{"id":115126,"date":"2017-09-07T12:00:58","date_gmt":"2017-09-07T16:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=115126"},"modified":"2017-09-08T15:31:07","modified_gmt":"2017-09-08T19:31:07","slug":"writing-roundabout-an-interview-with-sam-stephenson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/07\/writing-roundabout-an-interview-with-sam-stephenson\/","title":{"rendered":"Writing Roundabout: An Interview with Sam Stephenson"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Mary Frank and Sam Stephenson in Frank\u2019s studio on West Nineteenth Street, New York, 2010. Photo: Kate Joyce<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sam Stephenson\u2019s biography, <\/em>Gene Smith\u2019s Sink: A Wide-Angle View<\/a>, was published late last month. Its subject, the photographer W. Eugene Smith, should be familiar to longtime readers of the <\/em>Daily: since 2010, we have run Stephenson\u2019s chronicles<\/a> of Smith\u2019s myriad photographic projects and exploits with the luminaries of the midcentury New York jazz scene (Stephenson is also the author of <\/em>The Jazz Loft Project, which was excerpted in issue no. 190<\/a>) as well as\u2014and perhaps most importantly\u2014stories about the somebodies and nobodies who populated the margins of Smith\u2019s life. Over sixteen essays, Stephenson tracked his subject across six decades, from his childhood in Kansas through the American South to rural Japan and Saipan. And through these essays, Stephenson discovered that he could not untangle his work as Smith\u2019s biographer\u2014a job that has consumed him for the past twenty years\u2014from Smith\u2019s narrative. The very process of writing a life became part of the story in which that process unfolded, and versions of the <\/em>Daily pieces found their way into his very unconventional biography.<\/em><\/p>\n

Nearly seven years to the day of our first correspondence, Stephenson and I talked on the phone about collaboration, the importance of digression, and, of course, Gene Smith.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You wrote me with ideas for blog posts in September of 2010, the month I started at the Review<\/em>. One of them was on the artist Mary Frank, another was on the musician Dorrie Woodson, and another was on the musician Joe Henry. All of those ideas turned into pieces on the Daily<\/em>, and versions of the Frank and Woodson ended up being chapters in your book.<\/p>\n

STEPHENSON<\/p>\n

We got off to a strong start. If you look at the body of work we\u2019ve done together over seven years, it marks a span of time over which my outlook and my style and the final form of Gene Smith\u2019s Sink<\/em> evolved and took shape. The book became something much different than what I proposed and what Farrar, Straus and Giroux signed up for. I can now articulate that evolution to some degree, and working with you was critical to that development.\u00a0<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The approach you\u2019ve been honing wasn\u2019t obvious at first. I looked back at our early correspondence, and when we were working on your two-part Sonny Clark piece, you wrote, \u201cI see the piece as indicative of Smith\u2019s labyrinth and my own.\u201d You don\u2019t connect dots like most biographers do. If you\u2019re writing about the way two lives intersect, the effect they have on each other and on you, that effect can\u2019t necessarily be assessed by measurable events. This ineffability is, in part, what your Smith project ended up being about\u2014the currents and undercurrents that shape a life. I think you\u2019ve gotten better at articulating that. And the process of articulation, of figuring out what you wanted to say and how you wanted to say it, became part of the Daily<\/em> posts, too.<\/p>\n

STEPHENSON<\/p>\n

At some point, working with you on these pieces, I began to recognize the method I was using, and I became confident in it. If you look back at the Jazz Loft Project<\/em> book\u2014which you reviewed beautifully for Aperture<\/em> in 2010 and is how we met\u2014I was working in a similar manner then. But that book is more about the pictures than it is about the text, although I\u2019m proud of the text. The Jazz Loft Project<\/em> book isn\u2019t chronological, it\u2019s associative. Some have said it\u2019s chaotic, but others see a certain, if I may, poetry in it, and over time I became more confident writing in that manner. Working with blocks of text and sequences of photographs helped me figure out the way I wanted to write, which was with blocks of text and no photographs, allowing the relationships to emerge indirectly rather than explicating them. It\u2019s unusual in works of fact-mounting history or biography, and you encouraged this alternative method. I remember somebody called one of the early pieces you and I worked on, about Tennessee Williams, \u201croundabout\u201d\u2014\u201cthis roundabout piece about the relationship between Tennessee Williams and Eugene Smith.\u201d A number of editors over the years haven\u2019t allowed me to work this way, and it\u2019s awfully hard to be persuasive about this method in a proposal. Basically, the writer and editor have to trust each other.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

