Interview of Roman Payne by Sam Nortey

Recently at the Café de Flore in Saint Germain, I had the immense honor of meeting Horn’s Club member and author, Roman Payne to discuss his third novel, Hope and Despair.  Several coffees and hours later, I began to unveil the mysterious inner-workings of the Renaissance man and American expatriate.

Imprisoned on several occasions, Payne has lived more lives in his thirty-one years than most.  Journeying to the Pacific, Mexico, Western and Eastern Europe, the painter and music composer has now settled in Paris, France.

In Hope and Despair, Payne weaves a beautifully written tale with palpable characters who resemble us in our common search to define and find love. With readily accessible poetic prose, Payne delicately intertwines modern day situations with symbols and myths from Western literary heritage.

However, what makes Hope and Despair a worthwhile read is not only Payne's incredible story-telling gift, but also his unflinching courage to challenge long-standing definitions of romantic love.  Payne obliges his readers to reconsider its paradoxes and compromises on personal liberty in contemporary relationships.

While it is not often that one has the opportunity to meet with an artist whose work one particularly admires, it is even more rare to have validated on such occasions one's intuition of the artist through his work.

Many thanks to Roman Payne for sharing his time and reflections with fellow Horn’s Club  members.

For more information on Payne’s novel, please visit the website, www.hope-and-despair.com

 

Interview  

When did you know you wanted to be an author?

I was just a youth.  It was winter, and I was awake late at night in my room built away from the house, out in the woods overlooking a large icy lake in the Northwestern United States.  I had a kerosene lamp lit and was finishing a book my father had given me, A Farewell to Arms.  As soon as Lieutenant Henry left the hospital and walked out into the rain, and there was no more to read, I was overcome by a new sensation that was so violent and so sublime that I began to tremble.  These new emotions made my stomach ill.  I took my coat and went out for a walk.

         It was very cold and dark, and the silhouettes of the giant cedar trees waved against a shelf of clouds as a frozen wind blew over the lake.  I started down the railroad tracks, deep in thought.  It had been a baffling book.  The phrases were so simple, yet the emotions it caused were so intense.  I had never felt such despair mingled with such intense joy.  And it was all caused by just a few hundred pages of random words arranged in the right order.  I decided on that walk that I wanted to recreate that sensation, for myself and for others.

         I ran away soon after and started traveling - always with a blank journal I filled with youthful attempts at prose.  As time passed, I felt myself transforming into the writer I wanted to be, into a character of my own invention.  All the while, life began losing its seriousness, all the while becoming more and more romantic.  I watched my life become an unfathomable codex, beautifully bound, with no foreseeable end.

 

How much of your new novel, Hope and Despair, is based upon real life?

The stage is fake and the actors are real, although some wear masks and a few of the minor characters were invented on creative whims or drawn from old allegorical tales. 

Every scene and sequence of events in Hope and Despair was carefully calculated; a style of writing I would call “a layering of synthesized myths.”  As with any science experiment – any creation in a chemical laboratory – the sequences had to follow a certain order, all events firing at the right moment.  This cannot be done by a diarist, it requires invention.  It is for the same reason that we use numbers and formulas (imagined concepts) to execute scientific procedures.  If a chemistry experiment didn’t need to be performed with such exactitude, we wouldn’t need to use numbers, formulas, and carefully measured substances – we could make chemicals using scenes from everyday life!

My “passionate” characters, on the other hand, all come from real life.  The heroine, Nadja, is a girl I once knew, and was involved with.  She was a sensitive and tragic soul, a sort of frail Jeanne d’Arc; one easily be led away by visions.  She also had a real distinct pattern of speech to add to her imagination, which not only made the dialogue easy to write, but which also breathed a unique humanness into her character.  The real Nadja managed to immortalize herself in the book simply by inventing a new way of speaking in her day to day life.

Everyone who enters my life and makes an impression on me becomes a character in one of my books, however minor.  I’ve found that of the woman I’ve known, of the men who’ve made my acquaintance, those who make an impression on me are those with the greatest imaginations - or those who host a desire that burns with uncommon brilliance.  Some, however, simply become characters for their unique patterns of speech, or habits of living, though these characters tend to serve only as props.

 

What is your most influential sexual experience?

I was six years old.  There were four other boys and twenty-eight girls in my class at catholic school - thus each male student had a harem of five girls (I don’t recall what we did with the three remaining girls).  Anyway, of my five girlfriends, my favorite was a soft, pale creature with dark hair, named Katherine.

One day on the playground, I was struck by the sight of Katherine’s dirty, scraped-up hands, as she picked herself up off the pavement after falling. That was my first profound sexual experience.  To this day, many of my heroines are named Katherine.

 

Do you live out your character’s fantasies?  And more importantly, do your characters live out your fantasies?

Fantasies are to be played with.  Real acts made fictitious, the fictitious real.  If a fantasy is worthwhile, it should lived out, in life and in books.  A worthwhile fantasy, I would consider to be the bolder and more heroic of any two choices.  The only fantasies my characters have enjoyed living which I consider myself a stranger to, though I’ve lived them in dreams, are murder, suicide, and the extreme reaches of insanity.  Yet overall, I would say I am far more experienced than any of my characters in all things real and fictitious.

 

Do you believe in fairy tales? If so, what are your favorite fairy tales?

