you've got mail - peter terrin and peter stamm exchange letters (part two)
Unfortunately, it’s going to take a little longer before Belgian and foreign authors can get together at Passa Porta. In the meantime, we’ve invited several European writers to exchange letters.
Here is part two of the correspondance between the Flemish writer Peter Terrin and his Swiss colleague Peter Stamm, a conversation about the longing for invisibility, the personal and the common, and artistic responsibility. In case you missed their first three letters, click here.
Winterthur, 9 January 2021
I’m quite certain that my friend back then was honest enough to point out to me that that insight about the importance of closeness was from Robert Capa and not himself. Incidentally, I saw my friend again last week after a fairly long time. He was filming me as I said a few words at the wonderful Fondation Beyeler in Riehen about Edward Hopper’s painting ‘Cape Ann Granite’. On this occasion too it was a question of the artist’s presence which, we agree, has nothing to do with physical presence.
I say the following in the video: ‘The artist is a kind of medium. He exposes himself to reality, feels it and reacts to it with his work. Presumably that is why Hopper’s paintings seem so alive, even when all that is to be seen on them are a couple of blocks of granite lit up by the morning or evening sun. They always show more than what is to be seen on them. What this "more" is is difficult to tell. Perhaps it is quite simply the gaze of the artist, the presence of the artist.'
In an email correspondence I had around the turn of the millennium with a female author friend, we came upon another metaphor for the presence of the artist: we were of the opinion that you had to cut off a finger for a literary work, i.e. give a piece of yourself. Just as you can grow a plant from a branch or a leaf, an artistic work also needs a shoot, a spark of life, that makes a vivid work of art out of words, brush strokes, sounds. By the way, Edward Hopper is supposed to have answered, in response to the question as to what his paintings were about: ‘They are about me’ (quoted from memory).
I can well understand what you write about that torture scene in one of your books. And that is precisely what critics often don’t understand, at least not in the German-speaking region, where, among other most reviewers, all that matters is whether these literary characters behave well or are congenial, whether men can act in such a way with women or women with men, whether the (male or female) critic was properly entertained, whether the book brought them pleasure. The artistic content of a work is seldom discussed; it is often alarming to see inferior literature praised to the heavens by critics.
Are you, who has never been tortured and who has never tortured, allowed to write about torture? And can you, are you allowed to succeed in that? I’m of your opinion: of course it’s allowed. And of course you can. The only condition is that you do so truthfully and with good intentions. So, not for the sake of tension or controversy, but to understand what torture is and what it does to the torturers and the victims.
It would be the death of literature if that were no longer permitted. For if we, as writers, can no longer put ourselves in the position of torture victims, of people of another skin colour or gender, of children, dogs or, as far as I’m concerned, plants, then we wouldn’t be permitted to do so as readers either, since reading and writing are in fact highly similar processes. If that were the case, we would no longer be allowed to feel compassion for a beggarwoman, a refugee, an abused child since we are not beggarwomen, we are not refugees, we are not abused children.
I have written several novels and many stories from the perspective of women and – after my initial doubts, as you had – found it always very exciting and enriching. It wasn’t the case that I discovered ‘the woman in me’, but perhaps in writing I learned to better understand women in that I tried to empathize with them. That is, after all, our main task in writing, that which makes literature valuable: to empathize with other people and try to see the world through their eyes and to comprehend their actions. When I was uncertain, I asked women how they felt about this or that, how they behave in specific situations. And in doing so, like you I noticed that those differences within the sexes are far greater than those between the sexes. I feel a lot closer to many women than some men, and those are the women I dare write about.
Two weeks ago I received an email from a young woman who had attended one of the few readings I gave last year, but who, she wrote, had never read a book of mine. All she knew were the two stories I had read out that evening, but that was enough for her to form an opinion. In her email she complained about ‘the lack of proper representation of female characters’ in my work, which, she found, was ‘not particularly appropriate to the present age’. In particular, she disliked the fact that the main thing my eighteen-year-old protagonist noticed when he met a woman ten years older was that her bra was visible through her thin T-shirt.
The email writer admitted that it may have been impossible for my young man ‘not to sexualize a potential sexual partner and reduce her to her appearance’, but she believed that I was responsible for him and that this story reflected my worldview. Neither did she like the second story, narrated from the perspective of a young woman (one of my favourite stories in the collection), among others because the protagonist worried about her appearance, and this was a stereotype.
I answered that I was not describing the world I wanted, but the world I perceived around me. I did not write her that the world she seems to want is not the world I want. And above all, that the literature she seems to want would be the saddest and most boring literature I could imagine. I am the first to condemn sexual exploitation, discrimination of women, homophobia, but in my world and in my books, young people are allowed to be drawn to one another sexually and they are allowed to make themselves up to please others.
