A Conversation with Joan Silber
Sarah Frank:
Your novels and stories are often framed around a character’s relationships to words and texts. A meditation on the word “kiddo” appears on the first page of Household Words (1980) and in In the City (1987), Pauline isolates the peskier of Latin idioms, like caveat emptor. Ideas of Heaven (2004) takes up whole texts. As Tom in “Ashes of Love” looks to a copy of The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke for an understanding of lovers, Carl and Duncan in “The High Road” lean on the heartache in the work of Gaspara Stampa—one of the Venetian literati circa 1550 and a poet. What inspired Stampa to write then becomes the crux of the next story: her affair with Count Collaltino di Collalto. Also, your novel Lucky Us (2001) quite literally reads the body, tracing a young woman’s exposure to AIDS back to past lovers. Given the potent texture of literature in your work, I’m wondering, to what extent do you see living as an experience of reading?
Joan Silber
This question makes me think of a wonderful story by Tobias Wolff, “Bullet in the Brain.” An obnoxious book critic is in a bank line during a robbery, and his uncontrollable sarcasm gets him shot in the head; as he dies, the one thing he remembers is a childhood baseball game and a phrase someone uttered, an ungrammatical twist that sounded musical to him. A lot of what we hold onto in life is remembered phrases. Often my characters, when they’re reasoning out a dilemma, are given pause by a familiar word that has a newly resonant ring.
I like your saying that reading can be seen as experience (rather than withdrawal), since, like most writers, I’ve spent many waking hours inside other people’s books. In Ideas of Heaven I wanted to include crucial bits of poems by Rilke and Stampa because I’d never done it and I suddenly understood why a writer would want to. The poems had informed so much of my thinking that led to the stories, and I saw how the phrases could be elements in the story, like (as you say) weather and furniture.
SF:
In Middlemarch, Fred Vincy invents a game that he and his sister Rosy never play: “I shall write bits of slang and poetry on slips,” Fred says, “and give them to you to separate.” I was reminded of this game because I think the incredible cadence and control of your prose depends a lot on word choice. So let’s play. I’ll be Fred, and you be Rosy, except that the bits I pose will be words that happen a lot in your work; and instead of separating the slang from the poetry, you can talk about what each word means to you as a writer. Okay, here goes:
Weather. Besides being a noun, weather crops up in your stories as a verb and adjective. Also, Chekhov uses weather in his stories to mirror a character’s inner state. So I have this hunch that weather is kind of a Chekhov word for you. Am I close?
JS:
Well, I’m a city person, so weather is probably the chief component of the natural world that I have to deal with. So, as nature, I don’t think of it as reflecting a character’s inner state so much as illustrating the outer world that can’t be controlled. “Weathered,” as you point out, is a description that often crops up—generally as praise. I like characters who’ve been through things.
SF:
Idea. This word pervades the minds of your characters, usually as the thing he or she clings to completely until a moment of epiphany. “Nobody has that many ideas” (Lucky Us); “I’d had another idea completely” (“Ashes of Love”); “What a vain girl she had been and so caught up in one single idea” (“Commendable”). To what degree do you think your use of this word reflects the Platonic idea, from the Greek for form, which seems to connote the flux of things, and the shot of reality we feel when we see their changeable nature?
JS:
For a long time, I wrote about characters who came to the point where whatever ideas they held weren’t adequate to what life brought them. Rhoda, in Household Words, is a daughter of immigrant parents who believes in bourgeois safety, but she gets dealt a different hand. And certainly the characters in In My Other Life had one set of ideas when they were young and on the loose and have had to modify them to survive being older.
But now I think of “ideas” in another sense. As an author, I find more and more that ideas generate the fiction; Ideas of Heaven isn’t only tied together by ideas about sexual and religious longing—the energy of those ideas helped me invent the stories. This is also true for the novel I’m working on now, which is about the lure of solitude and the ethical conflicts of travel.
SF:
Interest. As a verb, interest is linked to tension in your work, even outright aggression, between men and women. In In the City, it is after Walter pays her a compliment, but before he tells a dirty joke, that “Pauline was interested in his degree of disillusion in her apparent powers of refreshment.” In Lucky Us, after her lover, Jason, smacks her, Elisa immediately thinks, “I knew we had crossed some line, and I was interested in that line” (italics yours). I’m wondering, is there a way in which you see interest and being interested as inherently unreliable?
JS:
Interest in both these cases is a kind of attraction—it’s involuntary. This is, of course, what fuels plots in fiction and indeed carries risks.
SF:
“Hot and heavy” is a pretty good phrase for many of the relationships in your fiction. What does it mean to write sexy, but also keep your language spare? Does this have anything to do with the “paragraphs laden with treacle and gravitas” you have said that you had to cut when trying to get at the longing in the “My Shape” story?
