Mark Helprin

• Born: June 28, 1947
• Place of Birth: New York, New York

Biography

Mark Helprin was born on June 28, 1947, in New York City. His father, Morris Helprin, worked in the film industry, eventually becoming president of London Films. Eleanor Lynn Helprin, Mark’s mother, was a successful actress, starring in several Broadway productions in the 1930s and 1940s. When Mark was six, the family left New York City for the prosperous Hudson River Valley suburb of Ossining, New York.

Helprin attended Harvard University, earning his English degree in 1969. After that, he attended Stanford University briefly, moved to Israel for a few months, and then returned to Harvard, where he completed a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies in 1972. During an additional nine months in Israel, he became a dual citizen and was drafted into the Israeli army. Though he did not see any combat duty, it was an experience he would use in many of his stories and novels. Upon leaving Israel, he attended Princeton University and the University of Oxford for short periods.

Helprin first realized that he had a talent for writing when he was seventeen. He wrote a description of the Hagia Sophia, the cathedral in Istanbul that he had never seen, and was so proud of the result that he decided that writing was something he could do, and do well. He went on to write numerous short stories that he submitted to Harper’s and The New Yorker. After a dozen rejections, The New Yorker accepted two at once: “Because of the Waters of the Flood” and “Leaving the Church.”

Those two stories, and eighteen others, were published in 1975 in the collection A Dove of the East, and Other Stories. This volume, with its wide range of characters, settings, and themes, received generally good reviews. Writer John Gardner was impressed with Helprin’s handling of various cultures and wrote that Helprin “seemed to be born and raised everywhere.”

Helprin’s novel Refiner’s Fire: The Life and Adventures of Marshall Pearl, a Foundling came out in 1977 to mixed reviews. This was a rambling, picaresque novel of improbable events skillfully rendered. Detractors faulted the book for having too much in it; one reviewer complained that it had “enough matter in it for three or four novels, but far too much for one.” Most, though, could not help but admire Helprin’s lyrical style and imaginative use of language.

In 1981, another volume of Helprin’s short stories appeared, many of them again reprinted from The New Yorker. Ellis Island, and Other Stories cemented Helprin’s stature as a major writer. This collection, like A Dove of the East, contains powerful stories of a wide range of characters, from cowboys in twentieth century Israel to a captain of a sailing ship in the 1850s to a would-be mountain climber in Germany. The title story, “Ellis Island,” about an immigrant to New York at the turn of the twentieth century, has the episodic nature of Refiner’s Fire and also introduces some of the fantastic elements Helprin further developed in his next work.

Though Helprin considered himself “prize-proof” because of his refusal to join writers’ groups and endorse other books, the publication of Ellis Island brought him many accolades. Helprin received the Prix de Rome from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Jewish Book Award. Ellis Island was nominated for the American Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction.

Winter’s Tale (1983) became a best seller, even reaching the paperback racks at grocery-store checkout counters. This novel, set in a fantastic version of New York City, spans the century from 1900 to the year 2000, touching on the themes of death, rebirth, love, and justice. Helprin’s next two projects, Swan Lake (1989), a collaboration with noted children’s illustrator Chris Van Allsburg, and the novel A Soldier of the Great War (1991), also quickly hit the best-seller lists.

Helprin’s next major work was Memoir from Antproof Case (1995), a sometimes humorous chronicle of the twentieth century through the memory of an old man hiding from assassins in Brazil. He followed this with two more collaborations for young adults with Van Allsburg and published another collection, The Pacific, and Other Stories, in 2004. Another comic novel, Freddy and Fredericka, followed in 2005.

Helprin has been making a name for himself as a conservative political commentator, with articles published in The National Review and The Nation and by the Claremont Institute, where he is a senior fellow. He is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and a fellow of the American Academy in Rome. He also served as a speechwriter and foreign policy adviser for Senator Bob Dole during Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign.

Helprin married Lisa Kennedy in 1980, and they raised two daughters together. The Helprins settled on a fifty-six-acre farm not far from Charlottesville, Virginia. The writer who said that he enjoyed writing more than anything certainly has enjoyed a measure of critical and financial success rare among serious writers.

