In my 33 years of life, I’ve only stopped one plane from taking off, though I was later kicked out of two airports for experiencing public panic attacks. They’re difficult to represent successfully in prose, but when I read Michael Clune’s Pan, narrated by Nick, a teenager who, at the age of 15, starts getting panic attacks that he attributes to being possessed by Pan, the Greek god, I wanted to speak to the author.
I had read Clune’s memoir of heroin addiction and recovery, White Out, re-issued beautifully by McNally Jackson Editions, and became interested in the stylistic jumps of his sentences, resulting in acrobatic paragraphs which mimic the thinking patterns of an addict in recovery, displaying missing links and attempts at piecing together a narrative, even if that reality is distorted. The leap from here to there is larger than you think, and the rules of gravity don’t apply in storytelling. In Pan, Nick staves off panic by reading books, which provide order in an otherwise chaotic world. I found this method of meaning-making to be similar to my own, so I wanted to explore a mind like Clune’s, who’s moved from academic text to memoir and, now, to fiction. Pan, which was published last week, wonders what it means to be young and alive, if it’s possible to really be open to other people. Just before the book’s release, I talked to the author about all of this and more.
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KYLE DILLON HERTZ: Hey, Michael.
MICHAEL CLUNE: Hello!
HERTZ: It’s good to speak to you. I’m such a fan of White Out. I’m also a fan of Pan, and I’ve been really wanting to pick your brain. There are really some echoes of White Out in this book.
CLUNE: Absolutely, yeah.
HERTZ: I was wondering if you see a connection between the two?
CLUNE: I think there’s a lot of different connections, just because of how I write. My writing’s sort of animated by a faith that if you look into important experiences deeply enough, they’ll reveal really surprising things. So when I’m talking about heroin and addiction in White Out, or I’m talking about panic and anxiety in Pan, I sort of see the experience as a door. And we have names for those doors, like addiction or panic or anxiety. But as writing allows me to open that door, it reveals really unsurprising facts between surprising places. For example, between addiction and the divine, or between panic and the occult. I’m really interested in allowing those kinds of connections to emerge.
HERTZ: Something I’m drawn to in both of these books is the way in which you’re attempting to map the thinking from A to B, right? In Pan, you have a list of 18 points of which a panic attack is potentially composed. And then in White Out, your paragraphs sometimes have a free associative nature which allows the narrator to really go into memory. But the ways that these are composed in each book are totally different. Did you approach them differently?
CLUNE: Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say there’s some differences, but there’s also a lot of similarities. White Out didn’t start as me trying to write a book that I was going to publish about my addiction. I started writing about my own experience as a way of learning what was in that experience of getting high for the first time, and being haunted by that. I collaborated with some neuroscientists to write up the insights I had, then I showed it to a couple of friends and they were like, “You should publish the book that you’ve written about this.” I hadn’t really thought of that before. I was kind of nervous because I was up for tenure. But I was like, “Well, if they deny me tenure I can sue them for American disabilities or whatever, and I’ll be set.” I was kind of looking forward to it. But yeah, it didn’t work out like that. With Pan, I started with a kind of literary desire. I was super interested in cosmic horror, and writers like Arthur Machen or [H.P] Lovecraft, [György] Ligeti. I was really interested in trying to get some of that energy into my writing naturally. In other words, finding an experience that had such weird and uncanny qualities that they could sort of naturally open up these cosmic horror types of spaces. And when I thought about panic attacks, I was like, “Man, this is it.”
HERTZ: You talk about the “White Out,” and the way that you almost go into a sort of an unconscious state. But due to the nature of addiction, you then chase the first time over and over again—there’s a kind of mythical quality to it. And this experience is almost mirrored in Pan.
CLUNE: I’ve never thought about that connection before, but it’s totally true. It’s the relation between some version of the spiritual, with all of its ambiguities and sacrifices and even evil, to a degree. For both addiction and panic, in my writing and in my experience, it does generate that kind of mythic entity. The whiteness of the white top vials of heroin that I first experienced became almost an idol. And it was super negative, because the cost of pursuing that vision or that idol was ruinous. But it also symbolized something powerful and otherworldly that was really, really attractive. Similarly, with panic and with Pan, the idea that in the depths of panic attacks and anxiety, one begins to feel the uncanniness of one’s own mind and then begins to think, “What is this thing? What is this entity?” There’s something profoundly alien about it. The character Nick in Pan is simultaneously horrified, like, “Oh my god, panic is making me see my body as this thing.” But it’s also kind of this ultimate escape from being trapped in this Midwestern, crappy, lower-middle class suburb. And this is something that I can think about as creating a difference between my normal degraded reality.
