After the success of his first book Carter Beats the Devil, author Glen David Gold spent eight years researching and writing his second novel, Sunnyside. The resulting work is an epic, touching, and often hilarious story focusing on the lives of three characters during the final years of World War I: Leland Wheeler, an aspiring actor turned soldier; Hugo Black, a culturally snobbish soldier stationed with the 339th Infantry in Northern Russia; and Charlie Chaplin, one of the most iconic figures in cinematic history.

Recently, Gold emerged from his literary time machine to talk to the Hipster Book Club about tributes to Monty Python, mistranslations of silent film, and the various ways authors can rewrite history.

You have three major characters in Sunnyside, and I know two are definitely based on real people, but what about Hugo?
No, Hugo is a fictional character. He's sort of a composite. I read a lot of journals and diaries and documents left behind by the 339th and tried to put together a bunch of their woes and triumphs and experiences.

Did you find journals about guys like Hugo?
Yes and no. There were a few guys who you realized felt they were very different from everybody else who was there. And I thought early on that if you have a character who has great camaraderie with everybody, there's less of a chance for him to have adventures on his own—there's less chance for his commentary on things. So as I was thinking about Hugo, I wanted to emphasize the more ridiculous aspects of being somebody who feels cultured and refined being trapped in the army. And also, kind of early on, Douglas Fairbanks asks Chaplin if his real nightmare of joining the army would be being ruled by idiots. Hugo gets to live out Chaplin's fantasies.

When you were creating this book, did you know you were going to have these three different characters, or did it start out with it just being about Chaplin?
Actually, all the way back around 1937 when I first started writing it, I was focusing on [Leland Wheeler] and his battlefield adventures. Almost simultaneously with that, I had discovered in a book a picture of Chaplin and [Harry] Houdini hugging, and I thought that was interesting. I knew that Houdini was the first most famous man in the world. Before him, the most famous people in the world were queens and popes and religious figures and political figures who had actually done something. Houdini was the first person to become famous for his image and because of his act; he was the first person to manipulate modern media. I knew he was superseded by Chaplin at some point, but I didn't know how. And I knew their fame was different somehow, but I couldn't really put my finger on it exactly. I knew Chaplin's was less controllable somehow—it went beyond him—and I realized that the difference is that Houdini was a terrible movie star. If you ever see any Houdini movies…he blew. He was good in person. Chaplin hated performing on stage, in person; he was much better mediated by the machine. So that picture of the two of them hugging is sort of the passing off from personal experience to having the entertainment experience be directed through a projector and a screen. I felt there was all that alchemy there that actually made Chaplin more accessible—more of a twentieth century icon than Houdini—so I ran with that.

You mentioned in the back section—the credits—that you messed with the historical accuracy a little. As someone who writes historical fiction, do you have any rules for when you can do that or why? Any parameters?
Before I even started working on Carter, I was at UCI and talking to Geoffrey Wolff, and I said to him, "I want to mess with this guy, Carter"…and I asked, "How far can you go in historical fiction?" He pointed me to The Public Burning by Robert Coover, which ends with the Rosenbergs being electrocuted in Times Square while Richard Nixon has anal sex with Uncle Sam in the middle of Times Square. That didn't really happen, but that's put down as historical fiction. So the fact is you can get away with almost anything. I thought the point for me was that I like sharing information with people; it doesn't have to be true. That's why it's a novel—it's fiction. I want to create a world that feels real, like when Raymond Carver creates a story and it feels real; you might not have met a cardiologist, but he feels real in "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." You feel that room, as if you've been there. Like place, like character, like setting, history is just another avenue to be manipulated in fiction.