In 2013, Helprin published In Sunlight and Shadow, a novel about a veteran of World War II set in New York City in 1946. In 2014, Helprin's Winter's Tale appeared as a film starring Colin Farrell, Jessica Brown Findlay, and Russell Crowe. Published in November of 2017, Paris in the Present Tense is a novel about a music teacher in Paris recollecting his life after the death of his wife and dealing with his grandson's ill health. Reviewers have commented on the book's lush imagistic prose, but also noted that the plot is tedious at times.

In 2023, Helprin published The Oceans and the Stars, a love story between a US naval captain and a lawyer set against the background of conflict in the Persian Gulf.

Analysis

Readers of Helprin’s work are immediately struck by sentences such as the following from the short story “A Room of Frail Dancers” (1981): “Once, far away, he had seen an endless column of tanks moving in rays of sun, and their dust cloud had risen like the voices of a choir.” This sentence demonstrates several features of Helprin’s acclaimed style and offers a glimpse of one of his main themes as well.

The most striking device in this example is the simile using synesthesia, or combining of the senses, to compare the tanks’ dust cloud to singing voices. Surprising and thought-provoking metaphors such as this abound in Helprin’s work. Sometimes his fertile imagination piles two or more onto one referent. There is also an example here of the author’s use of hyperbole, or poetic exaggeration, in the “endless column of tanks”—the column is not truly endless but seems so to the observer. Helprin often uses this device to describe the wonders of childhood, as in “A Vermont Tale” (1981), or to instill a childlike perspective in adults. The novel in which this device expands to become the driving force of the story, Winter’s Tale, has been described by one reviewer as a “children’s book for grown-ups.”

This example also hints at Helprin’s uncommon use of the imagery of light. Most of his descriptions of setting include at least a few words about how the light looks; Winter’s Tale begins in the “light blue flood” of dawn and dissolves, at the end, into another dawn with an ocean of “pale shimmering gold.”

Finally, the quoted sentence also demonstrates Helprin’s ability to turn commonplace or even tragic aspects of human existence into things of beauty. In this case, the movement of tanks, ugly machines going about the terrible business of war, becomes a thing of beauty through an image suggesting, ironically, an act of religious worship. The capacity to see the beauty in all things is one facet of a passionate love of life, and one that Helprin advocates throughout his work. The main character in the short story “Ellis Island,” an unnamed immigrant to New York in the early 1900’s, explains it best:

So, I worked in the kitchen, I didn’t care. In fact, I came to enjoy it. I saw every scene as if it were a fine painting. That, I suppose, is one of the benefits of a life of the mind—when you can turn the kitchen from homeliness into a thing of beauty. With patience, all motion becomes dance; all sound, music; all color, painting.

Life can also be illuminated by the nearness of death. As an avid mountain climber, Helprin appreciates, and shows in his characters, that life becomes most precious when it is in danger of being lost. In Winter’s Tale, Peter Lake’s lover is terminally ill when he meets her. She is burning up with fever; here Helprin paints an image of the body as machine, overstoked and destroying itself from too much heat, too much life. She gains from this existence a calm contemplativeness and a heightened pleasure in living.

In one of the most striking sections of A Soldier of the Great War, the title character, Allesandro, is awaiting execution, having been condemned to death for deserting his post in the Italian army. The narration slows, and the writing becomes lyrical, describing the almost suspended animation of the prisoners waiting for death, day after day, on an island in the beautiful Mediterranean Sea. As other condemned prisoners react with madness or despair, Allesandro achieves a transcendental peace. He even develops the courage, when he is miraculously reprieved at the last minute, to offer his life in exchange for that of a friend who has a wife and children.

