Muriel Murch: Welcome to
Living with Literature. This is your host Muriel Murch. Mark Danner
is my guest today. In 1958, Mark was born in Utica, upstate New York.
He graduated from high school in 1976 having spend his senior year as
coeditor of The Corridors, which that year was voted the best
student newspaper in New York State. He entered Harvard in September
of the same year, graduating magna cum laude in Modern Literature and
Philosophy in 1981. Through the 80’s Mark traveled and wrote extensively
about areas of conflict for The New York Times Magazine,
Harper’s and the New York Times. In 1990 he joined the staff
of The New Yorker, after they published his series on Haiti,
“A Reporter at Large; Beyond the Mountains”. Mark continued to report
and write articles and books about war. The mid -0s saw Danner in the
Balkans. A series of articles for The New York Review of Books
culminated in a documentary for Peter Jennings reporting series,
“While America Watched; The Bosnian Tragedy.” Danner is a frequent
contributor to The New York Review of Books. Over the last two decades
it has been hard to pick up a series or journal without reading some
insightful and disturbing journalism about war from the pen of Mark
Danner. His collection of essays on the War on Terror were published
in 2004 entitled Torture in Truth: America Abu Ghraib and the War
on Terror. He joined the faculty of the University of California in Berkeley in 1998
as a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Journalism,
where he is remains a full professor. The state of America’s
foreign policy and engagement with countries around the world make Mark’s
work more necessary than ever to our collective sanity and understanding
of the world we live in. But today Mark has taken a moment to reflect
back on his life and share some of the readings and literature that
has inspired, comforted, and maybe given him hope in this war torn world
that we all, and Mark in particular, live in.
Welcome to
Living with Literature Mark.
Mark Danner: Thank
you. It’s good to be here.
MM: This is
a wonderful place to be. (The basement of American Zoetrope Studios
in San Francisco) I want to see what you have to start with. You have
brought us a bagful of books here.
MD: I
am afraid so! Far too many.
MM: There never
are, never are. What do you want to start with? Or where do you want
to start in literature as it entered your life?
MD: Well
this has been a fascinating journey trying to figure out exactly where
literature did enter my life and where that river began as it were.
And of course I found myself inevitably led back to my parents and hearing
stories as a child. In particular when I grew up in northern New York.
We had a little house my grandfather built in the mountains of northern
New York State, in the Adirondack Mountains. And so we would drive there
during the summer, sometimes during the fall, and it was about an hour
away from our normal house. It seemed an immensely long drive for a
child. I remember very vividly my father telling me stories in the car.
In fact those stories made the drive not only endurable for a three
or four year old child but eventually a great source of fun. You know
I looked forward to the trips. I would, after awhile, ask him for these
stories as if asking for the greatest hits. And one of those stories,
the earliest one I think, my father favored bible stories, and the earliest
one I remember, I actually remember two, Samson and Delilah and David
and Goliath. And I think my father might have told David and Goliath
because I was very small. And that of course is the story of a young,
smaller, normal size boy triumphing over an enormous giant. And it’s
a story of great vividness and great drama. And it’s of course the
beginning of the kinship story. The kingships story of Israel. I looked
just now in the King James Bible and saw the key passage in First Samuel.
Its told here at rather great length but the critical, the climactic
point, is when David stand there before the giant who is probably 15
or 20 feet tall. The champion of the Philistines and he is a shepherd
with no armor of any kind and he reaches into, he has only a slingshot
of course.
42 And when the Philistine
looked about, and saw David, he disdained him: for he was [but] a youth,
and ruddy, and of a fair countenance. 43 And the Philistine said unto
David, Am I a dog, that thou comest to me with staves? And the Philistine
cursed David by his gods. 44 And the Philistine said to David, Come
to me, and I will give thy flesh unto the fowls of the air, and to the
beasts of the field. 45 Then said David to the Philistine, Thou comest
to me with a sword, and with a spear, and with a shield: but I come
to thee in the name of the LORD of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel,
whom thou hast defied. 46 This day will the LORD deliver thee into mine
hand; and I will smite thee, and take thine head from thee; and I will
give the carcases of the host of the Philistines this day unto the fowls
of the air, and to the wild beasts of the earth; that all the earth
may know that there is a God in Israel. 47 And all this assembly shall
know that the LORD saveth not with sword and spear: for the battle [is]
the LORD’S, and he will give you into our hands.”48 ¶ And it came
to pass, when the Philistine arose, and came and drew nigh to meet David,
that David hasted, and ran toward the army to meet the Philistine. 49
And David put his hand in his bag, and took thence a stone, and slang
and smote the Philistine in his forehead, that the stone sunk
into his forehead; and he fell upon his face to the earth. 50 So David
prevailed over the Philistine with a sling and with a stone, and smote
the Philistine, and slew him; but [there was] no sword in the hand of
David. 51 Therefore David ran, and stood upon the Philistine, and took
his sword, and drew it out of the sheath thereof, and slew him, and
cut off his head therewith. And when the Philistines saw their champion
was dead, they fled.
And I remember vividly
my father describing this and talking about how the earth shook for
miles around when Goliath fell. Because it was like the fall of a building.
And the sound of it echoed over the land when he collapsed. And after
awhile I would ask for this story along with the Samson story. And he
would supply it. And for years and years later I would think that my
father, my gosh, he knows all these stories isn’t this incredible. And
not very long ago, my father, who is in his mid 80s, I mentioned this
to him and he said to me,
“Oh boy I remember, you know, having to pull down the bible and all
these books before those trips to make sure I remembered the stories.”
I never dreamed that he was actually prepping! I though he knew them
deeply.
MM: How wonderful!
What a wonderful story to have chosen. In particular taking into account
the kind of child you were.
MD: I
think, well this is my supposition, that he was thinking in those terms.
Samson, as well, of course, while David and Goliath is a story of a
normal sized person conquering a giant against all expectations and
doing with a slingshot for God’s sakes. So it’s a story about contingency,
about bravery, about how strangely the world can evolve. What strange
things can happen? Samson is also a story of, on the other hand, the
giant strong man. Famous for being for being strong he is brought down
by some weakness. Who seduces him and eventually cuts his hair, the
secret of the strength.
MM: And that’s
the end of that.
MD:
Of course it is the end of that, but the end of the story is Samson
now this terribly weak man being led into the banquet of the Philistines
once again. And his hair has grown back. He has been blinded by the
Philistines but his hair has grown back. He is led into the banquet
and he is position himself under the great pillars in the banquet hall.
