Author Q&A: Kenneth Silverman

Photo by Nancy Crampton

About 20 years ago, when I was in graduate school to get my MA in American civilization at NYU, it was English professor Kenneth Silverman, a Bancroft and Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer who made the experience a marvelous one. It is a pleasure to see that Silverman, now emeritus at NYU, is making a double appearance this fall. His Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (see review) comes out in October, followed by Houdini: Art and Magic (Yale Univ.) in November, to which he has contributed an essay. A perfect chance to catch up with him!

As a biographer, you've picked a stimulating range of subjects over the years, from Cotton Mather to Edgar Allan Poe to Houdini, S.F.B. Morse, and now John Cage. What's the thread of connection for you?
The subjects who most interest me as a biographer are American artists—partly for what their careers reveal about being an American artist. My Cultural History of the American Revolution (1976) recorded the lives of American musicians, painters, and poets from the Treaty of Paris to the inauguration of President Washington. Over the past 35 years I've added biographies of Cotton Mather (arguably the first American writer, author of more than 300 published works), E.A. Poe, Houdini (superstar of the stage), Samuel F.B. Morse (inventor of the telegraph but also an eminent painter, founder of the National Academy of Design), and recently the uniquely American composer John Cage.

In your biography, John Cage comes across as an entirely likable and decent man, whereas, for example, Poe never seems that way. What were the challenges that Cage presented to you the biographer?
Cage worked harder than any other person I've ever known anything about. It was challenging simply to keep in mind his unending, varying attempts at art—especially since most were highly unusual creations of a labyrinthine imagination. Sometimes completed over long periods of time, the works raised a difficult structural problem: present such works bit by bit, chronologically? Ignore chronology and treat all the bits together at once, as a single work? Cage labored passionately in other arts as well, not only music but also engraving, painting, theater, poetry, and dance—not to mention his active interests in mycology, chess, and social thought. And he left behind thousands of letters and notes to his many friends that had to be recovered by research trips to Chicago; various cities in California; Raleigh, NC; Buffalo; and on and on.

Begin Again will have a Random House website link where it will be "sonically illustrated" with 11 tracks of Cage's recorded work, while the book itself includes illustrations of many of Cage's original scores. Over the course of your work on the biography, how did your empathy with Cage's kind of music evolve?
Studying Cage transformed my way of listening to music. He taught me not to passively hear, but to actively listen. As his compositions have done for many auditors, they also opened my ears to a world of sound to which I had never paid attention—indeed to sound itself.

Now, as to your other appearance this fall, in the book that's coming out to accompany the touring exhibition of the same name, Houdini: Art and Magic—you have contributed a piece on "Houdini, the Rabbi's Son." Do any similarities or interesting comparisons come to your mind between Houdini and Cage?
Cage and Houdini were both radical innovators, producing a never-before-heard music and a never-before-seen kind of magic. Cage's aesthetic was also very theatrical. He wished musical performances to be seen as well as heard. He created what has been called the first Happening, and surprisingly wrote a playlet in which Houdini appears as a character, bringing a birthday present to Erik Satie. Perhaps oddly, too, as a greeting card, he once sent a friend instructions on how to cut someone in half.

You have been an amateur magician, going back to your youth, so there's a deep connection there to the subject of Houdini. But that doesn't necessarily make it easier to write about the subject, does it? It can make it harder in some ways.
My lifelong interest in magic compelled me to follow the magician's first rule—Don't Expose. I felt obliged to refrain from explaining how Houdini did his escapes. Anyway, magicians themselves still argue about how he managed some of his inhuman feats—for instance, how he could stay underwater for an hour and 31 minutes while soldered into a galvanized iron coffin.

What are you reading now or have you read lately that you very much liked? And are you in the middle of your next writing project?
Aside from books, articles, and manuscripts related to what I'm working on I read mostly poetry—both because I enjoy it and because I try to keep in touch with exact language. Recently I've been reading, mostly in translation, the strong poems of Kadya Molodowsky, a Jewish immigrant from Poland who lived in America the last 40 years of her life. Reading her poems is also for me a step toward beginning a biography of Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky, founders of the Yiddish theater in New York City, with its later connection to the Actors Studio and such American popular songwriters as Irving Berlin. The challenge here is learning to read Yiddish. I'm trying.