On Spanish Novels

by Max Blue

Phillip Grant interviewed by Max Blue, with photographs from the poet’s personal archive

Life is a collection of disparate phrases, circulating around some frail binding, never adhering to an evident theme.

– Phillip Grant, from the poem “Babel”

Phillip Grant is the author of several collections of poetry including Byways (1994), Seasonal Depression (1996), and Last Man Standing Sings the Blues (2002). His most recent collection of poems, Sorrow Revisited, is forthcoming from ExNihilo Press.

Max Blue: What was your first significant experience with literature?

Phillip Grant: There was a year and a half, when I was in college, that I spent reading a single novel translated from Spanish, a five-book saga bound in one large hardcover volume that I had rented from the library, which was collapsing under its own weight, each page threatening to come right out in my fingers when I turned it. The Pain of Youth is an Ocean Deep and Wide by Alejandro Perez. It’s a truly epic book, two or three thousand pages long. And I was a slow reader back then, who bored quickly. But this book captured my attention. The mesmerizing, magical thing was that it was the story of a young man studying at university who was reading an incredibly long novel, and so, because it mirrored my reality one-to-one, it seemed as if it had been written just for me.

I was also from the suburbs, barely a boy, and being new to the city everything in my life seemed strange and wonderful, but also dangerous and frightening. This is another way that that novel seemed to be about my life: the state it was in; huge and crumbling, the same way I perceived the whole world at that time. I would sit for hours underneath the eaves in the courtyard of the English department turning the pages slowly, feeling how the words I ingested were coloring my perception of the world around me, blurring my vision. When the narrator said that the rain falling around him was oblique—a word I had to look up in the dictionary—which, by the way, means a line that is neither parallel nor at a right angle but, rather, slanting—after the narrator called the rain oblique, I could only ever see the rain around me that autumn as oblique, too. How words are the images through which we grasp the world. And I began to wonder—as I still wonder—was I living in the book or was the book living in me?

When I started reading The Pain of Youth, about halfway through my first year at school, I was living in a dormitory, with a roommate, a real jackoff, but over the winter break, since I couldn’t go home for reasons that have to do with my father being a drug addict and my mother being dead, I moved into a single room in a pay-by-the-week hotel, above a strip club in a really run-down neighborhood, because it was near campus and dirt cheap. There was a crack between one side of the window frame and the brick wall big enough for my little finger to fit through. Moths would fly in and out of that crack at night and circle the light fixture in the ceiling, casting small, diffuse shadows across the pages of the book, such that I would have to turn off the light and set candles on the dresser, both so as to see the text on the pages and to entice the moths to enact mass suicide. The room had come furnished with a twin bed, a sink, a table and chair, and a chipping, three-drawer dresser in which I kept all my clothes—my money stuffed in a pair of socks. It was so piss-poor that I spent most of my time in the café around the corner, when I didn’t have class or work, studying and reading and writing my term papers and early poems, even though it wouldn’t be fair to call what I was writing back then poetry, it was trash, the insufferable whining of a man-child. Most days, I bought a cup of coffee or a pot of tea, since you could get more hot water for free, and sat reading for hours.

And, the strange thing was, sure enough, the narrator of The Pain of Youth did the same thing—moved from his dormitory into a shitty hotel apartment, wrote bad poems, and haunted his neighborhood café, so that when I sat there, reading about him sitting somewhere reading, it was as if I was enacting a live reading of the novel—even if no one around me knew it—a performer acting out the text for an unwitting audience.

I know it sounds crazy, but throughout that time, other things that happened in the novel started happening in my real life, too. Like a fistfight with a cab driver, for instance, or even having a very intimate conversation with my father which mirrored the one the narrator had with his. And it wasn’t just that stuff. Some of the characters from the novel even started appearing in my real life. I began to see them in different places, around the city and the campus. I thought that one young woman in particular, a sculpture student at the university, was a dead ringer for the narrator’s love interest, even though the author never describes her. It’s brilliantly written—the narrator is in love with her, pines after her, is obsessed with her, but it’s totally unrequited love, and he never describes her directly, even though he spends most of the novel in love with her.

