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« Back to Books to Please, Part One main page    Transcript for: Books to Please, Part OneTHINK TANK WITH BEN WATTENBERG#1310 MICHAEL DIRDA, PART ONE FEED DATE: April 21, 2005 Michael Dirda Opening Billboard: Funding for Think Tank is provided by... (Pfizer) At Pfizer, we’re spending over five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have 12,000 scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer, life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. MR. WATTENBERG: Hello I’m Ben Wattenberg. In today’s fast, computerized environment, good books are sometimes forgotten. Not so for Michael Dirda, a lover of literature since his childhood in a working class town in the Midwest. A Pulitzer Prize winning book critic for the Washington Post, Dirda says that there are wonderful books that people from all walks of life can read and enjoy. Today, he will share some of those with us. What is the state of literature today? To Find Out, Think Tank is joined by Michael Dirda, author of An Open Book: Coming of Age in the Heartland and Bound to Please: An extraordinary one-volume literary education. The Topic Before the House: Books to Please, Part One. This Week on Think Tank… MR. WATTENBERG: Michael Dirda, welcome to Think Tank. MR. DIRDA: Thank you for inviting me. MR. WATTENBERG: We’re going to talk about two very interesting books. The first is called An Open Book and the subtitle, which I just looked at now, is called Chapters from a Reader’s Life. Tell me something about your early history. I guess hometown is... MR. DIRDA: Well this is... MR. WATTENBERG: Lorraine, Ohio. Is that right? MR. DIRDA: Yes. This book is about growing up in Lorraine, Ohio which is a classic Ohio steel town. My parents had quit school as teenagers... MR. WATTENBERG: Old rustbelt. MR. DIRDA: Old rustbelt, blue collar. My high school was supposedly first in the state in juvenile delinquency. It’s about thirty percent Hispanic and twenty-five percent Black and the rest east European and Italian – second/third generation kids; a rough school. An interesting town, though, to grow up in. But it was not a town of books or a town where people read a lot of books. And my parents were – my father was a steelworker; my mother was a homemaker. MR. WATTENBERG: And you worked at some of those blue collar jobs during the summer. MR. DIRDA: Oh, I worked ever since I was a little kid. MR. WATTENBERG: How did you get interested in books? This doesn’t sound like a bookish background. MR. DIRDA: Well the – my mother taught me to read when I was about four. I’d sit in her lap and she’d look at these little picture books and she’d ooh and ahh before the images of, you know, fluffy little bunnies and yellow ducklings. And it clearly gave her such pleasure to turn the pages of these things that I started to pay more and more attention to the books and gradually the books became part of my routine and I figured out that the squiggles were words and I started reading. To my father’s dismay there was no stopping me. He was often disturbed that I spent too much time with my nose in a book. MR. WATTENBERG: He was a steelworker? MR. DIRDA: Yes. He was – he certainly wanted me to do well in school because he knew that was a way to success. But I would go around and ride my bicycle to thrift shops and go through Salvation Armys and a place called Florisa’s Values looking for books. They’d only be a nickel apiece and I’d stock up and I remember finding Joyce’s Ulysses there when I was about ten or eleven for a quarter. MR. WATTENBERG: And that’s all in this open book... MR. DIRDA: Yes. MR. WATTENBERG: Memoir, but it – it’s a book – it’s a sort of your life but through the lens often of the books you’re reading. MR. DIRDA: Well the book – reading and books are the organizing principle. You can’t – you can’t tell everything about your life. You have to have something to organize it. Since books were essential to what I’ve done with my so-called career, I decided to use them as the organizing principle of talking about my childhood and youth. Book goes up to the age of nineteen, but it’s greater than just books. I talk about family and teachers and friends and girlfriends and run away from home for five days when I was fourteen and when I finally get out of Ohio and go to France and book ends with me in Paris. MR. WATTENBERG: Well, well. Let’s move on to the second book. We’re going to talk about this. It’s called Bound to Please; An Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education. The saying is 'so many books; so little time'. So let’s actually talk about some of the selections that you picked there. It’s a book of essays of your columns about specific books. MR. DIRDA: Well, let me – let me give you some background on the book of essays in general. MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. MR. DIRDA: They’re selections from the pieces – the longer pieces I’ve written over the last twenty-five years. One of my goals as a journalist – a literary journalist – was to promote good books from the past as well as covering the current books that are just being published and becoming bestsellers. So I would often use biographies or new translations as a way of talking about great writers such as Horatis (sp?) or you mentioned Boswell, Johnson and any number of others. There are about a hundred and ten essays in this book. The subtitle is a little over the top - I think my publishers view. I thought it was just essays of great writers and their books. The other point I want to make about the book is that by great I don’t only mean the canonical books. I also talk about science fiction, fantasy, couple a children’s books... MR. WATTENBERG: Mystery, humor... MR. DIRDA: Mysteries, humor. There are great books in all these fields and people should be a – know about these books as well. And so I – and my goal as a reviewer, as an essayist is to be not so much a critic and say, you know, this is good or this is bad, as to tell people what’s in a book and why it’s fun to read; what you can get out of it. And I quote – quote a lot. I talk about people’s lives. I make everything sound as appealing as I can so I want to stress that this isn’t the sort of perhaps heavy-handed kind of criticisms people... MR. WATTENBERG: Although some of the books... MR. DIRDA: They’re conversational. MR. WATTENBERG: Some of the books, and we’ll talk about it. Some are; some aren’t. You say or in some cases the author says they are hard to read; you have to read between the lines. MR. DIRDA: Some are. MR. WATTENBERG: And for a professional philistine like myself, I always get angry. I mean, I could not get through William Faulkner. I think it was a sign, and you know, that’s work. And you’ve got to read between the – or James Joyce’s Ulysses or Finnegan’s Wake. That’s – now... why should we have to do that? MR. DIRDA: Well, literature... MR. WATTENBERG: Why should we have to do that? MR. DIRDA: Well... MR. WATTENBERG: Why don’t they just tell us a story? MR. DIRDA: One definition of literature is that you have to read the sentences more than once. You have to read it – read them twice. MR. WATTENBERG: But that’s... MR. DIRDA: I won’t disagree that stories are important. I mean, you know, if you’re going to be an advocate of mysteries and science fiction, you know how important – the plot is the important part of the – the whole experience. But what – but the playful use of language, the imaginative use of language gives delight. It gives pleasure. It’s an aesthetic pleasure like listening to music. Sometimes you need to be a little more demanding with your prose simply because the ideas you’re trying to express are complex. You can’t do them as well in simple language. Or you need – you’re trying to build up a texture that requires language of some complexity. And the reader will... MR. WATTENBERG: And... MR. DIRDA: The reader will find that if he persists or she persists with the book, that the rewards of hard books are far greater than the rewards are of easier books. The easier books we can enjoy right now, but it’s the harder books that we go back to again and again because they keep talking to us. MR. WATTENBERG: First – the first one I want to talk about is the Dr. Johnson James Boswell. Give us a little background on that and the guy who wrote it and what it’s about. MR. DIRDA: Boswell was a kind of a male groupie. As a young man he followed Pasquale Paoli; he was the liberator of Corsica. He admired Johnson and he hung out with him in London. MR. WATTENBERG: Johnson was a famous... MR. DIRDA: Johnson was a great – the great public intellectual of 18th century England. MR. WATTENBERG: Did he write books or essays? MR. DIRDA: He wrote everything. He wrote a famous poem with the Vanity of Human Wishes. He wrote moral essays collected in a book called The Rambler; a collection of others as well. He wrote a novel called Rasselas. He – he was a man of letters and he was also a man of conversation. MR. WATTENBERG: But he is most famous because this James Boswell wrote a biography of him. MR. DIRDA: Boswell’s biography is almost more than a biography. It’s... MR. WATTENBERG: It’s called what, the Life of Dr... MR. DIRDA: The Life of Johnson. MR. WATTENBERG: The Life of Johnson, okay. MR. DIRDA: It’s a – doesn’t only offer you the biographical facts about him, it records his conversation, the – and his witty repertoire in coffeehouses and basically brings Johnson to life in a way that almost no other figure in English literature’s ever been brought to life. Many people think it’s the most entertaining book in English. And there was... MR. WATTENBERG: I mean people talk about it