Simon Van Booy Wants to Be Left Alone
(06/16/2009) Simon Van Booy, a Brit who grew up in Wales, is a writer of lyrical, romantic stories in which his characters’ emotions are
Ken Browar
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thoroughly excavated. The word “love” figures prominently in the title of each of his last two collections. The past is always present in his work, and Jamesian psychology and internationalism are afoot. So what was he doing playing American football in Kentucky?
“I liked the glamour of it,” he said earlier this month. The pads, the jersey, the ceremonial donning of the helmet. “It’s sports meets couture.”
He wasn’t some eccentric kicker, either, on the periphery of the team, but rather a tailback and punt returner. Turns out he had played rugby, and had planned to play it professionally.
He didn’t last at Campbellsville University. Writing on his mind, he reversed field, headed for a bohemian life overseas he said you can’t really pull off anymore.
“After I dropped out of college I got by on $8,000 a year. You know, poverty is the best diet going. Though I suppose the Dollar Menu ruined that deal.”
He lived in Greece for a time then. “Now the only cheap things you can find there are fish that are still flapping.” But he also praised the affordability of Greek herbs and leeks, which put him in mind of something else. “What’s funny about the Greek supermarkets is there are ashtrays in the aisles, so you can put down your smoke” while you reach for the asparagus.
When it comes to writing, he said, “you need solitude and poverty for emotional richness. When you’ve got no money, you’ve got no worries. To be young and have no money and live in another country is a great gift.”
He was speaking by phone from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where he lives in an apartment with his daughter, Madeleine, who’s almost 5. These days, he recommends Berlin for a foreign stay. “It’s young, artistic. Williamsburg used to be like that, but it’s become a bit ritzy. On my block there are these indie bands that are now world famous.”
And here we come to another mystery of Simon Van Booy. He is a contemporary master of depicting hotel rooms, nighttime walks through city streets, and diners eating alone, chatting with waiters, leaving outsized tips. But for someone who conjures characters who are so often lonely or simply alone, and who communicate in a shorthand usually freighted with the profound, he has an awfully facile tongue. He’s witty, charming, seemingly devoid of hang-ups. He sounds happy.
“There’s a difference between solitude and emotional detachment,” he said. “In the solitude of writing you’re absolutely free. All those emotions that don’t have a place to go, that stay stored up inside me, go into my work. A composer once told me he’d become miserable if he didn’t write. It’s almost like an addiction. Without writing I’d quickly become unable to cope with life.”
He works it out of his system, particularly in 5 a.m. bouts at the keyboard. “Or I’ll just sit at my window like an old Polish man in Greenpoint with a blanket over my knees.”
The routine has paid off. His new collection of stories, “Love Begins in Winter,” was published last month by Harper Perennial. He’ll read from it on Wednesday at noon at the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton. He’s also got a five-book deal that involves a novel, which he said he’s 200 pages into, and the editing of three books of philosophy.
“And it’s all because of The Star.” Sort of. His first published story appeared in these pages in the fall of 2000. Others followed over the years, but Mr. Van Booy, who earned an M.F.A. from Southampton College and is still a summer visitor to the South Fork, described the pleasure of that first experience as being “not just about vanity, but the idea of sharing your work, what you’re thinking. Then, it’s back to the typewriter, and it’s like starting all over again.”
In the new book’s acknowledgements, the name Barbara Wersba appears, right after that of the German director Wim Wenders. She lives on North Haven and ran the Bookman Press, and he singled her out as an early influence. “She saw the story in The Star and published a slim volume. It was a limited edition, 200 copies. People have e-mailed me about it; they’ve heard of it, but it’s impossible to find.”
The experience gave him great hope, he said. He recounted a nugget of her advice: “A good short story is like drawing a circle around a fire — too far out and it’s boring, get too close and you’ll get burned.”
These days he dispenses his own advice, teaching literature and classes like Good and Evil part time at Long Island University’s C.W. Post campus and at the School of Visual Arts in New York. “Teaching freshmen is exciting,” he said. “It’s a bit like teaching someone to drive who’s never seen a car before.”
For a week next month, he’ll be in Newark, teaching inner-city kids and kids from shelters through Rutgers University’s Early College Humanities Program. “The goal is to get them to college. They’re brilliant students. They don’t have attitudes. They understand concepts that my freshmen miss: They understand the lust in ‘Macbeth,’ the revenge in ‘Hamlet,’ the deep philosophical quandaries.”
That’s one week of the summer he’s looking forward to. At other times, he said, it’s so noisy in the city he walks around with earplugs in. His editor once sent him a pair of noise-canceling headphones and a blindfold. “It’s like being dead for a half-hour.”
“What distracts me is junk mail. It interrupts my solitude. That and phone calls. The constant advertising — you know, everything is great.”
“Even in a hotel room in Sweden, there’s not as much solitude as you’d think. People ask, ‘Who’s that foreigner?’ My good friends leave me alone.”
And just then it was time to hang up. “The air-conditioning people are here. Imagine Camus,” he said, laughing, “interrupted by the mailman.”
Mr. Van Booy rang off, and not unhappily, for the next day promised another kind of break. He and his daughter had an appointment with a log flume in Hershey, Pa.