The Elegant Variation

GUEST ESSAY: REVISIONING "THE GREAT GATSBY" (IV)

Herewith, the conclusion of Susan Bell's marvelous essay "Revisioning The Great Gatsby," which can be found, along with a number of other superb essays on craft, in The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House, and is reprinted here courtesy of Bell and Tin House.  Bell is the author of The Artful Edit and a considerably expanded version of this essay can also be found in her book.

Perkins’s influence was more or less limited to the macro-edit. Unlike his editing of Thomas Wolfe’s work, Perkins didn’t mark up Fitzgerald’s text word for word, didn’t roll up his shirtsleeves, dig in, and reposition the prose. The micro-edits of Gatsby were a solitary endeavor. Fitzgerald was a prose techie who could not merely polish but power up a weak passage, raise the ram of a slow sentence. Take this early one: “The part of his life he told me about began when he was sixteen, when the popular songs of those days began to assume for him a melancholy and romantic beauty.” This sentence may seem all right, but I dare any reader to argue its elegance or gravity. Fitzgerald would delete it altogether. In its place, he wrote:

It was this night that he told me the strange story of his youth with Dan Cody—told it to me because “Jay Gatsby” had broken up like glass against Tom’s hard malice, and the long secret extravaganza was played out.

Fitzgerald was driven to edit a sentence silly until it punched.

Inclined to clarity when he wrote, Fitzgerald’s first forays onto the page were at times—as for most mortal writers—blurred with ambiguity. As Somerset Maugham writes in The Summing Up:

[A cause] of obscurity is that the writer is himself not quite sure of his meaning. He has a vague impression of what he wants to say, but has not . . . exactly formulated it in his mind, and it is natural enough that he should not find a precise expression for a confused idea.

Sure enough, Fitzgerald seems unclear of his meaning in an early draft of the crucial scene at the Plaza Hotel. As Nick listens to Daisy, Tom, and Gatsby bicker, he tells the reader:

I was thirty. Beside that realization their importunities were dim and far away. Before me stretched the portentous menacing road of a new decade.

A few paragraphs later, as he rides home with Jordan in a taxi, Nick adds:

I was thirty—a decade of loneliness opened up suddenly before me and what had hovered between us was said at last in the pressure of a hand.

Nick’s thoughts are opaque. A threat looms, but he does not say what it is. Fitzgerald is trying to conjure up the narrator, reveal his deepest concerns, but Nick remains hazy. The writer blankets the insufficiency with three multisyllabic words—realization, importunities, portentous—that sound smart and say little.

Now look at the final version of this same passage, after Fitzgerald dramatically reworked it:

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

That’s all. He deleted the rest of the paragraph to aim at one point. In the next paragraph, Nick is in the taxi as before, but this time Fitzgerald picks up the line he had held back—the undefined threat—and casts it:

Thirty—the promise of a decade of loneliness, the thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair. But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age. As we passed over the dark bridge her wan face fell lazily against my coat’s shoulder and the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.

Fitzgerald took a couple of wordy, imprecise sentences and transformed them into a limpid exposé of a single idea: the loss of youth. The danger of turning thirty is defined: “the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm, thinning hair.” The theme of aging underscores the character descriptions and is not a coarse intellectual aside: “But there was Jordan beside me, who, unlike Daisy, was too wise ever to carry well-forgotten dreams from age to age.” The final sentence was a detached commentary on a detached relationship; now it is a commitment to human tenderness, however flawed: “the formidable stroke of thirty died away with the reassuring pressure of her hand.” By changing “a hand” to “her hand,” Fitzgerald created a truer intimacy that offers the poignant conclusion that human affection alone can compensate for the indignities of growing old.

Fitzgerald, Berg writes, “is generally regarded as having been his own best editor, as having had the patience and objectivity to read his words over and over again, eliminating flaws and perfecting his prose.” But The Great Gatsby would be a different book, and very possibly a lesser one, without Perkins’s counsel. Many consider editing as either the correction of punctuation (copyediting) or the overhaul of a book such as Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel. The editing of The Great Gatsby sits between these extremes—a testimony to a writer’s discipline to edit himself and his wisdom to let himself be edited by someone worthy: that is how he crossed the gulf.

(Return tomorrow when we'll be giving away a copy of The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House.)

GUEST ESSAY: REVISIONING "THE GREAT GATSBY" (III)

Herewith, Part Three of Susan Bell's essay "Revisioning The Great Gatsby," which can be found in The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House, and is reprinted here courtest of Bell and Tin House.  Bell is the author of The Artful Edit.

Fitzgerald edited his way out of this clump once Perkins pointed it out to him. He broke up the thick block of data into smaller pieces he judiciously distributed throughout the text and enmeshed in the dialogue and drama. The improvement can be seen in the confrontation between Gatsby and Tom. In the manuscript, this scene carried no reference to Gatsby’s Oxford claim or his army career; in the revised proof, Fitzgerald fully explains and seamlessly weaves the Oxford and army stories into the drama. The final version reads:

Gatsby’s foot beat a short restless tattoo and Tom eyed him suddenly.

“By the way, Mr. Gatsby, I understand you’re an Oxford man.”

“Not exactly.”

“Oh, yes, I understand you went to Oxford.”

“Yes—I went there.”

A pause. Then Tom’s voice, incredulous and insulting:

“You must have gone there about the time Biloxi [a poseur who’d falsely claimed he’d gone to Yale] went to New Haven.”

Another pause. A waiter knocked and came in with crushed mint and ice, but the silence was unbroken by his “thank you” and the soft closing of the door. This tremendous detail was to be cleared up at last.

“I told you I went there.”

“I heard you, but I’d like to know when.”

“It was in nineteen-nineteen. I only stayed five months. That’s why I can’t really call myself an Oxford man.”

Tom glanced around to see if we mirrored his unbelief. But we were all looking at Gatsby.

“It was an opportunity they gave to some of the officers after the Armistice,” he continued. “We could go to any of the universities in England or France.”

I wanted to get up and slap him on the back. I had one of those renewals of complete faith in him that I’d experienced before.

The editor had helped the writer reconceive the information as dramatic.

Fitzgerald obliged his editor with no hint of defensiveness or anger. The writer had gone very far on his own with Gatsby and was ready for the last editorial push—one he freely admitted he was incapable of envisioning alone. He wrote to Perkins, “Max, it amuses me when praise comes in on the ‘structure’ of the book—because it was you who fixed up the structure, not me. And don’t think I’m not grateful for all that sane and helpful advice about it.” In fact, it was Fitzgerald who did the fixing, but the writer needed his editor to point the way and was not embarrassed to say it.

