At the 2024 Glen Workshop, Jamie Quatro was in conversation with Sophfronia Scott about the similarities and differences between writing fiction and nonfiction. Both writers are gifted across the two genres, and it was wonderful to hear the interplay between reality and imagination.
Quatro shared that she is trained as a classical pianist, like her mother, and that music was itself a language with its own syntax. For readers familiar with Quatro’s prose, the observation rings true: her work is evocative, layered, and deeply conversant with literary and theological traditions. I wanted to continue the spirit of that summer afternoon, and am grateful that she answered a few additional questions for Image.
Two-Step Devil, her new novel, was released this week from Grove Press.
Quatro is the New York Times Notable author of I Want to Show You More, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, and Fire Sermon, a Book of the Year for the Economist, San Francisco Chronicle, LitHub, Bloomberg, and the Times Literary Supplement. Quatro’s fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, and Ploughshares. She is the recipient of fellowships from MacDowell and Yaddo and teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters MFA program. Quatro lives with her family in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
–Nick Ripatrazone, Culture Editor
* * * * *
Image: The epigraph for Two-Step Devil comes from “A Song on the End of the World” by Czesław Miłosz. You choose the final stanza of what is a deeply melancholic poem, certainly, but one that begins with a powerful, almost oddly hopeful juxtaposition: “On the day the world ends / A bee circles a clover, / A fisherman mends a glimmering net. / Happy porpoises jump in the sea, / By the rainspout young sparrows are playing / And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.” How did you arrive at this poem as the framing for your novel? And in what ways does reading poetry play into your process as a fiction writer?
Jamie Quatro: Deeply melancholic indeed. Milosz wrote the poem in 1944, the year Polish underground resistance attempted to liberate Warsaw from German occupation. The Home Army received almost no outside support, and the Nazis ended up leveling the city. “The city must completely disappear from the surface of the earth,” Heinrich Himmler said. “No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation.”
So that’s the poem’s immediate context: unfathomable evil and destruction and death set against the backdrop of the natural world, which seems placid and nearly untouched by the horror. You’re right, on the one hand, there is a hopefulness. The sense of heightened beauty in the midst of suffering; the way we blink in disbelief when tragedies occur on brilliant sunny days. It seems impossible that nature isn’t weeping with us. But there’s comfort in the familiarity of nature’s cycles: the bees continuing to pollinate, the porpoises to leap, the sparrows to play.
On the other hand—and this is where I think the poem has much to say to us now, in our contemporary moment—Milosz seems to be critiquing the refusal to look at, to engage with, the enormity of human-inflicted suffering. How many people turned away as Warsaw burned? How many of us turn away today? Gaza and Israel, Ukraine and Russia; starving reindeer populations in Arctic Sweden, decomposing albatross chicks with abdomens stuffed full of plastic bottle caps. The poem captures and subtly indicts a kind of collective, willful sleepiness. Tragedy and mayhem everywhere, yet women stroll beneath umbrellas, drunkards lie about on lawns, peddlers continue selling vegetables.
The impulse to look away is understandable. The geopolitical and environmental tragedies are overwhelming. We tell ourselves that when things get really bad—when the lightning and thunder come, “the signs and archangels’ trumps”—well, then we’ll act. But not yet, not yet. Let us go on listening to the voice of the violin as it floats up into a starry night.
Nature goes on in its innocence; people go on in their willful ignorance. Only in the poem’s final stanza do we meet the solitary truth-teller, the old man “who would be a prophet.” He is aware of how desperate the world’s situation is, and repeats, over and over, that the end of the world is here. No one listens. He’s pushed to the margins. My own Prophet lives in the backwoods of the Deep South. Like the old man in Milosz’s poem, he goes on binding his tomatoes and saying things that people don’t want to hear.
As for the role of poetry in my work: it’s of the utmost importance to me, as a fiction writer. I tell my students that if they’re not reading poetry they are robbing themselves of an entire musical library. There’s nothing like poetry for training the ear. And poetry reminds us, teaches us, that the natural object is always the adequate symbol, to invoke Ezra Pound. In The Captive Mind, Milosz writes: “A man is lying under machine-gun fire on a street in an embattled city. He looks at the pavement and sees a very amusing sight: the cobblestones are standing upright like the quills of a porcupine. The bullets hitting against their edges displace and tilt them. Such moments in the consciousness of a man judge all poets and philosophers. Let us suppose, too, that a certain poet was the hero of the literary cafes, and wherever he went was regarded with curiosity and awe. Yet his poems, recalled in such a moment, suddenly seem diseased and highbrow. The vision of the cobblestones is unquestionably real, and poetry based on an equally naked experience could survive triumphantly that judgment day of man’s illusions.” The only works that will stand the test of time, in other words, are those as viscerally, urgently real as bullet-ridden cobblestones knocked sideways by gunfire.
Image: “The Prophet didn’t trust any religious organizations,” you write. “Most kinds of churches didn’t understand his way of seeing, but at least the Pentecostals believed his visions were from the Lord.” I’m struck by the rhetorical power of the sections in which you depict the Prophet’s visions; they are inherently lyric, and yet also feel deeply authentic to a mystical tradition. Can you describe the experience of settling into that ecstatic voice?
