Steven Martin On "US CONDUCTORS"

I've enjoyed Martin's, Glinsky's, and Michaels' works for what they are, as xoadc has said. (What does your screen name mean?).  I think US Conductors is a fun read, if taken with a huge scoop of salt.  (I can enjoy Shakespeare's "history" plays as theater, although they contain more Tudor propaganda than actual facts.)

I just finished the novel this morning, and I think the first two sentences of the "Afterword" sums it up quite well in Michael's own words.  For those of you who have not read the novel, here is what the author himself says:

"This book is a work of fiction. It is full of distortions, elisions, omissions, and lies.  Termen was not a murderer.   As far as we know, he did not practise Kung-Fu. Anyone seeking the true tale of Termen's life must read Albert Glinsky's meticulously researched "Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage "

Luna - as for my screen name... it's simply the way i used to sign my emails to friends, and i recently decided to use it as the stage name for my musical projects... to acquaintances i would simply sign off "adc" (my initials... for amanda dawn christie)... but for close friends, i would add the "xo" as in... Xs and Os... a term of endearment... xoadc... i decided to use it, because i like the fact that my initials can stand for either an Analogue to Digital Converter... or for A Direct Current... or... if I pretend that there is a second middle name that starts with a "C" (the first C is silent)... AcDC. ;-)  so nothing magical there... just a term of endearment and some initials... signing off. xoadc

I kept trying to pronounce it, thinking there was a secret message there, maybe in Chinese?

Or, there are so many technical acronyms flying around sometimes on this site, I thought maybe it could be another one.

Beth

I went to a talk given by Sean Michaels on Friday, and the talk was entitled:
"Reimagining history to concoct stories" ... and I think that a lot of what he said was very enlightening in terms of his approach to and treatment of Lev Termen and Clara Rockmore, so I'll share a few notes that I took at his talk on the subject:

When dealing with a historical subject in "Us Conductors" he felt that he had two primary responsibilities:

1. To be explicit that the story of Termen in his novel was not true - filled with lies, exageration, and fiction.  So in both the forward and the afterword, he wrote explicitly that this novel was a work of fiction, and pointed readers to both Glinsky's book and Martin's film if readers wanted the true story.  He felt very strongly that he had to make it very clear to readers that the novel was not true.

2. To be as truthful and historically accurate as possible when it came to the Gulag sequences.  
He felt a much stronger responsibility to place emphasis on the accuracy of the stories of the forgotten unnamed people of the gulags, than on the life of a public character, such as Lev Termen, who already has biographies and documentaries out there and available to the public.  In addition to the extensive research that he did on Lev Termen and Clara Rockmore, Michaels also did a lot of extensive research on the gulags, so much so that he began having nightmares about them.  And yet, whenever he wrote the scenes about the gulags, he could only picture the  movie versions that we've all seen, and they didn't feel authentic.  So he travelled to Russia, and made a point of not only visiting St. Petersburg and Moscow, but also travelled to Siberia and Magadan, and spent time in those places where terrible things happened.  

When it came to the details of Lev Termen's life, Michaels played fast and loose with the details of his life in America, because for Michaels, it was more about exploring the more abstract concepts of love and music, and so he used Termen's life and relationship with Clara and the theremin as a way to ask broader questions about humanity in general.  Are we the conductors, like an orchestral conductor .. i.e. are we in control of our own destinies and relationships with other people (i.e. unrequited love)... or are we conductors in an electrical sense, like conduits through which the electriciy passes... do we conduct (control) love and music... or are we conducted by love and music... Are we conductors, or merely conduits?

In order to really explore that idea, he exagerated and changed Termen and Clara's story in America.

However, when it came to Termen's time in the gulags, Michaels stayed true to everything he found int he research.  For example, there was a scene in which Termen is asked to conduct a small group of musicians playing classical music outdoors while the workers walked to the mines one morning.  When writing the novel, he felt that particular scene seemed to be too romantic, cliché, and melodramatic, it seemed like something that would be fabricated in a movie to evoke emotion, and yet, in his research, that particular story was told by Lev Termen himself who described it as actually having happened, so therefore Michaels felt he needed to be true to it.  He struggled a lot with whether to keep that scene or to loose it, he tried to find the balance between being too refined and polished, and too rough.  He didn't want it to be too pretty.  He was trying to find the place on the dial between too rough and too smooth.

