13 Questions for Greg Gerke
Greg Gerke has published In the Suavity of the Rock (Splice) and See What I See (Zerogram Press), a book of essays. He edits the journal Socrates on the Beach.
Greg, self-portrait
What are you reading now?
Too much, but I’m not truly completing them. Fiction-wise there is Jacques Roubaud’s The Great Fire of London, as well as Proust’s Against Sainte-Beuve and his essays. It’s a mixture for Proust because Sainte-Beuve has work that is the skeleton key to the Recherche. I’ve also taken on Wordsworth’s The Prelude and some of the attendant criticism that goes along with that, mostly from Geoffrey Hartman. Proust and The Prelude seem like kindred spirits.
What book(s) most altered your taste in literature?
Probably three periods of reading fit here. First was reading the poems of Wallace Stevens about 16 years ago. Then the essays of William Gass about a year later. Then the novels of Joseph McElroy starting just as the pandemic began. I think all of these are connected—Gass and McElroy were, of course, inveterate readers of Stevens, and Stevens himself came to life on figures that also hold heavy in the formers’ fictions: Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Rilke, Valery.
I would guess that the simply fact that all these sentences, lyrical or not, add up to a work of the imagination that can stay with one for years and change how they see life, how they live it.
Describe the last time a work of literature art affected you physically?
Seeing Cezanne’s large Bathers painting at the Philadelphia Museum. It was a sublime experience. I just kept looking into it, more and more. I had seen it before but at a time when I wasn’t looking at a lot of art. This time I had been prepping for Cezanne, reading about him, mainly in the T.J. Clark book, but also Merleau-Ponty’s wondrous essay “Cezanne’s Doubt.” It was an astonishing viewing, with a number of Cezannes just around the corner from it—the museum also has it viewable from the far end of a corridor that goes through many rooms. The Bathers was left unfinished and he worked on it for seven years, but it seems quite finished to me—the form is true to the content, though to say this in regards to Cezanne is kind of lunacy.
Please share a passage from the book nearest at hand.
From A World of Love by Elizabeth Bowen:
The sun rose on a landscape still pale with the heat of the day before. There was no haze, but a sort of coppery burnish out of the air lit on flowing fields, rocks, the face of the one house and the cliff of limestone overhanging the river. The river gorge cut deep through the uplands. The light at this hour, so unfamiliar, brought into being a new world – painted, expectant, empty, intense. The month was June, of a summer almost unknown; for this was a country accustomed to late wakenings, to daybreaks humid and overcast. At all times open and great with distance, the land this morning seemed to enlarge again, throwing the mountains back almost out of view in the south of Ireland’s amazement at being cloudless.
Something is going on here. The landscape is alive in a way it normally isn’t in other books. The country of Ireland, the weather, and the landscape all come together in a beautifully wrought passage of prose, with much lyricism. The “land” “enlarges” itself, “throwing the mountains back almost out of view”—the language calls out to be taken to someone’s breast.
How do you treat the books you read?
I don’t like to write in books at all. More so I write notes in a separate notebook.
What quality do you most appreciate in a novel?
This is a difficult question. I would guess that the simply fact that all these sentences, lyrical or not, add up to a work of the imagination that can stay with one for years and change how they see life, how they live it. It’s quite incredible that The Great Gatsby has stayed with me all these years since high school—thirty-five. I felt some connection to it then and that connection has stayed solid through my whole life, though I don’t go back to it too much now. But it lives within me.
Who is an author you feel should be more widely read?
There are so many. I think all the writers we’ve published at Socrates on the Beach should be more read, save William Gass. I’ll highlight five and their best book: Jen Craig—Wall, Gabriel Blackwell—Doom Town, Christina Tudor-Sideri (who you’ve interviewed)—Schism Blue, Genese Grill—Portals (essays), and Mark de Silva—The Logos. These mostly happen to be fiction—novels. It should answer the question about no good novels being written in our current time. All these works are the most interesting creations of form and content in the last three years that I can imagine. They should be dominating the headlines because they are doing things that safe writers, who get all the press, can only dream of. These are our Modernists.
What book are you avoiding reading?
This would have to be Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities—though I have read the first 125 pages a few years ago. I know it is a masterpiece, I just keep coming up against times where I fear I’ll start it and not go through the whole thing—Proust took 3 years. It’s much more manageable—and Musil’s main current translator, Genese Grill, is waiting for me to do this. I keep putting it off, but there is no good reason.
[Literature] will do things to you that you will never know were done, like ghostly visits.
What novel would you add to our current season (on Family)?
I would add Christine Schutt’s Florida, in that it looks at family in a very heartfelt and lyrical manner, more in the Virginia Woolf mode and kind of in contrast to the other books on your list.
What book would you like to be the last one you read before you shuffle off this mortal coil?
Scary. I don’t know. I think they will all be with me.
If you were to design a literature course around a singular word what word would that be and what three books might appear on the reading list?
Contradictory:
The Tunnel—William Gass.
A Frolic of His Own—William Gaddis.
Mrs. Palfrey at the Clairmont—Elizabeth Taylor.
In what character in literature do you most recognize yourself?
I think I see myself mostly in the narrator of Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. I know he sees much more than me, but there is a sense of how he uses the past to filter the present (and maybe not in such good ways) that I relate to and have done (sometimes to my own detriment). I often think of some lines in the middle, that end part one: “Abalone, I imagine the you are here. Do you understand, Abelone? I think you must understand.” These ghostly presences of others are often with me, too.
Why read literature?
Because it will do things to you that you will never know were done, like ghostly visits. You’ll read Henry James in college and hate it and years later he will pop up in your mind and you still might hate him, but you’ll find out he was right. Or you will love Raymond Carver and then meet Joseph McElroy and Elizabeth Hardwick later in life and it will be a beautiful maturing experience—you are a tree and literature wraps around you, marking your years.
You can find out more about Greg Gerke at his website.
Read his work, such as his novel In the Suavity of the Rock (Splice, 2024), his excellent essay The Response To Art Is Everything, and more of his writing on Medium.
Lastly, read Socrates on the Beach, of which he is the editor, for great writing by some of the best contemporary writers and translators.