Q&A: Nathan Knapp, Daybook

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Daniel Davis Wood interviews Nathan Knapp.

Nathan Knapp’s début novel, Daybook, is fiendishly difficult to encapsulate: it’s a novel of philosophical and moral depth, of stylistic ambition and assuredness, of biting humour, self-exposure, and extraordinary emotional intelligence. It’s a very contemporary novel, moving from the ethics of livestreamed interactive pornography to the effects of Covid-19 lockdowns on love between intimate partners, and it packs in much more than you’d expect from a slim 150 pages. It finds its narrator on the verge of winter as he begins speaking to an empty page, unpicking the threads between his ancestry, his desires, his failures and uncertainties, and the love that has held him in exile from the world of Christian faith he once knew. As he writes, over the course of a year, he finds himself revising his own self-understanding and self-expression in realtime, laying out lines of prose that loop back on themselves, incorporating into the narrator’s concerns the very possibility of saying something meaningful in this or other modes of writing.

Knapp has given a couple of fascinating interviews about Daybook: to Jason Christian at Full Stop and to Ben Lindner for the Beyond the Zero podcast. But reviewers have yet to reckon with the novel’s aesthetic intricacies, ethical circumlocutions, and commitment to sincere self-appraisal at all costs. Following the publication of Daybook in spring, Nathan Knapp spoke to 3:AM’s Daniel Davis Wood—who also edited the novel—about how he approached these aspects of the novel while also addressing monumental themes of faith and death, intergenerational inheritances, desire, lust, and shame.

3:AM: Daybook opens with a quote from Emil Cioran: “A writer’s ‘sources’? His shames”. To set the stage: what does shame consist in for you, and where does it get enough generative power that an entire book can spring from it?

NK: As far as the most powerful emotions we can think of, I’m not sure if there’s a stronger one for the writer than shame. Without shame we have no Dostoevsky. Probably also no one who emerges from his tradition, either, nor most of those capable of being terribly funny: no Nathanael West, no Flannery O’Connor, no John Berryman, no Sebald, no Dag Solstad, no Knausgärd. No Suttree by Cormac McCarthy nor any Outer Dark. Without shame there is no wrath and as such no King Lear nor Thomas Bernhard. Of all the human emotions, shame is the densest. In that sense it’s a good source of literary energy. And yet it has the potential to wreck the entire process of composition.

3:AM: Wreck it how?

NK: There was a point after I’d written the first sixty or so pages of Daybook where I had to stop working on it altogether. The thought of anyone I knew reading it was an absolute horror, and still is, to some degree. Took me six months to get back at it. When I did, I found that the act of writing it formed a kind of externalization of that shame, and I felt like I was freeing myself from it, but that process was itself painful. Writing it did not make me feel better. This sort of brings us back to Dostoevsky as outlined in The Brothers Karamazov and elsewhere. Freedom feels awful. It’s terrifying. By and large we are all happier without it, which is in a sense why it’s always the first thing given up in a human life, before everything else.

3:AM: Even when I follow you here—from freedom to shame, to the horror of a witness to one’s shames, perhaps to anger at oneself for seeking freedom in this way—I’m startled by how quickly you connected shame to wrath as an inciting force for prose. Daybook doesn’t strike me as wrathful at all. The narrator is very introspective, not outward-looking enough to be wrathful—and to the extent that he does bear ill will towards others, it’s more with a sense of despondency than wrath. Do you see wrath in the book?

NK: It’s more something underneath the prose than in it, I think. Wrath both at the idea of God that I was raised with and God himself. Wrath at the warped ways in which my faith shaped me and also wrath at my faith for abandoning me—I never wanted to stop believing in it. Anger at the insidiousness of Christianity’s relationship to the body. Anger at the beauty that inheres in Christianity’s notion of self-sacrificial love and the awfulness of a religion that says one’s body’s desires are inherently evil. Wrath at the failed promise of eternity: I was told we would be made new, would be made whole, and to no longer possess that promise feels like disinheritance.

3:AM: Which brings us to the subject of faith: not quite the heart of the novel, but close to it. The narrator of Daybook was raised as a Southern Baptist, though he doesn’t adhere to scripture any longer. I’m tempted to say that he sheds the Southern Baptist ways of being to different degrees. He’s not a Biblical literalist and he lacks a sense of the supernatural; but he does have a sense of the numinous, he trusts in both forgiveness and justice, and he still seems to search for something like God. Crucially, while he has mostly ridden himself of the fear that the faith instilled in him, somehow the shame seems to stick. So why does his shame persist, even as it loses the support structures of the faith?

NK: If one thinks of faith as providing “support structures” for one’s life—which it certainly does if it’s sincerely held, particularly if you’re raised within it, as in my case and thus the case of Daybook’s narrator—one has to consider another word for that idea, which is that of scaffolding, and that particular word’s nearest neighbor in the dictionary, which is of course the scaffold itself, the site of execution. When one’s faith withers or dies, the underlying “support structures” remain. (I don’t think one has to be or have been a Christian necessarily for this to occur: the form retains its shape after the contents are emptied.) Which means the scaffold remains, only now there’s no God to be reached by climbing it, just a noose. At that point the only direction to go is down. If all your inner life has been spent in building that structure, I think it can become more vertiginous than a person can bear.

