SOURCE: Ozick, Cynthia, and Mario Materassi. “Imagination Unbound: An Interview with Cynthia Ozick.” Salmagundi, nos. 94–95 (spring–summer 1992): 85–113.

[In the following interview, Ozick comments on her writing career and the influences behind The Messiah of Stockholm.]

[Materassi:] Let's begin with a standard “first question”: How and when did you become a writer?

[Ozick:] This question is really very easy for me, because I never was not a writer. I think I knew this very, very early, before I could even hold a pen. Partly it was simply instinct, and partly I had a model: there was a writer in my family, my mother's brother, who died a few years ago. He was a Hebrew poet.

What was his name?

His name was Abraham Regelson. He emigrated to Israel when that state declared its independence in 1948. And though he won a number of major prizes there, his star is very much in eclipse. He did not write skinny little subjective lyrics—he wrote big, dramatic, philosophical poems rather like Milton, actually. He has a great poem called “Cain and Abel.” At any rate, I, of course, as a very small child, did not know anything about his content or his form—that goes without saying. Nor have I ever really absorbed it, because it was in a language that I have never mastered. But the fact that there was an uncle who was a poet, I believe with hindsight, made it possible for me to understand that there were writers in the world. And of course the minute I began reading fairy tales, it was irresistible—that kind of eery ecstasy that child readers have, that kind of buzzing in the head, or whatever it is. It's an attack on the soul. So I always knew this, and I have been writing since childhood.

That is a beautiful way of putting it—“an attack on the soul.”

So I always wrote. But I don't think that I achieved a really grown up, mature style until I was seventeen. Something happened in that year when, I think, even when I look back on it today, it stopped being child-like. That's how I became a writer, simply through—what shall I call it?—self-recognition: the way you know the color of your eyes, or how much you weigh, or what your name is. I think probably the way you know what your name is. That's best, because the others are too physical, and knowing you are a writer is metaphysical. It's like having a name, which has been given to you, which you didn't choose. Now that I have been a writer for a long time, I realize that that is a kind of slavery too: not to ever have had a choice is a kind of slavery.

Many years ago when I got out of graduate school (I did my Masters thesis on Henry James) I sat down to write a long novel which was called Mercy Picking Peace and Love. The title was taken from Blake, and it was intended to be a “philosophical” novel. It was going to set neo-Thomism up against secularism. But the emphasis … Am I making noise with this teaspoon? Sorry!

I'm worrying about when I'll have to transcribe this …

[Laughing] I have to do something with my nervous fingers! I'll keep them folded in my lap. I'll do something with my sleeve. My earlobes—something!

At any rate, I must have written about three hundred fifty thousand words, on this. It was like Jacob ruling Rachel and Leah in the Bible, because I put all my eggs in this basket, so to speak, and didn't do what young writers normally do, which is to chase around and try to get reviews, and write short stories and try to get them published. I had an idea of a huge, early masterpiece I was going to write, which I was going to publish by the time I was twenty-five. I had some notion that, well, if Thomas Mann did this with Buddenbrooks—which I hadn't read yet, but simply knew about—why not I? Well, the years dragged on. And then I wrote, in six weeks, a short novel which I completed, which was called The Conversion of John Andrew Small. It was turned down by Doctorow and a number of others, and ended up lost in London, in the office of some publisher.

Was that the only copy?

There may be a primitive carbon of it in the attic of our house, but I am not really certain—I've never found it there. And it's just a notion that it might be up there.

That's terrible.

It's lost. And it was a completed comic novel. One of the characters was an Italian American. It's lost. Probably well and good. Of course I haven't read it in years and years—decades. So I have no idea. When I finished that, I began another short novel, which was really going to be a novella. There was an editor in New York named Oscar Dalisa. I read that he was doing a series of short novels in paperback. It was a kind of contest, and I thought that I would write for that. And that ended up being a vast novel called Trust. By then I was thirty-seven years old, and substantially unpublished. Trust I finished on the day that John Kennedy was assassinated: November 22, 1963. I finished it that day. And I had begun it when I was twenty-nine years old. By then I was—how old was I? I am an imbecile in arithmetic … I was born in 1928, how old was I in 1963? Thirty-three. Is that right?

Thirty-five.

Thirty-five. O.K. So I wrote it between twenty-nine and thirty-five. That's when I really began … having begun at twenty-two, I spent many, many, many years in a long, distressed, envious, deeply, deeply miserable silence. And very recently I realized that I had to stop mourning about it. Bob Gottlieb said this to me—he is my editor at The New Yorker, a friend and a support. He said, “You're pretty old by now, you've got to quit lamenting, quit complaining—it's over, it's done!” But in some way, it's never been over and done. I think that youthful drive for recognition was very healthy in certain ways, because it cured me of certain mean traits that writers acquire, particularly envy, that is an ailment I am incapable of now—I was then sick with it.

That's why you could write “Envy.”

That wasn't my title! That was Norman Podhoretz's title. I protested that title, but I eventually kept it. I called that story “Yiddish in America.” He decided it was about envy, and so he made me call it “Envy; or, Yiddish in America.” I did, and kept the title afterward.