To me, writing is a tool of discovery. By describing something, I understand it. And the more difficult it is to describe something, the more I discover, and, let’s be honest, the more fun it is. It would be boring to just keep on writing what I can already write. So in every book I try new things. I am just finishing a novel, which I have largely written in the present tense, something I otherwise don’t actually like. I recently wrote a story in which I simply describe word for word and gesture for gesture two YouTube videos. Sooner or later I want to try writing in my dialect instead of High German. And for years I’ve been thinking of writing a novel without a single character. I don’t think I can manage it, but I’m drawn by the challenge. What bold challenges do you still want to take on as a writer?
Next week I will be in the mountains to concentrate fully on the novel. I love these weeks of retreat when I go straight from my bed to my writing desk and spend the hours until midday exclusively with my text, in my world, with my creations.
Kind regards,
Peter
PS: I think I’ll hold on to the Leica as a monument to the exaggerated opinion I have of myself. By the way, I still have an old Rolleiflex too, but I bought that one second-hand.
Translated from the German by Patrick Lennon
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Herzele, 21 January 2020
You ask me what bold challenges I still want to take on. The biggest challenge I face today is that I have written a book. Yesterday I received by courier, fresh from the printing press, the very first copies of Al het blauw (‘All That Blue’), which won’t be officially published for another three weeks. Perhaps you recognize the challenge, the slight sense of panic. Holding the book in your hands, but feeling no connection.
You are estranged from what you, together with a group of people – a publisher, an editor, a designer, a copy-editor, a production manager, a typesetter, a printer –, have prepared for the world, down to the last detail. From the very first idea for the story to the very last, ‘clean’ proof. You have made a thousand decisions, and now, on a rainy Thursday morning, with the copy in your hands, they have come back to haunt you one by one.
You open the book and it strikes you at once. The font is too small. It’s not black enough, and what’s more the paper is too thin. You hold the book under the light of the cooker hood, you stand close to the window, you look at the page layout, the sentences, the words from every angle. Is this book at all readable? And then the devastating idea that you have merely collected words. Your novel is nowhere to be found. You close the book and put it on the table. You look at it from a distance and see the cover. The image is so dark. How on earth did you come up with such a cover?
Two years of hard work. A failure.
It can’t be that bad, and with a deep sigh and your heart in your mouth, you pick up the book again. You hardly dare look at the text, you’re so afraid of discovering a misprint in every sentence. You put the book away. You go for a run.
After showering, there’s no getting round it, you have to go back to that foreign body on the corner of the table. You pick it up and read, come on, you’re a grown man. How strange those sentences sound. You doubt certain formulations, think back to earlier versions. Is that really how you put it? Did you all overlook something during the editing process? You pick up another book, a novel, at random. Yes, that’s how it should be. That’s right. That sounds like a book!
In my case, dear Peter, this process of acceptance – this is what I have written and this is how it is going to lead its public life – takes a day or two on average. Suddenly my mood changes and I can open the book without this sense of revulsion. Suddenly I see what is there, the words are what carry the story, and I forget what they look like and how they are arranged. I read whole pages at a time, without fear, under the spell of my own sentences. My novel. My brilliant novel!
A long time ago, in February 1998 to be exact, there was a picture of Edward Hopper’s Gas Station on the cover of my debut. A short-story collection heavily influenced by the work of the then popular Raymond Carver, a writer you could call Hopper’s literary counterpart. There is indeed always more to see or read than meets the eye.
You write that you’ve been thinking of writing a novel without a single character, no mean feat. Your idea reminds me of New Topographics, a movement in American photography dating from the 1970s which, incidentally, still has great resonance with contemporary photographers and with myself. There were no people to be seen in the pictures by the New Topographics photographers. What was shown, in a by now characteristic aesthetic of sharply contrasting black-and-white images (the sunny west of the US), were the indelible traces of advancing human presence in the desert landscape, the emergence and construction of suburbia.
I am sure that one day you will succeed in your ambition to write this exceptional book. (And that perhaps, when you hold your first copy in your hands, you will ask yourself, What have I done?) I look forward to it! In the meantime, I hope the mountains have given oxygen to your new ‘ordinary’ novel. Publishing is a part of our profession, but the writing period itself, a period of total immersion in the story, with the outside world at a safe distance, is truly a wonderful time.
Meanwhile, I am already writing a new book; the pandemic has delayed slightly the release of Al het blauw. My challenge, tomorrow, when I can sit down at my desk again with a clear head and an easy mind, is to continue writing a novel about the near future whose chapters can be read separately. This may sound like a collection of stories with a thematic red thread, but to me it is more like a photo book with a sophisticated sequence. You can look at the images separately, but if you read the book from beginning to end, like a novel, the visual resonance of one image lends depth and meaning to the next, and unconsciously creates a unity that is much stronger than a red thread. Wish me luck.
Warm winter greetings,
Peter
Translated from the Dutch by Patrick Lennon
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