It helped to have an editor as astute and courtly as Perkins and one who knew how to balance general commentary with specific suggestions. It was Perkins who pointed out the importance of the character-defining phrase “old sport,” when in a letter he wrote: “Couldn’t you add one or two characteristics like the use of that phrase ‘old sport’?” Fitzgerald had used the phrase only four times; now he ran with it. In the revised proof, Jay Gatsby says “old sport” incessantly and through it displays an absurd yet endearing self-consciousness. The phrase eventually becomes a spoil of war for Tom and Gatsby:

“That’s a great expression of yours, isn’t it?” said Tom sharply.

“What is?”

“All this ‘old sport’ business. Where’d you pick it up?”

And a few pages later, Tom shouts, “Don’t you call me ‘old sport’!” Fitzgerald, then, edited an ornamental detail so that even as it remained ornamental, it would matter. “Old Sport” had been a cute effect: now it was Gatsby’s weapon, armor, and Achilles’ heel in one.

(Essay concludes tomorrow.)

GUEST ESSAY: REVISIONING "THE GREAT GATSBY" (II)

Herewith, Part Two of Susan Bell's essay "Revisioning The Great Gatsby," which can be found in The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House, and is reprinted here courtest of Bell and Tin House.  Bell is the author of The Artful Edit.

Besides research, the writer used visual imagery to flush out his hero. Fitzgerald’s wife Zelda’s drawings of Gatsby must have made Gatsby more tangible, because after spending time with them the author added several superb physical descriptions. Among them: “His tanned skin was drawn attractively tight on his face and his short hair looked as though it were trimmed every day.” This is a good deal better than the original, ultimately (and thankfully) excised description of Gatsby, which is chock-full of generic adjectives and adverbs: “He was undoubtedly one of the handsomest men I had ever seen—the dark blue eyes opening out into lashes of shiny jet were arresting and unforgettable.” Finally, after the Perkins critique, the Fuller research, and Zelda’s drawings, Fitzgerald came up with this description of Gatsby’s smile:

[Gatsby] smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young roughneck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.

Fitzgerald wasn’t satisfied making his hero only more physically palpable. With one smile, he exposes the entire range of Gatsby’s character: the sincerity and generosity of the man who flips unpredictably, tragically into blankness and self-absorption. It is safe to say, then, that Jay Gatsby was not written so much as edited into a physical—and metaphysical—presence.

Gatsby was not the only character that needed work. Unprompted by Perkins, Fitzgerald amplified Daisy by stacking a metaphor of paralysis that betrayed her inability to grow up emotionally. In chapter seven, Nick arrives to find Daisy and her friend Jordan lying on a couch in the excruciating summer heat. Referring to the torpor, the women say only, “We can’t move.” After this scene was written, in galley proofs, Fitzgerald returned to chapter one to thread in a prescient phrase that underscores the one above: on seeing Nick for the first time in years, Daisy says, “I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.” Daisy’s inability to move in chapter seven reverberates with her paralysis from chapter one. The metaphor, begun in the writing, gets built up in the edit.

The Great Gatsby’s problems exceeded the need for character definition. In one section, the manuscript, as Perkins put it, “sagged.” Fitzgerald had sensed a drag in the prose but couldn’t see its cause. Perkins did:

I think you are right in feeling a certain slight sagging in chapters six and seven . . . I thought you might find ways to let the truth of some of [Gatsby’s] claims like “Oxford” and his army career come out bit by bit in the course of the actual narrative.

In giving deliberately Gatsby’s biography when he gives it to the narrator you do depart from the method of the narrative . . . , for otherwise almost everything is told, and beautifully told, in the regular flow of it,—in the succession of events in accompaniment with time.

Perkins diplomatically complained of a common structural flaw: clumping. Fitzgerald had shoved a clump of biographical information into one place. Actors have an expression to describe the mere facts an audience must know to understand the story: they call them the plumbing. “I’m not doing the plumbing,” some will protest, when asked to say a few lines that explain plot or a character’s history but stick out from the action like the proverbial sore thumb. At its best, a book’s pipes are laid into the work so suavely that the reader simply feels them function and never notices their cold, hard nature.

But pipes protruded in the original version of the scene in which Nick visits Gatsby after the fatal car accident. The two men go to the terrace and sit “smoking out into the summer night.” Into this static setting, Gatsby gushes his life story. “Suddenly he was telling me a lot of things,” Nick says. The line is a warning to the reader: be patient, you are about to be hammered with “a lot of” information. Yawn. The historical details of Gatsby’s life are given up in a monotonous drone. He explains his Oxford claim, then recounts his teenage reveries, his subsequent apprenticeship with yachtsman Dan Cody, from which followed his army career, during which he met and fell in love with Daisy Fay, after which he received a letter at Oxford telling him he had lost her to Tom Buchanan. Are you with me?

(Essay continues tomorrow.)

GUEST ESSAY: REVISIONING "THE GREAT GATSBY" (I)

We get all manner of books on writing around here and they tend to blend together but the offerings from Tin House always stand out.  They've just published The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House, which includes terrifically useful essays from the likes of Dorothy Allison. Rick Bass, Aimee Bender, Jim Krusoe, Antonya Nelson and Jim Shepard.  The collection also includes a bonus lecture CD.  But what immediately caught our eye is Susan Bell's terrific essay on revisions, using The Great Gatsby as her example.  Bell is most recently the author of The Artful Edit, which no less a language authority than William Safire called "original" and "helpful."  Bell and Tin House have graciously allowed her essay, "Revisioning The Great Gatsby" to be serialized here this week on four parts, and we'll be giving away a copy of The Writer's Notebook come Friday.

We all know The Great Gatsby. We were forced to read it for high school English. And like most books thrust upon students as another cut in the key that would release them from the prison of formal education, it has an ambiguous luster. We remember we liked it, but we’re not sure if our admiration was sincere or derived from a desire to please the teacher—and get out.

An informal survey of my acquaintances suggests that few adults have read Gatsby lately. When I reread it in the spring of 2002, at the age of forty-three, I hadn’t looked at it in almost thirty years. My early readings of Gatsby had been supplanted by images of Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, film having usurped literature, as Fitzgerald himself predicted it would.

I was reminded of this eminent yet largely ignored novel when I read the biography of Max Perkins, by A. Scott Berg. At the time, I was writing a book on the philosophy and practice of editing, and the legendary Perkins was my touchstone. He and Fitzgerald enjoyed one of history’s most rewarding editor-writer collaborations. Berg gives a fine account of how Perkins and Fitzgerald, together, refined The Great Gatsby. I reread the novel just to see how it matched Berg’s account of its making. It floored me. I hadn’t expected it to be that good. Its every sentence and event feel necessary. Fitzgerald succeeds at the unlikely fusion of ultramodern prose—taut, symbolic, elliptical—and gorgeous lyricism: ornate, fluid descriptions of parties, for example, that rival Tolstoy’s descriptions of war. Finally and heroically, Fitzgerald manages to maintain compassion for a humanity he portrays in the most sinister terms.

