Intersect Conversations: Ben Shattuck

I saw in Davoll’s that you have Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living by John Kaag and Jonathan Van Belle. So –– I haven't read it yet –– but what can Thoreau teach us about how to live and work today, and what have you learned from him? Kind of a big question to start. 

I kind of wrote a whole book about it. It's hard to answer succinctly, but I would say I think the great thing about Henry David Thoreau is his life and work is really prismatic. There's so many sides and you can reflect your own life through the prism of his work, work ethic, philosophy, and you can see, you can learn something, depending on who you are and where you're coming from and what period of time you're entering his work, you can take something, you take something different from it. 

So for instance, for some people, his abolitionism is really inspiring. For some people, self-sufficiency is really inspiring. For some people, his nature writing is inspiring and mesmerizing. When I discovered Thoreau much later in life, in my 30s, after being told how good he was in high school, but not really believing it because I was sort of worn down by his really academic prose. But when I found his journals, I realized that he is really one of the best [practitioners] of nature writing. He is able to see an oak tree in the evening on an August evening and describe what that's like. He's able to describe the sensation of hearing crickets early in the fall in a way that a lot of people aren't able to. So he was really tapped into something and had an incredible ability with words and was able to translate that experience into the English language. But the question was what he taught me? Was that it?

You've given a thorough answer already, but what did he teach you about how to go about the process of writing, how to be in the world? 

If you read his journals especially, you'll realize that he's one of the most observant people that has ever been around and he's really patient. He has his serious flaws — there's great arguments out there and they have been made about how misanthropic he is sometimes, sexist sometimes, incredibly insensitive to indigenous populations sometimes, all those arguments have been made and they're out there you can find them. 

But they also come with some really unique sensibility like one of my favorite passages of Thoreau is when he brings in flowers that haven't bloomed yet, but the buds are really full and they're about to burst. And he puts them in a vase in his kitchen and he just sits there and he's waiting to see if he can witness the moment that the flowers erupt out of the bud. And it's that sort of patience and observation and even impulse to be a witness to that is not only admirable but almost divine.

“ He died at 44: I’m 41”

It's almost like this is what we're on earth for, to witness a wood lily — I forgot what the flower was. And so I think there's a lot out there for some people. That’s why I say his life and his work is prismatic. It might be to appreciate nature or to stand up for people who don't have the rights that you have or to be self-sufficient. But for me, reading his writing, the thing that I really learned is the amount of patient observation in the doses that Henry was administering to the world around him feels almost divine. It feels like this is a worthwhile pursuit.

He was really prolific. He died at 44: I'm 41. He did most of his writing while he was in his 30s and had that exuberant, youthful passion. It's not like today where people brag about how busy they are. He would just write in the mornings and then he would spend half the day walking. He really did not think it was a good idea to sit at a desk all day. And I think, especially, our culture today could learn something from that. And I could learn something from that. Giving yourself permission to not be bound to your desk or whatever the big “W” work is that you're doing. That idea of being observant, being patient.

Hard to have that with cell phones, social media, the whole cacophony of stuff going on in the modern world!

Yeah, but I started thinking about when I was reading more Henry David Throeau is how he taught me the question of asking: Is it that hard? Like, is it that hard to just delete Instagram off your phone or not participate in Twitter run by a malignant billionaire? Is it hard to just check your email once a day? I don't know. Maybe if you're the head of produce at Whole Foods and need to constantly… like there are people who really need to be in touch, but how much of it is just blind impulse and how much of it is actually what is the equivalent today of sitting down and watching flowers waiting for the moment a flower will bloom? Maybe today that's just not refreshing your email every 20 minutes or something.

You talked about nature writing a little bit. I see in Six Walks a little bit of a Mary Oliver impulse where you're going on these walks and — as she famously did, she'd go on these walks and then she'd come back and report on what she saw, how she was mesmerized by nature. Do you have any interest in poetry? Would that be something you'd ever pursue?

I wrote a lot of poems when I was like 10 years old and gave them to my mom.I love poetry as an entry point to like lush language. But I like stories and narrative too much. And I think poetry, for a good reason, rejects narrative. I don't think I would let that go. And I would try to put poetry through characters' perspectives. In this story called “Graft,” which is the fourth story in the collection, maybe fifth, about a 19th century apple orchard in Cape Cod, the protagonist, Hope –– her brother is modeled after Henry David Thoreau and the way that his character sees the world is really poetic. And so I would filter my poetry through characters. 

In terms of Mary Oliver, I do think about her. Of course, like Wild Geese and her famous poems always rise up whenever you're thinking about describing nature. But I also think about her in interviews when she would talk about how she lived a really hard life and how poetry and art were a place where you could experience and produce beauty and that it doesn't have to be a place that's about pain and describing pain. One of the critiques that she got, I think, was that she was really a cozy optimist poet who was writing about just geese. I think about that and I think one could especially sympathize with that impulse that there's enough pain around you that poetry or books or art or cinema can be a place of joy and that's not anything to mock.

