A Layer Cake of Nostalgia
An interview with Christopher Tradowsky, author of "Midnight at the Cinema Palace."
I met Christopher Tradowsky a little over a year ago when Debbie Urbanski (author of After World and Portalmania) reached out to ask if I’d like to join a cohort of other authors with books releasing in the summer—an invitation I count among the greatest gifts of the past year. Christopher’s book, Midnight at the Cinema Palace, was set to launch a few weeks before mine. As we all chatted on Zoom, getting to know one another and sharing our excitement and anxiety, I was delighted to discover that he was also an art historian. What a crazy coincidence! And after reading his beautiful novel, I decided we had a lot to talk about. What follows below is the result of that exchange. And, if you haven’t picked up his book yet, I urge you to do so.
You teach art history at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, MN, in the Department of Art and Design, and creative writing in the MFA program at the same school. (You wear many hats!). You are also a writer and a painter, a true Renaissance man.
That’s a very flattering way of putting it, but to be honest, I’m kind of a scattered person, I suppose! But the thread that connects it all is art. I love the arts, especially the visual arts and creative writing, and I’ve made a career of teaching both. I especially love helping students translate the visual into the verbal, which encompasses both visual analysis in art history and visual description in creative writing.
Can you give us a brief synopsis of your book?
The novel is really about finding your people and creative community. Walter, my protagonist, moves to San Francisco in the summer of 1993, he’s just turned 22. For a while he’s adrift in a dazzling new town—it takes him some time to find his people. But then he meets a couple, Cary and Sasha, who blow his mind because they live as though the norms of gender and sexuality don’t apply to them. (Today we might call them nonbinary or genderqueer.) All three are avid cinephiles, and their escapades are regularly echoed or framed by film references—each chapter title is taken from a classic (or not so classic) film. There are other plot points, but at heart it’s a character study that explores how Walter is transformed by his love for his two friends and for San Francisco itself.
You have described the book as a love letter to that city, and I can see why. Your opening paragraph is so painterly: snow falling on San Francisco, bathing it in white. I love how it makes time slow down and changes the city from a fast-moving hub to a relic. It becomes nostalgic and poignant even before the story begins. Can you tell me a bit more about writing those pages? And perhaps more about your process?
I often think of my creative writing as painting by other means, and frequently I begin with an image, a setting or tableau, and I’ll start by describing it. As to the opening image of snow falling on San Francisco, this was an actual recurring dream I had when I lived there, since (unlike Walter) I really did miss snow in the years I lived in California. It wasn’t the first thing I wrote, but I wrote it very early on, and I knew right away that I wanted it to open the novel. Mood is of paramount importance to me, and the dream of snowfall set a gently ironic, slightly enchanted mood I hoped to maintain through the novel. After that, I wrote most of the story in order, following the chronological narrative. It may be because I cannot figure out how to write a more sophisticated narrative that jumps back and forth in time! I hope one day I’ll figure out how to do that.
When we spoke, you said that the teaching of art history requires some of the same skills as fiction writing: the ability to look closely—to note detail and structure in both objects and space—and the ability to tell a good story. Can you expand on this?
Yes, close observation and analysis, good storytelling, and research are three aspects that art history and creative writing share. (The amount, type, and application of research required for each differs the most, I think). Writing fiction necessitates close observation and analysis of human behavior, of course, if your characters are going to be believable at all. But, in a strange way, whether examining an artwork or human behavior, I think the skills of observation are the same: slowing down, registering subtle and overt expressions, considering motives (hidden and patent, which might be in conflict), observing group dynamics, recognizing signs and patterns. It’s all pattern recognition, in a way. That sounds cold, doesn’t it? In a cold way, I’m describing empathy. As for details, you can probably tell I’m a fetishist for precise details. I think the right detail, captured precisely, can make an entire scene come to life. That’s actually a lesson from painting applied to writing!
Was there a passage or two that you particularly loved writing?
You know, it’s funny, but I tend to remember the pleasurable parts of writing and forget about what annoying, difficult work it can be. I guess this is a good thing, if it were the other way around, I would have quit long ago! I feel like I’m dodging your question. I don’t want to say, “I loved all of it!” because that’s not true, but my memory is very forgiving when recalling the passages that were hard and even painful to write.
This week I’m having some students read about the flow state, which I believe is crucial for aspiring writers to access, with relative ease, if they’re going to be writers. I love writing, and I have found equal pleasure in different aspects of fiction writing (dialogue, description, summary narration, etc.). In any case, I have to get into the flow state; that state where the real world dissolves, and it’s just me, my characters, and the world of the story for as long as I can surf that tunnel of water and light.
Meanwhile, I can’t express to you how funny it is to me that I just used a surfing metaphor. I would break my neck as soon as I set foot on a surfboard!
Your area of expertise is Contemporary Art. You wrote your dissertation on Sherrie Levine, who is best known for her series of appropriated Walker Evans photographs. Her work questions the value of authenticity and originality, the very foundation of authorship (and genius). Is there any way that your exploration of her project overlaps with yours?