In addition to this acceptance of death, Helprin also considers death to be a great injustice, the ultimate enemy in the great war of life. This is especially true when death claims the young and innocent. One way to deal with this injustice, he feels, is through exploring the possibility of rebirth or resurrection. This is one of the major themes of Winter’s Tale. Peter Lake returns, after apparently having been dead for eighty years, to be a catalyst as New York City is burned and then reborn into the twenty-first century. Then he gives his life to resurrect a five-year-old girl who had died of a fever, a child symbolic of all those unjustly taken.

Among the old-fashioned values that Helprin’s work promotes are responsibility and commitment. Most of the romantic relationships in these novels and stories are true loves, often begun as love at first sight. In one of the few stories where marital infidelity is portrayed, “A Vermont Tale,” the narrator’s veiled confession, told in a parable of two loons, becomes a cautionary tale about the perils of unfaithfulness. More often, Helprin’s protagonists are faithful and true, sometimes for years after the lover has been lost, apparently dead. In A Soldier of the Great War, Allesandro’s commitment and enduring hope is rewarded when his lover, who had seemingly died in an air raid years before, turns up, along with the son she had been carrying at the time. In this case, hope and faith are rewarded with an apparent resurrection.

To be fair, many critics view Helprin’s style and message with a cynical eye. His prose has been called sugary and overblown, and he has been accused of showing off, of dazzling the reader with literary tricks and wordplay at the expense of the story. The stories themselves, and especially the novels, have been criticized for being too heavy-handed, with the author intruding on the story to point out the morals and messages. Some reviewers find his positive attitude a bit naïve and say that his victories, resurrections, and golden dawns are too easily won, though his later works, particularly the stories in The Pacific, are a bit more pessimistic. In many of these stories, the characters try to live perfect lives hoping that their efforts will be rewarded with happiness, but if not, hoping that the effort itself will be reward enough. Many readers, and reviewers, are refreshed or even moved by these tales of strength, integrity, love, and hope in an age of increasing trouble and despair.

“A Dove of the East”

First published: 1975 (collected in A Dove of the East, and Other Stories, 1975)

Type of work: Short story

A man risks ridicule and death to tend a wounded bird and recalls the disappearance of his young bride during World War II.

The title story of Helprin’s first published collection, “A Dove of the East,” is a beautiful story of love and courage set in Israel some years after the 1967 Six-Day War. Leon Orlovsky is a French Jew who has settled in the occupied territory of the Golan Heights and become a scout for a crew of cowboys. His job is to ride ahead of the herd, finding a route to water and fresh forage. He enjoys his work, taking pleasure in the solitude and the harsh beauty of his surroundings despite the persistent threat of Syrian snipers and saboteurs.

One evening, Leon finishes his day with an outburst of wild riding and an unexplained outpouring of emotion ranging from exhilaration to violence to tears. In the morning, he finds a beautiful dove, critically wounded, apparently after having been trampled during Leon’s wild ride of the night before. He decides that he must stay with the bird, to keep it company as it heals or, more likely, dies. Leon wonders why, and how, he can do this for a simple bird, shirking his responsibility to his comrades and exposing himself to ridicule and danger.

A long flashback then tells the story of Leon’s relationship with Ann, with whom he fell in love at first sight (a common occurrence in Helprin’s stories) when both were quite young. They courted, married, and had started on what would seem to be a wonderful life together until the interruption of World War II. Here, as with the Syrian guerrillas in the earlier part of the story, the enemy is simply the war, an impersonal force like a hurricane that sweeps over individual humans.

As Leon and Ann were fleeing Paris to the south of France, the train on which they were riding suffered a brutal air attack. Leon was wounded; upon regaining consciousness, he found the train, and Ann, gone. In the chaos of war-torn Europe, he was never able to find Ann again or discover her fate. Crushed by the loss of her, he is able to survive only by harboring a hope that she will someday reappear.

At the end of the story, Leon hears riders approaching. The reader never learns whether they are his enemies or his comrades, nor is the ultimate fate of the dove revealed.

Though the story is rich in symbols, correspondences, and meanings, one possible interpretation is that the dove represents to Leon innocence and beauty destroyed by random, unfeeling fate, just as his perfect relationship with Ann was inexplicably ended. Courage and hope in the face of tragedy are among the glories that Helprin sees in the world of “a God whose savage beauty made sharp mountains of ice and rock rise suddenly out of soft green fields.”

