Mark Helprin Interview

MF: So, to what do you attribute the change in the ethos?


Mark Helprin: Well, we've been mechanized. We view ourselves as mechanisms. This is a trend since The Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, in my view, has two streams - a good stream and a bad stream. The good stream is the beauty of reason, to approach something via scientific method, via logic. The ugly part of The Enlightenment is that if you confine yourselves to those methods, then you are limiting yourself in terms of your understanding of what a human soul is. By necessity, because you cannot define the soul as it's not subject to proof, human beings become mechanisms. Without faith, a person is a mechanism, and then there's no reason he shouldn't be treated or work under those assumptions, as a mechanism.

That's why, for example, you have the ineffective super-sexualization in American and Europe, which by the way is what the Muslims are reacting to. It just drives them nuts, as it is a blot against the spirit. If you think of yourself as a mechanism, then there's no dimension to sex other than simple pleasure.

The huge rise in the divorce rate and the alienation that everyone feels I think is all a result of that. It's the coarsening of understanding itself that derives from this effect. This is also why people use their bodies as billboards. The body is the temple of the spirit, and all of the religions in the world have ethics about how to treat the body - yours and others. Because if you begin to use your body as a mechanism, for instance if you use primitive things like putting bones in your nose and tattooing yourself and that kind of stuff, you defile the holiness of it. If you prostitute your body, you are doing the same thing.

And if this is the general expectation of society, that a young person is going to be promiscuous and have tattoos and that kind of stuff, you have a tremendous coarsening which spreads to everything else. You wouldn't expect someone who does that kind of thing to be sensitive to what Keats said is all you need to know -- truth and beauty.

But I'm of course a codger, right?

MF: From where did the idea for Freddy and Fredericka spring?

Mark Helprin: Fourteen years ago, we were on the Soldier of the Great War tour. My children were very little. They were four and six. We ate in a restaurant that had the kind of kitchen that you can look into and see this tremendous ballet of people working. So we were watching the people in the kitchen, and my four year old had a phobia of whales. That was her thing, you know not dragons or anything. The six year old was afraid of crocodiles; the four year old was afraid of whales. At that time, there was a lot going on about the Prince and Princess of Wales, and she was terrified of them because they were the real nightmare figures (laughs). I explained to her that they were actually people, but she was still scared.

So we were in this place watching the people in the kitchen, and there was a man and a woman at the sink who had caps on and were preparing dishes to go into a big commercial dishwasher. And my four year old looked at them and looked at me and asked, "Are those the Prince and Princess of whales?" Because they made her nervous I guess. And I said, "No they're not." Then I started thinking "Boy would I like to be the fly on the wall if in fact they were the Prince and Princess of Wales and they ended up working in this restaurant for whatever reason. And then I simply made it happened, in my imagination. Because I wanted to see what it would be like to go through that.

Of course there's a rich tradition of incognito tales, from the story of Joseph, and the Greek Gods were constantly disguising themselves and going amongst people, Henry V, Truman... Truman would walk across the street and sit at the drugstore counter. Times were different then.

I just love the idea of someone in a high position like that and traveling among the people. I like that very much, so I thought, what about these guys? They could use some of this.

And really what they needed - heal themselves, to heal their marriage - was a normal life. I mean, I don't think I could have done much better had I been brought up the way that Charles has been and even Princess Diana. They were really underprivileged in the sense of not having a normal life. So why not subject them to this and see what happens.