{"id":82666,"date":"2015-02-12T13:10:52","date_gmt":"2015-02-12T18:10:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=82666"},"modified":"2015-02-12T14:52:40","modified_gmt":"2015-02-12T19:52:40","slug":"ordinary-human-love-an-interview-with-clancy-martin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/02\/12\/ordinary-human-love-an-interview-with-clancy-martin\/","title":{"rendered":"Ordinary Human Love: An Interview with Clancy Martin"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Martin,<\/a>

Clancy Martin. Photo \u00a9 Greg Martin<\/p><\/div>\n

I first encountered Clancy Martin\u2019s writing in <\/em>NOON sometime in 2006 or 2007. He became one of my favorite writers. I looked forward to new work from him, wanting to add to the world he’d created in my imagination\u2014a world I found endearingly and distinctively full of vulnerabilities, awkwardness, psychology; bleak, funny, and extreme situations; emotional, considerate, out-of-control characters; and other things I enjoy. I liked his calm, detached, careful, slightly deadpan narrators, <\/em>and the stories they told\u2014in his novel,\u00a0<\/em>How to Sell\u00a0(2009), and his novella,\u00a0<\/em>Travels in Central America\u00a0(2012)\u2014<\/em>were dark and moving and, in certain moods, funny on several different levels.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Martin\u2019s new book,\u00a0<\/em>Love and Lies: An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and the Growth and Care of Erotic Love<\/a>, is moving and funny but not, in my view, dark. It\u2019s actually very optimistic, though maybe not in the way one would expect from a book about love. \u201cTo choose to fall in love is, we might think, in some way to fabricate or even to falsify love,\u201d Martin writes. \u201cBut that\u2019s the very notion I\u2019m combating. I want to challenge the idea that love forces itself upon us with all the strength of truth.\u201d He expands his argument by examining Plato, the Kama Sutra, Nietzsche, Freud, Adrienne Rich, Simone de Beauvoir, James Joyce, and dozens of others, as well as his memories of his personal experiences with his wife, two ex-wives, and three daughters. I asked Clancy some questions about love and lies via e-mail.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

One of the quotes in your book is from Ch\u00f6gyam Trungpa Rinpoche\u2014\u201cLove is mutual loneliness, and the deeper the loneliness, the deeper the love.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ch\u00f6gyam Trungpa Rinpoche recognizes that we are alone, and that the need for love is a mutual recognition that we are alone. Both the desire for and the desire to love\u2014giving and receiving love\u2014spring from this profound, unavoidable, so often avoided fact about human life. We are alone. I can\u2019t get into your head and you can\u2019t get into mine. Many of my memories and thoughts and feelings remain entirely private to me. But it is precisely this fact that informs our need for love. In some ways, the more I love you, the more urgent my need to know you and to reveal myself to you, the beloved, becomes, and so our separation becomes that much more intense. In Freudian terms, it\u2019s as though we all desperately wish to climb back into the womb. And I don\u2019t think we should underestimate the profundity of Freud\u2019s insight on these questions, even though it\u2019s the tired, tiring fashion lately to take him less seriously than we used to do.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Adrienne Rich wrote that \u201cthe liar leads a life of unutterable loneliness,\u201d and what she meant was, when we hide our thoughts and feelings from each other, we are interfering with the possibility of intimacy. I think there\u2019s a lot of truth to that, in extreme cases. She also admits that the search for \u201cthe truth\u201d about each other\u2014whatever that might mean\u2014has to be a gentle, tentative, slow, even furtive process. When we read a novel we feel less lonely, if it\u2019s a good novel. Why? Because, despite the fact that it\u2019s fiction\u2014in a way, a pack of lies\u2014we feel we are seeing into someone else\u2019s mind. We feel, Ah! I\u2019m not alone in feeling this way, in thinking this way, in suffering or enjoying or noticing this. For me, the process of growth in intimacy between people depends not so much on \u201ctruth\u201d and \u201clie\u201d as it does upon a kind of creative project of building love together, of writing the story, I suppose, of your relationship, your love affair, your marriage, and trying to write it together. When two people are each writing a totally different story, then the relationship falls apart\u2014and we can all think of lots of examples of this. I do feel less alone when I am with my wife, when we\u2019re talking, when we travel together, when we watch a movie together or read a book together\u2014all the very, very fun things a couple can do together. But I also see that Ch\u00f6gyam Trungpa Rinpoche is right. The deeper and deeper I fall in love with her, the better and better I know her, the more acutely conscious I am of the fact that she is ultimately unknowable to me, as I am to her, and I have to accept that. It hurts, but in a good way. It makes me want to take care of her, and I think it makes her want to take care of me.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"9780374281069\"<\/a>In a chapter on first loves, you distinguish between, on one hand, the coup de foudre set\u2014people who say, I\u2019m still waiting for love to happen to me\u2014and, on the other, people \u201cwho are\u00a0curious about love\u201d and \u201cwill initiate a process of falling in love that is at least partially voluntary, that involves that person\u2019s participation.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Falling in love is, in my view, almost always a mixture of voluntary and involuntary components, and if you really cling to the belief that you are waiting for love to \u201chappen\u201d to you, you may find that it never does. Because love\u2014all kinds of love\u2014involves judgment, and judgment involves your will and your reason. It also, of course, involves all kinds of needs, beliefs, and physiological factors of which we are unaware or only semi-aware, and that\u2019s why lightning bolts can and do strike people.\u00a0But even when we\u2019re \u201cstruck by the lightning bolt\u201d\u2014you might remember when that happens to the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather<\/em>, as he\u2019s hiding out in Sicily and sees Apollonia, and one of his charming bodyguards comments, Look, he was struck by the lightning bolt\u2014almost immediately thereafter our creative faculties kick in, and we effectively choose to fall in love.<\/p>\n

