This is the second part of a two-part Interview with the writer, translator and editor Stephen Kessler by Zara Raab. Read PART ONE.
Stephen Kessler is the author of eight books of poetry, fourteen books of translation, as well as a novel, The Mental Traveler (2009) and two books of essays, Moving Targets and The Tolstoy of the Zulus (El León Literary Arts, 2008, 2011, respectively). He was a founding editor of Green Horse Press and Alcatraz Editions, as well as the international journal Alcatraz and the newsweeklies the Santa Cruz Express and The Sun. He is also the editor and principal translator of The Sonnets by Jorge Luis Borges. His many works of translation include Luis Cernuda’s Written in Water, which received a Lambda Literary Award, and Desolation of the Chimera, which earned the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. He edits the award-winning literary newspaper The Redwood Coast Review. He divides his time between Gualala and Santa Cruz.
ZR: One of your essays in The Tolstoy of the Zulus discusses Irvin Yalom’s novel When Nietzsche Wept about an imagined encounter between Nietzsche and a Dr. Josef Breuer. The mental traveler, of course, spends months in the care of a psychiatrist in and out of mental institutions. And there’s the old New Yorker joke about the writer’s psychoanalyst becoming his agent. What do you think now about the role of psychology, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and the many forms it takes among California’s plethora of healers—for the writer?
SK: I’ve done psychotherapy in very various forms, intensively after the psychotic episode and a couple of times later. Psychotherapy is like marriage: if you can find the right person and the connection is there and there’s a sense of mutual respect and trust and you’re trying to figure something out, and you need an objective outside observer to ask good questions and call you on your shit, it can be a useful form of self-exploration, but I don’t think it’s universally helpful or harmful. I know people who are totally against it because of their own experiences with a horrible shrink, or some ideological objection to Freud, or other reasons. I don’t think there are any universal truths about it. It depends on what you need and the chemistry of the relationship.
Yalom’s book is excellent. He’s a shrink and he’s a writer—author of books like Love’s Executioner and Lying on the Couch. I think he became disillusioned with psychiatry. My essay focuses on the quality of his novel as an imaginative creation and the way he divides himself into the mad demented philosopher and the respectable bourgeois doctor (who was Freud’s mentor)—obviously aspects of the author’s personality—and he creates a setting for them to invent this relationship. There are several interesting things about it. The way he flips it, so the patient becomes the mentor to the doctor. It becomes much more a dialectic, where they both learn from each other and help each other––if not resolve, at least come to terms with, their respective torments. Nietzsche could have written Dylan’s line “I got a head full of ideas that are drivin’ me insane.” Breuer suffers from the hollowness of conventional success and respectability. It turns out they’re both obsessed with Lou Salomé, who is a gorgeous, young, sexy, brilliant woman, who for these men is a muse. She’s an object of erotic and intellectual desire and an inspiration for dialogue. She represents the unattainable object, Beauty, the ideal woman certain kind of men, including me, like to imagine exists. That book is so interesting in the way Yalom explores the psychology of the middle-aged male, and takes those themes and weaves them together in a remarkably coherent and moving way. It speaks to themes that were and remain very close to me.
But I’m agnostic about the value of the therapeutic relationship. I have a slight prejudice against the Woody Allen approach of going to a therapist your whole life because you need someone to hold your hand. But if you’re a storyteller, it can be a good place to tell your stories and maybe gain some kind of understanding.
In writing I feel lucky to have a vehicle to work through my thinking, my response to experience. I enjoy the writing itself. It gives me back something just in the act of doing it. But at this stage of the game, it’s a relief when I don’t feel compelled to write. When it’s working, as you’re putting the words down, there’s an endorphin rush that compensates for a lot of the less edifying aspects of life. I talk about this in musical terms in my essay on Sonny Rollins in the Tolstoy book.