“A Vermont Tale”

First published: 1981 (collected in Ellis Island, and Other Stories, 1981)

Type of work: Short story

A boy and his sister visit their grandparents in Vermont in January and learn about love and betrayal in a parable of arctic loons.

A simple and beautiful tale within a tale, “A Vermont Tale” starts with the journey of two young children on a train from the home where their parents are “having trouble” into the spectacular winter wonderland of their grandparents’ home. The early parts of the story are reminiscent of The Polar Express (1985) by Chris Van Allsberg, an author and illustrator with whom Helprin would later work.

The first half of the story is taken up by a child’s-eye view of the beautiful snow-covered farm, the cozy house, and the love shown the children by their grandparents. Then, one blizzard-bound night, the grandfather begins a story of two arctic loons that visit a pond on the farm. Loons are birds that mate for life, but the male of this pair forsakes his partner to spend time with another female from a visiting flock. The reader suspects that this is a story of the children’s parents’ relationship but soon discovers that it is the grandparents’ story instead: The female loon is said to have flown off to another pond far away, and the grandmother interjects “Baltimore.” After a description of very humanlike remorse and reconciliation, the birds are reunited and, it is assumed, live happily ever after. However, in the last line of the story, the boy sees that his grandmother’s eyes, “though beautiful and blue, were as cold as ice.” This detail recasts the entire preceding story, the beauty of the winter, the idyllic peace of the farmhouse, and the grandparents’ apparently warm relationship in a much colder light.

This is a strong cautionary tale of infidelity and the permanent damage that it can do to a marriage. It is one of the few relationships in Helprin’s stories that is not loving and true, and even in this case, there is no evil or meanness implied but merely good people gone wrong.

Winter’s Tale

First published: 1983

Type of work: Novel

This is a sweeping story of love and adventure in a fantastic New York City, from 1900 to the turn of the twenty-first century.

Winter’s Tale is set in a surreal version of New York City and its surroundings. Many of the places are real, and the story begins in the early 1900s. In this book, however, Helprin lets his penchant for exaggeration run free. The winters are longer and colder, the buildings higher, and the world generally more glorious than in real life. The city is sometimes encircled by an impenetrable cloud wall that could be a gateway to another universe.

Into this world sails the infant Peter Lake, Moses-like, to grow and find his way. Peter becomes a mechanic, tending the machines of the city, and later becomes a thief who breaks into the home and the heart of Beverly Penn, who becomes his true love. She is terminally ill and soon dies. Peter later escapes death with the help of his flying white horse and disappears into the depths of the sky. He reappears, nearly a century and many pages later, to help shepherd the city through the death of one century and the birth of another at the turn of the year 2000.

The city itself is a major character in the novel, with its teeming humanity, mechanical heartbeat, and seasonal moods. The story opens in the early 1900s with the dawn of the mechanical age; the highest achievements of human art and science are the magnificent bridges linking Manhattan with the rest of the world. The book ends with the new millennium, and the bridge builders also return from the neverland of time to attempt a new technology, a bridge made of light. The bridge’s architect “would not say where this bridge will lead, preferring to leave that to my imagination—as I will leave it to yours.”

This book is often considered a failure for its convoluted plot and lack of a coherent theme. Indeed, the author seems to have overreached himself, attempting a transcendental, visionary tale of death, rebirth, love, and justice. Many elaborate side stories and subplots seem to clutter the novel. The problem, if it is one, is that all the digressions and meaningless details are fascinating. Indeed, one of the reader’s chief pleasures is following the twists and turns of Helprin’s prodigious imagination. The beauty of the language is also reason enough to read the book, with its bits of sly humor and startling similes on every page.

A Soldier of the Great War

First published: 1991

Type of work: Novel

An elderly Italian man tells the story of his life and of his search for love and beauty amid the horrors of World War I.