The end of one’s faith, for a person up there on the scaffold, faces one with a choice to take the stairs or leap. In a sense, one has to execute. I’m glad I was persuaded to take the stairs. Not everyone is so lucky. Daybook is in a sense one person’s attempt to get off the scaffold of belief and to get out from under it. Everything I write in the end seems to be in response to this structure and also forms a protest against the ghost of the God in whose name it was initially constructed. I wish it could be otherwise. I’d like to be rid of that ghost and of the need for what the ghost once represented to me, and yet at some point everything I work on reveals itself to be an attempt to get out from under that ghost’s shadow.

3:AM: Now you’ve mentioned one of the novel’s key words—“ghost”—and I think it’d be easy for someone who hasn’t read Daybook to look at your response just now and assume that the novel finds a de facto antagonist in the ghost of an absent God, as if the narrator were simply working against that feeling of ghostliness. But in fact the novel is populated with a range of different and quite literal ghosts. There are hauntings of the conscience, of the self by the self, of the felt presence of the past; there are times when historical atrocities rise up from the earth, ghostlike, to haunt the meanings of events within the narrator’s purview…

So why so many ghosts? There is conceivably a version of Daybook in which the function of these ghosts—to disturb a settled sense of morality, to provide a historical counterpoint to present concerns—is achieved by other, more introspective means. But the version of Daybook we’ve got is thoroughly populated by the dead, often viscerally. Why?

NK: Good question. Hard to answer, though. To some degree I think I’ve seen the world this way from an early age. One thing that’s rare for most Americans these days, especially perhaps those that go on to become writers, is that I was raised in the same town where both sets of my grandparents lived and I knew three of my four sets of grandparents when I was a kid. This in the same incredibly isolated place—at right around a hundred residents it can barely be called a town—where my mother was raised and her parents and their parents were raised. It’s hemmed in by mountains; if I’m not mistaken there wasn’t a paved road to it until the 1960s. All four of my grandparents were Okies who did migrant work as kids, traveling to California and/or points-Midwest to pick cotton and fruit, poor as shit, and I was incredibly interested in that—that and the fact that their existence was so different from mine: if I ran around barefoot all summer it was not because my parents were intentionally holding off my shoes for cold weather.

I think it’s because of living around and with those people that I had such a strong sense that there was a past and that it was in some important sense not only still here but also the very fabric out of which the here and now are made—more personally, that those people, most of whom are now dead, remain in the sense that they are the fabric out of which I was made. That goes both for family and also the writers who’ve mattered most to me. When I go back to that landscape—southeastern Oklahoma, in the humid woods of northern McCurtain County, at the foot of the Kiamichi mountains—those people are still there and that version of me that I was as a kid is in some sense still there. In America the idea persists that people are made from scratch. Or that they exist only as the late expression of the various -isms of class and race and sex and sexuality. All those exert their influence. But it’s also important to look at how people are made from people, as Witold Gombrowicz insists, and, for me, how those people are both formed and deformed by each other and by the landscape in which they live, which is in a sense the dust from which they emerge. (Also, even if one counts God among the dead, that in no way prevents Him from exerting His influence.)

3:AM: So, to the extent that living people incarnate a vanished past, ghosts inhere in them?

NK: Not just people. There is a particular dead dog who waits on me in those woods. I had conversations with him almost every night when I was most recently back home. Maybe that sounds crazy but it helps keep me inside myself. The idea that there is nothing but nothingness in death haunts me, but it also has (I think) made me more attuned to the ways in which we live on in those who remember us—it’s the only version of immortality we have. In that sense the idea of the ghost becomes indispensable.

I should also say that reading John Berryman’s Dream Songs formed a pretty early influence in that vein. His work is as ghost-filled as anyone short of Shakespeare. Berryman’s many elegies are not just attempts to memorialize the dead, but to summon them up, to make his dead friends and his dead father physically manifest, in almost the same sense as that of the Catholic sacrament (the bread made flesh and the wine made blood) to make them present in the language of the songs and therefore to bring them into the very room with him. Most of that which in Daybook is most important to me is likewise an attempt to summon up the dead.

Funny: I just realized I was borrowing some of JB’s syntax: “Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.”

3:AM: In describing “coming down from the scaffold,” you said that one faces “a choice to take the stairs or leap”—and you took the stairs. But stairs don’t just lead down to safety. Stairs can also lead upward, to someplace both beyond one’s immediate reach, figuratively more elevated than the nadir one starts from. There’s a sense in which Daybook is the narrator’s attempt to build those stairs: a new structure which through the act of creation allows for a sort of ascension in the place of the absent God. What are the values and aspirations that the narrator is ascending towards, by way of writing this book?

