Influenced is an interview series featuring authors talking about the works that influenced them.

See our complete list of conversations, including:

Thick Skin, where authors talk about negative reviews, from both critics and readers

Pixelated, the digital, double-blind, lit-inclined author chat

A Bit Contrived, interviews with real authors about improvised books

The Art of Commerce, exploring the intersection of literature and the marketplace

Episode X: "The impulse to live a meaningful life, and the damage that impulse can cause"

Published 11/21/16
In this installment, Garth Greenwell talks about the influence of Death in Venice—both the novella and the opera.

Today I’m with Garth Greenwell, the poet and author, who’s debut WHAT BELONGS TO YOU came out from FSG earlier this year. It’s the story of an American expatriate in Sofia, Bulgaria, and his love affair with native Mitko, a relationship that is, at turns, both tender and transactional. The story received rave reviews everywhere, but I think James Wood put it especially well when he said that Garth “thinks and writes in larger units of comprehension…Rhythym, order, music, and lucid expression,” that he narrows “the frame of inquiry and then perfectly fills this reduced space.” Rarely does such sensitive writing meet realism head on, and the result is a lucid (and thoughtful and thorough) survey of, eventually, the entire emotional palette. The novel’s first sentence is an exemplar of Garth’s refusal to circle a thought that can be stated outright: “That my first encounter with Mitko B. ended in a betrayal, even a minor one, should have given me greater warning at the time, which should in turn have made my desire for him less, if not done away with it completely.”

Today, you’ve elected to discuss DEATH IN VENICE, both the novella by Thomas Mann and the opera that would be Benjamin Britten’s last, which first came sixty years after the book (in 1973), but which you saw before you read its inspiration. I’ve neither read nor seen it (there’s also been a film, a ballet, and other adaptations), but it’s not hard, upon first study, to see its tendrils in your work. It also details a writer abroad, obsessed with a younger man, and sickness too, which comes at the bend in your book. Can you start by telling me when you saw the opera, and its initial effect on you?

Music was my introduction to the arts: from the age of 14 to about 21 I was studying to be an opera singer. The second opera I saw was another Britten adaptation, The Turn of the Screw, which Kentucky Opera put on when I was maybe 15. That led me to fall in love with Britten's work; he's still my favorite composer. I listened to Death in Venice shortly thereafter, and either that season or the next the Metropolitan Opera put up a production of it starring my favorite singer, Anthony Rolfe-Johnson. I didn't get to see it, but I remember listening avidly to the Saturday broadcast.

Thematic elements of the story immediately struck me: the focus on desire, and on how desire disrupts all our intentions, including life-long discipline. The impulse to live a meaningful life, and the damage that impulse can cause. Maybe more than anything else, the dichotomy of dignity and a servility that can seem like the opposite of dignity.

Britten is the twentieth century's most literary composer, and his adaptations are deep readings, profound responses not just to a text's subject matter but to its formal choices, its style, its sensibility. I responded in Britten's opera to qualities I would later find in Mann: a very moving combination of visceral and cerebral elements; a sense of compression, that a great deal of pressure was being put to bear on rather minimal narrative material; maybe more than anything else, the way that Britten's music mimics a certain kind of thinking, the way an idea will be revisited, revised, reworked.

Often when we think of opera we think of grand productions, but most of Britten's operas are chamber-scaled, and I was drawn to that, too. My thinking about WBTY on a formal level was largely musical; I thought of it as three movements (which was the original title for the manuscript, actually), a kind of chamber symphony. 

The two strongest ideas here, I think, are the musicality of the opera (which makes me rethink WBTY in some ways), and the balance between counterforces, which is something that imbued my entire reading with palpable tension. It's a strong statement to say a) desire and b) the impulse toward meaning are both against the cohesion of a life (I'm putting the wrong words on whatever the opposite of "damaged" is). Was this something on your mind even as a teenager?

I think they were. Certainly I was aware of the ways in which desire is a disruptive force: it's hard for me to imagine a queer person who doesn't understand that very early on. And I was aware that the shame I was taught to associate with desire was at odds with the dignity and order I sought elsewhere, especially in music and art. And also, a little later, in certain kinds of religion, where it was very clear that what was presented to me as a coherent life required a kind of abnegation that was tantamount to self-destruction.

But I think I also sensed early on that this is a false dichotomy, that any too easy division between Apollonian and Dionysian presents a false image of the human. (This is a point made by both Mann and Britten.) Certainly I sensed early on, reading Baldwin and Genet and Winterson and Woolf, that art-making is deeply, necessarily connected to desire, that the kind of art I wanted to make is bound up with the drive of desire. 

Did Mann's handling of desire (and its inevitable damages) in DEATH OF VENICE influence you in a technical way—that is, how to artfully handle that tension without making it into a false dichotomy?

