Glen David Gold Interviewed

The Times July 4, 2009

Mike Harvey interviews Glen David Gold
The author of Carter Beats the Devil talks about fame, the strange ways of publishers, and why his new novel, Sunnyside, focuses on Charlie Chaplin

Glen David Gold is sitting in a corner of Mario’s Bohemian Cigar Store Café, in arty, beatnik North Beach, San Francisco. The author of Carter Beats the Devil looks appropriately at home with a beer in front of him amid the hustle of the landmark café where for decades artists, novelists and musicians have come to drink espresso and eat meatball sandwiches.

International fame sits lightly on the 45-year-old writer, and as we decide to move to a quieter Italian café round the corner he is nervous and excited about the reception that his new work, Sunnyside, is getting. He admits that he has stopped googling himself and leaves it to his wife, Alice Sebold, the even more acclaimed author of The Lovely Bones, to pick out the bits from reviews that he should hear.

The praise heaped on Gold eight years ago for Carter, a conjuring trick of a first novel about the lost era of the great illusionists and escapologists, means that there is much riding on Sunnyside for him and for his publishers. His subject this time is Charlie Chaplin in the early days of Hollywood and the opening scenes do not disappoint. Gold produces a masterly description of the Little Tramp, then probably the most famous person in the world, drowning off the North California coast while simultaneously causing a riot at a railway station in east Texas.

In reality, Chaplin is on the roof of the Los Angeles Athletic Club, about to have an encounter with his lover.

The scenes are drawn from a real episode of mass delusion when on a Sunday in November 1916 Chaplin was seen in more than 800 places across the US at the same time. It sets in motion a complex weaving of storylines and themes starring not only Chaplin but also Leland Wheeler, a lighthouse keeper’s son who winds up in the trenches of the First World War, and the bookish Hugo Black, who goes to Russia as part of a failed multinational expedition against the Bolsheviks. If that seems a bit complicated, well, it is. A host of co-stars and supporting acts people the novel — so much so that Gold provides a 43-name cast list at the beginning.

Sunnyside, by Gold’s own admission, is a different kind of book from Carter. If that work was a narrative romp, a rollercoaster that took the reader on an exhilarating ride through the life and loves of Charles Carter, a famous stage magician in the 1920s, Sunnyside is a work that cannot be read in a hurry. It is even, Gold suggests, a novel that might take you a month to read and then need to be read again (and again) to be fully appreciated.
Douglas Fairbanks Jr lifts Charlie Chaplin at a parade in New York, 1918, to raise money for the war effort
The power of cinematic fame in the formative years of the industry courses through the novel. In one memorable scene Russian peasants stare transfixed at moving images of Mary Pickford. Gold, born in Hollywood, says that the early screen stars were the first global celebrities — and that’s why people might claim to see Chaplin in 800 places at once.

It was, he says, a “brand new focus on a brand new hero in a brand new medium . . . It was a social experience to see Chaplin. I think this was new, too — people went to the theatre before, but not to see something that came out of a machine. Chaplin was the first appealing person to be mass produced”.

The idea for the historical novel grew out of an image Gold discovered when he was researching Carter. “There is a picture of Houdini and Chaplin with their arms around each other in one of Houdini’s biographies.But I could find no mention of the meeting anywhere,” Gold says. The episode fascinated him because, he says, Houdini was the first person to be famous worldwide for his image alone, not because of his status as a leader or king or religious figure. His successor, thanks to the silver screen, was Chaplin.

“I realised that what I had in my hand was a perfect metaphor for how the United States went from being farm country to being a superpower. The connection between the United States and Chaplin was Hollywood, which also went from being farm country to being a superpower.” The era is a critical moment in history, he says, with its reverberations still felt in the dominance of the US, politically and culturally, including the pervasive cult of celebrity.

Gold acknowledges that his wife is crucial to the writing process. It was Sebold who recognised that his authorial “voice” in the opening passage was perfect for the whole book, he says.

“My wife is my first reader. Before we became a couple we were critics of each other’s work. One of the things we had in common was that work was fantastically important and fiction was important. This gave us a good starting point. We don’t bulls*** each other whether we like something. That started in the workshop and that has continued,” he says.

Her book, the story of a murdered teenager who observes her grieving family and community, dominated the bestseller lists in 2002, selling 2.5 million copies in hardcover, a record for a first-time novelist. Sebold’s book was rooted in her own experience — recounted in her memoir, Lucky — when she was attacked and sexually assaulted while at university.

The couple married in late 2001, after Carter was published, but they had met six years before, on the first day of the master of fine arts writing programme at the University of California’s Irvine campus. He was wearing a motorcycle helmet in class because he could not remove it. But she liked the look of him anyway.