When you were writing the pieces that are included in Gene Smith\u2019s Sink<\/em> on, say, Ronnie Free or Sonny Clark or Tamas Janda, were you aware that you were working through them as a reflection of Smith?<\/p>\n

STEPHENSON<\/p>\n

At the same time I was writing that series with you, which we called \u201cNotes of a Biographer,\u201d I was also writing a conventional biography of Smith. I came to realize that they were parallel tracks and the alternative one was my book\u2014the \u201cnotes\u201d became key parts of my book.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

A page of Stephenson\u2019s notes from his first trip, in 1997, to Smith\u2019s archive.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

What made you realize that?<\/p>\n

STEPHENSON<\/p>\n

It happened incrementally. I was influenced by a lot of the music I was listening to at the time, and by interviewing those musicians and learning about their processes. Steve Reich had been a part of my Smith research for a decade or more. He studied with Hall Overton in the Sixth Avenue loft for several years in the 1950s, and Smith recorded an early string quartet rehearsal there. Reich had vivid memories of Smith. Then he was the headliner at the Big Ears Festival the first year we documented it, in 2014. Jonny Greenwood was also part of that festival. In 2011, when I spent a month in Japan and the Pacific following Smith\u2019s footsteps, I came home right after the big earthquake and tsunami and Greenwood\u2019s Norwegian Wood<\/em> movie soundtrack had recently been released. I had seen the film and had read Murakami and I had actually interviewed Murakami about Sonny Clark\u2019s popularity in Japan. There were so many overlaps.<\/p>\n

Greenwood\u2019s score moved me in a big way. At Big Ears that first year, the Wordless Music Orchestra played parts of it, and he was there playing Reich\u2019s \u201cElectric Counterpoint\u201d on guitar. I began to study Greenwood\u2019s work with Radiohead and noticed that he hadn\u2019t recorded a guitar solo on one of the band\u2019s records since OK Computer<\/em> seventeen years earlier. He\u2019d consciously decided not to do what rock music traditionally expected from a musician like him, which is shred on guitar. He just couldn\u2019t do it, didn\u2019t want to do it. Another musician I should mention is the bass player Eric Revis, whose work influenced me a lot. He can play traditional jazz standards or extreme avant-garde improvisations equally well, and he chooses his notes so carefully depending on the situation. Two weeks ago, I went to Chicago to hear Revis\u2019s quartet, and he told me that long ago he was encouraged by John Cage\u2019s writings to seek music he wasn\u2019t initially drawn to. His rhythms are always changing, but his profound, deep tone is unmistakable no matter what he\u2019s playing.<\/p>\n

I was still working on these parallel tracks\u2014the conventional biography and the pieces that were more digressive and reflective of Smith, but I was becoming less and less interested in the conventional material. I went through all of my writing, a total of around 150,000 words in polished prose\u2014maybe twice that if you included fragments and partial chapters\u2014and I marked the passages I really loved. I was thinking, I really love this piece about Dorrie Woodson, but it gets far into her story and away from Smith. I should be making connections between Smith\u2019s photo-essays for Life Magazine<\/em> instead of writing about Woodson. A voice of shame was telling me to hew closer to the facts and chronological narrative. I have all that information in my files and most of it in my writing, but that way of thinking bored me stiff. I just didn\u2019t love it, and so I just got rid of everything I didn\u2019t love, regardless of utility or chronology. It was then that I started loving the book. That\u2019s when Gene Smith\u2019s Sink<\/em> started emerging.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

How does the story of Dorrie Woodson tell you more about Smith than his process of working for Life<\/em> on \u201cCountry Doctor,\u201d \u201cNurse Midwife,\u201d or \u201cSpanish Village\u201d?<\/p>\n

