Greg Gerke
In Conversation
Daniel Davis Wood speaks to Greg Gerke, author of See What I See, about his inspirations and creative processes.
Paperback: £12.99
I’d like to start with the broad view of See What I See. It’s an unusual book in that it’s fundamentally a collection of essays on literature and film, but when I look back at the volume as a whole I’m struck most of all by how personal it is. Deeply, deeply personal. In fact there’s one essay in there, ‘All Naked, All the Time’, in which you compare the films of John Cassavetes with the prose of Gertrude Stein, asking whether they might both be examples of “emotionally naked art”, and so I wonder: would you see your work in this book as something like emotionally naked criticism? I don’t mean in an overly forthright, self-exposing sense, but more in the sense that you’re willing — with some conscious effort — to let your own vulnerabilities become visible, if that’s what’s necessary to make a particular point. Working on the book with you, I was often reminded of Nathaniel Hawthorne at the end of The Scarlet Letter: “Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!”
Would you agree with this view of See What I See?
I think, at some point over the years of writing these pieces, something I was not aware of began to happen — the insertion of myself, in hackneyed doses at the beginning, became more and more the substructure to the entire enterprise, and most extremely in the Eric Rohmer piece where the films become the gateway drug to analyzing my past. Not to say that this past is interesting, but in the context of the art, seemingly something shifts, because there is the art and you and all the possible imbrications. Pure memoir, unless Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Michel Leiris, and Paula Fox, is a hard sell. This dappling is something I’d been searching for in reviews and not getting. I don’t go to a review for a plot recap, I want to know what the art did to someone’s soul. The gesture of beginning and ending with little pretty personal anecdotes became too trite for me. The art needed to be submerged in the acid bath of the hidden personality (not the social media persona) and then reconstituted, which is what William Gass does without parallel. Cynthia Ozick wrote that the impression practiced by him is where “the criticism of the text vies as a literary display with the text itself.” It seems we go to art to learn about ourselves, even if we don’t think we do.
But it occurred to me that if art is, secretly, all about us (the time travel element, how we see our past through it), then one might as well not hold back. I’ve been disappointed in the memoirs and autofictions of people in my generation, as well as the Cusks and Knausgaards. It felt like they weren’t going deep enough — not in the way of truth-telling, more like how the poet Geoffrey Hill described creation: “It is the being forced down under the surface by the resistance of technique that inaugurates a self-alienating process which, as it drives down into strata that are not normally encountered, may produce alien objects.” Here is how biting art is made. Creation of a thing itself, not a simple journal entry on how one felt about something. The brouhaha about revealing (I had sex with so and so, etc.) was a sham — with a few exceptions (in non-fiction): Michelle Orange’s essay book This Is Running For Your Life and John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead. Having discretion issues is not the same as making art. Those writers weren’t going into the layers of consciousness and the skuzzy interiors — they wanted to keep looking good but it only made them more smug. A recent example of this is a much ballyhooed “takedown” of John Updike in the London Review of Books. Do any takedowns last, outside of Katherine Anne Porter putting her nails into Gertrude Stein? Even Renata Adler’s whitewash of Pauline Kael, while extremely well-written, is something I read once but have no desire to visit again. I hope what I’m doing is viewed much differently. When I began that Rohmer piece, I had no idea I would start writing about my past relationships; it came very naturally as if the experience of the films had willed it after months of stewing in my psyche. I think that art relates to your entire person and one must meet it with the same intensity and ferocity.
I think this is the fine line you walk, pretty much perfectly, in See What I See: not being self-revealing in a superficial or sensationalistic way, like disclosing a sordid past, and not looking at art for purposes of a “plot recap”, but focusing on the formal intricacies of artworks — so that somehow your attention to the aesthetics of art opens onto a deeply personal way of writing that is something quite apart from an autobiographical retelling of events.