My interest was editing, though, not just writing, and the author’s painstaking edit of Gatsby distinguishes it. It is a tour de force of revision. So much so that critics, who rarely mention the edit of a book, commented on the quality of Gatsby’s rewriting, not just its writing, in reviews. For H. L. Mencken, the novel had “a careful and brilliant finish. . . . There is evidence in every line of hard and intelligent effort. . . . The author wrote, tore up, rewrote, tore up again. There are pages so artfully contrived that one can no more imagine improvising them than one can imagine improvising a fugue.” Gilbert Seldes agreed: “The Great Gatsby is a brilliant work, and it is also a sound one; it is carefully written, and vivid; it has structure, and it has life. To all the talents, discipline has been added.” Careful, sound, carefully written, hard effort, wrote and rewrote, artfully contrived not improvised, structure, discipline: all these terms refer, however obliquely, not to the initial act of inspiration, but to editing.

Organization and clarity do not dominate the writing process. At some point, though, a writer must pull coherence from confusion, illuminate what lives in shadow, shade what shines too brightly. Gatsby is the cat’s meow case study of crossing what Michael Ondaatje calls “that seemingly uncrossable gulf between an early draft of a book . . . and a finished product”—in other words, editing.

In autumn 1924, Fitzgerald sent Perkins the Gatsby manuscript. The editor diagnosed its kinks, then wrote a letter of lavish praise and unabashed criticism. “And as for the sheer writing, it is astonishing,” wrote Perkins. “The amount of meaning you get into a sentence, the dimensions and intensity of the impression you make a paragraph carry are most extraordinary.” A crucial problem, though, was the hero’s palpability. Perkins explained:

Among a set of characters marvelously palpable and vital—I would know Tom Buchanan if I met him on the street and would avoid him—Gatsby is somewhat vague. The reader’s eyes can never quite focus upon him, his outlines are dim. Now everything about Gatsby is more or less a mystery, i.e. more or less vague, and this may be somewhat of an artistic intention, but I think it is mistaken.

Gatsby’s vagueness was intentional, according to Fitzgerald’s December 1 reply: “[Gatsby’s] vagueness I can repair by making more pointed—this doesn’t sound good but wait and see. It’ll make him clear.” To make Gatsby too clear would make him too human and unheroic. Fitzgerald wanted to clarify Gatsby’s vagueness, not Gatsby himself. But in a fascinating turnabout, on December 20 the author wrote again, this time to confess that the vagueness was not altogether intentional:

I myself didn’t know what Gatsby looked like or was engaged in & you felt it. If I’d known & kept if from you you’d have been too impressed with my knowledge to protest. This is a complicated idea but I’m sure you’ll understand. But I know now—and as a penalty for not having known first, in other words to make sure I’m going to tell more.

Although Gatsby needed to be enigmatic, his mysteriousness had to suggest something precise behind it, and Fitzgerald had to figure out what that was. He needed to do as good actors do: learn his character’s whole history to show only a small piece of it.

Fitzgerald used two techniques to discover the full expanse of Gatsby’s character: real life models and visual aids. In a letter to Perkins, he wrote:

 . . . after careful searching of the files (of a man’s mind here) for the Fuller case and after having had Zelda draw pictures until her fingers ache I know Gatsby better than I know my own child. . . . Gatsby sticks in my heart. I had him for awhile then lost him & now I know I have him again.

Fitzgerald had modeled Gatsby on his neighbor in Great Neck, Edward Fuller. Fuller was involved in various scams, including fraudulent stock dealing. Gatsby, wrote Fitzgerald, “started as one man I knew [Fuller] and then changed into myself.” When pressed to develop Gatsby further, Fitzgerald went back to the idea of Fuller and set out to learn more about his model’s real-life crimes and attitudes. The old nut goes, “Write what you know,” but often a writer is clearer about what he doesn’t know and must learn about. One easily gets lost in oneself. The detached concentration that research demands may have helped Gatsby come clear in Fitzgerald’s eyes.

(Essay continues tomorrow.)

GUEST ESSAY: DAVID FRANCIS ON THE WRITER'S DILEMMA

We were fortunate enough to read David Francis's excellent new novel, Stray Dog Winter, in manuscript, and we're delighted to have him offer this guest essay on the unexpected problems its success has brought, as he embarks on a series of events in L.A. and New York in support on the book.

If a writer is being nudged by an agent or publisher towards a genre or style that doesn’t feel right, what should the writer do? Listen up carefully, or write what he or she feels is intrinsic? In the old days, when a writer was given the opportunity to gradually build a career, the answer would be more obvious.

Stray Dog Winter, my recent novel, is what you might call an accidental thriller. Set mostly in Cold War Moscow in the early 1980’s, it started out as a strange family story unfolding in Australia, progressed into a literary mystery when the protagonist visited the Soviet Union, then ended up as suspense. Sold in Frankfurt to Australian and American publishers simultaneously, they each encouraged “upping of the suspense factor” so I went back in and re-inhabited it, jettisoned anything that didn’t propel the narrative intensity. The result is an unusual type of thriller – it has been compared to Graham Greene and yet it moves more quickly through time and space, threaded, still, with a faraway back story. Now that it’s out in the world, my agent reminds often of my new niche. “You do suspense so well,” she says, wanting more. More of the same characters even, innocents abroad but less innocent now.

So here I am starting something new – it has a motor and a certain confluence, but it’s not related to Stray Dog Winter and, so far, isn’t exactly paced like a thriller. It’s literary; a story that begins, as mine seem to, in Australia. Someone comes to visit. And I’m really into it, yet in my head my agent’s counsel speaks up. “You’re garnering a particular following.” But I don’t know how to write a thriller on purpose. I’m not the sort that comes up with some “idea” to pitch, all plotty and thrillery. That’s not me.

So, maybe I have no choice. I will allow a new story to unfold organically, see what the pages reveal. I’ll honor that desire to lay out the lines of words as they appear, as Annie Dillard suggests, securing a sentence before building on it, allowing it to grow "cell to cell, bole to bough to twig to leaf; any careful word may suggest a route, may begin a strand of metaphor or event out of which much, or all, will develop." That still feels right to me, to let it be what it becomes. Robert Olen Butler talks about "dreaming around your novel," allowing it to well up from within you, meditate on it until you see it all the way through, then write. While I don’t quite have that resolve, I can say that Stray Dog Winter unfolded from a dream that emerged from a memory.