Anyway, it is about envy.

It is about envy. I saw the point, that it was rather a good title.

So, that's how I became a writer: a very rocky and unhappy road. You see, I haven't really improved because now, with my new point of view, I'm supposed to leave that out and not think about it, not talk about it. But I seem incapable of not talking about those bad years. Maybe my own fault, because it seems to me that a writer, especially in this society, who doesn't scamper around and look for publication … But I finished Trust and I went out into the world—and you're right, I was thirty-five. I'm remembering now. I went to the New York Review of Books to ask for a review to do and they wouldn't let me into the office. They wouldn't let me cross—this was the threshold, I was here—they wouldn't let me cross the threshold. They shouted at me from across the room, “No, we have no reviews.” And I was sent away.

And to be thirty-five years old, to have written so long … But it wasn't just the question of writing. It was the question of absolute worship of literature. It was an altar, and I was a sacrifice on that altar—a self-sacrifice. I did nothing else. I read all day in those years, and wrote in the middle of the night. I would go to the public library and come home with a ton of books about every other day. I read literary criticism, I read history. In those years I read a lot of Jewish history, a lot of Jewish philosophy. This was a time of very deep self-education for me. I am an autodidact, in Judaism in particular. And I read novels—everything, about sixteen hours a day, day after day. I was married, and my husband was going away every day, and that's what I was doing. Then he would come home, we would have dinner, there would be an evening of, you know, marital conversation; and I would write until four or five in the morning. That's how I lived, for many years.

And that's how I became a writer. That's my story.

While you were training yourself to be a writer, you probably had some literary models. Henry James, for example.

Yes, I wrote an ironic piece about that, which unfortunately many writers, and among them some serious critics, have not seen the playfulness in, the tongue-in-cheek. I don't know if you know that particular essay. It is called “The Lesson of the Master,” and it is in a collection of essays of mine called Art & Ardor. “The Lesson of the Master,” of course, is a story by James and I played a little bit with that. It's a story about how it's important not to have great masters as your model, and of course that was my life mistake. Just as you say, yes, I had literary models, and they were giants—they were James, they were Proust, they were Chekhov, they were Forster, they were Conrad, they were George Eliot, Hawthorne, they were the masters, mostly in English and American literature. More English, I would think. But a young person shouldn't do that—I mean, as I put it in this piece, at the age of twenty-two, as a nearsighted and in those years extremely skinny young woman, I should not have imagined myself the elderly bald-headed, well-paunched Henry James. I had forgotten that Henry James was also twenty-two years old at one point. I had really forgotten this.

So I think that young writers should not run after the fulfilled, and the complete, and the masterwork. Young writers should understand that they are apprentices, and run after the ripeness to be found within, and not have great huge models. That's my belief—it's all hindsight, of course.

May I shift ground and ask you a very different question? I want to know to what extent the Jewish tradition has influenced your work.

For a collection of my essays called Metaphor & Memory I wrote a preface that seemed to me very important to write. Many people had been using my essays as a yardstick, so to speak, against which to measure my stories. Now, the essays are ideational, and the stories belong to the realm of the imagination. And I have been extremely upset about this, though I do think there is a way in which essays may also be discoveries—some essays are discoveries. (This is a tangent, but I just did a little tiny fifteen hundred word review of Italo Calvino, and that was a discovery for me. I found a definition of Post-modernism that was really exciting, just in fifteen hundred words. So an essay can be a discovery.) But, by and large, essays have definable contents almost before you begin—not always, but most of the time they do. In short, they have themes. At least you know you are going to write about Italo Calvino; you know that much. But when you write a story, you barely know anything. You have some kind of floating idea, a floating feeling, or you've heard a conversation, or you've glimpsed some portrait, or a piece of landscape—anything at all. It's a floating tendril.

Mystère des naissances, as Joyce says.

Yes. That's right. Well, I felt I had in this introduction to protest this measuring stick, or this Procrustean bed of the essays. Because what happens when I write is that I am not then a Jewish writer. I think that is an oxymoron, as I've written someplace else. Because the Jewish part refers to a philosophic heritage and a mode of conduct. The philosophic heritage, in brief, is monotheism, uncompromising monotheism; and the mode of conduct is a whole system of ethics, period. A whole system, period. Not so easily ended with a period.

But an imaginative writer does not have a system of any kind. And so, for a writer to be a Jew is definitely a contradiction in terms. If you are a good Jew, or a good Christian, a good Muslim, a good Hindu, you have a code of behaviour to which you must adhere. But a writer is a wild person. A writer is a running loose id. And for me to be a Jewish writer is an impossibility. I can't be a Jewish writer. I can be a Jew, and I can be a writer—but when I am a writer I'm not a Jewish writer, and when I am a Jew, when I am a well-behaved Jew, living by my conscience, then I am not a writer at all, because I think writing and conscience are very often contradictory. To me they are.

