The Lightning Room With Elvis Bego

 

Interview by DeWitt Brinson

Check out Elvis Bego’s There Like Nothing is Ever There in our May issue, then grab a watermelon and come watch him being obscene in cafes while he reads every book in the world at the same time hoping to meet a Jesus he doesn’t believe in.

 

1.Where do you write? 

The thing is you’re never not writing, so: everywhere. As with most writers, it happens in two stages, making notes and the actual composition. I never go anywhere without my notebook. I spend obscene amounts of time in cafes scribbling in the notebook — small observations, lines of dialogue, ideas for stories and essays. I also make lists, endlessly. Lists of stories to write, chronological lists of my books, that is, the ghosts of my books to come, often with dates of publication, which seems dangerously pathetic. And now that I have written and published a number of things, I try to come up with a possible list of stories for a first collection.

For actual composing, I work mostly at home. Either in total silence or with wordless music, something perfectly realized, like keyboard music by Bach or Schubert or Scarlatti.

Then there’s the third stage, the absolute necessity of not doing anything. It may even be the most important part of the process (hateful word). I don’t know who it was that said, When a writer is staring at the wall he is not doing nothing, he is working. I think that’s true of any artist, as well as any self-respecting building inspector.

2. What makes you stop writing? 

Anything. Usually the guitar, or the piano (which I never learned to play properly, but I can spend hours trying to make some kind of superior noise). Books. The internet should of course be banned, for me, at least.

Paradoxically, when I’m most excited or energized about a piece of writing, that’s when I’m most vulnerable to distractions, because this is when I am most restless, least able to contain that pressurized fizz in my belly.

3.Where do you read and what have you been reading?

I like to read in cafes, and on trains. In general, I love Sebald, Stendhal, Borges, Baudelaire, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Bruno Schulz, Kleist, Pushkin, P.G. Wodehouse, Flaubert, and watermelon. There’s usually a preponderance of Russians and Jews on my bookshelves, maybe because I was born in Bosnia, so there’s some sort of Eastern European affinity there.

But again, I am easily distracted. I read way too many things simultaneously. Here’s a partial list of books I’ve been looking into lately: Isaac Babel’s stories; Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist; Aubrey Burl’s book about Catullus; Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!; Catullus’ poems; Dostoevsky’s The Double; Tom Holland’s Rubicon; Calvino’s Mr Palomar; essays by Gore Vidal and Cynthia Ozick; James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare; A book about Paris in the 18th century; Kafka’s short fiction, and Alice Munro’s. There’s others. I also try to see what’s going on in literary magazines. Evidently, my reading habits are total chaos. I think I need more improvement as a reader than as a writer.

4. Talk about the first time you wrote something and loved it.

There was a time when I thought I was a poet. I was wrong. Back then I would write these inane, unmetrical sonnets. Each was a milestone, I thought. When I was nineteen, I wrote a 4000 line epic about a 17th century musician who conquers Italy, becomes the pope’s problematic composer, fucks everything that moves, gets beautifully killed at age thirty-three or so by the husband of his convent-educated mistress (who had of course been promised to this ridiculous patrician). I thought it was the best thing since Byron’s Don Juan. The problem is I also thought it was 1819. It wasn’t. I hadn’t read enough. You can never read enough. That ‘poem’ exists hideously somewhere at my parents’ house, scrawled in its fragrant blue ink. I used to love everything I wrote, but then I reread that stuff years later and considered jumping from a skyscraper. But happily there are none in Copenhagen, where I live. And yet I think you need to be delusional. How else would you get anywhere?

5. Are your stories strangers that you meet, children that you bear, or how do you relate to them?

They are the asshole neighbor who drills shit into your wall at 3 am, or what one of my friends calls The Upstairs Kid. The eternal nuisance. But seriously. Sometimes you live with a story idea for two years and you don’t know what to do with it and then the whole thing just ripens onto the page (to put it horticulturally) and you write it in two days. Some of them eventually become a stranger to you. So do you, if you live long enough. And so do your kids, apparently. Maybe that’s why I don’t have any.

6. In your story, the old man had no time to meet famous authors. If you could meet anyone from history, who would it be? what would you ask them?

In the story you mention (‘There Like Nothing is Ever There’), it’s not so much that he doesn’t have time to meet them, it’s that he is not interested. His son of course thinks his father is demented and so he assumes he will be making up all these meetings with famous people. This man has allegedly been alive for 700 years and, in hindsight, he should be meeting them. They were all there! But no, he is just an ordinary man who stumbled accidentally into immortality and his concerns are his concerns.

Generally, I would not mind living in Venice or Rome at any point between, say, 1400 and 1830, plague, slaughter and all, provided I have enough money. But who would I want to meet? We are begging for disappointment here, aren’t we? But let’s beg.

For good company, probably Raphael the painter and Charlotte Brontë. For pure kinship, Flaubert, so we can denigrate the world together like grumpy old farts. For sheer craziness Gogol and Benvenuto Cellini (read his autobiography). J.S. Bach to be in the presence of something inexplicable. Salomé and Caravaggio for sweet danger. Rembrandt and Paul Klee to learn more about painting. Although I have no religion, I would definitely want to meet Jesus. I want to know who was this guy crying in the desert and what was he really saying. And what happened to Mohammed in the cave, really?