Madeleine Schwartz

  Elegies of writers often tend toward the bombastic, but it would not be an exaggeration to call Adrienne Rich one of the poets who mattered most to the twentieth century. Dedicated to poetry as a form of urgent discourse and committed to prioritizing a vision for women, Rich pushed the boundaries of both her poetry and her activism.



  Rich was born in 1929 in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of a former concert pianist and a doctor whose “very Victorian, pre-Raphaelite library” she devoured. Although she won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets’ Prize as an undergraduate, she did not immediately pursue her poetry as a professional, publishing only one follow-up volume while starting a family with her husband, an economics professor. When she published again in 1963, her poetry had become more vibrant and complex, beginning her tendency toward freer verse and livelier spirit that would only increase throughout her long career. Both a participant in the women’s movement of the 1970s and one of its chroniclers, she captured in her poetry the kind of stifled rage that pushed feminism to its peak. The issues of American intervention, the future of the arts, and the public role of the self formed a backbone for much of her later writing.



  At Harvard, Rich studied English. She became friends with fellow undergraduates Donald Hall and Robert Bly, with whom she double-dated. But Harvard was not totally welcoming—as a woman, Rich could not enter the Lamont Poetry Room or become a member of the Advocate. “From 1947 to 1951, when I graduated,” she would later write, “I never saw a single woman on a lecture platform, or in front of a class, except when a woman graduate student gave a paper on a special topic. The ‘great men’ talked of other ‘great men,’ of the nature of Man, the history of Mankind, the future of Man; and never again was I to experience from a teacher the kind of prodding, the insistence that my best could be even better, that I had known in high school. Women students were simply not taken very seriously. Harvard’s message to women was an elite mystification: we were, of course, part of Mankind; we were special, achieving women, or we would not have been there; but of course our real goal was to marry—if possible, a Harvard graduate.”



  A sense of restraint is visible in her early poems, three of which are reprinted on the following pages from their original Advocate publication in 1950-51. Much of the writing is quiet and formal; it seems to echo Rich’s early influences, such as Robert Frost. Her verse, though evocative and lithe, is marked by a controlled and formal precision. As he praised her poems as “gently and modestly dressed,” Auden just as graciously noted in his introduction to the Yale Younger Poets’ Prize that her pieces “respect their elders but are not cowed by them.” Rich was consciously attempting to fit her voice into the model that had been given to her.



  Yet Rich’s early poems are striking in their urge to discover what lies beyond the limits. Each line pulses with the recognition that something does lie beyond: a “whisper of a shade,” a “live thing” shivering, an uneasy moth exploring the “edge of light.” Her pressurized pentameter holds an energy that will eventually burst in her later poems, propelling her style beyond its metrical container. Rich’s Advocate poems are harbingers of her career to come.



  Years later, when Rich wrote “Twenty-One Love Poems,” an expansive series describing her relationship with another woman, the same voice appears to move more freely. The female of Rich’s poetry is no longer confined to her dark room. Instead, she asserts her identity, walks an astonishing spectrum of pleasure and pain, and stands in life’s direct path. The uneasy moth near the night-lamp is gone, replaced by a narrator who is ready to declare: “I choose to be a figure in that light.”

In 2007, *The New York Times Magazine *asked a group of young writers for essays about their college experiences. Most of the responses were predictable—addictions to good grades, new horizons abroad, the pleasures and terrors of youth activism. Then there was the piece by Sheila Heti, a Canadian writer who studied playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada before attending the University of Toronto to study art history and philosophy. 



Heti wrote about how she had come to the University ready “to uncover the great mystery beneath the surface of everything,” and had spent her first few months confident in her ability to do so without talking to anyone on campus. “That summer I ended a relationship with a guy who was more charismatic than I was, and he kept all our friends. Well, to hell with them.” This, it turned out, was a pretty lonely way of going about things, so instead she began to interview other students for a project, which, she explained, had no purpose. “Suddenly, the yellow-brick road to friendship seemed to unravel before me. I hurried home to the room I was living in near campus and came up with a long list of questions: What lies do you tell yourself over and over? For whom are you performing?”



I remember reading this as a senior in high school and gulping. If college was going to make me a new person, this was the kind of person I wanted to be. 



Young writers are often told to craft a “voice” or develop a “personal brand” (an oxymoron if I ever heard one) in order to be more attractive to readers. But the most exciting writing gives you a sense of all the contours of a person, not just a well-defined identity. Sheila Heti writes that way. Her work is bold and daring, but it never sounds pushed—as if writing were just another extension of her self .



Heti’s first book, *The Middle Stories, *was published in 2001; *Ticknor, *a first person narrative based on the relationship between the historian William Prescott and his biographer George Ticknor, came out in 2006. Her most recent book, *How Should A Person Be?, *is a novel and was published in Canada last year. *The Chairs Are Where the People Go, *a collaboration with the improvisation artist Misha Glouberman, will come out this summer. 



This conversation took place over the phone in two parts. It has been condensed and edited. 



 



***



 



*How did you write *The Chairs Are Where the People Go*?*



 



I had wanted to write a book about my friend Misha for a long time. I had written part of a book about him but it was bad. So instead we talked. He talked and I typed. Before that, we had asked friends of ours about things Misha was good at. We came up with a long list. Then we talked about every single one of them. Mostly he just spoke in a monologue and then I edited the book. 



 



*Much of your work is very collaborative. For *How Should A Person Be?*, for example, you interviewed your friends and transcribed interactions with them.*



 



I come from the theater world. I missed theater. I missed the part when you do a play with somebody. I missed how close you get—what happens when they become family. I wanted to think of writing the book in this way.



 



*That must have been a change from writing your novel *Ticknor*. *



 



I don’t even think I talked to anybody about the book when I was writing it. Writing the book was more like writing about a relationship. All conversations just with myself and I was stuck all alone with my problems. I had to be stuck in my head. 