Do you suffer from this contradiction? This, of course, is probably too personal a question …

No, it's not personal at all. I think it is a very important question. No, I don't suffer with it because I don't feel that I am undergoing the contradiction at any time: I am living either in one world or in the other world. But I am not living in both at once. If I lived in both at once, then of course I would feel distorted and pulled in two directions. But when I sit at my table and I'm writing a short story, as I'm doing now, what am I thinking about? I'm thinking about the cadence of that sentence, the resonance of those words—the story I'm writing now is a comic story—and how I can make juxtapositions which will have some kind of comic penetration. You know, Puck: “what fools, these mortals be,” which I guess is what comedy is … That sounds very dumb, but anyway …

No it doesn't. What you say is extremely interesting—and the more so because, tendentially, I disagree with what you're saying.

I could see you disagreeing in your expression.

I'm sorry. I hope you don't take it as …

No, it's interesting!

… lack of respect. But I do disagree, though very respectfully, because it seems to me that although writers may be wild, as you say, still they adhere to a code of behaviour in terms of their own art.

Is that a code of behaviour? Is that a code of the conscience?

Ultimately, yes. Given the writer that you are, you would never write in order to sell.

Oh, in that sense.

You would never try to achieve an easy effect. You would never sacrifice something you feel is essential to the story simply because it might be difficult, or …

I couldn't do that—I would love to do that! Wouldn't I love to be a rich writer? But I can't do that.

I don't think you would.

I cannot do it. I don't know how to do it.

It's your conscience.

That's a gift, that's not a conscience. I really don't believe that there are hacks. I think to be what we call a hack and to write a commercial best-seller is a great gift. I like it. It's not a literary conscience that prevents me from being Jackie Suzanne and making a lot of money. I don't know how to do it!

But you don't want to try. I am very sorry, I'm really being too personal.

No, not at all. No, no—this is fun. This is what such a conversation should be.

There is a story by Henry James called “The Next Time.” Do you know the story?

Yes.

Do you remember the writer's name in it?

No.

I can't remember his name either. But he wants to make a lot of money and he wants to have a commercial success, so he sells all his principles down the river, and he fails utterly because he writes a masterpiece. And then he says, “Well, next time I'll really write a piece of junk.” And he works very hard, he writes as badly as possible—alas, another masterwork!

That was rather autobiographical.

Yes, absolutely. But that works in reverse, because hack writers also struggle to become serious. I happen to have a friend who wants very much to be a serious literary writer. Yet, next time she will write another piece of commercial historical fiction and she will clean up, make money. Every time she has a commercial success. The next time she hopes to be serious and literary, and it never works. So, that story can be written in reverse.

No, I don't think it's a matter of conscience or literary principle that I can't make money!

Let's leave the monetary aspect of it aside and go back to the larger issue we were pursuing. When you say that you can separate what you are as a Jew from what you are as a writer, from a practical point of view I can understand the separation. But I think there must be an underlying unity that determines your choices.

I'll tell you why I think not. Because when we sit across a table … I've had a good upbringing, and I am a responsible person. If I were writing a story, and I were sitting across this table, I might find some reason to do a villainous act. I might seize a knife, and do some violence to you, or you to me. This is not going to happen between us because we are living in the real world now, but in the world of fiction I'm not responsible. What I mean to say is that the responsibility that we all have as rational human beings in society doesn't apply in fiction.

But you have a responsibility toward the piece you are writing! And that is overriding.

What is the nature of that responsibility? What I mean is …

Your taste, for one thing …

Taste. But I'm talking about the conduct of the characters. You enter into, very often, pure evil, when you are writing a story. I mean, you have to enter into every character, and you do have villains, and you really have to enter their minds. At the time of the writing you necessarily become a person whom, in the realm of responsible other life, you would regard as wicked and villainous. And that's why there is a separation. I could not act like many of my characters in my own person.

Is this an important criterion in your eyes?

I think it's very important. When I found out that Sadat was a novelist, wrote a novel, I was swept away. There was some talk at one point that Sadat's novel was going to be translated from Arabic and published here. It never happened. I was burning to read that novel, because I think that these people who play out on the stage of the world their fantasies are very very dangerous, that they should confine the playing out to novels. After all, Goëbbels was an expressionist playwright, and actually wrote novels. As I think about that, I have to believe it's a good thing that there is the separation I described, at least for most writers. O.K., Sadat did a good act, but before he did a good act he started a war that killed his own brother. Writers are wild people. And if there were no separation between the writer and the person, the world would be more of a jungle than it is.

I agree with that, though of course not only writers are wild people. Years ago, I heard Singer say the same thing, “When I write, I'm not a Jew.” He was speaking at the B'nai Jeshurun congregation, on the West Side. The audience wanted him to say that he was a Jew all the time; instead he said exactly what you said. My contention is simply that, in my view, the morality that informs one's life in terms of behaviour, in terms of honesty to one's principles, carries over in one's profession, when the consistency in morality is directed toward something different, something imaginary.

You see, I would agree with you wholly and totally, vis-a-vis writing essays. But not when you cross the line into making things up. I mean, there are writers where this is true—George Eliot …

But let's take Faulkner's Joe Christmas: isn't the writer's honesty central to the way he makes his character come alive? Obviously Faulkner is not Christmas.

Oh, that's an interesting way to put it. I see what you're saying.

