"THE DREAM OF THE BROKEN HORSES"
Q&A WITH WILLIAM BAYER
Q. How did you come to write The Dream of the Broken Horses?
A. I'd been thinking about this story a long time, at least fifteen years. My starting point was always a Parents Day meeting at a posh private country day school for boys between an impoverished teacher and a wealthy mother of one of his students. They would have an affair, and then be murdered together in a shabby motel across the street from a honky-tonk amusement park. It took me a long time to find a way of framing that material. When finally I set my mind to it, the novel quickly came together.
Q. You give the impression that this book is very personal to you.
A. It is. But it's important for me to distinguish between real events in my own life and the stories I write. The job of fiction writer, seems to me, is to draw upon real emotions while depicting fictitious scenes.
Q. Nevertheless, you were brought up in Cleveland, and attended a private day school there. Is Calista, the imaginary Midwestern urban setting of your novel, actually Cleveland in disguise?
A. There are certainly elements of Cleveland in Calista, and elements of my old school in the fictional Hayes School in the book. There was a famous Cleveland amusement park called Euclid Beach. Etc. But I made a decision early on not to get locked into a real place. I didn't want to restrict myself to the literal details of Cleveland, and to receive letters post publication that I had a street name wrong or the street didn't actually run in such-a-such direction. This decision was liberating in that it freed me to fictionalize far more than just a few details. It allowed me to create something entirely new that didn't exist. I made Calista into a river town, much like Cincinnati or Pittsburgh, when, in fact, Cleveland in very much a city of the Great Lakes. I was able to turn the school into a rather nasty place, while, in fact, the school I attended, Hawken School, was actually quite fine. But I won't deny that there're a lot of very personal things in the book.
Q. Can you give an example?
A. Barbara Fulraine's diary would be one. As a kid I was quite the snoop; maybe that's why I specialize in writing mysteries. Anyway, one day when I was around twelve I was snooping around in my mother's private papers, and I came across a pocket notebook secured with a rubber band. From the way it was hidden away, I understood that it was important to her, and, moreover, secret. Of course I tried to read it. It turned out to be a diary she kept while undergoing a classic Freudian psychoanalysis. The names of people were coded with initials and much of the material was pretty intimate. The diary was painful to read, so I put it back where I found it. Then one day when I was home from college, I looked for it again, and it as gone. I've always wondered what all her cryptic entries were about . . .and that came to be the origin of the entries from Barbara Fulraine's totally fictional psychoanalytic diary that appears in the book.
Q. What about the unfinished case study by Barbara's psychoanalyst, also in the book?
A. That's pure fiction, but the methodology I followed was Freud's. The shrink character, Dr. Thomas Rubin, father of the protagonist and narrator, David Weiss, becomes pathologically involved with Barbara, his patient. He tries to write up her case in the classic manner exemplified by Freud in his famous The Case of the Wolf Man. But he becomes lost in the maze of her case and his feelings about her, and his craziness shows in his footnotes. By the way, I've always been intrigued by the kind of character I think of as "the troubled shrink" and by the psychopathology that often creeps into psychotherapist-patient relationships.
Q. There's a fairly provocative photograph on the cover of the original hardcover edition of your novel. Can you tell us anything about it?
A. When I was still thinking through the story, before I actually started writing, I came upon that photo in a book about a photography studio in Vienna between the World Wars. I found it fascinating, very kinky too, and wondered how I could get Barbara Fulraine to assume that same highly provocative pose…thus the sections of the novel dealing with the photographer, Max Rakoubian. Later, when we were discussing jacket art, I suggested adapting this photograph. In a sense, you see, the book is very much a "portrait of a lady." In fact, if I were to add a subtitle, "A Portrait of a lady" is what it would be.
Q. David Weiss, your sleuth….
A. Excuse me, please don't use that word. To paraphrase Hermann Göring, a thoroughly awful man, "When I hear the word 'sleuth' I want to reach for my revolver."
Q. Then let's say your protagonist, David Weiss?
A. Much better…thanks!
Q. David is obsessed with the twenty-six year old double murder of his French teacher and Barbara Fulraine, the mother of one of his classmates with whom he never got long. It turns out his father was Mrs. Fulraine's troubled shrink. So in a sense isn't David trying to complete his father's unfinished case?
A. That's exactly what he's trying to do, but in a totally different way. His dad wanted to decode Barbara's recurring erotic nightmare, which she called "the dream of the broken horses." David, on the other hand, wants to find out who killed the lovers and why, and, as an exemplary forensic artist, he has the skills with which to do that. He takes a courtroom illustrator job as an excuse to return to his hometown, Calista, and then spends most of his time delving into the old unsolved case. That was the structure I spent so many years trying to develop. As mentioned, once I had that figured out, the novel practically wrote itself.
Q. Which raises a question: why do you write murder stories?
A. I really can't think of anything more appropriate for me to do as a writer. Crime stories perfectly fit the times, not just because we live in a fairly murderous era, but because these kinds of stories often tell us important truths about ourselves. Crime stories, by their very nature, are complete, constructed as they are of beginnings, middles and ends. For that reason I think they not only entertain, but, by imposing order upon chaotic events, they can also help us make some sense out of our chaotic times and lives.
Q. Final query: the boxing match at the Hayes School: You describe it very vividly. Did something like that happen during your time at school?
A. Yes, and it happened pretty much as described. The teacher-referee did not allow a low blow from my opponent to go unchallenged, but otherwise the fight occurred as written. Believe it or not, even the provocation was the same. Needless to say, that fight was a traumatic event in my early life, and thus I was happy to find a way of working it into a novel, a classic writer's way of taming the power of an unpleasant memory.