By
THIRSTY
Jerome Charyn has earned praise from some of today’s most decorated writers. Michael Chabon, the Pulitzer
Prize-winning novelist, remarked that “Jerome Charyn is one of the most
important writers in American literature;” Joyce Carol Oates, a Pulitzer Prize
winner for fiction, said in the New York Review of Books, “Among
Charyn’s writerly gifts is a dazzling energy―a highly inflected rapid-fire
prose that pulls us along like a pony cart over rough terrain;” and, Larry
McMurtry, also a Pulitzer Prize-winner in fiction, referred to him as, “One of our most
rewarding novelists.”
Jerome Charyn is the
author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction, including The
Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King: A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt and His
Times; In the Shadow of King Saul: Essays on Silence and Song; Jerzy:
A Novel; and A Loaded Gun: Emily Dickinson for the
21st Century. His awards include the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award
for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his novels have
been selected as finalists for the Firecracker Award and PEN/Faulkner Award for
Fiction.
Stay Thirsty Magazine
was honored to visit with Jerome Charyn for the Conversation at his home in New
York City.
STAY THIRSTY: In
your newest literary spy thriller, Cesare, you propel readers back to
Germany in the late 1930s as your protagonist embarks on a mission to save the
woman he loves. Where did the idea for this story originate and what makes a
thriller a “literary thriller?”
JEROME CHARYN: I
originally wasn’t going to set the novel in Berlin at all, I was going to have
a sleeper agent arrive by submarine during the war and hide himself away on the
Atlantic coast. The novel would have started 30 years after the war; the
sleeper agent is now the sheriff of a small New England town and all his plans
are interrupted when another sleeper agent arrives and tries to blackmail
him.
I began writing this
novel and it had no ambience at all. I didn’t believe in the characters, and I
didn’t believe in New England, so I knew I had to sail back on my submarine. I
figured I would now make it an origin tale and show our future spy as a little
boy in Berlin. This was over ten years ago, so you can see how long it took me
to write this novel.
My inspiration has always
been John le Carré. I adore two of the Smiley books, Tinker Tailor Soldier
Spy and Smiley’s People. They are great works of art, and the
espionage is driven by the magic of the characters themselves. That is how I
would define a literary thriller. Alas, I’m no John le Carré, and instead of
George Smiley, we have Admiral Canaris and Cesare. But I know le Carré would
fall in love with my Cesare.
STAY THIRSTY: Set
amidst the backdrop of a country “whose culture has died, whose history has
been warped, and whose soul has disappeared,” you weave a story of love and
cruelty in pre-World War II Germany. How were you able to balance the big
stories of the Jewish underground with the Nazi push to move Jews to Auschwitz
and still keep the reader focused on your love story?
JEROME CHARYN: It
wasn’t easy to do. But we have to remember that Cesare is a spy working on
behalf of Nazi Germany, a Germany he despises. He also happens to be in love
with a half-Jewish princess who works for the Jewish underground, and so his
desire to save Jews is enhanced by his love for Lisalein. Lisa, or Lisalein, is
captured and sent to Theresienstadt. And Erik, who is in love with Lisalein, is
doomed to die with her . . . or get her out.
I grew up during WWII,
and as a child I dreamt of the Nazis appearing on our streets in the Bronx, and
how we would fight them off. They seemed invincible in their mad design, in
their thirst to destroy. And as a novelist I wanted to enter that world and
look for some kind of hero within the Nazi regime, the good somnambulist, the
good Cesare from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. I was still trying to tell
a love story amidst all the brutality, my own Berlin fairy tale. We have had so
many clichés, so many cartoons and caricatures about the Nazis that I wanted to
crawl inside the heart of the beast and have a look at what I might find. I
wanted to humanize the unhuman, to let the reader glimpse at Berlin—a cultural
capital gone mad—and a concentration camp that was brutally surreal, with its
children’s chorus, its soccer teams, its playhouse, all near a railroad siding
that transported these little angelic singers, these athletes, painters, and
actors to Auschwitz.
Berlin also had its own
Jewish hospital, with some of the best doctors in the world; and it, too,
became a kind of fairy land, where wounded Nazi officers flirted with Jewish nurses,
and doctors suddenly disappeared. Nothing was what it seemed to be, everything
was wrapped in a deadly silken cloth. There were no real survivors. The dead
mingled with the living: Berlin had become a city of ghosts. And Cesare, a captain
with German military intelligence, was perhaps the greatest ghost of all.
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| Jerome Charyn |
STAY THIRSTY: Why
are readers so attracted to the actions of spies and their work in the shadows?
JEROME CHARYN: The
spy is the ultimate “invisible man.” He – or she – has so many identities, that
he has, ultimately, no identity at all, and many of us are attracted to this
duality. We wish we could disappear and start all over again. A spy does this
every day of his or her life.
STAY THIRSTY: What
does the Holocaust mean to you and how do stories of “war-torn Berlin” keep
memories of the cruelty of Nazi Germany alive?
JEROME CHARYN: I
was a child during WWII and the Holocaust seemed unimaginable. When we first
saw images of America soldiers entering the camps, we were frightened,
bewildered, saddened and enraged. In New York City, which seemed like a
benevolent cradle, the Holocaust was impossible to understand.
STAY THIRSTY: Cesare
has been heralded as an “extraordinary tour de force” and a “full-throttle
fable.” As a writer, how do you perfect the pace of a novel so that the reader
never wants to put the book down?
JEROME CHARYN: You
have to fall in love with the characters. That is often an impossible task, but
both Cesare and Lisalein are shielded by an enormous well of sadness, and that
well is shared by us all.
STAY THIRSTY: In
the epigraph to Cesare, you quote W. G. Sebald from his novel Austerlitz: “It
does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing
the return of the past.” What are those laws and how have you applied them in
your new book?
JEROME CHARYN: The
past remains in our bones and shapes our future like a sculptor’s hammer. We
are condemned to relive everything that has ever happened – this defines our
humanness, and our ability to share our feelings and our love with others. This
evidently disappeared in Hitler’s Germany.
STAY THIRSTY: You
have added, at the beginning of Cesare, a section for Dramatis Personae
and one for Glossary of German Terms. Why did you decide to include
these?
JEROME CHARYN: I
love to create characters and as they multiply, I wanted to give each of these
characters his or her identity with an iron fist. Confusion would destroy the
musical line of the novel, and I didn’t want that music to disappear.
I studied German in
college. I loved the sound of the language. And I wanted to use the actual German
terms in the novel, without the reader becoming lost in the welter of foreign
words.
I am lucky that David
Colacci, the award-winning narrator of the Cesare audiobook, also spoke
German and was able to keep the poetic pace of the novel. One mispronounced
word ruins everything.
STAY THIRSTY: How
important is history to you as a novelist and does history become a character
in your stories or merely a backdrop?
JEROME CHARYN: I
was always concerned about the past, that’s why I have a problem with
futuristic novels. The past IS the main character in this novel, because
without the brutality of Nazi Germany you would never have an ambivalent
character such as Cesare. I grew up with Hollywood in my head and now I’m
writing a novel about Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles. I dream of Hollywood
Boulevard, of each bookshop and movie palace – that street has become my
Broadway.
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