The Hottest State by Ethan Hawke

Feature Interview

On an unreasonably hot April afternoon in New York City, Ethan Hawke pulls up his blue shirt to show that the black T underneath has "Central Park Carousel" written on it. The merry-go-round is hallowed by fans of The Catcher in the Rye because of its place in J.D. Salinger's classic. Of course, it's also a fun place for four year olds.

"I took my daughter here the other day," says the thirty-one-year-old father of two (daughter Maya Ray and a seven-month-old son, Roan, with actress Uma Thurman), a native Texan who's fallen hard for Gotham, "and I had to buy this shirt." Hawke's work onscreen, where he's best known for playing pensive characters, belies the wound-up presence of a guy who occasionally hops out of his chair, or starts to disrobe, to illustrate a point. The shirt he's showing off is evidence that he has a serious case of Salingerphilia.

In fact, Hawke's first important foray into writing was a high school effort with the longwinded, Salingeresque title "There are two kinds of people in the world: assholes and phonies. I like to think of myself as an asshole." Hawke wrote it when he was 16, just after reading Catcher. At the time, Hawke had bargained with his mother for permission to go to Europe by himself if he made the honor roll. To raise his dismal across-the-board grade point average at his high school in Princeton, New Jersey, Hawke tried for gains even in a class in which he was already doing well: He proposed to his English teacher that he'd write an extra-credit short story, and if she loved it, she would give him a 100 percent for his average in her class. She liked the proposal. More important, he says, she loved the story.

That teacher's encouragement, he says, made a great impression on Hawke. "At a real pivotal moment," he says, "if the right person literally stops you and tells you that you're good at something, you kind of believe them. And then you pursue it."

SOAK IT UP
Fifteen years after writing the short story, the Salinger influence is still there. With little provocation, Hawke recites the first few paragraphs of Catcher: He memorized the first 20 pages. His new novel -- his second -- features a self-deprecating young protagonist who sometimes sounds like Holden's older cousin moved to the edge of the new millennium: "I thought maybe someday I'd be in a Dairy Queen," Jimmy Heartsock Jr. says in Ash Wednesday, "and some bonzo lunatic would whip out an automatic and start wasting people, and I'd be the one guy there who'd be able to stop him, who'd show some signs of personal heroism or integrity."

Still, the Caulfieldisms, which Hawke says he tries to excise from his writing when he sees them, are these days tempered with a lot of other influences. Hawke, who didn't finish college either of the times he started it -- he enrolled first at Carnegie Mellon, then at New York University (he left NYU to star in White Fang) -- has shown a zealot's fervor in his self-education. He travels, he acts, he directs, he writes. He borrowed the title Ash Wednesday from T.S. Eliot because of one line in Eliot's poem of the same name: "Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still." He says it really moved him. "I thought, Boy that's the line that should be written on my wall."

THE VALUE OF MEMORIZATION
Often, Hawke has invested his characters with connections to literature and poetry. While filming Reality Bites, for instance, he improvised reciting a few lines of Gregory Corso's "Marriage." It's the kind of sexy intellectual move that certain girls -- Winona Ryder types, say -- have been known to go for: Hawke says the move was one of his own. "That was my steady," he says. "That poem always worked."

It worked in the movie, too. Corso, impoverished when the film was made, benefited from Hawke's whim. Producers had to pay for the rights to it, which earned Hawke a fan in the Beat poet. Later, Hawke was invited to participate in a documentary being made on Corso, who died in 2001. "I went to, basically, his deathbed to talk to him a little bit. I recited ‘Marriage,' and he corrected me in all the ways I was wrong." (Hawke used the bit in his first novel, 1996's The Hottest State, too.)

As much as Hawke always enjoyed literature's ghosts, he wanted to do more than brush up against them and act out their words. "Writing," he says, "is one of those things that if I don't get a chance to do, I get really unhappy. I get to be unpleasant. I need it."