You created Joseph Brill: the honesty that informs your personal life informed you in the creation of a character that is thoroughly convincing—that is to say, thoroughly honest, true, in terms of our understanding of human nature.

O.K., I see, that is an interesting word: honesty. That's correct. But there is good honesty, and there is bad honesty. There is the honesty of a villain, of a Hitler or a Goëbbels. That is one thing. Then there is the honesty of a writer whose fictional portrayal of a wicked person must be honestly done.

I see that there is a difference, but I don't see it as really countering my objection. Let me try again to understand. I know that Orthodox Jews cannot enter other temples, or a house where the shrine of a different religion is kept …

I am not an Orthodox Jew.

The point may apply anyway. A few days ago I was talking about this with Chaim Potok—that's why it's very much on my mind. I asked him, “Is this a way of fencing off temptation?” And he said, “Yes, it is.” Now, keeping this in mind: when you talk about an honest portrayal of a wicked person, do you feel that in order to portray a wicked person honestly, you have to experience being wicked, even if only in the imagination?

Yes.

And therefore this intrudes upon, or enters in conflict with, your honesty as a person?

Yes. Right. Because in fiction I am utterly reckless, and my behaviour through the characters is utterly reckless, wild. And there is no break.

And that's the joy of writing fiction. It's the relentlessly and recklessly unbound imagination which is, I guess, the bliss of writing fiction. I am responsible to nothing and no one, and you can get away with anything because it's all made up, it's all in your head. And when it's completed, if it turns out to be anything near a work of art, there is that further satisfaction. But you haven't harmed a soul. Actually, I don't know whether books harm people. I think books can improve people. I always feel improved when I read George Eliot, because I think she is a writer who doesn't imagine anything against her conscience—or very little against her conscience. Or if she does, it's to the end of expressing her conscience.

But I imagine things against my conscience. I don't think Potok imagines things against his conscience. I think he is a unified person. I do think he has this kind of unity of conscience as a human being and as a writer. I think he is that integer vitae scelerisque purus individual that Horace talks about. I think that the purpose of his writing is to show such a person. And the purpose of George Eliot's writing is to show such a person. The purpose of Jane Austen's writing is to show such a person. But something in me lets loose—maybe my writing seems very tame to you, maybe my feelings as expressed to you now seem exaggerated given what's actually on the page. That may be, and if that's true, then it may be that my sense of conscience is so strict that when I feel I'm flying away from it I don't really go very far. That may be. But, internally, it feels as if I'm flying far enough.

But if you do feel that you are going away from it, the distance doesn't matter. It's the first step that matters.

Yes. Exactly.

Whereas my contention is that when it comes to art, there is no first step “away.” The first step is into a realm that is so strictly regulated by its own laws, that by adhering to these laws (which, as a writer, you respect, because you made them, even though you may never have formulated them consciously), you are still the integral individual that you are outside that realm.

How interesting that you bring this up! I held this idea when I was twenty-one years old and was writing my Master's thesis, and I expressed it in something that I called the Theory of Parable, where the fiction, or the parable, was a universe with its own laws. My teacher, who was a neo-Thomist and on whom I was going to base this first book, was a South American Roman Catholic. In my aborted novel I called him Caritas—and his real name was Vivas, which is also a rather symbolic name. So, I once did believe this.

You don't anymore?

I don't think so.

Actually, I think I'm trying more and more not to think metaphysically about what is writing, what is literature, because when you are in the middle—as I am right now—of the actual struggle, you don't feel like you're making theories, you feel like you're writing sentences. And that the struggle is with the words of the single sentence, and how that sentence emerges from the sentence before, or where the next one will come from. It does not feel any deeper than that. Though this is a struggle enough, and in some way includes the other. But not on the conscious level.

II.

What prompted you to write The Messiah of Stockholm?

We didn't talk about this the last time?

No, we didn't.

Oh, right. I was in Sweden, in Stockholm, for eight days, and I had a Cicerone there who guided me through the literary community. Actually, it was on the occasion of the publication of The Cannibal Galaxy. I was taken to lunch by the publisher, and so on—and in one fell swoop, in one week, and in the intensest way, I met the Swedish literary community. I was swept away by them, because … well, later I realized that they are very much like the French literary community. They have the same ideas, and they have the same ability to wear many hats, so that a Swedish academic will also be a newspaper reviewer, and also publish poetry in the newspaper, and also sit on the Academy, and also teach at the university—the same like you!

Is this a phenomenon you don't find in this country?

No, you don't. People are sort of stuck in one profession. If a man is an academic, he will never be doing all the things you are doing—very rarely.

But they do write for the magazines.

Well, it's not the same way … So, to answer your question—what was the germ, what inspired The Messiah of Stockholm. An eight day trip to Stockholm, in which I was immersed in the literary world, and during which time I heard that Bruno Schultz's manuscript, The Messiah, had surfaced in Stockholm. It was merely a rumor, but as soon as I heard it, it was a stimulus to the imagination.

When was this?