Jamie Quatro: Well, as you know, I’m a fan of the medieval women mystics. Julian of Norwich, of course (so much blood in her visions, I’m always astonished by it); the polymath Hildegard of Bingen, whose music I sometimes write to; Beguine mystics such as Hadewijch and Mechthild of Magdeburg. I spent a lot of time reading and re-reading the Old Testament prophetic books, especially Ezekiel and Isaiah. And I revisited Blake, both his poetry and his art. Talk about a prophetic voice.
I also researched nonconformist, “outsider” art produced by self-taught artists such as Howard Finster, Nellie Mae Rowe, Myrtice West, William Thomas Thompson, and James Hampton. I wanted to understand, or at least try to understand, the particular translation of revelation into visual art. The Prophet sketches and paints what he sees so that his cabin becomes a kind of living book. I liked the idea of creating a parallel between the Prophet’s paintings and stained glass windows in medieval cathedrals, which—before scripture was translated into vernacular languages—functioned as visual Bibles.
There are also a number of ecstatic moments that wound up on the cutting floor. The vision of bees swarming up out of twin “hives,” or nuclear cooling towers…that one was too alarming. The Prophet himself was so scared by the vision he couldn’t bring himself to draw or paint it. If the Prophet couldn’t paint a vision, I didn’t allow the narrative to inhabit it in his point-of-view.
Image: Juxtaposed with these ecstatic visions and sections are endearing stories of the Prophet and Michael, the young woman at the emotional center of the story. Although their lives are quite different, they have both been wounded in some way, and their lives are united by fate—or something equally mysterious. “Let me be your thief, let me capture her, not for greed or any tainted purpose,” the Prophet prays about her. “To care for her as a father cares for his children.” Do you envision the Prophet as a salvific character?
Jamie Quatro: At one point, the devil figure—“Two-Step”—is taunting the Prophet. “You done shit and pissed yourself,” he calls out. “Who’s saving who?”
I suppose I see both the Prophet and Michael as salvific. In their own ways, they’re attempting to save one another. Michael tries to help him paint, get organized; eventually she tries to help him breathe. She’s helping him survive, not just physically, but emotionally. She is aware that his son, Zeke, has rejected him—aware that to some degree, she’s a second chance for him to get it right. And while the Prophet at first sees Michael as a means to an end—the one who will finally take his visions to D.C.—he grows to recognize that caring for her, loving her as a grandfather loves a grandbaby (as he longs to love his own granddaughter Sullivan)—that love usurps whatever importance he’d originally placed on getting the visions to the White House.
The question for me, I think, is whether or not Two-Step is salvific. He wants to be seen as such. He paints himself as the rightful Christ-figure, the actual sacrificial lamb. His whole theodicy is based upon the idea that Jesus isn’t the savior – that Jesus never even intended to be the savior. It’s utter blasphemy, from an orthodox standpoint—as it should be (the devil is, after all, the father of lies). “Who do you say that I am?” he asks the Prophet, as Jesus asked Peter. The Prophet denies him three times. But Two-Step’s taunts and lies are what finally get the Prophet to fight back, to fling his guitar at the devil (as Luther flung his inkwell). So perhaps Two-Step is, after all, the Prophet’s savior.
Image: I think great literature exists in a conversation with other works; sometimes we are intentional in that dialogue, and other times our art captures an existing and pervading mystery. While reading Two-Step Devil, at varying points, I thought of a few works: The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Gustave Flaubert, “Today is Friday” by Ernest Hemingway, and the “Circe” section of Ulysses by James Joyce. Have any of these works informed your reading and your vision of the devil, or an eschatological world?
Jamie Quatro: Believe it or not I’ve never read the Flaubert! It is now at the top of my list. Joyce had a profound influence on me back in grad school. I took an entire semester on Ulysses, and I remember thinking the Circe chapter was absolutely inscrutable and difficult—and formally one of the most exciting things I’d ever read. A play inside a novel?!
Coming to the form of the one-act play—which is absolutely the right form, for the Devil’s section—was a process of trial and error. I knew I wanted Two-Step to have his own section. I knew that I wanted to map onto the trinity in this strange way, with these three characters. But Two-Step’s voice came out, originally, as a forty-page diatribe. Snooze. I tried it as a Q&A, the Prophet and Two-Step in dialogue. That didn’t work either. I wrote a monologue with stage directions, and then a screenplay (the movie screen on which the Prophet sees his visions was already embedded in the text).
Finally I went to Yaddo. I was facing down a deadline and I had 200 pages of failed attempts. I knew what Two-Step wanted to say, I just hadn’t found the right form. I went to the library late at night and lay on the floor beside the shelves and thought, I might have to let this section go. I turned my head and there beside me was an entire shelf of anthologies of plays, curated by a Yaddo fellow named Eric Lane. (Eric Lane, my salvific character!) Plays for Three, Monologue Plays, Short Comic Plays. And the book I needed: One Act Plays. All of them classics. I sat there and read most of the book on the spot. It dawned on me that the stage motif was already everywhere in the book. The Prophet has imagined himself up on a stage doing hand-to-hand combat with the devil. And when Two-Step shows up, he shows up as a performer, dancing on the edge of a skyscraper. I’d found my form. There’s something inherently performative about the devil, isn’t there?