I finished my first novel, The Great Inland Sea, and was in Paris on a fellowship from the Australian Literature Fund. There, in my studio bed, I dreamt that a wayward aunt had a fling with my father and then went away, secretly bearing his daughter. I woke and wrote long-hand about this boy, Darcy. An aunt he'd only seen in photos arrives in a taxi with a young girl named Finola who transpires to be his half-sister. The girl is dumped on the drive unannounced as the aunt disappears, back towards the city. Scenes of these two began to unfold, of them together in Australia and then separated when the girl is banished to boarding school. Reunited at university, they rekindle their strange consanguinity, an interest in art and radical politics, and each other. Then, in 1984, Fin unexpectedly receives a fellowship to paint the industrial landscapes of Soviet Moscow. Darcy, the real artist, suspicious of her disappearance, gets a call from Moscow: She pleads for him to join her there, to paint. I imagined Darcy traveling from Prague on a train into the Soviet Union (a trip I'd made in the early '80s), and the story of these two in an alien winter became real, each chapter building on the last, "bole to bough to twig to leaf," until their lust and proclivities revealed them in ways and in places I'd never have imagined had I been a writer who structures a novel more consciously.

So I’m setting out, as so many of us do, on fresh unchartered ground, trying to stay true to my instinct – to write from some emotional truth, not a formula or bright, contrived idea. In this era of publishing, those smarter than I (like my agent) might say it’s self-sabotage, but unless I feel a hunger for the narrative as it’s appearing and hold to John Gardner’s notion of the “vivid, continuous dream,” it won’t ring true. Not for me. I need to seek the emotional landscape from where scenes rise up out of the well, because if I don’t it will all turn plain before me. If I don’t fall in love with it, the reader won’t either. So I’ll write what I see and feel, what I care about, with as much attention to story and rhythm and detail and language as I can muster. I will not avert my eyes. For all I know, I’ll have a thriller on my hands.

David Francis is the author of The Great Inland Sea and Stray Dog Winter, 2008 LAMBDA fiction finalist.

www.straydogwinter.com

Monday, May 4, 2009 (7:00 pm - 8:00 pm)
A Conversation With Australian Authors David Francis & Brian Castro
Sponsored by the American Australian Association
Book Soup
8818 Sunset Blvd.
West Hollywood, CA 90069
www.americanaustralian.org

Tuesday, May 12, 2009 (7:00 pm)
Event and Reading for LAMBDA Literary Award Finalists David Francis, Chris Freeman; John Morgan Wilson
SKYLIGHT BOOKS
1818 N. Vermont Avenue
Los Feliz
www.lambdaliterary.org

Thursday, May 28, 2009 (7:00 pm NEW YORK)
The 21st Annual Lambda Literary Awards
Proshansky Auditorium
CUNY Graduate Center
Fifth Avenue at 34th Street
New York, NY 10016
www.lambdaliterary.org/awards

Tuesday, June 2, 2009 (6:00 pm NEW YORK)
David Francis Reading and Reception at the Australian Consulate in New York
150 E 42nd St New York, NY 10017
www.australianyc.org (invitation only – email for info)

TOUSSAINT'S TRANSLATORS

In the new LA Weekly, FOTEV Jim Ruland takes a look at a pair of novels by Jean-Philippe Toussaint. Regular readers will remember his review of Monsieur on Bloomsday of last year. He continues his obsession with all things Toussaint by tracking down some of his translators.

JORDAN STUMP translated La Télévision (Minuit, 1997); it was published as Television by Dalkey Archive in 2004.

PAUL DE ANGELIS co-translated La Salle de bain (Minuit, 1985) with Nancy Amphoux; it was published as The Bathroom first by Obelisk / E. P. Dutton in 1990 and then by Dalkey Archive in November of 2008.

MATTHEW B. SMITH translated L'Appareil-photo (Minuit, 1989); it was published as Camera by Dalkey Archive late last year. Smith is also translating Fuir (Minuit, 2005), which will be published as Running Away by Dalkey Archive in the fall of 2009.

TEV: What is it about Toussaint’s style that sets him apart from other minimalists?

STUMP: It’s hard to answer because (no matter what anyone may say) I’m not convinced he is a minimalist. I’d call him more laconic than minimalist. If I had to make a comparison, I guess I’d say he has a more tender gaze than most minimalists.

DE ANGELIS: I was attracted to him because he was so clearly in the French tradition from Beckett to Robbe-Grillet but was so clearly contemporary (at the time). He took Robbe-Grillet’s and Butor’s chosisme and turned it on its head. He was funny.

SMITH: I don’t know who the other minimalists are nor am I sure if I know what minimalist actually means. Although the word is attractive, I think it can be somewhat misleading. That is not to say that minimalism isn’t somehow at work in his writing, but I am hesitant to say that it characterizes his work as a whole. His sentences can sometimes be exceedingly long and his descriptions are often far from bare. In fact, it is not unusual for an extra adjective, which may be in its right place in the French but dangling awkwardly in the English, to be suppressed in the translation. And, in terms of plot, there is actually a lot going on. In Camera, the narrator travels to Milan and London; he goes on an adventure through Paris; he steals a camera; he falls in love. These are all big events. It’s just that they are handled in an offhand way. As is often pointed out, narrative focus and attention are given to the insignificant, the banal, the infra-ordinary. But I guess that if it’s this last point that makes him a minimalist, then I’d have to agree.

TEV: Is Toussaint a comic novelist?

STUMP: Yes, of a melancholy kind, and again of a very laconic kind. And his humor often gives way, particularly in the later novels, to a kind of disorientingly sincere emotion. He doesn’t crack jokes (usually); he gives us situations, ordinary or otherwise, that are looked at with a certain quizzical distance. Humor is never the point of his books, but it’s always there.

DE ANGELIS: No question about it, in the tradition of Calvino, I’d say.

SMITH: Definitely. This is one of the main reasons I wanted to translate his work. I think it’s also what sets him apart from other writers. Toussaint uses a certain type of situational humor whose operating principle is actually quite simple. It consists of relating a comic act or absurd situation--such as a man shaving in a public space as in Camera--in a markedly flat and unassuming way. Although it sounds simple, I think to actually pull it off and make it funny takes a tremendous amount of skill. After reading and rereading Toussaint, it still remains somewhat of a mystery to me how he makes it seem so effortless.

TEV: Is Toussaint’s writing difficult or challenging to translate?