STEPHENSON<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a good question. It\u2019s possible that I\u2019m the only one who sees or feels the reflection of Smith in Woodson and her story, and maybe it\u2019s a mistake for me to try to explain it because I\u2019m not sure I can.<\/p>\n

Smith did \u201cNurse Midwife\u201d and \u201cSpanish Village\u201d in the same year\u20141951. Like so much of his work, those two essays, along with \u201cCountry Doctor,\u201d are about a kind of simplicity that Smith valued\u2014rural areas, ways of life that some might call old-fashioned, that Smith maybe romanticized. His grandparents lived in a farming community like that in Kansas. It\u2019s a simplicity Smith wished he could achieve himself amid the complete chaos of his life. Dorrie Woodson came from rural Maryland. She grew up on a farm, but she wanted to live in the city and she wanted to play jazz\u2014she\u2019d grown up listening to jazz on the radio. She couldn\u2019t make a career playing jazz in a rural area. So in one sense, her stories shows that the rural life Smith valued for its uncomplicatedness is as complicated as any other. She wanted to move to the city and \u2026 it\u2019s just not so simple.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

What\u2019s not so simple?<\/p>\n

STEPHENSON<\/p>\n

Well, the prioritizing of a certain way of life, a rural way of life in these cases. I found that Woodson is a woman who grew up on a farm but who wanted sophistication in her life. I think her story is the inverse of Smith\u2019s heroic rural figures. So many of the people Smith documented in the loft had moved to New York City from small towns. The truth is things were quite complicated in their small towns, too. That\u2019s why I ended my book with the quote from Dr. Ceriani\u2019s son, Gary, who told me his father may have been \u201ctrapped\u201d by Smith\u2019s portrayal in \u201cCountry Doctor.\u201d\u00a0After that portrait, in such a powerful publication, he felt he could never leave his job. Smith made Dr. Ceriani into an icon, and perhaps that wasn\u2019t the best thing for him and his family.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

So Woodson\u2019s story better illustrates the problems of perspective?<\/p>\n

STEPHENSON<\/p>\n

I think so. For me it does. But to put it into words seems to limit what I was trying to do. A critic might say I\u2019m glorifying Woodson in the way Smith did his subjects. Or I\u2019m glorifying Tamas Janda or Mary Frank or Ronnie Free or Sonny Clark or Ruth Fetske.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Many of your ancillary subjects aren\u2019t white men, which also broadens the book\u2019s perspective.<\/p>\n

STEPHENSON<\/p>\n

I had my nephew, who is my longtime research assistant, go through copies of the London Review of Books<\/em>, the New York Times Book Review<\/em>, and The<\/em>\u00a0New York Review of Books<\/em> from the past decade and make notes about every biography covered. To an astonishing degree, it\u2019s white men writing about white men, and even the reviewers are white men, by and large. Anecdotally, I worked in a great independent bookstore in the nineties and my nephew works in one now. We both agreed that people who buy biographies are mostly older white men.<\/p>\n

So even before I could articulate it\u2014I could not have made this argument when I originally proposed a piece on Woodson in my first letter to you\u2014I was trying to work against the grain of this pattern. I remember after one of my Daily<\/em> pieces about a woman, I got a note from a woman on the West Coast who said that I have written more about obscure elderly women than any younger man she knew. This note opened my eyes a bit. In order to tell an original story of what happened in Smith\u2019s world, I was leaning on female perspectives in this alternative track of my work. And so, for example, Robert Frank, who was friends with Smith, was an obvious person to write about, and I spent an afternoon with him at his place on Bleecker Street. But when it came down to finishing the book, I thought, No, I\u2019m going to leave out Robert Frank and include Mary Frank instead. What she told me was more intriguing to me.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Stephenson with photographer Takeshi Ishikawa in 2011 at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona, where Smith\u2019s archives are housed. Ishikawa was an assistant of Smith\u2019s in Minamata, Japan, in the early 1970s.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve left Smith open-ended. You haven\u2019t frozen him in his own story, or in one interpretation of that story. Are you opposed to straight biography?<\/p>\n