ZR: You’ve written a lot of poetry. Your first ambition was to be a poet. You’ve published a lot of books of poems, and of course, translated many more. But you have this other role as a critic. How do you make that transition? Do you pride yourself on your “ability to stand apart from or above the fray as reasonable observer, taking nothing and no one too seriously, smartly exploring whatever subject, from big-city political and social. . . .” [87, Bk 2] These are the words you use to describe Esquire magazine of the 1960s.
SK: Harold Hayes’s Esquire. That’s different from my approach. There’s a complete continuity between all my writing: One things leads to another. Because I was a student of literature and for a while in graduate school, I learned how to analyze a text. The New Criticism was the prevailing mode of reading when I was an undergraduate, and whatever limitations there were in that method, it taught you to look closely at what was on the page, not the surrounding circumstances and culture. That was great training for me as a reader.
After leaving graduate school, in part because of its increasing emphasis on theory, I eventually started writing book reviews. The first paper I wrote reviews for was the Santa Cruz Independent. When the arts editor became editor in chief, he invited me to write an op-ed column rather than a books column. This was a rather intimidating assignment for me at the time because I felt it was outside my area of expertise. The editor, Buz Bezore, saw that I could write and I could think, and therefore I could write about anything. That column broadened my canvas as a journalist, and made me write an essay every week. For me, writing criticism is partly a way of figuring out what I think about things.
One signature aspect of Esquire in the Hayes era was its ironic detachment. Irony is a great instrument, but for me, there’s much more at stake in what I write. Usually I write out of enthusiasm. I’m interested in a lot of different things. I want to share my enthusiasm or I want to work out for myself what I think about this artist or writer or musician or cultural phenomenon. The advantage for me in being outside academia, apart from not having to cite every source, is that I have no career to defend. I’m not trying to get tenure or climb up the cultural hierarchy or even trying to impress anybody, I just want to tell the truth as I see it. I hope that comes across in The Tolstoy of the Zulus.
ZR: What critics do you like?
SK: Among contemporaries, I think Louis Menand is one of the best. Cynthia Ozick is a smart critic. Daniel Mendelsohn. Adam Kirsch. Eliot Weinberger. A. O. Scott and David Denby are very good on movies. Jonah Raskin and others in the RCR.
ZR: Who are your influences?
In the essay? Kenneth Rexroth. Henry Miller. Alfred Kazin. Leslie Fiedler. D. H. Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature. Mark Twain. Emerson. John Ruskin. I love the Victorians with their long, elegant, complicated sentences. I admire that style, the individual sensibility that puts everything on the line. Criticism should be just as exciting to read as novels and poetry. The only criticism that matters is the criticism that takes a position and says what the critic thinks in an engaging way, a way that’s fun to read. It’s important to give the reader pleasure no matter what you’re writing about. Criticism came naturally to me. Luckily I dropped out of graduate school before I got contaminated with jargon. Good criticism is creative writing; I’d rather write a really interesting essay than a mediocre poem.
I think criticism gets a bad rap. Some people think when they hear the word that it’s about finding fault. Criticism is also about illumination, comparable to performing a piece of music or reciting a poem. The critic in a sense performs for the reader, enriching the reader’s understanding of a work of art, much as a musician interprets a score.
ZR: That’s a good analogy. I never thought of it that way.
SK: Lucky break that I got out of the academy when I did. That was one of the profound purposes of my psychotic episode: to help me escape from academia. I had some good years as a student and I learned a lot. But once you start specializing in the world of graduate studies, it takes a lot of spirit to resist being diminished, narrowed by it. I had much more fun as an undergraduate.
ZR: Let’s talk about some of your thoughts on other poets and writers if we may. Here, you have not only The Tolstoy of the Zulus, but also your earlier collection, Moving Targets, about contemporary poets. In that book, you have an essay about Denise Levertov, whom you met in your 20’s. What was she like? You actually spent a few days with her. Did you ever know Allen Ginsberg?
