Replaying the Past: An Interview with Anthony Bukoski

By Michael Longrie

I grew up in the same neighborhood as Anthony Bukoski and remember him as one of the "big kids" at the Nelson Dewey playground. However, he stood out for a number of reasons, notably his hitting prowess and strong arm on the baseball diamond.

Also, I remember clearly one time going with a friend to his house to trade baseball cards (this would have been in the late fifties when I was eight or nine and he twelve or thirteen). My friend and I were masters at cheating card owners out of valuable players (especially Stan Musial, the hardest to get back then), working out a complex system of diversion, whereby we "borrowed" many cards from unsuspecting traders. The day we visited Tony we were expecting great things, because he was known to have the entire major league roster (with duplicates). When we arrived, he appeared, not with boxes of cards, but with clipboard and a written, alphabetized list of all the cards he owned. Even then he was wise to the ways of the world.

Longrie: In your story collections there is serious attention to three great themes: the value of place, especially Superior; the Catholic tradition that raised you; and your Polish heritage. I'd like you to talk about these three themes and about how they're connected, if at all.

Bukoski: I've always thought of Superior as a kind of outpost, a geographical outpost because we are so far north, backed up against Lake Superior, the largest fresh-water lake in the world. We're surrounded by a range of hills in Duluth. The hills grow quite high. The range is thousands of years old and called the Duluth-Gabbro complex. We are stuck, as it were, here in the lowlands, or were at least in my childhood (I was born in 1945) until, say, the late 1950s. Even now we have only a two-lane highway coming up from Spooner almost to Superior, which isolates us. Add to this the oftentimes severe weather, and I'd like to think of us as kind of an outpost.

Isolated this way, I think we're psychologically and emotionally circumscribed. I lived in a largely Polish-American neighborhood. Our church was founded by Polish immigrants --- our church being St. Adalbert's. These were the people I had most commerce with.

Yes, and it is these Polish people who populate your stories. I listen to you talk about those days, and I wonder if perhaps your stories aren't, in some ways, attempts to capture what you think has been lost?

I do mark the passing of the immigrant population that I know best, that being Polish-American. St. Adalbert's Church was razed over twenty years ago by order of the bishop. So too were two other ethnic parishes in Superior --- St. Stanislaus and Sts. Cyril and Methodius, one Polish and the other a Slovak parish. Those three churches were razed, ostensibly, because we didn't have the priests to staff them. That wasn't true about St. Adalbert's, because our parish was self-sustaining. We paid the priest ourselves. But we have so many of the older Polonians, that is, people outside of Poland in this neighborhood, the Superior Polonia, who have passed away along with our ethnic parishes.

A community that was bound, in large part, by its spiritual belief in Catholicism was in some ways destroyed. And this has happened all over the United States --- in Detroit, Buffalo, and   [p. 30]   elsewhere where the Polish churches are being razed. So I'm trying to recall those sometimes noble, if largely unschooled, inelegant people. I'm trying to recall them in these fictions so that their voices and the memory of them, at least in this area about which I write, are not lost.

On perhaps a tangential matter, in what ways would you say that your repeated attention to working-class lives fits into this notion of elevating the status of the forgotten?

For a few years now I've thought this locale, this neighborhood, we're as worthy of treatment of fiction as is Paris or Madrid or any other location. I think we're no less noble and no less cursed with our humanity than anybody else.

That's a very interesting phase you use there, "cursed by our humanity." What do you mean by that?

I try hard not to make the Polish-Americans I write about sanctified, to elevate them to such a level that they are without fault. The people I write about are gamblers and adulterers and sometimes they are unscrupulous in their business dealings and have all the failings of the rest of humankind. On the other hand, sometimes I see the great charity and generosity of spirit and nobility that these old people I remember and write about showed. It so happens that most of those I knew in this community were blue-collar workers, and so thus my writing about them.

But these, you have to agree, are trans-national traits. Can you think of anything that is specifically identifiable in the Polish community that you think worthy of study and reading about?

I think of the great spirituality, the doggedness of Polish Roman Catholicism --- the refusal for years to give up on Catholic doctrine and the continued care and worship, and abiding very carefully to church law and the days when one is to worship and meatless Fridays and the like. I find great value in that. Many would say that that is just hidebound tradition, but I think of the old men and women who would not miss mass --- my great aunts were good examples --- even to this day if mass on Saturdays begins at 4:00, they're there at 3:00 to worship beforehand.

