Living Room: A Profile of Sam Savage

Light streams through the windows of an orange and yellow house on Lakeland Avenue in Madison, Wisconsin, bringing the clarity of an early June afternoon to Sam Savage’s living room. A block away is Lake Monona, which forms the south shore of the isthmus that gives downtown Madison its distinctive layout. The lake’s name is the Chippewa word for “beautiful,” and considering the dog walkers and the sailboats and the city’s modest skyline framing the shore, it’s easy to see why. But you can’t see any of that from the living room. All you can see through the big front window is a muted, tree-lined street—a view that is pleasant precisely because there is nothing extraordinary about it.

Inside the living room there is a simple couch and a wooden rocker—on which Savage is now resting—both positioned to take full advantage of the light. On the floor lies a fifteen-year-old dog, of questionable breed, named Bertram (Bertie to his friends), who can neither see nor hear very well. “Time is his ailment,” his owner says, in a way that indicates no further diagnosis is forthcoming. A red, leather chair is off to one side, closest to the window. “Over there, that’s my office,” says Savage, whose third novel, Glass, will be published this month by Coffee House Press. “I have a laptop. I turn it on and I put my feet up on that stool and I look out the window.” He is seventy years old, and during natural breaks in the conversation he exhales slowly, audibly, through pursed lips, as if just learning how to whistle—the result of a genetic lung disease, alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, that he has lived with for the past thirty-five years or so. “I just sit by the window and look out,” he says.

Which is not entirely true. For Sam Savage, sitting by the window and looking out is an act of the highest form of art. Although it may appear otherwise to passersby, the author is hard at work on the other side of the glass, creating some of the most original, unforgettable characters in contemporary fiction. There’s the eponymous rat in his debut novel, Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife (Coffee House Press, 2006), who quotes Ford Madox Ford and James Joyce as he devours books, both literally and figuratively, in a Boston bookstore in the sixties. There’s Andrew Whittaker, the aspiring novelist and literary magazine editor in The Cry of the Sloth (Coffee House Press, 2009), whose talents are no match for his great ambitions and the even greater mountains of debt and debris threatening his house and his sanity. And now there’s Edna, the elderly widow in Glass whose ongoing, typewritten argument with her late husband, Clarence, a novelist, covers in painstaking detail the mundane particulars of a life while ultimately uncovering the transcendent power of art.

These flawed characters—these excluded, invisible outcasts—are the hallmark of an author whose furious dedication to writing and unwillingness to settle for anything less than perfection very nearly led him nowhere but here: a living room with a view of nothing in particular in the middle of the Midwest. If not for what Savage calls a fluke—writing a novel from the perspective of a character he initially thought was a failed writer but turned out to be a rat—no one would have ever read a word he wrote.

Despite the fact that he had to wait until he was sixty-five years old to publish his first book, Savage has been writing—poems, stories, and always the attempts at novels—for as long as he can remember. He had earlier, albeit modest success with poems, but he didn’t really like any of them. “I published a few things in a few reviews,” he says. “The Chattahoochee Review published a long poem of mine once. But it was like dropping a stone down a dry well. You write a poem, and you can say it was published, but no one reads the poem—a few other poets, maybe, but I didn’t know any of them. I thought, ‘Well hell.’ I wasn’t happy with it anyway, so I just sort of quit—gave up completely. I was fifty-five years old and I just gave up. And it was total and it was sincere.”

He calls it his “great death,” borrowing Zen Buddhism’s term for the point of absolute despair that precedes enlightenment. To achieve the fullness of life, according to Zen tradition, one must cast off the ego and experience a second birth. It’s an idea illustrated in the story of first-century Zen master Hsiang-yen, who as a student was given a koan by his master and, failing to understand it, gave up, surrendered, abandoned his studies. Later, on hearing a pebble hit a piece of hollow bamboo—ping—he attains enlightenment.

Most writers can relate to the feeling of being so frustrated, so at a loss for words, so unable to make sense of the whole literary enterprise that quitting—the poem, the story, the chapter, if just for the night or even the week—seems the only reasonable thing to do. For Savage it was different: “My great death lasted five years.”