That’s something I want to get away from. It was like writing a biography. I had to become *Ticknor. *My brain became a book’s brain. 



 



*When you are writing about yourself or your friend group, as you do in *How Should A Person Be?*, how do you distinguish between real Sheila and fictional Sheila? *



 



When I was writing *How Should A Person Be? *there was a lot of bleeding between myself and the person in the book. A lot of things that were in my personality and in my point of view were only there for the duration of writing the book. I felt like I had to be a certain way. Asking people for advice, for example. I didn’t know what to do, so I would ask people for advice. I wrote about it in the book. That was a part of myself that I thought was a turn off. But it was a temporary thing. When I finished the book, it was gone. There are parts of yourself, when, if you are writing, you feed that part. If I didn’t feel that way, they wouldn’t have been so exaggerated in the book.



 



*What about writing things that were very personal, like people around you? Or like sex? *



 



One is an artist in part to train oneself to see more clearly.  If you write about fictional people, you don’t have to account to them. You do have to account to real people.  If I write about my friend Margaux [heavily featured in *How Should A Person Be?*] and I get something really wrong, she can say something about it and be hurt by it. Doing this kind of work tricks you to be a little more conscientious. I don’t have to account to Ticknor. But I do have to account to Margaux.



For sex: I didn’t have it in an earlier draft of the book. But something about the book felt wrong. When I put the stuff about sex in, the book suddenly became whole. I wanted the book to be about the human experience. A person is also sexuality. This is obviously not a new idea. But I think it made the Sheila character more real and the questions in the book more real.



But that’s still just writing. It’s a work of art, it’s not my journal or anything. I don’t feel like anyone knows anything more about me. I don’t feel shame. And I haven’t gotten creepy emails.



* *



*Your books often play with the idea of handbooks, or self-help. Is that a genre you know well? Do you think it is more “useful” than the novel?*



 



It’s not that I read them any more than the average person. I read the Alan Carr book on how to quit smoking. And books by relationship experts. 



I think that the idea of self-help as a genre—it exists in order to change your life. But the novel is something more active. There is also truth and beauty. And there’s also a certain desperation to it. I like that desperation. 



This book that I am reading now is called *The Master and His Emissary*. It’s about hemispheres of the brain. There are lots of books about hemispheres of the brain. This one is the most convincing. [Because of it,] I am now trying to use my brain in a different way that’s more effective and more suited to the tasks. 



* *



*Your writing plays on these ideas of self-help and practical philosophy. *The Chairs Are Where the People Go* is subtitled “How to Live, Work, and Play in the City,” and it’s structured as short thoughts on various topics, much like a handbook.  *



** **



Yes, I was interested in applied philosophy, and really tried to answer questions about life in that language. Down on the ground. Do you give up your seat on the subway, for example? How do you make friends? Maybe there can be small answers [to big questions]. The thing about the hemispheres, for example. Maybe that can be useful. 



When I was younger, I always really wanted to abstract life. More and more as I get older I realize that this abstraction is totally devoid of life. It’s missing something true about life. Every situation is different from every other situation. There is always the temptation to have some big abstract answer, but life is not abstract. That is inaccurate.



We come from the century of big ideas and we’ve all seen how that turned out. Communism and fascism and all the modernisms, with their manifestos—those were big and wide-ranging. I used to love reading those manifestos, the futurist manifestos. I can’t imagine anyone trying to speak in that way anymore. It seems so dangerous. 



 



*The first book that is thought to be of the self-help genre, *Self Help* by Samuel Smiles, was published in the mid-19th century, a time that is generally associated with the novel. *



 



Well, the thing about *Self Help *is that it is not really like a contemporary self-help book, where you are given instruction. There are ten different men, great men, and you are meant to be inspired to be more like them—to be more loyal or more brave. So to a certain extent, it’s a bit more like the novel in format, and the idea that you can be better by imitation. But it is not that complex emotionally. Everything is so complicated now. 



These great men never seemed to struggle to be great.



When I wrote *Ticknor, *I read the biography he had written of Prescott. He made Prescott seem so great. That doesn’t make sense to our sensibility. It is impossible for one man to look at another man and see only valor. It’s a prejudice of ours to think that darkness adds complexity.  I think there are probably other kinds of depth besides perversion and so on. Like bad luck—that could be a form of character depth. 



 



*Do you see your work following in any traditions? *



** **



There are artists that I have been inspired by and excited by. But I feel that the idea of traditions happens in retrospect, so I wouldn’t put myself in one. And I think those narratives are fantasies anyway. I don’t see histories where there is this line of tradition. 



There are people I have been inspired by: Jean Cocteau, Radiguet. I respond to people who are very much doing their thing. Andy Warhol. The Chris Kraus book *I Love Dick. *The Paris Review interviews. Delacroix’s “Portraits of the Insane.” 



* *



*Wow, Radiguet. When I was little, my family would go on car trips and listen to audio books. One of them, I remember, was *Le Diable Au Corps*. I think I was about eight, and I don’t remember understanding much of what was going on, but his strength of person is so forceful in his books, even though he was so young when he wrote and when he died. *



 



What I like about him is that he said that great works of art are great in their failure. That their greatness lies in imitating heroes and failing. So that all great works of art are failures at being great. 



I’ve thought a lot about that in my own work. I am interested in the idea of the novel, the idea of the short story. But I have never been able to do either of those very closely—not because I try to do something so different from them. I just don’t think that I am so interested in telling stories. I am interested in structures. 



 



*Have there been things that you have tried to do that you have not been able to? *



** **



I have written short stories that were plain bad. There are certain things that I try to do that just suck. But that’s not interesting failure. You know it in your bones. I don’t put that stuff in the world. 



