“A Gentleman in Moscow” Author Amor Towles Discusses His New Short Stories

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, INTERNATIONAL HOST: Well, next, the power of everyday encounters. Have you ever noticed how some of the briefest exchanges can give birth to life-changing realities? Well, bestselling novelist Amor Towles certainly did. His observations inspired his new book, “Table for Two,” a collection of short stories and a novella mostly set in the year 2000. And he joins Walter Isaacson to reflect on this latest work and his career so far.

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WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you. And Amor Towles, welcome to the show.

TOWLES: Walter, thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

ISAACSON: Your collection now, “Table for Two,” has a group of short stories and then a novella to it. It’s called “Table for Two,” which confused me at first, but then I realized one theme is there’s a whole lot of just two-person, almost like kitchen table, conversations. Is that a theme of the book?

TOWLES: Yes, it’s interesting. When I was — when I finished the manuscript it had no title, and I was preparing to send it in, and so I needed a title. And I had just spent rereading the material because I was editing it, as you know, the same thing you do with your work, you read it over and over and over, and I suddenly recognized that in two stories that there was a mother and daughter who were sitting across the kitchen table having a serious conversation that has big implications for their lives. And in the next story, there was a young man who had sort of gotten in trouble with a stranger and then had been invited to the stranger’s house, an older man, where they were having a serious conversation that had implications for their lives. And I thought, oh, that’s interesting. But then I suddenly realized it was in all the stories. So, they were all written in the course of the last 10 years. Something must have been subconsciously on my mind about how we in our lives can have a small thing that occurs that ultimately — that we might have to hash out in face-to-face in ways that could have implications for our lives. And yes, that turned out to be an underlying theme for the story. And so, that’s why I changed the title that it has such.

ISAACSON: In your story, “The Line,” it’s about a character who, I guess, his strength in life is he knows how to stand in line.

TOWLES: Yes.

ISAACSON: And yet, at the end — or in the middle, he goes to this mysterious line, which is called the Agency of Expatriate Affairs. He’s doing it for somebody else, I think, in the story, but he ends up becoming an expatriate. What was that about? Was that sort of a Kafka thing of escape, or is it just a fantasy?

TOWLES: It is Kafka-esque, that story, and a little bit of Gogol, too, because it is somewhat of a fairy tale. It’s a little bit of sort of a dark humor built into it, and it springs from when I was writing “A Gentleman in Moscow.” There’s a moment in which the character, Mishka, returns from doing time in prison, and he’s cynically viewing Russia in sort of, I think, in the ’30s at that point, or the ’40s — ’50s, actually, and he’s observing that lines have become a way of life, and sort of making this sort of a dark observation. And when I was writing that passage, I thought to myself, oh, wouldn’t it be interesting if you had somebody who they weren’t necessarily good at anything in life, but they were really good at standing in line and these lines that were all over the Russia? And that’s where the short story came from. So, when I finished “A Gentleman in Moscow,” the first thing I did is I wrote that story. And so, it is sort of about this life of an innocent open-eyed person, but in a way, a difficult time, who finds expertise in an unusual thing.

ISAACSON: And his expertise standing in line, and we’re talking about “Table for Two,” is contrasted to that of his wife, who is an extraordinary activist. I mean, just one of those people we kind of know who just finds a cause and just embraces it. Was that a particular contrast you were trying to draw?

TOWLES: I think so. And, you know, and that points to a different thing that sort of surfaced in the collection. A friend of mine observed reading it, Amor, all these are about marriage. And I was like, oh, that’s interesting. You’re right. A lot of the stories are about husbands and wives. And I think that that’s — as a writer, I’m always interested when you leave one project and sort of exploring a different area of human life because it forces me to write in a different way. And if I look back over my catalog, as it were, “Rules of Civility” is about 25-year-olds in New York. And “A gentleman in Moscow” is about sort of an aging aristocrat and the friends he makes in the hotel. “The Lincoln Highway” is about 18-year-olds, you know. And I have not really, in those works, explored marriage. And so, I think, as I was writing these short stories over the last 10 years, it must have been sort of a subconscious thing of constantly sort of turning back on this relationship, which is so important in our daily lives, marriage, whether we’re children or spouses and to explore the subtleties of marriage and the difficulties that can arise from it, the endearments that can exist, the bond of both — when it can be strong and when it’s weak, you know, it’s an area of endless inquiry.