This turns out to be an especially complex question for me, because it speaks to two opposite poles in my personality, a kind of internal paradox. Sherrie Levine’s work strongly appeals to a side of me that loves the most austere avant-garde practices. Levine’s appropriative work from the early ‘80s still has the power to disturb viewers nearly 50 years later. It really struck a nerve, and I think that’s amazing. I have a fascination with modern and contemporary works that approach art’s degree zero, which I sometimes think of as the least possible art, where many viewers wonder where the hell the art went. So, Duchamp’s readymades, Rauschenberg’s white paintings, Cage’s 4’ 33”, Fluxus scores and other conceptual works. All of these test the boundaries of how we define art, the artist’s role, the institutions that uphold them, and so forth, which is inexhaustibly fascinating to me. This doesn’t really show up in my novel at all, except that Lawrence, the seasoned filmmaker who befriends Walter about 1/3 into the novel, is a true avant-gardist, and he gently reprimands Walter for his love of conventional films from Hollywood’s golden age.
As to the opposite pole of the internal paradox I mentioned, see below…
You came to art history through painting. What did (do) you paint when you have the time? Is there a freedom in putting a brush to canvas that you don’t find in fiction writing? Are there other differences between the two creative media? Does fiction writing unlock something else for you, for instance?
So, the other part of my personality loves very lavish, sensory, and expressive art forms, Baroque painting, opera, 19th-century novels, and other old-fashioned, staid forms. I studied how to paint realistically, using traditional oil methods, and I painted traditional forms (landscapes and portraits and such) which I tried to queer. I don’t have much time to paint now, but painting was always sheerly pleasurable for me. Spending hours mixing and playing with color? What could be more fun? There is absolutely a freedom to painting that writing cannot capture—it’s exactly the freedom from language. From the first gesture, you are already in the realm of the ineffable, and unless you cover your canvas with text, you stay there.
On the other hand, creative writing is instantly more cerebral, because language is your medium and you’re stuck in it. But it can be incredibly visual and, in a way, more sensorily enveloping than painting. Good descriptive writing can invoke unpaintable visuals, but also textures, smells, and sounds (both the description of sounds and the music of the language itself). Plus there is the unbeatable magic that happens when setting, character, and story all cohere and come to life in the reader’s mind, beyond the author’s control. Even film cannot match that level of imaginative alchemy, I believe.
You spoke about the magic of archives. Did you ever have a wonderful moment in an archive? How does research make you feel? And did you have to do any for your book?
Research is the part that does not come naturally to me at all, I think maybe because I’m too dreamy (lazy?) and would rather speculate about reality than confirm it. Most of the novel I wrote from my imagination and my sensory memories of San Francisco, but I did look things up, and I had lots of conversations with old friends to make sure I was getting things right. I was careful; I wanted to avoid anachronisms. That said, I do love archives and I spent a fun day in the San Francisco History Center checking my work on a number of things. For example, the interior of Sears Fine Food, which I describe in detail in one chapter, was completely overhauled, in the aughts I believe. I loved the old interior, but I didn’t fully trust my memory, so I searched and searched for period photographs of it and found only a single one. Oh well! In the end it is more poignant, I think, to write about something that is completely lost to you.
You also talked about art history as a “rescue mission.” I love this so much. I think fiction offers the same opportunity. In Port Anna, I was able to resurrect the memory of a cottage my parents owned when I was a child, as well as the owners who built it. Miss Gilmore and Miss Whitehead, professors at Bryn Mawr, were a couple. I have heard from many of my readers how much they love the “Misses” and how important they are to the story. It makes me indescribably happy that they haven’t been forgotten. Is there some way in which Midnight is also a rescue mission?
Yes! I loved the Misses, too! Actually, I pinpointed the moment in Port Anna when Gwen behaves most like an art historian. It’s when, inspired by Steven’s photographs of demolished houses, she calls him up and declares: “This has to be a book!” That is the art historical impulse, I think. Don’t you agree? Basically, it’s the hunch that something unique will be lost if you don’t capture it the best you can with the tools you have. Even if the art itself isn’t in danger of disappearing, a crucial insight could be lost, and the loss of that perspective risks diminishing the art. One thing I love about art history is that, if you’re doing it well, it requires you to match the creativity of the work you are writing about. Part of what you are preserving is the creativity of the work, its openness, its liveliness, and if you reduce the work’s creativity or shut it down, you have definitely failed.
So yes, fiction, too, is a rescue mission. This may sound corny, but I think that in fiction, what we are preserving, primarily, is sensation. A history of queer San Francisco in the early ‘90s could tell you about the aspects of social life, the staggering number of AIDS deaths, community activism, the rising tech industry, and so forth. My goal was to capture what it felt like at that place in time, the sensations: the sights, the smells, the music, the attitudes, the pace of life, the joys, the anxieties. A good history might capture some of those aspects, but my aim was not to instruct or edify the reader, but to transport them, to make them see and feel.
I loved how much you used color and light and texture in your descriptions. There is a scene that features a tablecloth set with China and crystal. It reminded me of old master paintings: fruits and meats spilling over the rich silk cloth, the twinkle of wineglasses and candlelight. Was that on your mind when you wrote that?
