Q: The notion of leaving America and losing oneself in a foreign country is an intriguing element in your work. Can you explain it?
LB: Although the notion that my books are autobiographical has the persistency of a young dog trying to climb onto the sofa, none of them is a disguised memoir. They are simply, like all serious works of fiction, made out of the author’s experiences, thoughts, and feelings. I came to the United States when I was thirteen, as a refugee from Poland, a "displaced person." No matter how hard I have tried to become American and how successful in this effort I may have been, I am still a "displaced person" in the largest sense. Perhaps all writers are, but in my case the displacement has retained its geographical aspect. It is also the case that I have traveled frequently and widely and that my experiences outside of the United States have been intense, not those of a tourist. Leaving and disappearing are natural to me, like disguises. It doesn’t surprise me, therefore, that my principal characters also find it natural to move around: Ben in The Man Who Was Late quite literally escapes to France from a broken marriage. Afterward, he feels that the sidewalks of New York burn his feet. He escapes from Paris to Rio de Janeiro because he cannot face the implications of deep involvement with a woman who loves him desperately, whose love he in fact returns. Max, the narrator of As Max Saw It, is merely peripatetic. There is no particular significance in his meeting Toby and the great Charlie Swan in a villa on the Lake of Como or in his reconnecting with them in the Forbidden City in Beijing. Schmidtie of About Schmidt is, in fact, a homebody. He shuttles between Bridgehampton, in Long Island, and Manhattan. And Mistler! Poor Mistler knows there is no escape from the crab devouring his liver but he wants a moment of grace and irresponsibility before he must face his wife and son for the last time, before he crosses the river Styx. Like Ben, he flees, but for different reasons. He chooses Venice, the most beautiful city in the world, a watery, pink and gray Gothic graveyard. Can you blame him?
Q: Mistler is engineering a wildly lucrative sale of his advertising company, and his will to close the deal seems undiminished when he discovers that he has terminal cancer. Has your career in law and high-level business transactions given you special insight into the psychology of people at the top?
LB: I hope so! Otherwise I have been wasting my time. Discipline, the ability to carry on and get what you want no matter how awful you feel, are the means and the price of ascent. Terrible personal adversity often serves as a stimulant. You may have also noticed something I happened to be interested in showing: how one conducts two activities at the same time. For instance, Mistler’s idle chatter with the young photographer Lina Verano, who pursues Mistler all the way to Venice for sex and a chance to photograph him, goes on while he figures out the impact of the deal he’s making on his estate tax.
Q: Mistler describes his immensely successful career as "structured emptiness." Is the hollowness he feels entirely attributable to his own nature--could he have ever been happy? Or might one also infer something about the nature--and price" of success in our culture? Are we all vulnerable to such feelings?
LB: I take issue with your assumption that Mistler is fundamentally unhappy. In fact, at the beginning of the book, the reader is told that he "considered himself a happy man, as the world goes." That is, of course, before he has spent a week or more acquainting himself with the cancer colonizing his liver, before he has gone to Venice and looked into the abyss. And when he tells Bella, after a boozy lunch, that his "work is only another form of emptiness--structured emptiness!" I am inclined to think the reader should listen with a mixture of respect and skepticism. Note the forces that are at work. First of all, Mistler talks well, and likes to listen to himself. How much of what he has just said is phrase making? Second, he has a well-bred WASP’s normal penchant for self-deprecation. In this instance it would seem to have been put into overdrive by what Bella has just told him about the way Enrico, her late husband, faced death. Enrico was a great artist; Mistler’s writing career never got off the ground. Mistler surely dislikes the thought that he will be measured against the husband. A natural defense would be to make the comparison a priori untenable. Third, isn’t Mistler caught in an extraordinary emotional turmoil, the memories of his hopeless infatuation with Bella literally crowding out the room?
The doubts I have tried to sow do not invalidate the basic question about a career such as Mistler’s. I would say that my protagonist is afflicted by an excess of lucidity, which leads him to see his huge success in business as nothing more than the equivalent of winning at a superbly complicated game. A game, moreover, that is worth playing only at immense speed and if a maximum of risks is taken. This is a way that some brilliant, lucky players--fundamentally indifferent to material rewards of success but devoted to other values and vistas--judge their accomplishments. I do not think that all businessmen are vulnerable to such feelings or that a judgment about our culture should be inferred. Rather, I believe that Mistler presents a special case, epitomizing men and women who are obsessed by the vanity of all human endeavor that does not have some transcendent purpose. One such purpose in Mistler’s understanding, would be the creation of a great work of art. A different man in Mistler’s position would look back on his life and accomplishments and quite honorably congratulate himself.
Q: Like Death in Venice, Mistler’s Exit is both a love letter and a meditation on mortality. What inspiration, if any did you draw from Thomas Mann?
