By
THIRSTY
Jerome Charyn is an award-winning author
with more than 50 published works to his credit. Pulitzer Prize-winning
novelist Michael Chabon calls him “one of the most important writers in
American literature,” New York
Newsday described him as “a contemporary
American Balzac,” and the Los
Angeles Times called him “absolutely unique among American
writers.”
Since the 1964 Charyn has published
thirty novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short
stories, plays, and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named the
New York Times Book of the Year.
He has been a finalist for the
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, received the Rosenthal Award from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters, was named Commander of Arts and Letters by the
French Minister of Culture and is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Film
Studies at the American University of Paris.
Stay
Thirsty Magazine was privileged to visit with Jerome Charyn at his
Manhattan home for this Conversation.
STAY THIRSTY: In your new book, In the Shadow of King Saul, New York City plays
a central role. How has that city affected your beliefs, your dreams and your
ambitions?
JEROME CHARYN: I really
didn’t know New York at all as a child. I was born in the Bronx, and didn’t
ever visit Manhattan, except for a trip to some miraculous movie palace and
visits to my grandparents on the Lower East Side. I remember the long walks I
took, seeing the magical posters of Yiddish theatres and the pillars of the
Manhattan Bridge. But if Saul Bellow was “Chicago-born,” I was Bronx-born, and
raised on Manhattan dreams.
Once upon a time long ago, New York
was a city where the poor thrived as well as the rich. The city’s dowagers, the
wives of Manhattan bankers and dentists, frequently taught in the public
schools. We were their exotic gifts and they taught us how to speak with a
strange kind of aristocratic music.
The Manhattan of my childhood no
longer exists, except perhaps in the outreaches of the boroughs which have yet
to be gentrified.
I live among the rich. I don’t like it.
STAY THIRSTY: You have said that, “I am Saul, though I’ve never been a king.” It seems,
however, that your voice often comes from the darker side of your emotions. Do
you see yourself as a tragic figure like King Saul; someone whom God has
rejected?
JEROME CHARYN: To see
myself as a tragic figure would mean that I exist, and I don’t really exist
outside the page. I love Saul, because he was sentenced for his silence, for
his inability to sing, and to hear God’s songs. It’s within those silences that
my writing began and where I forever remain.
STAY THIRSTY: Your essays often focus on larger-than-life figures from politicians like
Ed Koch to authors like Saul Bellow. Do you see yourself as a one of them or as
someone else?
JEROME CHARYN: There’s
almost no resemblance between Ed Koch, our wonderful former gangster mayor and
Saul Bellow, who wrote about gangsters but had a kind of handsome dignity. I
admired the bravura of both these men, but I could never have crept inside
their skin.
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| Jerome Charyn |
STAY THIRSTY: The fact and impact of Ellis Island as a symbol of immigration in the
early 20th century resonates in your essays, in your descriptions of
life in New York’s neighborhoods and in your life. Are there modern-day Ellis
Islands in the 21st century that will provide grist for the writers
in the coming decades?
JEROME CHARYN: Perhaps
each of us has his or her own Ellis Island – it’s so hard for me to speak about
21st century immigration, because it has become so tragic. Ellis
Island was where I was born. I wouldn’t be alive without it. I still suffer
from those who suffered there and never really arrived in America.
The immigrants who came out of Ellis
were allotted very little dignity and had to crawl away from that monstrous
place to discover who they really were. That’s why New York City became the
land of gangsters in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. It was almost a kind of revolution or rebellion against the loss of
dignity. Those who survived paid a heavy price for their survival.
I am still on Ellis. I’ll always be
there.
STAY THIRSTY: Herman Melville is one of the writers that you admire. In his iconic
book, Moby Dick, Melville writes in the first paragraph of his story,
“…whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul…then, I account it high
time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and
ball.” By all accounts, Melville’s protagonist, Ishmael, was depressed and on
the verge of suicide. These moods were, in fact, not far from those of
Melville’s himself. What is it about him that influenced you as a writer, a
thinker and a storyteller?
JEROME CHARYN: Melville
rose out of the underground, was forgotten while he was still alive, and I‘m
drawn to that great sadness in him and that sense of injustice about America
and all its thieves on land and on sea. I inherited Ishmael’s depression and
Melville’s personal sense of invisibility. He was the writer who was there and
not there.
I feel that same sense of
invisibility and I’ve always felt drawn to that great white whale. Moby is
mine, an enemy and a friend who is larger and grander than anything I will ever
write. He is what I strive to discover – that great white whale of language.
STAY THIRSTY: You write about the meteoric rise and fall of early Hollywood movie star
Louise Brooks. What is it about her life’s story that attracted you and do you
feel a kinship with her?
JEROME CHARYN: I love
Louise. She had an extraordinary presence on the screen – as Lulu the eternal
uncaring seductress – and she had a great gift for writing about Hollywood and
all its menace. I wish I could have met her and I still hope to write a novel
about her one day, where she will be involved with a gangster who looks just
like me.
STAY THIRSTY: Another of your literary idols is Isaac Babel and you dedicated In the
Shadow of King Saul to his daughter. What does his mastery of silence mean
to you and how have you been influenced by it?
JEROME CHARYN: One of the
great pleasures of my life was meeting Nathalie Babel. When I knocked on her
door, I could see Babel’s face in hers and we immediately had a curious kind of
non-romantic romance. Everyone wanted to know about her father, but I asked her
questions about her mother, Babel’s first and only real wife. I was very sad
when Nathalie died because we had a friendship and sharing of our love and
hatred of language, and she did love what I wrote about her father in Savage Shorthand.
Babel himself was not allowed to
speak. He was told by his Soviet masters to write the silly tales of a
revolution that never really took place. Therefore he turned to silence. That
silence was very poignant to me – it’s the silence we all fall into when we
can’t say what we really want to say. It was his revenge upon the culture, and
perhaps his greatest poetry.
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