During college, I worked as an assistant in the school library and most evenings, after my classes, I would spend hours trundling the little red cart up and down the stacks, shelving returned books according to the Library of Congress Classification, which even now I’m still expert at. The sculpture student was often in the library until very late, studying or reading, and I watched her out of the corner of my eye while I worked, observing her immense beauty and her taste in literature and striking up minor conversations with her on the rare evenings of great coincidence when my shelving duties happened to bring me past her carrel and I was able to muster up the courage to speak to her. Our friendship mostly developed around discussions of what she was reading—she loved the Victorians and the Modernists—since, after the first time she asked me what I was reading, the answer stayed the same. Her mannerisms were like a bird, and her hair was short and auburn and she looked exactly how I imagined Jean Seberg might look in a colorized version of Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan. Have you seen that? You must. But that’s not the point. The point is, as we were discussing literature and art, we began to fall in love.

For the next year we were almost inseparable—she started living with me in the residential hotel in a perfect facsimile of domestic bliss. That’s not to say that we didn’t have our troubles, Ingrid and I. I lost my virginity to her, and even though she had had sex before, I wasn’t jealous at all because, in the book I was reading, the narrator and his girlfriend were in the same position, so it was all playing out according to Alejandro Perez’s grand design that I had come to live by.

So then my life was wonderful, as close to perfect as it’s ever been: I had my studies, my lover, and The Pain of Youth to assure me that my life was indeed on the right track. This lasted maybe eight months, a semester and a half. Because, whether I liked it or not, I had to finish that book at some point. At some point it had to end. It wasn’t infinite, like Borges’s book of sand. It was long, but it ended. And when it did, that period of my life did too.

MB: If fiction was such a large influence on you, how did you come to writing poetry?

PG: That was my first great encounter with literature, though, of course, it wasn’t my last, since literature—both read and written—has come to define my entire life. But it was so moving an experience that for the next two years, I stopped reading entirely. I didn’t read anything that wasn’t assigned for school, not a single work of fiction, not one recreational passage. And throughout that time, I drifted. I worked hard to finish school, but I felt somehow untethered, as if The Pain of Youth had given my life a true sense of meaning during the year and a half that I was reading it. For the first time in my life, I understood why people read the Bible, how they find meaning in scriptures or myths. And I also understood that, like many acolytes of religion, I had lost my way. But, also like many acolytes, I eventually returned to the fold.

For two years after graduating from university my life totally fell apart. First, I had to get a real job and figure
out what the hell I was going to do with a degree in literature. Then my father died of a drug overdose. I got evicted from the hotel I had been living in. During this period, I only read English translations of short, Hispanic novels—Chilean, Argentine, South American, Spanish—dozens of those little, hundred-or-less-page novels that somehow seem to contain whole sagas in their spare and fragmentary telling. This experience was quite different from that of reading The Pain of Youth, which I had come to see in everything else in my life. In the case of short novels, no single book stuck long enough to gain any purchase on my life—instead, it was my life that I applied to them, reading my existence into each fleeting story.

It's difficult to recall those years clearly, I was so sad and scattered, and now, of course, it was so long ago. I was working at a bookshop in a part of the city I hated. Riding my bicycle to and from work every day. Living in a room in a house with a married couple and two empty bedrooms and a vast porch where I sat every weekend smoking cigarettes from ten in the morning until dusk, reading short, Spanish novels at a rate of roughly one per day. Sleeping with a seemingly endless stream of women I barely knew.

My philandering began when I happened to reconnect with a classmate from high school, literally bumping into each other in a record shop and sleeping together that same afternoon. After that first time, she would ring my doorbell about once a week, late at night, and crawl into my bed. Her mouth always tasted like beer, which brought me immense sorrow. And it’s hard to fuck when you’re sad, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried it. But I did it, because I had seemed to have lost myself. Forgetting, or having not yet discovered, that what I desired in life was a far more tender, coherent form of love.

After that, I went on a quest to find my true love, a quest that would last the next two years and lead to an even greater incoherence in my love life and my life in general. The problem was that, rather than finding my true love, I just ended up sleeping with hundreds of women and contracting several venereal diseases because true love, real love, love that binds the heart, is hard to come by.

