2024-10-01 05:47:29
When their mom died, the boys thought it was a game at first. They were convinced that he was hiding and watching them from somewhere. They would purposely pee on the toilet seat or spit toothpaste on the mirror to summon her. After a while, they cried when they lost her handwritten note to the school. And even later they couldn’t agree on whether or not she read to them before bed the night they refused to go to the bath.
Now the boys are growing up and playing first with dinosaurs, then with trucks, and finally they go to kung fu. And her father’s people say that boys “mainly need time”. But they also need to buy washing powder, flashlights or bows and arrows, argues the father in a book called Grief is with wings. Its author, the forty-three-year-old British writer Max Porter, presented it last week at the Fall festival in Prague’s DOX Contemporary Art Center.
It was an opportunity to get to know a fiercely original, poetically written novel about grief, which won the Dylan Thomas Award and was translated into dozens of languages, including Czech. Since its release in 2015, she said, a stage production has been made with Cillian Murphy, star of last year’s Oppenheimer, and a feature film is now being made. In it, the grieving father will be played by Benedict Cumberbatch. “When the book came out and you tried to Google me, the search engine automatically whispered the connection: max porter wife death. Which my wife thought was funny, but don’t worry, she’s alive and well,” the writer said at the festival.
He wrote the prose based on another experience. “The boys in the book are a little bit me and my brother. When I was six, our dad died. My parents didn’t live together anymore, but we just had a sleepover at his place and he fell asleep out of nowhere. I wanted to go back to that experience for an awful lot of years, while brother not,” says the author.
He wanted to convey how painful it is to lose a parent at a young age. “I remember, for example, how at that time a boy kept bullying me at school. I asked my brothers about it, and my brother says: you know, he’s never had anyone die, so he doesn’t understand what it’s like to cause pain to someone,” Porter paraphrases. He invented a lot while writing, but he also drew on the feelings of the time. For example, how disappointed he and his brother were that such a turning point as the death of a parent was not more solemn. “We were only allowed to stay in our pyjamas, strangers came to our homes and gave us things,” he writes.
An unexpected guest
The book is moving, but at the same time full of dark humor, compiled from fragments of fantastic scenes, dreams, dialogues, essayistic reflections or literary references. The main Porter embodied the character of a father who, at the time of the tragedy, is writing a book about the real English poet Ted Hughes. When his wife dies suddenly and he has to take care of two boys, a huge crow appears to him as a metaphor for grief. She rings the bell downstairs as if she were a person, lays down on her father’s doorstep saying “I’ll stay as long as you need me” and then lives with them for a while.
Max Porter in an airship on the roof of DOX. | Photo: Jan Slavík
In the novel, the crow alternately fulfills the role of a down-to-earth friend, a therapist with a sense of humor, and a babysitter, depending on what the protagonists need. The animal slowly wears away their grief. She can be cruel, for example she mocks her father when he tries to have sex with another woman for the first time since his wife’s death. At other times, the bird protects a fragile community. For example, when in a surrealistic scene a kind of demon of grief invades. The crow then comes out, kicks the front door shut behind it, and after a bit of hopping about, rips the demon to pieces, after which it sweeps the remains into the canal with its talons. Boys in pajamas clap and muffled cheers outside the window.
“The book is, among other things, about how we impoverish ourselves when we perceive grief as temporary, pure sorrow. In my opinion, grief is also an invitation to celebrate life, almost to the point of ecstasy. The crow shows us how foolish it is to still wish sincere condolences and believe to the five stages of grief. The crow is telling us: it’s okay that it took you, you don’t need to get out of it, you need to find the much richer essence of it,” Porter interprets. “At the same time, the character works as a comic relief. Think of the crow as an unguided missile, which, when there are such high-flown speeches at a funeral about how great someone was, croaks: but mushrooms, he was a moron,” he jokes.
Readers of Ted Hughes’ works know that the bird refers to his collection of poems Crows: From the Crow’s Life and Songs, translated into Czech by Jaroslav Kořán, published by the Cave Birds Committee. “I like stories with hauntings, so I wanted the father to be possessed by another spirit than just the spirit of his dead wife,” explains Max Porter, why he chose the English writer. He was left alone with two children after his wife, award-winning poet Sylvia Plath, committed suicide in 1963 at the age of just 30. This happened after her husband cheated on her, abandoned her and, according to her claim, also beat her.
