Max Frisch, ca. 1961. Photograph by Jack Metzger

Max Frisch was born in a suburb of Zurich, Switzerland, on May 15, 1911. By the age of twenty-six he had published two works, the novel Jürg Reinhart (1934), and Answer from Silence, a novella (1937), both of which he burned in 1937 along with everything he had written up to then, vowing never to write again. “I had to make two trips into the woods, there were so many bundles,” he writes in Sketchbook 1946–1949. It was a vow he broke two years later by writing about his experience as a border patrol guard in the Swiss Army (Leaves From a Knapsack, 1940). In 1942 the author opened his own architectural design office, and Zurich’s public swimming pool is the result of a competition he won in 1949. After the war Frisch wrote and produced several plays in Zurich and began an important friendship with Bertolt Brecht. In 1954, the publication of I’m Not Stiller brought the author worldwide fame, and by the end of that year he was able to close his architectural practice and devote himself full-time to writing. Since then Frisch has navigated several genres with equal, and extraordinary, mastery: plays, including his best-known The Firebugs (1958), Andorra (1961), and Biography: A Game (1967); memoirs, Sketchbook 1946–1949Sketchbook 1966–1971, and Montauk (1975); novels, Homo Faber (1957) and Gantenbein (1964); and two classic novellas, Man in the Holocene (1979) and Bluebeard (1982).

On the Sunday evening in September of 1984 when I arrived in Zurich to interview Frisch, he informed me by phone that he wasn’t feeling well and asked if we could postpone our interview until Wednesday. I took the free days to explore Zurich—its narrow, café-cluttered streets and posh bank-lined avenues that have been home to Frisch for nearly seventy-three years. It is a city that in many ways has been as marked by the author as he has been marked by it; here he has spoken out on everything from urban planning to Switzerland’s position in the world, its “guilt of the guiltless.” When Frisch walks down the streets of this city strangers tip their hats to him, as to an old and revered friend.

Wednesday morning the author met me at my hotel and together we walked back to his spacious triplex apartment nearby. Frisch, with his strong hiker’s gait, easily outpaced me. “I had hoped we could take a walk in the country and talk there, but it’s not very nice weather and I’m afraid I’m not quite well yet. Perhaps tomorrow,” he apologized. His speech was halting, with a Swiss-German lilt that sounded almost like a brogue.

Frisch expressed some reservations about our interview: “Stone Age, Iron Age, Interview Age—it’s so vulgar. It’s not so interesting to have these questions and answers. You must have a dialogue.” It’s a word that for Frisch signifies not just an aspect of craft but a way of life, something that has been expressed in everything he has done, from his active citizenship to his work in the theater and the novels he has created. It was expressed in our interview, as well as our conversations over the next three days—of which this text represents only a small fraction.

 

INTERVIEWER

I’d like to begin with some questions about your most recent book, Bluebeard. When did you first get the idea for this project? 

MAX FRISCH

It began when I first came back from the United States and dropped in on a trial of a friend of mine. The trial had just begun the day before, and it was a case of murder, a very strange case. Without any particular intention, I got there and became extremely interested not only in the case—which is different from the Bluebeard story—but in the language of the court. The fascination for me was in the ritualization of the word. In the court it’s always the same sentence, the truth and nothing but the truth. I ask you this and that. This standardization of the language has the elements of music or architecture. The same questions come again and again, in different situations. I was actually fascinated more by the language than by the story.

INTERVIEWER

Bluebeard gives the impression of having been written quickly and easily. Was it?

FRISCH

Oh, no. In fact, it was twice the length it is now. I had the opportunity to make a so-called realistic, old-style novel to get a complete picture of the characters, their different standards, milieus, and so on. It would have included many more witnesses and interrogations so that we learn how they, the witnesses, live, what they think, their prejudices and their mental diseases. But I was unable to sustain the tension I needed. Melville could do it in Moby-Dick, but I couldn’t. 

INTERVIEWER

Dialogue seems important to you.

FRISCH

When I started to write in college, I wrote plays, not narrative. I was afraid of narrative. My first interest was the theater, not literature. It has to do with what I tried to say before, this fascination with the court language, which is all dialogue. As soon as I start to tell a story or describe a landscape, I can’t keep to this ritual language.

INTERVIEWER

Many of your heroes after I’m Not Stiller are technocrats, or men who are not self-reflective, who give a very flat testimony of their lives.

FRISCH

Yes, that’s especially the case with Homo Faber. That was the point, that a man is giving an interpretation that is flat, flatter than life is. Walter denies he has experiences because he’s very helpless in expressing his emotions. So he describes himself as flatly as possible. He has the arrogance to say nothing. He realizes too late that he was engaged emotionally in many, many things. I think Stiller is much more telling about his feelings.

INTERVIEWER

In Bluebeard, too, Herr Schaad says, “What helps is billiards.” He never says, “I’m suffering.”

FRISCH

That’s perfectly true. Actually, it has to do with my own personality, probably. I have very strong feelings but I don’t like to describe them. There are other ways to show them—body language, or silence—that can be very strong. And maybe, too, one has a distrust of words; one fears that they won’t be interpreted correctly. It’s very difficult to describe a feeling and not to lie a little bit, to put it on a higher level or to blind yourself. So I don’t trust myself to describe my feelings, but I like to show them by a piece of art. And as a reader I’m the same, I don’t like it if the author tells me what I have to feel. He has to urge the reader to get a feeling of shame or of hope. So there’s a lot of feeling, there’s a lot of emotion, but . . . not expressed in words. 

INTERVIEWER

In that sense your writing hasn’t been given over to the prevalent mode of confessional writing, the writing of what one might call “psychoanalytic culture.”

FRISCH

Yes, I hate that in literature. I have a good friend who is excellent at that, but I always feel as if I’m sitting in a therapy session with him. 

INTERVIEWER

When did you first decide to create the flat, cold, “affectless” hero we have been discussing?

FRISCH

Hard to know. I think I made it not all at once, but slowly; gradually it felt more and more comfortable. Just now I think—I don’t know if it’s right or wrong—that if you describe emotions, or the hero describes his emotions, as in the work of Dostoyevsky, for instance, or Melville, or other great writers, the danger that you will fall into the conventional is very great. It was Goethe who told us how we feel if we are in love with a girl—there are forms for that. But suppose you try to establish a situation, a movement, to show gestures and faces, and not talk about it. This is closer to film than old literature was. We have learned a lot from movies about what can be expressed without words. I would be proud or happy if a reader could feel the essential situation of, say, the man in Man in the Holocene, to feel how it is to be wet in your pants, how it’s getting colder, the feeling of growing tired, of melancholy or despair. Thatyou get without using all those words. That you feel sensually and see with your eyes. I want to give that, or I try, anyway.

INTERVIEWER

By creating these flat characters you’re also giving them the freedom to express themselves metaphorically, through objects. “What helps is billiards,” to come back to that phrase.

FRISCH

That’s right. If Herr Schaad would write a letter to a friend, “Now I am free, I can do what I want and I’m perfectly depressed, I’m desperate, and I’m poor,” I’d say, “Well, come on over, have a drink.” But if all he says is “the only thing that helps is billiards”—that’s desperation. If a friend phoned me and said something like that I’d say, “I have to go, I have to have a look at him.”