There’s a line in your very skeptical essay on David Fincher that has stuck with me, because it cuts to the heart of the matter. You say there’s one simple question you’d like to ask artists like Fincher: “Why do you show me the things you show me?” So your starting point for analysing any experience of art seems to be that you want to seek out a justification for all of the tiny elements incorporated into the artwork, word by word in literature and frame by frame in film. You want to understand how the artist has come to his or her style, in Susan Sontag’s sense of the term: “Style is the principle of decision in a work of art. … The most attractive works of art are those which give us the illusion that the artist had no alternatives, so wholly centered is he in his style.” And if you can understand “the principle of decision” that has led to the style — that has led for some things to be included, others excluded; some to be shown, others hidden — then you’re in a place where something in the work reverberates with your own soul, with your own history of decisions, exposures, concealments, in the thick of life.
Two wonderful examples come to mind for me. The first is from your essay on Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz, where you try to find words for the “superlative” performance of Michelle Williams. Ever seeking out “the principle of decision”, you try to be attentive to what aspects of her presence and mood the camera captures, what Polley allows her to do on screen, in order to show you a particular selection of emotional states. It’s hard not to quote you at length here:
Michelle Williams is certainly the best American actress of her generation, as she continually fills out more and ever more complex psychologies. In Take This Waltz she conveys fear, surprise, awkwardness, tedium, control, regret, and fatigue with a naked spontaneity. I have seen her no-bullshit gaze in a few interviews and would have to assume she draws on the spirit of herself in order to inform her performances. I don’t know how she does what she does, if she employs a method. I don’t want to know, either. Her performance crystallizes as the thing itself. … [N]o-one can wear pain like Michelle Williams; it oozes forth in the like manner that Wordsworth defined the sublime in poetry: a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. Her whole body becomes a tourniquet, trying to clog the loss of spirit that marks her great characterizations.
You go on to look at the way she modulates her accent, and the way Polley structures certain frames and narrative strands around her, but I’ll stop there because that’s enough to get at what I want to ask you about. In a word: beauty. In particular: the principle of decision that leads an artist to present something knowingly beautiful to you, where beauty is understood not bluntly as something that ‘looks good’, but as an expression of the fullest possible range of human capabilities within the circumstances of a given narrative or situation. The works of art that reverberate with you are not fabular, or surreal, or magical-realist, or comedic, and certainly not works of cultural or political commentary, but are those whose primary agenda seems to be stylistic, so as to construct a concept of beauty and offer it to audiences almost as a gift. Would it be fair to say this?
I think you set down those terms much more clearly than I ever could, Daniel — and when you mention how the artist chooses to show some things and hide others, my eyes light up, because there seems to lie a secret of art. Robert Bresson:
The difficulty is that all art is both abstract and suggestive at the same time. You can’t show everything. If you do, it’s no longer art. Art lies in suggestion. The great difficulty for filmmakers is precisely not to show things. Ideally, nothing should be shown, but that’s impossible. So things must be shown from one sole angle that evokes all other angles without showing them. We must let the viewer gradually imagine, hope to imagine, and keep them in a constant state of anticipation. … Life is mysterious, and we should see that on-screen. The effects of things must always be shown before their cause, like in real life. We’re unaware of the causes of most of the events we witness. We see the effects and only later discover the cause.
This quote provides the basis of that remark critiquing Fincher and other directors who fall short of auteur status, for me. The success or failure of a book, film, or play seems to relate solely to this — how much is shown. In Eyes Wide Shut, you never find out how the mask Dr. Bill wore was lost, though he locked it in his house. But how did it show up on his pillow? Who put it there? His wife appears oblivious to it, though maybe she did find it. Kubrick had no interest in a detective story — the mask is inexplicably there because it has to be there, which jives with the Sontag quote — yes, there are no alternatives; boom, there is the mask, deal with it — and it affronts the audience as it does Dr. Bill. At base, the mask is representative of our deepest fear, our hypocrisy (W.S. Merwin: “Something I’ve not done/ is following me/ I haven’t done it again and again…”). One can start from there and root out to just about anything. The whole film has been constructed so that at this moment everything that has occurred collapses — the character’s mind, the dream states, and the uncanny — such was Kubrick’s rhythm. I think Marianne Moore speaks to this: “you don’t devise a rhythm, the rhythm is the person, and the sentence but a radiograph of personality.” So too, everything in the frame of Eyes Wide Shut is the radiograph of Kubrick, who disappears and is only a cipher haunting his work.
So that’s all speaking to style. But what of style-towards-beauty?