Is there anything that happened in real life that you wanted to put into the book and then omitted?
Oh gosh, a ton. It's a big, long, honking book, but I don't think there's anything in there that's just there because I wanted to flap my gums about it. Anything that I was driven egotistically to put in there because a) it was well written or b) because I thought people should know about it, I tossed. The book was 300 pages longer, so there's a lot of stuff that's not in there.
One of the things that I wanted to put in was the legend of the signing pen. When Chaplin signed his contract for a million bucks, there was a special pen [the movie studio] had him sign with, and then six months later, when Mary Pickford signed for $125,000, they gave her the same pen to sign with, she was like, "I'm sorry, it's out of ink. Can you get me another?" That originally built into a much bigger thing in my book, where I kind of wanted to run with it, but it didn't add anything. It was funny, but I ended up taking it out.
Probably the biggest thematic thing that I lost is something called the benshi. When Western films came to Japan, the audiences couldn't understand the editing. So [if a scene with] two people talking inside cuts outside and there's some rustlers outside, [the audience would wonder], "Why? Who is this person outside the house? Oh, that's the same house?" The editing techniques were based on Western storytelling, not in the same way that Noh plays or kabuki worked. So when the first Western movies came to Japan, there was a guy who stood beside the screen and explained things. It was his job to go along with the print. And the best benshis, who were the most hired, weren't necessarily the ones telling the story on the screen. They didn't necessarily know what was going on, either, but they had this interpretation of what was happening up there on screen.
I thought that was a fucking outstanding metaphor for everything. In relationships, there's often the person who doesn't speak, and then there's the benshi who explains what the relationship is about to both people. In film, it's kind of the idea that no matter what you're putting on screen there's always somebody else interpreting for you. And I tied it to [psychologist Hugo] Münsterberg's theories of a stand in and the bust shot and your absorption into the film via diegetic effect, and it was like another whole round of ideas, and everybody who read it was kind of exhausted by it. It was like, "Yeah, that's great, but you've got to cut it." I rewrote it and made it very dramatic and made it really important to understand the benshis in order to get to the dramatic thrust of the scene…but it was just one thing too many.

Maybe there's room for a director's cut…
[My editor and I] talked about that, and it's not going to happen. There's also two scenes with [General Edmund] Ironside—one of them very sad and one of them very funny—that I fought to keep in like hell, but the death nail was when my editor said, "This one came beat for beat from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, didn't it?" Damn, it's true. It was my salute to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And she said, "Too many people are just going to read it like that than a scene out of the book."

Will readers ever see any of these scenes that you've cut?
I can't say never because there are more and more venues for stuff like that, but I'm also a fan of a piece of art just being what it is. Actually, a good example is The Catcher in the Rye. For like 20 years, I heard about the existence of the short stories The Catcher in the Rye is based on. Somebody went back and got all of the uncollected Salinger short stories—there are 40 of them. And eight of them kind of form the spine of The Catcher in the Rye, but there's stuff left out and different characters. I made it about a page, and I thought, "I don't want to know more. I only think I want to know more." The Catcher in the Rye is complete; it's done, and nobody knows anything more. And if you can pretend you don't know anything more about it, sometimes it's the best.

I did notice in the cast list [from the beginning of the book], you mentioned "Tatiana, a witch," but she doesn't show up in the novel.
Yeah, that was the Monty Python scene. It's funny that she stayed. It's part of a scene where Ironside is negotiating a bunch of diplomatic crises, and Hugo and Wodziczko [a fellow officer] bust up a fight at the fruit market where there's this woman there who claims she's a witch and she's going to turn everyone at the fruit market into animals. The townspeople are going to kill her, so they bring her to Ironside to see what he can do about it. She immediately is going to put a curse on Ironside, and he's just nonplussed. He doesn't want to deal with it. Her husband comes in and says, "It's true; she's a witch," and [Ironside says], "How do you know?" And the husband says, "Every time I beat her, she threatens to turn me into a rabbit." This is also based on actual Russian history that I've heard. And Ironside has this brilliant solution to it all, and there's more payoff to it afterward, where you think he has set up something beautifully so that it's going to be taken care of…and it gets much worse. And that already happens in other things. The things he does to take care of other things do blow up enough to show that…well, we like him, but he's got a bit of a problem. So I cut [Tatiana] out of the cast list twice, but she kept popping up in reedits, so she apparently wanted to be there. She's there in spirit.