NK: Maybe it’s just another echo of my protestant raising but I’m skeptical of the idea of any kind of ascension outside of the structure of belief in God. Mostly I’ve thought of what I was doing in Daybook as a kind of descent back to the world and especially to the body. It’s dark down there but it’s where we exist! That’s also probably where all the emphasis on sex and sexuality comes in. And yet, as with your previous question, with all of the book’s manifold ghosts, there’s an attempt to get the dead to cross back over the line that divides us and to return them to the world of the living. I’m saying: return to me. If there’s any desired ascent in the book, I think that’s it.

3:AM: Fair enough, but surely there’s more to it than that—more than returning the ghosts to the world of the living, I mean. To my mind, the most wonderfully alive character in the novel is Elle, the narrator’s wife, who is complex in ways that are hard to articulate: of fiercely independent mind, extraordinary liberality, something close to shameless sexual desire. Her complexity, combined with her humour and her comfort in her own body, feels to me like—well, a sort of idolisation, the result of the narrator’s attempt to place her above all other persons. Her development on the page feels like an act of appreciation—of dignification through details—and not just, or even primarily, for her bodily qualities, but for her ways of seeing the world and thinking about it, and for the force she exerts on the narrator’s life. Can you talk to that character?

NK: I don’t know if I can in those terms. Maybe. I like that idea of “dignification through details”. And it’s a great compliment to hear that she seems like the most alive character in the book. I’m a little uncomfortable, though, with the idea of her depiction being an “idolisation,” because if it were, she’d be dead on the page, I think. While everyone else—what few other characters there are in the novel—gets presented more or less through the lens of the narrator’s mind, Elle gets to walk and talk.

Then again, I can talk to that character, because I live with her. I like that woman a lot. And yet… as Karl Ove Knausgård somewhere points out, a marriage is also a kind of fiction. Elle exists and does not exist, both on the page and in my life, in the same way that my own imagination-of-myself-in-my-marriage both does and does not exist. This isn’t to say that to work through the fiction of a marriage in one’s life is the same thing as to work through the depiction of working through one’s marriage in a novel. It isn’t a stretch, however, to say that the working through of the real life marriage did lead to the other. If the marriage-in-real-life did not exist, then Daybook also does not exist.

3:AM: I assume that the various passages on sex, sexuality, sexual desire, and so on are mostly what you had in mind, earlier, when you said you feel horror at the thought of anyone reading your work. Are there other parts of the novel, aside from this material, that also make you feel mortified when you think of a reader?

NK: Mostly those parts, to be honest. I say things in the book that I wouldn’t say in life to all but the closest of confidants. But I wanted it to be that way. For me, the main thing that a novel draws its power from, regardless of its quotient of invented versus nakedly biographical material, is intimacy. It’s what makes a novel or film or painting meaningful. That which I desire when I open a book, sit down in the darkness of the cinema, or stand before a canvas is the writer, director, painter naked, not on the other side of the work but inside it.

3:AM: Last question, then. You’ve already connected your narrator’s journey through faith to your own journey, and the narrator’s outlook on the past to your own outlook. But Daybook is finally a novel—perhaps not a top-to-bottom fabrication, but in some sense containing enough veilings of the truth to not constitute a report.

Or is it? How naked does Daybook leave you? Do you see any part of it as a veil of any kind?

NK: Daybook was a tremendously uncomfortable book for me to write because there is so little veil. And I think it’s bootless of me to try to dictate how it’s read: the narrator is a man who lives with his wife and son in an apartment in Nashville, doing most of the writing at a table on his patio, looking up at a pair of pine trees he thinks of as three—and I am a man who lives with his wife and son in an apartment in Nashville, doing most of my writing at a table on my patio, often looking up at a pair of trees which I formerly thought of as three but are actually two.

Generally I think that the memoir as presented in most Anglo-American publishing is just a novel which the writer does not believe has the shape—or who have not troubled themselves to bother shaping—into the form of a novel. In that sense, I don’t believe memoir really exists (talk to a memoirist who hasn’t made-up some part of their memoir, even if only to fill a hole in the memory: bet you can’t find even one). There’s also a fair bit of condescension out there right now, some of it from people whose work I admire, about the term autofiction, which seems to me misplaced. A work of autofiction still has to succeed, if it succeeds, as a novel. A lot of those novels suck. Most of them are mediocre. Then again, most quote-unquote made-up fiction is mediocre. Such is the way of things, no? Daybook is nakedly autobiographical. It’s obvious. It also has a shape—or at least I’ve endeavored to give it one. Therefore: a novel. Fiction, autobiographical or not, must in one sense make for itself and in another discover its own form. (Guy Davenport and others talk about this much more eloquently than I!) This form emerges in response to the literary culture of which the writer is apart but also must spring from within the author, from the author’s lifetime of reading, the author’s desire, biography, inner life. And if it doesn’t do that, no matter what quotient of it is made up, it fails. Very little fiction manages this but it remains for me the goal, whether there is very little “made-up” material, as here, or if there’s a ton, as in the book I’m working on now.

In any case: E.M. Cioran said somewhere that the greatest mistake an author can make is by answering too much about themselves, leaving no mystery. Nothing for his readers to wonder about. It’s true that there is an attempt in Daybook to remove as much clothing as possible. I’m writing this response, though, on an uncharacteristically cold spring day in Nashville, so I think it’s time to button-up!