Originally from Asheville, North Carolina (USA), Gaither Stewart has lived most of his life in Europe, especially Germany and Italy. He served as the Italian correspondent of a Dutch newspaper, Algemeen Dagblad and wrote for publications in various countries. Recently, he lived over a year in Mexico to research and work on a novel that takes place in Italy and Mexico. Two years ago he came to New York where he is living before returning to his residence in Rome.
Mr. Stewart speaks with The Paumanok Review about the journey of a writer from apprentice to magician, and what he learned along the way.
'I Wanted the Wide World'
"A life of movement is not all roses and flowers. The dilemma for restless people is how to be in different places at the same time. You're in one place, and you feel nostalgia for another. But the very moment you begin leaving, you miss the place you're abandoning. You long for where you've been and also for where you're going. That's crazy! And if you're really restless, you even miss places you've never been and the places you'll probably never go. I've always been like that."A film, a story, a newspaper article, a random photograph, a careless word, can set it off and awaken the passion to depart or to return that is always smoldering like an ember in your brain. And you begin dreaming of departure -- and of arrival. It's confusing. You have alternating contradictory desires. One day you long for a residential life and then the very next day -- that film, that story, that careless word -- and you're ready strike camp again.
"That life on the move made me a natural for journalism. And journalism in turn facilitated my life of movement. Journalism helped me develop a good eye for observation and habits like recording images, words and impressions, and at the same time gave me a lot of personal satisfaction. It's an immediate pleasure to submit an article in the evening and find it in print the next morning.
"But like you leave one place for another, the time arrives when you abandon one life and you enter another. When I couldn't postpone any longer my love for fiction writing, I was fortunate to be able to leave journalism and begin writing full time. The two -- journalism and fiction -- I believe, are compatible.
"It's also reassuring to know that many fiction writers, if not most, have also been journalists. To name a few of my favorites: Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garca Marquez, Ignazio Silone, Alberto Moravia, Albert Camus. Journalism had an important role in their life work. Writers who have been journalists can claim it helped them immensely, or instead that it was a waste of their time. Writers who never worked in journalism may consider it damaging to the pure writer, and sometimes I too regret that I didn't begin writing fiction full time much earlier. On the other hand, some people believe that journalism is nearly fiction anyway. So who knows which is best?
"After dabbling in school newspapers as a boy in Asheville, NC and reading writers like Jack London, followed by Hemingway and Fitzgerald and much later Paul Bowles, I dreamed of the same kind of nomadic life. I wanted the wide world. And I set out.
"For me, living is a jumping back and forth in time and place -- Russian studies at Berkeley, young intelligence officer in Cold War Europe, Turkic studies and radio journalism in Munich, immigration officer in Rome for Tolstoy Foundation to welcome Russian intellectuals to Western Europe, Public Relations in Teheran, Dutch journalism in Rotterdam and Amsterdam, foreign correspondent based in Rome covering European politics, the Gorbachev era in Moscow, the collapse of the totalitarian experiment in East Europe, the Yugoslavian wars; and writer's residence in Mexico, residence in Paris, residence in New York.
"Sometimes it seems like it's also a life of chance, for there has never been a real plan. I recently saw the film Hamlet, set in today's New York. I shivered as if the narrator were speaking to me when at the end he summed up the tragedy with the famous quote: 'Our wills and fates do so contrary run,/That our devices still are overthrown.'
"My journalistic and academic background facilitated my lives lived in diverse cultures far from my origins, roaming around in search of the unknown. Sometimes looking for the edge. Lives disguised then behind diverse cultural identities -- American, German, Italian, Russian, as the case may be -- and at the same time looking back at what was left behind, for a base, for roots and the idea of permanence. It's hard to know which life style is best -- residential or nomadic.
"I think of myself as both voyager and sojourner. So that for a time I'm often residential in those different places -- absorbing those languages, assuming those identities, but always thinking of change. A chameleon of life, a good Italian friend calls me. But I still think that in my case it's mostly chance. One thing just leads to another.
"The result is, like Paul Bowles, you feel like a stranger everywhere. Your cultural roots are uncertain. Yet, if your life and your dreams are of the open world, in diverse cultures and languages, that's what you write about too. So there is certainly something important for me out there. This sense of nostalgia, the uncertainties, the endless search for other cultures and identities are present in my fiction.
["Not however that I would necessarily recommend this transient life to others as the proper approach to writing. I remember a couple useful pieces of advice -- Ignazio Silone, the Italian writer and traveler who wrote in longhand and was famous for changing hardly a word after it was on paper, explained his rare ability thus: 'I think a lot.' While Paul Bowles advised to relax and try to write clearly 'so that every sentence you write is understandable.']
"I admire people like Nabokov who wrote in Russian, German, French and English, and somehow tended to identify with those cultures. I admire Joseph Conrad's and Samuel Beckett's ability to change languages and cultures.
"Some people are more susceptible to external influences. Perhaps I am one of those. Of course there are always the welcome and less welcome influences swirling around us, vying for us -- people, circumstances, personal economics, society.