STUMP: Very, very difficult. You don’t want it to be flat, you don’t want it to be poetic; you don’t want it to be breezy, you don’t want it to be stuffy, you don’t want it to be too oral-sounding, you don’t want it to be too written-sounding. It has to be balanced right between all those things, and that’s a terrifically difficult feat to pull off.

DE ANGELIS: Yes and no. There’s an off-handed quality to the voice that needs to be captured that would be utterly destroyed by any bit of translatese. Yet it’s essential to be really loyal to the original, because every word counts and the entire book is about subtleties. I was the acquiring editor of the book and hired Nancy Amphoux, who’d worked on a lot of other translations for me. The first translation she finished didn’t get the voice right, so we worked intensely together to rework it and she insisted I get co-translation credit.

SMITH: Yes, but maybe no more so than any other writer. He’s the first and only writer I’ve translated so far so I have no basis for comparison.

TEV: What is Toussaint’s greatest strength?

STUMP: Hard to name one. I guess I’d say his vagueness: you’re never quite sure what you’re supposed to do with one of his books. Miraculously, he’s managed to write eight novels without ever falling into the trap of predictability; I still pick up his books knowing I’m not going to know what to think of it right away.

DE ANGELIS: I think he’s really truthful about the narrow nature of life among the Western elite during the 1980s.

SMITH: There are many stylistic features I really appreciate. I think his use of dialogue, which is highly infrequent, is amazing. It is often nothing more than two people saying very little or repeating the same word to each other. There’s a great little exchange between the narrator and his driving instructor in Camera in which, together in a small brasserie with nothing to talk about, the only topic of conversation they find is provided by a beer logo from a coaster on the table:

Tuborg, he’d remark, nodding his head lost in thought. Yep, I’d say, Tuborg. I’d then find it appropriate to bring up other beers that were served on tap at the brasserie. He’d sit unresponsive, putting his coaster on its side and balancing it with his finger. A Danish beer, I’d say, Tuborg’s Danish. He knew that, and would nod his head to express that he knew it. I knew that, he’d say. Yep, a Danish beer, and, sighing, he’d take a small sip of his espresso.

I also think that his use of spacing is striking. This is best seen in The Bathroom where each paragraph is numbered and framed by white space. This numerical ordering of discreet micro-segments of text is one of the many ways in which Toussaint gives significance to the trivial: no matter what a two or three-sentenced paragraph has to say, its privileged status as an autonomous, numbered paragraph already qualifies it as important and necessary.

TEV: What would you like readers discovering Toussaint’s work in English for the first time to know about his work in the original French?

STUMP: I think it would be useful for American readers to remember that he’s Belgian. I don’t know if I believe there is such a thing as “Belgian humor,” but if there is, Toussaint is a wonderful example of it: self-deprecating, earthy, wry, and reserved.

DE ANGELIS: I don’t think there’s anything so French about the language, but the conceit lies in a clearly French literary/cultural line.

SMITH: Maybe just the simple fact that it is quite common to have a novel of this size in France without considering it a slim novella or an amusing sketch.

TEV: In what ways are these novels that were published 20 years ago still relevant?

STUMP: Oh, they still feel new. And anyway, they weren’t necessarily “relevant” 20 years ago, so nothing’s changed there.

DE ANGELIS: For all the usual reasons that real literature (yes, it does exist) remains relevant, because it talks about the human condition.

SMITH: I’m not sure… Good writing doesn’t age? I don’t know how to answer that question but I think it’s interesting. In an academic setting I’ve been thinking about a way to answer a very similar yet decidedly different question: How are these novels, published only 20 years ago, already worthy of critical attention? For both questions it’s a matter of historical distance: in the first, the risk is that there’s too much, in the second, not yet enough.

TEV: Is there a passage that you are fond of or an anecdote you’d like to share?

STUMP: There are passages from Television that absolutely slay me (106-116), and others that move me (59-62).

DE ANGELIS: The book (The Bathroom) was edited just before I and everyone else in any kind of senior position at E.P. Dutton was fired in one of those typical book publishing purges, on Halloween of 1989. So the book was orphaned and largely abandoned by the new crew that took over. Nancy Amphoux had a recurrence of her cancer and died a year or two later. Still the book has made its way.

SMITH: There are many. I like at the beginning of Camera when the narrator, for no good reason, begins showing Pascale pictures of himself as a kid. Also the moment right after that when, back in the driver’s ed. office the following morning, Pascale asks the narrator if he’d like some tea. He refuses, but then asks for coffee. As Pascale goes to make some for him, he calls out to her “grab some croissants too while you’re up.” I also like the part when the narrator sketches rectangle frames with his finger on the window in the driver’s ed. office to create make-shift photos of the outside world. And many, many more…

The Elegant Variation would like to thank these gentlemen for taking time away from their work. If this has whet you appetite for more Toussaint, read this interview at the Quarterly Conversation. 

GUEST PROFILE: THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY - Part 4

Being the fourth of a four-part profile of Benjamin Black based on an interview that Jim Ruland conducted with the author during a recent visit to Dublin. Read Part One, Part Two and Part Three.

Benjamin Black’s most recent novel, The Lemur, is different from the first two in several respects. It features neither Quirke nor Phoebe nor any of the Dublin gang and is set in contemporary New York. The project was commissioned by the New York Times and it appeared in 1,500-word installments. The prospect of working in a new form – the serial novel – filled Black with giddy revulsion.

“I thought I was going to be writing a piece a week. I was thrilled by that. The challenge of it. I saw myself terrified on a Friday night: I’ve got to have 1,500 words by Monday morning. Of course, being the New York Times, everything had to be finished before they’d publish it.”

For all his disappointment, Black discovered that the rigors of writing on the installment plan, so to speak, had its own rewards. “I would add words and take words away just to get it to exactly 1,500 words. It was a nice challenge to try to do the arc, to know that in 15 sections I would have to finish. That was amusing. I like the technique of writing. Yes, I suppose that would be Black’s strength that he works out of technique.”

The result is the story of a journalist named John Glass who puts his career on hold to write an autobiography about his father-in-law. When the researcher Glass hires (and subsequently nicknames “the Lemur”), to dig into his subject’s past turns up dead (Black has an affinity for naming his novels after the character who spends the bulk of the book as a corpse), Glass is thrust into the role of the reluctant detective.

In terms of atmosphere and mood, The Lemur, a strikingly different novel from its predecessors, but The Lemur is similar to the Quirke books in one very important respect: once his protagonist gets involved in the case all signs point to his own extended family to which he is bound by honor but not blood. The tension between these conflicting forces propels the narrative forward. The stories are whodunits to be sure, but the families to which Glass and Quirke belong are much murkier and more mysterious than any criminal organization that Black could credibly conjure up.