So you talked a little bit about “Graft” and about The History of Sound. So I listened to your Marginalia podcast interview from just a while back. You explained the hook-and-chain form. If you don't mind, can you explain that again? Because it's this interesting element of historical fiction, I think, and playfulness with form that I think is really cool.

Well, hook-and-chain, it's an actual hook and chain. It's like a metal chain with a hook on the end and you can like loop it around and and hook it. I put it as an epigraph because epigraphs are usually places in books that people assume are truthful facts, like a quote from Chekhov or whoever, and the whole book plays with fact and fiction. Some of the most ridiculous out-of-this-world ideas or plot points are actually based on fact in the book and some of the most mundane details are invented. When writing historical fiction, there's a compact, an agreement between the writer and the reader in which both enjoy trying to find the line between fact and fiction. 

There's something about historical fiction. If you want to write about the Mayflower, both the reader and the writer know that it's based on a real event, but that you're going to fill the story with invented motives, feelings, and assumed characteristics of people that bring you to some emotional climax. But that whole contract, that whole thing of what historical fiction was, I always felt uncomfortable about it, or I always felt there was more to it. I always felt it was so strange that we just assume what's fact, what's fiction, that there's a little fact in there, there's a little bit of fiction, there's a little bit of this and that. 

“I was trying to create that exchange of the past and present.”

And so, to go back to hook-and-chain, that's a term that I invented because I knew that people would believe it and within the story itself, within the story collection itself, it was just the best way to describe that other comment I have on historical fiction in that it felt there's always one half of the story missing. What happened to those people who were traumatized? What happened to the descendants of what happened to that artifact? How does the past bleed into the present? How does the present bleed into the reader's understanding of the past? And so I was trying to create that exchange of the past and present. 

I was trying to underline that exchange more. When you read historical fiction, or when you read fiction, you're participating in some contract, some agreement where there's real movement, there's kinetic movement. And it's not just you wanting to walk into a theme park of 18th century New England or something. There's something that's your life now or interesting about the past that affects your life now. Yeah, so each of the stories in The History of Sound is not part of a broadly interconnected short story collection. It's a very specifically paired story collection –– each one has what I would call a companion story or a sister story, a story that would describe some element or solve some puzzle piece of the one prior.

And the past and present interplay brought to mind the “Radiolab: Singularities” story and “The Auk” story. I gave the collection to my grandmother, so I don't have it with me. So I forget which one was first. But there's a whole Radiolab episode about this awk and then you find out that it was this really heartwarming story of creating this narrative for this person who needed it.

I'm looking at it right now. “Radiolab” came first and then "The Auk” but that was a really interesting part of the book because you really could change the reader's experience by just flipping which came first. So the reader assumes that the auk was real. And then after you understand that it was fake. But if you put the auk story first and you went into the Radiolab story knowing that it was fake, you'd have some assumptions about the protagonist or the lead character that would undermine the characters or story itself.

And the same thing with “The Journal of Thomas Thurber” which comes after “August in the Forest.” One of the reasons why “The Journal of Thomas Thurber” has any narrative tension was because you know, by the end, all of them are going to die and you don't know how they're going to die. And so it was about making the decision of which story would come first and you can really see in that one how the pair helps each other, that the pair complements each other in a really specific craft-based narrative detail.

I have to say my personal favorite is definitely “Tundra Swan.” It's such a harrowing kind of addiction tale, especially with regard to the father-and-son relationship. Do you have a personal favorite from the collection or are you impartial? 

I think I would interrogate the word favorite or I can split it up. There's a special place in my heart for “The History of Sound.” It’s a microcosm of the entire collection and it jumps ahead. There's an artifact in there so the whole collection is almost within that story itself. The protagonist realizes he should have been regretting something his whole life, only too late, and the feeling floods back and that delayed realization is in the DNA of the collection itself. So that story just means a lot and I wrote it over 10 years ago. I didn't finish it 10 years ago, but I started it a long time ago. 

A story that I think is my favorite story as in just a short story that I would like to read from somebody else is “Graft.” I really like that story. I think it's just a well-written story. It seems like, if I was to teach a short story, this is a good way to teach a short story. A story that I just really love and I think is an underdog and feels more like an incantation to me is “Edwin Chase of Nantucket.” 

I think just as a young man not really knowing direction in life and being able to write about that through a character in the 1790s just felt personal. Like I said: an incantation. What is the story? Nothing almost happens in the story. A son understands something new about his mother and then they leave and it takes place in one night. What even is that story about? I'm not really sure but it’s also one of my favorites 

And then on this current novel that you're working on, are there any hints you can give us about what it's about? Or are you keeping that until publication?