The other day I was giving a talk and I had a girl come up and say to me, “Everyone wants me to write a blog. I am not good at writing a blog.” I told her not to write a blog. I don’t understand why we so often feel a need to do things we are not good at. 



 



*So you have always known that you were good at writing. *



 



I’ve always had people respond to it. I remember being a kid and having to write a short story, thinking, this [story] is the worst possible thing. I did not understand why it was so bad. I was trying to write a story like the ones I had read, but there was nothing of myself in it. I only felt confident about my writing when I was able to write in my own way. It takes a while to get to that point. 



 



*You started out writing plays, and you’ve done collaborations with visual artists and filmmakers. Are there ways of art-making that you prefer? Some that you think are more effective than others? *



 



What I like about plays is that there’s not a lot of time spent describing what something looks like. I am not a fan of writing description because I don’t notice things. If you don’t write descriptions, you are relying on the reader. 



For me, I have a pretty strong imagination, so it’s kind of stressful to read description. I feel like I am undoing what I already imagined. I like leaving that part to the reader. It’s like a pact with the audience, and the reader has some work to do too. 



It’s like: there are some people with whom you can never get a word in. They just talk and talk and talk. They are very ungenerous. There is no room for the other person. There are books that are ungenerous in that way. If I see a book that is 1,000 pages, I think it is not very generous to the reader. They just want to tell you everything.



** **



*You mentioned that you like writing that seems to come out of desperation. Is that something you apply to your own work? *



 



I am not in a very desperate situation right now. I am actually figuring out: how do you write when there is not this desperation? How do you write from a place of conscious calmness? Writing needs to be meaningful to the author. There needs to be a reason to write the book—the kind of situation where you need to write the book or you won’t be able to live as well. So much of what I read—it could be written or it could not be written. It doesn’t have that necessity. Some writers have that. Henry Miller—I get the sense that writing is part of living for him. If he doesn’t write, he will not be living fully. I like seeing that in art.



 



*I read in a Paris Review interview with Jean Rhys that she could never write when she was happy, which struck me as a sad fact considering how much she wrote. Is that the same kind of necessity that you are referring to? *



 



No, it’s not about feeling bad. Someone can be writing in a state of great joy. What I mean is that it can’t be like a writing exercise. It has to be more than that. It has to be connected to the writer’s living. I don’t care to be shown off to. I don’t find people impressive because they show me an impressive skill. 



Making art is an instinct. As much as sex or wanting to eat. I think it’s a real drive, and it should look like that.

On Thursday, December 8, Mayor Menino announced that he would be evicting Occupy Boston. I heard about it  first on Twitter, where people were upset. Boston was one of the last places an Occupy settlement had not yet been forced out, and a restraining order had been protecting the site from police interference. In the newspapers, the announcement was framed as a success for Menino— finally he would be able to take action against a movement that had “tested his patience.” I got a few emails—the occupiers were demanding that as many people come as possible to support the movement. “You don’t have to get arrested,” they said.



My friend J and I got to the Occupy site around 10 p.m. Most of the tents had been removed, along with anything valuable, so what remained were scattered structures standing in mud. People were picking up trash and putting it into bags; a sanitation truck was parked on the street. On one end of the camp, next to a big building, a large crowd was holding a General Assembly about what to do if arrested. A man was yelling: “The police are violent people! The police don’t have law degrees! Don’t ask the police what to do—they lie!”



We went to  find the protest chaplains, whom J knows. They were standing in a circle, deciding on a plan for the evening. They didn’t want to be arrested, but they wanted to show their support. It was an attractive group—tall men and women wearing white albs and clergymen’s outfits underneath their coats. A few of the members had come from Martha’s Vineyard, and they had that sort of precise, chiseled face that only New England makes. It was concluded that they would sing throughout the evening and bless the eviction as it occurred. A young man wearing a white alb spoke up. “We can say: Boston is watching, America is watching, the whole world is watching, and the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost is watching.”



A marching band made up of old men had been playing in front of the T stop since we arrived. People were dancing in front of it. Members of the media arrived, and began to take pictures of the dancers. The band began playing “Solidarity Forever,” which was written in 1915 and has the same tune as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”



Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite,



Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?



Is there anything left to us but to organize and  fight?



For the union makes us strong.



We walked around the camp. At this point, there were maybe 1,000 people. Everywhere, there were camera ashes. Across the street, a group of people were standing in front of an office building, watching. “I am the 99 percent and I want you to leave!” a man shouted.



In the sacred space tent, we took off our shoes and kneeled in front of a small table with books and electric candles. People were dividing up religious books so that they wouldn’t get destroyed. One man took the King James Bible, but there were no takers for a small bamboo garden in a jar. In a corner, a young man was talking about growing up in a Southern Baptist family and began to read the Book of Samuel out loud.



Later that night, after I left, the chaplains married two protestors. The crowd spilled out of the camp and into the streets, marching down Atlantic Avenue at 1 in the morning. Occupy Boston wasn’t evicted that night, but it was the next, when the police arrived at 5 in the morning and arrested 46 people.

By the time Romain Gary shot himself in the head, the French-Russian writer had published over fifty novels under four different names, directed two movies, fought in the air force, and represented France as a consul. His marriages—first to the British writer Lesley Branch, then to the American actress Jean Seberg—had brought him celebrity. He had enmeshed some of France’s literary giants in an elaborate hoax that broke fundamental precepts of the country’s cultural institutions.



But Gary always saw his own life as a series of incomplete drafts. Even as he planned his own death, he remained on the path to self-improvement. “To renew myself, to relive, to be someone else, was always the great temptation of my existence,” read the essay he left with his suicide note. It’s perhaps no surprise that biographies of the author often seem overwhelmed by the slippery nature of their subject. “Romain Gary: The Chameleon,” “Romain Gary: The Man who Sold his Shadow.” Gary was one of France’s most successful writers, but he lived the life of a spy.



