This is what William T. Vollmann tells me about death and getting the story. We are at the bar at Sazerac downtown, and are just wrapping up a long talk over the Scotch he generously ordered (Highland Park, him; Laphroaig, me):
One of the great things, I think, about death, is that as we get closer to death we start to sense our own aloneness, and so, whatever the story is, even if we want to hide it from ourselves, it has to come up. So it's always great to talk to dying people, too.
William T. Vollmann
Just past 50, Vollmann is no longer a have-gun-will-travel enfant terrible--but most except the enfant still applies. (When we spoke for this interview,his hazard-pay-worthy travels in Iraqi Kurdistan article had just appeared in Harper's, and he'd just finished writing another piece for Harper's on policy advances in suicide, with stops in Oregon and Switzerland.) His granite block of a head is topped by a buzz-cut stubble, his face weathered, and he couldn't have been a more agreeable former National Book Critics Circle Award-winner, telling me to call him "Bill."
Violence and Vollmann go together, not least because of his idiosyncratic, magisterial Rising Up and Rising Down, a 3,300-page, 7-volume examination of humanity's "moral calculus" as it applies to violence that more or less exhausted McSweeney's Books entire publishing budget that year. His first non-fiction book An Afghanistan Picture Show, or, How I Saved the World grew out of a youthful, action-seeking sojourn to Afghanistan in 1982.
If you mention trips you regret not taking, he says things like, "I went to Iraq in '98 for Saddam's birthday, and I wish I had taken the trouble to go to Babylon. He had it rebuilt and each brick was stamped with his name. I would have enjoyed seeing that." Your story was about study abroad, and you shut up and sip your Scotch.
So it might surprise you to learn that his latest book centers on esoteric Noh theater. Anyone familiar with Vollmann's prolixity will smile along with his his tripartite title: Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater: with Some Thoughts on Muses (Especially Helga Testorf), Transgender Women, Kabuki Goddesses, Porn Queens, Poets, Housewives, Makeup Artists, Geishas, Valkyries and Venus Figurines.
He's not kidding, of course. The list underscores that omnivorous Vollmann appetite for empathetic connection. In conversation, when cites someone else's opinion, he habitually takes up their voice and quotes them. It may be a paraphrase, but it's not derisive. He mentions several times how "alien" Noh is, and I hear, in part, a gratitude for the challenge of it.
As a classical Japanese art form, Noh theater doesn't seem to have a Western equivalent. Vollmann and I talked about whether opera is similar, but I got the feeling that, in terms of accessibility, our opera is more like Kabuki. ("Noh is for the warrior," a Kabuki actor told Vollmann. "Kabuki is for the general public." To which Vollmann later appends: "Noh's violence has most often to do with the severance of ties.")
You have to imagine an alternate universe where opera split at the time of Monteverdi, and a branch that distilled opera to its essence grew. Noh is music drama: it has a canon of plays; men play the parts of men and women, with masks and costumes; and its performance is ritualized and highly demanding of both performers and audience.
The book touches on many things besides, but its general preoccupations are with how we see and represent the feminine, the transience of life and the immortality of art, and empathy. Knowing of his 20-year construction of Rising Up, I asked how long Kissing the Mask had been germinating, and he told me, "I guess you can say I've been working on the book since, you know, 1975."
In the mid-'70s he was living in Bloomington, Indiana, going to high school there, when he ran across the book 'Noh' or Accomplishment: A Study of the Classical Stage of Japan, by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound ("published by New Directions--which is still in print, with the same cover, too, I think," he adds helpfully and encyclopedically).
Reading those Noh plays is sort of like reading the libretto of an opera and never hearing the music. But even so, I was very impressed, the stories were fairly haunting, and years later when I was interviewing this Noh actor, Mr. Umewaka, he was kind of laughing that I was so ignorant about Noh performance in general and yet I knew the actual stories better than a lot of Japanese. Because in a way, the plot and what's actually said is the least important part--and you can hardly understand it anyway because it's chanted in a peculiar way.
Despite this history--or because of it--Vollmann runs the opposite way from assuming the mantle of Noh expert, telling the reader in a self-effacingly jocular foreword that, "In brief, rather than a primer prepared by a Noh expert, this short book is an appreciation, sincere and blundering, resolutely ignorant, riddled with the prejudices and insights of an alien, a theatergoer, a man gazing at femininity." (Take this with a grain of salt: this "short book" is 500 pages.)
While he will at times leave Noh to go on to explore transvestism and transgendered life, chart the former faces of femininity (contrasting Greek statues and Norse-saga descriptors, for instance, with Andrew Wyeth's Helga paintings), and be made up himself as a woman, his approach is similar to what he tells me is how he plans his trips: "Just go with a big wad of money, and try to stay some place that's reasonably safe the first day, and then use that as a base of operations to find a local big brother or big sister who will teach me about life in that area. Then just make a plan based on what I learned, and expand and correct the plan as I go."
Vollmann is renowned for his intrepid writing and reporting, so it's heartening to hear that he doesn't just skip past no-man's-land warnings whistling a merry tune. His exploration of the feminine, then, begins with the "reasonably safe" landscape of Noh, with guides like Noh actor Mr. Umewaka Rokuro and mask carver Ms. Nakamura Mitsue. This is another difference from opera: the masks. Vollmann's intent at the outset was to do a wider survey on Noh, but the masks stole focus.
