In his debut novel, In the Suavity of the Rock, author and essayist Greg Gerke reflects on memory, and the impulse to seek — and impose — narratives as a way of making the inchoate of life cohere. We spoke over Zoom about the novel’s gestation, the importance of rhythm to the development of style, and the state of the contemporary literary scene.

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Tobias Ryan: In the section second of the book, the reader is presented with the idea that “Epiphanies can have a long durée”, as the narrator discusses how creative work develops over long periods of time. Was this the case with gestation of the novel?

Greg Gerke:  It’s been a long process. I think I wrote the first two long sections in 2018, and stopped there. I thought that that was maybe the end of the novel, the end of the second long section, but then a lot of other things intervened. Life and death. The pandemic started, and I think that actually changed the course of the novel more than anything, because as we started going through something like that, something we had no experience with — I mean the biggest world event since World War II, probably — that experience counseled me to go back to the novel. I was editing it through that time, or starting to edit it more, and seeing the flaws in it.

I began to feel that there was something missing from the book. And I thought of Mike Leigh, the filmmaker, how he talked about Secrets and Lies. The penultimate scene, where the secrets and lies come out to such an extent that the young daughter leaves in shock. It’s a long scene, but the daughter has to come back to extend the scene even more and bring out further secrets and lies. I was thinking of something like that, as: I have to go further, someone has to come back and that meant the character had to extend his pain up till his last days. The reckoning had to come in the form of something I couldn’t imagine without the death all around us, even before the pandemic. Not in the sense of prose fireworks, just in the sense of deepening the text.

So the third section in Oregon, which I think I’m most happy with, is the one that was ground out of being in that pandemic time. It just started coming to me. On a vacation I remember really starting to write it. I had bits and pieces of it from other things, but to see them in a different light, the tone had to come to me. It needed a slightly different texture, given the character’s age.

TR: Memory, and how it is formed, is a key theme throughout the book, so would you say the pandemic experience changed your relationship to memory? Changed your relationship to your past?

GG: I don’t think the muse would have granted that without the experience of 2020. And as Gass, I think, and others say, when you’re writing the text, you want to go one way, and the text wants to go another way, so I had to figure out how to follow the text as it kept going in this other way. It wasn’t going to wrap up in some easy kind of contemporary zeitgeist solution — there was this scene of watching the little daughter play with a friend, which in retrospect just seems awful. I can’t believe I even thought to write that, or end a book that way.

So, yes, the pandemic whatever it did, everyone being separated — but I didn’t want to refer to it. It happened, but like Sebald said, Virginia Woolf was writing The Death of the Moth essay while World War I was going on, and that’s in the background. It was sort of like that with the pandemic.

And it did change my relationship to memory because I kept getting older through the book, as I wrote it, and things changed, people changed, people died. And the three years of it — it’s a blur now. But it seems we were remembering in a different way because of the isolation and the need to have every get-together regulated.

TR: That’s interesting. I don’t think it would have occurred to me as a quote-unquote pandemic novel, but recognising that as going on in the background certainly adds layers — particularly, I suppose, in terms its nostalgia and bittersweet atmosphere, in the ‘Greener Days’ section, for example, imagining lives that could have been.

GG: It was written in the order it’s there, so that part was done before the pandemic. But I went back and changed things. At first there was some question of whether I was writing some weird memoir scene. And then I started to play with that. Some of it is true. I was in Coney Island, Ireland, and there was a wedding. But then, when I started the next section which goes to the south of France, I could see this was taking a shape of a novel, partially autobiographical, but still a novel.

Usually, I write more intuitively, and I don’t plan things out. I think that’s why there are these kind of moves in the book that are strange. I think that intuition can give birth to this— characters popping up out of nowhere, even in the last section of the book—the painter from his youth, a memory of this guy who had worked in his house when he was a teenager. I don’t know why I did that, it came out of nowhere, but it seemed the right thing to do. It was more instinctual, and I never planned out that it begins on a beach and it ends on a beach. I never once thought of those types of things or connections.