SK: I met Ginsberg once but I wouldn’t say I knew him, except through his writings. Denise Levertov is one of the masters. I recount in the essay how I wrote to her and sent her poems and what great generosity she had––to respond to someone she had never heard of. She invited me and my girlfriend to stay with her when we were on our way abroad. I don’t think I’m the only person to experience this. Like many big personalities, Denise liked having acolytes; she enjoyed being the authority/mentor figure. Kenneth Rexroth was like this, too. But if an acolyte has a disagreement with the mentor, a break can happen fairly quickly. I never really had a close enough relationship with Levertov to experience such a break. She tried to discover me as a poet, unsuccessfully as it turns out. She edited an APR [America Poetry Review] special supplement of lesser-known poets and she wrote a little paragraph about each one. I was one of those poets. She also published one of my poems in Mother Jones. It was a great honor to have her vouch for me and appreciate the kind of poems I was writing at that time, poems very dense with imagery and heavily influenced by surrealism. Levertov got my writing. It was such a vindication, such an encouragement for me to follow my instincts.
I was also Robert Duncan’s student in my final quarter at UC Santa Cruz. It was a History of Consciousness course, Ideas of the Nature of Poetry. I feel very lucky to have encountered some of these people. By accident in some cases, in others I knew them little bit better. All great writers are individuals, I think, and they have idiosyncrasies that you can’t possibly emulate or imitate, but you can see in them the example of being themselves. And that’s such a great lesson to learn.
ZR: You write about Bukowski, as well. What was he like?
SK: I met Bukowski only once, but we corresponded. I would send him clips of what I’d written about his work—reviews of his books in various little newspapers—and he would answer. He’s somebody who did his own thing. He didn’t set out to please anyone or ingratiate himself to the tastemakers. He followed his own instincts, and wrote out of a desperate need to survive, spiritually, in extremely dispiriting circumstances. Despite his persona as a dissolute drunk, I think he had tremendous integrity as a writer.
What I learned most from personal contact with these people—and of course from reading them—was to listen to my own deepest instincts, or as Duncan said, “Trust your own voice,” and “Give yourself permission to be an idiot.”
ZR: We’ve talked about your literary journalism and your poems and novels. But there’s a whole other side to your writing life, and that’s translation. Are you familiar with Chana Bloch’s essay on translation? Did translation teach you to write your own original poems? How has translation affected the rest of your work? What have you learned form it?
SK: I haven’t read Chana’s essay, but I admire her translations. Translation is an important part of my writing life. It’s the world’s greatest workshop, especially if you are translating people of proven quality like Borges, Cortázar, Vicente Alexandre, Luis Cernuda—all of whom I’ve had the privilege of translating. Your obligation is basically to impersonate them, to be them in English for the people who can’t read them in the original. You have to extend your own range and adapt to their style and rise to their level in order to render their work in a way that’s a reliable representation of them in English. It makes you pay deep attention. Translation is writing, some people don’t understand that. You have to call upon all your technical and imaginative resources as a poet. So that’s a great workout. And it affords a sense of discovery. You don’t know how the poem in translation will turn out any more than you know what your own original poem is going to be when you begin to write. So in that respect it’s process of discovery. The other general thing I would say about it is that it’s been a privilege to hang out with some of these poets—it really is like hanging out with them, even if they’re dead. I’ve been lucky to spend as much time as I have immersing myself in their writing and their sensibility and studying their lives and historical circumstances. Translation is one of the greatest things that has happened to me as a writer.
ZR: What about your own poetry? You’ve written several books. Are you still writing and publishing poems, giving readings, etc.? What are you working on now? Apart from trying to find a publisher for your latest Vicente Aleixandre, the Nobel Prize-winning Spaniard. I loved your stories about him.
SK: I’ve translated a late book of Aleixandre, Poems of Consummation, metaphysical lyrics on themes of eros, memory, old age, death and oblivion. Not an easy sell, I’m afraid, Nobel or no.