I think of the great necessity for worship that would bring people out under the worst weather conditions to Forty Hours Devotion, or to the Stations of the Cross on Friday, or to mass on Sunday mornings in the old days before Vatican II, and then return in the afternoon for benediction. It must have been a physical enterprise as well as spiritual --- I mean it was a physical, physical undertaking to come to the church and to worship and to kneel.

Your answer anticipates another question I have in my mind and that is, beginning with the very title of your first collection, Twelve Below Zero, the weather is a dominating force in many of these stories. Whether winter and its harshness or the ephemeral nature of summer, what is the weather's role in your stories and how does it reveal the kinds of things you're talking about?

I've come upon this unusual conceit: I like to think of a metaphor for us as the Canadian thistle. The thistle with its burrs and its prickers has a beautiful purple flower in July and August. And I like to think of that Canadian thistle, humble and prickly though it is, still as having some beauty. I like to think of us as kind of the childden of God, in my romantic moments. We don't have much sunshine in Superior, because of the influence of the lake. We don't have an abundance of flora, as one would even in southern Wisconsin. Our growing season is short. And we struggle against this. And we struggle against the early autumn. The spring is non-existent.

We struggle against this, and I think part of the struggle, the people going to mass, the people with religious icons at home, following Catholic tradition, is our great struggle to find heaven. This idea informs some of the stories, in that we fight against some of these terrible weather conditions and a bleak landscape to live the holy life and then to be raised up.

Your answer reminds me of one story --- perhaps one of your finest --- "River of the Flowering Banks" from Children of Strangers, the story about the Indian boy Gerald Bluebird and Father Nowak, the Polish priest. To my mind, some of your most beautiful writing is contained in that story, and I'm wondering, have any Native Americans here ever commented to you on the beauty of that story and the homage it pays to the Indian burial grounds on Wisconsin Point?

Well, no. I'm sorry, Mike, but no, none have. But coincidentally, two Native American students at the college are trying to gather support to remove from the Catholic cemetery the remains of those   [p. 31]   Indians who had first been removed from their burying ground on Wisconsin Point in the 1920s. The cemetery overlooks the Nemadji River, which I call the left-handed river in the stories, "left-handed river" being an English translation of the Anishinabe word nemadji. A steel mill was going to be built on Wisconsin Point and the Indian remains were taken from there, brought up river, and now have reposed for these seventy years or so in that Catholic cemetery. My story is an impression of the days those graves, those remains were brought up the river --- in the twenties. My father had told me the story of seeing the boat that had brought them up there, and that idea always troubled me and I wanted to write a story. But mine is a Slavic or Slavic-American's recollection or imaging in fiction of that event.

The culminating moment in that story, when Father Nowak dressed in gold chasuble performs the ceremony over the graves with the sorrowful Gerald Bluebird on the bank, seems to be an ethnic communal gesture. Now, I've talked to you many times when you have blanched at certain kinds of ethnic consciousness-raising within the academy. Are your stories in some way an attempt to perhaps carve out a space for forgotten ethnicities that you think have been passed by affirmative action and the attention of the academy?

Largely, I think, that is one of the motivating factors. I write stories about the Superior Polonia and other ethnic groups --- Greek-Americans and Finnish-Americans and Swedish-Americans who have been ignored in the last twenty or thirty years amid the push for ethnic studies sweeping through the academies. We've been passed over. And one of the reasons I'm writing these stories, aside from the great emotional and maybe even spiritual pull that I feel in that direction, is to rectify the situation.

But this story about Gerald Bluebird, who is a Native American child, is also my attempt to join together the Polish-American community and the Native-American community. There are also Vietnamese in the stories --- late-comers to Superior --- and also the Jewish-American population. I'm trying in these stories to elevate us all and to bring us all together, at least within the world of these stories. So the stories are not only about Polish-Americans but also about many people seen through the eyes of a Polish-American writer.

Critics have called attention to bizarre elements in your stories. At the University of Iowa you studied American literature of the South, where there is a strong tradition of the gothic, even the grotesque. Is there any connection between your studies and your fiction?

There is a connection, at least in the first book of stories, Twelve Below Zero. A lot of those stories are about grotesque characters and likely I'd been influenced by southern writers. My favorites for a long time were Faulkner and O'Connor and Carson McCullers and Tennessee Williams. I'm trying to get away from that in the new book, Children of Strangers. But there are still a few grotesque characters.