Roman Kacew was born in 1914, perhaps in Moscow but just as likely in Kursk, a small city near modern-day Turkey. His mother was poor and Jewish, an outcast in the Russian Empire. He never knew his father; the name Kacew came from a second marriage. From a young age, the boy began inventing stories about his heritage. He decided before the age of ten that he came from greatness: his father was really the Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine, with whom he shared a fierce stare. 



 



Kurksk didn’t last long. Next came Vilnius, then Warsaw, then Nice in southern France. Moving was tough for Kacew, who was scrawny and had to learn new languages fast. It was worse for his mother, a former actress who worked as a maid to support her son. She was driven to prove her son’s greatness. In each new town, she pushed the young boy to find his passion—dance, music, theater—always leaving open the possibility that he might write.



Looking back on his childhood in his semi-autobiographical novel Promise at Dawn, the writer would later paint this search for a passion as a search for a public identity. The question of a pseudonym runs through the novel. Even as his mother exhorts her son to impress his French peers, she asks that he tailor his work to their expectations. “‘We have to find you a pseudonym,’ [my mother] said sternly. ‘A great French writer cannot have a Russian name. If you were a virtuoso violinist, it would be great, but, for a titan of French literature, it just won’t do.’” 



 



The name Romain Gary came to him while he was defending the country in the air force. Romain was just the French version of what he already had; Gary was a new flavor. In Russian, it means “burn,” and it’s a command in the imperative. He knew it best from gypsy love songs. “Gari, gari… burn, burn my love.” His colleagues began to call him Romain, then just Gary, which they often took for his first name. Gary Cooper was a popular figure in wartime France.



After the war, Gary became French secretary to the United Nations, then General Consul in Los Angeles. He was well-polished and a good public speaker. Pictures from the period show him hand-feeding elephants or looking thoughtfully through a mansion window. One has him signing books, dressed in a navy military uniform.



It was in Los Angeles that he met Seberg. She had just finished filming Breathless under the direction of Jean Godard. He had just turned forty-five and was getting bored with his marriage to Lesley Branch. At his wife’s suggestion, he began to date the actress as a means of distraction. But Seberg soon became pregnant, and Gary left one woman for the other. They were a public item—the pair dined with the Kennedys and with General Charles de Gaulle. She entertained as the beautiful actress, while he, acting the part of the expatriate intellectual, always showcased his refinement.



A reporter eating dinner with the couple described Gary as the Pygmalion to Miss Seberg’s Galatea. “‘You should see what I gave her to read,’ Gary began. “‘Pushkin, Dostoevski, Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert...’” “‘Madame Bovary!’” Jean sang out. “‘That could have been me if I had stayed in Marshalltown one day longer.’” Gary may have seemed a little eccentric. But still he was a talented diplomat: he could make any young American see her life reflected in the French canon.



Gary was slowly infiltrating this canon. His novels, published under the official name, met with instant success. A European Education was acclaimed by its 1945 audience; Jean-Paul Sartre speculated that it might be the first great novel about the Second World War. By 1956, Gary had achieved France’s highest literary honor. His novel, The Roots of Heaven, won the Prix Goncourt, an award given annually to the best novel written in French. 



As Gary rose in fame, his marriage began to wear. A rumor surfaced that Seberg had slept with a member of the Black Panther group and was now carrying his child. The actress became depressed; she was found on a tropical beach half-dead after an attempted suicide. By the time Seberg gave birth to Gary’s child, the two had already agreed to separate. A few months earlier, Gary had discovered Seberg was having an affair with Clint Eastwood and asked for a divorce. It’s said that he first challenged the actor to a duel.



 



Emile Ajar was a ruse. Romain Gary had been “classified, catalogued, taken for granted” by the critics, which, to the author, precluded them from taking his work seriously. Emile Ajar, however, was relevant and fresh. He was a Franco-Algerian medical student living in Brazil in order to avoid charges of terrorism. And Ajar’s first novel seemed to offer the novelty it promised. Loosely translated as Cuddles in English, Gros-Calin tells the story of a statistician who falls in love with his pet python. It is a touching, humorous book, and only a few critics discerned that certain lines echoed Gary novels.



Ajar’s next was even better, said the critics. Madame Rosa (Life Before Us) seemed to seamlessly bring together all of France’s post-war worries. The earnest account of an Arab boy living with his Jewish foster mother, an obese Holocaust survivor, touched on guilt, immigration, and French identity. To the discerning reader, The Life Before Us might have seemed a rewrite of Gary’s Promise at Dawn, with the attention now shifted to another boy-mother pair. To France’s literary elite, it was worthy of its own Goncourt. Ajar’s own ambiguous identity made the prize all the more important. The name was neither definitely Jewish nor definitely Arab, which, to critics,  tinged the political narrative with an uncertainty. By uncovering the author’s true identity, France might earn insight into the book’s meaning.



Emile Ajar was carefully planned. Gary would send manuscripts to his son Diego, who, like the supposed Emile Ajar, was living in Brazil. Diego would then send them to the publishers in Paris. Only Seberg, Diego, and a couple of close friends could claim to know Ajar. But the Goncourt prize made the scheme difficult to hold up. The recipient of France’s highest literary honor can’t just hide out across the Atlantic—the secret had to be divulged. Before the ceremony, a revelation was released to the press: Paul Pawlovitch, Romain Gary’s distant cousin, had written the books. As a decoy for the writer, Pawlovitch accepted the prize and moved into Gary’s apartment building, where he and Gary continued forging papers and preparing speeches for Emile Ajar.



They were successful—even when Gary revealed himself to be Ajar in his suicide note, several critics refused to believe it. After all, they had made a place for Ajar in their own pantheon. “Ajar marks the revolt against the literature of our daddies; Ajar is the anti-cliché combatant,” wrote one critic. In France, The Life Before Us is the highest selling novel of the twentieth century.



