Interview: Christopher Castellani
Christopher Castellani visiting Tennessee Williams’s grave at Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis, Missouri, April 2019. © Bryan Castille / River Styx Magazine.
In April 2019, Christopher Castellani stopped at St. Louis on his book tour for Leading Men, his lustrous fourth novel about Tennessee Williams and lover Frank Merlo. While in town, he asked me if I would drive him out to Calvary Cemetery in North St. Louis County to visit Williams’s grave. I had been there before, a few years prior when I had become engrossed in Instagramming the city’s literary history and landmarks, history that includes writers like Williams, William S. Burroughs, Sara Teasdale, Rachel Kushner, Oscar Wilde, Maya Angelou, Mark Twain, T.S. Eliot, and many others. Over the years I have shown around many visitors who were astonished at how many notable writers lived and died here, or at the very least, as in the case of Wilde, entertained the city at its economic apex.
It was a memorable experience to ferry someone like Castellani, a writer I greatly admire both creatively and personally, on one of these excursions. Williams’s grave sits right along a narrow paved road that winds through the grounds, striking in its almost painful ordinariness, another headstone among thousands. Humbling, to know that the remains of one of the greatest playwrights of the twentieth century lay mere feet from my car’s tires. Mozart is widely believed to have received a pauper’s burial. Perhaps I shouldn’t complain.
There seems to be a special tendency among queer writers to commune with the souls of the dead, especially the literary dead. Dante did it. Auden did it. Merrill. Cunningham. “Death,” wrote Wilde, “must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.” We’re hopeless romantics, all of us. There is an obvious aesthetic parallel to me between the works of someone like Castellani, whose novels are largely preoccupied with the encirclement of love by the spirits of sorrow and grief, and the writer himself, clad in a red windbreaker, single rose in hand, standing in the middle of a cemetery under the relentless grayness of a Midwestern spring day. I am fortunate to have been a part of it.
Our interview was conducted via multiple email exchanges over a period of a few weeks in July and August 2024.
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What has been your experience in learning about your family’s European roots and how has being the son of Italian immigrants shaped your sense of self, as a writer and as a person?
CASTELLANI: Each novel has been a different personal journey that has revealed a lot about myself I didn’t know before I started: my biases, blind spots, secret pleasures, obsessions, and wounds. Such is the great joy—and risk—of writing fiction in general. You think you’re writing about—or toward—a particular emotion or idea, but if you dig deep enough, you start to see that something else entirely lies in wait for you, perhaps something you didn’t or couldn’t acknowledge about yourself or your family history before you started. This is maybe why I don’t put much faith in outlines? And why my early drafts take so long?
As for how being the son of working-class Italian immigrants has shaped my sense of self, I’d say they gave me my work ethic and my pride (for better or for worse): my guilt when I miss a day of work, or when I’m not maximizing my time and opportunities as a teacher or speaker; my sense that whatever talent I might have is a gift I’m lucky to be able to share with others. The artists I grew up with in my family—by which I mean my seamstress/drapery-maker mother, tailor/designer uncle in Italy, poet/painter/furniture refinisher uncle in the US—taught me these things by example.
Does your family read your books? What have they said about them?
CASTELLANI: I don’t come from a family of readers, and we never had books in our house, but my siblings and my parents have always supported me and encouraged me to keep publishing stories, even ones with characters that might vaguely resemble them. Neither of my parents learned to read English well enough to read my novels, but my mother has read the Italian translation of All This Talk of Love, and listened to the audiobook of A Kiss From Maddalena, two novels she directly inspired. Very late in life, my mother discovered a love of reading that has essentially saved her life, which I wrote about for Oprah Daily.
Can you tell me anything about the new book?
CASTELLANI: I’m too superstitious to provide much detail, but I will say that it’s a departure content-wise and genre-wise. I can also say that writing The Art of Perspective, a book of essays on narration and point of view, helped me juggle the nine (!) characters who tell the story. I’m revising it now, though, so it’s possible the book will look very different—at least structurally—when it’s finished.
You’ve spent a lot of time in Provincetown in recent years and I’m wondering how the place is affecting your writing now. In Land’s End: A Walk in Provincetown, Michael Cunningham writes, “And, somehow, in the end, I fell in love with Provincetown, the way you might meet someone you consider strange, irritating, potentially dangerous but whom, eventually, you find yourself marrying.” Are you in love with it?
CASTELLANI: Completely in love. I am never happier than when I’m sitting at a coffee shop in Provincetown reading or writing or people watching with the dear friends and fellow artists I’ve met there, or when I’m in the audience of a completely bonkers play the actors have just dreamed up that week. Cunningham got it right, and Land’s End is a terrific book. The town is gorgeous, messy, magical, simultaneously standoffish and permissive, maddeningly predictable and endlessly enchanting. No wonder so many writers have called it home.
In your 2013 story “The Living” from Ploughshares you write about a middle-aged man struggling to keep up appearances in his marriage while confronting his romantic and sexual attraction to other men. The protagonist, Tony, is alone in his sadness. He can share only surface details with his wife about a friendship with a man who died in the Iraq War. What inspired you to write this story?