And since his strength has returned he is able to push these pillars
and strain and strain and finally push them and the entire hall falls
down and kills all the Philistines and himself, of course. So there
is a feeling of redemption. Redemption of the sin of weakness.
MM: And we forget
that part of the story.
MD:
We do, we do. We usually, when we say Samson and Delilah, think it’s
about the fall. In the end he ends his own his own life out of the need
to redeem himself and to redeem this legend he had let go because of
his own weakness.
MM:
The great sacrifice.
MD: Exactly.
These two stories in particular were entrancing to me. And I grew up
with three sisters and they would groan when I would ask for these stories.
Bu he told them brilliantly and, you know, who knows where the interest
comes from. My father was certainly given to telling stories about conflict.
Because it affected his life greatly. Which I can talk about if you
want.
MM: Go ahead.
MD: Well
I was going to say that – you know its funny when I look back on reading
and what I have read and what literature has meant to me, I do go back
very often to my father in those early stories in the car. As I got
older they became more complicated, more sophisticated, and he would
often start telling stories of war. And then began I think, the post-biblical
stories, the stories taken from what I realize much later in my life,
was The Iliad. Stories about Troy, about, in particular, the
death of Hector at the hands of Achilles. The great battle which is
the climax of The Iliad. And also my father would always tell
me, not only that story and of course the famous passages of the death
of Hector, but also of Achilles driving his chariot around the great
walls of Troy with Hector dragging behind the chariot.
MM:
That’s right. You brought The Iliad with you.
MD:
I did. I did. And I want to read it, but this is not my edition. I was
trying to find it earlier when I was waiting upstairs. Where my father
would begin this is the final drama between Achilles and Hector. And
of course this battle is I think similar in some ways the Samson and
David episodes I described. Because it’s not a fair fight. Achilles
is a god. Or half god, with only weakness in his heel. Hector is a man,
but a great champion. In a sense the battle is determined beforehand,
which is a key part of the drama which my father would always bring
out.
So this young man
and the greatest hero of his city realizes he is about to die. He has
young children, he has a beautiful, famously gorgeous wife. He has a
happy, happy, home, which is one of the things Homer could describe
very well. He realizes he is about to die. And he makes the conscious
decision to die a hero at the hands of this god he faces.
And the death scene
which is from book 22 of The Iliad.
And then they have
their dialogue:
Fool that
you were: for I, his comrade, mightier far than he, was still left behind
him at the ships, and now I have laid you low.
Then Hector said,
as the life ebbed out of him,
“I pray
you by your life and on my knees, and by your parents, let not dogs devour
me at the ships of the Achaeans, but accept the rich treasure of gold
and bronze which my father and mother will offer you, and send my body
home, that the Trojans and their wives may give me my dues of fire when
I am dead.”
MM: And the
importance of that.
MD: The
importance of it, you know, to me is again recognizing here is this
man in the full flower of life, this great champion. I mean Hector,
the greatest of Trojans, realizing that his life is over. He realizes
it even before he is wounded. Decides for glory to die in a glorious
way first. And secondly when he knows he is about to die, he begs for
essentially his parent’s love. That his body be returned to them.
Not only for his own honor, but for his parents, and his family. He
begs Achilles, and Achilles does not comply. So there is this, you know,
assumption, as there was with Samson too I think. I don’t think my
father had this in mind, that this strong feeling that there is something
much beyond death, which is honor, and which is beyond murder, killing,
or which is a notion of very strong honor. And the rights of the dead.
And the rights due the dead.
MM:
The rights due the dead.
MD: Which
of course the Greeks were extremely fascinated with. I mean Antigone
is about that for example. And you know this whole sequence goes on,
and my father used to describe it. It only ends when Priam, Hector’s
father comes and pays this ghostly visit. To Achilles’ tent. Achilles
spends hours driving around the walls of Troy dragging Hector’s body
to the enormous pain of his family and the Trojans. And Priam must come
in as this ghostly figure in the middle of the night and beg for the
body from Achilles. Achilles does indeed relent and this is the beginning
of the healing of Achilles, who will soon die as well.
MM: So the gods
get it too?
MD: Yeah
the God’s get it too. Although he is not completely a god, he is only
partly a god. So he has that Achilles’ tendon. His heel and his tendon
MM: Well you
have got us off to a very warlike start, which is interesting statement
in itself. But where do we go from the Greeks?
MD: Its
funny, the natural place to go form the Greeks and I am slightly with
my father although we will go by him in a minute, and I can’t miss at
least mentioning this, is the Romans who in fact pulled together
Virgil pulled very consciously took, The Iliad, The Odyssey,
they come from this dark world. We aren’t sure Homer existed. There
were obviously a number of different poets under the same name. Virgil,
we know who he is. He is in the light. He is in our history; we know
where he lived, we know what he wrote. And he very consciously pulled
together these two epics to put together this beautiful poem that was
also propaganda. It was about the Roman state emerging from Troy, among
other things. It’s a very beautiful poem and the part I want to draw
attention to is the death of Dido. Which is about not war but love.
I read this first in college, but I first wept at the scene when I was
driving through the mountains of New Mexico down from Colorado in
Northern New Mexico, the most beautiful country on earth. Listening
to this recording of it. And the death of Dido left me weeping, weeping,
weeping. Because they, of course, have this enormous passion, which
is consummated very vividly in the poem, in a cave amid stags running
around outside and its very convincing. And it is a very passionate
love. Very passionate. Overwhelming love. And the gods once again interfere
and send Aeneas off on his journey and she indeed knows he is leaving,
sees him leaving, sees the boat ready to sail away. And she spends an
enormous amount of effort building a funeral pyre. Essentially as she
watches the ship leave she impales herself on the sword. And it is her
dying words, her death itself, that is just one of the most moving things
I have ever read because it’s hopeless—he doesn’t
know that part of the thing about the Aeneid is that he later meets
her. So you have this incredible death scene. This overwhelming scene
of death and then the funeral pyre in which she burns herself that she
has built, the flames of the funeral pyre. Well a number of books later
he meet her in the underworld. So you have in this moment after this
incredible passion that they have enjoyed, which is as I say is described
with great vividness in the poem. So he, Aeneis has gone into the underworld,
so he has had this enormous passion with Dido, he knows now she killed
herself, he’s wandering among the dead.
This is Book 6, which
subtitled, The Kingdom of the Dead. And the earlier passages
are from book 4, The Tragic Queen of Carthage. Especially around
line 200. But, so Aeneis has gone to the underworld and wandering among
them, wounds still fresh, he sees among the shade Phoenician Dido.
