HoboEye Interview: Salvatore Scibona

by Mitchell McInnis
I met Salvatore Scibona in New York City eight years ago. A coworker and I were considering resumes for a job that required a writing sample. Sal’s submission was his Pushcart Prize-winning story “Prairie.” My coworker, Sean Leadem (founding member of NYC band The Waylons), called him with a smile. Turned out, Sal was in Ohio, but he was willing to drive to New York to interview the following day. A man of his word, he drove through the night and arrived the next afternoon. On time.

He’s spent a decade writing and rewriting his novel “The End.” His sense of timing hasn’t dulled. While our collective sense of time has warped and compressed in that time, his work and process are immune to that compression.

He writes long-hand and edits voraciously, then works his slow way toward computer via typewriter. But “The End” doesn’t feel like or read like a long-suffered novel. It feels more like sentient dreaming.

McInnis: Reading your book, there’s a wonderful architecture apparent from the start. Just in reading the table of contents, it’s evident. And then, quite carefully, you set out to delicately enumerate details, ever threading them back and up to a much larger composition. It comes across quite naturally in the reading, yet it’s hard not to step back
occasionally and enjoy the shrewd artfulness through which it’s employed.

Can you let us in on how you developed that architecture? (Rather playfully, I have images of elaborate schematic drawings on your writing studio’s walls.)

Scibona: I did tack a drawing to the studio wall, but it was a map of the neighborhood, which is invented and so required a lot of cross-referencing to keep addresses and distances straight.  I also had a note card listing characters’ birthdates and wedding anniversaries.

But the architecture, as you say, of the novel was something I only occasionally tried to sketch, and never very successfully. The order of events was always changing in an effort to make it make the special kind of sense I wanted.  I have absolutely nothing against a story that treats time in a linear way—beginning at the beginning and moving step-wise toward the end.  In fact, I spent much of the revisions reordering the action within a section, even within a sentence, to make it unfold chronologically. I aspire to chronological sequence because it makes for an easier communication of meaning; but, for better or worse, I don’t spontaneously think that way.

The first section covers nearly the entire time span of the novel—1913–1953—from one character’s point of view.  We then go backward in time to 1928 and spend the rest of the book working back up to the day in 1953 with which the first part ends.  Then there’s a coda in the last chapter that takes place in the deep past.

If I had a structural model, it came from music, some of it from Bach’s sonatas and partitas for solo violin, which obsessed me while I was first writing The End.  In a long piece of music like that, we often get a melody (like a narrative) introduced at the beginning, and then we launch into an elaboration of the melody, often until it’s become so complex that we have forgotten the original song.  Then when we return late in the piece to the melody, enriched now by all the adventures of the composition (or the body of the novel, say), I always get a strange rush, a bright sense that something like meaning has been exposed just by the repetition of a few notes.

I think this attracted me in music because it seemed to explain certain feelings I had always had about time. 

An example: Two years ago I met an old man (a composer, as it happened) who told me that as a little boy in music camp, FDR had come to visit his class.  The children were packed into a little room, seated with their legs folded on the floor.  When the Secret Service carried the president into the room on a chair, they set it down on the young would-be composer’s foot.  And he screamed!  And the men moved the chair.  Now, for someone my age, Roosevelt is practically a figure of antiquity, but here was this man, eighty years later, pointing to the same living foot the president had squashed.  I thought my brain would explode.  That experience of a wormhole opening up in time, bringing the deep past into the present at moments we least expect, always strikes me as a secret truth revealing itself.  As Faulkner says, “The past isn’t over; it isn’t even past.”

The End is held together—I hope it holds together!—by a system of telegraph wires linking one time to another, or one part of the book to another part 200 pages distant but taking place at the same chronological moment.  I was hoping to continually generate in the reader’s mind these vertiginous moments in which we feel ourselves in two times at once, as the jeweler is “caught in two present moments, as though he were wearing a pair of eyeglasses from which one of the lenses had fallen out.”

McInnis: As you promote "The End," and as reviews come in, this project accumulates a different life. Can you talk about the process of watching this decade-long project come under others' control? Not surprisingly, the reviews are very, very strong. So, there must be a deliciousness at the center of that relinquishment like a seduction. Or is there?

Scibona: On Friday, a fierce and lovely woman whom I had never met--84 years old, a patron of the arts in the Twin Cities and a board member of the publisher--hosted a reception for the novel in her loft condo overlooking what I am told is  the only waterfall on the Mississippi.  Before I read to those assembled, she gave a rousing and descriptive
introduction of the book based on her reading of it.

I thought, this is a real thing now.  This isn't a part of my imagination.  It exists in the minds of other people.  As the character Ciccio in the book would say, it's actual rather than potential now; it is not made of mist.  My happiness about that  is unambivalent.  I don't mind  sharing it with other people because I never thought of the world of the book as mine; I thought of it as belonging to the characters. 

Like anyone, I have an ego that wants for itself.  But I have hopes for  the book that don't feel as though they come from that same infantile part of the soul that wanted to be praised in the first  grade for its shiny new shoes.  There is another person in my mind,
more like a parent who regards the grown child as an independent entity with freedom of its own.  As a parent would want his child to be loved, I hope the readers of the book will experience some of the feeling of love that I have for the characters.