Hawke originally envisioned his first novel as five short stories featuring the same character. He began it in the early '90s, typing first and then inputting the typed sheets to a computer. It was what he did between acting gigs. He sold the book, it's fair to say, a little more easily than many first-time novelists do. (In fact, he sold it twice. The first time, reports his literary agent Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, was in draft form, to Random House. But Hawke pulled out of that 1994 deal, which was for only about 10 percent of what the book eventually received from Little, Brown once he'd spent two more years writing and rewriting.) By any estimate, Hawke's payoff was substantial: $300,000 to $400,000, said reports that began appearing in late '95.

And from that point on, the buzz -- as in saws -- cranked up. Announcing the advance, Time wrote, "Next: Brad Pitt symphony." And from Entertainment Weekly, upon the book's release: "Somewhere between astronauts walking on the moon and poodles walking on their hind legs lies the accomplishment of actors writing books."

Director Richard Linklater was one of the people who warned the young actor what to expect. "You're going to get killed in certain quarters; it's just inevitable every time you step out," he recalls telling Hawke around the time they were working on Before Sunrise in '94. Hawke had finished the book's first draft, and Linklater says Hawke realized there would be detractors. "But yet he does it anyway," he says, "because it's like he has to. That just shows you, he's not doing it for a bunch of public adulation; he's doing it because he has books inside him and he feels better when they're borne out of him."

Reviews that start off with a wisecrack and then say, essentially, "Gee, this book isn't so bad" may be among the most frustrating notices he's received. "What does that mean?" he laughs, unamused. "I can't put that on the back cover." The cumulative noise from the lit crit community -- especially the shrill attacks that preceded even the first book's publication -- were enough to turn Hawke's ear deaf. "To be honest, once all that stuff happened, that was where I either was going to go crazy, kill myself or stop caring."

A QUIETER EFFORT
It's hard to believe Hawke doesn't care what people say. He's too quick to recall jokes and headlines made at his expense, especially one that accused him, in connection with The Hottest State's advance, of essentially performing an extremely flexible bit of autoeroticism. At any rate, he developed his second novel quietly. For a man who appreciates good conversations and enjoys collaborations, he made a point of keeping it to himself until it was nearly done. "With the first book," he says, "I wanted everybody to read it." Not this time.

"I knew what I wanted Ash Wednesday to be about, and I knew it was going to be hard to make it clear and vibrant," he says. "I didn't want to waste everybody's time having to read a lot of meandering stuff, until I really figured out how to articulate it."

The novel became a duet for two voices: those of somewhat hapless twenty-nine-year-old Jimmy Heartsock, who is AWOL from the army and drives a '69 Nova (Hawke is the proud owner of a '71), and Christy Ann Walker, the beautiful, peculiar, pregnant girl who loves him and whom he desperately hopes to marry, except when he's terrified of the prospect. Hawke expected to rewrite the book in the third person. "But then I started loving how they related to each other and the space that it creates," he says. "And I love the idea of two people telling the story of a relationship, and basically, none of their stories overlap: What was a pivotal moment to Christy, Jimmy doesn't feel it, might not even remember it."

The Hottest State was a straightforward examination of love and heartbreak for a not-quite-twenty actor living in New York City. Ash Wednesday, sometimes funny, sometimes moving, tackles more complex questions, and feels less like thinly disguised autobiography. It reads like a straight-ahead road trip story, but it's an investigation of marriage, of commitment, of parenthood.

COMING TO TERMS
These days, Hawke's various enthusiasms keep his schedule active: Three years ago, along with Walsh and the writer Rick Moody, he established the Young Lions Fiction Award, which, with the imprimatur of the New York Public Library, honors authors thirty-five and under. Hawke just stepped up to replace the wizened Moody, who turned forty this year, as director of the prize committee. He's working on a screenplay and has a few ideas for a follow-up to Ash Wednesday, but he says acting remains the thing from which the other aspects of his life derive.

If he had to, finally, could he pick one road?

Hawke says he's asked himself the question a lot. "I sometimes worry if I'd stick to one thing, I'd do it a lot better," he says. "But I've come to terms with that. I don't think I could."