And it will course
down through the history of literature. A man having left a woman who
he had betrayed by leaving. Pleading that it wasn’t up to him. He had
to go. But this is the first measure of it in actually in hell. And
she disappears from him of course.
MM: Where have
we heard d this story?
MD:
I think T.S. Eliot called it the most civilized moment in the history
of literature. That she rises like a moon, he pleads for her, and she
drifts away from him. There is no reconciliation. There can’t be. The
deed was done. He did what he did.
MM: He did what he
did. As men do.
MD:
As men do. They will do that. This is true. So anyway, this is the Greeks
and the Romans with whom, in whose midst, I dwelled during a lot of
my childhood and adolescence too.
MM: You took
them with you?
MD: Oh
absolutely, and I think my father, you know because of these early stories
I had an enduring interest in Homer and the Greeks and an enduring interesting
the Bible the Old Testament. The stories in particular in Samuel and
Kings. The great epical stories of Israel and Syria and Babylonia and
the Ancient and Near East. And its amazing that when I went to Iraq
in 2003, I had longed all my life to go to the Baghdad museum, which
has a number of very famous statues and other things from the time of
Gilgamesh, which is a book that I also love very deeply and almost brought
here today. Proto- Bible in some ways. And I walked into this museum
in 2003 and found only rubbish, of course, of statues whose had been
chopped off by the looters. Display cases that had been shattered. Rooms
full of file cabinets that had been looted and trashed. The museum itself
had been - looters had taken up residence there. For ten days.
Simply carried out methodically all of this amazing treasure from 5000
years ago. And just put them in pick-up trucks and driven away. Within
site of the American tanks, which sat there guarding the traffic circle,
in front to it, who didn’t interfere with the looters. I interviewed
the head of the museum, Danny
George who had been forced to
sit there watching his museum being looted. I thought my God I have
wanted to be here my whole life since I was a boy. And I arrive and
it’s all, it’s all been trashed in this awful way.
MM: I wanted to ask
you when you talk about the stories which I grew up with too, did you
get a sense of the geography of the Middle East and the Far East when
you were reading these stories? Did you have a place in your mind?
MD: I
did, because you know, I think my father started reading these things
to me when I was three or four. But probably by the time I was nine
or ten I think I was actually reading versions of these, children’s
somewhat adolescent versions and so on. And I was very interested in
maps, I really was interested in the Assyrians and the Babylonians.
This kind of sequence of very exotic people who had marched through
and conquered this place.
MM: Wonderful.
MD: So
I became fascinated with the region. When I was very, very young. And
I think it did come from that.
MM: Yeah. Very
much so. All right.
MD:
Shall we leap ahead?
MM: Well I don’t
know about leaping. I think we are plowing ahead.
[Laughter.]
MD:
Well the next thing I, you know, this is so painful of course one realizes
when you think about your life and the things that have affected them.
There are so many things. I do want to stay with my dad for a minute.
As I grew older I would accompany him on trips, very often just the
two of us, up north as we called it. Which was this hour drive up into
the mountains. And the stories he told me became more complicated and
more adult as it were. In particular he started talking about modern
history. In particular, the history of the 20th century. And his story
was sort of by happenstance conveyed to me. Which was he had been a
kid, a poor kid, grown up very poor during the depression. Got in a
lot of trouble. I found out later he failed a year in high school. He
had gone into the navy. Never intended to go on in school, he was a
disaster as a student. He had gone to the navy and he described a moment
when he was on aircraft carrier off Okinawa in the Pacific. There was
a moment, he was 20 years old, and he was commanding a gun crew on the
deck that was trying to shoot down these Zeros, these Japanese fighter
planes. He described very vividly. He realized he was looking on the
deck there was a plane coming directly at him, firing. And he had this
amazing perception as a twenty year old. ‘He is trying to kill me!’
And he was knocked down and wounded, not killed. But he had this shocking
realization. He always told me there is no accident that young kids
are sent to fight in wars. Older people are much too smart. Young kids
are stupid they don’t realize mortality. This was his glimpse of mortality
as a 20 year old. And it changed his life completely
First
of all he became fascinated with this notion that he was about to lose
his life, but he had no idea what was going on in the war. He had no
notion what was happening, where troops were deployed, what exactly
his part was. He was astounded by his own bewilderment. And this bewilderment
led him to start to read. He began reading. And he started reading about
the history of the 20th century. About WWI in particular and later,
increasingly about WWII. And this reading led him, when he got back
from the navy, to go to college on the GI Bill and become a dentist.
And to completely change his life.
I
bring this up at such length because his stories of war strike me because
there is a kind of literary trope there of the small cog in a large
battle. And the bewilderment that follows there from. And you know he
would talk about WWI which I eventually began reading about, and came
up with a kind of series of accounts that followed this trope. Unbeknownst
to my father completely. This is very common. The first example which
I think is wonderful and very famous is The Charterhouse of Parma
(Le Chartnevose de Parma) by Stendhal. The amazing thing is that
this book was admired immensely by Tolstoy, among others. Who was highly
influenced by it. And we see another version of this soldier in the
midst of a great battle who has no idea what was going on in the figure
of Prince Andre and the battle of Bordino. And then we have Stephen
Crane who admired both of these books intensely. Basically doing a whole
short novel on the same theme—The Red Badge of Courage. All
of these are immensely cherished books of mine. And its hard to even,
you know, decide which one to look at. But it seemed to me the well
spring of this. Even though the theme goes back to Homer and beyond,
the wellspring of it is Fabriztio’s experience at the Battle of Waterloo.
MM: In which
book are we here?
MD:
This is in The Charterhouse of Parma. In the, I think, the second
chapter, Chapter 3 I’m sorry. It’s a very prolonged, very prolonged
theme, and I have been having great trouble trying to decide what part
of it to read. He is a young. He is essentially a young man in love
with fame and wanting it to see L’Emporer. He wants to see Napoleon.
And he spends his time riding around the battlefield trying to figure
out what the hell is going on. He eventually finds some soldiers and
he brings them something to drink. They are in the middle of Waterloo,
a battle that will end Napoleon’s career.
“Give
me the rest of the bottle,” he said to the vivndiére.“What do you mean,” was her answer,
“what’s left there costs ten francs on a day like this.” And
he rejoined the escort at a gallop :
“Ah!
You’re bringing us a drop of drink,” cried the sergeant. “That
was why you deserted, was it? Hand it over.” The bottle went round,
the last man to take it flung it in the air after drinking.