 



When the ten members of the Academy Goncourt come together to discuss books, they’re self-consciously making history. On the second Monday of each month, some of France’s foremost writers and critics meet in a private room on the second floor of an elegant restaurant. There, they talk about the state of French writing and survey the country’s talent. The search for the best novel of the year pauses in August, when the group splits for vacation. Academy rules are strict—one book a year, and the award can be given to any author only one time. It’s been that way since 1902, when Jules and Edmond Goncourt founded a prize to celebrate French prose.



The room has hardly changed. I ate there once, on my grandmother’s eightieth birthday. The “Salon Goncourt” is shaped like an egg and lined with pictures of momentous gatherings. When you close the large wooden doors, you can’t hear a noise above the clinking of silverware on porcelain plates.



This was the institution against which Gary was writing. It was insular and back-scratching and he hated it. “Outside Paris there is no trace of that pathetic little will to power,” he wrote. So as he conformed to French standards, he was also chipping away at them. He had integrated himself into the country’s cultural monolith only to gnaw at it.



 



Romain Gary spent much of his existence inventing secrets, but at the end of his life he was very clear. As he prepared to kill himself in 1980, he wrote in an essay:



“And the gossip that came back to me from fashionable dinners where people pitied poor Romain Gary, who must be a little sad, a little jealous of the meteoric rise in the literary firmament of his cousin Emile Ajar…



I’ve had a lot of fun. Good-bye, and thank you.”

This October, NASA unveiled a proposal to carry people to Mars and leave them there. The project, called the Hundred-Year Starship, would fly four astronauts to the planet, resupply them with food and basic needs, and then let them adapt without the chance to go home. A NASA representative explained that the one-way trip would be more economical than going back and forth to Earth. Plus, by staying on the planet completely alone, the astronauts could thoroughly get to know its make-up. Mars is a rational first choice. It has water, it is near the sun, and it’s our closest neighbor—just a three-month trip away. If we’re going to settle the universe, it’s a good place to start.



The move constitutes one of the agency’s most pointed attempts at inhabiting new planets, and its boldest. Participants in the “Hundred Year Starship” would be denied most of the psychological amenities that mark usual NASA trips—return dates, accolades, the hope of seeing loved ones again. But Pete Worden, the Director of NASA’s Ames Center, defended the plan as a step forward for American space exploration. “The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds. Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars.” Now, he suggested, the agency pursues the idea headlong.



It isn’t far off to think of such a trip as a new form of colonial expedition. The proposal’s supporters speak of it with a sort of conquistador rashness, as if preparing to revive the Age of Exploration. In a paper about one way trips to Mars in the Journal of Cosmology, Dirk Schulze-Makuch and Paul Davies—from the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Washington State University and Arizona State University, respectively—describe the project thusly: “Explorers such as Columbus, Frobisher, Scott and Amundsen, while not embarking on their voyages with the intention of staying at their destination, nevertheless took huge personal risks to explore new lands, in the knowledge that there was a significant likelihood that they would perish in the attempt.” Only a bold project, they explain, could push space exploration forward in a time of scientific close-mindedness. Never mind the risks extreme weather poses on a planet where the temperature is often 100° Celsius below zero, or the possibility of radiation sickness, which an astronaut might acquire from the atmosphere without proper shielding: “The main impediment is the narrow vision and the culture of political caution that now pervades the space programs of most nations.”



The agency has begun to work on the project. According to the Daily Mail, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, is one of its main sponsors.



 



Gumption and a spirit of adventure are all well and good, but the fact is, if you send a human into space, you’ll have to account for his well-being. Enter the space architect. Space architects oversee the design of the cramped living quarters of the International Space Station or the loud cabins of a space rover; they make sure that whatever is carrying humans through the dark void is equipped to do so. It is their job to make the complex systems of wings and motors built by engineers function as a whole. Dr. Larry Bell, a professor at the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture at the University of Houston, the country’s only space architecture degree program, explained it this way to me: “We are kind of like the general practitioners. We are not just looking at the toes or at boob jobs. We’re trying to understand what things are and how they connect together.”



Such supervision is necessary to ensure that all the engineering science is tailored toward human safety. “Being a licensed architect means that you are qualified to protect the health and safety of the public in the built environment,” says Marc Cohen, an architect who has worked for NASA. “Space is a much more unforgiving environment than Earth. If you’re not qualified to protect the health and safety of the public on Earth, how can you do it out there?” Or, as Bell puts it: If you’re going to explore extreme environments, you’ve got to take care of “the human factor.”



Most architects work with models and blueprints, but how do you design a structure when terrestrial experience is no guide? Space architects have to figure out how designs will function when moving in different gravity, or when attacked by incredibly fine dust, or when faced with radiation. A good deal of time is spent looking for the appropriate analogue on Earth. Guy Trotti, who works at MIT and helped found the Sasakawa Institute, rides on the “vomit comet”—a plane whose movements simulate zero gravity—and tries to use his designs under the shaky conditions. If he can’t open a bottle or turn a handle, he builds it again. “I also spend a lot of time underwater with mock-ups,” he says. Some lunar rovers he designed got tested in the desert. He also once participated in an effort to set up a NASA base in Antarctica—the cold weather and uneven surfaces are a good approximation of other planetary surfaces. Today, much of his work is done in labs at MIT, where harnesses and simulators can make you feel like you’re walking on the moon.



External environment isn’t the only challenge. Much of the trouble in building something like the International Space Station lies in making it fit for human life, especially in the case of long-term projects. When Constance Adams, a space architect who once worked for NASA and is now the president of a technical consulting firm, designed a habitation for Mars, she created a closed-loop system that would both provide nutrients and process human waste for the 425 day-long mission. The key involved miniaturized, adult versions of edible plants—culled from the George Washington Carver Institute—that would fit in the small space. Another design, “TransHab,” would expand into an inflatable shell as it was released from a space shuttle. In the crew galleys, there would be room for a small gym and a bit of socializing space—enough, according to an article about the project, to foster the necessary “interpersonal relationships” and keep the crew healthy during a confinement of over a year. The International Space Station, where six to eight astronauts live at all times, has crew quarters fitted with binding straps so that occupants can comfortably nap, check email, or read without floating away.