I love your definition of beauty as “an expression of the fullest possible range of human capabilities within the circumstances of a given narrative or situation.” Overlapping this, I hope, one can feel the ghost of Walter Pater in certain nooks and crannies of the book; he is certainly there by name. Those works that do reverberate, as you say — yes, they construct a concept of beauty and offer it as a gift. And the gift has to be hard-hearted, as in, this isn’t going to come easy for you. Rilke: “You must change your life.” The gift is an interrogation.
I remember developing a friendship with a painter. She was in her late twenties and she modeled her works on works of the old masters. She had this stark affinity for similar works that entranced me, and we’d watch something by Tarkovsky or read passages of Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood out loud (or even just share our memories of a work we’d seen independently—Solaris, for instance). There wouldn’t be anything to say for a while after ‘taking in’ these experiences. We’d just sit there breathing (Hugh Kenner: “the whole point of a book is what happens in the five minutes after one has finished reading it.” We were still with the gifts coruscating over us, like the indelible line in Nightwood: “‘I have been loved,’ she said, ‘by something strange, and it has forgotten me.’” As Gass would say, that’s a monument to heartache and one feels many of the sharp shocks and long love pangs that have gone on in one’s life, but feels them inside-out — art is a great medicine.
Anyway, the shared silence, taking in those gifts — these are the moments that bring me to my knees. I think many people do incredible psychological work by engaging with art to this degree — there is a betterment process going on. We want to be as aware as we make out Djuna Barnes to be in Nightwood, the picture of her as narrator in our heads.
The gifts — the “hard-hearted beauty” — carefully cultivated through a deliberate style that is ultimately a process of selection, and therefore of revealing a personality or sensibility… That’s art for you, yes? That’s what it’s all about.
But I’m amazed at the terms in which you express your attraction to it, because they pull so strongly in two directions at once. I mean, on the one hand, I could imagine a reader looking at what you’ve just said and thinking, “No, this guy’s book isn’t for me because he’s too elitist, too aloof from the enjoyment a regular person gets out of art” — and quotes from Gass, Moore, Barnes, et al are ammunition for that criticism. At the same time, though, you’re so egalitarian, or democratic: you’re valorising the sharing of art and using the language of communion through art; you’re pursuing aesthetic experience in conversation, in dialogue; you’re getting mileage out of art via unexpected encounters and the way it gives fuel for the soul in everyday situations. And there’s a sense throughout all your essays that no special expertise is needed for these experiences of art. They’re open to everyone. You only need a willing disposition and a heightened sense of one’s lot being cast with the rest of humanity.
I guess that’s the risk one takes (judging one another being our favorite pastime), but I’m glad you see an egalitarianism. It’s best to be Janus-faced in terms of art. Geoffrey Hill has a great quote on coming into the country of the blue, or the force-field of a work of art one can’t shake: “Whatever strange relationship we have with a poem, it is not one of enjoyment. It is more like being brushed past, or aside, by an alien being.” I had the same experience when first reading Christine Schutt and Gary Lutz some twelve years ago, or when first watching Bresson or Rivette. I dare say this might be the same response people have to people they will end up loving.
So, then, I wonder how you see your egalitarianism dovetailing with your gravitation towards beauty, the aesthetic construction of beauty. I’m working towards the second instance of your looking at beauty that really strikes me, so bear with me. Here we are in the #MeToo era, and I could imagine some readers of See What I See looking at your remarks on Michelle Williams and thinking this is a textbook case of objectification. And the book contains passages on lust, desire, sex, and so on, which might give weight to the complaint, if one were to want to embark on a point-scoring exercise.
I’m against hypocrisy in all of its immense to itty-bitty incarnations. If what I’ve done is objectify in the sense of degradation (and doing so would go against my principles), that is for someone else to judge, an invitation that never needs to be sent. I’ve attempted to be as honest as possible; yet, of course, I’m using my own language, which certainly has a knack to corrupt. With this book I have indicted myself and my own failings much more mercilessly and consistently than anyone else. This maneuver is very true to my forms, both in writing and in the world. The book is part-memoir and to make myself look good would be to lie. Many of my mistakes are in relationships — I think one would be hard-pressed to find people who, every time out of the gate, don’t fall in love with someone’s image of another, rather than the person themselves. I’m interested in flaws because I am a flaw.
