Speaker Because you said you were born to be a alive.
Speaker This was your destiny.
Speaker Destiny is such a grand word for a writer. Oh, for anybody, I should think. I was I didn’t elect to be a writer. I just was one I was reading an obituary of James Merrill, the poet whom I knew for 50 years, and a friend of his said that. Writing poetry for him was like breathing for the rest of us. Well, writing prose was like. Talking prose is for the rest of us. I began to write at the same time, I began to read and I began to read when I was I was prematurely forced by a blind grandfather so that I would one day read to him, which I did do. So I had learned to read about five, six, and as I would read a book. I would start to write a book, CATSA, I got very far. But the idea that whatever I was thinking, experiencing, observing. It was more real if I wrote it down where that came from, I haven’t a clue.
Speaker When you learn to read, did you remember learning, do you remember a and great sense of power from being able to read?
Speaker At first, it was agonizing for me, as it is for any four year old, A is for Apple, the teacher would say, and they’d put an apple in front of you and bees for a bear and they put a bear. And so but I learned quickly because partly being forced by the blind grandfather. But I wanted to get inside those books. I wanted to know those stories. I had to take Latin for eight years. It always seemed to be Cesar’s very boring, warts and all. But I got so excited in Cesar that I got to trot, which you weren’t supposed to do, which was the English translation of the Latin. And I had to find out how the story ended. So I got caught with a trot and I said, what? I just I’m so bored doing a paragraph a day. I want to see how it turns out. So it was in order to read books for myself and not be read too. I found grown ups not terribly reliable when it came to reading to you. So the sooner I could do it for myself, I did it for myself and simultaneously started to write. And here I am.
Speaker Was it your grandmother or your grandfather?
Speaker Well, blind men are not all that good at deciphering the texts. My grandmother was called in, but as she had been reading to him for half a century, anyone who could spell her was a hero in her eyes. And I was the only one of the descendants who liked to read and had any aptitude for it. So her heart was really in it as she led me through prose and just as I was forced to guess at meanings and I wasn’t given much help. I quickly learned about syllables and I learned how to string them together and anything difficult. Sometimes they would tell me they wanted me to find it out for myself. I was sufficiently curious to do so much at the time.
Speaker What are the first books to remember?
Speaker Well, the first book I read all on my own was a kid’s book, by and large, I didn’t like children’s books. The first book I really liked were Tales from Living the Roman Historian or Lithographer, depending on how you read him. I thought those were wonderful and wonderful 19th century colored illustrations. And that was my world. I was very much at home in the Roman world. That was the first book I had a passion for and a grown up passion, even though I was seven eight. But at about five or six, I read something called The Duck and the Kangaroo, a story of unnatural love between a duck and a kangaroo. And I wasn’t bowled over by it, but I was rather pleased that I had read it all to myself and didn’t have to call in my grandmother to help out. And from then on, a door opened and there was literature. And there was I mean, do I want it to be a politician? I had no desire to be a writer, but since I was already a passionate reader and was writing, eventually the two became one. And you cannot be both a politician and a writer, since, as I have said so often, a writer must always tell the truth to the extent he understands it and a politician must never give the game away. That’s why, except for Benjamin Disraeli, there’s never been a good writer politician and don’t write in about Winston Churchill, he was a terrible writer.
Speaker So you do spend a lot of your childhood reading as much as I could.
Speaker Yes, there were powerful forces at work to get me. I was the son of an all-American football player. No, if my father liked the fact that I was a reader writer, he was fascinated by it because he wasn’t. And in every way that I differed from his highly successful career as an athlete in aviation, he was very pleased. So there was no might have been better if it hadn’t been than I would have forced myself harder to overcome parental disapproval. But I had parental approval in spades there, and he was rather delighted that I should be. He used the word erudite, and it was the first time I’d heard that word used. And I went and looked it up and. Surprised that he had used it. So it was.
Speaker Go on.
Speaker We’ll come back to you reading to your grandfather soon, but do you still love to read? Do you still be alive?
Speaker I do. It’s more difficult with age. My eyes are not what they were. And until two or three years ago, I could read the smallest print without glasses. Now I have a difficult time with glasses and that is an annoyance beyond belief to somebody used to reading and a half dark on airplanes and with no light at all, practically. And the smallest type. No, I’m constantly added, I have changed, I don’t like most people as they get older, I no longer care so much for invented stories as I do for. The memoir, the biography, letters. Something that has the unexpectedness of life, most fiction writers, I find rather to be anticipated in their effects, and they’re not half as droll as real life people. I just came across a wonderful line of Benjamin Disraeli. He got sent books as prime minister and also as a very popular novelist would be authors would send him their books. And he had a standard reply. Thank you, sir, for sending me your new book. Never fear, I shall waste no time in reading it.
Speaker Not what they hoped for.
Speaker I think as they read it, it was exactly what they hoped for.
Speaker What book, if any, do you keep by your bedside?
Speaker Well, for years, I kept frames translation of Montane.
Speaker Which has now been replaced by Screech, though I don’t read him as much as I used to and as I’ve read so much of Montane over the years. At the best of it, I sort of know by heart. He’s useful for leading me back into the classics. I have classic JAG’s every now and then I’m reading Luciane. I’ll pick somebody that I have never got around to Lucretius, I did a few years ago, just went through it from beginning to end, at least in the library. He’s very good as a guide. Let’s say the Cicero, if you read enough Montane, he’s a roadmap of where to go when you read Cicero. Otherwise you’ve got 30 volumes to wrestle with. Otherwise, there are no bedside books other than the ones that I am reading, and I usually read two or three at the same time.
Speaker Can you tell me who your what your favorite books are?