Stendhal helpfully distinguished between a first and second crystallization. He got the idea from the salt mines at Salzburg. Love is like the salt crystals that form on a twig that falls into the mines\u2014the twig is transformed! That\u2019s the activity of your imagination in love. The first crystallization may be involuntary, or partially involuntary, though it\u2019s still very much your imagination, your mind at work on the beloved, that is making the love happen. The second crystallization\u2014as the love matures\u2014is a much more actively chosen process, a process we might call the \u201cfictionalization\u201d of the beloved, or the choice of seeing and understanding the beloved in a particular way, from a particular perspective. This is not simple, straightforward self-deception\u2014but there is rarely such a thing as simple, straightforward self-deception. That\u2019s one of the things I am trying to argue in my book. We are not \u201cstruck\u201d by the truth. We create our own truth\u2014and that sometimes is mistakenly described as a simple lie. It\u2019s much more nuanced than that.<\/p>\n

The characters in your novella,\u00a0Travels in Central America<\/em>, are romantically involved\u2014and lying to themselves, and others, heavily. But Love and Lies<\/em> has a happier ending, I think. Does that have to do with it being nonfiction?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Love and Lies\u00a0<\/em>is a kind of commentary on\u00a0Travels in Central America.\u00a0<\/em>The first version of\u00a0Travels\u00a0<\/em>was a straight memoir. It was called Love, Lies, and Marriage<\/em>, and it told the story of an affair I had.\u00a0I wrote it mostly in a monastery in the Himalayas.\u00a0I showed it to a couple of friends and they said,\u00a0If you publish this, think of\u00a0the damage you\u2019ll do to yourself and possibly your ex-wife, not to mention your daughters when they get older. What will they think? I saw the wisdom of this observation\u2014uncharacteristically\u2014and it also influenced the way\u00a0I wrote the final version of\u00a0Love and Lies\u00a0<\/em>for publication. A chapter about the lies children tell, and a lot of material about my past two marriages, was not included in the book so that\u00a0I wouldn\u2019t do any lasting damage to anyone, if possible. Then\u00a0I rewrote\u00a0Travels\u00a0<\/em>as fiction and resolved to make\u00a0Love and Lies\u00a0<\/em>more analytical\u2014a mix of memoir and some thinking about love stories that had influenced my view of the relationship between love and truth.\u00a0The ending of\u00a0Travels\u00a0<\/em>as it stands is a true story, I suppose\u2014that is, it reflects what actually happened in my life at that time. The ending of\u00a0Love and Lies\u00a0<\/em>is a true story, too. They happened at different times in my life. So you\u2019re right to compare them\u2014in a weird way, they are the same book, written very differently, and from two different perspectives.\u00a0Travels\u00a0<\/em>can be read as a cautionary tale about love and lies, whereas\u00a0Love and Lies\u00a0<\/em>is written in praise of ordinary human love.<\/p>\n

