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Q&A with Robert Tillich

2023-05-05 | Q&A

When did you decide writing was something you wanted to do?

From about the age of 16. My family travelled around a lot when we were younger – my British-Italian father was in the army – and that seemed to give me permission to have an unusual sort of life. He was interested in literature particularly Joyce, Kafka and Proust. If we were ever in a bookshop, he would not only get me any book I wanted, but insist on buying me something he thought I would enjoy reading. Like this, writers are born.

Did you consider practising any other art forms?

All the art forms interest me in varying degrees. I’ve been a pianist in hotels before. This was helpful in learning to write musically. There is a clear correlation between an ability to write poetry and the ability to appreciate music.

When did you begin writing The Mesmerist?

The initial inspiration came 15 years ago. It was around then that I read Dante;I arrived at the view it could be updated for the modern era and that you could revisit the ecstatic spiritual emotion of The Divine Comedy. I am not sure now if that is possible. But something else was possible – and that is the book I wrote.

Why did it take you so long?

I kept getting it wrong.

That’s not surprising – it’s a readable book but there’s a lot going on in the background.

The theology as well as the different time scales in the book made it difficult to write. I will not enlarge on that here – readers must discover for themselves.All I will say is I have done all I can to make reading the book worth people’s while.

Are you strict with yourself in terms of words per day?I am stricter with myself in permitting myself to walk away when the wordsaren’t flowing. No doubt this is another reason why the book has taken me 15years to complete.

This book is the product of an enormous amount of thought and what might be called lived experience.

To a large extent, we inhabit the era of the professional scribe, and that’s largely to our detriment. I’ve done many jobs in many sectors: I’ve waited tables, worked in the financial and legal sectors, and held a position I greatly enjoyed as an archivist at a major picture gallery. When I was young, before I moved to America, I also did work experience in the British Parliament, as you can perhaps see from the book. All these things feed into the narrative. They are part of the backdrop of what I know as a writer which I am able to deploy in the story.

Are you a pen and paper or laptop man?

Laptop. I can’t understand why a writer would want to give themselves the extra work of handwritten drafts in this day and age. John Updike, whose workI think you have to outgrow, used to do so. But that generation learned a method of composition before the invention of the computer and simply didn’t deviate from it once the computer had been invented. I can’t imagine a young writer doing that today. Increasingly, I enjoy dictating work, particularly during busy periods. I think that the Otter.AI app is potentially revolutionary for novelists – especially those like me who have jobs.

Do you do many rewrites?

An enormous amount of material didn’t make it into this novel. Some will be in the second and third instalments. Some material will remain unpublished.Every page and every sentence has been worked on a many times. That is hard work, but it is necessary both to obviate against my embarrassment and to give the reader, I hope, pleasure.

You write in so many styles in this book. How have you managed to do that?

Without wishing to draw a grandiose comparison, Joyce’s Ulysses was somewhere in my mind. That book, though it is open to the charge of nihilismin some respects, was important to me. I find what I call the paragraph-driven novel flat and staid. I think the hybrid novel is the only kind of novel that can live meaningfully today. In The Mesmerist we have iambic poetry, terza rima, first person and third person narrative, drama, and so on and so forth. When you’re telling a story which seeks to pull the reader towards ecstatic experience, it can be helpful to have a splintered, cubist effect in your narrative.

You said that this book touches on Dante, who we share an interest in. Canyou talk a bit about the dangers of that – you need to be careful not to lean on a name like that too heavily?

Well Dante was there as an inspiration, as I’ve said, but you have to be careful.In terms of structure there is no similarity between this book and Dante’s: he is merely an intellectual aspiration of some of the characters, who wish to travel to Italy in a post-Deluge society to discover his book. Similarly there’s a strongGerman influence in that the Faust myth is explored. That may emanate from my German mother.

There is much more to talk about. Perhaps we can touch base again on this blog and discuss your novel in more detail.

I’d like that.