Right. And if I were to come across a reader who disputed that — who, for instance, took issue with your interest in the beauty of Polley’s images of Michelle Williams, without registering your interest in Polley’s beautification of Michelle Williams via the artful creation of those images — I’d be inclined to point back to ‘All Naked, All the Time’, where you have this to say about the spaghetti meal scene in John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence:
[The scene] contains close-up after close-up of regular guys, most of whom never appear in the film again. It presents individuals and it doesn’t judge or condescend to them, especially when Mabel’s pale white hands are splayed around Billy Tidrow’s round, black, beautiful, smiling face and she says, “I love this face. I love that face. Nick, this is what I call a really handsome face.” The actor is non-professional, the action is startling, accomplished so matter-of-factly, and for a few minutes one could cower at seeing race not being an issue.
Here’s your egalitarianism again, pointedly not gender-specific. You’re as attentive to Cassavetes’ artistic construction of male beauty as you are to Polley’s construction of female beauty, and as appreciative of it. There’s further evidence of this in your discussions of Polley’s framing of the attractiveness of the men in Take This Waltz, and in your impressions of the male characters in the films of Eric Rohmer and Stanley Kubrick. It’s elsewhere, too, including in the more explicitly personal essays. In ‘On or About’, for instance, you even investigate the origins of your artistic preferences in your younger years, where a sort of social ostracisation has its own origins in your body: “I went outside. I had a flicker of how I was being viewed by the others when trying to stand eagerly, but unable to be a party to anything. Myself: tall, very overweight, morose. Who did they see?”
Is this egalitarian approach to beauty the result of a conscious effort to extend your gaze to the aestheticisation of masculinity, to not only play the game of female objectification? Or does it come to you more in the reflection on art and the act of writing, without premeditation?
I think if all films and possible copies of films were obliterated, and aliens were only left that spaghetti meal scene from A Woman Under the Influence, humanity would be represented well. Watch how everyone, while still following up on instincts, is trying to be nice to each other. It’s this bizarre and sublime confluence of decorum and improvisation. I’m sure everyone has had these bejeweled moments in life where people just click with each other — and also that sometimes, someone goes too far and someone else gets mad. But the vulnerability is there and the key is Cassavetes, who said, “It’s when you’re really saying something that people can hurt you. When you’re not saying anything, no-one can hurt you” — wisdom the Buddha or Dante couldn’t have nailed better.
The whole thing is about vulnerability, and I assume that when you talk about male attractiveness, it is more the degree of vulnerability in them that makes them beautiful or pitiful, but mostly some mixture of the two. In writing about the men in these films, I’m probably writing about myself because I see myself in them, even poor and conniving Barry Lyndon. But that’s funny, because when growing up and first seeing the women in Bergman and Antonioni, I identified more with them, but simply because I hadn’t lived enough — plus, I eschewed males; they teased and made fun of me, while women and female friends gave me succor. So it was easy to swap in Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, and Monica Vitti as my ideals and, even more, as the poster images for my anima, the unconscious feminine side of a man. Men are harder to talk about because they speak less, mostly keep their feelings inside, and often define themselves by their athleticism — which is like a psychological desert, for me, though A Fan’s Notes is pretty good. I don’t care how many miles you biked today. Speak what you feel, not what you ought to say. Vulnerability.
When you realize at the end of A Woman Under the Influence that Peter Falk’s character, who threatens to kill his kids, should probably be in an institution before his wife, you understand how chaos will come and come again. Maybe 1974 isn’t so far from 2019 as many people think. There’s much work to be done.
Can we use this as a good point to turn from cinema to literature? I’d like to make the transition by picking up on a couple of aspects from what you’ve just said.