STEPHENSON<\/p>\n

No, I read them all the time. I\u2019m just incapable of writing one myself.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Why?<\/p>\n

STEPHENSON<\/p>\n

Because the way I think is digressive and tangential and associative. My editor at FSG, Ileene Smith, deserves a lot of credit for allowing the book to take the final shape it did. Also, before I submitted my manuscript, the writer and editor Scott Schomburg helped me cut it down to the essentials of what I wanted to do. My nineteen-thousand-word book proposal to FSG was for a very conventional biography\u2014this was about eleven years ago\u2014and I didn\u2019t know at the time that I was incapable of writing a book like that. The book was six years late, and as the years mounted, there were some well-intentioned people, good friends, who told me, You\u2019ve practically done it already, you have thousands of words of biography, if you just go straight ahead and connect those dots, it\u2019s gonna be a great book. But I didn\u2019t love doing that. In fact, I hated doing it. The final result is what I enjoyed the most. And here again, the work on the Big Ears musicians helped me find peace with this result. I know that it may frustrate some readers, especially those who want to know which camera lens Smith was using when he was photographed Schweitzer in Africa in 1954. I have that information, but I couldn\u2019t find a way to use it that made for good reading. There is some very deep material on Smith\u2019s photographic process in the book, I just didn\u2019t make it my focus.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t think that information says anything about Smith?<\/p>\n

STEPHENSON<\/p>\n

It might in other people\u2019s hands, but in mine I don\u2019t think it does.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

In a post from 2013 you wrote, \u201cI am tired of Gene Smith.\u201d That was four and a half years ago. I figure by now you must be utterly sick of him.<\/p>\n

STEPHENSON<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a long pause.<\/p>\n

STEPHENSON<\/p>\n

Well, I forget what year it was, but it was after Jazz Loft<\/em>, so it must have been around 2012. I was in Wichita, Kansas, researching Smith, and I was at a dinner, and the photographer Larry Schwarm was there, and he said to me, Do you have photographs of Smith all over your house? That really stumped me. I realized I didn\u2019t have pictures of Smith all over my house, or anywhere in my house\u2014they were all in files. I respect what Smith did, and I am still enthralled by his tapes, his bizarre tapes that he made in his Sixth Avenue loft. But I grew tired of feeling like I had to write a chronological narrative of his life. When I freed myself from having to do that, I started having fun again. Working with you was part of that turnaround.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Twenty years is a long time to spend on one person.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Stephenson\u2019s standing desk, repurposed from Smith\u2019s darkroom\u00a0sink. Photo: Kate Joyce<\/p><\/div>\n

STEPHENSON<\/p>\n

I became more interested in the people around Smith than I was in him. Perhaps Smith\u2019s ultimate genius is that he left behind a trail of so many fascinating and obscure people. I believe that portraits of these folks are reflective of him\u2014portraits of Sonny Clark and Ruth Fetske and Calvin Albert and Hall Overton. They add up to a picture of Smith that you wouldn\u2019t see if you read a chronological account of his life.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

What do you think they show?<\/p>\n

STEPHENSON<\/p>\n

They show what life was like, what it was like to be alive and struggling in New York City in 1960 and in that loft, which is where Smith lived longer than any other place, except his childhood homes in Wichita. It\u2019s difficult to get a picture of someone\u2019s childhood. It\u2019s the hardest thing a biographer has to do. It\u2019s the most important yet most undocumented part of a person\u2019s life. So if you\u2019re writing a biography, what do you do? My decision was to get a clearer picture of what was around Smith. I hope these portraits provide a kind of collage, a mosaic portrait that I think reflects an image of Smith and who he was.<\/p>\n

Recently I\u2019ve been reading Brian Eno\u2019s published diaries. He talks often about communal genius being more important than individual genius. Some of my favorite writers render the community beautifully in fiction\u2014Dos Passos, Malamud, Willa Cather, August Wilson. I guess I proposed the wrong book to FSG. Thank goodness they published this one, but the other one might have sold better.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

How hard do you think it will be to leave Smith behind and start something new?<\/p>\n

