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| Bio
written by Yves Delacroix |
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| Roman
Payne, American novelist living in Paris, was
born in Seattle in 1977. |
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As
a boy, Payne was sent to a Catholic art conservatory in
hopes that he would become an ecclesiastic painter. He
excelled in the visual arts, music and literature, but
at the age of 18, he abandoned all formal education. Struck
with wanderlust, he opted for an itinerant life of travel. |
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His
odyssey began in Vancouver, Canada, where he took a room
in the fashionable West End neighborhood
and attempted to earn a living selling paintings on the
street. A short love affair with a girl from Los Angeles
brought him back to America a few months later. He spent
a couple months in Hollywood, ceased to paint and began
focusing on the twelve-string guitar as a means of making
money. When the relationship ended, he left LA. The rest
of the year was spent hopping trains, hitch-hiking and
bumming rides around Yosemite Park and the Mojave Desert.
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In
1996, he traveled to San Francisco where he found work
as a night guard in a seedy China Town opium den.
It was at this time that he began writing the early works
that would survive in his later years. He still considered
himself primarily a minor poet at this age and had yet
to develop his style in the long form, thus the pieces
that come from this time are mostly single stanza poems,
and songs such as “The Wayfarer”
and “On My Merry Way”. |
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In
1997, at
the age of 20, Roman Payne felt his future belonged to
music. With the belief that the historical city of New
Orleans
would offer the young musician opportunities to make a
career of songwriting, he left the West Coast and hitchhiked
out to Louisiana. |
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Payne
recalled arriving in the subtropical city on “a
hot rainy morning when steam poured off the leaves of
the fig trees and the smells were thick and strange”.
He quickly met the French poet, Philippe Lijour (from
Concarneau, Brittany) who offered Payne a place to sleep
in a room in the “slave quarters” on Ursulines
Street.
Payne worked for whiskey playing the twelve-string guitar
in old French Quarter bars. He earned a few dollars here
and there tending bar as well. In his off hours, he took
up gambling. He recalls these early days in New Orleans
as “a time of few sorrows, of stifling days and
subtropical nights … a time of great poverty and
prolific creativity.” |
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After
Ursulines Street, Payne moved to a "shotgun
house" on
Bourbon Street
directly across from “Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop”.Here
in the center of the French Quarter, he found himself
in mixed company – the haunts of Bourbon Street
were frequented by talented artists and dissolute drunks,
criminals and gamblers alike. While continuing to play
on the stage and compose poems and songs in the sunny
courtyards where green lizards bask on tree limbs, he
also found himself winning and losing large amounts
of
money at the card tables on the riverboats of the Mississippi
each night, where he’d remain till closing hours.
Deep in debt from gambling, he decided to leave New
Orleans,
and in 1998 he boarded a train and traveled to Mexico
City. |
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In
Mexico City, he quickly blended in with the 30 million
inhabitants of the sprawling metropolis.
There he met an American expatriate named Jeff Eaton who
published an underground English-language newspaper in
the Mexican capital. Payne shared a basement with Eaton
in the Coyoacán district. There he worked writing
articles for the newspaper until the Eaton got into a
bar fight and was hospitalized (he later died as a result
of the injuries). The publisher lost his business and
Payne decided to move on. He immediately left Mexico City
and traveled down to Central America. |
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In
a land of “ruby leaves and crystalline waters”,
a place in the rainforest the locals nicknamed “El
Río del Muerto”,
Roman Payne settled for a few months. There he worked
in the mineral mines and gathered semi-precious stones
to be sold to local jewel traders. He wrote a great deal
of poetry at this time, though two of his notebooks were
lost. He also began focusing a great deal of attention
on short-story writing (an activity that would come to
dominate his interests for the next several years), although
he considered his prose writing skills to be not yet matured.
“Occurrence al Río Márron”
is one surviving short-story written at this time. Poems
that survive include “The Brazilian Streets.”
