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NOTE: All of Roselli's thirty-six albums are in print. Evanier lists seven as his greatest; "3 A.M.," "Best of Neapolitan Songs,' "Jimmy Roselli," "What Is A Song," "Come Into My Life," "The Italian Album," and "When Your Old Wedding Ring Was New." The CD's and records are available on Mr. Roselli's web site: "www.Jimmy Roselli.com." His records are also available on the Webster Records website and at Tower Records stores across the country.

David Evanier is a writer's writer. Authors study his craftsmanship.

His widely regarded books include "Making the Wiseguys Weep: The Jimmy Roselli Story," which was on the New York Times Recommended Books of the Year list and nominated for the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award.

Evanier has also published a novel about the Rosenberg espionage case called "Red Love," and two other novels: "The One-Star Jew" and "the Swinging headhunter." He received the Aga Khan Fiction Prize.

He has also written for Commentary, New York Magazine, The New Republic, The Weekly Standard, The Paris Review, Southwest Review, Antioch Review, The New York Times, The Forward, National Review, The New leader and The Village Voice.

Evanier has paid his dues along the way, working as a teenager as a copyboy at the New York Post. He received his B.A. from the New School for Social Research, working nights at the New York Times on the morgue/society news desk and later the New York Times Sunday Magazine. He received his M.A. from the University of British Columbia, where he worked as editor of the show business weekly, "Stage Door," and went on to become Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Douglas College in Vancouver. He has also taught at the Writers Community in New York and at UCLA Extension in Los Angeles. Evanier has also been assistant editor of The New Leader and a senior editor of The Paris Review.

TUOHY: Like the subject of your book, you're also a product of the east coast, big city, ethnic world, correct?

EVANIER: Yes, my friends call me a street rat. Love the big cities. I grew up in the Jewish and Italian neighborhoods of Queens: Elmhurst, Jackson Heights and Corona, near the home of Louis Armstrong. Had my first Sicilian pizza for ten cents from a store with a coal oven stove across the street from my school, Junior High School l6. Was bar mitzvahed at the Corona Jewish Center, right in the Italian neighborhood. It was a real Jewish-Italian mix. My best friend was Eddie Colletti. His father was a cop and his family fed me pasta a lot. Very warm family.

TUOHY: And your family?

EVANIER: I didn't have much of a home life.

TUOHY: Did that indirectly lead to a writers life?

EVANIER: At l4 I was a copy boy at the New York Post, picking up the five morning papers on south Street on the waterfront. Later I was a copy boy at the New York Times and graduated to the morgue-society news desk at the paper.

TUOHY: Any favorite writer from your childhood?

EVANIER: I grew up on Walter Winchell, Barry Gray, the radio talk show host, the proletarian novels of James T. Farrell, who I met later, Harold Robbins' "A Stone for Danny Fisher," Richard Wright's "Native Son." The RKO Palace revived vaudeville briefly when I was a kid and I went every week. I saw Judy Garland and Belle Baker, and all the old-timers: Buck and Bubbles, Whispering Jack Smith, Pigmeat Markham, Smith and Dale. They were magic to me.

TUOHY: I appreciate your candor, Dave. At the risk of prying, what was wrong with your home life?

EVANIER: My parents were first-generation American Jews, very self-conscious and insecure in their skins. They had a lot of shame about their origins, and wanted to be "modern" and fashionable in their views and styles. My father was an insurance salesman, my mother a typing teacher. Their mode of communication was a lot of screaming and hollering with each other and toward me. They separated when I was eight. Their shouting told me they were very frightened of the world, and I knew and felt it from an early age. I grew up sane by finding teachers and friends and mentors who had a firmer grasp on things than my parents. I have written a great deal about my parents in my fiction. My father often told me he was my best subject in my writing, and he was not far off on that. He also told me the best writers developed from suffering, and so I was also lucky that he made my life so miserable.

TUOHY: You attended the very progressive St. John's college in Annapolis, Emerson College in Boston, graduated from the New School for Social Research and received your M.A. from the University of British Columbia. That's a long way from the world of wiseguys and Jimmy Roselli. What brought you into Roselli's world?