I wasn’t thinking of any specific painting, though I have studied so many old paintings I think they suffuse my imagination at this point. In this case I had a tableau in my head and the scene emerged from the tableau. I knew I wanted Cary to hold an over-the-top dinner party in an unexpected location, something very stagy and spectacular. The enchanting phoniness of the Macy’s Christmas displays fit the bill. I’m such a visual person, I saw the scene very clearly: the fake pine grove, the furniture placed incongruently within that setting, all the lights and presents and fake snow. A lot of writing for me feels like trying to concretize images that flicker in my head; they solidify as I write them.
There is a single painting that I can cite as inspiring a moment in the novel. Walter’s first glimpse of Sasha reading in Sears Fine Food was inspired in part by the ethereal Gerhard Richter portrait Lesende (Reader), which SFMOMA owns.
I’d love to hear more about your love of film and how it influences your life and writing.
Well, in terms of how film influenced Midnight, my main characters are all queer, and queer folks have a special affinity for film noir. I think it’s partially because it’s melodramatic and campy, but also, think about the gender dynamics: film noir trades in hyperbolic gender archetypes, but they’re all twisted, in a way. The icy blonde can be both hyperfeminine and tough as nails (i.e., a drag queen); the macho detective is usually protecting a banged-up heart of gold. He’s a secret softie, maybe his fatal flaw. And the villain, as we talked about, frequently becomes more feminine or queer-coded as their villainy escalates. But in each case, the gender dynamics are not straightforward; they’re skewed, which makes these archetypes very fun to play with, even (perhaps especially) the problematic ones. (As drag performers know.)
Was there a film you had in mind for “Solar Flare”? I wondered if that had ever actually happened.
No, no film directly inspired it. But I have a fascination with artworks that self-destruct, that you can only experience once. I’m thinking of Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York, the giant kinetic sculpture, a machine that caught fire and blew up during its staging in 1960. Or Fluxus performances where they would “play” an instrument by destroying it—you can only do that once—and then you need a new violin. The ephemerality of the performance is prized above its preservation and commodification. Film is quite ephemeral (it used to be more so), so I imagine the task Lawrence (ed: the former film director who befriends Walter) set for himself was: how can I make a film that will be seen only once (or a small handful of times, in different settings) and then disappear?
The scene when Lawrence talks about the Elusive Pimpernel (I never knew that history!), you wrote: "Walter had never heard anyone talk about films the way Lawrence did now, as visionary or revelatory. Something about the film revealing something beneath the visible, as subtext is somehow beneath the verbal, yet revealed by it.” This is exactly how I think about art history, as excavating what lies beneath. Do you?
Yes, absolutely. And this is clear in Port Anna: we suspect right away that there’s something behind (or beneath) that sailor’s valentine! An art historian would suspect as much.
I tell my students that great art rewards investigation, which, in the simplest terms, means great art has layers. They may be literal, physically layered in the work itself, or found within a historical or theoretical discourse the work helps illuminate. Either way the process is the same: you dig down, and in the process of digging, the work becomes richer and richer. Bad art is thin. Your investigation comes up empty.
The above gives the impression that I am in the business of making judgment calls about good or bad art, which I almost never do! I try to avoid them.
I did find Sasha a bit elusive, a kind of beautiful phantom that floated in and out of the text. So I loved when Walter remarked that he was like Garbo, "A sphinx, a gorgeous riddle.” I wonder if that is how you imagine him?
Of the trio of main characters, Sasha is the most enigmatic. He is somewhat opaque to me as well. I don’t want to say too much about it, except that I felt Sasha needed to be that way. Walter and Cary both project their desires onto Sasha, romanticizing and idolizing him in the demeaning, confining way that women praised for their beauty have always been, it seems. It was important to me that, even as they become closer and closer, Walter remains blind, somewhat, to who Sasha really is, until very late in the story.
About that last sentence: don’t you think that this is the project of the writer, too? Scraping the dregs of memory for a story that is (always already) slipping through our fingers.
Right. I recently described Midnight to a friend as a “layer cake of nostalgia,” like, six super moist chocolatey layers of nostalgia, filled with a vanilla Bavarian cream of nostalgia and frosted and piped with more nostalgia … I’m joking of course. But the desperate urge to reclaim and preserve the past is there, for the fiction writer, as much as the art historian. Our attempt to capture and preserve the past is always in part a fantasy, a projection. There’s no way around that. You’re doomed from the start to wind up with some amalgamation of truth and fantasy.
I’ve always been fascinated by this question: how do you preserve something without killing it? If you think about it, most of our techniques of preservation require killing in some way, draining the life and freshness from a living thing or experience. Freezing, flattening, embalming, pickling. So then the question becomes: how do you preserve the life of something without draining it away? In telling its history, how do you preserve the creative vitality of an art object? In telling a fictional tale, how do you preserve the true sensations and emotions, the liveliness of a particular time and place? This is an ongoing question for me, I don’t have a sure answer! Any ideas?
I wish I did, Christopher. In the meantime, your novel remains with me. Thank you.
