Frederic Tuten: Books To Believe In

In Frederic Tuten's new novel, "Van Gogh's Bad Cafe," a wall suddenly appears in a desolate vacant lot on the Lower East Side. Through the wall, which separates the past from the present, steps the beautiful, redheaded Ursula: photographer, morphine addict, and lover of Vincent Van Gogh.

It's a book to be read slowly; there are no wasted words. Each sentence is like a smooth chip of agate lying in the palm of the hand - its striations slightly off-kilter, complex and unsettling, but inalterably right.

The scenes set in Van Gogh's 19th-century Auvers-sur-Oise in the months before his death glow with color and richness of language, while those in the New York City of today are painted in mundane language and tones of gray.

The End Of Elegance

The contrast reflects Mr. Tuten's discomfort with the present.

"I feel a dreadful sense of closure," he said. It's not just the dumbing down of America, but an end of elegance, politeness, and civility - replaced by money and vulgarity."

"I find a deep lack of appreciation of fineness in painting, writing, and music - a fineness that springs from the general historical culture."

"I don't want to sound as if I'm pontificating, but I feel I've earned the right to say this because of my personal and professional investment in what I believed was a meaningful culture."

On The Margins

That Mr. Tuten is both passionate and highly articulate is apparent; his warmth and friendly enthusiasm are harder to convey in writing.

The culture he talks about was first presented to him by the professors of philosophy and literature who taught him at the City College of New York, both as an undergraduate and a graduate student, and their successors during the 30 years he himself has taught creative writing and literature at the college.

"They were wonderful people," he said of the post-World War II professors, "real intellectuals, some escaped from Germany, rare and beautiful people. They were part of a culture I still believe in, which is becoming marginalized as a principle of conduct and moral success."

"I think we believed artists in general had to develop through moral and ethical discipline, hard work, apprenticeship, and a slow and hard-earned maturation."

College: The Way Out

As a boy, trapped in poverty in the Bronx because his father had left home when he was 10, books became both a hope for life and a temporary escape from its dreariness. Later, it was C.C.N.Y., a legendary training ground for working-class scholars, that enabled him to achieve a lasting escape.

"I always wanted to be a writer, from the age of 8 or 9 - by 15, I was sending poetry to New Directions. But I also wanted to be a painter. So I dropped out of high school to study art - this was in the Bronx of the '50s, where only hoods dropped out."

But at the Art Students League, he discovered to his chagrin that he was no good, that art was too difficult for him.

World Of The Mind

While he never attempted another foray into the art world from the working end of the paintbrush, so to speak, art has remained a dominant influence in Mr. Tuten's life. He has written art criticism for The New York Times, Art Forum, and other publications.

Once he entered City College, which was free for students who could not afford to pay, he found himself among people for whom the world of the mind was what mattered. It was a world that had its own reward - not a material one, of course - and that was held in esteem by the community.

"It's as if the exchange was, you can be a man of culture and have honor and esteem; we'll have the money," said Mr. Tuten. "Now, intellectuals have no honor, no esteem, and still no money."

"Van Gogh's Bad Cafe"

In "Van Gogh's Bad Cafe," when Ursula passes under the mulberry tree in the back of the Bad Cafe and squeezes through the crack in the garden wall, she brings with her all the artistic passion and intensity of the 19th century.

The besotted narrator, a drab figure known only as N, watches helplessly as she burns up like a comet amid the dross, drugs, and mediocrity of the present.

As one of Mr. Tuten's students, Walter Mosley, has written, the book "is a testament to the sanity of the imagination."

On a more mundane level, Mr. Tuten came up with a metaphor for what he was trying to get across about the diminishment of the spiritual and intellectual life of America.

"The most recent and horrific manifestation of this world of profit and gain, of course, is the closure of Books and Company. Despite the pleadings of the most serious artists, poets, writers, and intellectuals in the city, profit without mercy won in the end."