It was 1984. Yes, the fall—October, I think, of 1984. After that we went to London and we spent a week there—I could barely wait to get out of London and go home to my desk to get to start this … I thought it was going to be a short story that would take me two weeks, and it turned out to be a much more complex thing, which took about a year and a quarter to write. I never expected it to be a novel—it's a short novel, but it's really a novel. That was the beginning of it. It began truly with a trip to Stockholm, and hearing in this unlikely place that this Polish-Jewish manuscript had surfaced in the North country …

It was a completely unfounded rumor …

Totally unfounded.

It looks like destiny came up with this rumor, so that you could pick it up and write The Messiah of Stockholm.

So it seemed. Except, I heard last year that Jerzy Ficowski, who's the biographer of Schultz—there's now a second rumor, from him, that, indeed, he may be on the way to finding the manuscript.

Goodness!

This was told to me—and I couldn't believe it, because … Is it going to be true? Since then, there has been silence; and I'm just waiting with almost a desperation, to find out whether this will happen …

How would you feel, if the manuscript surfaced?

I think I would feel like the Lord God Creator when He says, Let there be light—and there was light. I would feel as if my invention had come true.

Although, in your invention, one never knows whether the manuscript is apocryphal or genuine. But the intimation is that it is not real.

Yes, right. It's not resolved. I simply leave that to the reader. I obfuscated it in layer after layer after layer, so that you can make a case either way. You can make a logical case, you can trace it to either conclusion. In fact, that book in a sense has two endings, if you believe Adela at the end, or you can sort of go with the flow of the book and assume that it is false, that it is an invention of forgers, with the collaboration of an imaginary … who is also a forger. Because Lars is himself a forger. He's forged his own life. He's forged his own identity. He has no idea of who he was. He knows that he was a Jewish child rescued, but it happened in infancy, he has no way he can prove who he is, and he's struggling for an identity which by definition can only be negative. It's an identity which can be pursued only through negation, through murder, through annihilation. If he proves his identity to himself, if he follows on that road, he's going to end up in ash. His choice is either to follow the road of ash, which he was doing by saying he is the son of Bruno Schultz, or to be a normal Swede …

So, you left it open.

You didn't think it was open.

I recognized the intention of leaving it open, but I felt that the possibility of The Messiah being real was somewhat secondary …

Yes, that's not the important thing, you're right. I am sorry. Go on.

I meant to say that, to me, the reader is encouraged a little more to believe it is a forgery, than to believe it is authentic.

I think it's true. Yes, that's true. Because the weight of the, so to speak, metaphysics of the book is forgery. The book is about forgery.

After all, the novel with which Lars begins his new career as a reviewer is about forgery. The metaphor of forgery is overriding.

Everywhere. And then, since Adela has lied to Lars before, is she lying to Lars at the end in order to punish him? So there's no way to know. I don't know. I left it ambiguous on purpose, because to be ambiguous is also to be on the side of forgery. A fact that you can nail down is not ambiguous. The imagination is always a forger anyway.

Knowing you were there for only eight days, it's incredible how you made Stockholm into a convincing locale.

Well, actually I've been very flattered by some Swedes who said, You must have lived in Stockholm a year at least … But that happened, you know, with The Cannibal Galaxy. I did the Jewish quarter of Paris from knowing a little bit what the old East Side was like in New York—and basically from maps and guide books. When I did the Marais in Paris, I did that with a map and a guidebook. When I did the inside of the Musée Carnavalet, I did that also from a guidebook. I guess it's as Tolstoy said: if you've seen a street battle, you can visualize a war. And which writer said—I don't know if it was Tolstoy also—somebody said that if you're walking by a doorway and you see a domestic scene, it's enough. And then, from your own experience and your own life, because of the universality of the substratum of civilization, you can extrapolate. So, eight days is more than enough. I wrote a story, the one called “Rosa,” which is about Florida, and people have said, Well, you must know Miami very well. I was there one night, and I've never been back. One night. I stayed in a hotel, and left early the next morning. So, it was not 24 hours, it was maybe eight hours. And also the story “At Fumicaro,” about Bellagio—that was also eight days. But that was deep saturation into the lake, the mountains … How much time do you need for intensity to give an experience? Intensity is by definition so antenna-like …

But you've got to have what James calls “the painter's eye.”

Yes, right. I don't know whether it's the eye, or some kind of … the pores get open, the pores in the eye, the pores in the fingertips, the ears—everything. It isn't only the eye. It's the whole being. Particularly when you are in a foreign place, when you're open to experience. Then you become like a child. It won't necessarily happen in your home terrain. But just lift the writer out and put him in another city, particularly in another language—and you're shut off, and then you have to use all the other senses aside from the one that comes to you from cognition. Then all the a-cognitive, or in a way anti-cognitive, senses come into play.

That's very true. Why did you dedicate the book to Philip Roth?

The book is dedicated to Philip Roth not because of The Ghost Writer, which was pointed out to me by my English publisher (and then I saw it immediately), but because if not for Philip Roth, I would not have been introduced to Bruno Schultz. It was through his introducing Schultz into America through translation that I came to Bruno Schultz. I wouldn't have known that he existed, without Philip Roth. Then, later on, Philip Roth was kind enough to give me some at that time unpublished manuscript letters, which have since been published. But Roth had sent them about three or four years in advance, he had them in his possession, and he xeroxed them and gave them to me, and I was able to integrate them into …

In translation?