EVANIER: I think I was always partly in Roselli's world. Colleges, the academic community, never did much for me, except for some writing workshops at the New School. I was family-deprived, and I was always looking for a family to make up for it and an Italian girl to love. I just wanted to write and to have a family. I had a lot of static in my head from my crazy family, and I needed anchoring. I guess you could call my search reality-oriented. Went to Emerson College, did nothing there but loved Boston, especially the Italian North End, the Boston Garden and writing by the Charles River. My best memories of the University of British Columbia are meeting my dear friends and first publishers Buddy and Cherie Smith, Jimmy Colistro, publisher of "Stage Door," a show business weekly I edited, and my nights in the student lounge watching Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra together on Christmas Eve, and watching Dean every week, who I revered. That's the truth. Loved the Italian singers: Sinatra, Dean, Tony Bennett, Louis Prima, Bobby Darin. So discovering Roselli was a natural for me.

TUOHY: Why?

EVANIER: As I said, I always had a warm connection to the Italian-American community. It had character and receptivity and friendship for me. And lots of fun.

TUOHY: Who introduced you to the culture?

EVANIER: When I was l7, I was in therapy with an Italian who charged me ten bucks for three hours. He was an eccentric: taught me to breathe by playing Sinatra records for me, took me to Italian restaurants in Greenwich Village to play bocce and learn to mix my veal, broccoli and pasta together. He knew all the old-timers in the Village. When he came here from Italy, he told me, he ate out of garbage cans. Loved women, loved Sinatra, loved literature, Hemingway above all. During our therapy sessions, he drank from a vodka tumbler and by the end of the session he didn't recognize me.

TUOHY: That's a pretty good price for an analyst.

EVANIER: Well, he didn't have a license. Even the medical magazines in his waiting room were filched for him by his patients from other doctors' offices. Later, after I stopped seeing him, I once saw him sitting on a bench in Washington Square with a pigeon on his head.

TUOHY: Did he also introduce you to Roselli? Or his singing anyway?

EVANIER: While going to college, I lived across the street from the famous Rao's Italian Restaurant in the Italian area of Harlem on Pleasant Avenue, where I first heard Roselli sing on the jukebox. I started to bump into his voice everywhere, yet nobody seemed to know who he was except Italian people. His picture was on the walls of al the restaurants, beside Sinatra and the Pope. I went to Israel for three months and that was another wonderful, inspiring reality-based experienced. Returned to New York and lived in the student house of the Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square, right down the block from my favorite hangout, Arturo's, on Thompson Street. I heard Roselli there. I lived on Sullivan Street in the village too. Walked down to the Limehouse, the only Italian seafood house in Chinatown then. Heard Roselli again there. Ate at Lanza's on First Avenue. The elderly waiter interrupted me when I played Roselli's "Just Say I Love Her" and said to me, "You're listening to the greatest Italian singer sing the greatest Italian love song." I was impressed by that.

TUOHY: When did you first hear him sing in person?

EVANIER: Then I went to see him sing for the first time at Westbury Music Fair. He had so many musicians bunched up on stage behind him (50 of them) they almost fell off the stage. This guy was so totally unpretentious, a man of few but succinct words. I was amazed by his voice, but also by the passion of the audience; their love for him and his love for them. The connectedness. And by all the elderly people in wheelchairs at the back who had come from across the country to see him. You knew they would do this for no other singer. I remember thinking this guy is the soul of the Italian-American community.

TUOHY: How did you locate Jimmy Roselli? How did he respond to the idea of a biography?

EVANIER: When I arrived in Hollywood, I faxed him and told him I wanted to write about him. He was receptive. I flew to Hoboken and met him and his wife Donna and his colleague Marie Greene on Christmas Day. On that first day of our meeting, he said "I'm going to work with you. Because I know you believe in what you're doing." He was right. He opened everything up to me, gave me access to his family and friends.

TUOHY: MR. Roselli seems to be a very direct fellow, to say the least, bearing in mind The business he's in. What was it like to work with him?