One of them is the woman who rusts to death in "The Tomb of the Wrestlers." That seems an appropriate metaphor for Superior. A woman has rusted to death because the railroad tracks have often been allowed to rust and the buildings have fallen because of the weather and what metal we do see around here has oxidized because of the weather. It seemed a perfect extension that a human being should rust to death as she does in one of the stories. However, I'm trying to get away from them, I think, because I'm free of the influence of southern writers. I see it as test of my own abilities to try to break away from that way of thinking and writing.

Would you say, then, that the grotesque is a kind of seductive lure for young writers, a lure which you think all serious writers have to grow beyond?

I don't think so. I'm sure that there are writers whose names escape me now who've made entire careers on grotesqueries.

In preparation for this interview, I reread The New York Times review for your second book, Children of Strangers. The reviewer says you are a "sensitive, lyrical writer." and that it was a good thing this book had been written to capture the people whose lives you document. I'm sure that kind of comment is most gratifying to a writer. What do you think the reviewer meant by it?

I don't know what she meant about sensitive, lyrical writer, though I was pleased that she said that. But I do know that I was moved when I read the last line of the review, where she mentions that the book insures that these voices of Polish-Americans, and others that I've written about, will not pass away unheard. This really moved me. I've said for a long   [p. 32]   time that any attention these books and, I hope, future books receive is good for my students, because they can see someone from a lower, middle-class background publishing stories, and because it's good for the university; but I think it's good even to a greater extent for the Polish-American community which has not, as I said, had many voices.

As I listen to your answer, I must state at this point, though, that anyone reading this interview who thinks these are simply Polish stories would be mistaken. Much autobiographical material is contained in the stories, including some of the time you spent in Louisiana. I think those stories have a sensitivity, if you will, about ethnic matters that are not exclusively Polish but that are cultural or specific to a region. What was your year in Louisiana like, and how did it enrich your writing?

It was a dream come true for me to go and take my first teaching job in Louisiana, because I was still very involved in reading southern writers. It was an absolutely enriching experience to go to a small town in Louisiana which is off --- really off --- the beaten track down there (seventy miles south of Shreveport), a lovely small community, many of whose buildings on the main street are in the National Register of Historic Places, and where there are antebellum plantations and mansions.

Your experience in 1965 as a marine in Vietnam is also included in some stories. How does that experience inform these ethnic themes?

I was fortunate in Vietnam to escape with my life and without permanent physical ailments that I know of. Still, I have had the experience of living in that country. I have written a number of stories about Vietnam, one of them is the last story in the book Children of Strangers, where an English teacher has the good fortune to be teaching English as a second language and in that class has a Vietnamese student. He tries to change some of her essays and one day realizes that in changing these essays about a Vietnamese woman and her mother, whom she's left in South Vietnam and will never see again, he is again a kind of imperialist even twenty years after the war, because he's still trying to reconstruct a country and a politics, and he's doing it from his western perspective and tampering with her essay. Twenty-five years later he learns something about the great loss that this person and hundreds of thousands of others have experienced due to the displacement and dislocation caused by the war.

In Hemingway's memoir, A Moveable Feast, he talks about being in a café and sitting down to write a story in the morning as the rain beat against the window pane and a beautiful woman walked in and he said he had no worries about being distracted because the story was writing itself. Has this phenomenon ever happened to you?

You know, that's happened about four times in my life, where I was so captivated by some idea. The story of the Vietnamese student is one where I couldn't let go. That weekend I remember telling you and a couple of others what had happened. Some say you shouldn't talk stories out firsthand because you might lose something in the telling of them. But I couldn't help but tell people.

Most recently, I had an experience in Chicago visiting the Polish consulate to interview them for a novel I'm working on. At about 6:15 a.m. on a Sunday morning I was heading into the terminal at O'Hare to get a flight north when I heard what I thought was piped-in music. It was an accordion playing, and I thought, What kind of muzak would include an accordion? So I stepped out of the sliding doors and tried to find the source of the music.

Then I saw that it wasn't at all coming from a loud speaker, but from a man playing an accordion. Moreover, what he was playing was a beautiful polonaise by Michael Oginski. Now, what are the chances that I would be in O'Hare airport early on a Sunday morning and hear an accordion playing Oginski's polonaise? I walked over and listened to him, spellbound. The title in English means "Farewell to my Country," and I suppose that this emigre standing there was playing as his heart was breaking. I suspect he couldn't go back to Poland even though there's been obviously great change in the political system in Poland. There are Poles here that cannot go back despite the change in Poland.

