Passion, Edited: An Interview with Frederic Tuten
Frederic Tuten | The Bar at Twilight | Bellevue Literary Press | 2022 | 288 Pages
Since the release of his first novel in 1971, Frederic Tuten has charted a singular course through the comparatively choppy waters of late twentieth-century American belles lettres. From the omnivorous, Pop Art-inflected bricolage of The Adventures of Mao on the Long March (1971), which interleaves quotes from texts like Walter Pater’s The Renaissance, Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, and more into a wittily chopped-up restaging of history, to the playful historical romance of Tallien (1988) and the sly, humanizing pathos of Tintin in the New World (1993), Tuten has managed to reinvent himself in one stylistically daring work after another. Throughout his impressive career, he’s seemingly done it all—penned the nonpareil deconstructive experiment in Mao, rewritten the classics in Tintin, plumbed the depths of a stricter realism in The Green Hour (2002)—so much so that a tendency towards self-reinvention can often feel like the defining trait of his body of work. Though of course, the diligent Tutenite will find other threads to appreciate, among them an air of wry, lightly-held elegance, a humanistic commitment to passion in all its forms, and a devotion to the sentence that culminates, often, in burnished lines that approach the density of poetry.
Tuten’s most recent book, The Bar at Twilight, is a sumptuous compendium of fables, pastiches, and stories in late style, all of them trussed up in a distinctively earthy, image-obsessed prose. At once riotous and soulful, saturated by a gentle, well-traveled tristesse, the stories feel both strikingly familiar—revisiting techniques explored in Tuten’s novels and in his previous collection of short fiction, Self-Portraits (2010)—and markedly fresh. In one story, Popeye is recast as the ur-wanderer Ulysses, making his way back home to Penelope—in this case, an ever-faithful Olive Oyl. Elsewhere, a bar in the East Village where horses (and later centaurs) go to drink and loiter appears. Though it’s not all fantastical. Many of the stories in The Bar at Twilight deploy a tight realism—think Brodkey, but with charm—to describe youthful passions and well-aged relationships alike. Some of the characters in these stories are artists, though more are the partners of artists—a shrewd vantage that allows Tuten to deploy his amiable, conversational style of art criticism.
While Tuten’s writings tend to feel impressively tight, the stories in The Bar at Twilight are often pleasantly associative and ruminatively paced. Set, among other places, in Rome, France, and the Lower East Side, the stories are ruled by a certain Mediterranean driftulness, as well as a fluid intensity of expression that recalls the planar color blocks of Fauvism and the gestural profluency of Poussin. Comparisons to painting are apt, since in recent years Tuten has returned to the graphic arts, a passion of his youth, and regularly turns out canvases and drawings on cardboard typified by bold wedges of color, a frolicsome vitality, and a wistful stock of images: sailboats and clouds, vases and blooms, ferns and sidelong faces. Soulful, poignant, and dreamily evocative of lost time, these works feel very much in keeping with the ludic, rhapsodic nature of Tuten’s prose.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Bailey Trela: How does your painting influence the way you write stories? Does it operate on the deeper level of ideas and the way you approach narrative, for instance? Or is it more present on the sentence level, in the way you craft your images?
Frederic Tuten: One way to answer that is by looking at Georges Simenon. Everyone thinks he’s a writer of entertaining detective stories, which he is, but he’s also a wonderful writer of psychological novels. He was asked in a 1955 Paris Review interview who had influenced his writing. The Impressionists, he said, “for the mood.” For Simenon, mood is character, and aligns with the action of the plot. He also speaks of Cézanne, and how he could paint an apple with just three strokes and give it freshness and life. I hope I can give a sentence, a paragraph, such precision and brevity that the lines resonate with the reader.