"I know that the diversity of my life is a powerful influence. Thank God it has made me tolerant of diversity and more and more intolerant of intolerance.
"In any case I can claim no deep cultural identity but instead take pride in my cultural eclecticism. Yet, all the while, images from childhood, hometown things, suddenly pop up and become important. Pleasant or unpleasant, it's important material, I think because it's universal.
"The social idea plays the same underlying role in my fiction as it did in journalism. The social idea -- since we are, how many? six billion human beings? we must be social creatures in order to survive. 'Individualism' has its limitations. I mean here the primacy of the social as opposed to elitist concepts of human relationships.
"The multiracial, multicultural society some people dream of seems like a goal and enters my writing. Paris and Berlin and Moscow, but above all New York City, are great social laboratories today. Who knows what New York in twenty more years will be like? Where today you can step out your door in Manhattan or in Brooklyn or in the Bronx and speak Spanish, French, Russian, Polish, Italian, Chinese, Korean and many other languages in one hour on the streets and in the shops in your neighborhood. Where some young immigrants speak among themselves a kind of universal English of 100 words. Or where young Asians excel in the new schools. Where mystified Anglo-Saxons are in the minority. Where, like it or not, the man of the future is being born.
"Although foreign languages are first of all a tool for communication, the languages I've learned continue to open up new worlds for me. Worlds that fascinate me and enter into my own personal culture. People differ according to the language they are speaking. You yourself are diverse personas -- your role is different -- in each language. A book in its original language can rarely be the same in translation -- when it becomes also the translator's book. A dubbed film differs dramatically from the original.
"Also I would list as a motivation in my writing, if it's proper to 'list' something so important, spirituality. From a religious Southern family, my memories are full of the intolerance of Baptist rhetoric, which I rejected. Nonetheless, I became a spiritual person. Both organized religion [negative] and spirituality [positive] enter my writing.
"So most of the stories I'm writing originate in or are related to my own experience. That experience sparks the inspiration -- not a word I particularly love -- for my stories. I'm often tempted to depart from my own experience into complete invention, but that's often dangerous territory.
"Besides, an idea can come from anything in one's own experience, past or present -- an observation, a casual word, a sentence in a book or a newspaper article, and you're off.
"Last winter a painter friend and I were walking in Harlem when we saw a little boy standing on a corner with a big doll in his arms. Just that brief image was the inspiration for my story, 'The Doll,' in this number of TPR. On the other hand, my long experience with Russia and Russians, especially intellectuals like Nikolai Medvedev, stands behind the story, 'Fallen Angel.'
"I believe that values will always stand tall in good writing. I especially admire humility. And modesty in one's struggles and in one's writing. That doesn't seem like much. But unlike Ravelstein in Saul Bellow's new novel who knows everything, we really know so little. I've always liked that Borges image of the man who wanted to create the whole world in words. At the moment he proclaims his creation he happens to look toward the skies and sees it there … the moon. He has forgotten the moon.
"I think that's the reason for my preference for understatement. If as far as my characters are concerned there's a tendency toward revealing rather than withholding, in my own life I unfortunately tend to withhold more than I reveal.
"Then I'm always dreaming of mysterious big cities on rivers with many church spires, and barges passing under their high bridges. I like mountains on the horizon and birds flying against high skies. And I've had an old dream of Russia. The pull of Europe. America is often present in my stories, as is the dichotomy between the residential life in the Center that I mentioned and nomadic life on the Edge. The alternatives it seems are comfort or vertigo.
"And today, after and during all this moving around, there's still the nostalgia, nostalgia for Italy, for Europe, for America. And an obsession with time: Is there time for multiple lives in our one life?"
Since leaving journalism three years ago Gaither Stewart has been writing fiction full time -- in Rome, Italy where he is a resident, in Mexico where he spent a year researching and working on a novel, and today temporarily in New York.
During his many years as the Rome correspondent of the Dutch daily newspaper, Algemeen Dagblad, he wrote for various European publications about international politics, culture, art and travel. As a radio journalist, he broadcast for many years for the World Service of Radio Netherlands.
He did some 1500 radio transmissions from Scandinavia to Malta, from Moscow and Teheran to Paris and New York for the World Service of Radio Netherlands. Special perks he says were interviews with writers in Europe -- from Alberto Moravia in Italy to Yevgheny Yevtushenko in Russia and Paul Bowles in Morocco. Chance recent conversations with four world spiritual leaders: the Roman Catholic Pope [warm], the Russian Orthodox Patriarch [diplomatic], the Greek Orthodox Patriarch [distant], the Dalai Lama [reserved]. A special highlight was official censor by the Italian neo-Fascist party for his exposes on the rise of neo-Fascism in Italy in the early 1990s.
When asked his opinion of the future of e-publishing, Mr. Stewart responds, "Many writers are only recently getting acquainted with the extent and the promise of e-publishing. If electronic publishing has already opened up many new avenues for the writer, to others it is still a labyrinth. Yet the e-zines, e-publishers, e-books, e-commerce are already out there -- a boon to new and old writers alike. Like .com commerce, it seems to be the literary wave of the future.