ISAACSON: Well, one of the greatest stories in the book is “The Ballad of Timothy Touchett,” which I assume is a bit autobiographical. You can push back if I’m wrong. And every character I’ve written about in my nonfiction biographies, they’ve had sort of misfits as childhoods. They were difficult, whether it was Leonardo growing up, illegitimate and gay and the village of Vinci or all the way up to Elon Musk. And I want to read you a long passage in your book, if you’ll just be patient, because it’s a wonderful passage, but it’s about the question of not being a misfit and whether you lose creativity if you aren’t a misfit. You write, what had caused Timothy to delay the start of his novel, he wanting to write a novel, was a fear so dark and disturbing it could barely be acknowledged, the fear that he had no story to tell. Consider for a moment the lives of Timothy’s heroes. Faulkner had come of age in the Jim Crow South, a time and place with its own idiosyncratic language. Hemingway had been a journalist and driven an ambulance in the First World War before hunting lines in the African savanna. And Dostoevsky, he went to Siberia. You go on like that. How could one expect a craft and novel of grace and significance when one’s greatest inconvenience had included the mowing of lawns in the spring and the raking of leaves in the autumn and the shoveling of snow in the winter? Why Timothy parents hadn’t even bothered to succumb to alcoholism or divorce? First of all, tell me, do you think having a complex or difficult childhood adds to creativity? And I guess I’ll follow up by saying, and how was your childhood?

TOWLES: Yes. I mean, I suppose that is sort of an ironically biographical sort of exploration in that passage. Because I had a — I did not have a life that was — of the kind that Faulkner experience in his youth or certainly, you know, Dostoevsky experience in his youth. And as a young reader, you sort of look at these giants of literature and you’re like, oh, my God, what an extraordinary experience they had that they translated into this work. And I think, yes, as a young writer, you’re in suburbia, you’re having — I’m beginning to doubt my — you know, oh, my God, what am I going to write about, you know. Now — but it is a little tongue in cheek because I do think that we all have the capacity to tell intricate stories. And through observation, through exploration of our own feelings, through the conversations we have with strangers, we can access humanity at a level that can allow us to build great narratives regardless of our past. So, it is sort of a winking sort of picture of myself about anxiety I had as a young man. But I’m kind of over it now. I think I’m kind of — I’m glad that I did not have to go through what Dostoevsky had to do in order to write, you know, a bestselling book.

ISAACSON: When you were at the New Orleans Book Festival, you were talking to your friend Michael Lewis on stage. And you were talking about as he had been being in finance for a long time, being in the Wall Street banking type world. And you, it seems, were saved by Peter Matheson. Tell me that.

TOWLES: Yes. Peter was, you know, a great American, both writer of natural history in essence or on natural topics but also a novelist. He came to Yale when I was an undergraduate. I got into his seminar. And out of that grew a friendship and a mentorship. But I did have a divergence and I went and spent 20 years in the investment business and it really pissed him off. Because he’s like — you know, he appropriately was like, I spent this time with you, mentoring you and encouraging you and here you go off and work on Wall Street, you know, what? And so, he — and eventually he said, listen, I think you — your time in Wall Street, it’s going to ruin your career. I think you’ll never be an artist, you know, over dinner one night. And that really — it was — it became for me that — like Jacob Marley, you know, shaking his chains at Scrooge and, you know, letting him know, you know, what lay ahead if you stayed on the same track. And so, on the one hand Peter gave me a gift as a young writer acknowledging or recognizing that I might have talent, but he then gave me the second gift later in life, which was to say, if you don’t pursue your craft, you will end up, I think, disappointed with yourself. And so, I began to then write on the weekends. And when “Rules of Civility” became a bestseller, I retired from the firm. And so, it was a long road to it, but it was — I guess it was the road that I had to take.

ISAACSON: When you’re conceiving a novel, or perhaps one of these short stories in “Table for Two,” do you start by conceiving the place, you know, the backdrop, what Eudora Welty would call a sense of place, or do you conceive the characters first, or do you conceive the plot first?

TOWLES: For me, the stories tend to start, whether it’s a novel or a short story, with a very simple premise. Like I did — I was in a hotel, and I thought, oh — one year in Geneva, and I thought, what would it be like to be trapped in a hotel for a long period of time? And that was the beginning of “A Gentleman in Moscow.” And when I have an idea like that, I tend to very quickly — as I realize, oh, that’s an interesting story, I tend to see things very quickly that are the basics. So, right away there, I was like, oh, it could be in Russia. He could be an aristocrat sentenced to house arrest in a fancy hotel near the Kremlin. The story can span from the revolution to the Cold War. And all of that I knew in a matter of minutes. But then, it’s what you describe, you start to build out the idea over time. And I’ll spend a couple of years designing a book, where I will try to imagine everything that happens. All the settings, the people in their backgrounds, their psychology, filling notebooks by hand, as I, in essence, build the world. And it’s not in an order. It’s not in order. What you’re doing is you are kind of building each element of it side by side. You get a little bit better sense of the place, better sense of the people, better sense of what happens. And then you kind of start again and advance and then advance and slowly, you know, build this world. And once I know that world clearly, then I, you know, put up — build an outline and start to write the chapter one.

ISAACSON: Your characters are so wildly different. I mean, you talked about the Russian aristocratic man in “A Gentleman in Moscow.” But there’s a working-class woman from Brooklyn in one of your stories, a farm boy from Nebraska. How do you get into the heads of such different people?