Some see Ted Hughes as the one who drove Sylvia Plath to commit suicide. Max Porter did not write his book in his defense, nor does he want people to resent the Englishman. “There is a lot of talk now about whether bad people can make good art. I also always thought that I would listen to Michael Jackson with my children. We don’t listen to him, but his music gives me a guilty pleasure at the same time,” he illustrates using the example of a pop singer , who was accused of sexually abusing boys. “Also, I read Knut Hamsun. Or Martin Heidegger. I am a passionate supporter of the Palestinians, and yet I read Israeli writers and have many Israeli friends. Similarly, we can say that when it comes to working with language, Ted Hughes was a giant and one of the world’s greatest writers. Which does not exclude that he was at the same time a completely terrible person,” he says.
The well-known Hollywood actor Cillian Murphy acted in the theatrical adaptation of the book Sorrow with Wings. | Photo: Colm Hogan
What about readers
Porter’s book consists of three monologues: the father, the crow, and the boys, who speak in two voices. “That was the key. When I thought that the boys wouldn’t speak for themselves, I started writing,” he recalls of the creation of his debut in 2015. “I wrote in notebooks, on my mobile phone and on bus tickets. the children were born, I changed diapers with my other hand,” he recounts.
Max Porter studied art history in London with a focus on performance art and feminism. He worked as a bookseller for years. What he liked about his low-paying job was that he met people from all walks of life and recommended books to both Mick Jagger-type celebrities and Polish cabinetmakers who could only spend a few pounds on a detective story.
Gradually, he began to earn extra money by annotating manuscripts, until he sent his to the Faber and Faber publishing house, which published Žal je s te s klinges in English. “I still have an email from them saved so that I don’t get my hopes up that 600 copies will be sold. And that the book is untranslatable. Which it really is, but at the same time it has already been translated into 35 languages,” he says.
The prose was so well received that director Enda Walsh created a stage production of it with actor Cillian Murphy. It premiered in Ireland in 2018, and since then tens of thousands of people have also seen it in London or New York. “Thanks to the play, even my brother, who has a slightly delayed emotional reaction, accepted the book. After the premiere, there was not a dry eye left in the theater, but it didn’t bother my brother either. My wife also asked him what he thought about it, and he said nothing. Then I about three months later, he calls out of the blue and says in a tearful voice how much it means to him. Everything takes a while for the brother,” laughs the writer.
Now, a feature film is being made based on the book Žal je t s klydy with actor Benedict Cumberbatch. “In my opinion, the book appeals to people not because of how sad it is, but because of its perspective. They often write to me that, for example, their partner died and reading it was therapeutic for them. Because while other books try to comfort them, this one seems to want to profane them, to shock, to lift,” thinks Max Porter.
The Czech title of the publication, translated by Jana Jašová and published by the Leda publishing house, also refers to the poem Hope is with Wings by Emily Dickinson, an American classic. Ted Hughes, who prepared a committee from her work, also read it. “At the beginning of the book, I paraphrase another poem of hers: that love is everything, is all we know about love. However, the crow crossed out this passage and replaced the word love with the word crow. Which is my message to the reader: do not be afraid of literature. Poetry is not sacred. Play with it, desecrate it, rewrite it. Find your way to it,” he appeals.
Max Porter also found it here. Today, he only earns a living by writing, he has three more books to his credit. He performed twice at DOX in Prague, in addition to the debate in the airship Gulliver on the roof of the Holešovice center, he also took part in the opening evening of the Fall festival. On it, he read an excerpt from the three-year-old prose The Death of Francis Bacon, in which he recounts the last days of the English painter before his death in 1992. “When I was fifteen, my mother took me to an exhibition of Bacon’s paintings. I was completely captivated,” he mentions.
He, in turn, amazed the people of Prague with an author’s reading that had elements of a theatrical performance. While Porter stood and gesticulated wildly like a rapper, Czech actor William Valerián accompanied him on keyboards and soprano saxophone. “I never read my books aloud beforehand. But I always listen to music while writing. So it is possible that my texts have a hidden rhythm,” he admits.
Last year, Max Porter published Shy, a novella about a teenager at a boarding school in the 1990s. Next year, the writer will chair the jury of the prestigious International Man Booker Prize. Since 2004, it has always been awarded to the author and his translator. Laureates include Philip Roth, David Grossman and Olga Tokarczuk.
For Max Porter, this means that he will have to read all 140 books entered in one year. “It’s one of the few awards where every judge still reads every book. Of course, you run the risk of going crazy, but I’m used to reading quickly. It’s just hard to explain to kids when they come home from school and see you lying on the couch with book and ask if you have nothing better to do. Isn’t it great to be able to tell them this is your job?” concludes Max Porter.
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