In English translation, right. So, how could I not dedicate it to him? Of course I wrote him a letter and told him I wanted to do it, but only with his permission, because if you dedicate a book to a very famous writer, there is a little problem of seeming to ride on his coattails, and I did not want to do that. I worried about that, and I wrote to him and asked him. I said that if this was going to be a problem, if he resented it, he didn't like it, I did not want to impose on him. I was very tentative in asking him. To my surprise and delight, sight unseen, without even reading it, he said, Go ahead and do it. So I was grateful.

The chapter in which you give a synopsis of Schultz's “manuscript” is an impressive tour de force. Did you immerse yourself in Bruno Schultz's writings at that time? How did you create somebody else's lost manuscript?

Yes. I appreciate that question, because that was a moment of crisis for me. The question came to me as I approached that point: Lars is going to open the manuscript and read it—what can I do? How can I possibly attempt—even if it's forged—to reproduce something that's going to look like a Schultz's manuscript? And I absolutely gave a rational answer: No, I won't attempt it. Technically, it would be beyond me—and I'm not too sure whether it would work in an arrogant way, anyhow, to interrupt by showing the manuscript. Besides, I can't do it. So I decided not to do it. It came at night, deep into the night, when against my desire, against my will, against my belief in its possibility, and certainly against any rational sense that that was what should be done, suddenly I began to write it. I did not immerse myself into Schultz at all. In fact, from the beginning to the end I kept as far away as possible from Schultz's writing. I never went near it. What I did was to struggle to find as much biographical matter as I could about Schultz, which at that point was one paragraph in one of the two paperback Schultz volumes that were available, Sanitorium under the Sign of the Hourglass and The Street of Crocodiles. Each of those books, or one of them, I don't recall now, had a small paragraph which I read again and again and again. I had no information on Schultz's biography. I went finally to a man, a Polish Jew who is a master of Polish literature, and he gave me a translation which his daughter did for me of part of Ficowski's biographical matter—I would say, about four pages. That helped some more. I got some views on it, I learned about the marriage to Josephine—the marriage that didn't come off. So I had very, very little biographical material. That I read obsessively again and again, and I squeezed what I could from it. But the text of the novels themselves, of the fictions themselves, nothing for a year.

But you had read them before?

Oh yes.

It seems to me that Schultz's prose is so catching. In a sense, it's like Henry James's prose: the moment you start reading him, you get that kind of rhythm …

But it's less catching than Henry James, I think, because it is so dense that I don't think that anybody … And I didn't pull it off, actually. I didn't. That's not Schultz.

True, it's not Schultz. But …

I just must tell you this. It was a kind of surprise, a kind of rapturous, mystical surprise, because I did that in one night, in a very slow writing. I did that whole section in one night, without knowing what I was doing. Without knowing where it was coming from, or what it meant. Later, with the rational side of the brain, I think I understood—or at least, I made an interpretation. But what it meant at the time, I have no idea. I had no idea.

You mean, the whole thing about the “Messiah,” the big flying machine—all that came to you as a …

… as a vision, one night. I haven't had that experience for a while.

Had you ever had a similar experience before?

Recently, in a new thing I've just finished, I did. A scene, one scene, which came to me as if it were a bird to the hand, given, wholly given …

But that was the first time.

The first time that ever happened? No. I think that happens very often. Not very often, but it's given to writers, to have it on occasion. No, that was not the first time for that kind of visionary flash … That's when writing really takes off and becomes magic, beyond the writer—when the writer feels like a vessel for something that somebody else is writing.

You have had that feeling?

Yes. Not often. Most of it, I mean ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent is drudgery, and no faith in it—and loathing it. Yes. But that night I didn't loath it. I wasn't loving it either, I was neither loving nor loathing, I was simply taking dictation. Not from Schultz. Because I knew it wasn't Schultz.

How did you know it wasn't Schultz?

Because I knew it wasn't Schultz. I also knew that it might not be Schultz: if this is a forged manuscript, I mustn't for a moment think that I'm getting dictation from Schultz. So what am I taking dictation from?

Schultz might have been playing …

Might have been playing? But I didn't feel it was Schultz that was dictating. I felt that it was perhaps the voice of the story, speaking in its own voice, without my having to manufacture it, or fabricate it. There was no fabrication, and that's the voice of the story. Once in a while there flies into the writer's head or hand such a moment when the narrative speaks out its organic and, in a way, orgasmic soul. That's when the prose writer is indistinguishable from the poetry writer. Actually, my feeling about prose is that it must be written as if it were poetry. I won't make a distinction—oh, surely, in terms of rhythm, in terms of genre, you must make a distinction. But the type of craft, the type of power, the type of passion, is the same.

The source …

The source. And some of the instruments.

But let me move on to another question or two.

Actually, I think you covered the very large ones.

Maybe I could just attach this tape machine to you for twenty-four hours …

Like one of those heart monitors you walk around with …

That's right. I would be the richer for it. I have one more question: why does Adela have a child, at the end? I have my own little theory about it, but I'd like to hear you on this.

