All Lit Up: What’s the most surprising thing about being a writer?

Endre Farkas: That I’m a writer. I didn’t have a standout moment when I decided to be a writer. I wanted to be a great soccer player. I wanted to fall madly in love. I didn’t want or not want to be a writer. Writing seemed to come easily, even when it was hard. It seemed as natural as the breath breathed in and out. Writing led to more writing. And so it still goes. What is also surprising is that I’m still writing after all these years, in spite of the fact that I haven’t become famous or rich. Revelation. Writing is not what I do. Writing is what I am. Maybe it’s a romantic notion, but it’s true for me.

 

ALU: Which writers have influenced you or had the most impact on your own writing?

EF: I’m a genre fluid writer, so I’ve been influenced by writers from different genres. I started my writing life by writing poetry. The first poet I encountered who influenced me, in the sense that he was the first poet I read, was Jozsef Attila, a Hungarian poet. I was in grade one in Hungary and everyone in class had to memorize and recite a poem. The poem I was given to memorize was “Lullaby.” It’s about a tired mother trying to convince her child to go to sleep. In each stanza, she lists a bunch of things that have gone to sleep, from creatures, to threadbare jackets, to streetcars to get him to go to sleep. I instinctively liked the rhyme, images and the idea of lists. I don’t know if I consciously thought that then, but I think it now. I can still recite parts of it. Sixty years later, I incorporated that poem into my first novel Never, Again. That’s influence.

       William Blake was the poet I most liked while in university, both for his poetry—simple and complex at the same time—and his weaving of social and political themes into his work. Being the sixties - and he being outside the mainstream of his time – he appealed to me. He made it into my second novel, Home Game. Blake and a high school friend led me to Allen Ginsberg, to his howling and yawping. I wrote a parody, Howl Too, Eh, that made it into National Lampoon and earned me over a thousand dollars (US). Not bad, Eh? Canadian poets David McFadden, George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, A.M. Klein and Leonard Cohen all influenced me in different ways at different times. McFadden turned me onto the quotidian as subject matter and Bowering to the Black Mountain poets. Marlatt turned me onto language, stream of consciousness, and rhythm, and Klein to my Jewish heritage as subject matter. And Cohen— he was mystical, cool and from Montreal. And finally, The Vehicule Poets. To know why, read  Vehicule Days:  An Unorthodox History of Montreal’s Vehicule Poets edited by Ken Norris (Signature Editions).

         In my plays and performances, it was Becket and Brecht who I looked to and read. Becket introduced me to non-realist possibilities in plays and Brecht to infusing social and political concerns into plays. “Food comes first and then morality” was a quote of his that I had pinned to my wall. Though, to be honest, I changed “morality” to “art.”

My prose—my most recent genre exploration—is influenced by my father who was a great storyteller, and Ferenc Molnár whose Paul Street Boys was the only novel I ever read in Hungarian—I was seven or eight—just before we escaped from Hungary in 1956. It was about loyalty, innocence, conviction, principled behaviour under stress, and individuality. It was a great read. I’ve even incorporated the novel as a “character” in both my novels.

 

ALU: Do you have a book that you’ve gone back and read several times?

EF: The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler. For its language, its observations and its hardboiled-ness. I channeled Chandler when I wrote Murders in the Welcome Café, a serial poem. There are books of poetry and favourite poems I dip into regularly. Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130,” Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence,” Ginsberg’s “Howl”, A.M. Klein’s “Heirloom,” Ken Norris’s “You are reading this too fast” and Carolyn Marie Souaid’s “Paper Oranges” to name few.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ALU: Do you have any rituals that you abide by when you’re writing?

EF: Not anymore. In the beginning, because I thought it was romantic and I couldn’t sleep, I used to write round about midnight to the cool jazz of Chet Baker, Miles Davis, etc. I also used to like writing first drafts by hand. I still do when on the road. I like the feel of my fountain pen, its scribbling/scratching on paper. Nowadays most of my writing is done on the computer. I also like to toke as a way of opening doors of perception. Editing, I do straight. I now write or not write anytime and everywhere. But one ritual I still abide by is showing up.