“Thanks
conrades!” he cried to Fabrizio. All eyes were fastened on him
kindly. This friendly gaze lifted a hundredweight from Fabrizio’s heart;
it was one of those hearts of too delicate tissue which require the
friendship of those around it. So at last he had ceased to be looked
at askance by his comrades; there was a bond between them! Fabrizio
breathed a deep sigh of relief, then in a bold voice said to the sergeant:
“Vive
l’Empereur!” at the top of their voices. It may be imagined that
our hero stared till his eyes started out of his head, but all he saw
was some generals galloping, also followed by an escort. The long floating
plumes of horsehair which the dragoons of the bodyguard wore on their
helmets prevented him from distinguishing their faces.
So basically again,
he misses what he has come to see, and he generally has no idea what
was going on, and unfortunately it’s difficult to capture in a couple
of paragraphs. But it goes on at some length about this general theme
about not being able to see not being able to understand what it is
all about.
MM: Not being
able to understand the battle. That is something that I suspect that
is so true still today in all our war situations.
MD:
It is. This idea of confusion, you know, you are only a small part of
it. You have no idea really what is going on. And that those who write
about it afterwards will see a kind of rationality in this enormous
cacophony of events that wasn’t there to anybody participating. And
you know …
MM: That’s
a terrifying thought Mark. That making order out of chaos after.
MD: And
the artificiality of it. And the fact that, you know, you see this again
and again. And as I say The Charter House of Parma does it most
vividly at a very famous battle, Waterloo. But Tolstoy took this; he
is an enormous admirer of The Charter House of Parma. And he
made it one of the centerpieces of War and Peace. And Stephen
Crane, an admirer of both books, did the same for Red Badge of Courage.
And this is kind of a literary trope that follows through. Its funny
because I tend to associate it with my father, for whom this feeling,
the feeling of profound bewilderment, combined with mortality, the sudden
rush of realizing that you are mortal, which happened when he was twenty
years old on the aircraft carrier changed his life. Because those two
things made him into a reader.
MM: That is
quite young for that realization to come. I remember asking a ranger
at Yosemite about how do people die at Yosemite. Is it old people from
heart attacks or babies falling of the edge? She said, “No we lose
the invincibles. They are the young people who think they can jump from
rock to rock.” But that was a wonderful phrase. ‘It is the invincibles.’
MD: It
is the invincibles that go to fight wars. And because as my father said,
as a much older man, anyone older than 20 or 25 would be crazy to do
it. So they send the young people. But it changed his life. As so many…
MM: All right.
Lets move on. I think you have spoken of The Red Badge of Courage.
We’ll let that one go because we have noted it.
MD: Well
I couldn’t, you know let this session go by without talking about poetry
a little bit, even though you know I tend to think stories. They compel
me to talk about whether novels, short stories or so on. My father,
again, would recite some poems. He liked Hiawatha, he like
Horatio at the Bridge, not surprisingly. And I had my whole life,
a very strong taste for poetry. And I thought, well I have to at least
read something. And I decided late 18th century. I’m a great lover
of Gerald Manly Hopkins, both for this recognition and crystallization
that language can crystallize uncrystalizable things that you can capture.
The world of the spiritual through language. If the language is shaped
in a way that makes it almost break. That you can get beyond the denotation.
The function of language to identify things and talk about things and
get way beyond it. And so Gerald Manly Hopkins, who was a priest and
who is famous for his experiments with language, particularly the Saxon,
use of Saxon words, the idea of purging from language, the Latinate
elements which he took very far indeed. He always really excited me,
with his language. Out of many, many poems and poets I picked two poems,
both fairly short. One is very famous called,
God’s
Grandeur
MD:
A poem about earthiness of earth, the spiritual reality of earth, that
does it through the language itself in a way that to me is rather astonishing.
The grandeur of God in comparison to saying it will flame out like shining
from shook foil. You have foil and the shining that the sun brings to
it. Another even more earthy but very similar shaped poem is called
Pied
Beauty.
MM: Those are
good choices.
MD: Well
good. Well yes it’s such an unchooseable choice.
MM: It is. Its
there is no choice there.
MD:
There is no choice there.
MM: I saw on
your list you have The Castle.
MD: Which
I don’t have a copy of unfortunately. But I can talk about.
MM: Talk about
that.
MD: Well
let me talk about Camus just for a second because it leads into it.
I was a very rowdy kid. I got in a lot of trouble. Got sent home, got
in trouble a lot.
MM: You were
your father’s son.
MD: My
father’s son. Exactly. Although frankly I didn’t know this about my
father until quite recently. And I find it amazing that he rather
kept it secret from us, you know, because he would talk about his life
a lot. And yet he wouldn’t give us a basic necessary detail of his life.
Which is that he was in enormous trouble when he was a kid. He got into
fights. He was thrown out of school a couple of times. I didn’t know
any of this. All I heard were the uplifting stories of how he forged
forward. Anyway, early on, when I was, I believe, a junior in high school
I used to get in trouble with the librarians a lot. Because I would
flirt with a couple of girls in the library. And they would constantly
shush me and throw me out. This was an almost daily occurrence. Someone
had talked to me about The Stranger. I didn’t know if I saw it
in a book. I can’t remember. But I do remember vividly going up to
the desk of the library and this librarian who had thrown me out several
times who I thought of as a foul old woman. Very nasty. And saying to
her, do you have The Stranger by Albert Kay-Mouse? And she looked
at me, paused, raised her eyebrow, I remember the sequence vividly,
and said,
“Do
you mean, Camus, Mark?” Ha ha ha! And I could never again face her.
And I told this story to a friend of mine who would repeat it constantly,
Albert Kay-Mouse He still says it to this day. So it was a cause of
enormous embarrassment. But I did get the novel. Having shamed me to
that degree, she came and brought it to me. And this was really I think,
as a junior in high school, I was introduced to books I loved very much.
All Quiet on the Western Front in particular. Which meant a lot
to me. But reading Camus, and reading this book was really an introduction
to a new world of literature. It brought me to Kafka. It brought me
to Dostoevsky. It brought me to this whole modern world of so-called
existentialist literature that I didn’t know anything about and literature
that wasn’t historical, but that could effect in particular you perception
and how you lived. I was going to read this scene, just the very famous
scene from Camus’ book, where the killing happens at the heart of the
book. Its page, in this edition, 58, 59. he is on the beach.
As soon as he saw me he sat
up a little and put his hand in his pocket, naturally I gripped Raymond’s
gun inside my jacket and he lay back again but without taking
his hand out of his pocket. I was pretty far away from him, about ten
meters or so. I could tell he was glancing at me now and again and then,
through half closed eyes but most of the time he was just a form,
shimmering before my eyes in the firey air.