Speaker I don’t think writers have favorite books. And certainly after a certain amount of time and life and experience and just simply milage. You’ve had your favorites, and I shudder when I think when I was 20 how much I admire D.H. Lawrence, whom I came to loathe, the more I understood it more that fascism of Erens, Rod and Kangaroo really, really got on my nerves was first time around. I just saw the kind of wild would be sensuality of the books. You go through phases.
Speaker Who would you say are your literary ancestors, the. But what writers and most of.
Speaker What I would put my roots in the classical past. I suppose to begin with, in my grandfather’s library, he had the classics. And so I said stories from Livy was my introduction to the Roman world, and I just kept on between Rome and Greece.
Speaker I’d say as a novelist if I were to analyze. My inventions, as I call them, books like Myra Breckenridge or Duluth. I would find my ancestry and Petronius and in Latin and Papoulias the golden ass and Greek. And I think of them as the two progenitors, and they gave me the courage of example. That in the days when we were all so nervous about obscenity and pornography and this and that, you know, the United States has come very, very late to the edge of civilization. We haven’t crossed into a civilization of any kind, and I’m not terribly optimistic. But Rome and Greece both cheered each in its own way. And through reading, particularly those two writers who are essentially satirists and juvenile and arts, I found my voice through them. I’d like to be able to boast and say that I read them one in Greek and the other in Latin, but I didn’t. I read them in translation, but that was quite enough to.
Speaker Jet propelled me. And what about Henry James?
Speaker James was a great influence, but that’s later. It’s what gets you going early, then you go through phases of liking people, not liking them. I put off until I was 40, Milton, because I hated him so much in school. And then at 40 in this very room. I would. When I first woke up. Drinking coffee, I would read. A section of paradise lost aloud every morning, you must read it aloud and get the sound of it. And once you do that, it is a revelation. It is, to me, greater than Shakespeare. It is overpowering. And I wrote about it in Palimpsest, a memoir that I wrote a few years ago, and one of the reviewers of the book was Martin Amis, quite a good writer. English novelist, and we were on television not long ago together, and he said he was talking about turning 40 and he said, I followed your advice. I read Paradise Lost. I said it where he said, yes, it works.
Speaker But other influences.
Speaker Well, you have you have affection, so I think it’s a bit like sex or or friendship, you have an affinity, an elective affinity for a writer, and then sometimes you lose it.
Speaker Sometimes you just absorb it and you don’t think about it again. I long period with James, I came to him pretty late. I waited wisely with George Eliot until I was well into my 40s on the grounds that I advised no teacher ever to give Eliot to anyone in school or too young for. You have to know about time and you have to know about death, you have to know about. The disappointments of the day before, you couldn’t deal with George Eliot, so I waited until I was in my 30s and I read all of George Eliot and ended up regarding her as probably the greatest novelist in English of that division, which is. Who was it, Mario Pratts, who must always make the sign the tour against the evil eye, because he’s supposed to have had it, but he was the best, probably the greatest critic of English romantic literature and of what he called Biedermeier, which was the middle class novel of the 19th century. And she was the great master of that. She wrote about. Marriage, divorce, she wrote the first great study of alcoholism. Janet, something I lose the title of this, a woman alcoholic. This was a very daring thing to do in that period when ladies didn’t know about such things. And here is Elliott writing a tougher novel and the lost weekend of Charles Jackson to mention a novel of yesteryear. And she she was in a territory that I don’t much care for, but she certainly brings it to life and.
Speaker I was profoundly impressed, though not in the least influenced.
Speaker Who is your ideal reader?
Speaker Well, I prefer them not to move their lips, but if that’s the only way they can get it, move your lips and it might even be better if you read me aloud because I write for the ear as well as the eye. And which is why a number of my books have been done by these people reading the audio editions or whatever it is they call them and.
Speaker And an actress who a great friend of mine has read several of mine, including the Golden Age, and I’ve never had the nerve to listen. For fear, I wouldn’t like what I heard. Meaning that I wouldn’t like what I was doing when I was writing because he’s a very good actress. But one day I really will sit down and listen, particularly when a good performer is doing them.
Speaker And as you know, in antiquity, all reading was done aloud. If you were in a classroom, you would hear 50 boys. Or if girl’s if it was a girl’s classroom, there was nothing but no noise as they read, they all read aloud. I don’t know what the teacher made of it, how how he could make anything of it. But you read aloud and it was often it would be noticed. When I was writing about the umpire in the fourth century apostate emperor, someone wrote in a letter that he was even in his schooldays.
Speaker He was famous for reading silently. Which some people took because it wasn’t couldn’t be very serious if he read silently. How do we know he got it? You know, you have to hear it. Well, that’s an interesting attitude toward reading.
Speaker Would that be very unusual at that time when it was that was somebody thought to mention it in a letter to a friend or not? He did. He read it to himself. He read quietly, but he read an awful lot.
Speaker I think I read that it started as a form, that it was prayers. So it might have started with.
Speaker There was prayers at. Also, I would say before reading began or prose, it was music, it was singing, so instead of you would all sing together and that would be either a prayer or whatever it was you had in mind. So essentially, we go back to sound and what our words on a page, but like notes are music for a musician they’re there for to strike something in your brain to make a picture. I used to have more than I do now. I had the gift of the curse of being able to visualize what I read on the page. It’s what it’s called an eidetic memory or an eidetic form of reading.
Speaker And I asked the class this, I was up at Dartmouth and I took the classics class that came to different classes, would come and visit you as part of the thing and the classics when it does come to see me and I want to see them.
Speaker And I poolers, I said, how many of you? Visualize actually what you’re reading. I didn’t know I was talking about except for one girl.
Speaker And she said, do you do that? And I said, well, I used to. I said, Sometimes I can do it. I can’t force it, it’ll just happen. I’ll be reading about that and oversized Louis 14th crosses in front of the news and suddenly I’ll see it and smell it and feel it in the air.