First: “Men are harder to talk about because they speak less, mostly keep their feelings inside, and often define themselves by their athleticism.” This comment grabs my attention because it males me notice something I’d sensed but not seen in See What I See. Throughout the book, there seem to be a few major literary lodestars for you, whose work you read aloud in the presence of another person in a way that creates and sustains (or not?) a relationship. In prose, the two most prominent are Cormac McCarthy and Alice Munro. In ‘Living Words’, you say you’ve “read three of Cormac McCarthy’s novels to three different lovers”, and McCarthy reappears in the centrepiece essay, ‘Highlight’. Munro also gets a mention in ‘Living Words’ and an embodied reading in ‘Highlight’. But — significantly — the gender roles are switched: it’s the über-masculine McCarthy who you read to your lovers, and it’s Munro whose words you read aloud in an extended exchange with another man, in a friendship of extraordinary tenderness and sympathy. Why? What is it about these writers that lets you create bonds with these particular people?
Well, we were young and we had time. As to the difference in gender, it’s probably just a coincidence; plenty of Munro passed between women and myself. McCarthy’s last two books came out back to back in 2005–2006, a time of many transitions in my life. I think what is at the taproot of all of it is the human experience of people passing time in a much more ancient and imaginative way than just watching TV. To share a human voice with someone is an incredibly enriching experience.
I remember I was at this huge event in Utah many years back, with the friend in ‘Highlight’, and I’d brought along some books — Austerlitz, actually, and others. We were camping at 8,000 feet and people sat around talking, playing music, taking drugs, and falling in and out of love — and in the midst of a late morning, I just started reading aloud William Gay’s awful, violent short story ‘The Paperhanger’ to a few people. Then a few more people appeared and a few more — and pretty soon there were a dozen people. I don’t think the story had any great interest for everyone; people just wanted to be close to the voice that shared — one might say a few wanted to fit in or not be left out, but I think it was something much deeper than that. We all wanted to be together on some plane of electricity, which is often language or eros — and how often can you keep telling your own stories? We needed something to reflect on.
I would guess that’s why book clubs are so vital — or ‘salons’ that still exist. We have to know that not talking to each other is ruining civilization. And email is wonderful — hell, we’ve never met and we’ve made a whole book together — but there is the live-quality, the face to face, which has no substitute. That’s why I’m nostalgic for bars without TVs. Yes, people were drinking, but at least they were talking and watching each other to learn about themselves, not looking at their phones to sop up their minutes of vulnerability.
When it comes to Munro and McCarthy, I guess we are talking about age and time. I haven’t had the desire to look at Munro for some years and I think that has to do with the language — how it is not a musical feast as in James, Patrick White, Gass, and Hardwick. I’ve similarly relegated William Trevor. It’s accomplished, it’s adept, but that cycle of writing where one leaves things out to suggest more has run its course for me — I would include Carver in this, but not Schutt, because of her uncanny music. The only writer I’ve discovered in the past few years who does this in a much more interesting way is Penelope Fitzgerald, more in the later historical novels, with The Blue Flower as the zenith. There’s too much to read, but I want those things that take a pick-axe to my brain strata like Proust, The Cantos, Moore, Musil, Stein, Ruskin, Emerson, Valery, Dante. With McCarthy, I’ve read all the novels multiple times — and I would not hesitate to read Suttree again — but I guess we pass in out of writers. I believe in an email we were writing about McCarthy’s blind spot: women. Which is, let’s face it, a pretty big blind spot. To see women only in terms of Madonna, whore, or suicide is as ridiculous as his saying, in one of his interviews, that he didn’t get Proust and James because there is little death in them. When you read White’s Voss, you get Blood Meridian and Mrs. Dalloway — at the same time. That’s a much more interesting proposition for me. And Faulkner knew how to portray women much better.
Second: why does it seem that Wallace Stevens succeeds, where neither McCarthy and Munro have the power to last?
Stevens still entrances because of the music and because the images he created avoid any easy apprehension. He was keyed into something, a spiritual realm of creativity, that only a limited number of people ever access. His Cuban correspondent, José Rodríguez Feo, said it the best upon meeting him and observing, “I realized then that to him a piece of fruit was more than something to eat. … It was good enough for him to look at it and think about it.” And the book of essays called The Necessary Angel is exquisite. ‘The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words’ essay is as important as Barry Lyndon and Gruenwald’s Issenheim Altarpiece in Colmar. It’s one of the few works of literature that could just as well be philosophy, telling us why language so supremely affects us.