TR: Recently on Twitter, you’ve been talking a lot about like rhythm, the rhythm of sentence. I was curious about from where you think that rhythm comes?

GG: Right, I think I put up that famous Woolf quote, which is so hard to understand and think about, and someone was making fun of it.

TR: I saw one response of someone saying, essentially, that the idea has been responsible for a lot of brainless writing, where it’s purely a rhythmic exercise with no thought behind it.

GG: I think that can be true. I think when Murnane does it, it’s right. He believes it. He used that Woolf quote in one of his essays. But when another writer, that I might not be into, does it? Then I think it’s wrong.

I do think you can really tell, through someone’s writing, who they’ve read. As they say, reading is reversible writing. You can tell if someone hasn’t read more world literature, or maybe old literature, like Shakespeare and Milton. Reading too many modern things, I think, can poison you in a certain way. And actually, Lydia Davis even said you shouldn’t read the modern because you live in it. You have all you need of the modern. So read Shakespeare and read Woolf, or Milton, or world literature. It really has to do with reading. At a base level it teaches you how to write.

And sometimes in reading contemporary work, I feel that something’s lacking. And maybe that is reading, because so many programs today are concerned with the writing of things, instead of close reading of other (wholly thought out, riven) things that can really help your writing in the end, and give you something to say eventually.

But you know, when you pick up the Garielle Lutz, you know the rhythm — everything — is extruded from the last sentence. Christine Schutt is a lot like that, too. This is kind of the Lishian way, the Gordon Lish way. Every sentence leads to the next sentence. But that’s also hard to understand or grasp fully. I think it’s in the process of hearing the words cycle through your mind, but you’re always looking back to go forward.

You can only see the lights of the car on the road. You can’t see rhythms in the distance.

TR: Going back to the notion of memory, would you say the rhythm of your sentences reflects the rhythm of your thought, your invocation of memory, or does it work in reverse, your sense of literary rhythm providing the structure of your thinking?

GR: I’m not sure. I think for many years it was the former. But maybe the rhythm provides the structure now because I often tell editors that the rhythm supplants the idea. But one can’t have a sloppy sentence. And Lutz taught me that—fix the grammar and the hydraulics of the sentence toward the clear, then tackle the rhythm.

TR: You started writing screenplays or, rather very descriptive screenplays à la Bergman, does cinema influence your sense of prose rhythms or is that something which can only come from literature?

GR: I think it does for me. I like certain movements in the novel that remind me of how Bresson might cut in Pickpocket — as in the ballet when they show the pickpockets going into the subway and how they make every complex move to steal. I liked how certain sections of the of this novel reminded me of that in in some way. I felt like the sentences were turning like motion picture film — the period is an edit of sorts, commas, em-dashes, semicolons, the internal pauses in lines are all edits; the words the angles and movements of the camera to me. Probably a lot of people wouldn’t say that, but to me, yes, it feels that way.

And I’ve often imagined film when writing or imagined other films while watching films that I didn’t like, wishing I was watching another film, wishing I was watching Antonioni instead of whatever the mediocre film was.

And I did make films, 16mm, so I do know about cutting and editing and camera movements to a very rudimentary degree.

TR: Were there any other particular influences or reading you were doing at the time of writing In the Suavity of the Rock?

GR: The main one is the Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. But early on I realized that I didn’t want to get too close to it, so I stopped reading it. I’ve read it a few times, but I didn’t want to have it fresh in my mind, so I put it away for the duration of the writing. I just wanted to have it in memory as a ghost. And I think, with all the ghosts in that book somehow I was able to summon some of that ghostly feeling for this book. I aspired to do something like that. I hope I did it.

Naipaul’s Enigma of Arrival would also be there taking for your own biography and whisking it away, or embellishing it, or playing with it. What else? T.S. Eliot essays. I read a lot of poetry and essays on poetry. Not so much philosophy for this book, more prose and poetry.