as THE great biography in the English language. I mean... MR. DIRDA: It is. MR. WATTENBERG: Yes. MR. DIRDA: It – it’s able to be that way because Boswell was at Johnson’s side for so much of the time; had a near-photographic memory; would come home at night and record Johnson’s quips. MR. WATTENBERG: So we should read Boswell’s Life of Dr. Johnson. MR. DIRDA: Yes. MR. WATTENBERG: Which I actually am going to read. I was very fascinated by your essay. I’m going to get that one. And then the actual book you review is called Boswell’s Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson. So this is a biography of a biographer. MR. DIRDA: And of the biography itself. A biography of the biography itself, too. Boswell himself was a complicated man. He was a Scotsman in England where he was looks – looked down upon because he was not truly English. He was unfaithful to his wife. He liked London prostitutes. He drank a lot. He made a mess of his family’s – his children’s lives. MR. WATTENBERG: There’s a lot of sex in these books. MR. DIRDA: A lot of sex in these... well, you know, since I’m writing in the hopes of making the books as appealing as possible, I tell as many funny stories and sexy stories as I can when I can. And in this case, Boswell’s whole life was worthless to the eyes of the world and he felt that by writing this book about Johnson he could redeem himself. And he dies at 54 having just finished the book and – and does in fact live long enough to see it welcomed, although there were those who criticized that, you know, that he was – he was far too presumptuous to tell so many intimate details about the people – about Johnson and the people he came into contact with. But we often, you know, there’s this distinction between the artist who creates and the man or woman who suffers in real life. And artists are often not very likeable people – writers aren’t. They’re very vain, egocentric; they live very messy lives. But it’s their art that redeems them insofar as they are redeemed and this is a very good example of that. And because he lived a colorful life and tells so movingly the story of how hard he had to work in order to make this book, a very complex, long book... MR. WATTENBERG: This is in Sisman’s book? MR. DIRDA: This is all Sisman’s book, yes. MR. WATTENBERG: Right. MR. DIRDA: But I mean, Johnson – I mean, it’s because of Boswell that we have such famous quotes from Johnson that – I mentioned a couple of them. I’ll just read. 'Were' - talking about sex – 'Were it not for imagination, sir, a man would be as happy in the arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess.' Johnson who also published a lot of books with - through subscription, he said – once said, 'Sir, I have two very cogent reasons for not printing any list of subscribers. One; that I’ve lost all the names. The other; that I’ve spent all the money.' MR. WATTENBERG: Alright. Now. Let’s move from the middle of the 18th century to 1750s, to the middle of the 20th century where you talk in a brief section about an American humorist named SJ Perleman, who I used to read as a kid. He’s the only man I’ve ever read that made me laugh out loud to your self. You’re in a room alone and you read him and I – I recalled reading one paragraph about a dentist and his forceps or something like that. I used to read it again and again. I knew it by heart; I don’t anymore. And I used to hear myself laughing out loud. So tell me a little bit about SJ Perleman. MR. DIRDA: Well, Perleman appears in a section where I talk about the great stylists – prose stylists of the 20th century, and he certainly is one. He’s sort of the master of what we think of almost as – I guess Jewish-American humor. Just the wisecracks and the playfulness of language and that kind of rat-a-tat speed. Nothing ever slows down with Perleman. Of course, he wrote for the Marx Brothers. He wrote the film scripts in conjunction with Groucho for the early – some of the early movies, and in fact when you read Perleman it’s hard not to think of Groucho’s voice coming through there. But he was a very learned man. These things appeared in the New Yorker. He himself thought that he was not – he thought the funniest man he’d ever read - who I have an essay on in this book - is an Irishman called Flann O’Brien, who he thought was really the great humorist of our time. But Perleman – I quote a couple of typical Perleman-esque sentence... MR. WATTENBERG: Couple of quotes, yes. MR. DIRDA: Yes. MR. WATTENBERG: What’s the name of the – of the book that people should buy if they want to read? Is that... MR. DIRDA: The – Perleman’s – He wrote... MR. WATTENBERG: Dozens? MR. DIRDA: A dozen or more. The – probably the best introduction is called The Most of SJ Perleman. MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. MR. DIRDA: A great big omnibus of his favorite and best pieces. Here’s a typical sentence. 