His song “The Slave Quarters”
which he began in New Orleans the year before, was finished
here, and reflects a little of the spirit of his life
at El Río del Muerto. |
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Yearning
to progress his life, Payne soon left the jungle and made
his way back north to Mexico city. He was only planning
to pass through and check on his old friends when, by
chance, he met a young beautiful Jewess from Boston. She
was visiting her father, an American diplomat, in Mexico
City. The two became immediately attached and although
Payne was broke and had few prospects, the girl invited
him to return with her to Boston. A few days later, the
couple flew first-class to Massachusetts. The wealthy
Louisburg Square
area would serve as his home for the next few months. |
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His
relationship with the diplomat’s daughter was stormy
and passionate and ended quickly. Payne acquired a sum
of money through uncertain means and decided to leave
New England. After a bitter argument one snowy December
night at the end of 1998, Payne took the midnight train
to New York City. |
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Arriving
in Manhattan with a suitcase, a classical guitar and a
writing notebook, Payne stayed a week at the Gershwin
Hotel before he rented a small room at 284 Mott Street
in the fashionable Nolita section of SoHo in Downtown
Manhattan. There he spent his time writing in his room
or down at Café Gitane on the corner of Mott Street,
or up the rooftop of his building. It was at this time,
in 1999, that Payne lost interest in becoming a professional
musician. The art of short-story writing was becoming
more and more seductive. It was also at this time that
his prose writing began to mature. One well-constructed
story written during this period, “The City Alchemist”,
reflects this. The mood of his life at the time is well
described in his footnote to the story: |
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‘“The
City Alchemist” was written in my apartment in May
of 1999 on Houston and Mott Streets […] Its windows
faced west revealing the roofs of the bodegas and the
bars below as well as the constant stream of traffic on
Houston street, which we watched – the famous Maggie
Mayfield, Mich Poe,
and myself, till many a sad, damp, blue-grey dawn came
arising.’ |
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This,
at the end of the twentieth century, signaled a great
change in the life of Roman Payne. The twenty-two year
old had decided that songwriting was to remain something
of a fond personal activity for him, and that his greater
talent and joy lay in writing literature. It was also
at this time that he decided to go farther abroad. Europe
for him, which he’d never hitherto visited, was
a continent he described as being “a place that
could not exist, except in the imagination, in glorious
dreams, and through the careful lies of the silver screen.” |
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In
1999, having sold enough work to travel, he left America
to begin a life in France. |
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He
first visited his old poet friend Philippe Lijour in Brittany.
He traveled then through East Germany, visited Paris,
and then returned to Brittany. There he set up residence
in the region’s capital of Rennes. |
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He
lived at 6 Rue Saint Louis
off Rue Saint Michel
in the old city-centre of Rennes for the next year. These
were fruitful and formative times. He painted many canvases,
wrote stories (best known from this time is “The
Ideasmith”
which is set in Rennes) and composed a handful of songs.
After travels through Bohemia and a visit to Prague,
he went to Paris to write his longest short-story to date,
a 50 page adventure tale called “Bohemia”.
With its completion, he decided to publish a selection
of his stories and poems written in the 20th Century.
In this edition, is the long poem in two parts: “Songs
from the Dawn and the Coming Down”.
This collection would later be republished under the name
“The Old Century - The Early Stories and Poems of
Roman Payne” (ModeRoom Press). |
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The
year 2000 had arrived. Now on the bridge between the 20th
and 21st centuries, Roman Payne was putting away his old
work and starting anew. He returned to Rennes to begin
his first novel (the manuscript was later lost). The strange
atmosphere of European provincial life continued to have
its charm and offer inspiration – though this same
provincial setting soon became tiresome. Longing again
for capital city life, Payne set off on another voyage.
He left the oil-paintings he’d finished behind in
the care of his girlfriend in Brittany. Unfortunately,
she subsequently disappeared and the paintings disappeared
along with her. |
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Payne
then traveled through Spain, Eastern Europe and Russia
with the intention to have some privacy, see new places,
and work on his novel. He visited such cities as Barcelona,
Warsaw, Moscow, Yekaterinburg,
and St. Petersburg and spent time writing in a Russian
country dacha.