So instead of one book\u2014Love, Lies and Marriage<\/em>\u2014there are now two books, one optimistic and one pessimistic, or at least troubling or bleak.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s how love is. And maybe I am more optimistic in ordinary life than I am in my fiction, or maybe one of my self-deceptions about ordinary life is cheerful optimism, and in fiction I am, perhaps paradoxically, more honest. But I think both perspectives on love are important and accurate. It\u2019s very hard to assess my own narrative position, especially on such intimate questions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Love and Lies\u00a0<\/em>is, I think, an obviously optimistic book. I try to argue for the good of love as most of us actually live it and experience it.\u00a0I don\u2019t think love has to be revised or improved\u2014I don\u2019t think we need a Human Love 2.0. But that means looking at the way it really works in our lives, not at the way we often pretend it works, or at the way we argue it ought to work or some love guru says it\u2019s supposed to work, truth equals transparency equals unconditional love equals trust equals intimacy, some such ludicrous equation.\u00a0I very much admire the writing of Bell Hooks, and she argues a version of this view in her\u00a0terrific little book on love, All About Love<\/em>\u2014that we need to become better lovers than we are.<\/p>\n

But that takes all the fun out of it! We\u2019re great lovers just the way we are\u2014when we are being lovers, we\u2019re so good at it, in all of its crazy messiness. It\u2019s when we get into this \u201cabsolute truth\u201d nonsense and other forms of unnecessary dogmatism\u2014telling people how they ought to be, and it\u2019s always how other people ought to be and to behave\u2014that we get ourselves into trouble, that we become dangerous or boring or stupid.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Do you ever view\u00a0Love and Lies<\/em>\u00a0as a tool, a motivator for your current love life? I imagine that you, having published this book, have even more motivation, or pressure, to practice love and become more skillful at it. \u201cLoving requires at least as much practice as tennis,\u201d as you wrote.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Love and Lies<\/em>\u00a0is emphatically a motivator\u2014it\u2019s an exercise book for me, in learning how to be a more caring person. I have to learn how to be as careful as possible. I see Love and Lies<\/em> as an important part of that project. I hope, of course, that some other people might find it to be helpful for them. Or at least entertaining.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tao Lin<\/a>\u00a0is the author of\u00a0<\/em>Taipei\u00a0and other books.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I first encountered Clancy Martin\u2019s writing in NOON sometime in 2006 or 2007. He became one of my favorite writers. I looked forward to new work from him, wanting to add to the world he’d created in my imagination\u2014a world I found endearingly and distinctively full of vulnerabilities, awkwardness, psychology; bleak, funny, and extreme situations; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":797,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[1628,17027,17028,1544,17029,17026,71,7216,2111,7931,657,7403,3988,492,6382],"class_list":["post-82666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-adrienne-rich","tag-care","tag-chogyam-trungpa-rinpoche","tag-clancy-martin","tag-dogmatism","tag-erotic-love","tag-fiction","tag-lies","tag-love","tag-lying","tag-marriage","tag-philosophy","tag-romance","tag-sigmund-freud","tag-valentines-day"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nIn Praise of Ordinary Human Love<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Tao Lin interviews Clancy Martin about his new book, \u201cLove and Lies: An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and the Growth and Care of Erotic Love.\u201d\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/02\/12\/ordinary-human-love-an-interview-with-clancy-martin\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ordinary Human Love: An Interview with Clancy Martin by Tao Lin\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"February 12, 2015 \u2013 I first encountered Clancy Martin\u2019s writing in NOON sometime in 2006 or 2007. 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