The sound of the waves was
even lazier, more drawn out than at noon. It was the same sun, the same
lights still shining on the same sand as before. For two hours the day
had stood still. For two hours it had been anchored to this sea of molten
lead. On the horizon a tiny steamer went by and I made out the black
dot from the corner of my eye. Because I hadn’t stopped watching the
Arab. It occurred to me that all I had to do was turn around and that
would be the end of it. But the whole beach throbbing in the sun was
pressing on my back. I took a few steps toward the spring. The Arab
didn’t move. Besides, he was still pretty far away. Maybe it was the
shadows on his face, but it looked like he was laughing. I waited. The
sun was starting to burn my cheeks and I could feel drops of sweat gathering
in my eyebrows. The sun was the same as it had been the day I buried
Mamant . And like then, my forehead especially was hurting me.
All the veins in it throbbing under the skin. It was this burning that
I couldn’t stand anymore that made me move forward. I knew that it was
stupid that I wouldn’t get the sun off of me by stepping forward. But
I took a step, one step, forward. And this time, without getting up
the Arab drew his knife and held it up to me in the sun. The light shot
off the steel and it was like a long flashing blade cutting at my forehead.
At the same instant the sweat in my eyebrows dripped down over my eyelids
and all at once covered them with a warm thick film. My eyes were blinded
behind the curtains of tears and salt. All I could feel were the symbols
of sunlight crashing over my forehead and indistinctly a dazzling spear
flying out from the knife in front of me. The scorching blade slashed
in my eyebrows and stabbed at my stinging eyes. That’s when everything
began to reel. The sea carried up a thick fiery breath. It seemed
to me as if the sky split open from one end to the other to rain down
fire. My whole being tensed and I squeezed my hand around the revolver.
The trigger gave. I felt the smooth underside of the butt. And there,
in that noise, sharp and deafening at the same time, was where it all
started. I shook off the sweat and sun. I knew that I had shattered
the harmony of the day. The exceptional silence of a beach where I had
been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body, where
the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking
four quick times on the door of unhappiness.
MD: Astonishing
passage! I vividly remember it. In Utica Free Academy I remember reading
it in the library. And I think it affected me not only because of its
demonstration of how you can be described, your life could be described.
Not that I was killing anyone at the time. But this kind of powerful
world seizing you. Anxiety. Seizing you. The world determining your
actions in a way that seemed to let go of volition. But I think I also
was very influence by the language. The so-called écrtiure blanc. The
white writing of o ne sentence after another. In this kind
of powerful cadence. The beauty of Camus’ style. Which I very much admired.
And I from this read The Plague and the Myth of Sisyphus.
His essay, famous essay, on Why Not to Commit Suicide. And I
think this particular book just led me in all sorts of places. I remember
taking out Crime and Punishment from the library. I think I was
a junior in high school. And umm, you know, when I went to college,
to Harvard, I met all kinds of people who read these books as a matter
of course in prep school. Because they had read these. They were assigned.
They read philosophy. They read Plato. But I went to an inner city high
school where this is. You didn’t read this stuff.
MM: I am very
curious to think of the mind of your librarian. You know when you asked
for this book and did your relationship with the librarian change after
that moment?
MD:
I think it deteriorated. I hate to say it. She had shamed me, you know
its interesting, that I say I was a cut up, I guess is the phrase. She
would have to shush me, yell at me and I get would get thrown out. And
when you are like that you are proud of it. You know you are proud of
your defiance and you look down on the people who are doing it. You
look down at your teachers. She kind of got over on me, as the phrase
went by saying you mean Camus. So I think I was red faced and could
never quite look at her again because she had shown herself to be superior
in that way. On the other hand it was fortuitous because I became deeply
interested in international world literature. Which led me to Kafka
as well. Which I read very shortly after. I read The Trial and
loved it. And you know I think when you are young, you read these things
as just kind of feasts of narrative. It’s a story telling. You don’t
sit there and say oh Joseph K is it a psychological thing? Is it about
psychoanalysis? We can give this a Marxist reading.
When you are 17, the
great pull of it is, that the pull of the strange narrative, this thing
that is absolutely strange, you know. What is this force? It’s enough
to read the story itself. And you might reflect a little bit on it and
have the nagging feeling that there is some secret being hidden here,
but there is also a sense in which it is enough. The feast is there.
I remember thinking that with The Trial, and The Metaphorses.
Which I also loved. And the reason I include The Castle is because
it is the first of Kafka’s books where I suddenly, I think, I suddenly
realized that this stuff was funny. You know. That among other things
it was funny. And because there is The Castle, it is the most
unmistakably humorous of his books. That you really have a kind of Marx
brother’s routine going on. And of course Kafka loved Buster Keaton,
Charlie Chaplin. He loved the cinema. Could it have been Buster Keaton?
MM:
I don’t know. I would be lost on that.
MD:
I know he was loved comedy in film. He loved slapstick. And you can
see it particularly in The Castle. In the people he meets in
the situation of not knowing. Of authority not understood. And yet there
is no appeal from authority. Which is the same as The Trial.
But it’s much lighter and funnier.
MM: And I have
a great reading of that. So I can slip that in and we’ll add it.
MD: I
know, when he first arrives in the inn. I believe that is a very funny
passage. But I couldn’t find the book.
It
was late evening when K arrived. The village lay under deep snow. There
was no sign of the castle hill. Fog and darkness surrounded it. Not
even the faintest gleam of light suggested the large castle. K stood
a long time on the wooden bridge that leads from the main road to the
village gazing upwards into the seeming emptiness. Then he went looking
for a night’s lodging. At the inn they were still awake. The landlord
had no room available but extremely surprised and confused by the late
comer he was willing to let the latecomer sleep on his straw mattress
in the tap room. K agreed to this. A few peasants were sitting over
their beer but he did not want to talk with anyone. He got himself a
straw mattress from the attic and lay down by the stove. It was warm.
The peasants were quiet. He examined them for a moment with tired eyes,
then fell asleep.
But
before long he was awakened. A young man in city cloths, with an actors
face, marrow eyes, thick eyebrows stood beside him with the landlord.
The peasants too were still there. A few had turned their chairs around
to see and hear better. The young man apologized very politely for having
awakened K. introducing himself as the son of the castle steward and
said,
“This
village is caste property. Anyone residing or spending the night here
is effectively residing or spending the night at the castle. Nobody
may do so without permission from the count. But you have no such permission
or at least you haven’t shown it. K who had half risen and smoothed
his hair looked at the people from below and said,
there
shook their heads at K. “The castle of Count Westward.”