Speaker And she was quite wonderful, she went into she said, will I get that reading, Homer? And she said, actually, I have seen. A Greek encampment at Troy. Black wool tents on a beach, on a brown beach. I said, do you ever check to see whether the beach was brown? And he said, yes, it was brown. And that is one of the miracles of reading, if you have the trick of the eidetic memory, which I don’t think you can learn, either you have it or you don’t, I don’t have it much anymore because I think, like many useful things, it wears out on you. But.
Speaker I have had it I always thought it came from, you know, from seeing a movie and picturing.
Speaker What do you mean?
Speaker Well, that’s remembering the movie. It’s it is from the page itself. I know it first hit me in the bathtub at Mary Wood in Virginia, above the Potomac River.
Speaker The house with my stepfather, Mr. Auchincloss. And I was about 13, 14, and I was in a hot tub reading. One of the Tarzan books.
Speaker And suddenly in the middle of it, and I remember for some reason, I was using a kind of very harsh ivory soap, I still remember the smell of that soap.
Speaker And I was in the jungle.
Speaker Jungle, which mysteriously smelled of ivory soap, which rather spoil their effect, but I couldn’t control that. And my heavens, there I was and there was no the lion and Tanta, the elephant and Tarzan swinging through the trees.
Speaker And I thought, this is wild.
Speaker And it stayed with me for quite a bit. Well, quite a bit. Ten minutes maybe. And then I would have recurrences not of that scene, but of other scenes that I was reading. I don’t know how it works when you sit down to write something, to make up something out of your head. Sometimes at great speed, something like Myra Breckinridge, which I wrote in maybe four weeks. I know that I visualize an awful lot of and I heard a lot of it, I hear more than I see.
Speaker And dialogue, I hear it even as I write it. Which was a great help when I turned dramatist.
Speaker And do you ever. When you’re finished, finish a passage or or a scene or a chapter, read it aloud at the end when you’re working.
Speaker Yeah.
Speaker Right, I take. I don’t read everything I read aloud, but I read a good deal, I read key passages and I always read the dialogue to make sure it rings true.
Speaker And I am a mimic and I can I have a fairly wide repertoire here or I used to have different accents, so I would particularly if I’m writing a play. I do read the dialogue aloud.
Speaker Prose is a little different. It depends on what kind of prose you’re doing if I’m doing invented stuff. I tend to read it because I write it as if it were poetry. I pass it and it’s it’s got it. It’s got it’s got its own innate rhythm. And I have to make sure I’m maintaining the rhythm and I’m not breaking it. If I’m writing history or criticism, I don’t read aloud.
Speaker Where do where do your ideas for books come from?
Speaker Out of the blue.
Speaker I was walking down, I often mixed it up, but I was walking down the steps from the Quirinale Palace.
Speaker Toward the Corso in Rome. And suddenly into my head game. America.
Speaker Duluth.
Speaker Love it. Also, that you could never leave it. Or lose it. What on earth, I said to myself, does that mean? And why Duluth’s one of the few American cities I’ve never set foot here.
Speaker But it went home, wrote it down, and a book just followed.
Speaker Wrote itself, as they say, and I realized that I had had one of those lucky moments in which something comes to you and says, all right, here I am, write me, write it down. It’s coming. Don’t do anything to it. Just leave it alone. Let it come out.
Speaker Does that happen a lot?
Speaker No, it does not happen a lot.
Speaker But when you’re writing a novel, you know. Do you sometimes feel like the stories leading you?
Speaker I think. If you’re going to stay interested in the writing of a novel or anything invented, if the story doesn’t lead you to abandon it. I mean, what’s the point of writing something that, you know already, what is going to be?
Speaker I never know where I’m going, and this is even truer when I turn to my historical novels where I am obviously circumscribed by the fact that John Wilkes Booth is going to shoot Abraham Lincoln, but I have to stay with certain facts that will govern my narrative. But at the same time, I get extraordinary insights into people that I never thought I would have. I’ve never liked Woodrow Wilson. This is a family dislike because of my grandfather’s problems with him and I took my grandfather’s side and I still don’t much care for Wilson as president or in any other way. And yet when I came to Hollywood, which, as I pointed out, somebody is about Woodrow Wilson, Warren Harding and not so much about Hollywood. Wilson comes out of it very well. Because you have to become Wilson, well, you write him. And you see why he does certain things or you think you see why he does certain things. And he imposes the character, imposes a kind of logic. Which impels you to to be him and to argue his case.
Speaker Now, if I just didn’t like Woodrow Wilson sat down and wrote a book. So what an awful man Woodrow Wilson was, why bother? I could do that in a paragraph somewhere. Why write a book about it?
Speaker So it’s constant discovery. You don’t know really what you think even of a historical character that you may have thought quite a bit about, then what’s invented? That’s the joy of what I call the inventions. And I’ve done a dozen or so now. As you never know, I was halfway through Myra Breckinridge before I realized that she had been a man. I had no idea that this was a transsexualism. Except the dialogue kept going wrong for a woman and I kept thinking, well, Myra has her own voice and I heard her voice walking along a Roman street. I am Myra Breckinridge, who no man will possess, started the thunder in my head, this great raging voice. So I just followed my voice where it led me. Well, halfway through, I realized he’d been a man.
Speaker And that was the plot, as it turned out, a lot of plot.
Speaker Well, if you start out knowing things like this, it’s like painting by the numbers, which I think must be the most boring thing on Earth. If you can’t surprise yourself, how are you going to surprise anyone else?
Speaker I read that you said sometimes when you’re writing, you laugh out loud. I wondered what would give me an example of what would give you such pleasure.