The light is changing, the shadows lengthening, and still, Sam Savage looks out the window. He  doesn’t feel at home here. But then, he’s never felt at home anywhere. He was born in 1940 in Camden, South Carolina, a small town in the middle of the state, about thirty-five miles northeast of Columbia. His father, Henry Savage, was the town’s mayor for ten years. He was also a lawyer and the author of a number of books on nature and Southern history. “A lawyer by trade and an author by vocation” is how Savage puts it, and his father absolutely loved small-town Southern life. Savage’s mother, Elizabeth Jones, did not. She was born in Columbia and yearned for something more. She got a master’s degree in English from Wellesley College and loved poetry. She wanted to live in New York City but ended up in Camden, where she raised seven children.

“There were two gods in my family,” says Savage. “Darwin on my father’s side and Keats on my mother’s side.” He recalls how when he was a teenager, he and his siblings—four older, two younger—would play a game with their mother, opening an anthology of poetry to a random page and reading a single line. “She could almost always say who wrote the poem and often she could go on and recite the rest of it. She had an enormous love of poetry and an encyclopedic knowledge of it.” (After her death in 2004, Savage found copies of a literary magazine that had published some of her own poems—she had torn out each one. “She had a full life because her kids were so important to her,” Savage says, “but she had less of a life than she should have had.”)

Living in Camden was not easy for Sam—nor, indeed, for the rest of the Savage family. “This was the South in the 1950s,” he explains. “This is pre-integration in South Carolina, and we were a liberal family. My father was liberal by Southern standards: He thought integration should come, slowly, so he was considered a real radical. In fact, he was physically attacked once in his office by an irate citizen when he was mayor because of his integration stance.” One night in 1956, Sam’s oldest sister was looking out the window of their home when she turned to the family and said, “You know, we have the loveliest cross burning on our lawn.”

Shortly thereafter, the Savages moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and stayed there for two years, partly to allow Henry to research a book on the South and partly to save seventeen-year-old Sam, who was becoming something of a delinquent. He had dropped out of high school in the midst of what he calls “a furious rebellion” against the limitations of small-town life and the closed-mindedness of his peers. Having been taught an appreciation of poetry and art by his mother, young Sam Savage was often teased and ridiculed for expressing it.

Cambridge during 1956 and 1957 was a revelation. Joan Baez was singing in coffee shops, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was published, and Sam’s oldest sister was hanging out with Gregory Corso. Although the family eventually returned to Camden, Sam had seen the light. He finished high school, and in 1960 he went off to Yale University intending to study English. After just a few months, however, he quit and returned to South Carolina. “I was a small-town Southern boy and Yale was like a grown-up prep school,” he says. Instead of going back to Yale, he enrolled at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and married his high school sweetheart. Both experiences—his marriage and his time at Chapel Hill—lasted about a year. He then spent some time in New York City, where he got involved in the Committee for Nonviolent Action, which had been formed a few years earlier to resist the government’s nuclear-weapons testing. In the spring of 1962 he and about twelve others, including poet Ed Sanders, marched from Nashville to Washington, D.C., where they were arrested on the steps of the Pentagon. “We got arrested everywhere. That was the period when I was getting sort of radicalized politically,” Savage says. “I just wanted to get out of America.” So he traveled around Europe for several years, spending his parents’ money. (“Not much money,” he laughs. “It was easy to get a hotel room for five francs, which was a dollar.”) In 1965 he married a Frenchwoman in Paris and the two had a son, Joshua. The marriage didn’t last long, so Savage returned to Yale, where he studied philosophy, graduating in 1968.

He went on to get his PhD, studying for a time at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, but by the time he finished, his interest in the subject had deflated. “I went into philosophy thinking that there would be some transcendent meaning at the other end—some answers—and I got a certain kind of training, but in the end...” Savage breathes in, turns the words over in his mouth, and slowly breathes them out. “Wittgenstein has this famous statement; he said, ‘My aim is to show the fly the way out of the bottle.’ But I didn’t care about the bottle. I loved the system; learning the system was like learning a new game. That was fun. But in fact I didn’t believe any of it. I could argue one side or the other, but I didn’t care. The game was over.”

In 1972, after completing two years of obligatory teaching at Yale, Savage returned to France and met Nora, the daughter of Ralph Manheim, a widely acclaimed English translator of books by Freud, Proust, Brecht, and others. While in Paris, Savage was diagnosed   with emphysema, but it was later determined that he suffered from alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency. In 1977 Nora returned to the United States with Sam and the two were married soon thereafter. For a time Savage worked as a bicycle mechanic in Somerville, Massachusetts, but he was getting sicker, and doctors in Boston advised him to move south where the weather was better.

