“The Fire Agent” by David Baerwald Interview

In December 2017, David Baerwald was emptying out his childhood home in Los Angeles as wildfires from the nearby Skirball Fire raged around him. While rummaging through boxes, looking for things to save, he came upon a cache of his grandfather’s letters, diaries, documents, and photos. Baerwald knew that his grandfather Ernst had worked for IG Farben, the German chemical company infamous for manufacturing the poison gas used in Auschwitz and other camps. “But I thought he was just an ink salesman,” he tells me. “What I learned was that Ernst was actually the director of IG Farben in Asia.”

Ernst had also been a spy for Germany before switching sides to train American agents at the Office of Strategic Services school in San Francisco. While in Japan, he had rubbed shoulders with Albert Einstein, and during World War I, he had been imprisoned in the Bandō POW camp, where he played violin in the camp’s esteemed orchestra; years later, he would provide invaluable technical assistance in the firebombing of several cities across Japan. Initially an idealist, he was a witness and sometime accomplice to the rise of fascism in Germany and Japan.

Ernst’s story seemed the perfect fodder for the twistiest of spy novels. But who would write it? Baerwald had spent much of his life in Los Angeles as a musician-songwriter, performing in the rock duo David & David (“Welcome to the Boomtown”), cowriting songs with Sheryl Crow (“All I Wanna Do”), and collaborating on musical projects with everyone from Joni Mitchell to Baz Luhrmann. But he had never written a novel. Even so, Baerwald took to the task with gusto. “They say, Write the book that only you can write,” he says. “And who else was gonna do this?”

This Zoom interview with Baerwald about his debut novel, The Fire Agent, which centers on Ernst’s experiences, has been edited for brevity and clarity.

You moved from Japan to Los Angeles when you were 11. What was L.A. like back then?
In retrospect, it was paradise. At the time, though, it was a total shock. I was not expecting to be in America. And it wasn’t just America, it was L.A. And it wasn’t just L.A., it was Brentwood! Suddenly I’m on a softball team with Steve McQueen’s son and getting picked up hitchhiking by Walter Matthau and Jane Fonda.

Did you become your typical L.A. kid?
Oh yeah. I played in punk bands. My band used to play pool parties for the Z-Boys and the extreme skaters of the day. We played the L.A. clubs and caused a lot of mayhem. We surfed and skateboarded.

You’ve obviously had a successful songwriting career. Were you concerned about writing a novel and having people go, Um, well, he was a good songwriter?
No, I wasn’t really concerned with what people were going to say. I was concerned with whether I could honor the material and honor the survivors. But in terms of what people were going to say about me, no, I’m a little old to be concerned about that.

How is writing a good song like writing a novel?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this. Writing a song lyric can teach you how to write a page, but it can’t teach you how to write a novel. Song structure is essentially a four- or five-part structure, reminiscent in shape, if not size and intent, of symphonies. It’s the same thing, you know, four or five bits.

Structure is really important to me. Without structure, everything is just sort of, you know, amoebas. So this four- or five-act structure is deeply embedded in me. And just because something’s long doesn’t mean the pages don’t have to be good, too, you know what I mean? You can’t write a novel and say, Oh, look at how much I’m doing, and look how awful it is!

You have a really wonderful description of Beethoven’s Ninth in The Fire Agent, which is a piece that your grandfather played while in the Bandō POW camp in Japan. It reminded me of Salieri describing the music of Mozart in Amadeus, where he’s just weeping at the memory of it. Was that fun writing about music, as a musician yourself?
Yeah. A friend of mine turned me on to this performance of Beethoven’s Ninth that was done in 1933 for Hitler’s birthday, and it’s a largely Jewish orchestra, of course, and you know they were not happy about the whole thing. It’s this incredibly pissed-off recording. It’s powerful. I had the score, and I tried to write in cadence with that as much as possible. I mean, I was extremely moved a lot. [The Fire Agent] was a very emotional book for me. I know there’s a lot of stuff in it, but it’s really about people and emotions and hope and betrayal, and just the kind of things that happen to people.

Did you intend for the book to have this grand, sweeping scope? To some extent, it had to, given your grandfather’s life. But that meant a lot of research for you.
The more I learned about Ernst and his life, the more dominant of a personality he became, the more I realized that his travels and his timeline were the spine I had to build his story on. Did I know that there was a plague in Manchuria in 1910? No, not at all. But I knew he was there, because there are records. I was like, Well, I have to deal with that. I didn’t realize I was going to write a whole plague sequence in Manchuria.

Your book ends with bad men going free and bad companies going unpunished. Is there a lesson at all here?
Well, “too big to punish” becomes a certain thing. MacArthur’s second-in-command was a proud fascist. That’s how he distinguished himself. He made no bones about it.

Was there a particular thing you discovered in your grandfather’s papers that made you go, This would make a fantastic novel?
The more that I researched his life, the more that I found that his story was not only the story that I wanted to tell about my family. But it was also the story that explained to me the best what we’re now experiencing in not only the United States but all around the world, with the resurgence of all these fascist groups.

What do you think you learned about yourself from the eight-year journey of writing this book?
I learned a lot about my family. I’m able to understand my father better. You know, we didn’t really have a very good relationship for the most part, and I was able to see my father more as a product of circumstances than I had prior to that. A lot of forgiveness happened as a result of this.

You know, it’s a strange story. It’s a story of idealism, the energy of idealism being retasked for total destruction. It’s a difficult topic emotionally, and I think it changes anybody. I mean, it certainly changed me. It aged me. I certainly look a lot older than I did when I started.•