'Our meal finished. We sauntered into the rumpus room and Diana turned on the radio. With a savage snarl the radio turned on her.' He – what I – as I... MR. WATTENBERG: It’s very verbal humor frequently. It’s spinning a word around. MR. DIRDA: Well, as I just – I say in talking about him, Perleman kind of – he sets sail on the stream of consciousness in his prose and then lets everything mutiny. The words turn just as this. You think you’re going along one way and then he suddenly will shift the language on you. MR. WATTENBERG: And the first one in that passage before the ellipsis is a funny one also. Thousands of... MR. DIRDA: 'Thousands of scantily draped - but nonetheless appetizing - extra girls milled past me'. The under – the under, you know - the understatement is typical Perleman. And he does make you laugh out loud. He was one of that great generation of humorists out of the ’30s - which James Thurber is probably the other, you know, wonderful example. MR. WATTENBERG: Alright. Michael, tell me next about Ernest Hemingway. That was another one of my favorites as a kid. MR. DIRDA: Well, as I said, I talk about Hemingway as I talked about Perleman in a piece about influential prose stylists. And almost unquestionably, Hemingway is the great American master of the – of what we think of as American prose. He took the complicated syntax of the Victorians and made it simple. MR. WATTENBERG: The word they always use for his style is 'terse'. MR. DIRDA: Terse, direct, to the point, concrete. He’s not afraid to use declarative sentence after declarative sentence, and... MR. WATTENBERG: And sometimes they caricatured him also. I mean... MR. DIRDA: Oh, easy. And I mean, there – there are – there’s - just as there are faux Faulkner contests there are bad Hemingway contests and people compete to win this prize. But it shows a love for the writing. Hemingway’s fallen a little bit in favor in recent years partly because his later books were not as good as the early ones. But the impact of his style for forty years was one that almost no American writer could avoid. MR. WATTENBERG: If you want to read one Hemingway book to start out, what should you read? MR. DIRDA: Well, you should read the novel The Sun Also Rises or you should read the stories of In our Time. MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. Why don’t you, on this terse style, read me a little bit of that excerpt you offer... MR. DIRDA: This is a pass – passage from – talking about this stripped clean, emotion-free language that Hemingway would use and its, you know, influenced people like Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Carver, but in Big Two-Hearted River a war vet has come back home and he’s trying to recover his serenity, his psychological health. So he goes... MR. WATTENBERG: And which book – which book is this? MR. DIRDA: It’s a short story called Big Two-Hearted River and he’s gone fishing. 'He started a fire with some chunks of pine he got with the ax from a stump. Over the fire he stuck a wire grill, pushing the four legs down into the ground with his boot. Nick put the frying pan on the grill over the flames. He was hungrier. The beans and spaghetti warmed. Nick stirred them and mixed them together. They began to bubble, making little bubbles that rose with difficulty to the surface. There was a good smell.' MR. WATTENBERG: That’s a classic line; 'There was a good smell.' I mean... MR. DIRDA: I mean, the fact that he’s willing to repeat words like 'bubble'; that he uses even verbs like 'got'. 'He got them with an ax', shows this, you know, willingness to do everything possible to avoid literary language. He didn’t want to sound phony. MR. WATTENBERG: But I – I... MR. DIRDA: He wanted to be sincere and authentic and by keeping the language away from literary effects he was able to gain that authenticity. MR. WATTENBERG: I can see why you as a professional bookman and critic are very concerned about and write about changes in literary style. But why should we as – I read a lot but I’m not a book critic. I was an English major but that’s a long time ago. Why should we care so much about style? If you like the book, read the book? MR. DIRDA: Well, style is what keeps the language alive. I mean, if you take the – look at the government’s style. Do you think people should write the way the government workers do and bureaucrats? MR. WATTENBERG: Oh, sure. MR. DIRDA: It’s as often to disguise meaning as to convey it. Style is – it gives prose life; it gives it beauty, charm; it allows us to say things in punchy ways that are memorable, or in poetic and evocative ways that may be even more memorable. It’s why we turn to books after a certain age. You – sometimes you read for plot, but sometimes you read for the sound of the words on the page. I, for