Since then I’ve seen things that would have changed it, like Roubaud’s The Great Fire of London. It would probably have been a much different book if I had read that before or during that time, or if I’d read Gaston Bachelard as closely as I did later.

TR: Through your own writing, and with Socrates on the Beach the review you edit, there is a real sense of setting out to defend high literary style. What’s your sense of the contemporary literary scene, and why might such a defence be necessary?

GR: There has been a regression of sorts. As our moment has turned to the political and art has become overwhelmed with the political artists, are being more didactic, which seems a recipe for bad art.

I made a silly little list and posted it on Twitter some weeks ago, but it does seem that The New York Times and others only give publicity to certain writers. And actually, I’ll be biased and say a lot of the Socrates on the Beach writers don’t get the publicity they deserve, and a lot of them have books coming out right now. Garielle’s book will get reviewed, she gets press as cult writer, so there’s one or two that get their due, but that shouldn’t be enough to satisfy us. The Jen Craigs, the Gabriel Blackwells, the Christina Tudor-Sideris, where do they come in?

That’s why I look to Australia more than the US or UK. Just on Twitter, I’ve made a lot of Australian connections, and their culture seems much more thriving and interesting. They just have a different viewpoint. Ours is still entangled by the New York connection, with publishing and the New Yorker and The New York Times. Twenty years ago, it had this set amount of vast coverage: there’s a new Richard Russo book out, or there’s a new Alice Munro, but those times have ended. They’re pushing these certain mostly pedestrian writers on us, and honestly, of all the hyped writers I can remember being pressed since 2010, there are really maybe one in thirty that I have felt was worthy of the hype.

TR: It goes back to something you mentioned before about the didactic political stuff. Very often it seems that’s what gets promoted — that this is a book which talks about such and such topic, rather than its literary qualities. It seems like a dead end in terms of fostering literary culture.

GR:  Yes, exactly. I firmly believe the sound is the story. It’s not anything else. We can cast a cold eye on the gatekeepers, too. Now the LRB, someone assigned The Baudelaire Fractal by Lisa Robertson, and that got a good review. And that’s a book that should be pushed because it’s really doing something different. They can do that. So why can’t more critics and editors and gatekeepers take chances? Why can’t they push more of the small presses where our literary culture is surviving? We need that.

But then, you have to get someone in there that’s going to spice it up, and as we see at this moment where we know that at the colleges, it’s all about the donors, who’s giving the money. It’s just the bottom line, the bottom line, the bottom line.

And we know that the bigger presses are all about the bottom line. I mean, a few weeks ago I saw someone saying that for a debut novel sixteen different readers in a large press had to so say “yes” for this specific book for it to be okayed. Sixteen people, paid readers—that is their job. You’re not going to end up with a worthy product because it’s simply the lowest common denominator.

Going back to William Gass’ first novel, it was one person’s choice, and he almost backed off doing it. This is Omensetter’s Luck in 1966. Gass even had to write a letter to him saying, you know, you have to do what you have to do, but there’s nothing I can do. I’m not going to try to get blurbs from Saul Bellow to convince you to sell my book. But often now, just to get one person to say, Okay is hard and we’re lucky we have publishers like Splice, Clash, Sublunary.

TR: In terms of high, or challenging, even, literary style do you have a sense of wanting to put demands on your readers?

GR: A little bit, but not much. I think “difficult” as a means of describing a text is such a knee jerk word, and it’s used to describe a lot of things that really aren’t difficult. It’s just about paying attention. There’s a lot of prose that you don’t have to pay attention to because it’s giving you what you expect. It’s a template; where you would expect this adjective, Oh, there it is. Where you would expect the swerve of this character or that kind of dialogue, there it is. It’s given to you. Since Franzen’s essay on Gaddis, ‘Mr. Difficult’, “difficult” has become a watchword.