I don't think there's any axiom or paraphrasable principle I took from Mann, but I know the book is deep in my literary DNA. In Mann and many other writers I love, I'm drawn to a kind of formal control that can create an impression of distance but that is crucially imperfect, that cracks in some way under the pressure of intense emotion. That sense of great control and uncontrollable feeling—and of those things being at war with one another—is explicitly thematized in Death in Venice, but it's a characteristic of much of the art I love best. And it's also a characteristic of operatic singing, which creates the impression of great passion but demands a kind of dispassionate technical control on the part of the performer. 

And control being at odds with passion (or imperfection) in the medium of operatic singing is so distinct from the interplay of the two within prose. Where voice is continuous (and so uncontrollable in that), words are discrete objects. In your mind, how does one writerly voice show more control than another?

Well maybe the obvious place to look for that is syntax. I'm kind of in love with English syntax, and especially with its capacity for expansiveness. An extensively hypotactic or subordinated syntax gives a sense of control, of a mind that's able to assign a relative weight and logical relation to things. A paratactic or coordinated syntax gives the sense of a mind that doesn't have that kind of control, of a mind more confused or overwhelmed or prone to experience. Beyond syntax, there are rhetorical structures that give a sense of control or mastery, and I'm intrigued by writing that makes use of those structures when narrating from the point of view of someone who is obviously not in possession of that kind of mastery, in terms of his relation to his situation or psychological state. This is the case of Aschenbach, I think, who writes his most polished, masterly text as he's being mastered by desire. 

Can you give an example of a writer (or writers) who you admire who utilizes paratactic or coordinated syntax, relinquishing some control? When you're actually writing, are these systems on your mind, or is it more in the editing process that you use them to your advantage?

Someone who uses paratactic syntax to great effect is Jorie Graham, especially in her recent books. And also Mark Twain, in Huck Finn. But I think all good writers modulate between paratactic and hypotactic structures; it's a way of controlling the emotional temperature of a work.

No, I don't think any of this is particularly on my mind as I'm writing; what I'm conscious of then is trying to feel the energy of a sentence, the shape it wants to take, and then writing into that shape. More analytical frames don't even really enter into the picture when I'm editing, which is still more about trying to get the feel of things right. Those frames are mostly useful when talking about the book, thinking back over choices made and trying to understand them at a more analytical level. 

Do you think dissonance can be found between the shape you're trying to fill and the shape your words actually present? If so, does this contribute to 'crucially imperfect' writing? If not, what helps pronounce those cracks, of an honest human voice being fit by blocks of language?

Oh, the actual shape is always a failed approximation of the ideal shape. Which I think is a kind of failure every artist has to make their peace with: nothing we make is going to be adequate to the impulse that impels us to make art.

The kind of crack I find compelling can take any number of forms; often it is the "right wrong note," that dissonance you mention. At the end of "One Art," Bishop's parenthetical command, "(Write it!)," is an example. There's a moment in Peter Pears's recording of the last song in Britten's "Winter Words" cycle (settings of Hardy poems), where his voice cracks or nearly cracks—it's a moment of almost unbearable emotion. It can be anything, really: a comma splice, an uncharacteristic word, an anomalous shift in tone. 

What stopped you from being an opera singer?

A few things. Frustration with my instrument, which wouldn't do all the things I wanted it to. The realization that I didn't want the life of constant motion and insecurity that is a musician's life. Most profoundly: coming to terms with the fact that I came to music too late for it to ever be anything but a foreign language. My best friend is a brilliant conductor. He played the piano before he could speak, read music before he could read words, wrote music before he could write words. Music is a first language for him; when he looks at a score or listens to a performance he understands things I could never learn to hear. Singers don't need that kind of knowledge, but I hated feeling that I couldn't fully engage intellectually with the music I was singing. When I took a poetry class at the University of Rochester (I was a junior at the Eastman School of Music), I realized that I could have that kind of engagement with literature. 

Because English is, literally, a first language for you. That you've had training in the performance arts make sense after watching this video. It was somewhat satisfying to see a writer so able to give themselves to the art of performance, and honestly it made a lot of your writing even more impactful, which is kind of against the ethos of writing and reading, or mine anyway, which is that the words stand alone. This isn't going anywhere. We're nearly out of time, and so I'd like to know if you're working on anything at the moment.

It's kind of you to say that about the video. I guess I don't actually think the words stand on their own. I think that literature lives in the voice, and that any good reading or performance is good because it's a powerful interpretation of the text. I don't think the author's reading necessarily takes precedence over other readings, but I do think that any strong interpretation can expand our understanding or response to a text. 

I am working on something, and after nearly a year on the road I'm relieved to be at a residency where I can focus on writing again. I'm kind of freaked out by how far publishing a novel takes you from the privacy and quiet you need to write a novel, and so I'm hoping to stay in writing mode for as long as I can. I had two projects underway when WBTY came out; I'd love to finish them both before submitting them. 

Thanks so much for your time and words, Garth, it was a pleasure.

Thanks so much, Andrew—the pleasure was all mine!