10 Questions for Ariel Dorfman
Bertram Bracht’s luck changed for the better exactly twenty-four hours and ten minutes before the American immigration authorities boarded the good ship Betrüger to decide which passengers would be admitted to the United States and which sent back to their perilous homelands. His fortunes until then had been dismal, an endless series of fears and miseries that, over the course of several stormy nights at sea, he had confessed to Jonas Bloom, the pastry chef who had befriended him and who turned out to be the architect of Bracht’s new life, first in New York and then in Los Angeles.
—from “Bertram Bracht Emerges From the Flood,” Volume 66, Issue 1 (Spring 2025)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I was afflicted (or blessed) with ADHD as a child, so I only learnt how to read and write when I was well past seven years old going on eight, on a ship, of all places, traveling from New York (where my family lived at the time, as my Dad was at the UN) to Buenos Aires, returning for a month to the city where I had been born (and had left for the States when I was two and a half). My canny mother used the opportunity to teach me to read as I ran tirelessly around her deck chair.
Was that vessel in the back of my mind as I began to write my Bracht nouvelle that has now appeared in the Massachusetts Review? Maybe, but there were other, even more significant boat trips in my future related to Germany and exile, particularly one where, sailing from New York to Le Havre on the De Grasse at the age of nine, I met Thomas Mann. This is a true story. (The encounter is narrated in my first memoir, Heading South, Looking North). So on the return journey, as we steamed into Manhattan, I saw the Statue of Liberty, which I had already seen on the previous voyage and which Bertram had seen more than a decade before my birth. I marvel at how experiences accrue and, in this case, reincarnate in a fictitious librarian fleeing his native land, as I would soon have to flee McCarthyite America and then, years later, dictatorial Chile.
After this lengthy digression, I return to explaining the consequences of learning to write until I was older than most children of my class and privilege. Not that this blocked my infantile imagination: with boundless energy, I staged stories in our backyard in Parkway Village in Queens, illustrated by drawings I had concocted and with myself voicing all the characters. But none of those tales were written down, merely learned by heart (or improvised) as I performed them for willing and unwilling neighbors.
It was also a performance which led, when I was ten or so during my first year at Dalton, to the first piece of what I might call real writing, something that others could read. We were studying the Greeks thanks to a brilliant teacher named Tess Ross, who urged me to let my imagination fly—and fly it did, in a playlet I wrote for my classmates that had its planetary (and only) premiere at Peter Ascoli’s estate (well, his parents’), featuring Sam Delaney (yes, the future astonishing sci-fi writer) as Socrates and Priscilla Meyer as Xanthippe (who would go on to become a major expert on Nabokov and write perceptively on Dostoevsky and Gogol, all writers who accompanied me as I wrote the Bertram Bracht novella).
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
Well, the Russians have just been mentioned, but there is such a wealth of influences that seems almost unfair to answer with only a few examples. Brecht, of course! Seriously (or not so seriously): Cervantes and Shakespeare, to the point of idolatry that I ended up writing a long story where I have them meet in Valladolid (told by an interpreter who speaks Spanish and English and acts, as I often do, as intermediary between languages and human beings). And I was lucky enough to have as friends and elder brothers, two of the authors who have most shaped my work: Harold Pinter and Julio Cortázar. But where would I be without the persistent guidance of Toni Morrison? Or Faulkner? Or Ernesto Cardenal? Or the wisdom of Deena Metzger over the last fifty years? Or my contemporary and everlasting pal, Antonio Skármeta, whose death has left me bereft and orphaned, but remains close by with his stories and his sense of humor.
But really, when you ask about the way I write “now.” I am tempted to include every book or article or essay or play or poem I have ever read.
What other professions have you worked in?
Like so many authors, I have been given refuge by Universities, where I have taught, on and off, ever since I became a teacher’s assistant at the age of 19 at the Universidad de Chile.
Though, for time, I guess I would have defined my “profession” (if that is what one might call it) as that of a resistant, a crusader against injustice. Because, in fact, I exercised all manner of revolutionary and clandestine activities (all democratic, none violent), during the Pinochet years when, for quite a sustained interlude, I was the cultural coordinator for the Chilean Resistance in exile.
What did you want to be when you were young?
