Frank Wilson is the book editor for The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he has worked since 1980, and as of this writing, he is not on strike. When he is not editing book reviews or writing his column, he can be found at Books Inq.
In the second part of our chat, Frank tells me the truth about the importance of phenomenology, the desires of young men the world over and James Joyce’s reading habits. The first section can be found here.
Liz Lopatto: What would you say are the most common errors that you see good authors make?
Frank Wilson: Well, let’s take Saturday, because it’s a perfect example; it’s beautifully written but there are problems with it. The main character is a neurosurgeon. He gets threatened by a trio of thugs, and he’s in danger of being really hurt by these guys, and it just so happens he notices one of them has the symptoms of Huntington’s disease. And this is not something that you or I or most of the people on the planet could possibly know–that’s a stretch. It fits into the theme, but I’ll get to that.
There are other problems. That’s a highly improbable thing there, that it just so happens that this character has the expertise to notice this, and the guy knows he’s got it, and so on. I’d even give you a pass on that, but is a highly improbable thing. But there are other things. The son, Theo, is the British equivalent of a high school drop-out, or maybe has graduated from high school but isn’t going to university and he wants to be a blues singer. This is an upper class, well-to-do British family, obviously. It just so happens that his grandfather is a world-renowned poet, periodically mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel prize, with the preposterous name of Grammaticus, by the way, and it so happens that granddad is a friend of Jack Bruce, formerly of Cream. And so he gets the son a listen from Jack, and they set him up in a masterclass with Eric Clapton, and he gets a gig in Manhattan, and I’m thinking, “Boy, are we far away from the Mississippi mud here. Here’s this upper class British twit who wants to be a blues man, and this is the blues?” That annoyed me.
Then the daughter, who is going to become, like her granddad, a poet, has researched her poems by sleeping around in school in order to gain material for her volume of poems. I’m a published poet. I may not be the next John Keats, but that is not the way people go about writing poetry, thank you. It wouldn’t work. You wouldn’t come up with anything good, and it’s rather an appalling thing to do, when you think about it. And then, near the end of the book, Matthew Arnold saves the day–not to give anything away. I should ask you what you thought about it. You may totally disagree with me.
LL: I agree it was beautifully written; I love McEwan’s style, and it made me zip over some of the things you’re mentioning without really lifting an eyebrow. It did seem to me more like a fairy tale more than anything–I didn’t read it as being especially true to life.
FW: It’s very coldly written. I guess you could argue, well, the guy is a surgeon. Also, where he ends up operating on the guy“
LL: That was what I found jarring. It threw me. I have always been under the impression that surgeons, like lawyers, have a code of ethics where if you are at all, in any way, personally involved with the patient, you have to step aside when it comes to the operating room–whether that involvement is positive or negative makes no difference.
FW: Certainly, ethically, they should not. But the other curious thing about it is the coincidences, the randomness, is that there’s a philosophical theme in that book, and it’s stated quite explicitly in the book, as I recall, although I haven’t read it since it came out. But clearly there are statements in there that we live in a completely determined universe, and yet all the pivotal events in it are purely random. Well, there’s a contradiction between one accident after another, one coincidence after another, and a completely determined universe. They’re not reconcilable. The world is either completely determined or completely random.
And that was one of the things that annoyed me. That I was being preached something that was contradictory, and there was something preachy about that book. And you know, there’s not a single person in the book that I particularly liked. There wasn’t anyone in that book that I really warmed to. I kind of like Max Morden in John Banville’s The Sea–in fact, I did like Max. And I have to confess, if there’s nobody in a book that I like, I have a problem with that book. I have to find someone that I can identify with.
LL: So you look for a character with whom you identify–what kind of a character does that for you?
FW: Someone who resonates strongly with me. I just read–there’s an interesting book I reviewed earlier this year: The Trial of True Love by William Nicholson, and I recommend it highly. I said in my review that the narrator, Bron–I think men will find him bothersome because he will remind them of their younger, more callow selves. If you’re honest, you will think, “Yeah, that’s probably the way I was then.” And you can pretty much figure out what will happen in that book.
There’s another character in that book, the art dealer, that is in many ways the dream sophisticate that I think many men–I think many men have a secret sophisticate that they’d like to be. There’s a Cary Grant trying to get out of every man, don’t you think?
LL: I think I maybe shouldn’t comment one way or the other for fear of ruining my love life.
[both laugh]
LL: So you said you’re a poet. I remember seeing one of your villanelles that’s been set to music?
FW: Yes, there’s one of them that I’m going to post on my blog on Sunday that was published in Boulevard last–either last fall or last spring. I can’t remember. Once they’re done, I don’t pay a heck of a lot of attention to them. They’re not for me to read. But it happens to be a villanelle that I got the first line for around this time of the year and didn’t finish until around Easter. [laughs] You know, because nothing came. And it ended up being a villanelle that retold the story of the coming of the Magi, so I called it “Advent,” and it got published and since this coming Sunday is the first Sunday of Advent, I thought I’d post it on my blog.