EVANIER: Difficult, entertaining, maddening, endearing. He's very smart and very tough, a man's man. There's no veneer. Very witty: remember his line in my book about his early days as a singer in tough saloons: "They used to have intermissions to carry out the wounded." That's vintage Jimmy. I love to listen to him talk. He's a charismatic guy; people fight to be around him. He brings out a protective streak in people. Underneath the tough guy is the little kid whose mother died in his childbirth, and who was a shoeshine boy in Hoboken. He has never forgotten his roots.

TUOHY: So he sat through a series of interviews for you?

EVANIER: Many hours of interviews, covering the entire span of his life.

TUOHY: Any one of Roselli's songs you hold as a favorite?

EVANIER: "Just Say I Love Her" is my favorite. But I love many of his songs.

TUOHY: Any one song he holds as a favorite?

EVANIER: I would guess "You May Not Remember" is a favorite of his. Also "For All We Know" and Sammy Cahn's "I Should Care."

TUOHY: Jimmy Roselli is a great singer. He's no John Tuohy, but he's great. where do you rate him as far as that generation of Italian balladeers is concerned? Better than Sinatra?

EVANIER: I rate Roselli and Sinatra at the top. To compare them is to compare apples and oranges, they're so different. You're talking about the best. They both have the riveting passion and the warmth. They both give everything they've got. Roselli has a much greater range. He has a cantorial quality. And he's also a belter. Sinatra is more nuanced, sophisticated, introspective and stylized. They're both great saloon and ballad singers. Roselli is also the greatest Neapolitan singer and a great singer in Italian. Sinatra can't do any of that. But Sinatra is more versatile and varied in English. You're talking about greatness, different kinds of greatness. They both have that intimacy: you feel as if they're singing directly to you. I listen to Roselli all the time, constantly. He's just a wonderful singer. They're both rooted in the streets; you hear the pavement in their sound. This is true of Tony Bennett as well, which was pointed out by the music critic Whitney Balliett.

TUOHY: Music and song is important in every culture, of course, but it seems to have a special place in the Italian and Italian-American community. What's your take on that?

EVANIER: Yes, there's no question of that. You will find it in every nook and cranny of Italian experience. If you examine two classics of Italian American literature: Pietro de Donato's "Christ in Concrete" and Jerre Mangione's "Mount Allegro" you will find the centrality of music and song in Italian life. In "Christ in Concrete" the impoverished, oppressed bricklayers constantly brighten their lives with music and song.

TUOHY: Why do you think Americans like Italians so much?

EVANIER: They bring us joy, character, centeredness, authenticity and vividness. It's no mystery why "The Sopranos" is probably the most popular and certainly the finest series in television history. Think about all the great films that the Italian-American experienced has evoked. I can name you 22: "Saturday Night Fever," "Mean Streets," "Rocky," "Donnie Brasco," "From Here to Eternity" (Sinatra as Magio), "Raging Bull," "Goodfellas," "A View from the Bridge," "Marty," "A Bronx Tale," "Mac," "The Godfather One and Two," "True Love," "Somebody Up There Likes Me," "Baby It's You," "Federal Hill," "Prince of the City," "Broadway Danny Rose," "Moonlighting," "Serpico," "In the Soup," "Bullets Over Broadway." That's only the start of the list. It's not an accident.

TUOHY: In 1992, you received a screen writing fellowship from Universal/Amblin. Did you ever produce any work for the studios?

EVANIER: My only work for the studios thus far has been my Roselli biography, "Making the Wiseguys Weep: The Jimmy Roselli Story." I now have other projects which the studios are considering.

TUOHY: Did you pen the screenplay for "Making the Wiseguys Weep" or did they, the production company bring in their own writer?

EVANIER: I did write a screenplay for it, which I'm proud of, but they didn't even look at it. They have their "A" list of screenwriters who they use. The screenwriters leaned heavily on talking to me and adapting their work from "Making the Wiseguys Weep."

TUOHY: John Travolta and Touchstone Pictures optioned "Making the Wiseguys

Weep?"

EVANIER: Yes, twice. Now it looks as if it will be done by someone else.

TUOHY: What's the working title for the film?

EVANIER: "Standing Room Only."

TUOHY: Travolta's good, of course, he's no John Tuohy, but he's a good,

seasoned actor, Italian-American. What brought the role to his attention?