The moderator of the discussion, Mike Landry, commented on how often even most historians when writing "truthfully" about history are often really pulling stories out of the ether, like a thereminist, pulling music out of the ether... even when we think we are being "true" there is a lot of interpretation, selection, and manipulation of the facts that happens, even in biography and in documentary... so in fiction, there will be that much more.

I like that idea of historians pulling "truthful" histories out of the ether.I normally thought of historians more like archeologists digging for facts in the dirt of time... but I guess there is a certain amount of invention there too.

So overall, I would have to say, that in addition to being a compelling and beautifully written book as a work of fiction on its own...

that after hearing Michaels talk on Friday, I now have a much deeper appreciation and respect for Michael's approach to history:

1. He made it clear that it was not true... he used the historical characters as conduits through which to explore deeper issues... this is not a story about Lev and Clara... it's a story about love and music... and it uses Lev and Clara to tell that story...

I think it is perfectly respectable to do that... especially considering there is already a biography and a documentary on Lev Termen. It's not like his life story has not already been told.  It is publicly available.

2. He felt a responsibility to be true to the stories of the forgotten unnamed people of the gulags.  I think that is incredibly sensitive and  socially responsible.

So now, after having read the book, and heard Michaels talk about the immense amount of research he did, and then how he very carefully considered how he would deal with that history, and which parts he would be true to, and which parts he would distort, and why he was distorting them....  I now think that Steven Martin was way off base in his response. 

When I read Steven Martin's response... it reads like a rant that was written in an emotional state late at night before bed... without self-censure, without filter, and perhaps even without sincere reflection.  I wonder if he still feels the same way, or if he might regret some of the things he said... I think we've all probably at some point ranted passionately about something late at night, and then later softened our opinions and wished our words weren't quite so harsh.  So, I would like to believe that the harshness of Martin's words had more to do with his late night state of mind, than his actual thoughts... However if that's what he actually still thinks about then novel, then I think he's way off base and out of line.

i should also mention that the above is merely my interpretation from his talk on Friday... I only shared the bits that resonated most with me... he said a lot of other things too.

I also just got back from a reading by Michaels tonight in a neighbooring town, and after that reading, someone in the audience asked the question: "How do you feel about writing fiction based on historical characters?"
to which he replied: "You mean how do I feel telling lies about real people?"
He then went on to discuss how he considered at length about how far one could go, what was ethical and what was not ethical in the fictional treatment of stories based on real people.  Two things stood out for me in his discussion of this:

1. he said that if had he written this book in a time before the internet, he would have felt the need to stay much closer to truth in terms of the characters of Lev Termen and Clara Reisenberg... however, given today's ready access to the internet, and the fact that the official stories of both Lev and Clara are out there, and easy to find either on the internent (wikipedia, web forums like this one, etc. etc. ) and that the factual biography book and documentary are both easy to find and buy online, he therefore felt more freedom to play loosely with their characters and life stories, because if readers wanted to find the truth, they can easily do so.

2. he used the kung-fu as a way to blatantly indicate that his version of Lev Termen was fictitious.  Even though he wrote clearly in the introduction and the afterward of the novel that it was fictitious, he also created certain embelishments to Lev Termen's life that were so far from the truth, extreme and outlandish, that it would be obvious to most readers that it is not true... specifically the kung-fu part. 

Anyhow, for what it's worth I thought I'd share what I heard him say about his own approach to history and fiction in those two presentations.

Amanda, the quote about historians pulling "history" out of the ether really resonates with me.  As a former theater historian, I always felt uncomfortable attempting to do performance reconstruction, reception alalysis, and speculation about the motives and approaches of the authors themselves, and even worse when articles I'd published were quoted by others as evidence for their own arguments.  "But I just made that up!" my head always screamed.  My dissertation advisor's favorite adage was, "We are making knowledge."  That never sat right with me.  One of many reasons I am not in academia today.