In the Richard Stark novels, Parker is the ultimate outsider, but once he starts planning a caper, his gang functions as a kind of surrogate family. This is something that Quentin Tarantino uses to great effect in his films. In Black’s novels, the opposite holds true: his family is the gang. Unlike Simenon’s novels, in which the author professes not to know where the story is going or how it will end, Stark’s Parker novels are formulaic, technique-driven affairs. It is, perhaps, a limitation of the sub-genre of heist stories and caper flicks. What makes Parker so striking is his seriousness, his complete lack of humor, which is a departure from Donald Westlake’s other books, where he is always going for the joke.

“Stark doesn’t do jokes,” Black says.

Precisely. But what is Mr. Black consciously not doing that Mr. Banville does?

“Banville is obsessed by sentences. Flaubert’s mother said about her son that he threw away his life for a mania for sentences. That’s what we do, you know. If I was asked to say what was the greatest invention of human beings I would say the sentence. I spent three, three-and-a-half hours the other day writing a paragraph. Black couldn’t do that. What you get with Banville is the result of concentration; what you get with Black is the result of spontaneity.”

He pauses, looks at the ceiling. The skylight reveals neither sky nor light, a portal into gloom. It’s still raining, still dark. It is nearly noon. My time is nearly over and neither one of us is sure who is being interviewed: Banville or Black.

“What John Banville writes is disguised poetry. You know, I think of my novels as a long sequence of… sonnets. Really. I can’t write poetry that has ragged ends on the page. My friend John McGahern always said, There’s verse, there’s prose, and then there’s poetry. Poetry can happen in either. Since we’re both novelists we agreed that it happens much more often in prose than it does in verse. But again, one has to be aware that there’s nothing more off-putting than “poetic prose.” You have to achieve a kind of harsh music to make poetic prose real. And the poet I look to constantly for that is Yeats. The older I get the more I read Yeats. His poetry is extraordinary. I keep reading him over and over. That harsh music that he gets is wonderful.”

For the moment, Benjamin Black is on vacation from his writing desk while John Banville finishes a book that he started in 2004—The Sinking City—with many interruptions.

“I’ve got to finish it now because it climbs slowly up, you know the feeling, and it’s got me by the throat, and it’s saying, Finish me, finish me. So that’s an obsession. I think becoming Benjamin Black was a way of doing that because the John Banville book that I’m doing at the moment is very personal. It’s quite different from its predecessors. Well, personal in that I’m the only material that I have. Everyone in the book is me, but it’s not autobiographical except that all fiction is autobiographical, except the autobiographical.”

Banville, Black, whoever it is that sits before me is clearly enjoying these Jekyll & Hyde shenanigans, but I take the bait, and ask him to tell me more about the book.

“It’s set in the countryside in a house, as usual, on a midsummer day. It’s about a family. The father of the family is in a coma and is dying but his mind is working. There is a first person, which is the god Hermes, and when I told my publisher this he said, 'Oh, yes, John, another crowd pleaser.' ”

The hour is over. The author asks if I have any more questions. I close my notebook and ask if he recommends the Joyce Museum at the Martello Tower in Sandycove. Banville frowns.

“It’s worth going to, but don’t expect very much. It’s his walking stick and his waistcoat, his this and his that. But you look at them and they’re just lying there because there’s nobody inside them. Nobody uses them. They’ve become completely inert. There’s no presence. Curiously, when you go to museums and you look at gold amulets from 2,000 years ago, they’re alive, precisely because they’re anonymous. When you see something that somebody actually owned it’s always completely dead because the person who owned it leaves an absence in the object.”

And with that, the author takes his leave. As I gather my belongings, I notice that Mr. Banville has left his hat and umbrella on the cold hearth. Or perhaps they belong to Mr. Black. In any case, they seem anything but inert.

A few days later, I go to the Tower that every reader of Ulysses visits on its opening pages. The Museum is even shabbier than expected, the items on display feel picked over, scavenged. Banville, or maybe it was Black, was right. The place feels dead, funereal, and not even the view from the top of the Tower is enough to lift my spirits.

But before leaving Dublin I dutifully *ahem* stop by McDaid’s for a bit of the water of life. McDaid’s is a whiskey bar and I sampled some twelve-year-old Power’s, a brand that was once more popular than either Jameson’s or Bushmills.

The atmosphere is warm and cheerful and the pub is filled with locals who don’t pay any attention to me. In the back of the bar, on the way to the gents, is a snug where a blokey-looking fellow holds court with an attractive young lady. They are dressed for a night on the town but there is carnality about their affection that suggests they’re still in the grip of last night’s fun.

The man next to me tells an impolite joke I don’t catch but his companions laugh. Someone adds their own bit of wit to the punch line and the laughter expands, convulsive and contagious until the harsh music overtakes the pub, fills it with life. I imagine we are all characters in the next Benjamin Black novel and there’s no other place in the world I want to be.

(Photos by Nuvia Ruland.)

GUEST PROFILE: WHISKEY IN THE JAR - Part 3

Being the third of a four-part profile of Benjamin Black based on an interview that Jim Ruland conducted with the author during a recent visit to Dublin. Read Part One and Part Two.

At the beginning of Benjamin Black’s second novel, The Silver Swan, we find Quirke back in Dublin, but under extraordinary circumstances: after getting riotously drink at his favorite watering hole, “flushed and bulbous and bleary” our hero has decided to give up the drink. Depriving Quirke of his whiskey is akin to sending Popeye into battle without his spinach.

“I just wanted to see what he’d be like when he’s sober," Black admits. "He’s worse than when he’s drunk! I mean he’s such an awful person, Quirke. He’s a horrible person.”

It’s not often that you meet a novelist who holds his protagonist in such low esteem.

“He’s a pretty grim character,” he continues, “but I think he’s real. He’s no Phillip Marlowe. He’s no knight in shining armor. All he has is his curiosity. His unwillingness to let something go, and that’s not a great thing to boast of. So I think he’s nicely awful. That’s what I like about him. He’s cold, he’s selfish. My wife says, He’s just a man!”

Maybe so, but Quirke differs from his countrymen, including his author, in at least one regard...

“I wanted to write about somebody very large and slightly awkward because that would interest me. How a really large person manages the world. Especially this country, where people are quite short.”

Quirke makes his decision to stop drinking in McGonagle’s Pub. When I ask the author if there is a corollary, he admits there is: an old place called McDaid’s on Harry Street, which is just off of Grafton Street, the pedestrian thoroughfare just north of the city center.