You have this book set up like it's a program for an evening at the movies. How much of the style of cinema at the time became a part of your style as you were writing?
One hundred percent. I was very interested in what somebody saw when they sat down in the theater. And it's one of the few ways in which it really paralleled Carter because Carter was broken down like a magic act. I resisted breaking [Sunnyside] down like an evening at the theater for a long, long time because I didn't want to have another fucking program at the beginning of the book. It's like, "Can't you do anything else? What's next? Opera? Circus?" But then, it really made sense, especially when I was done with the first scene. It was so obviously a newsreel: It was all one day and all of these events. It really helped me come up with a form, and there were some places where it was especially helpful. I knew that the last half of the book would be the feature presentation…and it was helpful to decide that was going to be the feature presentation, so I could start it with America making its own movie. You have [United States Treasurer William] McAdoo sitting in the White House downstairs fantasizing about what kind of movie America would make of the world, and then you're launched into the rest of the book, which is the movie that America makes over the world—the world being America's stage after World War I. So it was crucial to have that down. And some of it just ended up being fun.

There's something in the book that I tagged about Mary Pickford. You wrote, "There are two ways to be a genius. One is to be a genius and hope the world notices. The other way is to show contempt for your audience. They'll mistake that for genius. If you make them feel bad for not understanding, they'll figure the fault is their own." Is that you talking more so than Mary?
I have noticed, probably since I first started noticing reviews and critical parlance…[that] the agenda is not necessarily to bring the best possible book or movie to my eyes; it is that you know the author, you want to fit in, you want to slag something you think is uncool… There is something I started calling the "literature of contempt." You pick up the review, and it says, "This book is 200 pages too long, the author's obviously never met a woman in his life, but he's 22 years old and you should read it because he's a genius. He's so smart, you can feel his genius on every page." And it's like being slapped in face and being told you're going to like it. I won't say who, but there was a writer who, [when] I saw his author photo, I said, "Wait a minute; I recognize that expression. It's sheer contempt!"
People are sold on their insecurities all of the time. Every magazine that succeeds is based on insecurity. Architectural Digest is pictures of homes you'll never be able to afford. Vanity Fair is profiles of people you'll never meet. The New Yorker is for people who are smarter than you and the products in the back are for their summer homes, so you can get the throw pillow for the summer home you can never afford. So there's a kind of striving idea, and literature is sold that way, as insecurity: this person is smarter than you. There are some people who are genuinely smarter than all the rest of us, and their books are sold that way, and I understand why. But there are a lot of pretenders, too. With Chaplin, he really was a genius. And he really did have moments of contempt in his movies, particularly in the later part of his career. Monsieur Verdoux is dripping with contempt and misogyny. So he had that in him, but I thought Mary Pickford would be a good spokesperson for what I had noticed. It's one of the key phrases that drove the book.

Seeing as you came up with the ideas for Sunnyside while writing Carter, do you have anything planned next?
I do, but I don't know… I'm just protective about it enough that I don't want to talk about it. I don't think I'll be doing historical fiction for a while. I like it, but for one thing I don't really think of it as historical fiction; it's fiction where the past is something to play with. [The next book] is probably actually going to be a memoir. That's what I'm working on right now. We'll see if it actually ends being a finished book or not. I've got a bunch of short story things, too. I'm writing a libretto for an opera. Although, that's been on hold for the past year or so, as I think we're all regrouping—the composer and the company and I. There's this amazing composer named Gavin Bryars, and his music is beautiful. I guess they call him a minimalist, but he has a great streak of warmth to [his work] that you don't normally find in minimalist music. It has a great soul from having that. We met in Philadelphia and tried to hammer out some ideas, and I think we're on to something, but we've got to get back in touch again.

How did this opera come about?
He read Carter and he had an idea for an opera about a magician, based on a true story. I did not know the story that way he did; I heard it from a totally different angle. So when we compared notes, we actually realized either story would be an interesting opera. Both of them together could be something totally mind blowing. Like, Act I presents it his way, Act II presents it mine.

Do you have any background in music?
I come to it with more of a traditional idea of narrative than what a lot of contemporary is like…I'm told. So it's not so much Einstein on the Beach as it would be something more plot-driven. They alerted me to what's possible on stage now for showing magic…with nonprofessional magicians. So it's fun. Your reach should always exceed your grasp. You should always be trying things that you can't quite do.

(June, 2009)