JS:
The key thing about sex scenes (I decided some time ago) is to keep them linked to character. The mechanics don’t have to be explained step by step (any adult can guess the rudiments)—what’s necessary is to convey what the character feels, what surprises him or her. A sex scene is part of the story, not a decoration.
Writing about religion was harder because I’d probably read fewer examples in fiction. (And in some sense had less experience of it in life.) But the chief problem was the same—to avoid cliché and cheap sentiment. I also couldn’t rely on traditional religious symbolism (as, for instance, a writer like Flannery O’Connor could use Christian symbols her readers would recognize). I don’t think contemporary writers can do that any more and I probably wouldn’t do it anyway. Which made the task feel more like a pioneer effort.
SF:
I have a crush on the idea of that tall, romantic, older man that crops up a lot: Mack (In the City), Moe (Household Words), Terry (“First Marriage”)—not Byronic heroes but real Byrons, brilliant but flawed. Just as Byron, it is pointed out in In the City, had gonorrhea most of his adult life and his poetry is “glib and facile,” so these men fail with women, physically and in words. Mack is too latinate for Pauline, Moe too crass for Rhoda, and Terry falls out of a makeshift tub and almost dies, for crying out loud. Why Byron, and why debunk him like this, over and over again?
JS:
I actually would pick Jason, from Lucky Us, as the one most like what Byron was supposed to be—a p“mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” The others are, as you say, disappointments to the women who fall for them. (I think disappointment is as common as rejection in the realm of thwarted love.) Debunking anything seems like a natural fictional impulse to me; people start to write because they’ve noticed the difference between what they’re told and what they experience.
SF:
I think a particularly beautiful conceit in your books is how language functions as a form of devotion for your characters. In “Ideas of Heaven,” Ben tells Lizzy that studying Greek and Latin is “making him more religious.” Do you think there’s something paradoxical in how the idea of a grammar could relieve an anxiety that dealing in language seems to presuppose: having to pour all our unwieldy desires into these containers called sentences? Do you feel that language is sort of messy and pure, mundane and divine, all at the same time?
JS:
Until I was in my twenties, I wanted to be a poet, so I’ve always been closely aware of language. My characters (after all, I made them up) share this habit. The limits of language don’t actually feel like a frustration to me. There’s a kind of poetry, for instance, in dialogue where characters can’t say what they mean.
I probably have a romanticized relation to other languages. As the settings of the fiction moves around, I notice I feel required to put a few words of foreign languages into dialogue, and this gives me pleasure. In “Ideas of Heaven,” Ben is moved by the discovery that Sanskrit shows connections to later European languages—that the complications of history have a buried unity.
SF:
Bali figures as a kind of artistic fantasy land in your fiction. “It’s always given as an example of a culture where art is part of daily life,” Ed tells Gabe in Lucky Us. Does the island hold the same sway for you as it does for your characters? Is that sway a reality or a fiction?
JS:
I’ve never been to Bali, unfortunately—the quote about art and life was something a neighbor who’d been there said—and I wanted to give Gabe a fabulous place to regret not seeing. As it happens, since writing that, I have done a lot of travel in Asia, and my own idea of paradise is probably somewhere in southeast Asia.
SF:
Your historical settings are often violent and political. “Also we took the eyeballs out of orphans’ sockets to use in our cameras.” Here, Lizzy is reciting what the Chinese think she and her fellow missionaries do in “Ideas of Heaven,” a story informed by accounts of the Boxer Rebellion in 1890s China. In the City puts Pauline at a spring 1927 rally in New York City amidst the soon to be executed “anarchists” Sacco and Vanzetti. You’re also working on a story that involves the Patriot Act. What compels you to write historical fiction like this? Maybe you could address this in terms of the research you do, the kind of details you acquire, before actually writing?
JS:
That’s a really interesting question. I certainly didn’t want to write historical fiction where everything was cozy and adorable. (Even in the Renaissance Venice setting of the Gaspara Stampa story, I tried not to make everything too gorgeous and purple.)
One thing you come up against in choosing historical settings is your own limits in experience and imagination. I didn’t feel, for instance, that I could write from a Chinese point of view, but I felt I could try to do an Italian historical character because I lived in Italy for a year once.
But back to politics and violence. Certainly that’s more on my mind now—on everyone’s mind. The novel I’m currently trying to write has scenes in Vietnam and sequences having to do with violence in southern Thailand.
