Every book has a genealogy, even as it strives
to be new in its own way.
How better to examine this simple fact than the method
Frederic Tuten uses in The Adventures of Mao
on the Long March, his groundbreaking first novel
published in 1971.
In this fictional account of Mao Zedong's rise to power,
Tuten employs a kaleidoscopic lens, offering,
among other narratives, expansive literary quotations,
homages, and parodies.
Tuten has noted that the voice of the book
is not what can be found on any single page,
but in the overall effect.
In this, and in his next four novels,
Tuten intertwines distinct elements in human nature,
or in our cultural history, often manipulating the time
and place of a story's telling.
And he consciously and eloquently
invites consideration of and conversation with literature,
art, and history.
His next novel, Tallien, is the life story
of a French revolutionary who gives it all up
for the love of a countess.
And this story is made new and heartbreaking
as the tale of present-day man, long orphaned,
wishes he could tell the revolutionary in his own life,
his estranged father.
In Van Gogh's Bad Café, a beautiful morphine addict who
is Vincent van Gogh's lover steps through a brick wall
into the 21st century to ravish and beguile a new contemporary
artist, and to tell Vincent's story.
Characters don't just leap through time,
pushing the concept of perspective to new levels,
but they skip across the aisle of the library as well.
In Tintin in the New World, the famous French comic book hero,
Tintin, as well as his companion, Captain Haddock--
and of course, his little dog, Snowy--
is reanimated in his crystallized child state
on Machu Picchu, conversing at table
with the gang from Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain-- most
especially, Claudia.
Marrying these narratives brings out
something vibrant in both of them,
and it made my first reading of The Magic Mountain much more
tolerable, and indeed, quite enjoyable.
In all these works, our artistic and cultural history
is addressed through dichotomies and conversations,
both in subject and style.
And turning to The Green Hour, Tuten's most recent novel,
we see the principle of an artistic life once again
addressed, this time as the passion of the protagonist,
a professor and art critic for whom art is everything--
except the other everything, which is the incendiary love
she shares with a man who disappears as regularly
as he returns, and which is also, finally,
the love of an extraordinary child.
And while there is a sense of the quickness, the urgency
of life in all Tuten's work, it is in The Green Hour, as well
as his most recent short stories,
that a recognition of mortality draws our attention in,
bringing the work into sharp focus.
Applauding the Mao book when it first came out,
John Updike commented that the novel cuts the reader
into awareness, and Susan Sontag has written of Tuten's work,
"There's nothing like the ride, the rush
that Frederic Tuten can give."
The former Director of the Creative Writing Program
at the City College in New York, and frequent writer
on the arts, Tuten is the recipient of a Guggenheim,
and the very prestigious Award for Distinguished
Writing from the Academy of Arts and Letters.
Tallien is subtitled A Brief Romance, Tintin A Romance,
van Gogh A Love Story.
And indeed, this man before us tonight writes love stories.
What else is the force between us that shapes and changes
our lives?
But love does not stop there.
Each book is evidence of the essentialness
of art and literature.
Art-- pure art--
without regard for the market, for faddish movements,
for any pressures but that of beauty itself.
To quote Walter Pater, whom Tuten quotes
in Mao, "To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame,
to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life."
Frederic Tuten introduced this concept
to me, and to my conception of the art of fiction.
May I now introduce to you the man who burns this way,
and maintains this principle--
Frederic Tuten.