 



As the potential for human space exploration and colonization has grown, so has the field of space architecture. In 2002, to celebrate the advance of the discipline, a group of space architects led by Adams wrote their own “Millennium Charter Manifesto” outlining the methods and goals of the space architect’s job for the public. The manifesto recorded their motivation—“we are responding to the deep human drive to explore and inhabit new places”—and important ideas that each space architect should keep in mind, such as “Human Condition” and “Humility.” In so doing, these architects were placing themselves in a long line of visionary endeavors; architectural movements, like Futurism, have often marked their own importance with a manifesto.



This expansion is not just theoretical though. The Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture, which started in 1987, now trains a dozen polymaths each year to work for space agencies and private design companies. Space architecture has moved into the public eye as well. A few weeks ago, I attended the Moon Ball, a forum on whether humans would ever be living in space. Unfortunately, the event was also a big party, closed to those under twenty-one. I spent much of the panel on “How we will live on the moon” and the difficulties of low-gravity design arguing with a very real and very weighty bouncer. Nearby, a man dressed in an old astronaut costume was trying to drink water, but couldn’t fit the liter bottle over his round metal collar.



The announcement of large-scale programs and private investments in the space industry has helped kindle the hope that space exploration will expand in the next few decades, and space architecture with it. Many architects describe the field as poised on the edge of an explosive growth. The moment space is privatized, Guy Trotti tells me, space exploration “will be the largest business on earth. Like maritime exploration was three hundred years ago.” This may be an overly optimistic view. Adams says that she has worked on three separate programs to replace the space shuttle with a newer spacecraft, and none of the resulting designs have been built. With every announcement like the one about the Hundred-Year Starship, there are new budget cuts, indefinite holds due to lack of funding, attempts at downsizing.  “We’re going to retire the space shuttle with nothing to replace it,” Adams says. “We are hoping that Congress will put some serious funding into this program sooner rather than later, so that the U.S. gap in space access and the loss of essential intellectual capital may be kept to a minimum.”



While the development of the field is well underway, the question of who began the practice is still in dispute.  One architect told me that the field grew out of industrial design. Raymond Loewy, best known for his Studebaker designs and his new take on industrial sleek, helped NASA build the first American space station, Skylab, in the mid-70s. He drew the trays and tables, chose the color palette and fought for the inclusion of a window allowing astronauts to look out at the space they were flying through. NASA conceded a 24-inch hole. But who was the first practicing “space architect”? Marc Cohen says it was Maynard Dalton, another SkyLab contributor. When I asked Trotti, he responded, “You’re looking at it.” 



 



On a recent Wednesday night, the astronauts in the International Space Station were trying to watch a football game. I was listening in via NASA TV, a channel set up by the agency to connect the station with humans down below. The team that the astronauts really wanted to watch (Missouri, I think) wasn’t coming through the communications antenna, so they watched Texas Christian University instead. As they settled down to enjoy the game, their talk was interrupted by a loud voice: “There’s no wagering in sports.” After that, the astronauts seemed to have stopped conversing, and all I could hear was a high-pitched sighing sound as the station’s camera tracked its flight over an icy pole.



“It is unknown on year-long interplanetary missions, where there is no Earth to look at and no planet to walk on, what activities can mitigate the negative effects of boredom, confinement, and limited social interaction,” say the authors of Out of this World: The New Field of Space Architecture, a book on the discipline. Even when the engineering science is solid and the budgetary concerns are resolved, there’s one problem that remains to be ironed out: Human beings are not meant to live in space.



Many of the space architects I’ve talked to over the past few weeks have made references to the “craziness” of their work. For some, it is the continuation of a childhood fantasy. “I’ve always wanted to build spacecrafts, since I was very young, and now I get to do it for a living,” says Marc Cohen. “In the end isn’t space tourism the dream of the child inside each one of us?” asks Out of this World. The sentiment even shows up in some of the designs for future space tourism infrastructure. A blueprint for a space hotel based on the TransHab has candy-colored walls and furniture that could have come from a Fisher Price catalogue. The pieces of the hotel are made out of the most advanced material NASA knows to create, but, in the mock-up, they look like they are made of plastic.



In conversation, there’s the inevitable comparison of the work to science fiction. Cohen likes Ursula LeGuin and Ray Bradbury despite being “somewhat disillusioned” by the unrealistic portrayals of the civil servants who work in space agencies. “A thorough encyclopedic understanding of science fiction help one to judge ideas,” Constance Adams tells me about her designs. “An idea that has some game has been dealt with in science fiction.”



One of the most recent science fiction movies about lunar living is called “Moon,” and it was directed by Duncan Jones, David Bowie’s son. The premise is that in the near future, humans harvest energy from the moon’s surface; one man supervises the process for a three-year shift. The main character has a strict regimen to stay sane—morning exercise, talks with his wife and child, a countdown calendar. He cannot wait to get home, but he has trained himself not to fret. Just as you become engrossed in the psychology of the man you’ve gotten to know—he’s even friends with a robot!—it turns out that he’s actually a clone. The movie turns into more of a thriller after that, and the strict regimen is left behind. By that point, the film has already answered its own question. What real human would want to cut himself off from Earth?



 



When the Hundred-Year Starship was announced, I asked Adams if she thought anyone would sign up were the project actually put in place. The “Starship” is unlikely to happen, she said—while the engineering behind it is sound, NASA would never commit to such a controversial plan.