Speaker Well, obviously, a funny line would make me laugh out loud and a funny line that I had not anticipated. Language dictates what it’s going to do as it comes out of you and it starts to manipulate itself, you manipulate it, but it manipulates, you sound initially and suddenly you get a wonderfully comic effect that you didn’t intend. And there it is and you laugh. I used to work in the same room in the days when Tennessee Williams and I traveled around Italy. And we would share when we get these great suites and those days for practically nothing. And we would share a living room and I’d be writing longhand at one end and he’d be writing on the typewriter at the other end. Tennessee was just he had got tap, tap, tap, and he’s very fast Davis and go and suddenly Blanche Dubois had joined us in the room and Tennessee was suffering with his arrogance and he would really be limp when he finished a scene.
Speaker Would you ever read out loud for each other?
Speaker No, if you were working, never give each other the satisfaction.
Speaker And when you when you’re working on one of the historical novels and you have an invented purely and invented character, and then you have a character like you were describing Wilson, but it could be Roosevelt or Evidence or Lincoln, for example, where you have side by side and interacting an invented character and a character from history, but that does the character from history become as much yours as an invented character?
Speaker No, he’s whatever it is that I will have him say to the invented character, he indeed said to somebody. In pretty similar form to what I am about to transcribe. The fact that I don’t sometimes give it to the actual person he said or wrote it means that I want to analyze what he said and did, which obviously the recipient of his conversation or letter never did. So my invented character. And here’s something very interesting from Franklin Roosevelt about. Wendell Willkie and the proposed plot to overthrow the election of 1940, which is being rumored all over the country that the Germans were going to. Pay people to overthrow the election. We have the Supreme Court now, they had Germans then, and I can have Roosevelt say something along these lines, which I know that he had said, Eleanor Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins. And say it to Caroline and invented character, and she can inquire into it more and get a bigger sense of what it was all about than the actual historical recipient of President Roosevelt’s. Warning and worry.
Speaker I guess I’m a. In terms of your.
Speaker On. You didn’t invent him, but your. The way you’ve written about him. When he and Caroline are talking, I mean.
Speaker There’s no there’s that.
Speaker In terms of when you’re writing. The Henry Adams character versus Caroline or some of your invented characters.
Speaker Is your involvement any different with you or is it any different, is the.
Speaker Well, Henry Adams is closer to me in attitude and tone of voice. Or I am closer to him.
Speaker And obviously, I’m more at home with him and I have, but he’s written so much about himself, I mean, you can you can fill an entire novel, very long book with nothing but conversations of Henry Adams to different people, as indeed others have done dealing with Adams. We know all of his favorite lines and what line he would take on almost anything. And he is sort of the Greek chorus of the republic as it was turning into an empire in 1898 and then just before he died, I think he died in 1917 when we were really stepping out of the world stage and the European war. No, I don’t feel any different, I just feel more at home, probably.
Speaker Getting back to something you alluded to earlier. Do you consider yourself or. Like an observer. As a person, you think this is is related to becoming a writer?
Speaker Did you ever discover at a certain point in your life that you were observing as well as participating in life?
Speaker Well, I think everybody has a sense. If you’re not the principal character in a scene that’s going on around you, which in the case of most people would be their families. When they themselves are not the center of attention, but the mother or the father or a sibling is. Yes, you do. You do a lot of behavioral observing observation. But did I ever sit down and take notes on what people say and do? No, never. On the other hand, I have a very good audio memory, I can recall conversations from years ago and would ask me what someone was wearing, what they looked like, and that has already started to blur. There are those who hear the text, there are those who see the scene. So I was so grateful in the days when I had my. Eidetic memory. Or capacity, when reading that, I could really summon up things visually, I was stunning to me because that isn’t the way my brain normally works. I was getting a little something extra that. Fate had not dealt with me except as a tantalizing glimpse.
Speaker You said, I guess, that writing makes an experience seem more real to you.
Speaker You know, the writing itself is probably more real than the experience. It’s commonplace in many writers don’t feel anything until they’ve written in. And that’s why there’s so much bad writing and that’s why some good writing is very good indeed. Not able to have lived it within the scene.
Speaker As it played out in your life, you can revise and review it, Tennessee was the greatest example of that. He would.
Speaker He would fall in love, we’ll say, with an unobtainable object, write a play in which the unobtainable is obtained, not necessarily by his character, but by a character. By possessing them, the beloved in his text. He would have totally drawn that character toward him. And he would be the sole inventor progenitor of that character. Then he gets another go at it. It goes into rehearsals. There is an actor and an actress playing this couple that he was in love with or drawn to or aroused by. And then from rehearsal that goes into performance, yes, three goes at everything.
Speaker He was a happy man, despite his demons.
Speaker Why do you write?
Speaker It is my nature to right. Also, it is my nature to think. Or to try to think or to think that I am thinking this is best done by writing. Let’s say I’m going to review a book, I’ve just read the book because I’m going to review it. I start out with no particular prejudice, if it’s by a writer whom I dislike, I won’t review it. But is about a writer that I’ll be blank about, and I read it and I make up my mind as I go along, I make notes. When I finished the book, I still don’t often know what I think about it. I go through, I make the notes in the margin I go through and I add them up. As I add them up and I think, well. I guess this is what I think about it. But really, am I being fair or am I have I thought enough about it? Then I take the next step, which is what we call literary criticism, something very few people, particularly in America, know how to practice. It’s description. I then describe the book that I have read.
Speaker Helped out by my marginal notes, which comment upon details that I would probably have forgotten in the course of reading so that those act as markers for me and then I have the text. And as I start to describe it, I don’t even know how I’m going to begin once I begin, I find that as I describe the book, my description of the book, I never say I like it or dislike it.
Speaker Only acts do that. Nobody cares. Let me tell you, any of you who happen to think your book reviewers don’t give your opinion, only your mother cares about that.
Speaker What the real reader wants is a description of what you have read, and you don’t have to say it’s good or bad, the words that you use to describe the book that you read will be the criticism. Whether you like it or not, you’ve done it.
