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Don Swaim Interviews

Audio Interview with Malcolm Bosse

From Don Swaim:

A crushed foot as a youngster led Illinois-bred Malcolm Bosse (pronounced BOSS-ee) into writing because he was unable to excel at athletics. Ultimately, he published twenty-two books, the best known The Warlord. Malcolm and I became drinking pals of sorts in the eighties in New York after I interviewed him at CBS on the occasion of his novel Fire in Heaven. At the time, Malcolm was disconsolate over his failing marriage. Since I had a similar malady, our conversations evaporated into an inevitably forgotten alcoholic haze.

He and I were boozing in Greenwich Village when we took a side trip to visit another great writer, the glib and charismatic Herbert Gold (Fathers, 1967), who was crashing in a New York University sublet on Washington Square (the very row houses made famous by Henry James -- buildings cleverly transformed to resemble their original brownstones in the front, but which had been gutted inside to make a single apartment building). Unluckily for us, Gold was cold sober when we arrived, and while Herb didn't precisely kick us out, our sloshed states failed to amused him, a man who'd boasted to me about his affair with a woman who became a well known television network news personality. According to Herb, the woman (who later married a former improvisational comedian and film director) was so smashing it almost didn't matter she was a Republican who'd once worked for Richard Nixon. In later years, Gold (a Cleveland native who'd debuted with a short story in Playboy), told me that, after writing a couplet each morning and ensconcing himself in San Francisco's outdoor cafe culture, he'd exclaim to himself, "Stop me before I write more!" Thankfully he didn't.

Bosse was a practitioner of an ancient excruciating Chinese form of exercise and meditation, Tai Chi Chuan. While it may have worked for him he never sold me on it. How would I ever have the patience to focus on moving my bodily appendages mere millimeters at a sitting? In our too-short relationship, I found Malcolm outgoing, self-revealing, and vulnerable. He seemed to have doubts about his own abilities -- although he was a Yale graduate with a masters and Ph.D., who had been a Fulbright scholar. When some forgotten agent told him the first book he'd written wasn't publishable, Malcolm took the rejection without question. He told me had stacks of unpublished manuscripts in his closet because he accepted as truth the opinions of those who claimed to know. Later, he understood.

A photo on the back of the dust jacket of his second published novel, The Incident at Naha (1972), shows him scowling ferociously, pipe in mouth, and artificially posed -- so unlike his benign demeanor in real life. He and I all but lost touch. I received a note from him in 1986 postmarked Malaysia, which read, "Coming to the end of nearly 3 months in Bali, Java, Sumatra, and Borneo. Tired & wanna go home. Think I like Borneo best, although don't intend to write about it. Sumatra least -- especially a nasty place called Palembang." After his odyssey to the Pacific Malcolm landed, in of all places, Reno, Nevada. In 1992 he moved to an apartment on Second Avenue in Seattle, writing, "Leaving the desert for civilization again." Four years later, after two failed marriages, he married for a third and final time.

By then we'd completely lost connection as I became self-absorbed with my own petty issues, most of them non-literary but unavoidable. I blame myself for the loss.

Rummaging around in a second-hand book store along the Delaware River I hit upon his second published book The Incident at Naha, written as M.J. Bosse, an Inner Sanctum mystery involving murder and the cover up of a My Lai-like incident in Vietnam, which followed his first novel, The Journey of Tao Kim Nam (1959). I googled to reconnect, if only through email, but found he'd died in New York of esophageal cancer two years prior (on June 14, 2002). He was ten years older than I.

Listen to the Malcolm Bosse interview with Don Swaim, March 18, 1986
(38 min. 24 sec.)

MP3 File

These files are for your personal use only.
Classroom use is permitted.
Redistribution is not permitted.

Listen to the Malcolm Bosse interview with Don Swaim, April 19, 1991
(35 min. 39 sec.)

MP3 File

These files are for your personal use only.
Classroom use is permitted.
Redistribution is not permitted.