I'm Writing, Really Writing

 Norman Lebrecht had a deceptively wonderful article last week about how symphonies underdeliver. They are novels in sound, yet they do not provoke the complicated expressive journeys of novels. At first, I was enraged by it, then I realized that these were exactly my complaints about classical music. It's not really an issue of profundity, it's an issue of dogma. We do not have composers who express profound thoughts with the true freedom of novelists. Think of the religious tie ins in the most profound works of basically every composer until... Mozart? Think of the nationalism of Wagner. The dogmatism of Schoenberg. The near-impenetrable density of the Darmstadt school. These are all people capable of the profoundest masterpieces: what they lack is expressive freedom. Most composers seem unable to venture through the entire kingdom of music to feel as though there is complete freedom of thought, where high stands proudly next to low, sublime next to ridiculous, tragedy next to comedy, romance next to satire.

It's no secret on this page that I've had novelistic ambitions, but for years I despaired of finding novelists who inspired me as much as Mahler. Then I found the total, maximalist novels. Not necessarily the modernists, and rarely the postmodernists, but those novels which contain the universe. Novels denser than Tolstoy, not quite as dense as Joyce or Proust: Dostoevsky and Mann but really only those two at their best, and also underregarded names like Vasily Grossman, Robert Musil, Herrman Broch, Carlos Fuentes, John Dos Passos, Naguib Mahfouz, Jose Saramago, Jaroslav Hasek, Bohumil Hrabal, Joseph Roth, and many many more I'm sure I'll find along this journey. And then you go even further back to a freedom even past Shakespeare's once you discover Don Quixote, The Arabian Nights, The Canturbury Tales, and perhaps my favorite of the older ones: The Decameron. I could try to describe the difference: but it comes down to literary places that surprise you. From sentence to sentence, you never know what you're going to get, and I find that utterly delightful. One day I hope for the confidence and competence to write about all these findings, because finding your way through these books is a deeply slow process, and in most of the cases, I still have not finished them. It's not like Mahler where you can wrap things up in 75 minutes (imagine, Mahler is comparatively shortwinded). In music, emotions lead to thought, in literature, thought leads to emotion.

In reading, as in music, I'm no American. I'm a Jew as always, but if I ever truly become a novelist, I'll never be a 'Jewish Melville or Faulkner', but I may be a mediocre Jewish Musil or Broch, a crude and disorganized assemblage of Thomas Mann at his most pedantic, a displaced central-eastern European writer for attention spans people don't have anymore, needing an attention span I'm not even sure I have as a reader.

But I think I'm funny, I think I have things to say, and for the first time in my life, I think I'm writing with a small spark of the freedom with which Mahler writes music.

--One could make a list of the exceptions. It's not long. The truly existential moderns like late Beethoven, Schumann in his piano music, Janacek in his second half, Schubert in his final two years, Mozart's best operas, the entire careers of Mahler, Shostakovich, Ives, Berlioz and Mussorgsky. Maybe a second line of 'almosts' it's not worth getting into...