“From
the count,” said K, “There doesn’t seem to be any alternative.
“Get
permission from the count now at midnight,” cried the young man stepping
back a pace.
“The
manners of a tramp.” He cried. “I demand respect for the counts
authorities. I awakened you to inform you that you must leave the counts
domain at once.
“Enough
of this comedy,” said K in a remarkably soft voice as he lay down
and pulled up the blanket. “You are going a little too far young man
and I shall deal with your conduct tomorrow.”
MM: Now here
we are coming up for an hour and you are 17 years old!
MD:
That’s true!
MM: What
have we got here?
MD:
Reading Kafka, from The Castle
I began reading his stories, which really showed me an entirely new
kind of writing. I mean this idea that the word symbolic is completely
pale and has nothing to do really with Kafka, you have these stories
that are creations out of the imagination that are not obviously realistic.
On the other hand, they are descriptions of the most powerful kind of
emotions. That can only be reached it seems through the avenues he’s
chosen. So verisimilitude, which tends to be when you are a kid your
judgment of art is tied to recognition. Is this something I know? Is
this something I have heard? It goes away. When you are talking about
Kafka, when you are talking about The Country Doctor and the
images of the horse pushing their heads through the windows. The astonishing
attention to horses in that story. Which is anything if realistic. But
you are not sure what it is. Is it a dream? Well not really at all.
It has clarity that is unmistakable. And then The Judgment which
is about his relationship with his father. Which is an extraordinary
thing, far from anything real. With no explanation. And climaxes with
this conflict. You could call it. With his father. The end of the story
is his father essentially yelling at him, challenging him. Basically
it’s the end of the story.
MM:
O.K.
MD:
You know its the father, kind of. It’s about, among other things,
your guilt about your parents and your guilt about your father. And
his father accusing him and the final scene is well maybe I shouldn’t.
It’s him throwing himself to his death. This entire piece is about
the relationship of a character to his father.
“You
probably wanted me to say this before but now its no longer suitable.
So you know what else there was in the world besides you. Previously
you only knew about yourself. You were truly an innocent child. But
you were even more truly a diabolical man. And therefore know I hereby
condemn you to death by drowning.” Gareth felt hounded from the room.
His ears still rang from the crash of his father behind him falling
on the bed. Hurrying down the steps as if they were a sloping plain,
he ran into his housekeeper who was about to go upstairs to clean the
apartment after tonight.
“Jesus.”
she cried, covering her face with her apron, but he was already outside.
He leaped front the front door and dashed across the road, driven toward
the water. He was already clutching to the railing the way a hungry
man clutches his food. He swung himself over like the astounding gymnast
he had been in his youth, the pride of his parents. He was still clutching
tight with his weakening hands when he spied a bus between the railing
bars. It would easily drown out this sound of his fall. He softly cried
MM: Thank
you so much! My goodness! Where are we?
MD:
But there is no, its about guilt, anyway. It’s The Judgment.
MM: OK. It’s
interesting because you started off so clearly with these books, these
stories of ancient war, ancient warriors and heroes. It seemed very
direct. The path of those early, early seeds to be the genesis of what
you have become. And then you had this wonderful literary education
which you brought upon yourself and then went forward with and went
further very much in the similar way to your father. You just got a
little bit of a leg up from him it seems to me. And then went forward.
But as you began your work you had to be looking at some more of the,
I want to say the modern history. I don’t think that’s quite right,
but you had to be looking at some of the work that came from the countries
that you were exploring. It would seem to me that as you went to Haiti
for instance, was it from the literature that you pulled out factual
stuff or was it from talking with people? When you went into, you know,
Bosnia and Iraq, and then some, when you are thinking about going to
the museum and how heartbreaking and crushing that is, do you turn to
the work there? Does a love affair take you into literature?
Those are other questions
I am looking at. But I am looking at your work. One can get very caught
up, the way physicians do often, with well I have got to read the work
to keep myself current. And you stop reading, and stop really looking
at literature. But I have a feeling that you have always been able to
keep it beside you.
MD:
Oh absolutely. I think that its absolutely true that I have always been
a voracious reader and to me even if the beginning of my exploration
in this you know session of ours, this discussion of ours really was
about finding where stories began for me. Which tended to begin with
war and conflict because that’s what my father liked. And so that
path seems direct. I think it’s much less direct. And I think that
what I am very often reading about is writing, is how people describe
things, how you actually tell the story. How you do it. Which is one
of the reasons I have loved Chekhov for example. How to tell the story
about what it is what realism actually is. What the realism of Kafka
actually is for example and which you can take a story like The Judgment
and in some way identify guilt. Something that is so amorphous and so
illogical. And similarly if you are writing about war or conflict or
politics. There are a lot of emotions that are so difficult to nail
down. We have words that we use customarily in writing about war and
politics but they never quite get it right. Then of course if you had
you wouldn’t need to cover it again and again. You wouldn’t need your
own particular clash. The clash of your personality and your experience
with what’s happening in the world. And with Iraq and with wherever
else. So I have found, I think, that the things I have learned have
been from the way people describe nature. And the way people describe
the world and above all the ability to identify in some way the strangeness
of the world. How odd the world is. How surprising. It’s a regular
experience of mine that when I am far from a place I am going to cover
I understand it completely. And when I get there I know that I have
reached a point where a profitability in being there when I realize
that I have no understanding at all.
So there is a kind
of growth of ignorance, a productive ignorance that comes about. When
you are far from Iraq, you understand it. When you arrive you are overwhelmed
with this blizzard of sense impressions. And suddenly you have to come
up with a story for yourself that makes sense of them. Because of course
our stories of Iraq and our distance are pre-masticated as it were.
Someone has seen all these, has taken in all these sense perceptions
and made a narrative out of them. When you are in the middle of the
story there is no story. It’s just this blizzard that’s sort of
buffeting your face with these cold bits of truth and fact. So I think
really my reading is really about how to tell the story, how to talk,
and you know I brought a couple of things that might speak to that a
little bit.
One is the story of
Robert Musil who is one of my favorite writers. Who is an engineer who
writes. He is thought of as one of the least known great modernists
of the century. If you name the great writers of the 20th century, certainly
you would name Joyce and Proust probably and many people would
add Musil as the third. He is the famous author of The Man Without
Qualities. Which is his answer to Remembrance of Things Past
or Ulysses. But I have chosen Five Women, which is a collection
of his short stories which are highly erotic. And the writer is fascinated
with how you identify, describe, perplexing emotions, like eroticism.