The book is not about me or for me.  It doesn't need me, or seek to please me, or look on me with judgment of any kind. It is not a part of my self.  It was never really under my control so  much as I felt under its control, or under the control of the thing it was
trying to become.  It isn't under the control of others now.  It has its own life.

McInnis: I loved your response, and it opens a barn door to something else... Reading your novel, and corresponding with you, you've clearly found a way to access the sublime as a discipline and technique in your art. I know this has been an essential pursuit for you. It reminds me of the way bluegrass musicians learn the craft, then go off to develop their own style. You bump into your friend after years, and you realize he’s developed his own style. What does the sublime have to do with your style and process?

Scibona: I think the sublime is an experience.

Kant says we have it when the imagination and the intellect regard the same object at the same time. The imagination sees the infinite, and the intellect sees a finite wholeness. When we see those two contradictory qualities in the same object, we experience a cognitive dissonance that he calls the sublime.

I'm being a little loose, but you get the idea.

Your question was about technique or practice. Practically, I'm dissatisfied with a character, an observation, a sentence that is  closed to paradox. Lacking contradictory motives, the character is not only fake, but boring.  Lacking some kind of surprising clash, an observation has no pop, and fails to please the mind's eye as much as it fails to be true.  Of course the clash can't be a product of randomness.  I'm not trying to make a mess; I'm trying to find the true  things that do not seem as though they should be true.

The word "sublime" may not occur in the book—unless Rocco uses is at Niagara Falls.  Anyway, I hope that the book is open to philosophy and certain kinds of abstract thought while not relying on them in a practical, structural sense. Let the people eat meat, not cake.

The book is, however, undiguisedly interested in the self and how, in losing ourselves or consciousness of self, we risk death, sleep, stupidity, damnation; and also make it possible that we might finally wake up and come alive. One of the priests concludes, paradoxically, near the end, "When we are redeemed we shall cease to be ourselves.

McInnis: We’ve touched on the connections between the universal and particular in “The End.” At several points in the book, you introduce insights via cooking. You can understand a lot about a person by the way they cook, about where they come from and how they are as a person.

In the States, where food is all but misunderstood as an elegant mechanism for social cohesion, it’s wonderfully romantic to be reminded of the Italian tradition and food as  living history.

Food and cooking, in this way, are an orientation point between past and future, but also a way of making all moments the present moment. As someone with a passion for cooking, talk to me about this interaction from a cook’s point of view.

Scibona: The book directly describes cooking as little as possible.  I think it's usually a dull subject, because its charms are already assumed.

The characters eat and report to the reader the record of their sense of taste, but in a way that doesn't differ categorically from what their eyes and ears tell them.

The novelist James Salter writes marvelously about the dining life of mid-20th-century Westchester WASPs: "Life is meals," he says.  But one of the reasons he can do this is that the reader does not begin with the expectation that a book about such people will be
dominated by food--a subject that any story written about Italians and for an American audience is required to address with the kind of gooey reverence we otherwise save for the Sioux Indian's eternal bond with the Black Hills of South Dakota.

A benevolent cliché may not offend our sense of taste or manners, but it offends the imagination.

Your questions makes me realize that the food in The End is almost never described in such a way as to make you want  to eat it.  Some  of it is quite awful. Ciccio feeds "at a coagulated mound of eggs."  There is a supper of boiled squash, another of broccoli and
chicken necks.  And the broth Mrs. Marini makes out of the head  of the walleye seems to me only a practical way of making use of the thing; it wouldn't taste like much; freshwater fish make  poor stock.

We have all had enough reminders that the Italian family finds its spiritual expression at the supper table; this ironically freed me from having to show it.

My grandather, as a boy in Ohio during the Depression winters, stowed away on freight trains headed south, because there  was fruit to be stolen from the trees there. My grandmother was taken from her home by the state and sent to a fattening farm because she was so poorly nourished.

They wouldn't have known pesto from toothpaste, if they had toothpaste.

The food is just food, I hope.

McInnis: We were corresponding outside of this exchange, or maybe I was on an atheistic rant and you were maintaining your usual cool, and you said something intriguing: "I finished the book with a lot more respect for what Christianity  requires than when I began. Maybe as a result, I started the book as an aspiring Christian, and finished it more  or less convinced that I wasn't up to the job."

It sounds like you envy your characters. Is that so, and if so, why?

Scibona: I envy all the characters. They're all capable of things I can't do.  They've lived  in a place and time I wish I understood.

In fact I envied some of their qualities--Rocco's Christianity, Mrs. Marini's fanatical self-respect, Lina's self-posession--before I knew much else about them.  If anything, I had to work against that envy to keep them from being idealizations.  But that wasn't really a problem in the end, because they all took over for themselves after a few years and began violating what I thought I knew about them.

I finally learned from them just how complicated and unenviable those previously enviable qualities could be. Lina, for example, began as a woman entirely at home in solitude, but over the years that appetite for solitude turned into a ruthless introversion that I neither admired nor felt in a position to condemn. She had her own mind.

Read more about Salvatore Scibona’s novel “The End,” and learn more about the man himself.

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