HERTZ: You mentioned escape, which Nick does in multiple ways. He escapes through literature, which I think is one of the most relatable qualities in Pan for writers. Is that your own experience of literature?
MICHAEL CLUNE: Yeah, that experience where Nick is having this panic attack and he’s reading Ivanhoe, but he thinks it’s a heart attack. One of the things about writing this book was recapturing that moment of me being 15 and not knowing what a panic attack was, not even being able to name it. That’s totally my own experience. I was reading Ivanhoe and I was like, “As long as I’m reading this book, the language of the author, the images of the book are occupying my mind, and I don’t have to deal with what’s in my mind.” So, literature does a number of different things in the book for Nick, as it has for me. Proust talks about that most powerfully, where he says that the only way to get outside of the habit and dullness that afflicts us with time is to look at the world through someone else’s eyes, which only art can do. I think that’s also what Nick was interested in, finding books by Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde. It’s this sense of being able to have an experience that is totally alien to this Midwestern world, where people aren’t reading a lot. I’m a first-generation immigrant from Ireland, working-class family, first-generation college student. When I was growing up, I didn’t really have a lot of literary books in the house or anything like that. So when I first discovered Oscar Wilde’s play Salome when I was about 15, I was just like, “Whoa, there’s something occult or esoteric about this language.” It’s so not like the language of television or of church or of conversations with friends. I found it alluring.
HERTZ: You mentioned this idea of the sensorium, which can only be experienced through art. And you sort of recreate it in the book itself through Nick’s experience. He ends up in this friend group where they’re attempting to pass the spirit of a person into the vessel of another person, and then also through his sexual relationship with Sarah. Is this your way of literalizing this artmaking experience through a cult-like barn full of teenagers?
CLUNE: Yeah. I think a lot about the relationship in our time between art and artmaking, and a more serious commitment to art and the occult. I think there’s a bunch of different resonances. Primordially, literature had an involvement with the cult. The first poems are spells or prayers. And you’ve got these artifacts, these literary works that are distanced from the discourse of the social media world. I do think that the cult scenes in the novel and the occult dimension is part of working through the experience of art in our time. I think it also captures when I was 15, having my first panic attack and not knowing what literature really was, or knowing people who were interested in it. I’m just sort of discovering it on my own with a couple friends.
HERTZ: You keep bringing up your 15-year-old panic attacks. How clear in your mind is it still?
CLUNE: It’s funny. With White Out, I didn’t really understand what drugs and addiction was like for me until a couple years of being clean. Because when I was in it, I was so caught up in the pursuit of getting high and the evasion of the cops that I didn’t really reflect on it. It was only afterwards, in the writing, that I had this capacity to put myself back in those spaces in a way that I’d been afraid to do before. Writing enables me to really access those experiences in great detail, but without the fear that I’m going to go back to using or that I’m going to get myself into a panic spiral. And with Pan, it was the same. I’ve had panic attacks occasionally in the years since I was a teenager, but very rarely. But when I was writing about it, my technique would be to focus on very vivid memories that I would have and go and explore around the edges and see what else would be revealed.
HERTZ: It’s interesting in Pan, too, the characters are in that strange adolescent space where these things are kind of normal to us as adults. So many of us have anxiety, PTSD, OCD, but at this time when we’re sort of just developing, there’s a real potency in being diagnosed. And by setting it in that exact moment in time, it really allows you a lot of room to play. Was that a strategic decision or did this just occur since parts of it were inspired from real life?
CLUNE: I would say definitely it’s inspired by my own experience. When I started writing it I tried to set it at an older age, like in your twenties. But what you just described is exactly why that didn’t really work. When you’re in your twenties, at least for me, you’re a lot more familiar with psychological discourse and medication and so forth. When I was 15, we didn’t have the internet. The discourse in the 90s was nothing like it is today. People didn’t really know what this was. But the great thing about the clinical approach to mental illness is that it puts it in a box. It says, “You’re not insane. You’re just suffering from panic attacks.” You know what I mean?