Speaker It’s true, when I read your.
Speaker Twelve Caesars immediately wanted to run out. That given yeah, you know, by your description, made me want to pursue it more.
Speaker That was a funny piece. I think on the way to see this, I wrote that for nobody. There had been a new translation of the Saturnus. But 12 outsiders and I, I found a new idea reading it. Given had said of the first 12 seasons, 12 very tough military men, only one of them was sexually regular meeting in today’s terms heterosexual, and that was Claudius.
Speaker And. I thought to myself, wait a minute, he’s odd man out.
Speaker The others were bisexual like everybody else, like everyone was intended to be. How on earth did we get into this situation where the the odd Caesar is considered the normal one and the 11 others are deranged monsters? Some of them were deranged monsters, but the others were very capable people. Haven’t we got it backwards? And I sat down and wrote this piece and nobody would publish it, they said it’s untrue. I said, well, because your superstitions about sex you take to be true doesn’t mean that I take them to be true. And the twelve Caesars is 12 rather tough. Military men would be rather horrified that you would look down on them because on Monday it was a boy and on Tuesday it was girl.
Speaker Who are we to make these rules or why not follow evidence, evidence, this is something that’s not in the American tradition.
Speaker Evidence is something that faith can overcome. What year was that, 1950, and finally the nation published it and there began I’ve been writing for The Nation for over 50 years now. And it all began with the 12 seasons.
Speaker And you can see the can you report, you know, after the attacks on it, every well, thinking liberal particularly, forget the conservatives, but Lionel Trilling launched a major attack, whereas loves that Lionel Trilling and all this, well, he was an instant Luv’s, instantly jocular. You can’t measure one person’s love for another, but you can certainly measure the number of ejaculations. His ad with George or Ann or.
Speaker The family pets. Can you say that can you somehow bring in the new report line at.
Speaker And of course, when I wrote the 12 Caesars, the Kinsey Report had been out. For two years, as had the city and the pillar of our which came out just before the Kinsey Report, so I had submitted some evidence that people are much more various in their sexual responses than the society, particularly American society, corrupted by monotheism would allow. So everybody had been alerted, but just people couldn’t face what I had to say about the world sees it is much less what I had said in the city and the pillar and poor Kinzie, great liberals like Lionel Trilling were denouncing him as whereas love for his love. Well, he said, I’m a scientist, I can’t gauge people’s love, I’m trying to figure out who does what with whom and how often. I’m measuring I’m not divining this is this is beyond the American ability to absorb anything so complex as evidence. So the evidence is the one thing that faith can always vary.
Speaker For whom do you write?
Speaker For whom do I right? Well, that’s a difficult one. Virginia Woolf’s common reader, I think, was my common reader. The person who was curious to find out things that he or she didn’t know. And would come to a book to read about whether it was other states of being. Activities and classes, nationalities, religions, not one’s own. You read for information, you read for to inhabit alternative worlds. And some of the ones I’ve created have been really quite off the wall. Intentionally. I’ve had many different audiences. I mean, people who like to lose Myra Breckinridge are not apt to be terribly keen on Burr or Lincoln and vice versa. My publishers were always distressed that I wanted to do the two lines of books they wanted me to do, correct historical novels and leave my inventions alone, but the inventions were the favorite books of people like Italo Calvina. Probably the greatest 20th century writer. So if if he alone was my only reader, I would have been quite content.
Speaker You just have you have different readers of different sorts and you don’t necessarily write for them. Tennessee was a very dear friend of mine, and he was bored to death by novels, by anybody. He always praised. People like Carson McCullers, you know, who needed help, but Tennessee couldn’t get through a novel, he was only interested in poetry and he was interested in obviously in the theater. But novels did nothing for him. They just they were pretty dead. So in other words, I was not writing for my friend Tennessee Williams. On the other hand, he was writing for me. I love some of those plays. And but in the long run, I found that it was not his place that I cared about. It was his short stories. He really was our best short story writer, and you can’t tell it, I didn’t figure it out until I wrote the preface to some 50 of his short stories and I read them all straight through. And that’s when I came to the conclusion that the novel isn’t for Americans. They don’t write them terribly well. Obviously, they’re great exceptions. But by and large, it’s a short story writing country and it’s a poetry writing country. We have many good poets and we have wonderful short story writers. I’d much rather read a short story by Melville and read Moby Dick No Power, it could get me to read that again. On the other hand, I think Redburn is pretty wonderful.
Speaker Let’s talk a little about umm.
Speaker Some of the process or the rituals, at what time of day do you.
Speaker What I write when I get up, and I couldn’t be any time of day.
Speaker And I like to start in right away as soon as I have. Risen from bed, I go to my desk.
Speaker And you are closer to your dream life that early in the morning, in fact, I dream intensely and I still have I often remember them, not that I sit down and record dreams, but. The world of the dream is still with me when I start to write another trick, I found that I pass on to anyone who was interested. If at a certain age, such as the one that I have achieved, your memory starts to go. And we all have the experience of watching, you know, when he was married to that actress. No, no, not that one. The one with the red hair and what was in it. We all get into that bind. We can’t think of the names.
Speaker Trick, as you go to bed at night, try and think of the man who married the redheaded actress. First thing, when you wake up in the morning, you’ll have the name.
Speaker My whoever is in charge of my files just gets busy during the night, exhausted sometimes, and I’ve had a day of not getting names wrong and it’ll all be laid out and it’s wonderful and the same thing happens. Calvino said it would happen to him was upon waking things that had been difficult for him when he had ceased to work the day before, would suddenly straighten out.
Speaker Graham Greene said the same thing, though he was not very inventive as a writer, but.
Speaker He had a clear narrative sense, and I suppose he came up against roadblocks. It is the early hours of the morning or the early hours upon awakening that the answers come.