TOWLES: I’m sort of that school that I was sort of raised in the notion that to master my craft. You would write short stories from as many different perspectives as possible, taking on different lives. And by doing so, you know — rather than just writing about my own experiences, let’s say. It was because by writing about different people, it forces me or any young writer to try to imagine what would it be like to be in that situation? What would be my vocabulary? How would I — how would be my morals? What would be — how would I describe a situation that I stepped into if I was an 18-year-old woman in Berkeley in the ’60s versus, you know, a Viennese violin repairman in the 19th century. They would see the world differently. They would talk about the world differently. And so, you try to teach yourself through short stories taken from different perspectives how to look at the world slightly different from another perspective. And then, over time, it starts to become second nature. Now, when I’m creating a novel, all my characters are invented, and it’s a very natural process for me to sort of invent them one by one by one after this sort of decades of training myself to imagine the world in narrative through the lives of — eyes of others.

ISAACSON: One of the complex things is — to me, is how you choose narrators in your story. Sometimes they’re omniscient. They know the whole story. Sometimes they’re part of the action. Sometimes they’re a little bit like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby and just observing things. How do you choose narrator styles?

TOWLES: Yes, that’s an excellent question, Walter, because I think that — as I think about short stories, novels, either one, the whole process of invention deciding who the narrator is the most difficult decision and the most interesting decision that I will make. Figuring out where it happens, when it happens, what happens, who’s in the story, these are all important decisions, but nothing compared to who’s going to tell the story. And it could be, as you say, the omniscient narrator up way up here who knows all, it could be the — you know, somebody who is related to the main character. But, you know, it could be a spouse, it could be a stranger who’s observing the events, it could be the main character, his or herself telling it in first person. And the two — once I kind of know what’s going to happen and where it’s going to happen and when it’s going to happen, then I actually will start to go through different alternatives to try to feel where is this story, where does it belong, who should be telling it, and in what tone. And I may try it in my head or in writing in different ways, until suddenly you say, oh, yes, this is it. This is the person you should tell it. And here’s the sort of an interesting thing, I think, about “Table for Two” that readers can sort of look for or consider, the six stories in New York are laid out in such a way that you move from the omniscient — the most omniscient narrator, the person who knows everything and unnamed, and — in the first two stories, and then you get some stories where the person is an observer. It’s their spouse who’s involved in the circumstance. It’s in — it’s their father who’s involved in the circumstance. And then you get stories where it’s the individual talking about what’s happened to themselves. So, as you read the stories, you are kind of moving from way up here down to closer and closer proximity. And that’s a very — each of these is a very different type of storytelling. So, I think the reader will may enjoy going through that experience of how the shift in orientation changes the way that the story unfolds.

ISAACSON: Your story “Eve Goes to Hollywood,” it sort of springs out of your “Rules of Civility” novel, Eve, the character. Have you thought of going back to “A Gentleman in Moscow” or other things and doing that?

TOWLES: I think “A Gentleman in Moscow,” it ends in a beautifully definitive way for me. So, it feels very holistic. But “The Lincoln Highway” is something that I would probably consider returning to. Emmett and Billy and Sally at the end of that story, or at the beginning of something sort of a great new adventure, as it were, the adventure of adulthood, I guess. And also, you know, going off to California. And I could imagine being drawn back into to telling that story, probably not in the next couple of years, but maybe a decade from now.

ISAACSON: You know, reading your novels to me is to my personal best reason that we should all read novels. But tell me in your words, why should we read novels?

TOWLES: I think that reading novels provide — one thing they provide is what we were discussing a second. The novel is pretty unique for me in terms of the arts in that it can place us in the position of another human being. And it can do it so powerfully that we as readers, if something in the main character that we’re really embedded in our story, something funny happens to the character, we laugh out loud while we’re reading. If something tragic happens, we may actually shed tears as we’re reading. When the character has a victory, a minor victory, we feel — you know, and when they have — something’s being mean is done to them, we feel indignant. You know, we start to see the world to some degree, we can see the world from the perspective of a character who we’ve become interested in. So, the novel really has this relatively unique way. I don’t think the film can achieve this. I don’t think that, you know, nonfiction achieves this in the same way, this idea of sort of giving yourself over to the character and seeing the world as it unfolds and — to them, but taking it very personally. And that opens the door to this extraordinary dynamic where, obviously, empathy grows out of that, where we suddenly can take the feelings of others more seriously, our ability to imagine ourselves and experiences that we have not had, which adds to both empathy and adventure and curiosity unfolds. And so, I think that, you know, this is really the great power of the novel, is that it can enter — allow us to enter the world from new angles to see experiences we have not witnessed ourselves to imagine them in a very personal way, in a way that opens both our heart and our mind.

ISAACSON: Amor Towles, thank you so much for joining us.

TOWLES: Walter. It’s great to be here. It’s good to see you.