Perhaps he was playing this piece at the door to the international flights, I don't know. However, it was such a transcendent experience for me that I put aside everything else when I got back and wrote a story. I saw the man playing the accordion and thought of my father who played the accordion. My father's now dead. I don't hear him playing the accordion any more. At that moment I missed him. I missed the old country. Perhaps when I heard that accordion, I missed my grandparents and the whole community that seemingly has passed away.

But I think your stories are about a lot more than mere loss, though many stories are about loss. I know that you're the president of the local Polish club, and I know you have stories with such titles as "The Pulaski Guards"; and I'm wondering if your meeting this man at the most unpredictable place, O'Hare airport at 6:00 on a Sunday morning, if you don't feel a kinship of sorts with that kind of outsider status. Did you feel different because of your Polish traditions even growing up with what would seem to be a normal, healthy American boyhood?

No, I didn't feel different. No, I didn't. I felt as though I were one of the kids in the neighborhood. But then there was this different life at home that I saw no reason to talk about with others. We carried on with Polish traditions, and my grandparents spoke very little English. It seemed natural to me. But now the old ones are gone, and thus the emergence of my own ethnic consciousness over the last ten years.

Another reason I ask this question is because (our readers won't know this) Superior thirty years ago had what I consider to be an anomaly. That is, I also went to a small, Catholic school, St. Francis. And yet, there was a Polish church and school, St. Adalbert's, two blocks away where Polish or Slavic kids went. I   [p. 33]   would guess there were fewer than one hundred students there in the eight grades. Why was there a need for another Catholic school only two blocks down the road when there were six other Catholic schools in other parts of the city?

We went to St. Adalbert's because our parents went there. I guess it was just assumed that the Polish kids would go to St. Adalbert's because of the Polish priest, because it was a Polish school. Szkota Wolciecka --- St. Adalbert's School --- was written in Polish over the door and the nuns were largely Polish-Americans come to teach us there. There was never any thought that Anthony Coda or that Bernard Gunski or Arthur Libby, whose mother's name was Bahnek, or that Anthony Bukoski or Norm Lear, whose mother's name was Zowin, or Bob Novak, my cousin, would go anywhere else. It was inconceivable to me that any of us whose parents had gone to St. Adalbert's would go to St. Francis. Ours was the Polish church.

What has been most satisfying in the critical reception of your work?

When I was reviewed in Narod Polski, a newspaper printed in Chicago (the title means "The Polish Nation"). That was such a magnificent experience for me because --- and maybe again this is overblown and romantic thinking --- it seems to me that a second-generation Polonian who's getting reviewed in a Polish newspaper in Chicago was kind of justification for my grandparents coming here at the turn of the century. It was a kind of justification because of how far we had come from both sets of my grandparents who did manual labor and my father who worked as a Great Lakes seaman and in a flour mill, a pretty lousy job. But here, the product of these people had written a small book of stories that had gotten reviewed in a Polish newspaper. In a way it's a small paying back --- what else can I do to pay back the people who came here?

One final question. Before I ask that, I want to thank you for taking time out for this interview for the Wisconsin Academy Review. Since you have returned from the University of Iowa (except, of course, for one year teaching in Louisiana), you have chosen to reside in the house of your birth. Your father and mother passed away years ago, but only recently have you decided to sell your childhood home and move into the country. What is the significance of that leave-taking?

I'd written about the house and the people who'd dwelled there. Finally, with my parents having been gone for all these years, I concluded that I'd used up the emotions of that house. I'd written about every room of the house and some of the occurrences that had happened therein, and I'd described the house in a lot of the stories, with the holy water bottles up stairs and the scapulars hanging from my sister's vanity and the many, many rosaries and Polish prayer books. Finally, I'd used up the house. And I didn't feel any loss in leaving. I didn't feel a longing for it, and I still don't. There came a time when I didn't know whether there'd be any point in remaining there because it was a neutral ground for me having, as I said, spent all the passion that one accumulates over the years living in a place. And so the move was not as tragic or as difficult as I thought it would be.

But you know, there was a kind of hearkening back to the old days, because the last thing I did before I left the house that morning, having cleaned it and moved everything out, was to go to all the rooms and bless them, saying my goodbyes in that way. So that was a fitting closure to the place too.

Who knows, maybe it was just kind of a superstition that I was playing out. But I'll tell you, in the new house I have hanging from the walls a wonderful picture of the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, whom Poles revere. So while I said my goodbyes to the old house, now I have brought this Madonna to the new one. And, of course, I have all the Polish prayer books and rosaries and things in the new house. So the past will later replay itself in another way.