The Thomas Fuller Interviews (Part 1)

I, Brooks Roddan, publisher, recently spent  time with Thomas Fuller, writer, to talk about Mr. Fuller's new book, "The Classical World" and other items of common interest. Our conversations took place at Mr. Fuller's home studio, during walks around the San Francisco neighborhood near his home, and at a coffee shop on Geary Boulevard that Mr. Fuller often frequents.

Q: "The Classical World" is an imposing title! 

A: I suppose it could be read that way, but the book itself is a simple tale about the civilizing benefits of walking; at least that's one way to read it. 

Q: You originally wanted to subtitle the book, A Novel of a Film...

 A: I did, but was persuaded by my publisher and others not to do so. The book has a cinematic quailty to it, don't you think? I settled on the subtitle, A Novel of Ideas instead, taking that old chestnut off the shelf and putting it to some use.

Q: Do you think the book would make a good film?

A: I do. I think it regards time in much the same way a good filmmaker regards time: that if a scene is set in Rome for instance or Naples or Palermo, the reader will feel as though he's there right now, walking those streets in the 21st c, and that what he sees and feel will very likely feel very much like the past he imagines it to have been.

Q: You're playing with time?

A: I suppose I am. I'm also sticking up for writers. It seems to my that filmmakers have placed a strangle-hold on literature, co-opting the terminology of literature, for instance, and the mythologies of literature's established world order without paying proper homage to the expropriation. A true film wouldn't have words, just as a real writer wouldn't write. So my original idea--to subtitle The Classical World, A novel of a Film--was to subvert the order of the medium, to ask which came first, the novel or the egg?

Q: I see!

A: O do you now? I'll have to take your word for it, but I wonder...

Q: How do you describe yourself as a writer?

A: I am a travel writer who is an avid reader of poetry, philosophy and the sports page of the daily newspaper.

Q: Your bio says you've written poetry.

A: Everything I write aspires to poetry, even the novels, which are pure hybrids, born of concept first and then of plot. My first novel, Monsieur Ambivalence, sprang from the notion of Pascal that all of man's troubles stem from his inability to sit quietly in a room for one hour. The Classical World is animated by the author's belief that a big part of our essential nature is to ask questions--that asking questions may be our saving grace, provided we're willing to listen for answers, even when there are none. I ask many questions in The Classical World--what is truth, what is justice, what is love--the questions the ancients asked. These questions drive the plot, insofar as there is one.

Q: Your novel isn't plot driven?

A: I consider plot as something that animates the conceptual. A comment made recently by the novelist Cynthia Ozick about the fiction of William Trevor made an impression: "for Trevor--and this could be his secret engine--plot is feeling." For me, plot is concept, a move from one incident to another that plays with, examines, affirms, doubts, pokes holes in, fools around with a controlling concept...

Q: You write in The Classical World, "Reading ancient philosophy, it takes forever to fully understand the human impulse to believe eveything can be make better, especially considering the flaws of the ancient Greeks--at war repeatedly, expansionist, proponents of slavery and repression--yet also the creators of the enduring concepts of the individual and the state, the two great glories of civilization."

A: One way to 'read' history is to see it as the progression of failure. Currently, I'm obsessed with the problem of the inferior quality of our politicial leadership and the inability of the cultural-intellectual classes, myself included, to come up with at least one workable counter-action. I suppose my book contains the strong implication that all this, 'this' being the dislocating distances between the rulers and those they rule, has happened before, and there's a real possibility that we'll survive the current moment and go on to some glory heretofore unachieved.

Part 2: Why read "The Classical World"; the composition of the book; writerly influences.Aphrodite kneeling, Museum of Antiquities, Agrigento, Sicily, 2015