An interesting question. I don't know. Why does she?

Are you asking me?

Yes. Since you have the answer. I don't.

Oh, I don't have the answer. I just have a theory.

Yes. What's the theory?

Well. Since Lars—Larsh … ?

That's the way the Swedes say it. But we wouldn't say it that way.

O.K., we'll say Lars. When Adela goes to him with her final “truth,” in the eyes of one so conspicuously childless as Lars is, the fact that she has her child with her lends her authority. He is forced to feel that her experience is far wider and more complex than his is. This is my little theory. Any truth in it?

It's wonderful. I think that's an excellent solution to that. I suppose the reason I did it is that Lars is childless, yes, but he is also the subject of this novel as a child, as a son. So there is the resonance of the child, even at the end. The book starts with the image of Lars as the child of Bruno Schultz, the child of a maybe-father and an unknown mother, and so I ended it with a child to send out the continuing resonance of the image of the child—the son of, the son of, the son of … And since Adela herself is the daughter of—first the make-believe daughter of Bruno Schultz, and then the daughter of Doctor Eklund, so there are two generations at all points. But when you are talking about the authenticity of her status, you mean her reality in the world out there?

No, I simply feel that to him, although he resents the child (and he resents the child because he resents her), for a man so obviously childless, to be confronted by a woman who has a child, who has kept him, has managed to keep him, would mean a greater grip on reality than he has …

Yes. I think that's right.

… and, therefore, would create a greater …

… belief in her story.

Well, a greater possibility of authenticity, of authority. That was my feeling.

Yes, that's true. That's wonderful. It sounds right to me. I accept your theory.

One other thing I'd like to ask you. Why the ellipsis between when Lars leaves his foster home, and when he has already adopted Bruno Schultz as a father? For some reason you didn't investigate …

… the time in between.

No, just when he appropriated Schultz as a father. Why that ellipsis?

Because I didn't want to give a detailed biography, chronologically, of how this person came to be. I wanted to show his appearance.

A kind of parthenogenesis.

Excuse me? Oh, yes, of course. It is a parthenogenesis, that's right—he does give birth to himself. And this kind of thing you can't really show. It's a psychological magic moment. One can't do without facts. So Lars is brought in in an ambiguous way. It's a saintly act to rescue a child. It was also a mercenary act, because the person did get paid for it. So in a sense his real birth into Sweden is ambiguous, this way. Then his rescuers are also ambiguous: they have rescued him, they are bringing him up, and yet he doesn't fit in that family. They don't like him. And so he runs away to make himself. At that point I skipped, because the moment of the making was implicit—in fact, you see him making himself into his father's son every time he writes a review and he goes under the quilt, and that self-creation occurs. What we don't see is the first time, and how he came to it. But, in fact, we see it repetitively again and again, because every time he goes under the quilt, it's like an undersea thing—it's an amniotic fluid that he enters …

And the egg.

Precisely—the egg. It's an amniotic fluid that he enters, and he comes up reborn, freshly born into the son of Bruno Schultz, into Bruno Schultz's genes. So I didn't think it was necessary to show the first time, as long as I have it there. It would have been perhaps … from sixteen when he left—I think I did give some facts, I don't remember exactly—I said he worked in a newspaper, he worked his way up, and so on. So it's interesting that the end is not too different from the beginning, because he began in a rather mediocre way, on a newspaper, and he ends at the top, but in a mediocre way. In his beginning is his end.

Is there any possibility that Dr. Eklund was the one who brought him in?

I don't think so. I think Dr. Eklund himself is a Jewish refugee from wherever. Heidi also is a Jewish refugee who is pretending not to be. Actually, in Stockholm I met a man who was a bookseller—I saw that store, which was not as shadowy as Heidi's but I did see that store, and I saw the man who ran it, a man from Germany who claimed he was a German who didn't want to live in Germany, that he was anti-Hitler and he'd come to live up there. He also had a wall of Judaica, which he was interested in; but he absolutely denied any Jewish identity. And that was Heidi, that became Heidi. Now my friends who guided me said, No, no, this man is not a Jewish refugee, he's only a German who wanted to get out of Germany. He didn't want to live there under Hitler.

But you felt that he was a Jew.

My suspicion was that he was a hidden Jew. And I think the same of Heidi. Of course I have given so many clues—when Heidi says she threw food over the fence, but she sounds like she knew too much.

Why would she have hidden her Jewish identity?

Well, because it's dangerous, and one becomes afraid. In the century of Hitler where Jews hid themselves and hid themselves, some remain hidden and cannot return to the ordinary … Yes, out of the habit of fear. Where you're afraid to disclose your identity. Also, you want to escape it, because you want very much to enter the world of freedom, where you can assume another identity and not return to this chosenness which, in this, in that part of the century meant victimization. So I think this may be true of Heidi.

I have asked you a lot of questions. Now I have to tell you that I enjoyed translating the book tremendously.

Well, I have to tell you how grateful I was. … I'll let you finish your remarks, but I have to tell you now, so urgently. As we are sitting here doing this, I realize these questions are not coming from the outside. It's as if they were coming from the inside of my head—and that's because, who knows the book better than the translator? You know it better than the writer.