Early on, a painter. Colors and figures rather than words on a piece of paper. But as soon as I could read and write, I switched to the certainty that I would be an author and spend my life scribbling away non-stop. And except for a period after the 1973 coup against Allende when I could not conjure up anything creative for several years (though lots of ads and propaganda and reports), I have never ceased building worlds out of words.
What inspired you to write this piece?
Perhaps readers will be interested in the intricate labyrinth of ways in which any given story is created, so if they bear with me, I will try to discern the protracted path that led me to “Betram Bracht Emerges From the Flood.”
I have, at any given moment, dozens and dozens of ideas, characters, situations, possibilities buzzing in my head and have learnt to wait for one of these to surface and take on a life of its own. Once in a while, some of them find their place in a major project, such as The Suicide Museum, where I inserted ideas and whole sections from potential novels I had been working on into the main plotline. (Thus, I had the hapless protagonist of The Suicide Museum, who sets out to discover the mystery behind the death of Allende, trying simultaneously to finish a novel on murders in the Argentine Embassy in Chile in the aftermath of the coup.)
In the case of the Bertram Bracht nouvelle, it was the other way around. He was initially part of a much larger and ambitious novel from which I eventually extracted him for this current story.
I had written, around twenty years ago, an epic novel called Americanos: Los Pasos de Murieta, that follows four generations of a latino family in California history from the 1770s until 1861. It has yet to find a publisher in English, perhaps because one of the three narrators is a piece of soap (and I will not budge from suggestions that I eliminate this perspective). Undaunted—and encouraged by a wonderful reception of the Spanish version—I began to sketch out what a sequel would be like, that would take the story until the 1950s or 1960s (with an old camera as one of the narrators, I am if anything rather stubborn in my aesthetic choices). And thinking of who, in 1930s Hollywood, could be hired to write a film about the bandit Murieta, I toyed with the notion that such a screenwriter might be a refugee from Nazi Germany and, at some point, the extravagant and impossible name of Bertram Bracht floated into my crazed brain. I had no idea who that man was, except that he would be escaping his homeland and that such a name opened the possibility that he might hoodwink an ignorant movie producer into confusing him with the great Bertold. I drafted some reluctant paragraphs but they were leading me nowhere, so Bertram was banished to the realm of the unfinished to await final dissolution or, perhaps, resurrection. As the years went by and it became clear to me that I would never write that sequel on top of which I acknowledged that, anyway, to have a German refugee writing about a Californio bandit who may or may not have existed was the wrong task for him.
Nevertheless, for many years the Weimar Republic and, specifically, Weimar on the Pacific had fascinated me. In 1983, while still in exile myself, I reviewed for the Washington Post Anthony Heilbut’s magisterial Exiled in Paradise (which I also mentioned in a long essay a few years ago in the New York Review of Books). I felt a kinship with those artists (primarily writers—yes, Thomas Mann!) who had to build a new home while remaining faithful to the one in their original country, which was being decimated by a ferocious dictatorship.
As the years passed, I read other books on that period, like Joseph Kanon’s mystery and spy story, Stardust, and Salka Viertel’s memoir The Kindness of Strangers or, more recently Donna Rifkind’s excellent The Sun and Her Stars: Salka Viertel and Hitler’s Exiles in the Golden Age of Hollywood—and indeed, Salka ultimately became one of the main characters in my Bracht literary excursion.
But not until another strand in my evolution as a writer wove into my life.
As I grew older (I am now verging on 83 years old), I have slowly become more intrigued with writing about artists I cared about and, therefore, about the past they inhabited. That is where the Shakespeare-Cervantes story came from (and from that there ensued a whole novel, Cautivos, dedicated to how Don Quixote was conceived in a Sevilla jail), and several stories set in the Middle Ages, including one that has just been published in Index on Censorship, about a dog and a cat that are on trial for black magic and the woman healer who can speak to animals and acts as their interpreter and advocate in front of a merciless court. And, of course, my latest novel, Allegro, narrated by Mozart and featuring Bach and Handel.
On this extended rendezvous with yesteryear’s creators, I never lost sight of that amazing exiled German intellectual and artistic community in Los Angeles. They would beckon to me from time to time as a challenge. So much had been written about those people that it made no sense to add to that abundance unless I came up with something that would be strikingly different (I am perpetually thirsting for originality).