If you want to avoid self-conscious complications or facile provocations, I think you have to throw away a lot of your early writing, and you have to take a lot of stepping stones, which you then throw away. That’s what I did. I think I’ve written at least three other novels and many novellas over the last twenty years or so, and I’ve them all away. They were just no good, early imitations of you know, whatever, Alice Munro. You have to find your voice. However cliché that sounds, it’s true. If you imitate someone too much, people can tell. But if you go through things, the warp and weft of time, I think there comes a point where you’ll feel it, you’ll see that you’re writing your own sentences. It took me fifteen, twenty years to figure that out in terms of fiction.

I think it’s much easier to get a grasp of fictional writing by writing nonfiction because then you’re doing the close reading and you’re writing more cohesively. I would like to see more writers do that. I’m often more interested in their nonfiction works than their fictional works because I think fiction is so much more difficult to pull off. I think only there’s only a chosen few for that because it has that high degree of difficulty. But you can learn your chops by writing essays or book reviews and approaching things from a whole other angle. That will enable you to see how you just can’t come to the table with a googly glop of Pynchon-like prose out of nowhere when you’re 23, or 26, even 49. As Michelangelo said, you have to chisel, you have to keep chiselling through the rock to find the true sculpture.

TR: This points back to the notion of long durée that we began with … which is often seems compromised by the pressure that dominates the culture, to be published young and published frequently, moving in the right circles.

GG: It just seems that people are cranking stuff out, so many are doing that right now. Like they’re not writing in their blood. Again, however, cliché that sounds. Jim Gauer of Zerogram would say, I only want books that you’re the only person who could have written.

TR: Underlining a contrast with the mainstream, and an opposition to this culture of cranking stuff out, I’m curious whether you consider there to be a spiritual aspect to your writing — if not in religious terms, at least in an approach to literature which seeks something beyond, something which invest the writing with a kind of moral seriousness?

GG: Yeah, I think so. In this book, I’m wearing the badge of all the names that are alluded to throughout, like Rilke, Eliot, Yeats, and Cezanne. Because the character is a writer too, he’s exorcising these years of hearing all these cliches and platitudes about writing, and trying to free himself of them, even though he’s kind of given them up at the end of his life. They still haunt him. I think this is what many writers have to go through, especially in our time. All the platitudes, all the advice that is graffitied over Twitter every day. Then you have someone, like the cancelled Peter Handke, saying a real writer doesn’t need advice …

But yes, there has to be something spiritual — therapeutic in a certain way, I guess I would say in my case. My entanglements with Buddhism, or any other kind of religion, have been about that, helping the self. I see a crossover because if you’re developing a spiritual life, you’re changing your life. Not in that you’re going through therapy, but you’re changing the core of your being by following a certain spiritual path.

For me, writing can be therapeutic in a certain way, and I think this character is going through that as well. Most of the years when he’s not writing are years of failure. They’re not even worthy of being remembered. The last twenty years, up to the present of his life, are given up, because he loses his muse and his daughter at the same time. It’s scary to have this obsessive artistic expression and to give up on it. And that’s probably what I was imagining, the worst that could happen to this “writer,” because I’ve seen people go that way, and it’s hard. It’s a hard one to think about: to lose your passion for your main purpose in life.

TR: Are you working on any new projects at the moment?

GG: Well, I had started another novel last year, but I’m holding off on it for now, and I’ve been doing more on this Passages and Sentences project, responding to either a sentence or a passage in literature and self publishing them on Medium, just kind of short essays on the words of  Marguerite Duras or Guy Davenport.

Fiction is kind of off the table at this moment. I’m more nonfiction mode again.

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In the Suavity of the Rock is available soon from Splice. You can order a copy here.

Greg Gerke is an essayist and writer of fiction, based in New York. His work has appeared in 3:AM Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He also edits the online literary journal Socrates on the Beach. His story collection, Especially the Bad Things, and a collection of essays, See What I See, are available from Splice. Twitter: @Greg_Gerke

Tobias Ryan is an English teacher and translator, based in Paris.