Ernest Hilbert Interviews Novelist and Poet Gustaf Sobin (1935-2005)
by Ernie on 26/09/08 at 10:39 am
The novelist, poet, and scholar Gustaf Sobin made a rare visit to the United States in 2001. I joined him in his room at the Gramercy Park Hotel to talk about his (then) most recent novel, The Fly-Truffler. We spoke for a few hours over bottles of beer as early spring light angled in through the window overlooking Gramercy Park. What follows are some of the highlights of our conversation. Sobin passed away in 2005.
Ernest Hilbert: The Fly-Truffler is set in Provence. You’ve lived there for three and a half decades, but you were born in America.
Gustaf Sobin: I was born in Boston and lived in and around Boston. I went to boarding schools. I went to a boarding school outside of Boston called Fessenden. It was a prep school. Later I went to Brown. My parents introduced me very early on to European culture. This was during the 1950s, the Cold War. My education was highly academic, and I took refuge in the writings of the American novelists of the 1920s. Very early on I learned that in order to be a good American writer you had to be an ex-patriot. I have lived in France since the 1962. I live a very simple, productive life.
Hilbert: You are known as both a poet and a novelist, possibly in equal measure.
Sobin: I am a poet who writes novels, rather than a novelist who writes poetry.
Hilbert: With that in mind, how do you feel your experience as a poet affects your style as a novelist.
Sobin: I construct according to a syllabic nature. I am every bit mindful of the sound as the sense. These are often called the “twin deities” [originally by the American poet-critic Charles Olson]. With virtually every word that I write, I am mindful of the sound. People have said that they find themselves reading my prose aloud because of the pleasure they derive from the sound. I find that it is the ear that discriminates.
Hilbert: Jon Stallworthy [the English poet and biographer of Wilfred Owen and Louis MacNeice] has remarked that the written poem is equivalent to a score for music, that even if not read aloud the words should be understood as an acoustic mental image.
Sobin: I find major differences [between poetry and fiction] in terms of the construction of the work. In a poem it should be apparent in the message that it is a poem. I don’t know where it comes from. I don’t take the poem; the poem takes me. The poem takes me somewhere I have never been before. It not only becomes an expression, but a self-revelation. Whereas with the fiction, it is a complete dramatization, and I know where I am going. It still holds wonderful surprises.
Hilbert: It is a very interesting distinction. Can you cite any particular influences in the composition of The Fly-Truffler?
Sobin: First of all, the landscape. Consider the little rhyme that appears at the end of the book: “Quand lo pesseguier es en flors / lo rabassier es en plors” [“Peach trees in bloom, / Truffler’s doom”]. This is a rhyme that I had heard years and years ago. It was spoken by a couple passing by me, and it always intrigued me. How could something as beautiful as peach trees in bloom have anything to do with truffles? It toyed with my imagination, and I started building a story around this notion. Basically, I write the kind of story that I like to read. If the reader in me believes what the writer in me is writing, then I feel I have succeeded. So I am both the writer and reader. This is the heart-line of the novel.
Hilbert: Do you have any personal experience with truffles? You seem to have a strong grasp of art, as I guess it should be called, of gathering truffles.
Hilbert: No, but my son does. He has a wonderful eye and all the patience and concentration that the age-old earthen ritual requires. More than anything, though, he possesses the geomantic flair for such things. When the season is at its height, he’ll often return with his pockets bulging with those priceless tubers. He’ll let them tumble out onto the dining room table, black as charcoal and pungent as gardenias. He never sells them, though. As “gifts of the earth,” as he calls them, he gives them away to friends, family, immediate neighbors in the countryside. What else can you do, he explains, with something so generously given but give it, in turn, yourself? What else, indeed, any of us might ask ourselves? It is a lesson in morality.
Hilbert: When writing on the dreamlike power the truffles have over Cabassac, the central character in the novel, did you by chance ever think of [Marcel] Proust’s “Madelaines”, his use of them in the Overture to Swann’s Way, their power to inspire a recall of sensory experience?
Sobin: Yes, but very indirectly. It wasn’t an immediate determination.
Hilbert: Do you often realize that such things have an indirect influence on the compositional process?
Sobin: Yes. Months after I finished The Fly-Truffler, a dear friend of mine read it and pointed out to me something of which I was totally unaware. He said “you recreated the myth of Orpheus traveling down to the darkness to retrieve Eurydice from Hades.” For the life of me, I never thought of it. Is it madness when he brings her back? One wonders if the mind really follows the heart far enough—maybe in my case you say that it is the fear that if one tumbles far enough—it is more than likely that those patterns are laying in wait for all of us.
Hilbert: I might be completely off here, but as I was reading, I felt that your prose reminded me of D.H. Lawrence’s, particularly the late Lawrence of The Virgin and the Gypsy and The Plumed Serpent.
Sobin: Really.
Hilbert: Yes.
Sobin: Not at all. I have not read Lawrence for at least 30 or 35 years.
Hilbert: It must be coincidental. The prose of The Fly-Truffler is rich in metaphor and very passionately assembled. Can you talk about what you’re working on at the moment?
Sobin: It is about one a very famous woman, an actress. Though she is never named, readers will figure it out pretty quickly. It touches upon a 19 year old girl. You do not recognize who she is from the beginning. It takes place in Constantinople in the last few weeks of December, 1924, where the great Swedish director Mauritz Stiller brings his protégé and this 19 year old girl, where he basically loses himself. The girl is Greta Garbo. The research is very difficult. Basically I became an expert on these few critical weeks in December of 1924. Stiller’s father died when he was three years old. The mother committed suicide two years after that. Stiller from an early age felt a tremendous sense of rejection. He grew to worship women. Stiller himself was gay. So there was never any sexual linkage there with Garbo. They had an absolute mutual adoration and worshipped each other. She played a countess in the film. She began playing this role completely. She had lost herself. She had become the role in the film. She herself has written on the fact that she herself was completely taken up by this. She wore a plaid suit and she kept that suit the rest of her life.