“I should’ve been dead thirty years ago,” he says now. “I didn’t think I was going to live very long.” So in 1980 he was back in South Carolina, working as a carpenter in Charleston. He and Nora had a son, then a daughter, and they eventually moved to McClellanville, a coastal town of about five hundred residents surrounded by the Francis Marion National Forest, where Savage became a commercial fisherman. “I had a crab boat that I ran,” he says. “It was wonderful. I would do that the rest of my life if I could. I loved it, but it’s starvation work. It’s the bottom of the commercial-fishing heap.”

Meanwhile he wrote. He was always writing. Until all of a sudden he wasn’t—his great death. For five years he was adrift, having abandoned the art he always considered the one true form of salvation. “I really do think that art can save you in some sense,” he says. “It’s the last meaning, unless you’re religious—and I’m not religious. It’s the only secular vehicle for transcendence we have. It’s an immediate self-validating experience. It lifts you beyond your mortal clay.”

No longer a writer, or at least not considering himself one, Savage decided on a different journey. “I had a sailboat—not a big boat, about twenty-six feet, but it was seaworthy—and I decided I was going to sail to France. It took about two years of preparation, but then I got much sicker. Before too long it had become a suicide mission. I couldn’t do it. Even a small bad-weather situation was more than I could handle. So anyway”—another breath in—“I didn’t do that. That delusion kept me going for several years, but then I stopped.”

In the summer of 2002, Sam, Nora, and their daughter, who was born with a cognitive disability, moved to Madison, where she could finish her high school education and get the help she continues to need. Nora is a special-education assistant at a Madison elementary school. “And here we are,” Savage says. “We set up camp here. My wife feels more a part of the city. I sit by the window and look out. I don’t feel I’m in Madison in any sort of permanent way. I don’t feel it’s home, but here I am.”

Less than three hundred miles northwest of Madison, in Minneapolis, Chris Fischbach is talking about Giulio Einaudi Editore, an Italian publishing house with annual revenues of about !1.5 billion, which puts it roughly on the same shelf as Random House. “They made it big by force of publicity and will,” says the newly appointed publisher of Coffee House Press, referring to the publicity and promotion that accompanied Einaudi’s publication of Firmin in 2008, two years after Coffee House published it in the United States. “Imagine an article about a book on the front page of the New York Times—not the New York Times Book Review—the New York Times. That’s how they treated it in Italy.” The latest figures from Einaudi reflect sales of just under half a million copies. Add the figures from Germany, Spain, France, and the other countries in which Firmin has been published and you get close to a million copies. They’re even making a movie of it in Spain, although Fischbach doesn’t see how that’s possible: Animated or live action? A real rat?

How Sam Savage went from being a failed writer to an international best-selling novelist is undoubtedly a feel-good story—even he grudgingly admits it. “I know, it’s a good story: Don’t give up.” But in fact that’s exactly what he had to do. “I started writing again because I’d given up,” he says. “I didn’t expect anything from it. There were no stakes left.”

During their first two years in Madison, Savage spent the winters back down in McClellanville, where the weather was better, in the house they hadn’t yet sold, and he finally started writing again. One night he wrote a page and a half in the voice of what he thought was a failed writer, inspired by Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground. The next morning he read what he had written and—ping—he thought, “‘Jesus, this is a rat!’ That seemed like the perfect outsider, the perfect metaphor for exclusion, because a rat is a part of human society. They live in our houses and yet they are the most despised. They became a metaphor for any kind of exclusion or invisibility,” he says. “So then the novel became this raging against this invisibility, this exclusion. There was this desire to become visible, to become human. The idea that art and literature could make him human, visible, that he could take his place among us. Art could save him. That’s something I got from my mother: that art can save you.”

After he had finished writing the novel, Savage sent it to a handful of independent publishers, including Coffee House Press, which had published Ed Sanders, whom he knew from the march to the Pentagon, and the late Gilbert Sorrentino, one of his favorite writers. Fischbach says Firmin was picked from the slush pile, which attracts about three thousand manuscripts annually, and it struck a chord with everyone who read it. “It’s a feat of genius to get a reader to fall in love and cry and laugh over a disgusting rat,” he says. In 2006 Coffee House published the novel with an illustration of that disgusting rat emblazoned on its cover. Savage had a hunch that a small indie press was the way to go, and he was right.