example, read by moving my lips still - which you’re not supposed to do - because I like to feel the rhythms of the sentence and to taste the words as they appear on the page. Those are one of the, you know, the – the almost sensual pleasures of reading. Of – those things count. Also styles is – a Frenchman once said, you know - 'Style is the man; it’s through style that we reveal ourselves, our characters, our personalities are revealed to the way – in the way we write.' And you know, the world is filled with all kinds of interesting styles, makes one of the pleasures of reading all kinds of different books. MR. WATTENBERG: Immediately after World War II there were a number of very famous best-selling books. Norman Mailer’s Naked and the Dead, James Jones’ From Here to Eternity and Herman Wouk’s The Cain Mutiny. What did you think of those books? I mean, I loved them because it was – I was a kid when World War II was going on and to actually see and feel the – what went on. MR. DIRDA: Those books are not in – in Bound to Please partly because no occasion... MR. WATTENBERG: No, I understand. MR. DIRDA: ... arose for me to write about them. I would say that probably with the possible exception of The Naked and the Dead, the other two books are largely forgotten by this generation. They’re seldom read. From Here to Eternity is probably Jones’ best book. He wrote a lot of books. He was an important figure when he lived in Paris for many writers who learned from him and he was from all accounts an extremely charming and engaging and wonderful man. But this is the sad lot for almost – well, certainly for all – almost nearly all critics, but for many writers. That they write for a generation or two but then they’re pushed out because people only read so many books. That’s why we have this whole controversy about... MR. WATTENBERG: That’s why we have a critic. MR. DIRDA: ... this is why we have this whole business about the cannon because with the best will in the world unless, you know, you can’t read everything. So that what happens from generation to the generation is that these guys wrote realistic novels, basically, and the generation that came up in the ’60s and ’70s, a lot of them were interested in things that were not quite so realistic and hard-hitting; naturalistic almost. They were more playful. They turned to fantasy. They were more experimental. The – the book – the character of books became somewhat different just as the – now, in fact they are – they – we have a – Malraux – the Andre Malraux, the French writer once talked about a museum without walls because we could appreciate in the 20th century, art from all periods. We are now able as readers to read books from around the world. I – I think that the novels that we read – historical novels are – fall into the area of popular fiction where most people do not go back to the popular novels of the past. If you look at the 1920s in America, the most popular writer and critically esteemed writer was a guy named Joseph Hergesheimer. People do not read Joseph Hergesheimer anymore. They – he doesn’t speak to them as well. The – the writers – this is - we go back to your original point about hard writers. The hard writers are the ones that people return to and also the writers that we often overlook. The – literature develops not in a direct, straight line from father to son and mother to daughter. It – young writers don’t look to their parents, you know, previous gen-– ; they look to the sides, to the margins. So they go to their uncles. They go to their aunts as models for them. And so they’re going to find in – as I said, fantasy or science fiction or mysteries or marginalized genres, things that their parents would have rejected and they will use those as the basis for their own fiction. MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. On that note, Michael Dirda, thank you very much for joining us on Think Tank and enlightening not only our audience, but me. And thank you. Please, join us for a future episode as we continue to discuss books. And please, remember to send us your comments via email. We think it makes our show better. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. ANNOUNCER: We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. Please send your questions and comments to New River Media, 4455 Connecticut Ave NW, Suite C-100, Washington, DC 20008 or email us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Tank, visit PBS online at pbs.org and please let us know where you watch Think Tank. Funding for Think Tank is provided by... (Pfizer) At Pfizer, we’re spending over five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have 12,000 scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer, life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. 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