STEPHENSON<\/p>\n

Part of what I\u2019m feeling now about this book is perfect closure. If I tried to write the definitive eight-hundred-page biography, inevitably there would be mistakes and errors. On the day that it was printed, I\u2019d learn something I should\u2019ve changed. That kind of work is never done. Henry James said a historian can never have enough documents. Gene Smith\u2019s Sink<\/em> is what I had to do to cut off my accumulation of documents. It\u2019s what I had to do to finish twenty years of work and move on.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

There\u2019s the idea\u2014I\u2019ve heard other writers talk about this, and it\u2019s always been true for me when I\u2019m writing\u2014that you look at the subject head-on, you can\u2019t see it clearly, but if you look to the side, or if you think or read about something unrelated to your subject, you start to see your subject more clearly.<\/p>\n

STEPHENSON<\/p>\n

Absolutely.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Approaching it obliquely. I\u2019ve always found that to be the most productive way of getting started and of seeing where I need to go, if I feel stuck.<\/p>\n

STEPHENSON<\/p>\n

There\u2019s almost nothing I believe in more than that. If you look at stars in the sky, often you can see them clearer if you look off to the side. Your peripheral vision is clearer. The epigraph to my book has Adam Phillips quoting Marion Milner, a British psychoanalyst and writer, and she said exactly that. She applied it to painting\u2014if you want to paint an object, don\u2019t look directly at the object, look all around it.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a basic exercise in art classes\u2014depict the negative space. Instead of representing the object, you\u2019re painting the space around it.<\/p>\n

STEPHENSON<\/p>\n

Maybe I should have been an art teacher.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Nicole Rudick is managing editor of <\/em>The Paris Review.<\/em><\/p>\n

Join us on October 26<\/a> at National Sawdust in Brooklyn to celebrate the publication of <\/em>Gene Smith\u2019s Sink with readings, music, and film.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Revisit \u201cBig, Bent Ears: A Documentary in Serial Uncertainty<\/a>,\u201d a project published by <\/em>The Paris Review and Stephenson\u2019s Rock Fish Stew Institute of Literature and Materials. \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Sam Stephenson\u2019s biography, Gene Smith\u2019s Sink: A Wide-Angle View, was published late last month. Its subject, the photographer W. Eugene Smith, should be familiar to longtime readers of the Daily: since 2010, we have run Stephenson\u2019s chronicles of Smith\u2019s myriad photographic projects and exploits with the luminaries of the midcentury New York jazz scene […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":54,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[1962,30455,16328,33,30458,30448,4126,5893,17255,199,13057,30457,7323,30450,1555,457,30449,30447,2081,30454,21835,1132,1553,30444,8117,3889,17356,2619,30456,3877,30459,30443,46,30451,100,1003,395,30445,30452,1551,30453,1662,25793,1949,30446,1754,1550,7557],"class_list":["post-115126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-adam-phillips","tag-albert-schweitzer","tag-aperture","tag-archives","tag-august-wilson","tag-bent-ears","tag-bernard-malamud","tag-big","tag-big-ears-festival","tag-biography","tag-brian-eno","tag-calvin-albert","tag-cameras","tag-digression","tag-dorrie-glenn-woodson","tag-editors","tag-eric-revis","tag-hall-overton","tag-haruki-murakami","tag-ileene-smith","tag-improvisation","tag-interviews","tag-jazz-loft-project","tag-joe-henry","tag-john-cage","tag-john-dos-passos","tag-jonny-greenwood","tag-kansas","tag-larry-schwarm","tag-life-magazine","tag-marion-milner","tag-mary-frank","tag-music","tag-photo-essay","tag-photography","tag-radiohead","tag-robert-frank","tag-ronnie-free","tag-ruth-fetske","tag-sam-stephenson","tag-scott-schomburg","tag-sonny-clark","tag-steve-reich","tag-takeshi-ishikawa","tag-tamas-janda","tag-tennessee-williams","tag-w-eugene-smith","tag-willa-cather"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nWriting Roundabout: An Interview with Sam Stephenson<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Nicole Rudick talks with Sam Stephenson about his long journey of writing a biography of the photographer W. 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