I think I posted one poem of mine on the blog, and I put it there for people to respond to, and they really did. They wrote their own poems in response, in huge numbers. I am hoping to eventually gather them and put them in the paper, have a special book page consisting of nothing but the poems that people wrote in answer to that poem.
But yes, a villanelle “Time is the measure of the world below” was set to music by a Philadelphia composer named Harold Boatwright, who used to be, before he retired, a professor of composition at Haverford College. I recently saw it done a couple of years ago. It was almost a kind of miniature opera. I was actually genuinely impressed by it and I only say that because I didn’t have anything to do with it. I was so far removed from the poem. It was like encountering something and saying “Hey, that’s kind of good.” [laughs]
LL: It sounds very much as though there are different muscles engaged when you’re writing poetry.
FW: Oh yeah, poetry is something that I do as a–I’m in the Eliot school, that you use it to escape personality and emotion. And as Eliot said, you have to know what it means to be tyrannized by them to want to escape from them. Excuse me just a sec.
[pause]
Carlin Romano has just advised me to tell the truth. [laughs] So much for the respect I get from my staff.
I find that there are certain moments in my life that crystallize. I was thinking of writing a little about this, actually. If I were to write the story of my life, I wouldn’t be interested in writing a narrative, the narrative sequence of events, because I don’t have much of a sense of nostalgia. I’ve got a good memory–if you ask me about something that happened when I was five, I can give you all kinds of details. I’m just not interested in what happened sixty-odd years ago. I’m interested in what’s happening right now. I’m very present-oriented.
What I find interesting is that when I look back at the past, I see certain–for want of a better phrase–time crystals, certain moments that details crystallize around that stay with you in the form of a constellation that has guided me, at least, through most of my life. There are various moments that are extremely vivid visually and auditorily in my memory and imagination, and when events happen like that, that’s what I feel like writing a poem about. And whatever the form is tends to come out of what the experience is–it may be in free verse, it may be a villanelle. I can say it won’t be a sonnet. I can’t make that work. I can write them, but as e e cummings said, “A word of made is not a world of born.” Poetry is the most authentic thing I do.
LL: Forgive me for being a philosophy major, but in what sense do you mean “authentic”?
FW: I mean “authentic” in the existential, phenomenological sense. You were a philosophy major? What was your specialty?
LL: I did a lot of epistemology, and a fair amount of philosophy of science, formal logic, and I read quite a bit of Aristotle, which doesn’t sound like it ought to hang together very well.
FW: You might want to take a look at my blog–I had a couple of interesting things on the philosophy of religion that Dave Lull sent me. One was a piece by Colin Wilson about phenomenology, and–since you mention Aristotle–what it brought to my mind was that I studied Thomism, in addition to existentialism and phenomenology, and my metaphysics primer was a very good book called Existential Phenomenology, by a guy called Lightman. It’s a fascinating book because it makes the point that philosophy is philosophy for me. It isn’t learning a set of theses, and studying the history of the philosophy, it is your thinking through the major problems of philosophy to arrive at a satisfying conclusion. So in that sense–that’s the sense of authenticity. That’s what I mean by poetry being the most authentic activity I do, because that’s the one thing I do where I am really my whole self, the whole self is committed to getting that right.
When you’re writing for deadline, you’re well aware that you can make a mistake. You’ve got to make it fit, get it done. It’s not there for the ages and so on and so forth. I do the best I can. But I don’t have a deadline for a poem. It’s done when I notice that it’s done.
But I mention that Colin Wilson piece because it brought to mind St. Thomas’ idea that the faculty of the intellect is active, not passive, that it reaches out–and this is his term–grasps the form of what is known and makes it a part of oneself. Meaning that knowledge enhances being. And I think that’s also an Aristotelian point.
I think also if you read Ulysses carefully–I had to read Ulysses carefully a few years ago because we did a big piece where our photographer and I went to Dublin and followed in Leopold Bloom’s footsteps for the centenary of Bloomsday.
Joyce used to read a page of Thomas Aquinas every day in Latin, and I am convinced that underlining much of Ulysses is precisely that theory of knowledge, because Stephen Dedalus quotes Thomas Aquinas’ treatise on the soul, which is of course about Aristotle’s treatise on the soul, when he’s walking along Sandymount Strand. And so that’s what Mr. Bloom is doing through his day. He is enriching his soul by grasping the form of the things he encounters in his day. I am absolutely convinced that if I were a scholar, I could prove that. You’re young, you have all the time in the world–you do it. I give it to you.