Speaker You. Do you write longhand or use a typewriter, computer?
Speaker I have a large corn here and my middle finger of my right hand is from writing longhand. I write the novels in longhand and dialogue.
Speaker I’m writing a play on the typewriter. Portable typewriter, I never graduated to the electrical ones. And essay writing I tend to do on a typewriter because you’re making it, it’s like a legal brief, you’re making an argument and you have to see you have to see what you’ve written.
Speaker The other unpleasant side of another unpleasant side of aid is short term memory starts to go.
Speaker And I haven’t got to the point where I come to the end of the page and cannot remember how it started, but I can certainly if I’m writing a long piece, I have to refer back to the points I made early on in order to pull it together at the end. In the old days, I could hold it all in my head. I could hold a whole book like a as a conductor does a score. Lenny Bernstein was walking around with all of Mahler in his head, you know, and he could just reproduce it whenever he chose. Had he lived longer, he would have begun to lose that, he might have begun to lose it toward the end anyway.
Speaker So does writing come easily to you?
Speaker Yes, rewriting does not come easily to me, and I rewrite a great deal. I seem to do five versions of everything.
Speaker And sometimes I cheat or sometimes I think, well, my third or fourth version, I’ve got it. There are right and I reread it.
Speaker It’s got to go through the next and the next the fifth generally, is it if I have to go on past that and I’ve done something probably very wrong when I began the piece and so I’ll scrap it or.
Speaker Do something else.
Speaker So when your foot goes to the publisher.
Speaker I mean, to the editor, if you have an editor that, you know, I had it myself, I like another pair of eyes, but that’s just I before except after C, you know, kind of stuff copyediting. That’s what they used. I used to rely on. We all did. And except for certain places now in the magazine world.
Speaker Vanity Fair, The New Yorker have good, good copy editors. But most of them don’t have any at all, and you see the results on the page. But no, I’ve never relied on. Editorial help, I did have one editor who.
Speaker Didn’t contribute much of anything except one thing that was invaluable. He knew a lot of historians.
Speaker And.
Speaker Until very recently, every one of those historical things of mine from Burlington, 1876, was each given to an expert in the field. Professor? The level of David Herbert Donald, in the case of Lincoln McKitrick, in the case of 1876, authorities on the period who would read the novel. Be given a polite fee for doing it and point out any ghastly mistakes that I might have made. And generally, they didn’t find any ghastly mistakes, but where they were terribly useful was to draw my attention to later literature on the subject that I hadn’t seen. But they, as professors, were obliged to look at and say, well, the attitudes on duelling, we know much more about Hamilton and Burr than you knew when you wrote it at the time when your authorities wrote about it. That was very useful.
Speaker You’ve already talked about this a bit.
Speaker I was going to ask you whether you love the arc of the book that you talked about, you know, it being an act of discovery.
Speaker You talk about sentences. You once said you got the right sentence.
Speaker Well, I write as if I were writing a poem generally. Even dialogue has its own kind of. Rhythm to it and contrapuntal, since I try to make my characters each sound different from the other.
Speaker What did you say? Sir, I was asking about writing a sentence by sentence.
Speaker It was going very fast for something like Meira. Then you have to say it’s a mystical experience. You don’t know what it’s like automatic writing. You don’t know what’s going to come out. That really is startling. And it’s not till you reread that you think, oh, my God, is that what I was doing? If you’re doing something like Julian, where, you know, you have you have history to draw upon and you have this correspondant. Then it really is, you know, you’re you’re working with a mallet and a chisel and you’re you’re working in marble and try not to make mistakes because you may rickett.
Speaker That sentence by sentence, I think it was apropos that that I made that remark.
Speaker You mentioned this already, but I want to ask you about research. How you go about researching whether you do it all yourself.
Speaker I do my own research. I would certainly farm it out if I knew what I wanted. But it’s not until you start researching do you realize what it is that you do want and and what is out there? I pity the people in the new era of libraries where you press buttons and so on, and you you can’t walk through the stacks, walking through stacks and taking books down and looking quickly through them, I can find out immediately what I need. And I can’t tell a librarian in advance just from a list of titles.
Speaker I don’t know which one I’m going to want. So I do that myself, usually going through the stacks of some library. In the states or if it’s classical, it’s the American Library. Or if it’s classical at the Library of the American Academy, out of which came to books, Julian and Creation.
Speaker I have to.
Speaker Collect books, really. When I’m starting on a subject, I was lucky with Burr, there was a guy in Los Angeles where I was living at the time. There was a collector of books about birth and it went on the market.
Speaker Nobody was interested in beer and all of Los Angeles except me, so I bought this 400 alliums for very little. And so I do my own research partly because it’s the most fun. The writing can be laborious with that sort of book because you have to juggle so many facts and you have to fit them in and it’s like like doing a mosaic, whereas the research just looking for a little.
Speaker Right, glittering bits of porfiry and gold leaf to put together in a pattern.
Speaker That’s that that’s the treasure along the way.
Speaker But I’ve never had a researcher.
Speaker I get into controversies and which I have a couple of people I call up who will go to the library and look up stuff that I’m not in a situation to do sitting here in Italy, I can’t very well get to the Library of Congress to buttress my case.
Speaker How would you define your writing style? You seem to have so many voices.
Speaker Well, I don’t know how I would define my writing style, since I write in different voices.
Speaker I think it varies from book to book.
Speaker Depending on the subject, depending on what character, whose point of view I’m telling the story from. In Julian, I have four voices, I have the emperor as emperor trying to sound like Marcus Aurelius and making a hash out of it than I have, the emperor has an extremely nervous military commander who’s about to be murdered by his own troops, and his style totally changes.