EVANIER: The producer heard Travolta was about to go on a plane trip. She rushed to his house and gave him a copy of "Making the Wiseguys Weep" and he read it on the plane and loved it.

TUOHY: Anyone else show an interest in taking the role?

EVANIER: Oh yes: Joe Pesci, Chazz Palmintieri.

TUOHY: Anyone else you can imagine playing Roselli?

EVANIER: Sure. Jimmy Gandolfini would be great. Steve Buscemi, Johnnie Depp, Armand Assante, Tony Danza.

TUOHY: In 1992, you received a screen writing fellowship from Universal/Amblin. Did you ever produce any work for the studios?

EVANIER: My only work for the studios thus far has been my Roselli biography, "Making the Wiseguys Weep: The Jimmy Roselli Story." I now have other projects which the studios are considering.

TUOHY: Did you pen the screenplay for "Making the Wiseguys Weep" or did they, the production company bring in their own writer?

EVANIER: I did write a screenplay for it, which I'm proud of, but they didn't even look at it. They have their "A" list of screenwriters who they use. The screenwriters leaned heavily on talking to me and adapting their work from "Making the Wiseguys Weep."

TUOHY: You've got the training, the skill and the inroads; why not go into screenwriting full time.

EVANIER: I plan to do much more of it. But fiction is my first love, so it's a matter of the amount of time you have.

TUOHY: And how do you choose a subject to write about?

EVANIER: Someone who obsesses me, grips me, fascinates me, inspires me. I have to like someone a lot to write about them. Subjects by nature have to be dramatic as well. Stanley Elkin said, "I never write about someone who's not at the end of his rope."

TUOHY: How do you write? What methods do you practice? Do you sit down and go at it full steam or work your writing over a series of months?

EVANIER: I go at it full steam. Usually it's the culmination of a gestation process: you're thinking, you're taking notes. By the time I sit down to write, it sometimes jumps out of me. I start with the most far-out image I can conjure up, the wildest. You have to trust yourself. I immerse myself. The best stuff comes when you're no longer thinking about it but fully involved, when it has to come out. Getting that second wind and flying.

TUOHY: Who influences your writing style?

EVANIER: Anybody I admire. Good writing can be contagious: Stephen Dixon, Philip Roth, Harvey Shapiro, Ralph Ellison, Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Beller, Grace Paley, Daniel Fuchs, Rita Ciresi, Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams. Regarding work for the screen or TV, David Chase, who conceived, directs and sometimes writes "The Sopranos" has got to be any serious writer's inspiration.

TUOHY: Can one learn writing?

EVANIER: I've never reached a definitive conclusion about this. Sometimes I think yes, sometimes no. It depends on the individual. Some have a tin ear, and always reach for the cliché or the flat word. There are people who could never write. Yet I've been surprised more than once by someone who seemed hopeless who carved out a niche for themselves by sheer dint of will, stamina, crazy determination, finding a subject that was so important to them they just had to do it. God knows you can't know by the look of a person. There are dazzling talkers who freeze on the page. There are introverted, withdrawn, desperately shy types who take to writing like to a first lover. I think--regarding fiction writing--that scientists, philosophers, abstract thinkers, have a particularly hard time thinking fictionally. But it's a mystery, and you never really know who will turn into a writer. I'm teaching a fiction workshop now where every single student is working on a manuscript that is potentially publishable. That took us two years to achieve. I pushed, prodded, criticized, gave them emotional support and understanding, talked to them on the phone, helped them understand why they were avoiding getting closer to their material, and helped them reach an awareness of what they really wanted to write about. I got them to tell me when I was hurting their feelings. They told me they thought I was favoring one student, so I learned from that. Students do learn from my passions. If I see a published story by a writer I really love, like Stephen Dixon, who sometimes I think is the best fucking writer I've ever read in my lifetime, like his novel "Frog" or his short story, "Sleep,"I'll bring it in, pull it out, and have to read it to them. They learn from the story itself, but also from my enthusiasm about it, why I feel that way about it. And not only fiction, anything that excites me, like the autobiographies of Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan, or Alfred Kazin's memoir, "A Walker in the City." So in answer to your question, can one learn writing: who the fuck knows?