And then, one day or evening or noon or dawn, Bertram Bracht revisited me and demanded to be the pilot into that world, promising me that he would not let me down, offering a semi-humorous angle on such a tragic period in our dire twentieth century. It was a matter of getting him on that ship to New York and then figuring out how he could possibly manage to be confused with Brecht and, a more thorny question, how to keep up the pretense year after year with all those émigrés who personally knew the author of The Threepenny Opera, keep this up until the moment when—there was no doubt in my mind that this reckoning would arrive—Brecht himself stepped off a merchant ship in the bay of Los Angeles and headed for a confrontation with his doppelganger.
How was I to imagine that my nouvelle would be published when we would be living, in the United States and all over the planet, the resurgence of the disastrous dictatorial depravities that plagued us in the not so distant past, making Bertram’s journey more relevant than ever?
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
Your question made me realize that in a novel I finished late last year, called Karina’s Other Life, the protagonist happens to inhabit the major cities that have been central to my existence: Santiago, New York, Paris, Amsterdam. (Karina, a female sculptor who has been granted two parallel multiverse lives with two different husbands, also has major encounters with Rome and Berlin, but those cities have more echoes for her than they do for me).
Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
Music has been central to my existence and I listen to it obsessively while I am writing. Blues, classical, rock, jazz—but above all classical. I have, after all, penned a play called Death and the Maiden, where Schubert’s quartet is crucial to the plot—and, again, Allegro, my homage to Mozart, which includes an extensive playlist of the music that accompanies the composer as he investigates the suspicious deaths of Bach and Handel. My obsession with Mozart never subsides. A few months ago I penned a story called “Burning Don Giovanni in New York”, told by Lorenzo Da Ponte, the librettist of three of Wolfgang’s operas. Everything, for me, is song.
Who typically gets the first read of your work?
My wife, Angélica, to whom almost every one of my books is dedicated, has been, for most of our communal journey of over sixty years, the first obligatory reader and she has always been sincere and sharp and compassionate. I also share, sparingly, my work with some others. Deena Metzger (whom I mentioned as a major influence) has been consistently generous in her appraisals and opinions, and Max Arian, a Dutch friend, has, for decades, been reading what I write before it is published and giving me feedback.
If you could work in another art form what would it be?
I would have loved to have had the ability to compose music, but I do not have that talent, so it’s necessary to seek elsewhere. As to painting, I closed that window when I abandoned that artistic expression as a child. But if I were ever to stop writing, I would love to craft some pottery, even if, due to my clumsy hands, I would probably break whatever I worked on before it came to fruition.
What are you reading right now?
For the last twenty years or so I have been reading books to my wife every night. Currently, we are two thirds through Á la récherche du temps perdu. On my own, I am re-reading most of Alice Munro’s stories and have just finished Gospodinov’s extraordinary Time Shelter. And, after rereading Le Père Goriot and Eugenie Grandet and the disturbing “Une Passion dans le désert,” I am now halfway through Balzac’s Illusions Perdues which I had never read and that has far too many uncomfortable parallels to our turbulent and greedy twenty-first century (and a ruthless critique of celebrity and commercialized culture). And, in waiting, as soon as I am able: Colum McCann’s Twist and Samantha Harvey’s Orbital. I’m also eager to read the latest novel from the always admirable Juan Gabriel Vásquez: Los nombres de Feliza. And…. every morning, invariably, I read a poem. Recently, Rilke and Juan Gelman.
ARIEL DORFMAN is a Chilean-American author, born in Argentina, whose award-winning books in many genres have been published in more than fifty languages and his plays performed in more than one hundred countries. His works include the plays Death and the Maiden and Purgatorio, the novels The Suicide Museum, Widows, and Konfidenz, and the memoirs Heading South, Looking North and Feeding on Dreams. His latest novel is Allegro, narrated by Mozart. He writes regularly for the New York Times, Washington Post, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian,and CNN, among others. His stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s and The Three Penny Review, among others. He lives with his wife Angélica in Santiago, Chile, and Durham, North Carolina, where he is the Walter Hines Page Emeritus Professor of Literature at Duke University.