“But if we announced tomorrow that we were looking for volunteers for a one-way trip to Mars, eight hours later, we would have tens of thousands of exceedingly qualified names,” she added.



“The hard part’s getting them home. The people who would adapt to that kind of situation might not handle going home. Imagine: you’ve left whatever you care about on Earth, and you have few ties there anyway. You’ve done this big adventure. You’ll never see Mars again.



“If you’ve got a crew of six it only takes one wild card to cause a problem. Who knows what someone might pull.”

Artists have always had assistants—Greek sculpture was carved in workshops, and Rembrandt painted with aides whose anonymity continues to cause curatorial headaches. But the figure of the “fabricator” is a relative newcomer in the history of art production. The fabricator was born only a half a century ago, when a push toward the use of modern materials and bigger, more complex projects meant that the art waiting to be created was unrealizable without a trained hand.



Fabricators cut, solder and engineer ideas into formation; they build and construct technologically complex visions on behalf of their author. Fabricators are not just helpers. While they follow orders, fabricators know something that their bosses don’t: how to make the art work.



Beginning in the 1960s, Robert Rauschenberg synthesized found object and painting, technology and sculpture to generate art that whose form no longer offered easy understanding. Donald Judd stripped his creations to their most substantive essence so that his compositions equaled their content. In doing so, each obscured the lines between art and material, object and creation. Artistic innovation required a technical equivalent. For Lawrence Voytek[1](#_ftn1) and Peter Ballantine[2](#_ftn2), fabricators for Rauschenberg and Judd respectively, each day meant finding practical and mechanical solutions to ideas in gestation.



Voytek mastered material so that Rauschenberg didn’t have to. Welding, bending or just experimenting with anything industrial—from aluminum (he used over two tons in his 27 years working for Rauschenberg) to Renobond, 3 mm thick skin coating for skyscrapers—Voytek shaped the substance of Rauschenberg’s hybrid inventions. Ballantine, a carpenter, cut and glued Judd’s freestanding, discrete, plywood structures into their Minimalist simplicity. Unsupervised in his workshop, he built Judd objects as he might have built a table, so that the art would echo the kind of well-made appropriateness suitable to a finished product. He estimates that in his shop, entirely set up for Judd fabrication, he constructed 250 plywood cubes over the course of his career. In conversations with both their fabricators, one can hear the excitement of building art “like it had never been done before” resound twenty years later.



 Fabrication meant different things to Rauschenberg and Judd. For one, it was a means for increased experimentation, for the other, a way of distancing the artist’s hand from his creation. Rauschenberg’s delegation was practical—he simply could not produce the work himself—whereas for Judd, the delegating a task meant transferring control. As a result, the two artists developed distinct relationships with their colleagues. Rauschenberg kept his fabricators close by. Judd had no contact besides the initial object order and its final pick-up. But today, both Ballantine and Voytek retain a fierce trust in the artists they worked for. It is always “my artist” and always “the work.” 



The Harvard Advocate: How did you get started as a fabricator?



Lawrence Voytek: In college at RISD, I worked a lot in the industrial design department. When I graduated, my wife-to-be and I moved to Florida, where I took classes at Edison Community College. [Robert Rauschenberg’s] fabricator before me had recently left, so I sent my portfolio to him [Rauschenberg]. Bob had me come out to interview. It was pretty intense. Bob was always a hero of mine. I had seen a lot of films on him. When I was going to school, some were into Jasper [Johns], some into Roy [Lichtenstein], but I was always into Bob.



I went and I knocked. He said, “I’m Bob Rauschenberg.” I said, “I’m Lawrence Voytek.” That day, [other assistants] showed me where the welder work and they asked me if I could weld an aluminum frame. No one ever told me that I had the job but they told to come back tomorrow cause they had more frames for me to work on. 



Peter Ballantine: I came to New York in 1968 to be in the Whitney Independent Studies Program, which was just starting. Judd was one of the teachers there. I ran out of the money I brought with me and in those days, the fashion was for artists who needed to make money was to be a carpenter or a plumber or an electrician.



I started working for Judd on his building on Spring Street as a carpenter. I learned carpentry on the job—out of books. I always said yes whenever he asked me to do something. In 1971, he brought me a paper with a sketch and asked me if I could make it.



HA: Can you describe the studio? What kind of work did you do?



PB: There was no typical day at the studio—there was no one studio. There was Judd’s building over at Spring Street. That was a studio and the idea-making happened there. But that studio was not a place where art got made; the Judd studio was not where things got cut and glued. The art was made in shops. There was my shop, one in Switzerland, one in Long Island City and others. The shops were small, with only 1 or 2 people. Or in case of Bernstein Brothers—an industrial metal shop in Queens where fabrication started, there were 5,6,7,8 people working but only one guy doing the Judd.



My shop was in my house. There was a lot of work to do. Judd was prolific and sometimes before a show there would be a big rush of things to finish. It was basically a small factory. When you are an artist fabricator, you sometimes end up pulling a lot of all-nighters. It’s not a 9-to-5 job. If you had a shop in your house, you could glue up at 10 and do another one at midnight. Weekdays, weekends, evenings and all that stuff—I didn’t make distinctions among those.



Sweating about the materials was a big part of the job. It’s a special problem in Judd’s case because you’ve got angles that have to come together with other angles. If you introduce curves into that, you’re in trouble. I was always looking for really good material. 



LV: Captiva [an island off the coast of Florida where Rauschenberg held his studio] was very magical back in the early 80s. Bob’s studio was a simple piling building that faced the Gulf of Mexico. You could probably throw a stone from the studio it into the water. Bob would be working upstairs, in a 35x45 ft studio with glass doors that facing the Gulf. It was painted white and he worked on a large table in the center of the room. The welder worked below the studio and there were a lot of mosquitoes and it was hot and balmy. The bugs and the wildlife—it was like being in a tropical jungle.