TUOHY: You're working on a piece about the legendary Buster from Chicago. Who was he? Did he exist?

EVANIER: Buster was considered one of the Mafia's most prodigious killers, working first with Al Capone and later with Lucky Luciano. His mentor was

TUOHY: Of course he's mentioned in the Valachi papers, the memoirs of Joe

Valachi, whose memories have never been questioned, you're aware of that I guess?

EVANIER: Yes, Valachi writes about him at length. Says he looked like a student and always carried his machine gun in a violin case. Buster actually took violin lessons as a young lad.

TUOHY: Favorite mob film?

EVANIER: "Mean Streets." (Roselli sings in it, by the way). And now "The Sopranos" as well.

TUOHY: Let's step back and talk about your book, "Red Love" which is a novel about the Rosenbergs. What brought you around to that?

EVANIER: As a young man, I hung around the periphery of the Old Left, looking for a girl friend and, as I said before, a family. It was too freakish for me, but its very oddity gave it a human fascination. This was after Khrushchev's l956 speech detailing Stalin's crimes. These were people worshipping the Soviet slave state, yet they prided themselves on their humanity. The hysteria surrounding the Rosenbergs was amazing to witness.

Later, in the l980s, I decided they were a great subject for a novel. Anyone who knew the Communist Party operation knew the Rosenbergs were guilty. But after all, spying for Stalin was a high honor. The slogan I invent in the novel sums up how the Communists felt about the Rosenbergs: "Whatever they did, they didn't do it."

But it took me years to figure out how to write it, they were considered such saints in many people's eyes. And I wanted to prove their guilt, even though it was a novel. Finally I decided on the style of comedy, which freed me up and gave me a chance to get at the subject in, I think, a fresh way. One of the reviews said my book was "almost disgracefully funny." But I arrived at the writing of the book after a very long period of studying the files the history of the case, and interviewing hundreds of people, including Morton Sobell, who was convicted with the Rosenbergs, Sobell's wife Helen, and the sister of Julius Rosenberg, and scores of their neighbors and friends. I believe I got under the skin of these people. It took years of effort. When I finally wrote the first chapter, I threw out all the files and the documentation, and let my head and heart do the work.

By the way, when I wrote the first chapter, it was a rainy, miserable day, but when I finished and looked up, the sun was shining. I believe my novel would make a good film.

TUOHY: What about the infamous Pumpkin Papers? In the end, it appears that Nixon was correct.

EVANIER: I'll need to sketch in a little background here. In l948 Whittaker Chambers testified that Alger Hiss, a respected member of the Washington establishment, was a secret Communist and Soviet spy. Chambers described an extensive Communist underground that existed in Washington in the l930s. He worked with Hiss as Soviet source and courier from l934 until Chambers' defection from the underground in l938. After that, one of his key assignments was assisting secret Communists who worked for government agencies in Washington. Chambers became a Washington to New York courier, dealing with the Harold Ware group in the State department. The Ware group was a small cadre of New Deal officials, young Communist professionals including Hiss, working for the Agricultural Adjustment Agency. It was both a "Marxist study group" and transmission belt for stolen government documents. After the group disbanded following the death of Ware, Chambers kept receiving pilfered material from Alger Hiss and other Washington sources, delivering it in l935 and l936 to Itzhak Akhmerov of the NkVD and Joszef Peter, [known as "Peters"] who represented both the American Communist Party and the Comintern. When Chambers decided to defect, he began to hold back various State Department items he had received from Hiss: four handwritten notes, 65 pages of retyped cables, and three rolls of microfilm. Fearing retaliation, he called these documents "life preservers" that would keep him from harm by the Communists because he warned them he would have the documents turned over to American authorities. The documents are among the most extensive tangible evidence of Soviet espionage within the U.S. government during the Stalin era. Chambers defected in April l938, and squirreled the documents away for safekeeping. They eventually would prove that Chambers was telling the truth in his allegations against Hiss. In l948 Chambers told the House Committee on Un-American Activities that Hiss had been a member of the Ware Group and that he was a Communist. He repeated his charges on "Meet the Press." Hiss sued for slander, demanding that Chambers produce any documents relevant to his charge that Hiss had been a Communist. That was a crucial mistake on Hiss' part. On December 2, Chambers took two HUAC investigators to his Westminster farm. He walked into a garden patch and removed the top from a hollowed-out pumpkin. Reaching inside, he pulled out two strips of developed film and canisters containing three rolls of undeveloped film. The film contained State Department documents. The two rolls of undeveloped film contained Navy Department documents from early l938. These documents--the Pumpkin Papers�were powerful evidence. Hiss was convicted in l950.