CASTELLANI: This storyline actually appeared in a relatively late draft of my third novel, All This Talk of Love. In that draft, Tony was the oldest child who was never able to reconcile his sexual attraction to men with his love for his wife and his upbringing in an immigrant Italian American Catholic family. By the time the novel reached its final form, the character of Tony had morphed from a middle-aged man battling his identity to a teenage version of the same character who died by suicide. At the time I was writing All This Talk of Love, I’d been haunted by the many stories of gay teen suicide I’d read about and seen on the news, and by my own suicidal ideation as a gay teen, and I chose to explore those in the novel instead. So I cut the middle-aged version of the original Tony character entirely, and reworked his story into what became “The Living,” the form of which is, of course, a humble homage to “The Dead,” quite possibly the greatest short story of all time. The crushing realizations at the heart of that story—of a husband who’s never actually known love, and whose time on Earth was running out—felt resonant to me with Tony’s situation.
Beauty is a central theme in your fiction. Why do you think that is?
CASTELLANI: I’ve never really thought of myself as an aesthete, but, when I look back on some of the stories I’ve written, I think you’re right in noticing that I do have a narrative preoccupation with characters who consider themselves beautiful, or who have something beautiful, and are either in danger of losing that beauty or have already lost it. Beauty here could be physical beauty, or a person they loved, or a happy period of life in a country to which they can no longer return, or a sense of themselves as “good,” or something else. I think I’m less interested in the nature of that beauty itself than I am in what happens to a character’s identity when they lose it, or it’s taken away from them. That said, as a writer, the only way to fully understand such a loss and why it’s meaningful to a character is to see that beauty through their eyes, to explore what about it is so meaningful to them.
How has your conception of beauty evolved since A Kiss from Maddalena?
CASTELLANI: Well, for one thing I’ve been more willing to explore the sexual aspects of that conception, especially from the perspective of men up and down the Kinsey scale. I think my first two novels were a bit timid when it came to depicting desire, most likely because the main characters in those novels were inspired in part by my parents.
I’m recalling the time you were in St. Louis for the Tennessee Williams Festival and I took you to see Williams’s grave. Could you talk about your connection to him and his work that led you to write Leading Men?
CASTELLANI: I’m still so grateful to you for helping me find Williams’s grave that day. It was such an emotional experience, and, as you may remember, I left him a red rose, a nod to The Rose Tattoo, the play he wrote for Frank Merlo. Though I’d read and watched and loved Suddenly, Last Summer and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and [A] Streetcar [Named Desire], I didn’t know much about Williams’s work or life until 1997, when I stumbled upon Dotson Rader’s memoir, Tennessee: Cry of the Heart at a used bookstore. It was in those pages where I first learned about Frank, the working-class gay Italian guy from Jersey who’d been Williams’s longtime lover, and who died at forty after days of waiting for one last visit from him. At the time, I myself was a twenty-five-year-old working-class gay Italian guy from Delaware with dreams of being a writer, and I remember feeling an instant kinship—which eventually became an obsession—with both men: the neurotic and ambitious Tenn and the steadfast and searching Frank.
I wrote them into a short story in my MFA program, but the story didn’t quite work, so I wisely expanded it into an even more glaringly flawed novella. The idea wasn’t “big enough” for a novel, I feared, and, worse, I didn’t fully believe I had the right to write about them. It took reading Christopher Bram’s Gods and Monsters, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, and Colm Tóibín’s The Master to teach me how I might be able to fashion Frank and Tenn into “fictional” characters who could sustain an entire novel.
In The Changing Light at Sandover, James Merrill channels Auden (who had channeled Yeats, who had channeled Rimbaud). Did you ever feel like you were channeling Williams?
CASTELLANI: Honestly, I felt more like I was channeling Frank. The fact that we shared a similar cultural background, and that—as a reader and opera lover and aesthete and homosexual-—he was an anomaly in his own family much the way I was, bonded me with him. More importantly, though, I believed on some cellular level that my fateful encounter with him in that bookstore in 1997 at just the right time in my artistic life obligated me to get him right, to do right by him, to give him a complex inner life that only a novel could provide. From what I learned in my research, the glitterati in Tenn’s orbit didn’t take Frank very seriously; though well-liked, he was seen more as the “life of the party” rather than someone with a rich “life of the mind”; his value seemed to come more from his beauty (ahem!) and his “wife-like” stabilizing force in the great artist’s life than his own artistic ambitions. I sensed, and, yes, channeled, how painful that must have been for him because I’d felt some of that dismissiveness at various points, but also because I believe that such a role—the partner of the artist—has its own dignity. In other words, if given the chance, Frank might have been both an artist in his own right, and the catalyzing force in his partner’s genius. Those possibilities thrilled me, and I admit that, at times, I felt like Frank was sitting beside me as I was writing, silently encouraging and admonishing me.
Christopher Castellani is the author of four novels, most recently Leading Men, for which he received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, MacDowell, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, among others. His book of essays on narration in fiction, The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story, was published by Graywolf in 2016 and is taught in numerous writing workshops. Christopher is on the faculty and academic board of the Warren Wilson MFA program, chairs the writing panel for the National YoungArts Foundation, and is the current Writer in Residence in Fiction at Brandeis University. A 2024 NEA Fellow, he lives in Boston and Provincetown.
Bryan Castille is Managing Editor of River Styx.