Bob was a collaborative artist and there were always a group of people working with him. I did all the welding and putting the pieces and the parts together. In the early years, we lived a very gregarious sort of party lifestyle, but it always focused around what Bob was doing. We would get everything ready for him during the day. He would wake up and go to the beach and hang out. Since he was part Cherokee, he would get a dark tan. Then he would have a nice lunch. We would get to the studio before the sun went down and everything would be prepared and then he would work.



My working hours were really crazy. Sometimes we would work through the night. At one point I worked 73 days in a row without taking a day off, just because we had so much to do. 



HA: How would you start working on a piece?



PB: Sometimes I got a phone call. Sometimes it would just be a discussion in person with me taking notes. Sometimes he gave me a drawing. But those were not engineering drawings. In fact, you would be surprised how un-drawing-like they were.  They were sometimes just ideograms—tools to get the work made. But I didn’t always need drawings because I knew his work pretty well.



Judd never stopped by. It wasn’t because the shop wasn’t close. My shop was a block and a half away from his studio. It was so close that you could walk over and discuss the new pieces that you were thinking about in the rain without an umbrella. But you weren’t running to ask, “Should I use a darker grain of plywood?” That kind of stuff—the type of plywood, where to cut the sheet, to a large extent the details of the joints—those were fabricator decisions. They were not Judd decisions. You just had to make those decisions. There’s a lot of amount of unspoken trust in fabrication.



When we had discussions, they were practical, not aesthetic. I knew what he wanted and he knew that I knew what he wanted. He didn’t have to over-explain it. Though in pure theoretical fabrication, we wouldn’t be discussing that at all. 



LV: Bob always had a lot of vivid dreams. I would come to work and he would tell me what he had dreamt. He would dream of a glass car tire and he wanted to make a glass car tire. That started a long journey of getting in touch with glass blowers and mold maker and finding the perfect tire that he wanted to mold.



I was also in charge of development and research, so I would read samples of what industry was playing around. Bob would see something and would say, “I want to play with this” and we would order it and he would start playing with it.



Bob was a real hand-on person. He was also like a little child—he wanted to see everything. He would come up with ideas and he wanted to see different materials and different ways he could do them. So I would make samples. He would say, “I want this” and I would show him this, this, this and this and he would say, “I like this one the best.” It was like getting a show-and-tell together. It was pretty wild—like bringing a child a new toy to play with. And we would buy these expensive exotic materials and he would just play with them.



PB: Judd made a point of not playing around in his studio.



The studios were removed from him and he from them. That was essential to do what he was trying to do. Judd was looking to work within other traditions and he was looking for well-made pieces. He got control in his work by ceding control and putting the work into these old traditions of good workmanship, like carpentry and sheet-metal work. This was fabrication in a straight, classic factory kind of way, like the Ford plant in Michigan, in which you don’t know who is fabricating and there’s no fabricator’s hand. This way of working that Judd did, the idea of fabrication is now pretty well accepted. You could name 100 people who do it today, but in 1964, it was pretty unusual. 



The other day I was watching a Sol Lewitt wall drawing project going on nearby. Lewitt is famous for delegating the work to others. But while everyone was working, there were instructions taped on the wall. Those guys were working on a real set of instructions! And in “The Factory,” Andy Warhol might not be there for three weeks but then he was there. If you are going to delegate and supervise at the same time, that’s not delegation. With Judd, it was real delegation.  



HA: What do you feel when you see something you built in a museum? Would the work look different if it had been made by a different fabricator?



PB: I have a shop where I am the only person, alone with these pieces for their whole gestation and birth, so I have quite an intense relationship with them. Once they are gone, they were never my pieces, but when I am constructing, they are my something, “pieces” is not right word. I come back into a relationship like that when there’s damage and I have to restore the piece.  I can almost always tell my own work. Even though I strived to do top quality anonymous work, I can tell the way I did glue blocks.



I have a feeling toward the pieces I made that I would see in a show in Zurich almost equivalent to driving by an apartment in Chelsea that I used to live in when I first came to New York. It’s not, “That’s my piece.” I don’t have a proprietary interest and even, when I am looking at a show, I don’t go rushing across the room to tell someone not to touch a piece. They become as if I hadn’t made them.



LV: When I look through the Bob’s work, I can tell you this is an Eric Holt, this is a Brice Marden. When I started working for Bob, I changed the shop and I brought in everything. Anybody else would have done something different. Even [art historian] Calvin Tomkins said in a review that he preferred Bob’s work before that high-tech fabricator, me.



But if you look through Bob’s work, I hope you feel it’s all Bob and not the apprentice helping. In some ways having the non-ego when you fabricate for somebody else and trying to make what somebody else wants while your attitude was invisible—that was always important in working with Bob. Sometimes people want their mark to be known. But I think that the vision of the artist should be valued. And that’s a strange thing. You don’t want to say “Look at me” you want to say, “Look at him.”



 



*This interview was conducted in three parts—one-on-one phone calls with Mr. Voytek and Mr. Ballantine respectively, as well as a phone conversation with both at once. The text was then condensed and edited.*





[1](#_ftnref1) Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Lawrence Voytek realized that he wanted to be an artist from an early age. He graduated Rhode Island School of Design in 1982 with a degree in sculpture and started working for Rauschenberg that same year. Since Rauschenberg’s death in 2008, Voytek has been completing approved works, including some for the Obama sculpture garden. When he is done, he plans on returning to his own art, both painting and sculpture.



[2](#_ftnref2) Peter Ballantine grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. He went to college in Colorado, where he was an art major. He fabricated for Judd from 1971 to February 1994, Judd’s death. He then spent ten years as an art supervisor for the Judd Foundation. Since 2004, he has worked as a freelance restorer and curator. Ballantine is currently organizing a symposium on Judd and fabrication to occur this April.