Mr. Tuten seemed deflated by outrage for a second, but drew breath for more. "There was a deep sense of culture there and I felt it came organically. It wasn't imposed on anyone. The place that should close is the Whitney, because I think what they have done is cultural assassination!"

"I don't even regard the Whitney as an authentic museum," he added, "but a desperate showcase for the latest fashion. I publicly urge all people connected with American culture to boycott the place - if the curators had any courage, they would resign en masse in protest."

Books To Believe In

His arrows spent, Mr. Tuten then allowed the interview to return to its appointed track.

An advantage of his lifetime involvement with City College, he said, was a steady job, which meant he could write what he wanted. He has had a small output because he wanted to produce books he could believe in, books that would live up to those he admires, like Flann O'Brien's "The Third Policeman," Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano," and Juan Rolfo's "Pedro Paramo."

In 1971, to much acclaim, he published "The Adventures of Mao on the Long March," which has just been reissued in paperback after being long out of print.

"Tallien: A Brief Romance," inspired by an obscure 18th-century French revolutionary, was published in 1988, and "Tintin in the New World," where the French cartoon character grows up and gets a sex life, in 1993.

Sense Of "Closure"

"Most likely, all my novels together, including all the foreign publication rights, have earned me what a hot young writer could have got as an advance in the '80s," said the novelist.

Outside, the trees were weighed down by blossom and redwing blackbirds, the sun shone, and green shoots pushed up through the earth.

"It's so pleasant to be here," said Mr. Tuten, who is an attractive, rumpled man who doesn't look as if he's filling the coffers of Hampton Supergym. "It seems wrong to sound so pessimistic."

"But even here in 'the Hamptons' - I hate to use that dreadful, generic word, like Gstaad or Monte Carlo - I feel this sense of closure. It threatens to become just a resort for multimillionaires' palaces, without an appreciation of the earth, the sea, the birds, landscape. . ."

Friends All Around

"I love this area more than anywhere else on earth," he said. In part that is because this is where his friends, most of them painters, live - Dorothy and Roy Lichtenstein, who illustrated the covers of two of his books, David Salle, Eric Fischl, whose tender illustrations run through "Van Gogh's Bad Cafe," Eric Kraft, and others.

"I have no children or surviving family," said Mr. Tuten, "but I've been extraordinarily privileged in my friends, and they have become my family."

He also counts himself lucky to have been in the company of many remarkable women - not necessarily lovers - starting from when, as a child, he was on a television show called "Youth Wants to Know," asking "hokey questions" of Eleanor Roosevelt.

Interesting Women

And what about the lovers?

From his first wife, Simone Morini, an older Italian woman "better looking than Ursula Andress" and a doctor in classical philology who changed his life completely, "there is no woman who has been important to me who hasn't stayed with me somehow," Mr. Tuten said. "I'm either haunted by the loss or nurtured by the memory."

"And if my heart has been broken a few times, at least it was by interesting women."

And, like his love of art, they have made their way into his books, which are all about love of one kind or another.

Ursula, missing Van Gogh and having found no reason to stay in 20th-century New York, tries to return to the past, but cannot. She goes back through the crack in the wall but melts away in a blur of light just as Van Gogh finds her.

Anniversary

As the painter settles down in a corner of a field - "Pure was the sky, an icy sheet caught in a sun of pale Dutch butter" - with Ursula's revolver in his hand, a flock of crows rises from the green mown hay.

Just such a flock of crows rose from a field in Bridgehampton one day when Mr. Tuten was passing on a bicycle, startling him by the resemblance to Van Gogh's "Wheat Field With Crows." Having later discovered the day was the exact anniversary of the artist's suicide, he started writing "Van Gogh's Bad Cafe."

So if we can't return to a past we yearn for, and the frenetic experience and fool's gold of the present leaves us unsatisfied, what's to be done? If you are Mr. Tuten, you rely of the sanity of the imagination and turn it all into books.