Typography
can
be
visually
arresting
and
psychologically
ba f f l i n g
That’s what Mark Z. Danielewski thinks, anyway, which is why he took a perfectly good concept — the novel, with its neatly typed pages and steady march of chapters and stately linear narrative — and ripped it to pieces.
By the time he taped, paper-clipped, stapled and dog-eared it together again, he had decked it out with strange typography, braided narratives, dueling footnotes, multiple fonts, pictures, poems and tickling mysteries. His “House of Leaves” (2000) is like nothing you’ve ever seen before, a sort of do-it-yourself fiction kit hiding out as a ghost story about a haunted house.
And just to make certain he’s not confused with anybody else out there in the overcrowded world of high-concept novelists, Danielewski recently embarked on a book tour that includes his sister, the rock singer Poe.
Or did Poe recently embark on a rock tour that includes her brother, the novelist Mark Danielewski?
Hard to say — which is what makes their creative collaboration so nifty. Poe’s music includes echoes of her brother’s prose; Danielewski’s prose is influenced by his sister’s music. On “Hey Pretty/Drive By 2001 Mix,” the current single from Poe’s “Haunted” CD (Atlantic) that recently reached No. 13 on Billboard’s modern rock chart, Danielewski reads from pages 88 and 89 in “House of Leaves,” creating what a Random House spokesman called “a first for publishing — a popular song bringing readers to a literary novel.”
Most siblings can’t get along in the back of a station wagon for the duration of a two-week summer vacation, let alone a rock ‘n’ roll bus on a two-month, 32-city concert tour. But Danielewski and Poe haven’t killed each other yet, which means either that they’re unusually compatible or that all sharp objects have been removed from the vehicle.
Danielewski said during a recent stop in Chicago, where Poe opened for Depeche Mode.
Given the bizarre and daring nature of his novel, you might expect Danielewski to be a wild man in person, stamped with tattoos and snarling against authority. But the 35-year-old novelist is polite, almost courtly in his manners, and if he were wearing a blue suit instead of a blue T-shirt with a scene from “The Exorcist” on its front, you might mistake him for a CPA.
(Time out: A year-old description of Danielewski in Newsweek described him as “big, strapping” with “hair the color of blue M&Ms.” The man visiting Chicago who called himself Mark Danielewski was slightly built and had a perfectly ordinary shade of closely cropped black hair. After you read his novel, in which no one and nothing is quite what he or it seems, this mystery either will dissipate or deepen.)
Moments later, Danielewski was joined by Poe, who looked exactly like what you’d expect a rock singer to look like: streaked blond hair, elaborately painted fingernails, cool clothes tightly riding her lean body, and a face with angles sharp enough to sever twine.
Not your typical rocker
What you wouldn’t expect, most likely, is that Poe, a year younger than her brother, was funny, friendly and utterly self-effacing, the antithesis of the rock-singer hauteur.
Once together, the two talked a blue streak — not to be confused with a blue M&M streak — about their peripatetic childhood; about their complicated relationship with their late father, avant-garde filmmaker Tad Danielewski; about their Ivy League educations (hers at Princeton, his at Yale); about music, mysteries, language, ideas and poached eggs.
“We’re each other’s biggest fans,” Poe said. She spoke in an earnest, emphatic way, as if every word mattered, which to her, it clearly did. Her voice still was husky from singing the night before. “I can’t wait until I get another piece of writing from him. It does things to me that no one else’s writing does for me.”
While the “Hey Pretty” single is their first formal collaboration, “We’ve been doing this our whole lives,” Danielewski said. “We’ve just never been in the same place at the same time for it to happen.”
“House of Leaves” was published last year, after a decade’s hard labor, he said. Hunks of it had been posted on the Internet along the way, building high expectations among fans of experimental literature.
Danielewski didn’t disappoint. His tale of a house that grows bigger on the inside than on the outside, supposedly chronicled in a documentary film, requires the reader’s eyes to zigzag across pages spliced with footnotes and wily cryptograms embedded with separate and seemingly unrelated narratives. At some points, the reader literally has to turn the book upside down to follow the plot.
A `Blair Witch’ book
The author spent three weeks typesetting portions of the book by hand, just to make sure it was done right.
The payoff: “House of Leaves,” a best seller with more than 100,000 copies in print, was called “a `Blair Witch Project’ with footnotes” by Newsweek and “funny, moving, sexy, beautifully told” by The New York Times.
And that’s where things might have ended, with Danielewski repairing to his Los Angeles apartment to work on a second novel, except that he and his sister realized one day that they had been exploring similar themes: death, family, loss, reconciliation. He did it in prose fiction and she did it in music and lyrics, but no matter: the same big issues captivated both.
So when Poe’s “Haunted” was released last year, she and Danielewski teamed up for a tour of Borders bookstores in 22 cities. He had already completed a solo book tour, but this was different: On this one, he would read, then Poe — backed by a deejay and pre-recorded music — performed her songs.
“We thought it was going to be a small event,” Danielewski recalled. “But we’d go to these Borders stores and there would be 150 to 700 kids. It was unbelievable. In Austin, we started signing autographs at 9 p.m. after the show, and we were there until 3 a.m.”
Their work is intensely personal — Danielewski’s obliquely, Poe’s directly — which led Danielewski to offer this summary: “Welcome to our breakfast table.”