TUOHY: What motivated them, the Rosenbergs, and hundreds of thousands of others, to believe as they did? Recently, I finished a work by the Chicago-based writer, Nelson Algren who also held, generally, the same leanings as the Rosenbergs. Why was it so much a part of that post-war generation?

EVANIER: Well, the Rosenbergs took their beliefs a lot further than the fellow travelers of the period, but yes, there were many who believed as they did, and others who acted as they did. These were people shaped by hard times, especially the Depression, the rise of Nazism, the feeling the world was falling apart. They were looking for a panacea, a new utopia, and for many, many years, they clung to the pipe dream that the Soviet Union was the best hope of humanity. This point of view made them feel good about themselves: they were "progressive," they were on the right side of history.

It took an endless series of disillusioning events to pull them away: there was the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Soviet concentration camps, Khrushchev�s speech, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, on and on, until there was nothing left of the illusion.

TUOHY: But don't you feel, as many people do, that there was, at least in some part, some anti-Semitic element to the execution of the Rosenbergs?

EVANIER: There has been a long history of the far right's tying Jews to Communism. Anti-Semites will blame anything on the Jews. I deal with it in "Red Love." That did not make the Rosenbergs innocent of their specific crime. The judge and prosecutor were Jewish, and they undoubtedly felt keenly aware of their role in the case. The Communist Party actually exploited the Rosenbergs as a way of diverting attention from the anti-Semitic trials of Rudolph Slansky going on in Communist Czechoslovakia at the time. I did not favor the execution of the Rosenbergs, but I do not think there was any anti-Semitic element, except to the extent that anti-Semites were happy about it. I do think, however, that America was becoming grimly aware of the dangers of Communist aggression due to the Korean war. The realities of Soviet espionage in the Rosenberg case, following upon the Judith Coplon espionage case and the conviction of Alger Hiss in 1950, also made the country feel vulnerable and afraid. All this influenced the verdict in an extreme way.

TUOHY: Joe McCarthy is an interesting figure, some swear by his name, others swear at it. What's your take on him?

EVANIER: I think McCarthy immeasurably damaged the cause of anti-Communism because of his irresponsible and wild charges. He shouted, "fire" so many times that people actually ignored the flames when they were real. Anyone could shout "McCarthyism," no matter what they had actually done, and receive a sympathetic ear. There are many superb books on McCarthy: David Oshinsky's "A Conspiracy So Immense" and Thomas C. Reeves' "The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy." Most recently, Bill Buckley, once a passionate defender of McCarthy, has written a vivid and powerful novel, "The

TUOHY: No conversation about Joe McCarthy is complete without at least a passing mention of his fascinating assistant, Roy Cohn. What's your take on him?

EVANIER: No one who knew Cohn tended to think of him as anything but loathsome. Smart, gifted, but a permanent prankster. Again, see Buckley's account of him in "The Redhunter." Cohn's obsession with David Schine explained almost all of his reprehensible actions, and were part of the reason for McCarthy's downfall. That said, I found the glee with which some people reacted to his having contacted AIDS to be more loathsome than he was.

TUOHY: Back to writing for a second. So do you hold to the theory, "Write with our heart first and rewrite with your mind later?" and can you do that, successfully, when writing non-fiction?

EVANIER: No, that's much more applicable to writing fiction. But it's also relevant in a limited way to writing non-fiction. If we write about a subject we feel deeply about, care about passionately, that informs any piece of writing. But clearly in non-fiction, a profound grasp of the subject, logic, reason, organization, objectivity and factual knowledge are very important factors.

TUOHY: We are, in my opinion, a wealthy and successful society, but we are not, again in my opinion, a highly literate people, by way of comparison to our wealth. So what is the role, the function of the writer in our society?

