Lev Raphael

Award winners often thank long lists of people, sometimes including their children, and most recently, Mickey Rourke thanked his dogs when he accepted a Golden Globe Award. The next time I win an award, I think I’ll thank Henry James. Don’t panic. I don’t mean that I’ve been channeling him or that I’m descended from his illegitimate son. I’m not fixated on James and I haven’t been cyber stalking him or anything like that.

But James is the writer who’s influenced me the most, and whose work I’ve read and studied most over the last thirty years. I’ve been inspired by his lifelong dedication to his craft, his questing mind, his own hunger for inspiration, and the amazing brilliance of his output over five decades: twenty-two novels, over a hundred stories, and hundreds of essays and reviews. James kept writing decade after decade despite declining sales and a shrinking audience after he had early international success. He suffered profound humiliations, some private and some very public–like being booed by the audience of one of his plays. Yet he kept writing and even tried transferring what he learned from his forays into drama to his fiction. James’s determination is a great example for every author, especially now with the publishing industry in the same kind of meltdown as most other businesses in this country.

It was reading one of James best-loved novels that woke me up and helped make me not just become a writer, but a published writer. All through college I had a creative writing professor who kept saying, “You have to write something real—you have to write something real. You’ll be published some day and win prizes, but you have to write something real.” I should add she wasn’t just blowing smoke. I was one of three students she predicted success for, and she was right in each case.

But something real? I had no idea what she meant. Even though I was writing fables about medieval knights, and stories about girls whose fathers locked them in towers while they played Beethoven by the fire, and working-class Irish couples, I had no idea what she meant.

Then one night in my senior year, at about 3 a.m., I read the famous Chapter 42 of The Portrait of a Lady. If you don’t know this beautiful, resonant book, you should. It’s a classic story of the collision between dreams and reality, a very American conflict. Set in the 1870s, primarily in England and Italy, it tells the story of Isabel Archer, a free-spirited, independent, optimistic young woman from Albany who finds in Europe that a huge inheritance leads her into the blind alley of a loveless, cold marriage. Her husband married her solely for her money and instead of being the man of great taste and boundless possibilities she took him for, he’s really an emotional skinflint, a “sterile dilettante” as someone in the book astutely observes.

When she finally begins to sense the nature of her trap, Isabel sits up late at night in front of a fire in her magnificent Italian palazzo, mulling over what her life has come to. She had longed for a home of intellectual freedom and love that was openly given and received, but now she realizes that what she lives in is “The house of dumbness, the house of deafness, the house of suffocation.”

I read that passage and was never the same again. It blew me out of my tree because that was the house I lived in. I saw it, felt it, finally had the words. And what words in that book. James’s amazing metaphors, his lavish character descriptions, his quiet wit.

Write something real? Baby, I was ready! Within weeks, my writing started to take on an emotional depth and color that was new, and my writing professor noticed instantly. I wasn’t copying James, but I was resonating to him, to his profound understanding of human psychology. Soon I was reading everything of his I could find, and about him, too. I was studying him. I was inhaling him.

Not too long afterwards, when I’d already graduated college and was in a top-ranked MFA program, I began a story that was completely unlike anything I’d ever written before. It opened with a paragraph describing a character’s father and how very intimidated the boy felt around him. This was brand new territory for me. I knew it was the doorway into a story I had to tell and was afraid to tell. After I called my former writing professor and read it to her on the phone, she urged me to keep writing, in fact made me agree to write a section, call her and read it to her, write another, call her, and so on until it was done a day and a half later. I was terrified—I was alive.

It turned into a story about the son of Holocaust survivors who felt alienated by his parents’ past and crushed by it. It was very autobiographical, emotionally. It plumbed the darkness in our family that my parents wanted to protect me from, but couldn’t. Because that darkness was all around me when I grew up, and the only way I could get through it was to write, as clearly, as strongly, as powerfully as I could. I had to find my own light. All writers do.

James showed me the way. That story was the beginning of my career-long exploration of what it means to grow up in the shadow of almost immeasurable tragedy and deep, abiding sorrow. In a way, growing up as the son of Holocaust survivors, it was as if I lived in a land where a meteor had hit the ground and my task was to walk the crater’s perimeter and study its depth.

Now, some thirty-odd years later, I have my own shelf of books. I’ve had many surprises as an author, some of them unpleasant ones. At one dark time in my career, I had a dream in which I stood outside of Carnegie Hall with James, who was dressed to the nines and I asked, “That’s how you did it, isn’t it? You just kept going, no matter what.”

He nodded sagely. And that was enough for me—then, and many times since. Defeat and disappointment made him a better artist. I hope they’ve had the same effect on me.


Lev Raphael grew up in New York but got over it and has lived half his life in Michigan where he found his partner of twenty-four years, and a certain small fame. He escaped academia in 1988 to write full-time and has never looked back. The author of nineteen books in many genres, and hundreds of reviews, stories and articles, he’s seen his work discussed in journals, books, conference papers, and assigned in college and university classrooms. Which means he’s become homework. Who knew? Lev’s books have been translated into close to a dozen languages, some of which he can’t identify, and he’s done hundreds of readings and talks across the U.S. and Canada, and in France, England, Scotland, Austria, Germany and Israel. His new memoir My Germany will be published April 2009 by the University of Wisconsin Press and in September 2009 by Parthas Verlag in Berlin. You can learn more about Lev and his work on his website. Lev has reviewed for the Washington Post, Boston Review, NPR, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Jerusalem Report and the Detroit Free Press where he had a mystery column for almost a decade. He also hosted his own public radio book show where he interviewed Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, and Julian Barnes among many other authors. Whatever the genre, he's always looked for books with a memorable voice and a compelling story to tell. Contact Lev.