Speaker Then I have the funniest, as some pronounce him. And. He’s rather sardonic. MAXIMISERS Rabei. Inflated pompous fool and all it voice plays off the other voice, and since it’s largely letters. You have the legitimacy of the form. To have this to use that awful word, again, contrapuntal effect.
Speaker With Myra or Myron or.
Speaker Something like perhaps Kalki, which is told in the voice of a woman who survives the end of the world.
Speaker It’s a challenge to inhabit somebody quite different from yourself.
Speaker And that’s the fun of that, and that’s your only worry there is getting a little bit, too. Inventive. More than the case requires. Most people do not aim at colorful speech if they have colorful speech. It’s part of their DNA code or nature versus nurture or nurture versus nature. They aren’t doing it consciously. They are an author who is becoming somebody else, is working consciously. And hence the possibility of striking wrong notes.
Speaker Can you tell me how you your style was when you first started writing as a young man and then leading up to judgment in Paris when you felt that you had found your voice?
Speaker Well, I started so early.
Speaker The time I wrote Will Awuah, my first published novel when I was 19, and that already started and abandoned about five books before that. And I was working in the realist American tradition. Hemingway ASRC was an adjective used to describe me at least to describe Willow up, which was a sea story set in the Second World War in the Bering Sea. But not a war story as much as a sea story. But Hemingway was not the influence on me. It was Stephen Crane who wrote The Open Boat, and Crane was very much on my mind. When I came to write that book and I wrote in this plain, flat, realistic style which had come into fashion with Stephen Crane, though he’s not given credit for it.
Speaker Hemingway saw to it that he got credit for that, but it was really the author of The Red Badge of Courage, not not the author of Across the River and Into the Trees. God Help US, Who Was Invented? The Plain Style in American Literature. It comes from Twain, Mark Twain, and it also comes from Stephen Crane.
Speaker And.
Speaker I didn’t dare to be as funny as Mark Twain, probably because I wasn’t as funny as Mark Twain. But in other words, Mark Twain is not anyone you can use as a model unless you are a master of wit and humor. If you are or if you’re aiming to be, then Twain is a desirable master. But why there are so few imitation twains, you either are that way and can do that kind of comedy or you can’t do it. Well, it’s much easier to follow the beautiful sentence straight and clear of Stephen Crane.
Speaker And if you want to see how good Stephen Crane is, read one of his stories and then read one of. Ernest Hemingway’s and you see the difference between a master and a and a journalist sort of hack.
Speaker And when it came to judgment in Paris, what happened?
Speaker Well, the judgment of Paris was about my fifth or sixth book, and the others were getting much freer inform.
Speaker I was less addicted to the playing style and remember, I was reading and reading and reading and I more I read, for instance, that was the period that I began to put my roots down, as I mentioned earlier, in the Petronius, Annapolis and the classical writers, because they suited me much better than the Victorians or the Edwardians or the American classics, which by and large did nothing for me. And it wasn’t I didn’t find literature really exciting, at least the novel, until I had read something like esoteric and interesting when I found that one thing Don Powell and I had in common.
Speaker She, too, was a child of of Petronius.
Speaker And you don’t find many women, certainly not women of that generation, who would be attracted to anybody so obscene, basically, and graphic and and wildly funny. And she was all those things.
Speaker Well, by the time I got to the judgment of Paris and I got to Paris and got back to Europe for the first time since I was 13 or 14 before the war, and I first came to the side of the water. And I.
Speaker And I just had my voice then and I knew exactly the sort of effects I wanted to make and the style just totally changed on me, wasn’t conscious. I was just saying something else, and there was a different metronome ticking in my head and there was a different.
Speaker A different music being made.
Speaker And how much was conscious and unconscious, I would no longer be able to say or guess I must’ve been very exciting.
Speaker Yes, it was read something that I quite like always before. I can think of something lacking here.
Speaker And I get the narrative straight. But where?
Speaker Where are the sentences, where where is the magic to it? And of course, I was just doing those plain flat sentences, which some people are masterful with, as was Stephen Crane. All right. So.
Speaker Do you find that each book is very different to write? I mean, you’ve talked about how different it is to write Meira or one of your inventions is. As opposed to one of the historical novels, for example, what do you find that process tends to be the same, but it’s just other sorts of challenges that are different with each book, or how much does it vary for book to book with an invention?
Speaker It’s all language. And I talk about sentences. That’s what I mean. One sentence leads to another and you don’t know where they are or where anything is going. And that’s very exciting to do. And presumably, one hopes that is exciting to read because you can’t guess what’s going to happen next. You start to laugh, I started to laugh and not a great joke, which is something. I forget what it was and deluce. Klores Craig, always with quotation marks around her name because she says that’s her real name is also a pen name. So she has has to have these these little marks, brackets, quotation mark. And close, Craig. Was deaf, but then, of course, he was a natural blonde. Well, I find that very funny, I don’t know why it’s funny and I don’t know where it comes from, but Klores Craig inspired that in me and she and she she can’t read or write, really. So she had somebody write her books for her. And she has difficulty with any words over three letters now, so she some people tricker, you know, with four letter words, knowing that she’ll be totally at sea and she regards them as insincere people.
Speaker You must have a lot of fun when you’re ready. I have a lot of fun when I write those books.
Speaker Of your own books, which are your favorites?
Speaker You know, what’s the usual response to that is it’s like asking about children. What I couldn’t begin to say, I mean, how can I compare creation, which I think is here? A necessary book. And I shall be accused of such vanity to think of a book as necessary. But for those who think it vein, I can only point out you’re the same people who think that notebook is of any use at all. Anyway, so creation’s the book I wish everybody would read took me a long time to write it. It’s fifth century B.C. in which all the religions, ethics board sciences. Evolved. And one man, had he lived to be 70, 75, could have known the Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, Mahavira. Everybody was contemporary that time, Zoroaster. I spent years working on that, and it’s easy to read the end of it, we don’t understand Asia. We know nothing about religions other than our own. We don’t know much about our own culture. I thought if ever there was a book that if someone else had written it, I would have rushed out and bought it. As a kid in the earlier you read it, probably the better. It was just, you know, just another book or historical novel. Well, you know, they’re not history and they’re not novels.
