 here) is interesting for a couple of reasons: one, it’s yet another sign of how immediate blogging is compared to print media, and two, Parker sure does go on and on about the wonders himself and Joan, er, I mean of Spenser and Susan:

EB: Talk to me a little bit about Susan Silverman and Spencer’s [sic] relationship, which leads to my broader question: is there any through-line that you see throughout the Spencer [sic…well, you get the idea] series? Is Spencer going to end up somewhere with Susan, and in general, or are you just kind of taking it as it goes?

RBP: Susan and Spencer will never part. You can count on that. And I plan on writing the series until I can’t. I don’t plan to kill him off. I don’t plan to write a book hidden away that would reveal that his first name is Bruce, and that he and Susan have a child. The last book will be the last book. And when I’m dead or can’t write another one for whatever reason, that’ll be the end of that. Maybe someone will finish one or write one for me. Who knows? But you can count on Susan and Spencer being together in the way that they are. Will they ever marry? I don’t know.

I’m 72-years-old, and the singular event in my life is my marriage to Joan Parker, whom I met 55 years ago, when we were both 17, at the Freshman dance at Colby College. And I swear I fell in love with her when I asked her to dance. She thought I was hideous, and it took her several years to get over that, but I prevailed.

So that relationship is the central one in my life, and I couldn’t really spend my life writing about a guy who had no such relationship. So in that sense, very loosely speaking, Susan is like Joan and I’m like Spencer. Joan is not Jewish and hasn’t been married before. Joan hasn’t children, Susan doesn’t. Joan is not a shrink, professionally – I present a heavy case load for her, but… you know, the superficial resemblances are not there. But Joan is beautiful, Joan is smart, and Joan is funny…

…this is what I’ve got, so I make stuff out of it and I change it. There’s a wonderful passage in T.S. Elliot’s critical writings where he talks about the imagination. You take a bell jar, and put an inert gas in it and you add a piece of tungsten, I think it is, and it changes the gas so that the gas is not what it was. And he said, “That’s the imagination.” I think he was talking about poets, so he described that as the poet’s imagination: that piece of tungsten that takes something and changes it so that it’s something else, by being a party to it. And so all of it is filtered through my imagination. I quote people a lot because I have nothing original to say. If I would have thought of that, I would have said it.

So yes, there’s a lot to be said there. Will they ever marry? Probably not, but I don’t know that they won’t. They seem happy the way that they are.

I think I’ll just Parker speak for himself, really.