"I realized that although the warrior plays are very interesting--and I do talk about them a little bit--to me the most beautiful and peculiar thing was watching an actor express himself as a woman," says Vollmann. "I fell in love with these beautiful female masks... It's very strange to look down at the floor at one of these ancient masks, but it feels alive, it's not like a decapitated head, it's like a woman who doesn't have a body, all she has is a face. And she is looking at me and through me."
One reason for the masks' effect is that they're carved so that they seem to change expression as their angle alters. But there's more to it than that. As Vollmann explains, these masks literally do live a life of their own, as they are handed down generation to generation. His poetic synopsizing of Noh plots, along with his biographies of Noh notables, trips to see where the myths were born, takes you through empty centuries that fill with the restless ghosts of people long-dead: "The typically loss-centered Noh play "Semimaru" portrays two cast-off Emperor's children, the sister having been expelled because she is made, the brother because he is blind."
The Noh masks chart the evolution of human life (from young girl, to young woman, to middle age, to crone-hood) and devolution of human spirit, degraded by desire: one mask is made eerily beautiful by her need (for a lost lover, for the capital, for a child or a father), while another is disfigured by anger, jealousy, madness. Some are caught in between their human existence and possession by those demons.
There's a curious and powerful mirroring between Noh's disentangling from earthly attachment, and Vollmann's own mid-life recognitions of what's in his past (including his memories of Noh performances, to make the hall-of-mirrors regression complete). "No matter how attachment incarnates itself, says Noh, the finite will continue hatefully toward infinitude; the soul will be unable to die," writes Vollmann. "Like erotic attachment, the love between parent and child must also be dissected by death or separation, and then what? Every human bond is a trap."
Since there's only so much gazing into the abyss one can take in a given sitting, it comes as a relief when he suddenly zags to the present day to discuss a porn actress, visit geishas, and drop in at a Sunset Boulevard (the name feels more portentous than ever, here) transvestite bar.
"I started interviewing geishas and onnagatas because they are both representers of femininity in different ways," says Vollmann, "and I also thought, A Noh actor is a man acting like a woman, so let's go out and talk to some transgender people--who may consider themselves men or may not, but they're male bodies trying to express femininity and there has to be some common thread between what they're doing and what Noh is doing." (A little later he adds a postscript: "I'm one of these plodding German guys who likes to have a system. [Otherwise] it's a little disconcerting for me.")
He says this as if it's the obvious thing to do, after all, but in fact it's a defining Vollmann move, to sneak behind lines and gather information. And the landscape here is contentious--What is femininity? How much is performance? (Vollmann brings in Janice Raymond--called "transphobic" in some quarters--for an opposing viewpoint.) Though he admits that "I was brought up to consider that men should be men, and women should be women," his empathy confronts him with the consequences of categorization:
I think of some of the T-girls that I met…they're all beautiful in their own way, even if they have 5 o'clock stubble, and if I were to tell one of them, I don't consider you a woman, I think you're just a man dressing up as a woman, I can imagine the hurt in her eyes. I think, Who am I, to cause that hurt in someone's eyes?
So much of identity consists of who we are to ourselves. The aspect of who we are to others is interesting, too, and when there's any sort of schism between those two, then there's a degree of torment, usually. I think that women who say T-girls can't be women, they're appropriating our femininity and robbing us--I think that's very ungenerous. I can't see why it would possibly take away from their femininity, any more than I have to feel threatened if I see a woman wearing a necktie and a T-shirt.
There's a visceral nature to Vollmann's writing that I imagine is--along with his tendency to make a long story epic--why he's not on everyone's bookshelf. The plain truth is that while some people find that thrill in the gut appealing, as Vollmann strikes out toward the hash-shaded part of the map, others are just perturbed. They will find his interests unseemly, and complain that he's interviewed yet another prostitute. ("For example, some commentators view Vollmann's interest in prostitutes, both as people and as metaphors for contemporary existence, as juvenile.")
"I feel that if I don't find that visceral response then I've failed," says Vollmann. "Sometimes I don't know what direction a book is going to take me--I might just think, Oh, this seems like an interesting subject, and I do have confidence that everything is worthy of study, so let's see where this goes, and if I don't have any feeling yet, then I need to try harder."
In Kissing the Mask, the geisha Kofumi-san tells Vollmann, "If you're on stage, it's as if you're completely naked. A perfect artist needs the grace and dignity to exist in that situation." Vollmann heard in that something he took to heart. He speaks admiringly of her goal "to constantly do her best, live her life in that way, and to know that it's up to her to be ready to create something good and beautiful when people look at her."
Taking up the cause of public nudity, he says, "I feel that it's important for the sake of the book--not necessarily for me, if anything it's not particularly beneficial to me--to arrive at a point at which I'm naked, in the book, and then people can see who I am, and evaluate my prejudices and my sincerity.
"Sincerity is not necessarily a comfortable thing. The Japanese notion of seppuku, of harakiri, involves slitting open the intestines to show the sincerity--the belief was that sincerity resided in the stomach and in the entrails. Seeing somebody's sincerity there is not particularly pleasant--certainly not for them either--and all the more reason to think, Well, this guy must have been really sincere, if he was going to go to those lengths."
Speaking of those legendary Vollmannian lengths, early in the interview I stammered my way through what felt like five minutes of trying to find the words for my question, which boiled down to: "It's not necessarily meant to be a primer on Noh, that's not the motivating impulse behind it?" I was hoping he'd open up with a personal story, the golden pull quote, anything.
Instead he regarded me kindly, and said, "That's true, Michael. I agree." And waited for my next question.
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