“I generally prefer things independent to things large and corporate,” he says. “That goes for pretty much everything. In publishing, I don’t like the dominance of marketing departments. I loathe the big-book mentality, the pushing of certain—often second-rate—books at the expense of other, better books, the failure to support books that don’t catch on in the first thirty days or so, and the tendency to talk (and think) of books as ‘products.’ I expected something else from a small independent press, and I have not been disappointed. At Coffee House, and I think at many other small presses, they put everything they have behind the books they publish, and they keep on doing it year after year. They bring the writer into the process, right from the beginning, even in questions of typography and cover design. Unless you have a lot of confidence that your book will be one of the chosen few on which the corporate publisher is going to lavish its money, I can’t understand why you would want to entrust them with your manuscript.”

As it turned out, Firmin was already on its way to a big publisher—many big publishers, actually. As typically happens, Coffee House sent Firmin to a Spanish sub-rights agent who shopped it around and eventually sold it to Seix Barral, in Barcelona, for a modest price. Shortly thereafter Seix Barral called back with an offer to buy world rights—for a hundred thousand dollars. “And we said yes!” Fischbach says with a chuckle. “It did well here for us—it’s one of our best front-list books—but nothing like that.” The only catch was that world rights included U.S. rights, so Coffee House had to pull its edition of Firmin from the market. Seix Barral then negotiated the sale of U.S. rights to Delta, an imprint of Random House.

While Savage has nothing nice to say about Random House—certainly not about the “cutesy” cover of the Delta edition—the novel remains as edited by Fischbach back in 2006. “If it had gone to a bigger house initially, they probably would have made him make all sorts of changes, and as a result it probably wouldn’t have been so successful,” the editor says. “It’s a real success story for artistic and editorial integrity.”

Emboldened by the fact that, after decades of trying, he could actually finish a novel, Savage took advantage of the artistic freedom afforded by the success of Firmin and continued writing, charging ahead with The Cry of the Sloth and Glass, as well as another novel he is currently writing, about a failed art collector, tentatively titled “The Way of the Dog,” which he says will be finished in a year. While his subsequent books haven’t enjoyed the level of success of Firmin, Coffee House—as well as many of his international publishers—remains dedicated to publishing just about anything Savage writes.

“Firmin has given me a greater disregard for the possibility of a large readership, because I have it. I’ve done that,” he says. “I have lots of people reading my book in Italy. Not many will read Glass? Okay. There are three billion people in China—none of them will read it. It’s all relative; a hundred thousand copies is a drop on the planet. Firmin was a happy misunderstanding. I didn’t set out to write an Italian best-seller. I wouldn’t know how to do that if I had.”

None of the characters in his later novels are quite as endearing as the rat with an appetite for great literature, nor are the plots as precisely drawn. The Cry of the Sloth is an epistolary novel, and while writing Glass Savage made an enormous effort to avoid all salient plot markers so that every event in the novel is seemingly insignificant: A glass of water falls on the floor, a pet rat dies (yes, a rat dies in the new book), a window washer cleans a window. All that readers are left with is a voice so strong that Savage is able to derive significance from these events by sheer literary force.

“Slowly I think people will come to see that Firmin was a fluke,” Fischbach says, “that Sam is not this enormous international success but actually a very serious, dark, and darkly humorous writer who should be listed with some of the major writers we have in the United States.” Not that Savage himself is giving it much thought. He’s never set out to write for an audience and isn’t about to start now. “I think you have to ask yourself, ‘If I knew no one was going to publish anything of mine for twenty years, would I go on writing?’ And if you say no, then you should just quit. There has to be some other reward.”

Savage says that this morning he sat in front of the window in his living room and tried to describe how the lights from Camp Randall Stadium, across the lake, make the sky glow at night. “You put something down like a piece of clay and you just work it and you keep working it…and you have to get your nose right up against it,” he says about the writing process, his voice growing louder as he describes it. “You go back to it and keep hammering at it: ‘There must be more, there must be something else, there must be.’ I spent half the morning trying to capture this great glow, and I didn’t succeed. But that I like—that I enjoy.”

Kevin Larimer is the editor in chief of Poets & Writers Magazine.