In his later novels, Céline wrote telegraphically. Sentences of three or four words, or sentence fragments followed by three dots. That meant concision, precision, velocity. I crave that in contemporary literature. Most of what I read today is dross and verbiage, yards of exposition and backstory. I still read Thomas Mann and Proust, so length isn’t the issue, but the writing can’t be turgid, can’t be blather wrapped in lard. It can’t be lazy. Put your heart and soul and craftiness into your writing, or why do it at all? Unless you’re bent on making product, more source material for the media, which of course has its place, but don’t confuse it with art.
BT: It’s interesting you bring up Mann. There’s so much of The Magic Mountain in Tintin in the New World — you essentially take Mann’s characters, like Settembrini and Chauchat, and plop them into the Tintin mythos.
FT: The Magic Mountain was and is deep in my life. There’s something compelling in great fiction, something more than what you can find in even the most wonderful theater or cinema. There’s something more profound, more lasting. It becomes a partner in your life, and stays in your marrow. If you love words, if you want to know people the way you would if they bared their souls to you, read great fiction. E.M. Forster, in his brilliant Aspects of the Novel, asks you to imagine entering a room and finding Raskolnikov, Don Quixote, and Moll Flanders sitting there at a table. You’d immediately feel comfortable joining them because you know them, know them better than your own friends. The characters—my friends—in The Magic Mountain visit me often, and I them. Long ago, I transported those friends from the sanitorium high in the Alps where they were ill and dying and falling in love and took them to the heights of Macchu Picchu, to another mountain in the New World, to meet one of my heroes, Tintin, and to see if the wild chemistry of their personalities would mix. Actually, I had missed them all and wanted very much to have them close to me. It took me sixteen years of on-and-off writing before we all sat at the same table in that little hotel in Macchu Picchu.
BT: Was Candide on your mind at all when you were writing Tintin?
FT: It must have been in some way, because Candide’s really the archetype of the innocent hero who blunders out into the world, learning about life along the way—and maybe at the end he or she has learned something about their garden, and how to cultivate it. Tintin is smart and even crafty. He understands how criminals operate, and how to apprehend them. But he’s a boy. He doesn’t know what the larger world is about. About love, especially. In that regard, Candide is Tintin’s ancestor, as well as the innocent youth, Hans Castorp, at the center of Mann’s great novel. What I had hoped to do with Tintin was to start him off as an innocent but have him change and grow through love—love would be the catalyst. Love changes you. You become a person who will know both love and sorrow—that’s the start of being a person.
BT: Throughout your work, you’re constantly appropriating popular cultural figures. There’s Tintin, obviously, and in the story “L'Odysée” from The Bar at Twilight, Popeye takes the place of Ulysses. At the same time, in Mao, in your novel Van Gogh's Bad Café, and elsewhere, you also appropriate historical figures. I'm wondering how you think about these two types of appropriation, and whether there are similarities or differences in the way you approach them.
FT: The characters come to us fully formed. The reader knows immediately who Popeye is. I don’t have to explain him, tell his backstory. I don’t have to explain who Van Gogh is, either, or whichever known characters I choose, precisely because they’re readymades, to use Duchamp’s term. Now, the question is, having the character in place, what’s next? I’m not writing fictionalized biography. A good story is hook and revelation.
In the story you mentioned, Popeye’s returning home after being captured by a circus, where he was made to play the strongman. He became friends with the circus animals and he engineered their escape, and now he’s returning home to Penelope, who of course is Olive Oyl. Of course, Popeye speaks like Popeye, which is something you’re not allowed to do in so-called realistic fiction. Dialogue there is made to sound as if real people are speaking. But what kind of real people, anyway? And so what? To speak as Popeye speaks is kind of wonderful to me. Or Captain Haddock, from Tintin. Haddock doesn’t say, “I want,” but “Me wants.” So readymades give me flexibility and are very appealing to me. In my first novel, The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, I made Mao, I hope, poetical, complex, and—eventually, quietly—murderous.
