Giuseppe Becce as Wagner, 1913.
In three months, Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish my third book, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music. I thought I'd write a few blog posts describing the genesis of the project and its gradual voyage toward the appearance of reality. Over the summer, I'll add various auxiliary features to my trusty old website: a general guide to Wagner's works, with recommendations of recordings; a bibliographical essay, touching on topics and sources that fell by the wayside; an index to Wagner on film; and a glossary of Wagnerian jargon, such as "mystic abyss." If I get my act together, I will also present an online chapbook of Bad Wagner Poetry. Whether in-person appearances will be possible in the fall remains to be seen, but we have a string of virtual events scheduled. FSG has an advance excerpt on its Work in Progress blog.
Why Wagner? Why Wagnerism? The two are not the same. When I tell people about the project, they tend to assume that this will be another book about the composer, his life, his work, or some combination thereof. Instead, it's a book about his effect, his impact, his shadow — on literature, the arts, film, popular culture, intellectual life, politics. I make almost no mention of his influence on other composers; in this sense it is not actually a book about music at all. Wagner is present on every page, but often in modified, distorted, sometimes unrecognizable form. It is Wagner as seen and heard through the eyes and ears of an absurdly large and multivarious cast of characters, from Baudelaire to Buñuel, from Willa Cather to Rosa Luxemburg, from W. E. B. Du Bois to J. R. R. Tolkien, from Herzl to Hitler. It is a book around Wagner, after Wagner. It begins with an oblique jest: the man is briefly alive and then falls dead in the fifth paragraph.
As I write in the epilogue — which, in an admittedly contrarian narrative choice, swerves into a personal register otherwise absent from the book — I came late to a full engagement with Wagner. In childhood, I found his music baffling and vaguely revolting. In college, as I studied the intellectual history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he interested me as a problem, as a crisis. Only in my twenties did I begin to give serious attention to the music itself. And only in my thirties did I begin to understand it, as far as I understood it. The idea for a book about Wagnerism emerged from The Rest Is Noise, which I wrote between 2000 and 2007. I found myself frequently backtracking toward Wagner in order to explain what was happening at the beginning of the twentieth century. When I addressed music in Nazi Germany, the vexed Wagner-Hitler question distracted me at every turn. These persistent hauntings by the old sorcerer of Bayreuth seemed a sign that I should turn toward him next. So I offered up Wagnerism as a topic to my publisher in 2008. First I put together my essay collection, Listen to This. I also went through a phase of listening to all of Wagner's works with scores and reading his all-too-voluminous prose writings. I began writing in August 2010; I submitted the finished draft last September; I sent in final changes last week.
The journey took so long because the territory is so huge. Wagner was all but unavoidable for artists working at the turn of the last century, and few evaded his inky shadow. The phenomenon of Wagnerism — defined here as the composer's influence on the arts — has elicited an extensive and rich literature. There are books about Wagner and Mallarmé, Wagner and Joyce, Wagner and the British novel, Wagner and the visual arts, Wagner and modernism, and so on. Dozens of books have studied his relationship with antisemitism and Nazi Germany. What struck me, as I surveyed my shelves, was that no one had really attempted to pull all of these diverse Wagnerian discourses into a single volume. There was, to be sure, Timothée Picard's 2500-page Dictionnaire encyclopédique Wagner, which I acquired a year or so into my researches, and which delayed the process for at least a year longer as I fell into a mesmerizing and sometimes alarming subculture of lesser-known French writers who had spelunked the Wagner caves. Marcel Batilliat's incomparably creepy novel Chair mystique, which ends with a scene of what can only be described as amatory decomposition, made a not entirely welcome entrance into my life. Could the sort of omnivorous overview undertaken by Picard and his team of authors be accomplished in a narrative of under a thousand pages? I thought it was worth a try. I now understand why it had not been done: it is impossible. Wagnerism, as long as it is, is far from being comprehensive. Big swaths of material go untouched, not least because of limitations of language; I can read only French and German. I caught passing glimpses of Italian Wagnerism, Polish Wagnerism, Portuguese Wagnerism, Latin American Wagnerism, but could not stop and explore.
The project also took a long time because I enjoyed the research phase so deeply. It has been, as I say in the introduction, the great education of my life. I read and re-read hundreds of books, some directly related to the work, some more tangential. I took the opportunity to read everything by Willa Cather, everything by Virginia Woolf. I watched at least a hundred films; I stopped at museums as I traveled; I delved into the archives of lesser-known figures like Sidney Lanier and Owen Wister; I followed Wagner's footsteps in Italy. Alongside myriad discoveries, I brought to bear longtime obsessions, going back to university or even high-school days. Not a sentence of my senior thesis on James Joyce proved to be reusable, but I did consult some yellowed notes on Joyce's relationship with the work of Otto Weininger, unhappiest of Wagnerites. (Sign of aging: when papers from one's past become parchment.) What excited my attention were unexpected links between artists in far-flung places: how Philip K. Dick recapitulates themes from Joséphin Péladan, how both Marcel Proust and Francis Coppola associate aerial combat with "The Ride of the Valkyries."
The book is structured so that the grimmer side of Wagner's influence comes to the fore in the middle sections. In the first third, the reader may have the sensation of touring a kind of delirious theme park of fin-de-siècle decadence; but in the chapters on Wilhelmine Germany and on Wagnerian antisemitism, the shadow grows cold. Hitler enters in the tenth chapter, as a young man who flounders as an artist and then finds purpose in war. Nazi Germany occupies the thirteenth chapter, in counterpoint to the later work of Thomas Mann. I hope to replicate for the reader a feeling of harrowing descent. The disaster is not absolute; new varieties of Wagnerism surface in the final chapters, in Dick, Ingeborg Bachmann, Terrence Malick. I resist any blunt equation of Wagner and Hitler; the former was a kind of monarchical anarchist, the fascist state foreign to his hazy political vision. Nonetheless, the Nazification of Wagner was not some sort of unfortunate accident that befell a "great artist." I end the book by proposing that the monstrous complexity of that connection is what makes Wagner a perennially relevant case. Working through the problems he has created is the kind of labor we must always undertake when art collides with reality, as it inevitably does. The fundamental error is in assuming that art and reality are separate to begin with.
There, then, is the general lay of the land. In future posts I'll say more about the researching and the writing. I'll close this first post-mortem dispatch by expressing desperate gratitude to my editor, Eric Chinski. He presided over the cutting of around a hundred thousand words from the initial draft — not as catastrophic as the Rest Is Noise situation, but bad enough — and provided crucial guidance in getting the remainder under a semblance of control. I have always been lucky in my editors; I would be nowhere without them.