He never returned to Rennes. When he came back to France,
he went to Paris and rented an apartment at 9 rue Martel
in the 10th arrondissement. |
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Here
he recalls “the frozen air and the smoke pouring
out of chimneys pipes on the zinc rooftops, grey like
ash powder. The days spent looking out the window, drinking
coffee. The coarse red wine and heavy meals cooked by
an old woman and her daughter at the little brasserie
on
Rue Martel,
and
the lonely walks through the Arab Quarter where pickpockets
scurried past working-class laborers sitting with their
lunch pails.”
These first few cold winter months in Paris, Payne made
no friends and spoke to no one. He simply wrote and
wandered
the streets. |
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When
his novel manuscript was lost in the winter, Payne
suffered a breakdown which landed him in the hospital “Hôtel
Dieu”
for a short period of time. It was, he considers it now,
one of the lowest moments of his youth, his 'première
jeunesse.' |
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After
he was released from the hospital, Payne moved across
the river to a chambre
de bonne at 32 Rue des Fossés St. Bernard. Here
in his writing room, he isolated himself and began a
new novel. He declared songwriting as ‘an inferior
art to literature and the art of the novelist.'
This decision to stop writing songs was crowned by an
incident
that followed a month later when Payne lost the tip of
one of his right middle fingers in an iron gate at
the Notre Dame Cathedral.
It was successfully sewed back on by a surgeon at the
adjacent Hôtel Dieu, but Payne lost the
ability to play the guitar for about a year. He recalls
this
time
on Rue
des Fossés St. Bernard as “a mental descent
… a time of dark nights and deep depression of
the kind that only the impervious frailty of youth allows."
The discovery at this time that his oil-paintings in
Rennes were nowhere to be found only added to his sorrows.
Seeing
another breakdown on the horizon, Payne decided to leave
Paris. He packed up his clothes, his novel manuscript
and notes, his stories in progress and a few sketches
he was working on at this time and boarded a train for
Amsterdam, where he intended to work. |
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While
on the train, Payne suffered a fever and light delirium.
While ill, thieves broke into the train and stole many
of the passengers' luggage. Payne lost two bags that
contained
– in addition to his money and clothes – his
novel manuscript, several unpublished stories, and all
of the notes for his works in progress. Struck with despair,
he continued on to Amsterdam and stayed there, bed-ridden
with fever, in a cheap hotel, for several weeks. As soon
as his physical health returned, Payne left Amsterdam.
Having no more money or resources, he decided his career
in Europe was over for the time being. In August of
2001,
he flew back to America and set up residence in New
York City. |
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This
period in New York contrasts sharply with the colorful
and affluent days on Mott Street years before. A few weeks
after he arrived, the World Trade Center was destroyed
by airplanes. The city suffered its depression, no jobs
were available, prices remained high, and Payne was in
miserable condition.
He rented a room in the half Polish, half Puerto Rican
neighborhood of Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It was a dirty
overpriced
rooming house let by an angry Polish slumlord. Through
dingy paper-thin walls came the sounds of gunshots at
night,
as well as the moaning of neighbors suffering heroin
withdrawals.
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Payne
eventually found work as a bartender in a seedy Brooklyn
bar where drunks slept over their beers and addicts nodded
off in the toilets. Often, fights erupted in the bar and
Payne had to break them up. He was involved in several
knife fights but seemed to always manage to avoid getting
stabbed. The New York winter came on quick and brutal
and the times were hard. Payne’s luck, however,
was soon to change. |
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It
began in January of 2002, when a publisher bought reprint
rights for his story, “Sister & Brother”,
(a fable that remains one of his readers’ favorites).
Following this, he received an offer to travel to Sri
Lanka to write an article on the culture of the country.