HERTZ: Yeah. So, Pan is a book that’s obsessed with prophecy. What’s your relationship to this idea of a teenager who’s into the prophecy?
CLUNE: One of my obsessions that goes through all my work is time and the weirdness of time. Obviously it’s not just my obsession; it’s a classic theme of literature and philosophy and science. A vivid experience that I write about in the book, which is from when I was five, was when I became convinced I could tell when the wind was going to start. I convinced myself and some of my friends and even my babysitter that I was able to do this for an afternoon. I’m really interested in uses of literature that have sort of fallen by the wayside in our society, and one of the ancient uses of literature is as a prophecy for discerning the future. Also, I think the greatest mystery of literary works is how they’re able to last, how a work that was written by Shakespeare in the 1500s can be something that we still read and are moved by in the 21st century. There’s some kind of time-defeating mechanism encoded in there. So, with the prophecy motif, it was a way to mess with some of those kinds of ideas.
HERTZ: Recently, I was making fun of this movement that’s been happening, this idea that straight white men don’t get published anymore. And whether or not you agree with it, one of the things that has happened because of this discourse is that a lot of the weird writing from masculine stalwarts of that generation of writers has been erased. Denis Johnson, who’s my hero, his work is really reduced because it’s quite strange. But when I was writing my own novel, there were certain things I kind of took from him: a forward-looking narrator, someone who’s talking into the future and using different tenses.
MICHAEL CLUNE: I really love what you just said. With Denis Johnson, that stuff is super bizarre and strange, and the idea of what’s going to be an icon of white male writing is super bizarre. There’s this American obsession with representation, and the idea that art is representative of the social identity of its author. But a more interesting way to think about it is, “I’m not necessarily interested in the social milieu of the author, but because some of my favorite authors are black, queer, not like me in those categorical identity terms, it’s really just about great writing.” I think people have a real problem with making value judgments by just saying, “This book is great, and this book sucks.” Or, “This is really weird.” To me, that’s a value term, and it’s a positive judgment. I like that stuff. I feel like this hand-wringing about whether an identity group is not represented correctly masks a more fundamental problem in our literary culture, which is the capacity to make value judgments that are different from the value judgments of the marketplace.
HERTZ: It’s so difficult. There’s the world of the commercial literary scene, which in some ways is a totally fake thing. And on the other hand, when you’re young, certain things don’t hit the same. I remember not understanding The Odyssey or The Iliad at all when I was an undergrad, and then I was just reading it this summer thinking, “Oh wow, this isn’t good, but I’m kind of identifying a bit with Achilles.” How do you approach this as a teacher?
CLUNE: I couldn’t agree more. To me, great writing has a power that I have faith in. I taught Jane Austen last semester. I love Jane Austen, and a lot of the students there were into Jane Austen. Some of them were just curious about it, and the books just hit. And the deeper we went into it, the richer and stranger they got, and the more the students got into them. But I’ll say, I feel like there’s some barriers that need to be sort of loosened, for students and for all of us, which is the idea of “relatable”—the idea that the work should reflect me, rather than giving yourself an opportunity for the work to change you or to show you something you don’t already know. I remember, again, being 15 or 16, and I would discover this book and I just wouldn’t have a vocabulary for understanding what it was doing. I feel like the role of a guide can be really helpful with that.
HERTZ: We keep going back to reading when you’re young and experiencing things when you’re young. Everyone has this performative layer to them, and then everyone has this layer of seeking beneath them. Maybe for artists, we try to keep this alive for a little bit longer, but really in your teenage years, this is so omnipresent. How did you approach this?
CLUNE: That’s a great way of putting it. What you said about the two layers is really true. There’s a thinness to the performative. There’s a brittleness to the veneer, and there’s always the capacity for something under it to come out that’s surprising and exciting and fascinating. It’s almost like every relationship is overlaid with qualities that we typically associate only with sexual or romantic relationships. The feeling of an energy that is encoded behind a kind of front that could be released with the right words or the right movements or the right kind of body language or whatever. I feel like that’s really alive in adolescence, and later we get ossified a little bit.
HERTZ: I really love this book, Michael.
CLUNE: Thank you so much, Kyle. I really appreciate your questions.