Helprin’s third novel, A Soldier of the Great War, is a huge book, and opening it is less about starting to read than beginning to live another life. Its 792 pages encompass the story of a well-born Italian, Allesandro Giuliani; it is the tale of his early life and loves and of his experiences in World War I. Unlike Helprin’s previous novel, Winter’s Tale, there is no fantasy here and only a little hyperbole or humor. Like Helprin’s other works, though, this book is written in his acclaimed gem-like lyrical style, perhaps even more polished here.

The smooth writing and luminous images reinforce one of the main themes of the novel: the desirability of finding beauty and the joy of living, in nearly any situation. Allesandro is a student, and later a professor, of aesthetics, and his concerns about art and life, and the author’s eye for the beautiful, infuse the book with light. In one scene, after Allesandro, as a soldier, has been sentenced to hard labor in a marble quarry for desertion, the description of the quarry in action at night, with searchlights glinting off blocks of marble being transported high in the air on cables, is nothing less than dazzling. The exhausting, backbreaking labor is accepted by Allesandro as a way of feeling truly alive.

War is a major theme of the book, and Helprin’s ambivalent feelings about it are clear. War is at once a brutal waste of human life and resources and a testing ground that can bring out the best in individuals. The battle scenes are frightening and realistically drawn, yet there is always space for a noble act of mercy or a radiant sunrise. Allesandro fights valiantly or tries to escape, whichever seems to be appropriate to him at the time. He also accepts totally the consequences of his actions, as when he uncomplainingly faces execution for desertion.

The absurdity of war is clearly shown in the character of Orfeo, a strange and probably mad scribe in the office of Allesandro’s lawyer father. Orfeo ends up working for the government war department, where he edits the military orders he transcribes, saving Allesandro from his execution and virtually directing the war by his personal whims.

Finally, the novel, though set amid the horrors of war, is filled with the values that Helprin holds dear. Almost all the characters are good people who are trying to do what is best for themselves and their loved ones. Families experience tragedy and survive in love. Allesandro finds love at first sight with a nurse who cares for him when he is wounded, but then he loses her in an air raid. Like Leon in “A Dove of the East,” he is sustained for years by the seemingly impossible hope of finding her again, though here he miraculously does.

A Soldier of the Great War is an old-fashioned book, full of positive values and written in sparkling prose. It is a life, an adventure, and a love story that is not soon forgotten.

“Mar Nueva”

First published: 2004 (collected in The Pacific, and Other Stories, 2004)

Type of work: Short story

An idyllic summer by the sea turns to tragedy when the narrator’s passionate, outspoken sister confronts their country’s brutal dictator.

“Mar Nueva” tells the story of, among other things, a boy’s coming-of-age and his encounters with freedom, captivity, integrity, oppression, and life and death. Helprin’s prodigious imagination weaves a novel’s worth of themes, settings, and details into a thirty-two page story.

The narrator recalls the seasons of his youth when his family would summer at their beach house in Mar Nueva, a seaside region of an unnamed South American country in the grip of a powerful dictator named Santos-Ott. Despite the ominous political background it was an idyllic life for a young boy, with days spent swimming in the sea and fishing. He becomes such an accomplished fisherman that he supplements his family’s income with his catch.

One summer, the family arrives at Mar Nueva to find the neighboring property built up with a wall-encircled mansion complete with sentry boxes and armed guards. An old man dressed in a swimsuit and sandals appears on the dock one day and befriends the boy, talking mostly of fishing; he is Santos-Ott.

A side story develops as the young narrator catches, almost accidentally, more than twenty huge bluefin tuna, a species of the deep sea rarely caught from shore. Despite the relative riches that these fish would provide, the boy is in awe of the fish, declaring that “they had everything about them of the open sea, and I had never intended to capture the open sea.” As the boy and his older sister, Claudia, are cutting the tuna free, Santos-Ott arrives, this time dressed in his medal-bespangled white military uniform, underscoring the symbolism of the freedom of the fish in the sea versus the control that Santos-Ott held over the fearful people of his country.