That winter he traveled to Sri Lanka, leaving New York
behind with no desire to ever return. |
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After
the article, he traveled up Turkey and lived for a
while
in the desert, in a house on a tiny lake, with pomegranate
trees in the garden, followed by some time spent in
the small fishing village of
Kas
where he painted frescoes on the walls of a restaurant
and worked on a novel. The money he had earned from
recent
jobs allowed him to travel freely, and he spent the remainder
of 2002 exploring Turkey and Greece. |
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Although
Payne wrote many stories and minor literary sketches
during
this time, his real desire was to write novels. The novel,
he believed, was the ultimate literary form. He wrote
to a friend at this time: “I have never seen a
poem bring anyone to tears. Neither a short story. I
have,
seen many people destroyed by a novel […] saved
or wrecked. [A novel’s] capabilities, if written
well, are as formidable as anything that can be created
– man, or woman herself, included. Only a well-composed
letter from one’s beloved can compare […]
yet here the author must be known and loved. The great
novelist
can seduce or strangle a stranger from miles and centuries
away.” |
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At
only 25 years of age, however, Payne didn’t
feel capable yet at this time of composing well in
the long
form. The manuscripts from this period that were not
lost or stolen, came to be abandoned when he declared
that
they "weren’t good enough." (This series
of false starts would last until his 27th birthday.) |
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In
2003, Payne was imprisoned in Galicia, Spain for a
few months for an unknown crime.
All charges were dropped and erased upon his release.
He then returned to America and lived in California
and
Seattle. |
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In
Seattle, his money ran out and he was worried that he
was going to be trapped again in poverty. Through some
old Seattle contacts, (people whom he would later refer
to as 'The Lotus Eaters'), he began work in the highly
illegal, but quickly lucrative, trade of counterfeiting
checks and paper money. |
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“It
was a short and fast lived time,” he admits. “Black
money piled up quickly and criminal contacts multiplied
overnight and it seemed like an activity that was going
to explode,
implode, or otherwise disintegrate.” |
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In
the summer of 2003, Payne’s basement house was raided
by the Secret Service and tens of thousands of dollars
in false American bills were confiscated. Several of his
partners were arrested and charged. Some believed that
it was too convenient that Payne was not at the house
at the time of the raid. He was tracked down and found
on the 16th of June returning to the room where he was
staying at the Camlin Hotel
in Downtown Seattle. An unidentified car fired two shots
at Payne and missed. Payne recognized the driver to be
his primary contact in the counterfeiting business that
he was now trying to get out of. The next day, in an attempt
to preserve his life and keep out of prison, Payne flew
to Hawaii. |
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For
the next six months, Payne lived in Hawaii on the remote
Big Island in "pleasant obscurity." His days
were spent swimming in the blue-green waters at white
sand beaches, walking in the rainforests among tropical
birds and waterfalls, learning the ukulele from the natives
and betting on cockfights. He describes it as “a
colorful and sun-drenched time […] trying to forget
the madness of Seattle, trying to make my skin dark and
my head clear.” |
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January
of 2004 brought an end to the idyllic tropical sojourn.
During a visit to Honolulu. Payne was in the Waikiki district
when contacts from his criminal past caught up with him.
The windows of the hotel where he was staying were shot
out and Payne suffered minor injuries. He was held for
investigation but released shortly after and permitted
to return to the Big Island for safety reasons. |
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Less
than a week later, Payne decided on a self-imposed exile
and left the USA, never to return again. |
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Payne
arrived in Paris on January 31st 2004 (his 27th birthday),
intent on settling down to write the novel that had been
weighing on his mind. After a few weeks spent in the
Bastille
area, he moved to 6 Rue de Montfaucon
(the apartment in St Germain des Prés where he
would start and finish his first novel, Crepuscule). |
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“The
day I turned 27,” he describes, “I borded
an airplane in Hawaii to go to Paris and immediately
began the notes for Crepuscule […]
this novel immediately seized me by force and dominated
my every breath until its completion the following
autumn […] when it was finished, I felt as though
I’d aged 50 years in 9 months.”