ZR: Good luck with that.
SK: I published nine poems of Greg Hall’s a couple of years ago The Redwood Coast Review. I have a longer essay on his work, and eventually I’d like to bring out an edition of his selected poems. He’s a wonderful poet, the real thing, a longtime friend of mine who lived in San Jose, whom hardly anyone has ever heard of. I also have a new poetry manuscript of my own, called Scratch Pegasus, which I’m still refining and am not in a big hurry to publish.
Right now, in addition to my editorials for the RCR, I’ve been writing some critical or journalistic essays and articles for various publications: Santa Cruz Weekly, Translation Review, or out of Otis College of Art and Design in LA. In terms of my own imaginative writing, I’ve been writing a series of prose poems for a column in the Santa Cruz Weekly called Street Signs. I’ve written about 15 of these 350-word prosems, as I call them. Each is an attempt to evoke a local place or experience, and involve my personal history and the local geography and local culture. It’s an interesting experiment in form; I’m mixing media and writing a kind of journalism that isn’t really journalism. For me, this is something new, and so it’s refreshed my poetics, I think. I’m grateful that my editor at the Weekly, Traci Hukill, likes these things. It keeps me motivated.
Newspapers have saved my ass so many times. Having someone willing, eager to publish something you write and to publish it right away, and not in some obscure literary journal but in a public medium where anybody can read it, and maybe they’ll be surprised. That’s one reason journalism has always been a very congenial genre for me.
ZR: The Mental Traveler is a tour de force, really, an insider’s report on complete hallucination—and in a way quite funny, like Don Quixote meets Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Do you ever consider writing another novel?
SK: I have two or three other ideas for novels. Maybe I will and maybe I won’t. I never really thought of myself as a novelist. That particular novel I wrote because I had to tell the story. I have ideas for other stories I’d like to tell, sequels to The Mental Traveler. One would use the Santa Cruz media wars of the 1970s and 80s as its raw material, the drama in the small-town radio and newspapers of the time. There’s another story in my journeys as a translator, a book about my travels in that world. And there’s another story based upon my family, my mother’s relationship with this guy who ended up being her partner after my father died, which would involve much greater imaginative projection of myself into their relationship.
But I just don’t know. I started The Mental Traveler in New York in Richard Brickner’s workshop at the New School. It took three years to write that book, and then many more years of trying to get it published. The Redwood Coast Review takes a lot of time. To write a novel, I think, requires one’s undivided attention. So it’s going to depend on whether one of those stories kind of rises up in me in a way that demands to be written. I honestly think I’m more at home in the shorter forms. But there’s something about book-size projects that’s very gratifying. So I guess we’ll see what happens.
ZR: Thanks for doing this interview, Stephen. It’s a pleasure to speak with you.
About the Interviewer, Zara Raab
Zara lives in Berkeley and is one of the first women to graduate in architecture from UC Berkeley. She grew up along California’s North Coast, attending school in Portland when she was fourteen, and later Mills College and the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) for college and graduate school. In her twenties, she traveled, living in Paris, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., where she made a living as a freelance editor and writer, participating for a time in the Capitol Hill Poetry Group, before returning to the West Coast to raise her children.
Early California is a subject of her book Swimming the Eel, just as the drama of family life is the subject of The Book of Gretel. In leaving behind the rural counties, she became a part of the human potential movement of the 1960′s, and that movement perhaps more than anything, shapes her life and her work. Since she was a teenager, she kept journals, and sometimes returns to those early notebooks for ideas. Her poems appear in many literary reviews and magazines, including The Dark Horse, The Evansville Review, River Styx, Crab Orchard Review, Nimrod, Dos Passos Review, Arts & Letters, and others. She also review books and writes essays on literature for various publications, including the Redwood Coast Review, Poetry Flash, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Colorado Review, and The Boxcar Poetry Review.