The focus of the story then shifts to Claudia, a passionate, outspoken girl of seventeen. She confronts the dictator, speaking freely the things most citizens were even afraid to think. She argues with him about fear and power, anarchy, and oppression. She knows that she has endangered her own life and that of her family with her courage, honesty, and bravery when Santos-Ott says that she must have been raised by revolutionaries.

Finally, she becomes a sacrifice to freedom and integrity when, to save the lives of her family, she drowns herself in the same sea that had brought such pleasure to them all and had been the symbol of all that was free and beautiful.

“The Pacific”

First published: 2004 (collected in The Pacific, and Other Stories, 2004)

Type of work: Short story

This is the story of Lee and Paulette, a young couple deeply in love and struggling to survive the separation and dangers of World War II.

“The Pacific” is the ironic title of this tale of war and is the theater of Lee’s battle, the ocean that separates yet connects the couple, and the seashore where Paulette waits and tries to work the miracle that will see to Lee’s safety. Helprin makes the reader wait for the last sentence of the story to find out whether she is successful.

Paulette and Lee do everything right and to the best of their ability. Lee tries to be the best soldier that he can be. In his military training, he marches for three days and nights and then stands guard over the rest of the unit. When sent to battle, he writes home that he will do his duty but refrain from unnecessary heroics that would put him in extra danger. Paulette is the one who, while essentially helpless, works the hardest at living a perfect life.

Paulette takes a job at a defense factory, situated picturesquely on the California coast, where she is a precision welder working on aircraft instruments. She works both obsessively, doing the job of two, and carefully, knowing that these instruments could end up in an airplane, giving support to Lee’s infantry unit. She also keeps her spare time full by planting and tending a garden, choosing to carry her gardening tools on her shoulders the several miles from her home to the garden plot, suggesting a Christlike suffering and sacrifice.

Her job on the welding line gives Helprin the opportunity to take his favored light imagery to the limit. The flames and arcs of the welding are described as pure light, the very spark of existence. The assembly line, seen through the lens of the welders’ hood, looks like the birthplace of stars. This pure light compares also to the pure and intense love between Paulette and Lee and her intense effort, through the force of will, to create a miracle that will ensure his survival.

Summary

After finishing nearly any of Helprin’s novels or stories, the reader is left with the feeling that, despite tragedy and misfortune, life is as it should be. The author’s love of life and his joy in using language sweep the reader up into the world of imagination. Though some critics think that Helprin’s style is overdone and his happy endings are too unrealistic, others find his work an antidote for the nihilism, despair, and purposely artless writing that are characteristic of much contemporary fiction. The reader is uplifted by Helprin’s stories and given new eyes with which to see a world filled with mystery and beauty.

Bibliography

Alexander, Paul. “Big Books, Tall Tales: His Novels Win Critical Acclaim and Hefty Advances, So Why Does Mark Helprin Make Up Stories About Himself?” The New York Times Magazine, April 28, 1991, 32-33, 65, 67, 69.

Byrd, Max. "Life, Love and Mortality in the City of Light." Review of Paris in the Present Tense, by Mark Helprin. The New York Times, Nov. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/11/17/books/review/mark-helprin-paris-in-the-present-tense.html?‗r=017. Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.

Butterfield, Isabel. “On Mark Helprin.” Encounter 72 (January, 1989): 48-52.

Craig, Barry. Recollecting Dante's Divine Comedy in the Novels of Mark Helprin : The Love That Moves the Sun and the Other Stars. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2014. Ebscohost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=909935. Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.

Goodman, Matthew. “Who Says Which Are Our Greatest Books? The Politics of the Literary Canon.” Utne Reader (May/June, 1991): 129-130.

“The Oceans and the Stars." Mark Helprin Official Website, 2024, markhelprin.org/novels/the-oceans-and-the-stars/.  Accessed 7 Oct. 2024.

Rothenberg, David. “The Idea of the North: An Iceberg History.” In Wild Ideas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

Shulevitz, Judith. “Research Kills a Book.” The New York Times Book Review, May 5, 1991, 26.