LB: The question is impossible to answer. Thomas Mann, like Proust and Henry James, like the ghosts of so many others, is always there. They crowd the corners of the room. Mistler of course knows with a certainty that he is going to be dead very soon. In this he differs from Aschenbach. He goes to Venice to taste the forbidden fruit of irresponsiblity, freedom and emptiness, and, he hopes, pleasure of the senses (looking at paintings and buildings he loves, not sex!), before he must enter the war zone of dying. Poor Aschenbach thinks Venice will restore him.
Q: Mistler’s marital and professional choices have always been conventional, yet his decision to flee to Venice when he learns he is dying is out of character for him. What makes Mistler tick?
LB: You have to read the novel--carefully--to find out! The bare bones answer may be in the comment he makes to Barney Fine in the barroom scene: his genetic puritanism. Combined with a curious mixture of an overpowering need to be the first, especially among equals, and his existentialism. Mistler believes that a man’s life is his sum total, his complete definition.
Q: About Schmidt seemed to sound the death knell of the American Establishment, but in Mistler’s Exit, the WASP plutocracy seems still ascendant, or at least alive and kicking. Is there still an Establishment that works in the manner Uncle Abthorp describes, or have the past couple of decades forever altered the traditional paradigm of money and power?
LB: Don’t forget that Uncle Abthorp delivers his lecture on Old and New Money a long time ago, say in the late 1960s, when Mistler, Lovett & Berry have hit their stride. Schmidtie, on the other hand, takes stock of New York society in the 1990s. Much had changed during those momentous intervening decades. Nevertheless, Uncle Abthorp’s views remain valid.
Take the cultural institutions he recommends to his favorite nephew as hunting grounds of choice. If you peruse their annual reports, you will see boards of directors that are bouquets delicately composed of different types: colossally rich new men and women, the ones who, according to Uncle Abthorp, have kept their money and are able to "fit in"; the not nearly as rich old Establishment types, whose presence makes the new boys and girls feel they have really and truly made it in society; and the "trophy" members. Into this last category fall intellectuals or artists or persons who pass for such, whose role is to amuse and educate the others--think of the role of Athenian slaves in imperial Rome--to make them feel that charity can be fun. And, indeed, the new rich have gotten their seats by giving and giving and giving.
Effective power has slipped from the hands of the WASP plutocracy (except of course for those few members of the old elite who have remained very rich), but not the power to anoint, to give the new rich a certain gloss and increased respectability. That is why Mr. and Mrs. New Money collect the old rich, even as they constitute great art collections, acquire historic dwellings, and take up polo and the most expensive of blood sports. The pattern is not novel. After all, so many of the grandest old WASPs descend from robber barons of the end of the last century and their hangers on. Those worthies knew that in a democracy, since you can’t become a prince or a marquis, you had better found a museum, give to charities, and shine as a patron of the arts.
Q: One is continually startled by the elemental sexuality that invades the decorous atmosphere of your novels. What is the significance of this counterpoint?
LB: There is a considerable amount of powerful sex in my novels because I think the sexual drive exerts an overpowering influence on us. Beyond procuring pleasure, it opens us to one another, it ripens us much as the sun ripens green fruit. Indeed I have always thought that sex is the only proven means of breaking out of our solitude. That is more important than sex as a means of exerting power.
Q: One of the most moving elements of the novel is Mistler’s relationship with his son, Sam. What have you learned about fatherhood through writing this novel?
LB: How one never does anything right, how almost every well-intentioned action miscarries, how nothing can be truly repaired. Parental love is tragic; the relationship necessarily ends in loss. One’s adult children are fatally different from the childhood images fixed in one’s memory; they may be splendid, but they are different, and in the meantime one has become an old man. If one is lucky, one will receive from the son the rite of forgiveness, as Mistler hopes he will receive it from Sam, perhaps because he has accepted so totally what time has made of that once beautiful child who is his only son. I always have in mind those lines in Yeats’s "Among School Children," where the poet asks himself what woman would think the shape of her son with sixty of more winters on its head a compensation for the pain of his birth or the uncertainty of what awaits him.
When it comes to their emotions, fathers and mothers aren’t all that different.
Q: Where do you see Mistler’s Exit in the development of your novels since Wartime Lies? What’s next for you?
LB: I hope I have made progress in learning the novelist’s craft. My themes have remained the same: our dreadful isolation (Proust put it unforgettably when the narrator learns his grandmother is dying: Chaque personne est bien seule), and how only love and solidarity can help us break out of our isolation; men’s indifference to other men, which is the bland mask of cruelty; death as our absolute ending.
Before I reach that ending, I would like to write more novels. The one I am beginning to write is actually a temporary resurrection. I intend to bring back Schmidtie, the crotchety protagonist of About Schmidt, and his magnificent friend, Carrie.
© Copyright 2012 by Louis Begley. Reprinted with permission by Fawcett. All rights reserved.
• Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.
top of the page