EVANIER: To entertain, enlighten, illuminate, give us joy, give us insight, make us more aware of ourselves and of the human condition. To inspire us to be better toward each other, to right wrongs and see things in a new light.

TUOHY: How do you bring together the world of the writer, which is to some degree, at least, an artistic vocation, and the business world that is publishing? Do we, writers, write to sell or write what is important and won't sell?

EVANIER: We write because we have to, we write to sell, and we try to write what is important. We want all these things. Sometimes the good work sells, sometimes it doesn't. The business of publishing is the usual business of profit and loss. If the author's books sell, the publisher will be happy to publish the work when it is good and important. If the work is good and important but doesn't sell, the publisher will lose interest. Nevertheless, I think many if not most publishers hope to sell good work. Sometimes they will take a loss to publish it. They will sometimes stick with writers over the long haul, hoping to develop them and build their careers. Writers do get a chance in the marketplace, but if they don't produce growing profits for the publisher, their chances grow dimmer with time.

TUOHY: Fiction is your first love, yet isn't it much more difficult than writing non-fiction?

EVANIER: Yes, you write fiction because you need to and want to. The odds of making real money from it are very low. I don't know of any talented fiction writers who don't get published somehow, but I know of very few who are making a living from it.

TUOHY: And how do you write? In spurts? Over a period of weeks? In rushed frenzy?

EVANIER: Sometimes each of those things. As I said earlier, it's obsession and need. You've got to do it. When it goes well, it's one of the great experiences of life. But it has to be done in private, in isolation, so it's lonely and anxiety-ridden.

TUOHY: Advice to new writers?

EVANIER: I teach fiction writing, so I've often pondered this question. Above all, read great work. Don't start small in your reading. Talent is inspiring and contagious sometimes, if you're not intimidated and frightened by it. And don't worry about plunging into chaos and uncertainty. That's the process of fiction writing. You don't have to know where you are going when you start a manuscript. And trust yourself. Trust your instincts and your thoughts and feelings. Choose subjects that are of urgent and desperate importance to you. Those are the subjects that will make you work hard and do the job. And take notes all the time. Write down dialogue. Listen to people. Everyone has a unique way of speaking. Dostoevsky said, "Respect life."

TUOHY: You said that Eugene O'Neill was an influence. And I think, considering your family lives, that you and Mr. O'Neill would be fast friends.

EVANIER: I would have considered knowing O'Neill a great honor. He represents the highest glory of American literature. His best work will live forever: "Long Day's Journey Into Night," "A Moon for the Misbegotten," "The Hairy Ape," "The Emperor Jones," the one-act sea plays. I did, by the way, know his biographer, Louis Sheaffer, who died a few years back. Lou was a desperately shy man who lived in a studio apartment all his life--in the Brooklyn building where Thomas Wolfe had lived. Lou had been a reporter for the Brooklyn Eagle. When the paper folded, he devoted the rest of his life to O'Neill and won the Pulitzer Prize. He sacrified everything for that biography. Interestingly, Lou was not a born writer at all. He was a plugger. He rose to heights because of his obsession with his subject. He somehow willed himself to do it. I doubt he could be as eloquent about any other writer or work of literature as he was about O'Neill. You know, writers are as strange as the rest of us. You never know when they'll emerge. It's a mystery. Elia Kazan's autobiography, "A Life," is totally different from his other efforts at writing. It's a masterpiece. And yet when he tried to write autobiographically on film, with "America America" and "The Arrangement"--and we're talking about one of the greatest directors of all time--he failed, I think.

TUOHY: I have no doubt "Red Love" would be a good film. Have you brought it to Hollywood's attention?

EVANIER: I agree that it would. You never know in Hollywood, but with the preponderance of films that are geared to kids, with huge technical effects and exploding missiles and firestorms and automobile chases, very few serious films get made. I would hope that one of the independents might take a look at it. "Donnie Brasco"--a great film, by the way--took nine years to get made, and it was a British director who pushed it through, Mike Newell. Publishing is tough, but Hollywood is a trip. You have to experience it to believe it.

Mr. Tuohy can be reached at MobStudy@aol.com