Mark Helprin Interview

Mark Helprin has authored numerous essays and short stories, three children's books, and several novels, the most celebrated of which are Winter's Tale (1983) and A Soldier of the Great War (1991). In 2005, he published Freddy and Fredericka, his fifth novel. I was fortunate enough to speak with Mr. Helprin during the book tour for Freddy and Fredericka.

Mark Helprin's novels are epic tales of human struggle. Often hilarious as with Freddy and Fredericka, his writing is always transcendently lyrical and focused, as is the author, on the Keatsian ideal of truth and beauty.

Mark Flanagan: Your last novel, Memoir from Antproof Case, was published in 1995. What have you been up to these past ten years?

Mark Helprin: Well, in the summer of 1995, I published Antproof Case; in the summer of 1996, I published City in Winter; in 1997 I published The Veil of Snows, a children's book; in 2004 I published The Pacific, a collection of short stories; and this year, I published Freddy and Fredericka. So that's five books in ten years -- an average of one book every two years, and everyone asks, "Where have you been?"

I understand it however. When I get involved in political discussions, I am constantly referring to this because people don't understand it. It's true that two things can be true at the same time. That's the amazing thing.

From one point of view, this is my first adult novel in ten years. From another point of view, I've had a book every two years. The thing is what grabs people's attention in the literary world as it is now constructed is the novel, because short stories are orphans now. Nobody cares about them anymore, unfortunately.

For example, when I started writing short stories there were many venues to publish them and many honorable ones. Now there are very few. There are no places you can publish short stories honorably and make money doing it. You have your choice: you can either publish "Perfection" in Commentary which is a great deal of honor but not a great deal of money. I published "Ellis Island" as a short story in the New Yorker in 1979 or 1980, and in today's dollars I got the equivalent of twenty times what I got for publishing "Perfection," which is the same length. And for "Perfection" I was paid today's going rate.

Now maybe in the New Yorker they still pay that well, but the New Yorker doesn't publish me anymore because they've changed so radically. I never fit in the old guard either, but I certainly don't fit in the new guard. The New Yorker used to lead with two stories every issue because that was their metier, that's what was most important was literature. They would lead with two and then have others in it and poems and stuff. Now it's all sensationalist political stuff, and there's no place for me there.

Some people write for posterity, which I think is absurd because you don't know what posterity will bring and it's pretentious. You don't know what your fate is going to be, and you won't be there anyway. I think you have to write for what you think is right and just and beautiful. And sometimes you have to do that even though you don't get rewarded for it, even though you get reviled for it. So that's what I do.

Another problem is that the entire enterprise has gone off on a very strange track - not that I'm qualified to comment on it, because I don't know anything about it now. I just know what I sense from a distance. The whole thing has been perverted, though. It's been sexualized; it's been politicized; it's been ethnocized; it's been commercialized. All the -isms took ahold.

Perhaps the worst is actually in publishing. Publishing has always been a business, but business was not actually the prime motivation for most who went into it. But then it became busnified and now it is. Of course, this went hand in hand with the change in America, in which people became willing to receive the kind of stuff that publishers were willing to give them. If you ask Hollywood or publishers, "why do you put out such crap?" They'll say, "It's what the public wants." If you ask the public, "Why do you look at such crap," they'll say, "It's what we're given."

It used to be there was a different ethos. There was restraint in things. But the restraint just vanished, and now, as with everything else, it's grab the money while you can. It doesn't matter what you do or how you do it, you grab the money.

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