So it’s a sort of an amalgam—an actual person plus a composite.
Yes. And in many ways, the book itself is a composite, a literary composite. I think Bellow’s Herzog is a wonderful book, and far be it from me to criticize it, but in the spirit of the kind of people I’m talking about…the only criticism I’ve ever had of it is that while Herzog was made to seem, was written to seem, out of his mind, he was never really, truly out of his mind. He might walk around with a gun, write letters to the dead, but it was all an intellectual craziness, never a real craziness, never incoherent. That always bothered me. It always seemed as if Bellow was holding back some of the truth about this sort of person. You know that Bellow is mentioned in Schneidermann, right? He has sex with someone. I’m proud of that.
What about music? What was the role of music in shaping the research for this book? How did you go about infusing the book with so much musical history and terminology and detail?
To begin with I had this character. Now, this kind of person derives their ego from a specific source, a home subject, a subject in which they’re expert. This person is threatened by the world—its enormity. And so he survives it by mastering one thing—or by finding that one thing or discipline over which he can attempt, or hazard, complete mastery. Risking his sanity. Risking the margin. In Schneidermann, that discipline is music. I read a great number of performers’ memoirs, composers’ memoirs. The violinist Szigeti has a wonderful book, with a title either brilliant or terrible: With Strings Attached. That type of “art history,” degenerating into gossip—it interests me. I worked for a while as a musician on Miami cruise ships and at casinos in Atlantic City when I was in high school. I was playing with people who might have played with or behind Frank Sinatra for half an hour in the ‘60s. These people, drug addicted, divorced, hardened, they extrapolated experiences like those, playing with Sinatra, with Miles Davis, into enormous stories, a history—a sort of backstage lore, the Bible of the dressing-room. It’s interesting—though “interesting” is a terrible word—to read these memoirs, or to audience these memories, and then to contrast them with musicians writing academic or scholarly articles about music; to compare the experiential memories with program notes, or even with newspaper or magazine journalism about music. These people walk around with so much in their heads, so much experience, and it’s all emotional, abstract, or else technical, professional, and then they have to write or talk to the public, the audience, and they have to make it relatable. I like that translation. I’m translating like that now, or I’m trying to. The most beneficial thinking I did for this book related to this act, or performance, of translation. I’m thinking about how, for example, Pierre Boulez, who knows his theory, who knows his mechanics, has to translate these thoughts polemically, politically, into manifestos—or else, more recently, how he has to sell his art to the public, how he has to advertise what to him is or should be a pure idea.