So then, how much, finally, does sense matter to you? How much does it or can it attract your interest in a work of art — or compensate for deficiencies of style — to make the work worthy for you? In your appreciations of Gertrude Stein, Stevens, and in cinema Terence Malick, I get the feeling sometimes that words and/or images are enough for you — almost that you crave a literature of ‘pure’ word-sound and a cinema of ‘pure’ image-and-audio, with no regard for its making sense. Or would that be overstating it?
Narrative probably has to have some vestige of sense just by its nature. Maybe if something is too sensical, it is too staid, too TV-series like — and here’s where the executive or money-minded editor corrupts art, as in the case of Robert Gottlieb, editor of Gaddis’ JR, who obviously didn’t understand the book, and recently wrote, “The problem was… the book didn’t sell.” JR is arguably the greatest English-language novel since Beckett’s trilogy — does anything in the last fifty years top it? These are the forces for “sense” one fights. The words of Stevens and Stein, or the images of Malick, and let’s bring in Stan Brakhage: the made objects of these artists are enough, but only because they are grounded in the action of their personality clashing with technique — to return to that Hill quote above — where you find the alien objects after giving your personality to the art. And likewise in Gaddis’ “Compositional Self”, who he said is the self who endures all the revisions. The clash of Malick’s personality with his technique is documented in a Jim Caviezel interview about The Thin Red Line:“One day Terry asked me, ‘What do you think of Sean Penn?’” Caviezel recalled in the Rosy-Fingered Dawn documentary. “I said, he’s a rock, one day you can go and talk to him, the next day you go up to him and he doesn’t even know who you are — that’s Sean Penn. When we were shooting that scene, Terry said, ‘Tell him that. Tell him what you told me.’”You can see here how Caviezel uses the line, while keeping in mind that Malick likes to shoot a scene at least twice, once with and then without words (just blocking), as you can see Caviezel walk in twice. In this sense, the literal one, Malick’s personality creates the story, but also the form — he could see the antagonism (and more from Penn) between these two men (the real people, not just the characters) and then, in his improvisations, he knew what button to push. Look at the last shot of Penn’s shrunken face after this encounter — one can believe more than the character has been cut down to size, a testament to Penn’s acting. This is not too far from the process in writing — for me and a few others at least. I think one asks oneself, maybe mostly unconsciously, what do you think of your father, your wife, about the friend who betrayed you — and then it just bubbles out, this communing with the Muse. How this ties into “sense” is like a chain reaction train crash that should ideally leave little visual carnage, because if all writing is autobiographical (I think it is) it is all transformed into beauty. In a sort of addendum to the book, in a piece I wrote on Korean director Hong Sang Soo (published just as we finished the book), I wrote this: “It’s incredible that artistic filmmaking can really have little to do with the story or the form employed, but all to do with the biography of the person in charge — the ‘what the artist has to say’ bromide.” That bromide is repeated by Ingmar Bergman in the book, and I believe for the past years I’ve been revising what I’ve always taken it to mean — that it’s really all about form and not content. Having something to say is not about having words of wisdom or even ‘wisdom’ at all; it’s how attractive the form is made to engage, move, and upset others. Shirley Hazzard wrote of Patrick White:Imputing “inspiration” to novelists is as dangerous as discoursing on Nature with farmers: but each of White’s novels has been blessed and quickened with a center of narrative power — large meaning in which the author seeks to create our belief. Without at least some measure of this mysterious ignition, which is utterly distinct from ‘content’, the most diligently wrought book remains stationary and merely professional. White has always been able to command it in abundance: his novels, plays and stories are irradiations from related central themes in which the author participates no less intensely than his characters.
One takes their personality out on the art, so it is transformed into the raw tools of the art — the film frame or sentences, Moore’s “radiograph of personality”. To get back to the beginning, those made objects are the form the personality takes after the escape. The form itself is the sensical matter, the narrative is something else — and as I say in the review of Gass’ Eyes, the sound is the story. So yes, the purity of word-sound or imagery, but only as it is nestled in that “mysterious ignition”, which, when you are in its presence, you might follow anywhere.
About the Author
Greg Gerke is an essayist and writer of fiction, based in New York. His work has appeared in 3:AM Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. His collection of stories, Especially the Bad Things, is also available from Splice.