Writing fiction is so hard. I used to be so precious about it. Now I’m like: Whatever, this book might be this book, it might be something else. You set off on a little vessel of ambition and then you hit the winds and the tides of boredom and difficulty and research and the book turns out to be something totally different. It's inspired by a retelling of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and the Headless Horseman, who is based on a Hessian German soldier. 

And so the book is based on the real-life of a 18th century theologian and poet who was walking from Germany to Paris and was kidnapped and sold to the British to fight in the American Revolution. It spans continents and who knows if that's going to be what the book is, but it's starting off as a poetic 20-something-year-old German young man who finds himself in an extremely difficult situation in the Hudson Valley.

“ It’s a book that feels like a fresh alpine breeze blowing through your life.”

I grew up in South Dartmouth, right by the marshes. It's very flat, but the ocean's expansive. I can't figure out what is going on except for an explanation of past lives. But in the past few years, I've had this really alive impulse to be in the mountains and visit the mountains. I feel like Bilbo Baggins or something being called to the mountains. I can't figure it out. And Switzerland, Bavaria, and that area of Germany, that area of Europe, it just feels like I want to be there somehow. And so I'm taking myself there in fiction. I mean, I've started to dream about high altitude mountains! So just sort of following that in fiction now. 

I don't know if you're looking for book recommendations, but one of my favorite books is Robert Seethaler's A Whole Life. It's Austrian, and it's very thin, and it's about a man in the mid-century living in the mountains. It’s a book that feels like a fresh alpine breeze blowing through your life. It's like Tinkers, Train Dreams, and A Whole Life are all in the same category to me. They're short, beautiful, single-character-driven narratives. All young men in a natural setting. 

You took my last question which is: Are there any book recommendations that you have or any people that especially influenced you?

I know those are two different things, but, for short stories, I really do think people don't realize how much they would love short stories if they really started giving them a chance and reading them. Jim Shepard’s Like You'd Understand, Anyway, is one of my favorite short story collections. He's a professor at Williams. And then Andrea Barrett won the National Book Award for this book called Ship Fever. And if anybody likes The History of Sound, I think they'll love Ship Fever and her other stories. It's an extremely beautiful book.

Short story collections, especially linked short story collections, are so fun. Who has time to read a 500-page novel now? I don't understand why there still is that feeling that short stories are outside of the literary realm. I don't know. Maybe we need to rethink how books are being marketed or something, but we watch these limited series and television shows and these little, contained narratives are what short stories are. And it's so satisfying to read a good short story.

“it’s so satisfying to read a good short story.”

I recently read Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. It seems like it's just around and people are using his quotes for all sorts of reasons. And I liked reading that to just see how wrong the podcast bros are. It's a book about understanding your own mortality and the limited time you have on earth. I'm interested in whatever philosophical underpinnings the political sphere is referencing. And I just heard Meditations a few times.

I wanted to go to the source. I actually wanted to read what this book is. And it feels to me like it's not about taking control of your own life in a way that Jordan Peterson might be saying –– like walking into a Catholic church and saying: “Wow, they're great candle makers.” It's like they’re not understanding the greater point of what that book is, which is based on mortality. So I really liked reading that. And I'm reading Mary Beard. She's at Cambridge University Anyway, she's a historian of the Roman Empire and I’m reading her book about Roman emperors. I would say my two obsessions weirdly right now are the Alps and Ancient Rome. 

You can combine them and write about Hannibal! And then, actually, I have one more question. So the whole cast of The History of Sound film does an excellent job of bringing the story to life. However, there's something special, I think, about the two leads. You get two of the biggest young actors of their generation to buy into the project and to put in really good performances. Did you get to meet with them to discuss the script that you wrote or do any readings with them? I know that Paul Mescal contributed to the audiobook.

I did with Paul, not so much with Josh. When it was already going, a lot went through Oliver [Hermanus,] through the director. He would ask me: “Hey Ben, it's not in the script, but what would have happened between when Lionel left the New England Observatory and ended up in Rome, because Paul's wondering what the background of the character would be. So there could be that. And then when the film was shot in New Jersey, I would go to set and when the movie starts to be filmed, your job as a screenwriter is really over. It's the director and the actors.

The director is using my screenplay as a template for how they're going to create this piece of art. Some of my favorite moments in the film were the easiest lines to write, like when Paul understands from the music professor that David has passed away, because the music professor uses the past tense, and then informs him, when Paul says that line –– to write it is just four letters — but the way that Paul delivers it was so powerful and rich. And that's the cool thing about the adaptations. Then you take the movie to Cannes or the London Film Festival and it's fun to hang out with the actors, of course.

Ben Shattuck is a writer, painter, and author of the books Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau and The History of Sound: Stories. For more information on Ben and his work: visit here.