And all that time, those two years, I was working in the bookshop and reading one or two tiny Spanish novels every weekend—Pacheco, Zambra, Lispector, Marquez, Bolaño, Melchor,

Borges, Linh, Rojas—Manuel and Gonzalo—Fuentes, Aira, Cisneros. To name just a few. Did I say Pacheco? I was attempting the opposite of what I had experienced in college, when reading one long novel had coincided with my one long romance. Instead, I made a rule for myself that I had to read one novel per woman I slept with, within one or two days of sleeping with her. So, if I banged a girl on Friday, by Sunday I should have read a novel, and if I had another date that went well on Saturday then I had to read a second novel by Monday. And the women I went through during those years were as varied yet similar as the novels I read. I didn’t know what I wanted—or who I wanted—in literature or love. So I was very confused and reading too many novels very quickly and sleeping around and still smoking a pack a day and hadn’t started writing yet and didn’t even own a television. It was one of the great periods of my life. But I’m glad it’s over.

All of these romantic relationships had been short Spanish novels, brief encounters with beauty that gestured toward something grander, the vista of potential human connection that I yearned for. And even if I can read a novel a thousand pages long, I was still searching for my epic, a love story that would last me a lifetime. So, what I did next might seem a little desperate, but it was my attempt at some sort of reconciliation with my past, and to find a doorway that would lead me to whatever was next for me in my life. I began translating Spanish-language novels into English, even though, regrettably, I don’t speak Spanish. So that presented an obvious difficulty. At first, I just went by feeling, the feelings of the individual words, and the common tropes and themes I had soaked up from all the books I had read, but the results really were never any good. So I quit my job at the bookshop, packed up everything I owned, which fit in a single backpack, and got on the bus for Mexico City.

I spent the next eight months there, never getting used to it and never learning the fucking language. But this was wonderful because, for the first time, I was totally alone in the world. Language is a powerful thing for connecting to the people around you, for giving you a sense of place and purpose—more powerful than you realize until your lack of language disabuses you of those illusions completely. I had made a rule for myself that I wouldn’t speak any English with the locals, so I wound up in a sort of self-imposed muteness, speaking a lot with my hands and repeating over and over again the few words I knew. But my rule about speech didn’t prohibit me from writing in English, which is probably why I started writing. To keep myself sane, to feel connected to something. If you can’t talk to anybody, the second best thing is to write, a sort of delayed speech. Also, I realized that I had to command my own destiny somehow and the only way that seemed possible was by writing. The discipline of writing to structure my life; the opportunity to think life through by putting it on the page; the possibility that within the text itself I could make a life that I would want to see reflected in reality, which had been my experience of reading, too.

So, to answer your question, that’s when I started writing. I wrote my first collection in Mexico, the narrative poems in Byways and a few others that wound up in Seasonal Depression. They all came very quickly, over the course of six or seven months, writing every day.

MB: And what about your latest collection, Sorrow Revisited, which has won or been shortlisted for several prizes here in the US and aboard?

PG: Sometimes I wonder if I’m nothing more than the words I’ve written, the words other people read, by me and about me. What troubles me now, in my old age, is the idea that I’ve been entirely misunderstood. That everything I’ve written has been misread by everyone and anyone who’s read it. And I don’t just mean that I’m afraid they didn’t get it or got it wrong; I mean down to the word, every single word, because no two people conceive of the same word in exactly the same way. Take that very long Perez novel, for example, the one I read as a young man. I started to see its contents everywhere in my life. Of course, that wasn’t some strange act of magic—it was just interpretation; all I had to support my interpretation of that novel was my own, limited experience. And the short novels I read during the two or three years after graduating—that was the same thing, only the other way around: I saw the novels themselves as somehow reflective of my shattered life. When you read something, you make it your own. Reading takes all the agency away from the writer, disempowers them completely, makes them nonexistent. And if, someday, all that’s left of me are the texts I’ve written, then I’m completely at the mercy of other people’s minds. I’ll just exist inside them. I’ll become more you than myself. Or there isn’t any difference between the two of us. So it seems foolish now to have spent so much of my life feeling lonely.

Max Blue is a writer living in San Francisco. His art criticism has appeared in Artsy, Cultured, and Hyperallergic, among others, and he is a regular contributor to the San Francisco Examiner. His short fiction has appeared in ARTWIFE, The MacGuffin, and North Dakota Quarterly, among others. He holds a degree in the History and Theory of Contemporary Art from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA in Writing from the University of San Francisco. More can be found at maxbluewriter.com.