"Many writers are still wary of e-publishing. I think it's up to the e-editors themselves to comment on what this new technology means for quality fiction and how it will promote the same. One wonders if Internet is destined to be filled with amateur e-zines simply posting and filing in the name of democracy whatever they receive from whomever. Or will e-publications, like the best are doing today, become promoters of the same high quality of writing as the traditional literary press? One assumes that during upcoming months there will be a gradual and natural weeding out among the hundreds of e-publications and a beefing up of the best. "
"In the meantime, I would like to see more e-zines printing anthologies of their best works, as a form of recognition of quality writing and in order to give those works a permanent, traditional character."
Short Story:
Fallen Angel
The return of the flame could have saved him. He had known that for a long time. The return of the constant pure flame of his passions - and his genius. Tantalizing flashes of memory and blurry glimpses of vague images of another life arrived suddenly and then vanished too quickly to even attempt to grasp them. Each time as the confusion cleared he saw before him only his failures. How could it happen, he now at the end asked himself, that my once fertile mind has become a jungle? How could I have been so blind and wild, so presumptuous and self-assured -- and so mistaken?
Again he looked out the narrow window onto the empty rear courtyard, sighed audibly, and aimlessly began a turn through the two tiny rooms of the dark apartment, colorless like his life and, in its crowded dimensions and eternal night, ironically reminiscent of his lodgings in his former life on the canals of Leningrad. With a grimace of disgust he glanced from the dark space that he called the hall into the bedroom so small that one passed from the narrow doorway directly onto the bed. As always disappointed, he turned back to the living room smothered under a ceiling he could touch. With bored eyes he surveyed the books piled on the floor and lined in the shelves helter-skelter, noting with disgust the coat of dust leaping uninterrupted from one volume to the other. The desk was sinking under stacks of Russian and French magazines and newspapers turning yellow, two broken-down typewriters, a dilapidated fax with a telephone on top, a heavy Soviet radio, filing folders, ledgers, telephone books, dictionaries, vases of dried flowers. On the dirty beige walls hung dozens of small oils and watercolors by painter friends, groups of framed photographs, and four good copies of Rublev icons in one corner. Two sprawling leather chairs crowded the desk and filled half the doorway so that his pacing space was reduced to nearly zero and he usually simply spun around in place. In profile in front of the bathroom mirror he sucked in his belly and with a pale, veinless hand smoothed down his thinning hair, so suddenly gray, and said aloud, “How did it all happen, Angel.” His question echoed in his brain but he knew there was no answer. Today it seemed that it was all a misunderstanding. “Ah, vremya,” he said aloud, “techet kak reka.” Time passes like a river. “Da, DA, techet kak reka.” Sometimes, walking the streets in recent years, he purposely uttered disconnected phrases in Russian, so that people would glance at him in commiseration.
Once, back in the good times, he’d wanted to forget who he had been. No longer. And anyway who was he to talk with during the endless days if not with himself? He had become a lonely man. Yesterday’s memories! You could almost survive on them. For back then, in the early years, everything was festive. His arrival at the Gare de l‘Est, now 25 years ago -- Nikolai Medvedev, the affirmed writer, still bewildered by his sudden release from the prison in Rostov, the stripping of his passport and his deportation abroad. Paris, Parizh, had met him like a hero that day. The speeches at the station -- leaders of the Russian emigration, Soviet experts, intelligence agents, human rights activists, and his old friend and forerunner in Paris, the famous writer, Maxim Zhelezniak. In the name of Paris, it seemed, in the huge Mercedes, Maxim had escorted him and Irina to their first residence in the West - a luxurious apartment near the Etoile. Life was luxurious, then. Brilliant and shiny like gold. Paris awarded him citizenship. France wanted him. From Germany and Italy, from Denmark and Holland came the publishers. The Russian writer’s books were the rage. Magazines and newspapers bought his stories. TV stations sought him out.
Nikolai Medvedev was an energetic man. A charming man whose smile was the contagious smile of one who has seldom been alone. Sparkling blue eyes of a seaman lent him an air of naivetŽ. Eyes reflecting the northern seas and something of the eternity in them. His was the face of his ancestors of Baltic regions mixed with confused races of Scythians and Vikings and Magyars and Slavs and Mongols. Of average height, dark complexioned, with black hair and beard, already as a young man he’d acquired just the slightest of paunches revealing his fondness for a fast life of drink and play. His feet were too small for his body and his hands delicate as of one who has done little physical labor. Yet he concealed a silent, resilient strength that during his year of imprisonment lent him an air of heroic stoicism. His speech was rapid, intelligent, yet down-to-earth, so that he’d always been equally comfortable with intellectuals and simple people. Ah, zolotoy zapad! The Golden West! How long he’d waited for the final magic door to open into the new magical world. And when it opened to him he’d entered in grand style.