He says: “She shows me things in draft and there are points when I think my work is finished enough that I can show it to her. Neither one of us is the final authority on anything and we each have blind spots on each other’s work but we are both pretty good about it. I ignore her at my peril,” he adds.

The couple live with their dog in a house on top of one of the hills in an upmarket part of San Francisco. They have avoided the celebrity writer circuit since their dual success. He has written short stories and essays and she has published The Almost Moon, in 2007. Gold says it is enough for them simply to enjoy being able to support themselves by writing. Little, he says, has changed for them on a day-to-day level.

He checks himself and quickly adds: “I always hated it when I was unpublished and a writer would say in an interview that it is no different on the other side, it’s the same sort of struggle. It’s not the same sort of struggle. When I talk to someone and they say, ‘What you do for a living?’ and I say ‘I am a writer’ and they ask, ‘What have you published?’ I can tell them. They may not have heard of it, but that bit of identity is so affirming.”

He is similarly quick to dismiss suggestions that they are a literary power couple. “I don’t understand what that means. Is there a secret handshake?” he asks.

For all this modesty, there will be another round of publicity for the couple in December when the movie of The Lovely Bones comes out. Directed by Peter Jackson, it is a star-studded affair, with Saoirse Ronan as the murdered Susie Salmon, Rachel Weisz and Mark Wahlberg as her parents, Susan Sarandon as her grandmother and Stanley Tucci as George Harvey, the killer.

Gold was also close to seeing Carter made into a movie. It was optioned by Tom Cruise at one point and a screenplay was written, but the project is now officially dead, he says. He recently went back to Hollywood to pitch a TV series about a love triangle at a suicide prevention hotline.

But for now there is the publicity tour for the UK launch of Sunnyside. A minor publishing furore broke out when Gold’s British publisher, Sceptre, announced that it was to make the hardback available exclusively through Waterstone’s, cutting out the rest of the book trade. Independent booksellers complained that it was unfair for them to have to turn away customers.

The publishers eventually relented and brought forward the general publication of Sunnyside with the trade paperback to follow in September.

Gold is rather nonplussed by the controversy. “My first reaction was that I know that there are books that come out where they don’t get reviewed, but the novelist’s advance gets reviewed instead. I thought this might be the first time in history when the promotion plan got reviewed but the book didn’t,” he says with a smile.

His connection with his readers is important to him. He has a blog and after our meeting he e-mails me details of one reader’s comments to illustrate a point he was making.
Some early reviews of Sunnyside in the US have spoken of the novel being “overstuffed” with detail. Research is certainly a central part of Gold’s creative process. He realises that this dense, intricately researched work may not provide the literary snack that some might be looking for. But he takes real delight if, by the addition of a particular detail, he can bring a smile to the face of an aficionado of, say, the wheelbase pattern for a particular type of train used in a rural part of America in 1916. There is, for some readers, a sort of pornography in authentic detail.

Gold recently sorted out his library and counted more than 400 books on everything from observer squadron aircraft to 1920s cotillion etiquette that contributed to Sunnyside in some way. And then there were the thousands of hours spent in newspaper libraries and on the web, checking, ferreting out and sometimes getting lost in wonderful stories that, he says, he knows will never find their way into the work itself.

He describes how one of his most concentrated pieces of research involved trying to re-create a weekend in April 1918 when a liberty loan parade took place in San Francisco to raise money for the war effort. Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford were the stars of the show.

Gold spent weeks looking at the microfiche archives of several local newspapers in a San Francisco public library. He even photocopied pages from the papers and stuck them on his wall to get a better feel for the event.

The author denies that he is trying to achieve an “archaeological dig”. He says: “I am trying to give a sense of something that feels real to us today and by necessity is altered. I like to point out that fact by inserting the word ‘novel’ on the cover.”

The result, when Gold gets it right, is a richness of reality that shines out from the pages. But there has to be a sense, he admits, that he is also keeping the story moving forwards, that he is keeping the “marquee lights flashing”.

But if there is one reason, above all, for persevering with Gold’s new novel, it is the ending. This is a moment of true shock.

He says: “I was trying through the entire book to construct how it was that Chaplin went from being a great comedian to being the greatest genius in the predominant art form of the 20th century and, as any Chaplin scholar will tell you, something happened in 1918 that changed him.”

Having shocked you, Gold wants you to begin again and re-examine his novel in the light of what you have just read. In these days of 140-character Tweets, instant messaging and prose that reads like e-mail spam, it is a big aim, an old-fashioned one.

Gold says he does not measure success in the number of copies sold. Before we part and he disappears up one of the steep streets of San Francisco, he says that being a bestseller of books is a “terrible way to validate yourself”.

“When I was writing Carter I had 18 months of not writing anything at all. I went into a clinical depression. That was because I was so bound up in the identity of being a writer I forgot how to be a human being. I had to recover that. Ever since then it has been human being first and the writing has sort of come with it.”

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