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Why
this
creative explosion at age 27, allowing
him finally to complete a novel? It could have been
a culmination of the turbulence of the previous years,
simply growing up, or for reasons explained later.
In any case, this begins a new period of artistic maturity
for Payne:
'...a
time
when
novels and notes for novels flow like water and wine.'
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Being
a
natural Russophile, and with fond memories of his
time
spent in Russia, Payne intended from the beginning to
have the heroine of the novel be a Russian girl who
emigrates to Paris. As fate would have it, that early
spring, Payne met a young fashion model from Moscow
(Anastasia Mironova),
with whom he shared a passionate and turbulent love affair
which fueled the writing of Crepuscule. He
admits that a “work of such an immense scale
could not have been written so quickly, had I not
been violently
involved in the threads of a tragic romance." |
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The
relationship between the American novelist and the
Russian
model was not a perfect fairy-tale, however. Due to a
scandal created be one of Anastasia’s jealous
past suitors (an influential Russian businessman),
Payne was
locked up for sometime in a Parisian jail cell. Anastasia
faired not much better. After being deceived by Russian
authorities into returning to Moscow, she was
incarcerated against her will in a mental asylum.
She remained
there
for two full years. |
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Payne
finished revisions of Crepuscule on the first
of September, 2004. By the end of October the first
edition
was published by ModeRoom Press.
Following the publication of his first novel, Payne
traveled
to Barcelona to begin his second. In January of 2005,
he began work on the notes for the novel that would
become
Cities & Countries.. |
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After
the whirlwind affair that begat the tragedy Crepuscule,
Payne desired to make his second novel, as he put it,
“lighter […] more gentle, pleasurable and
sublime to read. Something pleasant to reflect these improved
times." |
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The
novel was to be a tale of travel and adventure. After
Spain, Payne traveled to the Balkans and spent time in
Bosnia and Croatia,
When he returned to Paris in the spring, he moved into
an apartment at 60 Rue de Varenne,
in the 7th arrondissement. There he began turning his
notes for Cities & Countries into the outline
that would serve to write the novel. |
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In
January of 2006, while Payne was finishing the last
chapters
of Cities & Countries, he set to work on
completing a long poem that he had been working on off-and-on
over the previous year. This poem, “The Basement
Trains”,
was completed on the day before his twenty-ninth birthday. |
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Payne
traveled to Mexico in June of 2006 to finish the revisions
of Cities & Countries. He returned to Paris
with the final manuscript in July and moved to an apartment
near the Seine, in the 6th arrondissement. Also at this
time, the French translation
of his long poem “The Basement Trains” was
completed. A bilingual French/English 1st Paris Edition
of the poem was published by ModeRoom Press in August
of 2006. |
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In
November of 2006, the 1st International Edition
of “The Basement Trains” was released (ModeRoom
Press). |
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One month before Payne's 30th birthday, ModeRoom Press
published the 1st edition of his epic novel, Cities
& Countries.It
was released in stores in early 2007. |
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By the end of summer in 2007, following a wild stint
in Ibiza, Spain, Payne realized he had to take
a more reclusive
break from the French capital to tie up his loose projects.
While the luxurious parties and the other temptations
of Parisian
life were providing inspiration for new material, they
had begun to interfere with productive accomplishment.
Payne decided to seek a quiet place to finish the
corrections
of Hope and
Despair(a
novel he started writing while in Croatia, two summers
prior). In October 2007, Payne traveled to Verona,
Italy, to the
home
of the Italian philosopher
Tommaso Tuppini.
In
Verona, he finished the final corrections of Hope
and Despair and
signed his
name on the book. |
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Hope
and Despair was
published in March, 2008.
Although he had high hopes for this novel, claiming
it "surpassed Crepuscule and Cities & Countries in
both emotion and scope," it wasn't well-received
by readers. He quickly put this third novel behind
him,
declaring Cities & Countries as
his best novel to date and went on to his next project: The
"Soliloquies."
