Kathryn Davis Couldn’t Live Without Musicals and Writes Fiction Like a Piano Player (and Other Tidbits)

Kathryn Davis’s novel, Versailles, is available now from Graywolf, so we asked her a few questions about writing, reading, alternate careers, and more.

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Who do you most wish would read your book?
I wish my sixth grade teacher could read all my books, but Versailles in particular. In a lifetime filled with many remarkable teachers, Robert I. (Robespierre Ichabod) Fine was hands-down the best. He got rid of the standard textbooks provided by the Philadelphia public school system and gave each of us our very own set of notebooks (Reading Diary, Great Composers, Ancient Gods and Goddesses, Nature Walks, etc.) to write in and illustrate.

It was in Mr. Fine’s classroom I first heard “The Ride of the Valkyries.” It was in Mr. Fine’s classroom I first encountered “One morning Gregor Samsa awoke to find himself transformed into….” And it was Mr. Fine who told me I was a child of eighteenth century France.

What was the first book you fell in love with?
I always used to say Alice in Wonderland—but then I realized I was wrong. The first book I fell in love with was Mopsa the Fairy. I’ve never found anyone else who’s actually read this book, let alone claimed it as their favorite.

Unlike Alice, where everything is out of joint, the world of Mopsa is governed by natural law, and though the law gets stretched and twisted, it still prevails. Night falls. Jack is in a boat on a river, drawn by the current. He sees a thin crescent moon. And then a raven perches on the side of his boat and diverts his attention by pointing out a water snake, and while he’s looking at the snake, the bird grabs one of the fairies he’s got in his pocket and eats it.

I loved that Mopsa was about the world I lived in, and that things like that could happen in it.

Which books do you reread?
Mostly these days all I want to do is reread. I want to get a picture of who I am now as opposed to who I was when I first read—for example—Wuthering Heights. It seems like romance was the only thing on my mind (would Cathy and Heathcliff ever “get together?”) back then, as opposed to being fascinated, more recently, with what Emily Bronte had to say about the deadly toll Romance takes on the human psyche.

Recently I reread Anna Karenina, a book I first read when I was in Mr. Fine’s classroom. I wanted to be an adult, meaning I wanted to read the longest book I could find in my local library. I recall adoring the book, though I also recall I didn’t have a clue what “adultery” meant.

Which non-literary piece of culture could you not imagine your life without?
Musical theater, I guess, in all its iterations. I remember being at my cousins’ house in Basking Ridge New Jersey, singing along with Carol Haney singing “Steam Heat.” From there it was a short step to the Columbia Record Club (Guys and Dolls, Oklahoma, Brigadoon, Show Boat, Carousel), followed by the amazing good luck to take part in a production of The Pirates of Penzance in Mr. Fine’s classroom.

To this day, every encounter I have with Gilbert and Sullivan mysteriously transports me into the self I was when I first sang “With Catlike Tread”—the same  highly charged condition I found myself in at a local production of Carousel just last summer, listening to Julie Jordan sing “What’s the Use of Wondering.”

Unlike what happens with—what I desire from—rereading, my experience with musical theater defies intellectual analysis.

If you weren’t a writer, what would you do instead?
Music, for me, is the greatest of the arts. It can enter everywhere (brain, heart, soul, molecules), whereas the other art forms rely on specific points of access.

While I can’t imagine not being a writer, I feel like the writer I am is doing her best to poach everything she possibly can from music. I like to think of myself seated at a grand piano like Yuja Wang, clad in a skimpy glittering garment, playing the sixth and last and wildest bagatelle of Beethoven’s Opus 126.

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Versailles by Kathryn Davis is available via Graywolf.