BT: It’s so interesting to bring in Duchamp. Especially when you’re using pop culture figures, a lot of the pathos comes from these being essentially comic characters, repurposed in serious or domestic settings—Tintin, Popeye, and so on. These are pristine characters that suddenly have to contend with deep love, aging, death—the whole gauntlet of human experience. Do you think, in your writing, it’s easier to access that grand sense of tragedy through these readymades?
FT: Well, let’s say that it's easier for me to do it. Because I find I have distance from it, and the distance allows me a certain kind of passion that, if I expressed it on the page without wit, irony, humor, would be maudlin, saccharine, overkill, preachy—all of that stuff. So the remove is very interesting and important for me. In the way that Mann does it with Hans Castorp—he treats him very gently, ironically, but all the feelings are there, they come through on the page. How to put it? It’s a kind of passion recollected and edited on the page, rather than passion being poured on the page—it’s been tempered in some way. It’s not just you feeling the passion, but the reader feeling it as well. And that takes skill, that takes artifice. It’s a lifetime project.
Say, for instance, I make up a character, a Chinese man in 1920, from a wealthy peasant family, who reads newspapers and wants to become a poet, and one day becomes radicalized. That’s the story of Mao. Yes, but that’s all exposition. I want to go right into it, right into the world as it’s occurring. Simenon does that. No backstory, just right to the action. You find the crucial moment of the character’s being, and start there.
BT: We haven't really talked about the book of stories yet, so this is a bit of a transitional question. What’s the difference for you between writing short stories and writing novels? Are there different impulses at play?
FT: People often say a good short story, like a poem, has to be concise, to deliver its feelings briefly. But some of my stories are fairly long, they’re almost like novellas. I think that what's astonishing about writing is that every time you think that a short story is a certain way or has always been done that way, or it's the way that it should be done, something comes around and changes your mind. As Godard said, a film has a beginning, a middle, and an end—but not necessarily in that order. So, if you are at all interested in writing what has not already been done—another well-tailored version of the standard-issue fiction—the question is: How do you make a story that's unlike any other story? Let me put it this way. I like to read stories that, when I’ve finished them, I feel differently about life. It doesn’t explain life to me, or tell me how to live. But I know something new. I’ve felt a truth that I hadn’t felt before I had read that story. I’d hope that some of my stories have done that.
To put it another way, I always want discovery. I want to feel when I come out of an experience I haven't left the same way I walked in. Imagine you’ve gone to a dinner party. The food is good, the wine delicious, the conversation engaging and intelligent, everyone’s charming, everyone’s, friendly, gracious, even. And yet when you go home, and you’re alone, you feel alone. Because nothing has been said from the heart, nothing has reached your heart. There’s been no frisson, no surprise, no shock — no one has spit into the soup or told the hosts they’re boring and that the art on their walls is really just trendy shit. A well-mannered dinner party is what most current fiction aspires to.
I want fiction that jars me. Jars me to its beauty, its freshness, its surprise. Otherwise, why waste my time and my eyes, my ever-shrinking brain cells? Which is another way of getting at the question of what a short story is. How do I define a short story or a novel that interests me? I would say it's a body of words with the concision of poetry, and with images, scenes, characters and conversations that awaken you.
BT: I think your fiction is so good at, on the one hand, discarding all of these outmoded ways of telling a story—verisimilitude, say, or classic narrative progression. But then there’s another side of your fiction that’s a send-up of those modes, a parody almost. Tintin in the New World is loaded with these dense, heavy, parlor-type conversations that feel torn from a nineteenth-century novel. So you take that and you explode it, and it becomes this new thing that’s fun and filled with life in a totally different and unexpected way. What I mean is, there turns out to be a lot of realism in your work, though the techniques are being tweaked.
