As evidenced by Lawrence Weschler's latest book, the juxtaposition of the unexpected can be an engaging and startling affair. Including pieces from over the past twenty years, Vermeer in Bosnia incorporates such various works as a profile of Roman Polanski, a commentary on the light in Los Angeles, and a reflection on Weschler's daughter's eyes. TAP talks to Weschler about Vermeer in Bosnia and his great love: magazines.
After publishing 11 books, why did you choose to do this collection now?
I have consciously been trying to put together a set of themes that have come up in my work over the past couple of years. Vermeer in Bosnia was an occasion to sit down and bring back some pieces that people remember and want to look at again. It's an opportunity to talk about the kinds of concerns that animate my tragic reporting and comic reporting, and this collection animates the grittier and more lyrical stuff.
How do you feel -- if at all -- the title of your book ties the collection together?
The [title] essay itself isn't intended to summarize all the work. It summons up the convergence of things that you wouldn't expect to have together, and indeed the idea of being open to serendipitous, peculiar connections. More generally, it's about my interest in politics and culture and the sense that there is no cultural life that's not political and no political life that's not cultural. There is the art critic and the political critic, and you don't usually see them together. They are very much desiccated when not conjoined.
It's funny, that piece has been photocopied and Xeroxed more than anything I've ever written. The odd thing about it is that people love the claims it makes for art. It is positively the most heartening and hopeful vision of what the artist can do. A kind of sense of what peace might mean is invented in that little room in Holland with that particular splay of light across the wall.
It's a touchstone piece for me because it suggests that reportage about politics and reportage about art are not by any means mutually exclusive. It's kind of an anthem piece, and it stands in for my concerns.
When you wrote the title piece, were you anticipating it would be part of something larger?
Much of the book is divided into triptychs, which was done very consciously. I made a point of doing three pieces in the Balkans and they hang together. The idea was three and three and three. I didn't want to publish the book until I had created the structure. I am very interested in organic form, which comes from my grandfather, the composer Ernst Toch. Although I myself am not musical, I subscribe to his notion of sequential narrative material through time as opposed to through space. The categories in thinking about writing are all architectural, organic notions.
Did you try to stay contained within this sequence?
There are pieces that I would have liked to put in a collection that didn't fit. The next thing I'm doing is a book with McSweeney's. It's a giant book of convergences; I've been doing a series of convergence pieces where I take things that you wouldn't ordinarily put side-by-side and weave a story through them.
In the book, you say that your reporting becomes about “taking any single knot and worrying out the threads, tracing the interconnections, following the mesh through into the wider, outlying mesh, establishing the proper analogies, ferreting out the false strands.” How do you feel these essays are threaded?
Vermeer in Bosnia has a sequence of themes that run throughout. Some of the themes in the book are progeny and posterity: what it is to be a father, a son, a grandson; what it is to become imbued with passion, to catch fire. This idea of “catching fire” is a theme in much of my writing over the years, in both my cultural comedies and political tragedies. There is also the theme of wonder and marvel; the essay written by my daughter is an example of being subject to sudden abashed silence and wonder.
Another ongoing theme in my work is exile. There is the idea of wonder and exile and the operations of grace, and the idea that one works and works at something that then happens by itself.
Another theme is the loss of grace. It's the business about people suddenly catching fire and taking off, but then getting dowsed and grounded as well. The Ed Weinberger piece is an example of this. The very moment he becomes paralyzed is the moment he takes off. This man who had been felled by this calamitous case of Parkinson's disease virtually crumples into extreme opacity, yet he creates this incredible body of work. Vermeer in Bosnia addresses the reader as capable of marvel.
Is there any particular piece that you are most attached to in this collection? The chapter “Grandfathers and Daughters” seems very personal in comparison with the others.
“Grandfathers and Daughters” is clearly the most autobiographical and at some level perhaps sentimental. The piece about my daughter's eyes and the confusion about whether you're looking at the past's pasts or the future's futures -- this idea shows up again and again in the book.
The Polanski piece is just filled with complication and disaster, and it's another piece about what it means to become a father. What's really fascinating in retrospect about Polanski is that he had just become a father at the point when I was writing, and it took him becoming a father to be able to make his film about the Holocaust.
In the acknowledgements, you refer to your career as “tumblingly various.” How has your personal curiosity and diverse interests affected your career?
My career has been kind of scattershot but, I hope, rich. I've had a good time. I'm not easy to pigeonhole. A real problem in my book-publishing career is that bookstores don't know where to put me. The argument I am humbly advancing with this book is that where to put it is with writing. My work, not unlike that of several other, though by no means all, nonfiction writers, aspires to writerly providence and grace. And where you put writers is in alphabetical order under literature. The point is that all of my books really are intended to be read side-by-side. However, they're never side-by-side in the bookstores.
You became director of the NYU Institute for Humanities in 2001 and started Omnivore, a visual and literary magazine. Can you talk a little about Omnivoreand how this publication is reflective of your writing?
My heart's true home is in general-interest magazines. The thing that I love is the experience of reading a piece on something you had no idea about. It's a question of freshness and surprise. I'm perfectly happy to have this book but what I really love is that experience of surprise and community you get in magazines. I hope that in trying to get Omnivore started -- we only have a prototype issue so far -- I'll create this. It's a very visual magazine that also creates a space for writers to write and revise things that have been lost.
The general thing that's true about most of my writing -- and this is the case in the first chapter of Vermeer in Bosnia -- is that I tend to come at these issues from the side. The kind of writing that I love is writing that seems to be about nothing, but you read it because of the sheer narrative energy, and you keep reading it and about halfway into it you realize it's the most important thing in the world. The most important thing in the world can only be gotten at from the side. It blasts you from unawares.
Heather Bobrow is a freelance writer in New York.