McDaid’s is one of Dublin’s oldest drinking establishments and was once Brendan Behan’s local and many of Ireland’s men of letters have spent time there, including Flann O’Brien, J.P. Donleavy and Patrick Kavanagh. Before McDaid's was turned into a public house, the edifice housed a Moravian church and before that, ironically enough, a morgue.

“McDaid’s was the one they all went to cure their hangovers. How they managed to do so much drinking and do all that work…” Black leaves the sentence hanging as he pours more water into his tea.

“I often wonder if they did drink as much as they said they did. Brendan Behan, for instance, was an undiagnosed diabetic. And I suspect that a lot of his problems came from diabetes not from drink. I couldn’t work with a hangover. I can’t do anything with a hangover except sit and feel sorry myself.”

For all Quirke’s flaws, self pity isn’t one of them. Quirke’s sobriety forces him to confront himself, warts and all. Quirke’s institutional past is hinted at in Christine Falls, and while he has a long way to go before he achieves enlightenment, he revisits his humble origins in The Silver Swan. In this respect Quirke is a symbol for the way modern Ireland has been forced to come to terms with its past: church scandals, industrial schools, pedophilia.

“We’ve learned so many horrible secrets about ourselves that that was preying on my mind. And I wanted to give him a past that was shadowed. First of all, to make him an orphan so he wouldn’t know his background because that’s the source of his curiosity, his urge to know, to find out secrets. When he looks back all there is is silence about his earliest background. That was a conscious choice. And I wanted to give him the weight of a dark past.”

The burden of troubled yesterdays drives much of the action in The Silver Swan. Like Christine Falls, it begins with a body and a cover-up. This time an old acquaintance of Quirke’s comes to ask for a favor: he doesn’t want an autopsy performed on his young wife, Deirdre, who turned up on the rocks of Dalkey Island. If such a request seems preposterous, it has less to do with our knowledge of modern science than our lack of understanding of mid-century mores where a mysterious and tragic death by drowning was preferable to an accidental overdose or, even worse, suicide.

Quirke, of course, ignores his friend’s request and delves into the case. He quickly zeroes in on Deirdre’s business partner, a two-bit lothario who draws Quirke’s niece, Phoebe, into his web of deceit. The Silver Swan is superior to Christine Falls largely because Phoebe, one of the former novel’s more cheerful characters, is given her own voice. As a result, not only do we see Quirke in a more nuanced light, Phoebe emerges as a fully rounded character in her own right.

“I’ve become very interested in Phoebe,” Black confesses. “I think she’s a fascinating character. I think the next one I do, whenever I do it, I’m going to feature her quite strongly. My agent insists I’m in love with her. Maybe I am in love with her."

Tomorrow: Through a Glass Darkly  (Photos by Nuvia Ruland.)

GUEST PROFILE: DEAR DIRTY DUBLIN - Part 2

Being the second of a four-part profile of Benjamin Black based on an interview that Jim Ruland conducted with the author during a recent visit to Dublin. Read Part One.

Christine Falls, Benjamin Black’s first foray into existential fiction, is set in Dublin in the 1950s, at the mid-point between modern times and the day that James Joyce made famous. The skies are gray, the alleys dark and foreboding. An atmosphere of economic oppression and Cold War angst hangs over everything, like the smell of gas in a Victorian novel. And then there’s the city's famously lugubrious weather. Dublin means “black pool” and Black gets it exactly right.

“It seems to rain all the time,” the author muses, “and if it’s not raining, it’s foggy. I’ve said this many times in many interviews: if you want to write noir fiction, Dublin in the 1950s is just the place for it.”



I’m reminded of a noir-ish bit of exposition, not from Christine Falls but from Georges Simenon’s The Strangers in the House.

On the first day of January the wet pall of cloud that had hung so long over Moulins had lifted, enabling people to go about their business without hugging the walls and trying to dodge the drips, in a world that was eternally black and white, like a bad charcoal drawing.

This passage perfectly captures the post-War provincialism of northern European cities, particularly the overgrown villages that had the audacity to masquerade as cities by dint of not having been knocked down in the spasms of war. The banal scene is viewed through a phantasmagorical screen, revealing something both seedy and sinister.

“The 1950s is a curiously forgotten time,” Black opines, ”but it was an absolutely fascinating time. Of course, we were under the yoke of an iron ideology. We were told in those days that the Soviet satellite countries, behind the Iron Curtain, they are not free there. We are free. It was only in the ‘90s when we actually did free ourselves that we realized for all those years we were exactly like a Soviet country. The church and state were hand in hand just as the state and party were hand in hand there. And our lives were completely un-free.”



If Dublin’s climate makes it the perfect place for a post-noir novel, Black’s protagonist, Quirke Griffin, is just the man for the times. A criminal pathologist who is more at home in the pubs than he is in the morgue, Quirke is a long-suffering widower who drinks to excess and always seems to be smoking. He is a lumbering giant who prowls the priest-haunted streets of Dublin in an over-sized coat, calling to mind Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op or the mysterious man in the mackintosh who makes several unexplained appearances in Joyce’s Ulysses. The theme of paralysis permeates Joyce’s short story collection Dubliners and culminates with the masterpiece “The Dead”; Black gives us a character who traffics in the deceased and is tasked with prying secrets out of those who are deathly stiff. With one foot rooted in the past and another striding toward modernity, Quirke is a compelling twist on the “hero” as reluctant detective.

 

(James Joyce death mask, via The Modern Word.)

When asked if Quirke’s profession required a great deal of research, the author laughs uproariously.

“Not at all! I asked a pathologist friend of mine about it and when he read the book he said, 'You didn’t take any of my advice. You got everything wrong!' I’ve no interest in research. I think research, heavy research, is death to fiction because you become mesmerized by fact.”

Again, he seems to be channeling Simenon, who held similar views: “I know nothing about the events when I begin the novel,” he said in an interview with the Paris Review over fifty years ago, “I know nothing whatever about the events that will occur later. Otherwise it would not be interesting to me.”

But Christine Falls didn’t come out of nowhere. The basis for the story arose from a television script that was never going to get made and Black turned it into the novel while staying with a friend in Italy. He’d begin in the morning at around nine o’clock, and with Simenon as his muse, crank out 1,500 words by lunchtime.

“Everybody hates me when I say this,” he continues, “but I didn’t realize it was so easy. I believed novelists when they whined how difficult it was. Then when I started writing novels, you know, novel novels, I thought, What are they complaining about? This is fun! You sit and make up these stories and you’ve got these people and you push them around. It’s wonderful.”

