ASK WARD JUST TO SUM UP HIS WRITING IN ONE WORD, AND HE'LL TELL YOU: 'UNDERSOLD'

Chicago Tribune, May 26, 1997
By Charles Leroux, Tribune Staff Writer.

  Ward Just's latest novel, "Echo House," is his 16th book, his 12th novel, rating him a place on the writing senior circuit. He's no duffer. He has been compared to Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, John O'Hara and J.P. Marquand. For years, reviewers have called the 61-year-old, Waukegan-born former journalist "America's most underappreciated writer."

  Passing through Chicago recently on a promotional tour for "Echo House," Just took a break from talking about the book, ordered a glass of white wine, lit a Camel (he's about a two-pack-a-day user) and talked generally about his writing.

  "Parts of my past five books have been written in three different locations in Paris, but they were always begun and the final work done in the same office on Martha's Vineyard.

  "It's a small office with a lot of reference stuff, but it's the place I walk into to write. I don't pay my bills there. I do that at the dining room table. The office is for the work.

  "I'm very much affected by place. When I was Writer in Residence at NORTHWESTERN University (in 1995), they gave me an office. It was larger than I was used to, and my back was to the window, which I didn't like. The walls were bare. I put up a couple of German expressionist posters I got down at the Art Institute, but they weren't enough.

  "Also (he bent forward here as though getting to the crux of the matter) NORTHWESTERN is like, I suppose, any number of places in that you aren't allowed to smoke cigarettes there. I held out for the first couple of days, set up the desk, got paper out, all that. Then I said, 'To hell with it.'

  "From then on, every morning I'd come in with coffee in a paper cup from a deli around the corner. I'd finish half the coffee then use the cup to put out the cigarettes I'd smoked. I'm basically a law-abiding person, and I felt guilty about what I was doing, so at the end of each day, I'd take the cup full of snuffed-out Camels and I would put it into a filing cabinet that the university had supplied. I did that for six weeks getting almost no writing done.

  "One day, I opened the file drawer to put the coffee cup in, and all the previous cups were gone.

  "I thought, 'Oh, oh. I've been found out!' Nothing, in fact, happened; but I was in constant fear of a knock at the door.

  "I was working on 'Echo House' and got 30 or 40 pages done. They were not very good pages."

  Just writes on a heavy 1959 Smith Corona that is only nominally portable. He has resisted attempts of people he characterizes as "fanatics" to convert him to writing on a computer, preferring a sort of aura of past books lingering in the Smith Corona over the literal memory of a computer. Also, he likes the feel and sound of the typewriter, likes its link to the industrial age.

  "There is something satisfying about how the pages grow and grow, and 2 1/2 years later you find you've used 22 reams of paper--that's whatever 22 times 500 pages is (it's 11,000 pages)--to get a 432-page manuscript which comes down to a 328-page book.

  "That's a lot of discarded pages, but even discarding pages gives a sense of growth."

  Just's most significant discard was his career in journalism.

  He had been a correspondent for the Washington Post at the height of the Vietnam War. His peers said the stories he filed were among the best newspaper writing on that conflict. He came home in 1967 and joined the editorial board of the Post. Two years later, he took a leave to write "To What End," a Vietnam memoir. When he asked for a second leave to write a second book, Post executive editor Ben Bradlee suggested it was time to make a career decision.

  "It always had been in the back of my mind to write fiction. The stories that I was interested in telling were those that went beyond the facts and were in the ambiguous area where most of life takes place.

  "That way of looking at the world had been ideally suited for the war in Vietnam. But that subject was over, and I knew I'd never get a better assignment. I had been there for a year and a half, and what I had done was probably as good as I was going to get. That's not a good thing to discover about yourself at age 32."

  In the frontispiece to "The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert and Other Washington Stories," Just wrote: "truth wears many masks, and . . . facts sometimes tend to mislead. All the facts sometimes tend to mislead absolutely."

  He cast aside the family calling (his father and grandfather had been publishers of the News-Sun in Waukegan and the Libertyville Independent Register, both papers since sold to a chain). He perhaps was emboldened to make this break because of something that happened to him on June 6, 1966.

  Just had joined a patrol in the Central Highlands with the 101st Airborne when the unit came under attack from North Vietnamese Army troops. A dozen Americans were killed and twice as many wounded. A grenade exploded only a few feet from Just. In later surgeries, 38 pieces of shrapnel were taken out of his body.

  Wounded people recur in his fiction. Rather than talk directly about the effect on himself, Just talked about the World-War-II-wounded Axel Behl, a member of the power-brokering family of his most recent novel.

  "His was a lot worse than mine. The physical alarm he went through and the endless operations and rehabilitation and, overlying all of this, a sense of his own ugliness because his body was so torn apart changed his view of himself. He had been an extremely handsome, extremely jaunty man. The wounding didn't break his spirit though. Far from it. It made him a tougher and almost crueler character than he was before."

  Just's break with journalism was total. His novels, set in mid-20th Century Washington D.C., are tapestries of intrigue, alliance and misalliance, compromise, secrets, disappointment. And yet, he has spent just one night in that city in the past year and a half.

  "I almost never get there. I lived in Washington on and off between '61 and '73, and I don't feel a need to go back and do research. I've found that, far from gathering facts, you have to empty your mind of facts.

  "For me, writing comes second to thinking. I'm not talking about thinking up front, alas, or my books might get done faster. I'm talking about thinking as you go along. If you get the thinking right, the sentences will follow.

  "You write a sentence and the game is afoot, and something at the heart of that sentence leads you to the next sentence and the next. Usually, by about halfway through a book, the repertory company is in place. Then the task is to get their relationships straight each to the other so that they can take over some of the work. A book never writes itself, but, if you set it up properly, it becomes a hell of a lot easier."

   Though he remains fascinated with the ambiguous, that doesn't mean Just allows himself to be sloppy. He sometimes reads the Oxford English dictionary to renew his sense of the weight and power of words.

  "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is formidable. Paradoxically, precision in words makes it more difficult for the reader. You can slide past an almost right word but the right word might stop you, make you think. The mudslide is easier than being on concrete.

  "Consider that majestic last line of 'The Great Gatsby': 'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.' The verb 'beat on' is exactly right because it's a maritime expression; and 'ceaselessly' is exactly right--it's not endlessly.

  "And another thing, I'm not underappreciated. I'm quite nicely appreciated. What I am is undersold."