Insomuch as fairy tales are myths, yes.  They are our unconscious dreams enacted out, told and told again over the centuries because they enthrall us.  Freud called myths the ‘collective dreams of society’ … I don’t believe it’s possible for a society to dream collectively, however, individually. Yes.  I believe in myths as I believe in hunger or thirst, jaywalking or adultery, or the truth of my reflection in a mirror as a water drop runs down the glass and the shadows of dusk creep slowly across the floor.

One of my favorite myths is a story of male initiation called “Iron John.”

In fact, the plot of my second novel, “Cities and Countries,” is concretely based on the sequence of events in this tale.  It mirrors “Iron John” the way Ulysses mirrors The Odyssey. 

It’s a great idea for a writer to plot a novel to a myth that has survived in a culture for centuries.  Although the furniture of the story changes - myths are malleable, evolving over the ages and across cultures – a girl wears a sandal then, now she wears a slipper -  to mold to our evolving customs.  Still, our hardwiring stays the same, so do the plots of our myths.

The reader of such a novel has no idea that while they’re enjoying the light-hearted adventures of the book’s hero, a mythic needle, as strong as the bond to our families, as potent as our desire to live and understand life, is driving its insidious tip into the veins of their psyche.  A pleasurable manipulation!

 

How do you define sexuality in your novels? Do believe in the war of the sexes?

I don’t think I’ve ever tried to define it. 

‘War of the sexes’ is a pop-phrase I don’t much care for … There is a war insofar as wars focus on attaining territories - focus on possession.  ‘The sexes’ is a collective, however, too broad to be interesting.  Novelists should stay away from collectives because they depersonalize individuals and mute the emotions.  It’s far more seductive to talk about a war involving simply one man and one woman.

 

If you were a tree, what would you be? 

The tree which tempts Tantalus.  …If so as only to have a life engaged with others, a life of action, over one of mere contemplation.

 

Would you consider yourself a romantic?  If not, what would you consider yourself? 

I would consider myself a classicist.  The problem with the term ‘romanticism’ is that the characteristics of literature that are used to define can be found in all great literature. The romantic period has no beginning nor any end.

Schlegel, who first applied the term ‘romantic’ to literature, considered even Homer a romantic.  So the classics were romantic, as the great romantics were searching for a new classicism.  In my art, I strive for the ideal classicism, for the Homeric classicism – and that is a very romantic idea!

 

Do you see men and women in their traditional roles; men

as providers and women as caretakers?

I didn’t know these were their traditional roles.  I always thought man’s role was to seduce woman and woman’s role was to seduce man.  Each uses their biological tools of seduction to attempt to win for themselves power and that illusive ‘eudaimonia.’

 
Do you aspire to get married, have children, and home with a white picket fence? 

Do they allow such fences in Paris?  I’ve never seen one.  I prefer large stone walls.

 

If you found the woman of your dreams, would you vow to be chaste until marriage?

On the condition that I don’t have to be chaste after marriage.

 

What qualities do you look for in a woman or mate? 

The face of Helen of Troy.  The voice of a siren.  Lips that speak only in French.

 

Did/do your parents encourage your writing and artistic endeavors? 

My mother is an artist (a painter and interior designer).  She’s one of the most creatively gifted people I’ve ever known or thought to imagine.  When I was very young, it was she and I who were the dreamers.  She’s always encouraged me to put art above everything else – a great mother’s sacrifice.  Although I think she wanted me to be a painter or a musician more than a writer.

My father also taught me a lot.  He gave me ambition, teaching me to aim for the epic, to attain a life of monumental proportions.  Still, he wanted me to apply this ambition to business and not to literature.

 

If you could be someone else, who would you be? 
Achilles.  Or else, Mohammed Ali.

 

Is there one thing you regret doing in your life?

Do you mean something I’ve already done?  Or something I’m going to do?

 

Do you believe in good and evil?  How do you treat these themes in your novels?

I don’t differentiate between the two. I differentiate between the beautiful and the ugly, the heroic and the cowardly. 

 

Do you believe all couples experience what you’ve described in your recent novel?

Extreme acts of passion are the bejeweled accessories of living with which very few men and women have the luxury of adorning themselves. 

 

What other profession would you consider if you weren’t an author?

Counterfeiter, gigolo, check forger … anything where, like writing fiction, I could work by myself, for myself.

 

Do you believe you can change the world with your novels? Do you believe anyone can change the world?

Changing the world is of no concern to me.  Anyhow, the world is fickle.  Like a child, it happily adopts an idea or the life of a man or woman, only to discard it once that life or idea is worn out.  Youthful “Alexis” (my character in Cities and Countries) learned that better than anybody.  This realization was one of the most pleasurable experiences I had while overcoming my own youth: that while one is busy tramping around the world, trying to wear it out, one is being done-in one’s self – breaking bones and flesh and noble plans.  It’s an exhilarating realization!  I recommend that all twenty-year-olds read Cities and Countries for a glimpse into the somber joys the future holds for them.

         Anyhow, no.  Changing the world doesn’t interest me.  The world is another collective.  And as I’ve said before, collectives are of no interest to me.  They are of no interest because they cannot dream.  Because they cannot emote.  Because they are impersonal.  What does interest me, however, is - through literature … through the right word writ in the right place … that I might change the emotional train of one individual reader at one time.  That I may, for a moment, disturb their dreams, driving him nuts, driving her to the boundaries of animal desire, creating and destroying illusions of loss, of hope and love and despair… and then… leaving off.  For the pages must end, the book must be set aside.  The lamp must be blown.  For the reader is capricious, as fickle as a lover.  The lover as fickle as the world.  And rightly so.