No, no …

I mean, I've translated, and I know that in order to do it well you must enter the soul of the words, every single one. You become the writer—I mean, I feel there are two of us: there's me, and there's you, who's also me, insofar as you've translated it.

I wish that were true! Well, I must say that it was probably the most difficult translation I ever did. Almost more difficult than Call It Sleep.

The translator of Roth says this?

Yes. I think it was more difficult. I participated in the book in a way I've seldom done.

I've had such translators, including one in Germany: I've been told by people I trust. And one of the French translators was like that. Actually, I met the two French translators, and one I knew had an imagination and a sense of language. The other was dealing with inert matter: it was a question of moving one block of inert matter to another.

The reference to blocks somehow makes me think of size, length, and so I ask: In your fiction, do you have an ideal length in mind when you start something new?

I could never write a big book again, because of the one which took so long. It drained me out. I'll never write another huge book again. Never again.

So you write shorter narratives.

It's not by choice. I can't seem to write a short story. Again, what I just finished was supposed to be a short story, not a novel—and it's a short novel. Actually, it's a story about George Eliot, George Lewes and Johnny Cross. Johnny Cross was the man twenty years younger that she married after George Lewes—which was never a marriage, because he died; and then she married the man twenty years younger. And then they went on a honeymoon to Venice, and in the middle of the honeymoon—they had a hotel on the Grand Canal—he jumped out of the window, and he had to swim in the Grand Canal, and the gondoliers saved him. And nobody knows anything else about it. So this is part of my story.

You mean, nobody knows why he did it, or nobody knows what happened afterwards?

They know what he did, they know what happened afterwards, but nobody knows why on his honeymoon with the great George Eliot as his wife—she was sixty, he was forty—when it came to the moment of the honeymoon, out the window he went. That was the scene.

Maybe she dumped him.

No she didn't. She screamed, she shrieked for help. She shrieked down at the gondoliers, Save him, save him! That's the scene that came to me. That scene gave me real pleasure. I didn't write that: that scene was given to me. Nobody knows what happened, but now I know what happened, because I made it happen!

Is this going to be published as a volume?

No, it's going to be published in the New Yorker.¹ And I'm under some pressure this week, as I told you, because I am waiting to hear from the editor who is thinking about cutting it. I haven't heard yet, and maybe tomorrow will be the day. I have appealed to him not to, because everything in there has resonances. It's so woven that I feel that to pull one thing out, the whole fabric would disintegrate …

How do you feel about editors, and their role in the preparation of a book?

It seems to me that the voice of the writer includes the flaws, includes the idiosyncrasies. You can make a wonderful case about Anna Karenina. Take out those essay-like chapters: what do they add?

Can you imagine if anybody had edited Moby Dick?

Exactly! An editor must allow failure in a writer, must allow flaw, must allow all those things that come under the category of personality, character, idiosyncrasy. If it weren't finger-printed, if it came out of the cookie cutter, then you wouldn't know how to shape it. I think there are some writers that are cookie cutters—in fact that's not even the image. I think of them as coming off big, big bolts of yard goods—you know, long, long bolts of cloth, and you go like this with the scissors, and that's one novel, and then along comes the next, you are on the assembly line. And I think theirs is a pedestrian prose. It's interchangeable.

Without naming names.

Without naming names. You don't have to name names—it's all over the world like that. And so, that kind of yard-goods-prose an editor is permitted to fiddle with, but not when it's a finger-print. Not when the writer is utterly deliberate about every syllable, every comma. I really regard punctuation as part of … You can't separate punctuation from the resonance of the words and the prose. A comma sometimes has more weight than a word—it's its breathing. Copy editors come with the rule book, and they start making order out of your punctuation. I want to kill them. I hate copy editors with such a passion—I think they are a breed that you need an Ayatollah for!

I understand that in England it isn't like that. In England—maybe it's changed now, but as I've been told, while here we have a scourge of copy editors, in England either you are a writer who is literate, or you're not published. Here, illiterates are published because there are copy editors who fix it up. But I don't want to be in a class with those. I know what I'm doing. I am literate.

But so far, you've won. You have won the right to do what you want, haven't you?

Yes. Yes. Copy editors are by and large not literate anyway.

Well, often they are failed writers themselves, right? Why would they take the job?

I don't think they are failed writers. I think they are kids out of school, looking for a job in publishing. And I don't think most of them are literate anymore. Because they don't know the difference between “o” as an evocative and “oh” as an ejaculation—I mean, simple things like that. They put commas where they don't belong, they don't know the meaning of words. They have taken my spellings and misspelled. They have taken my syntax and put in bad grammar, thinking they're correcting. Some are better than others, but I have seen depredations with copy editors. Jacques Barzun, retired Professor Emeritus of Intellectual History at Columbia, did a paper on the illiteracy of copy editors. It was published in the American Scholar. It was a great piece. Thank you for letting me get that off my chest!

Note

1. The story appeared in The New Yorker, October 8, 1990, with the title “Puttermesser Paired.”