FT: Realism, as a style and way of thinking about subject matter and truth to life, was once radical in fiction. It had and still has its place, if that is what interests you. Well, what’s the realism in Chekhov? The realism is, simply, insight into life. To see life as it really is, or as you understand it to be. The result of that sort of realist story is to have the thought, “Oh, before I read the story, I thought this, but now I see it’s really this.” But there are many different ways of telling a story. Kafka is honored now but for the longest time his work was seen as aberrant – the truly new is always aberrant. It’s scorned. It’s the same in painting as well. When Picasso turned to and created Cubism, his own friends objected to the new style. His own friends! They hated the new work. One of them, it might have been Léger, when he saw Les Demoiselles d'Avignon said something to the effect of, “French painting is finished.” They thought Picasso had gone mad. Who could make such a crazy painting? Styles change, but the realism of art never changes.
If I talk negatively about contemporary fiction, I’m also talking negatively about contemporary life. They go hand in hand—the dumbing down and leveling of thought in America, in every sphere. How can fresh and original work find its place in a middling atmosphere where the mediocre is the standard and constantly held up for praise? But then, of course, the question is what makes work valuable.
BT: In “Winter, 1965,” the protagonist, a young writer, admits to a woman that he’s not very good at “realism or office fiction.” Then we get this line: “He knew nothing of that world, making him wonder in what America he lived and if he was an American writer, or any kind of writer at all.” I’m wondering, is that something you’ve felt yourself?
FT: When I was young, I loved American literature most. Melville especially. I even have a PhD in early American fiction—Hawthorne, Thoreau, Poe, that crew. But I also loved reading the great Russian and French writers. I was enamored with their ideas, their mission to tell the truth beautifully and to give their lives to making literature, to making art. I felt close to European writing, especially in my twenties, because those themes of alienation and estrangement were close to me.
I naturally gravitated to the world I imagined was Europe, though I’d never been there. Paris meant the cafe lifestyle, and many of my stories take place in cafes because I’m still thinking of those cafes as cultural engines. When I was kid, I’d come down from the Bronx and go to Cafe Figaro in Greenwich Village. It was magical. Classical music, cappuccinos, newspapers papers from all over the world. Young artists and poets bunked there. You could sit by a window all day over an espresso with Rimbaud for company. There was an atmosphere, in other words.
BT: In the story “In the Borghese Gardens,” there’s a wonderful discussion of Hawthorne, specifically The Marble Faun, which is a book you’re very fond of, though you have some strong words for it as well. The book’s obsessed with statuary and sculpture, which infects Hawthorne’s writing, weighing it down. I wonder what your interest is in these failed novels, what your experience of them is, and what you get out of them.
FT: The Marble Faun is Hawthorne’s strangest and most remarkable book. The Scarlet Letter is almost perfect in its symmetry, its formal qualities—he was on firm ground. But it’s so clear that in The Marble Faun Hawthorne was reaching for something he didn’t fully understand, something that was so wholly different from his experience of life. There he was, coming from Puritan America believing that to be closer to God you didn’t need a church with icons or sculptures or paintings of any sort. In Italy, Hawthorne found himself in this painting-besotted, voluptuary, color-filled world, and it baffled him. All that sensuality made him dizzy. I think he was trying to find a way to explain the mystery of that feeling, and he lost his way.
The Marble Faun isn’t formally—well, coherent, you might say. But it’s magical, and there’s a nobility to its failure. A kind of sadness, a melancholy, bathes the pages. I’m attracted to melancholy. I suppose that’s one of the reasons I come back to it. Also, I found resemblances between one of the book’s protagonists, Donatello, the innocent, faun-like character, and my vision of Tintin, and I even lifted a crucial passage from Hawthorne’s novel and embedded it in Tintin in the New World at a parallel moment in the text. You know, Melville once said something to the effect that he’d rather read a failed novel that dives than a successful one that doesn’t reach beyond its safe self. Hawthorne dove as far as his plumb line would take him. What he saw down there was the dark muddle of life, where art lives.
Frederic Tuten is the author of five novels, the memoir My Young Life, and two short story collections, Self-Portraits: Fictions and The Bar at Twilight. Among other honors, Tuten has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Writing. He lives in New York.