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Payne's "Soliloquies"are
first-person prose vignettes, written
empirically, narrating
their author's adventures and reflections, during or
directly after they occur. Unlike "memoir,"
they focus
on a brief
span of the author's
life, and may involve fictional (often fantastic) events.
Unlike "diary," their purpose is literary and poetic achievement,
rather than the mere recording of the author's life. |
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In
December of 2009, Payne completed his first collection
of Soliloquies (#1-#22), which was designed to
become his fourth novel, titled: Rooftop
Soliloquy. The
book was completed in Paris in December, 2008; and
in
March of 2009, Payne traveled to Tuscany, and installed
himself in a villa,
outside
of Certaldo (birthplace of the writer, Boccaccio -
whose work was of some influence to the author at this
time)
to work quietly
on the book's corrections. The novel is in some ways
reminiscent of a Parisian Decameron
with its bawdy tales, and "frame-story" devices. It
was
finally published in October 2009 (chez ModeRoom
Press) and received great reviews from critics and
readers alike.
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Payne's Soliloquies
in Rooftop
Soliloquy. are
sensuous, often highly erotic, tales of travel – stories
of amorous seduction and experience. Their heroic
themes signal
a break
from
the norms of the current literary techniques in use
since the establishment of 20th century Modernism.
In a style that appears to waver between autobiography
and imaginative revelry, Payne continues with the Modernists’ approach
to worldy experience as a loner's self-referential,
often lonely, passage through life; yet his fervent
expressions
of
passion, his praise of power, heroism,
and optimism towards life, remind the thoughtful
reader more of the trials of
Heracles
or the adventures of Odysseus than those of Aschenbach
or Leopold Bloom. Payne evades the weak and helpless
personalities that are omnipresent in 20th century
literature. Like the pre-e-modernist Nietzsche, Payne
looks back to Classicism, while aiming towards the
future. His Soliloquies he
believes, begin a bright new departure that “will
take 21st century literature forward into a renewed
Classicism,
a modern
heroic
age. An
age that sings of strength. One that celebrates life.”
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Roman
Payne currently lives in the Paris neighborhood of
St-Germain des Prés. He
travels extensively in Europe, continuing his wandering
life. In Parisian society, he resembles
a Pushkin or Lord Byron in the way he balances high-society
pleasures with the solitude necessary for good literary
output. While his style has been
noticibaly "tainted," as he puts
it, by the
erotic
french novel (à la
façon de Georges Bataille, Apollinaire,
Alfred de Musset, etc.). His style
has also been remarkably
influenced by
the
places
he's lived
and
visited. His travels to Spain are visible in his fondess
for writing "picaresque" scenes, where a roguish
anti-hero goes on a quest of initiation. Tuscany introduced
him to Boccaccio. While travels in
Greece
chiseled him into a sturdy Hellenophile. Greek—and
to some extent Roman—mythology permeats his work.
Payne admits that the discovery of Homer's Odyssey was
the single most important event in his mature literary
life. He
believes that he could easily spend his remaining years
writing novels based on this millennia-old epic poem
that Payne considers to be the greatest literary achievement
in history.
One can believe
his delight when he discovered that the hero's name
"Odysseus," can be
translated from
Greek
to mean
"pain"... "I'm not ashamed of heroic ambitions," he
writes, "If man and woman has only dance upon this
earth, let each of us be an Artemis or Odysseus, Aphrodite
or
Zeus."
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At
the beginning of 2010, Payne divides his time between
writing novels, classical scholarship,
and organizing Parisian parties. He lives his life
entirely in French, rarely uttering a word of English
throughout
the day. Yet his intense love of the English language
(that "most vast, ardous and enrapturing of all occidental
tongues") brings him to the page every day as he continues
down
the path of the artist—to wherever it may lead. |
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-
Yves Delacroix
ModeRoom Press
©2010
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Last
updated: December 2009
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