Black’s “novel novel,” however, is no slapdash affair. The characters are vividly drawn and cloaked in mystery. Like Dublin (or it’s deceased inhabitants), they don’t give up their secrets easily and with good reason: when Quirke begins to probe the mystery of Christine Falls, the name of the woman who disappeared from his morgue under mysterious circumstances, all signs point to Quirke’s half brother, Malachy, who just so happens to be married to Quirke’s deceased wife’s sister and for whom he not-so-secretly pines for. In other words, it’s a rather complex muddle that Black must unravel.

This is not to say that Black’s method of composition, which is considerably faster than Banville’s, is not without flaws: there’s an entire subplot which takes place in the United States and involves a Yankee-without-a-cause type that doesn’t come off very well. Having escaped Dublin’s gloom, Quirke is a fish out of water in comparatively brightly lit Boston. These scenes, perhaps because they didn't come naturally to Black, seem hastily written, and leave the reader wondering how long it took to write Christine Falls.

“John Banville takes 3-5 years. Benjamin Black writes a novel in two or three months. John Banville was appalled. He said, 'By God, you slut!' John Banville never gave a damn about characters or plotting or any of that stuff. I feel like I’ve regained my virginity at the age of 60.”

Thankfully, Black continues to play fast and loose with his fiction.

Tomorrow: Whiskey in the Jar.  (Photos by Nuvia Ruland.)

GUEST PROFILE: WE’RE ALL SOMEBODY ELSE WHEN WE’RE ELSEWHERE - Part 1

Being the first of a four-part profile of Benjamin Black based on an interview that Jim Ruland conducted with the author during a recent visit to Dublin. (Photos by Nuvia Ruland.)

The hotel where I am to interview the author Benjamin Black sits in the city center, smack dab in the heart of the Hibernian metropolis. The atrium is a contrast of styles: Georgian and Oriental. The walls are painted salmon pink and decorated with oil paintings of horses and birds displayed alongside Japanese prints of subdued scenes of pastoral grandeur. Green and yellow wing-backed chairs are arranged around glass-topped wooden tables decorated with black lacquer and gold leaf. The Eastern European serving girls ferry trays bearing pots of Irish tea and porcelain bowls of sugar and milk across the marble floor. A pair of stately looking palms presides over the stairwell that leads to the lobby.

The atrium is surrounded by five stories of curtained windows and is topped with a massive skylight with panes of clear glass. One can observe the fast-moving clouds as they blow in from the Irish Sea and make their way Liffeywards to the mountains. The light in the lobby is always changing -- an appropriately John Banville-esque place to conduct an interview.

But I’m not interviewing John Banville and it is a dark and stormy morning. When Benjamin Black arrives, his jacket, hat, and umbrella are slick with rain. He arranges them carefully at the foot of the cold hearth. I offer my opinion of the atrium to which he replies, “Mr. Black doesn’t care much about the weather.”



Banville is, of course, the Booker-prize winning author of 16 books, most of them novels, all of them unabashedly literary. For years he was the literary editor of The Irish Times. Black is the pseudonym Banville has taken when writing noir-ish thrillers. Two of these, Christine Falls and The Silver Swan are set in Dublin during the 1950s; the most recent Black experiment, The Lemur, was first serialized in the New York Times Magazine and published by Picador in June of this year.

For a man juggling multiple identities, he does not affect eccentricities of dress one might expect from Dublin’s most highly regarded literary artist. The author is dressed is dark trousers, a blue oxford shirt buttoned down at the collars, and a tie. It is Saturday morning. He serves himself some tea, which he dilutes with hot water. His ginger biscuit sits unmolested on the plate. He could be a financial adviser summoned to the assistance of a beleaguered contractor, an admissions officer with some regrettable news about an application. But asked the right question, he becomes impishly furtive about this split personality that he has so brazenly cultivated.

“Nobody knew that I was doing this.”

The decision to launch Mr. Black’s career on the heels of Mr. Banville’s greatest achievement – winning the Booker Prize for his extraordinary novel The Sea – is curious to say the least. I’m reminded of the story of Edgar Allan Poe who, in his eagerness for fame, passed off a fictional account of a man who’d crossed the Atlantic in a balloon as a true story in the hopes it would create a sensation. On the morning of the story’s publication, he went to the newspaper offices roaring drunk and confessed to anyone who would listen.

“On the day that it was shortlisted my agent was able to hand my publisher Christine Falls, the new book, by me. You had to have been there at that lunch to see my publisher’s face.”

The Sea is about a grieving widower who returns to the scene of his first boyhood crush. It’s classic Banville: a deeply flawed man obsesses over the mess he’s made of his past; but at the mid-way point the story asserts itself in a manner that is startling, fresh, and – yes – epiphanic.

   

“Knopf didn’t want to do it. They didn’t want to take on Benjamin Black and it went to Henry Holt. My Italian publishers almost went down on their knees. Don’t use a pseudonym. We want to establish the name John Banville! So I published there under the name John Banville and this puzzles Italian interviewers: This book is by somebody else when it’s elsewhere. We’re all somebody else when we’re elsewhere!"

But why bother creating an alternate identity if you’re going to tell everyone about it?

“Well, I didn’t think there was any point in hiding behind it. My publishers, of course, we’re like, Look, you’ve just won the Booker Prize. We can’t keep the name off it. They wanted to do it much more. They wanted to say, John Banville writing as Benjamin Black. I said no; couldn’t do that. I wasn’t going to hide behind the pseudonym. Originally I was going to call him Mr. White because he’s a character in my very early novels, which, I’m glad to say, nobody reads anymore. My agent and my publisher said, We think Black is better. Sounds better. Looks better. And besides you’ll get much higher in the librarians' purchasing list, which is alphabetical."

The author sips his tea and regards me over his wire-framed spectacles. It’s impossible to tell if he’s joking.

There are precedents for writers adopting a pen-name when they try their hand at other genres, but Mr. Black makes it clear that he’s not slumming. His conversion came when he discovered Georges Simenon’s romans durs – the hard novels – which are distinct from the novels that feature Detective Maigret, for which Simenon is best known. Mr. Banville has written eloquently and at length about the staggeringly prolific writer, who wrote 193 novels under his own name and over 200 more under 18 pseudonyms. Banville makes no bones about his devotion: “He’s an extraordinary, extraordinary writer.”

Another author Banville cites as an “exemplar” of “existential crime fiction” is the work of Richard Stark, the alter ego of Donald Westlake. Both pen crime novels, but Stark’s novels are more hardboiled.  Westlake employed a pseudonym to convey a mode of storytelling distinct from its predecessor so as not to confuse or disappoint his fans.

“I simply wanted people to realize that this was a different direction that I was doing. This was an experiment. And I think it was a necessary experiment because I’d written a series of first-person narratives going back to the early '80s and I had to break out of that.”

And break away he did.

Tomorrow: Dear Dirty Dublin.