Like the different-ness of worlds that you enter that can take you away
from the everyday. And several of the stories, notably Grecian
Tonka are about rationalist,
engineers for example who leave the town, leave their accustomed life
in the town and go into the countryside. Notably in Gresia, the mountains. And I should say by the way
the preface is by Frank Kermode the wonderful British literary critic
who was my tutor. I was lucky enough to have him in college. He came
to Harvard to deliver the Norton lectures. Very Famous. Probably the
greatest critic in the English language and he came to deliver the very
prestigious Norton Lectures. I assaulted him after one of the lectures
and asked, in this graduate seminar, I was just a sophomore, I asked
a question that was actually a stupid question, but he, Professor Kermode,
having a choice whether to think this is a stupid question or its a
brilliant, subtle question decided it was a brilliant, subtle one. And
answered it on that basis. And afterwards I walked up to him and asked
him to be my tutor. And he, to the shock of everyone, agreed. So I was
privileged to spend two hours a week sitting with this man in his office.
For whatever it was. However many weeks that was. Each week we would
got through various books including Musil.
MM: That’s
wonderful. I think that the relationship one has with one individual
tutor if you’ve been lucky with it, you never forget it.
MD:
I mean he changed my life. I put him on the train with my father, because
I have remained friends with him. I see him periodically in England.
He is in his late eighties.
MM: Don’t read,
because we are going to run out of time, but give us another piece that
you really enjoy here.
MD: Well
there are several, and the question is which one. There are several where
they talk about The Hay. He falls in love with Grigia, a peasant girl.
Homo walked along the long row of Hay stooks,
that the peasant women had set up on the level part of the hillside.
They were resting. He could scarcely believe his eyes for they were
lying on their hillocks of hay like Michael Angelo’s statues in the
Vichy Chapel in Florence. One arm raised to support the head and the
body reposing as if in flowing water. And when they spoke with him and
had to spit, they did so with much art. With three fingers they would
twitch out a handful of hay, spit into the hollow and then stop it up
again. One might be tempted to laugh only if when one mixed with them
as Homo did when in search of Grigia, one might just as easily start
as if in sudden fright at this crude dignity.
But Gresia was seldom among
them, and when at last he found her she would perhaps be crouching in
a potato field laughing at him. He knew she had nothing on but two petticoats
and that the dry earth that was running through her slim rough fingers
was also touching her body. But the thought of it was no longer strange
to him. By now his inner being had become curiously familiar with the
touch of earth. And perhaps indeed it was not at the time of the hay
harvest at all that he met her in that field. In this life he was leading
and there was no longer any certainty about time and place.
So the story is about
the displacement and interruption of rationality, rational time, rational
place—by eroticism. By this extreme eroticism of this woman. This peasant
woman. And it leads eventually to his being entombed in the earth. The
remarkable thing about it is that the language of the earth, is evoked
or is told or is spun out. With such mathematical precision. In a way
that is utterly strange. The images are utterly strange. About a different
time. When they make love he says Grigia trickled through him. And it’s about the
transformation of a man in to the earth and he eventually is entombed
in the earth. Alive. In a cave. It’s a very strange story. And Musil’s
short stories are about the erotics of… they’re about women, I think
they stand for him for the erotic of the world. Irrationality, the breaking
of the breakers of time–space and a rational frame that we use to
prevent life from rushing into us. So he is a lesson back to the idea
of this blizzard of sense impressions.
MM: That’s
interesting. You come back to the earth again, I’m interested that
you do that. That’s another reference to that. But I am looking at
this pile of books, here.
MD: This
remaining pile.
MM: And I am
looking at a book that I love also. The Good Soldier by Ford
Maddox Ford. An extraordinary piece.
MD:
Yes. A wonderful one. One of my favorite books, also a writer’s
book. A favorite of Graham Green. A favorite of William Gass, a
favorite of Michael Ondaatje. Very well known and prized by writers.
This book was introduced to me by my tutor Frank Kermode. Who you will
see introduced this volume and did the notes. And in fact he handed
this volume of it to me, when I was in Cambridge two years ago, as I
was leaving his apartment he pressed, you know he’s in his mid-eighties.
But he pressed on me seven or eight volumes he had recently edited of
various things. And among them was The Good Soldier. He and I
had long discussions about this book. In Widener Library in his office
on the top floor in Cambridge MA in, lets see, 1977.
MM:
Well that would have been a conversation to record!
MD:
I wish! The thing I remember about it is, him, among other things reading
the first paragraph. Because the first paragraph, the book as you know
is a kind of jewel case. It’s a complicated jewel case. Or a complicated
watch mechanism. You can shift the metaphor. Its full of traps. Its
full of byways, its full of, there are even, as my professor pointed
out to me, a number of mistakes in it where the author himself
forgets the sequence. Because the time sequence is scrambled. Very severely.
And it was Ford himself who said that he one day sat down in 1915 with
the idea of putting everything he knew about writing into one book.
And Ford of course published something on the order of 60 books. He
had a Victorian productivity. But this is surely his greatest, his greatest
book. And the beginning, as my professor always told me, is full of
lies. Almost everything in it is full of lies. It begins. Well it’s
a famous first sentence. “This is the saddest story I have ever
heard.” It’s a wonderful first sentence not least because
Ford wanted to title the book The Saddest Story. That was his
title when he wrote it. The publishers refused because it was published
during WWI, and they thought it wouldn’t sell during this difficult
time. WWI of course was key to Ford’s life. He changes his name because
of the anti-German feeling.
Well, as Frank Kermode
pointed out to me almost every word here is a lie. He didn’t hear the
story. He took part in it. The various people who have hearts, the way
he knew this couple who of course were an adulterous couple, all of
it is much more complex than this first paragraph suggests and the book
itself is a massive deception. It’s like a complicated game. And yet
it’s extremely powerful. It’s a book about love, about adultery
and about a person who is either so simple as to be an idiot or as another
professor argued, is a liar. So it’s a book told by a liar or a fool.
And yet it’s about the deepest human relationships. And also it’s
an attempt to understand the modern world. What went wrong, why did
WWI, which for Ford and for all of his contemporaries, not least Henry
James, seem to them a complete catastrophe. How could the world as James
wrote, that seemed to be gradually bettering, had been headed in fact
to this kind of barbarity. And this is partly an attempt to answer
that question. To see where things went wrong. So I greatly love this
book, not only for the beauty of its prose, but it’s a very funny
book, its full of grotesque images, beautiful writing.