SF:
Your work tends to conclude with death—or its onset. Rhoda dies at the end of Household Words; Elisa and her lover Gabe in Lucky Us are comforted by the idea that her illness and his age may align their deaths in time, when they will escape, per the last line of the last story in In My Other Life, “these bodies we will all pass out of.” There is sudden death too: Adolfo’s death by fire in In the City; the bomb that swallows Sylvie in “The Same Ground.” The pull of this grimness—and the question, why is death so readable?—reminded me of something Walter Benamin theorizes in “The Storyteller:”
The novel is significant, not because it presents someone’s fate to us, perhaps didactically, but because this stranger’s fate by virtue of the flame which consumes it yields us the warmth which we never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.
Can you comment on this idea, in light of how your work broaches mortality? I’m also wondering whether death is something you initially intend, or—like that line in DeLillo's White Noise, that “plots tend deathward”—does it write itself?
JS:
As it happens, I lost both parents at a fairly young age (my father died when I was five and my mother when I was in my mid-twenties) so the possibility of illness and death is pretty firmly lodged in my imagination. Lucky Us was also connected to working as a Buddy for Gay Men’s Health Crisis, though the characters are entirely invented.
There is a famous quote from Hemingway, to the effect that all stories end in death and he is no true storyteller who would tell you otherwise. I probably believe that. Certainly fiction, as that great Benjamin quote suggests, consoles through both distance and intimacy.
Most of the deaths in my fiction were pre-planned. A few surprised me—Peggy’s in “Ashes of Love” and Nancy’s in “Bobby Jackson.”
SF:
When Carol Houck Smith, your editor at W.W. Norton, thought it might be too goofy to begin “My Shape,” the first story in Ideas of Heaven, with a paragraph about a character’s breasts, you moved the humor back a couple pages and put Alice at the bus stop instead, doing homework and thinking about Las Vegas. The revision seems to hint at the kind of problems writing longer works produce, on the level of the story and collection. Can you go deeper, maybe talk a bit about what you keep in mind when structuring a novel, a collection? This might relate to the book on craft you're working on now…
JS:
Usually I map the sequence out in advance and I don’t write ahead of myself. The stories in Ideas of Heaven were written in the order they appear. My novels have also been written following some plan, with minor revising but not rearranging. But the novel I’m working on now, which has five narrators, has been written in sections whose order I haven’t quite figured out—this is the first time I’ve worked this way.
SF:
Your stories take funny jabs at Episcopalians—they don't hug, etc.—but you are less ribald and offhand about Buddhists. In “The Same Ground” (Ideas of Heaven), after terrorists blow up the wife he cheated on, Giles finds comfort in the Dharmic notion of impermanence. Pauline in In the City can’t drag herself away from a conversation about reincarnation. And the epigraph to your novel Lucky Us from Mark Epstein’s book Thoughts Without a Thinker echoes the non-Western thought that the selves we inhabit are “already broken.” What draws you, as a writer, to this faith over others so generously?
JS:
I feel a little badly about taking a cheap shot at Episcopalians, though it’s only a mild social slur. For years I had a fluctuating interest in Buddhism, and now I go (somewhat irregularly) to a weekly Insight Meditation group. It’s been the belief system that makes the most sense to me—with its emphasis on loss as built in to human existence and its oddly comforting insistence on looking beyond the individual ego.
SF:
After what the poet Marianne Moore said about the aim of poetry, creating “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” I think objects are the realest toads in your writing, specifically furniture and antiques. Can you talk about your furniture? What is your relationship to the objects you write about?
JS:
Well, I love describing rooms. I think of Edith Wharton as a writer who uses interiors as a way to define characters and talk about social assumptions—that’s what I’m after.
Your question about my own furniture makes me laugh, since it’s entirely ordinary, all hand-me-downs and budget purchases, with the single exception of a Chinese cabinet I bought last year at a street market. But as in any dwelling, the pieces have stories—the desk is from an abandoned office building my friend Elaine once lived in, the china cabinet was my mother’s.
SF:
A favorite moment of mine in Ideas of Heaven is when Giles and his son Marc chill together over goopy Nutella sandwiches. And it reminded me of a couple things you said in interviews: one, that you “love reading about food,” and two, that before writing you “sometimes have three desserts—to stall.” Can you maybe list the triumvirate of desserts that kept you from your desk the longest?
JS:
I’m happily fixated on food—my idea of escape reading is to flip through Gourmet Magazine or a cookbook, though I don’t actually want to bother to make most of the food. A classic way of stalling after lunch, before I write, would be to eat an apple, a cookie, and a piece of chocolate—you can see the escalation in that sequence. A friend, Michael Martone, is collecting a book of essays on rubrics writers live by, and mine was, “Eat first.”
And like sex and furniture, I think food helps define character. Readers always say they want to eat the dinner that Duncan makes for Carl in “The High Road,” but it contains some tempting items (raw oysters, a purslane salad) I don’t necessarily like myself. I wrote it for him.
Otium
