By Steven Jay Griffel
Queens, NY, USA
Jerome Charyn reading from Winter Warning
Despite
his travels (which have included living in Paris much of his time), the Bronx
remains Jerome Charyn’s emotional home, if not his actual mailing address. It
seems altogether fitting that the borough of his birth would have inspired his
acclaimed Isaac Sidel mystery series, which is regarded by many as masterpieces
of noir fiction. The latest book in the series—and touted as the last—is Winter Warning, a behind-the-scenes,
inside-out, topsy-turvy look at presidential life and politics in the White
House. The book is a savvy commentary. The book is a madcap romp. I met with
Jerome Charyn in New York City to discuss his latest achievement.
STEVEN
JAY GRIFFEL: How did your Bronx boyhood prepare you to write your own noir
literature?
JEROME
CHARYN: It wasn’t simply my
Bronx background—the Bronx itself was a kind of void, a kind of hole without
culture.
It was the particular instability of my
family—a father who had been depressed his entire life, who was both violent
and weak, and left me with one secret feeling: I had to kill him or grow up. And
that’s where the noir began.
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| Jerome Charyn |
STEVEN
JAY GRIFFEL: Your Isaac Sidel series represents twelve books written over
forty-two years. Were you planning a series when you wrote the first book (Blue Eyes, 1975)?
JEROME
CHARYN: No, I did not intend
to write a 12-book series. A novel is just a crazy river and you can’t tell which
path it’s going to take. The path it took for me was to kill off my hero in the
middle of the first novel and fall right back into the void.
Then I realized, long before Tarantino
did Pulp Fiction, that you could kill
a character and bring him back to life by writing a new novel that began just a
little bit earlier in time than the novel you’d just written. So the first
words of my novel Marilyn the Wild
are “Blue Eyes,” spoken by Marilyn herself. The character Blue Eyes was
resurrected—for one book.
Once I realized that I couldn’t keep
resurrecting Blue Eyes I had to push the arrow of time a little bit forward and
turn Isaac Sidel into the central character, but even then I wasn’t really
thinking of a series. It’s only because the actor Richard Harris was interested
in the novels that I wrote The Education
of Patrick Silver, in which he, himself, appears as a character, an
Irish-Jewish janitor at a synagogue who’s also involved with the Mob.
Then two years later I wrote Secret Isaac, which really was the
beginning of the idea that I would be doing a whole series—a kind of epic on
New York City in the 70s and the 80s.
In Secret
Isaac I began to sculpt a whole new universe, which is a love story between
two cities, Manhattan and Dublin. And like a good researcher, I went to
Ireland, walked the streets of Dublin looking for James Joyce’s ghost—and found
Isaac Sidel.
STEVEN
JAY GRIFFEL: How does writing a book in a series compare with writing a stand-alone
book?
JEROME
CHARYN: There’s no such
thing as a stand-alone book because Blue
Eyes was a stand-alone book that mushroomed into a series.
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| Jerome Charyn |
I could have continued any other novel
that I wrote because the story that you tell never really ends. The music of it
remains inside your head. If I didn’t have that music I wouldn’t be able to go
from one Sidel book to another—the dream of him is always inside my head. I
could have written about Abraham Lincoln for the rest of my life, but I had to
end I Am Abraham somewhere—why not
moments before Lincoln’s own death?
STEVEN
JAY GRIFFEL: Why do you think your work resonates so well with European
readers?
JEROME
CHARYN: I think both German
and American readers have the sense that crime novels have a certain
architecture. This architecture keeps changing from generation to generation
and that’s why they understood the texture of my novels and were able to
celebrate their very perverse and strange music.
STEVEN
JAY GRIFFEL: How were you able to write about the presidency and White
House with such apparent familiarity?
JEROME
CHARYN: I grew up with
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and somehow it seemed like he would be president for
the rest of my life, so that his death was also like my death. And when I wrote
a novel about Roosevelt (called The
Franklin Scare), and began to research Roosevelt, long before there was the
Internet, the White House almost became another home with Roosevelt inside it.
He was my crippled father—we loved him
despite all his faults. And somehow he still remains as president, despite
Donald Trump.
STEVEN
JAY GRIFFEL: The book seems amazingly topical, almost as if it were
written as a response to the Trump phenomenon. But that’s not the case, is it?
JEROME
CHARYN: Winter Warning was written long before Trump became president, but
the surreal world I write about has become frighteningly familiar as Trump wanders
through the West Wing. We now have a political landscape that’s almost as noir
as my own novels.
If you write with a certain dreamlike
sharpness the world eventually catches up with your dream.
STEVEN JAY GRIFFEL: You describe Isaac Sidel as a profoundly moral man who didn’t have a penny in his pockets, wasn’t fueled by greed, and never used the presidency for his personal gain. Even so, readers will be struck by parallels with President Trump. The differences seem starkly obvious, but how do you think Sidel and Trump are alike?
JEROME
CHARYN: Sidel and Trump are
both combative fellows, they both have their own poetry, they’re both
incredibly stubborn and finally listen to nothing or nobody other than their
own particular voice.
STEVEN
JAY GRIFFEL: “Follow the money” is a common mantra used to suggest the root
of political corruption. How does this idea play in your novel?
JEROME
CHARYN: Corruption is
rampant everywhere, at every level, in every corner. There seems to be no other
subject but money. This is what Isaac detests, and there’s little he can do
about it. We’ve all moved over to the devil’s side.
STEVEN
JAY GRIFFEL: Apparently, you intend Winter
Warning to be the last book in the series. What makes you think this book should
be the capstone?
JEROME
CHARYN: I saw it as a 12-book
series, three quartets. I published the first four books as a quartet in 2002. Now,
with Winter Warning, we have the last
of two more quartets.
The only thing that might make me
change my mind is Trump’s presidency, because he has redefined the president’s
powers and I might want to shadow him a little bit with one further adventure
of Isaac Sidel.
Since he wasn’t really the elected
president, perhaps I might want to think about his possible second term. And
this not-yet-existent novel would be all about his campaign.
STEVEN
JAY GRIFFEL: Your literary output is prodigious and your interests are
wide-ranging. I’m curious: What book—or books—are you writing now?
JEROME
CHARYN: I finished the first
draft of a novel on Teddy Roosevelt and I’ve now returned to an earlier
unfinished novel about the life of Charles Lindbergh. It’s only been revealed
in the last ten years that Lindbergh was a serial husband who had three other
secret families in Europe and seven other secret children. That fascinated me
and I wanted to explore this other Lindbergh.
I am also currently working on an
animated series based on Blue Eyes; the
artists of this series are Tomer and Asaf Hanuka, who created the wonderful
film, Waltz with Bashir.
(Jerome Charyn photos: credit Klaus Schoenwiese)
Links:
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Steven Jay Griffel is an Amazon bestselling novelist, an editor, and a publisher. His latest novel, The Ishi Affair, was released in March 2017.