And it’s also written
by a man who’s enormously fascinating, who knew Hemingway well. There
is this scene of him in Moveable Feast, a quite wonderful scene
by Hemingway. In which Ford tells about 20 lies in the space of five
minutes. He orders a drink. They are in a cafe. The waiter goes of to
get him a drink and he yells, “No no I didn’t order that drink are
you insane? I ordered something different.” You see in him this very
dramatic portrait of a man who couldn’t help but lie. And this is
a book of a man who is a liar but also a very great artist. So a wonderful
a wonderful book.
MM: Well I love
it too. Mark, I’m looking at our time. Choose me one more.
MD:
Choose you one more. Goodness.
MM:
I hate to do that to you.
MD:
Oh my God this is very hard. How about two more?
MM: Well
all right.
MD:
Well I think that an artist who has meant an enormous amount to me in
my life is Chekhov. On whom I am teaching a seminar now with Bob Hass
at Berkeley. So I am reading his stories and his plays once more from
beginning to end. Which has been extraordinary experience because I
think there is no greater realist in the history of writing. He is an
extraordinary creator of descriptive prose an extraordinary comprehender
or of human beings. Of what makes them act the way they do. And in particular
the delusions they entertain that allow them to live the way they live.
I have chose here
his most famous story. The Lady With the Little Dog. Simply because
there is a passage in it that I love intensely. The story describes
of course, a love affair, between a man, a married man and a married
woman who meet at Yalta who have what the man thinks is going to be
a very brief passionate affair. He returns to Moscow, where he lives
and discovers that he is in love with her. And the description is, or
the story is about this affair and what will happen. Although the what
will happen is left outside the frame. And the scene I want to read
comes late to the story, to the final part of the story. Part IV, when
she has arrived in town for one of their assignations. She lives in
a provincial town. He is going off to see her but on the way takes has
daughter to school.
“It’s
three degrees above freezing-point, and yet it is snowing,” said
Gurov to his daughter. “The thaw is only on the surface of the
earth; there is quite a different temperature at a greater height in
the atmosphere.”
He explained that, too. He
talked, thinking all the while that he was going to see her, and no
living soul knew of it, and probably never would know. He had two lives:
one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative
truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends
and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And
through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances,
everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything
in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that
made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people; and all that
was false in him, the sheath in which he hid himself to conceal the
truth—such, for instance, as his work in the bank, his discussions
at the club, his “lower race,” his presence with his wife
at anniversary festivities—all that was open. And he judged of others
by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that
every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy
and under the cover of night. All personal life rested on secrecy, and
possibly it was partly on that account that civilized man was so nervously
anxious that personal privacy should be respected.
MD:
The reason I love this obviously is because of its humanism. That it’s
recognizing that there is no moral judgment here. There is the simple
reality that he recognizes that he is living this double life and the
real life is the secret one. It’s where the emotions are real where
the love is real and the surface life is the lie. And Chekhov doesn’t
rail against this. There is no, as Uncle Vany does in the play of the
same name, he rails against this deception. In this story Chekhov doesn’t
rail against it, he simply recognizes the truth. I love that particular
line, By Some strange coincidence this is what is happening.
MM: Well I am
looking at a strange coincidence because I have a book of Chekhov by
my bedsides, his book of medical stories.
MD:
Oh yes, I just read a medical case. Which is wonderful
MM: Yeah I have
those. All right, that’s great. I am glad we have some Chekhov.
MD:
All right this is the last one. I’ve one of my favorite writers
is Nabokov. And I, it’s very hard to choose, as with a lot of this, to
choose from his work. But I chose a wonderful story call Spring in
Fyalta, which he translated himself from the Russian. Which has
a spectacular beginning and I will explain in a second why I love the
beginning so much. It begins as many of his stories do, with a description.
Spring in Fialta is cloudy
and dull. Everything is damp: the piebald trunks of the plane trees,
the juniper shrubs, the railings, the gravel. Far away, in a watery
vista between the jagged edges of pale bluish houses, which have tottered
up from their knees to climb the slope, a cypress indicating the way,
the blurred Mount St George is more than ever remote from its likeness
on the picture postcards which since 1910, say (those straw hats, those
youthful cabmen), have been courting the tourist from the sorry-go-round
of their prop, among amaythist toothed lumps of rock and the mantelpiece
screens of seashells. The air is windless and warm with a faint tang
of burning. The sea, its salt drowned in the solution of rain is lest
locust than grey with waves too sluggish to break into foam.
It’s the first paragraph.
MM: It’s the
first paragraph.
MD:
You know when I cam back and this is perhaps where I will end, because
it talks about writing and literature. I always have enormous trouble
beginning pieces. And I am not the only one, a lot of people do. To
hear, as Nabokav says, that opening throb. That its somehow like hearing
something and the piece or the book or whatever it is I am working on,
the essay, won’t come until I have that sentence right. The first few
sentences or the first sentence of the piece. Because in a sense the
whole piece is contained in that sentence in a way. If it’s right,
if it sounds right. There is a sound of the writing works. And I came
home from Iraq in 2003 and I’d had an awful experience, 2004 actually.
Seeing a lot of killing and it was grim and cold there and it suddenly
to me, a sentence ” Winter in Baghdad was cloudy and grey.”
And of course this sentence, I kept thinking it was an echo from somewhere,
an echo from somewhere, and I couldn’t understand where it was from.
And I wrote it, and in fact I used that phrase to begin several parts
of this piece. It appears three times in the story. And I had a very
close friend, Cristina Garcia, a novelist, a wonderful novelist, author
of Dreaming in Cuba. A long time close friend of mind. She said
Papi, as she calls me, you echoes the first sentence in Spring in
Fialta, which is of course, Spring in Fialta is cloudy and dull.
It has that same, Winter in Baghdad is cloudy and grey. Somehow
out of that sentence came this long piece about Baghdad, and about the
death in and of Baghdad. So you know we have echoes. We have echoes
in our soul. And I don’t think Mr. Nabakov, were he here would particularly
love this because this is a story about love and about the way that
people we love can’t quite be captured, they are elusive forces. They
are elusive figures. Nina the beautiful heroine of this story is elusive,
he never catches her. But Nabokov would like the fact that, I think,
the echoes, that I read it and it echoes through my work.
MM: I’m sure
he would. I think that is one of the great gifts that one artist gives
another.
MD:
Absolutely. He has given many gifts.
MM: Many Gifts.
Mark Danner you have given us a wonderful gift of this conversation
about Living with Literature. Thank you so very much.
MD:
My pleasure. Thank you.
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