Once the Borders tour concluded, radio stations began to play “Hey Pretty” with Danielewski’s spoken-word interludes — there are two versions on the CD, one with his words, one without (the one with is “Hey Pretty/Drive By 2001 Mix”) — and garnered great reaction from music fans.
That inspired the novelist to hitch a ride on Poe’s current concert tour, which concludes Aug. 14 in Los Angeles. During last week’s stop in New York, brother and sister performed “Hey Pretty” on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien.”
Extraordinary lives
From the first, Poe said, they were not destined for ordinary lives. “We’d lived all over the world by the time we were 8 — Spain, Africa, India, Switzerland, France, all over. My dad was making these films.”
Tad Danielewski, who died in early 1993, was a Polish refugee who spent a year in a Nazi concentration camp before escaping to America. He made documentary and experimental films and founded an actor’s workshop, at which performers such as James Earl Jones, Martin Sheen, Sigourney Weaver and Mercedes Ruehl studied.
“But,” Danielewski quickly interjected, “don’t be lulled into some aristocratic image. Yes, we traveled, but we were sleeping in drawers. It was rags to riches to rags again, over and over and over. Dad would make a lot of money on a film and then suddenly lose it all, because he’d use it to make another film.”
Added Poe, “Some friend of his with a villa in Italy would say, `Oh, go stay there.’ And we’d be there for six months. And then we’d be, like, sleeping on the streets in India.”
Loss of their mother
Their mother, who lives in New York, left the family when Danielewski and Poe were in their teens. That made their father even more of an imposing, monumental presence, both said. His death only meant the physical person was gone; his shadow still falls across their lives.
“My father was this extremely compelling artist-guy,” Poe said. “Everything mundane was made epic by him. Could Mark have written this book without growing up with that guy? Absolutely not. He’d play us Bergman films when we were 8 or 9, telling us, `Everything falls apart.’ Entropy — that was a big word for him — entropy. `Everything must rot,’ he’d say. `Trees rot, stars rot.'”
She paused. “At the end of his life, I think he hated himself and thought he was a failure, that he’d made some horrible decision by committing himself to the arts. I remember him telling Mark, `Nothing you can write is real. It’s worthless.’ So much of our drive and inspiration comes from this complicated father.”
Danielewski added quietly, “It’s true that we started to succeed after my father died. That’s when I put my writing into high gear. That’s when my sister had her first record.” The CD was “Hello” (1997).
A few years ago, they found a box of tape recordings their father had made. Poe uses his voice — sometimes sweet, sometimes cajoling — in “Haunted,” which explores the thorny parent-child bond with its mix of jazz-infused rock music and piercingly evocative lyrics.
“The arc of the CD and the book,” Danielewski said, “is that how youthful anger, if you allow it to be voiced, will mutate into a kind of respect and sadness. At the end of the CD, she says, `I miss you.’ To have the strength to say, `I miss you’ is kind of amazing. It’s much easier to be angry.”
While they live minutes from each other in Los Angeles, they move in separate circles and work independently, Danielewski said. At the mention of actress Angelina Jolie, who brought close brother-sister relationships into ill repute when she planted a big wet kiss on her sibling during the 2000 Academy Awards ceremony, both Danielewski and Poe uttered a nose-wrinkling “E-e-e-uuuuu,” indicating severe and unremitting disgust.
A love for words
Their love for words is evident not only in their work, but also in their conversation, which can be as complex, meandering and overlapping as the dialogue in Danielewski’s novel. They argue, tell each other to shut up, then listen while the other talks; they employ each other’s thoughts as links to whole new galaxies of discussion. Their sentences are like a chain smoker’s cigarettes, the new one lit from the used-up stub of the old.
“We’re discovering,” Danielewski said, “that language is so significant. Words have been around for millions of years. They’ve survived. This is a cold world we live in; things don’t survive without a reason. They’ve survived because they’re necessary.”
The current tour is in one sense a fluke, a confluence of artistic interests and family synergy that won’t be repeated. In another sense, of course, it’s repeated every day, as Danielewski and Poe talk and dream and do. The last words on the liner notes of “Haunted” give Poe’s side of the story:
“Who would have thought that the first friend I ever made in this world would still remain my most cherished? Who could have imagined that a promise we made one November night as children would still remain unbroken? Only you could have imagined such things. And only I could have believed you. I still do.”
`House’ to `Haunted’
The serpentine sentences of Mark Z. Danielewski’s “House of Leaves” (2000) and the hypnotic harmonies of his sister Poe’s “Haunted” CD (2000) are related but not ostentatiously so. Only when you read and listen closely to their works and their life stories do the associations emerge, as subtly as sighs:
1. In “Haunted,” the title track from Poe’s CD, the lyrics include a reference to a “house of leaves,” the title of Danielewski’s novel. The title derives from a poem in the novel: “And this great blue world of ours seems a house of leaves/moments before the wind.”
2. “Spanish Doll,” a song in “Haunted,” is a reference to the time the family lived in Spain, Poe said. Listening to her work on the song, Danielewski said, reminded him of their mother, who left the family shortly after the Spanish sojourn. Contemplating their grief over her loss led him to include a section in “House of Leaves” of letters from a character’s mother. “Your sentences cast spells,” she writes.
3. In the song “Hey Pretty,” Poe sings, “I built the growling voice.” One of the characteristics of the rapidly expanding haunted house in “House of Leaves” is an uncanny growling sound.
— Julia Keller