Speaker Novels are about marriage and identity, finding your identity.
Speaker History is just artifacts, lots of facts, all of them true, otherwise they wouldn’t be facts with their.
Speaker The stupidity, I must say, that a writer of my period has had to put up with. And I don’t mean myself personally, I mean just the world that I live in is so devotedly stupid about everything.
Speaker And the pride with which people take in not knowing anything if they can help it. Is it cause for despair?
Speaker Because I can’t see much of a civilization other than in the applied sciences, which where I am a dummy and others are experts.
Speaker If is there any other century you would like to have lived in?
Speaker No.
Speaker To have lived through three fourths of the 20th century, I think I have met the greatest bunch of fools that ever lived and I am thrilled to have been in their company.
Speaker I think you sort of answered this, but, um, why do you enjoy your invention so much?
Speaker Well, obviously, I have a sense of humor which needs exercise and comedic humor is one way of doing it invention. It’s also these books are little essays in logic. You posit something that everybody takes for granted and then you do a little twist on it and it suddenly becomes foreign and strange. Well, partly that’s language. Again, that sentences and again, its concepts. And may I say, you know, the world is not blessed with many comic writers and not very many who can read them. I put off until last year reading Gulliver’s Travels because I’d read as a kid the usual thing that you were given as a kid, the bowdlerised version. And rather wearily, I took it down, I said it’s time because I’ve been compared to Swift so often by schoolteacher’s, I thought, well, let’s see if there’s any resemblance or any similarity. Let’s see if he’s any good. Well, it’s wonderful. I was overwhelmed by it. And concept after concept was just so far more brilliant, they should burn those motorized books that we were given as kids because they do a disservice that is permanent to a very original comic thinker, satirist, whatever you want to call him. Yeah, he has grasped the world and he’s got a firm grip on it. I also read a book that I have tried to read for 50 years, and I finally read it, Tristram Shandy. I have never hated anything so much in my life. The word facetious applies to that word and and it was Abraham Lincoln’s, the only novel Lincoln liked was Tristram Shandy.
Speaker I fear he goes down a notch or two in my inner measurement of great men.
Speaker Well, he had very.
Speaker Particular kind of work, so well, it was Shaggy Dog and Tristram Shandy is Shaggy Dog, but there’s good shaggy dog and Lincoln was rather good at it part of the time. And then there is just garrulous facetiousness. And I don’t mind, I love the secretary. God knows I go in for that sort of thing myself, but it doesn’t work for me.
Speaker I loved when you said there’s nothing so satisfying as making an audience laugh while moving its insides.
Speaker I’d say that.
Speaker I think you did. So there’s humor and then there is, you know, eviscerating humor.
Speaker When the audience is eviscerated. And doesn’t know it. But you’ve got to put something back in place of the viscera that you remove. That is the trick.
Speaker What would you say sets you apart? So what would you say sets you apart from other American writers?
Speaker Well, I don’t think much about other American writers, some I like, some I don’t care for. Most I’m indifferent to. I never.
Speaker You see, I read so much and I don’t think many of them, at least the ones I’ve come to know at all, well, read a great deal. They read their contemporaries with an eye to the competition. But you don’t find them. Well, one of the reasons I sort of. Escaped literary company, most of my life, I’ve had a few writer friends, but. Is there wasn’t anything to talk about? They didn’t read and I did read well, you can’t talk about what you’ve read, what on earth are you going to talk about? I’m not interested in their marriages or their book deals.
Speaker So. I would say that set me apart. And I was.
Speaker Probably more interested in literature than most of the most of them tend to be part of the American temperament, interested in success and all that comes with it. Nothing wrong with that. That was the Greeks were always being accused of. Overbearing love of Gloria. But it is rather limiting, so I have never thought of what other writers are writing as being anything similar to what I’m doing when I do find somebody that I think is doing.
Speaker Working in my line of country like calvina. And I’m thrilled for me a success by calvina. I take this personally and delightedly as I do a success by myself, if he succeeds with the book, I feel as if I’ve succeeded with a book that is true fandom. And I’m a true fan of certain writers. Because I feel that what they do is what I do, but they’re extending it and they are doing it in ways that I don’t do it or can’t do it or haven’t done it. And I thought that always with Anthony Burgess, half of whose books don’t work, but there’s always something very interesting that he’s trying to do. And I couldn’t imagine a Burgess book coming out that I wouldn’t go out and buy it and read it, and if he succeeds, I’m delighted. And if he doesn’t, I study it to see what went wrong with us. What was the idea?
Speaker Those are people that you read with real attention. Somebody who tells a good yarn, I just as soon get a videocassette and put it on and have the good yarn and spool itself before my desk will die.
Speaker Which of your fictional characters, if any, do you most identify with?
Speaker I don’t know. Can you sometimes incorporate the question into your answers? Yeah.
Speaker Well, one is asked, which of a fictional character do you want them to fire with and.
Speaker I don’t think I identify with any of them, otherwise they wouldn’t be fictional, I’d be autobiographical, I’d be writing Palimpsest, I’d be writing a memoir. And I’m not so sure I identify with Gore Vidal either in that book.
Speaker So what you’re doing is searching for new territory and not extending yourself into another frame.
Speaker Well, let me rephrase it. Hmm. Do you have any favorites or I mean, do you forget that?
Speaker Let me I I find when I’m reading your books, I sometimes, you know, making notes and then I, I hear something that Charlie Schuyler says or Henry Adams says, and I feel like I’m hearing you speaking through them. I mean.
Speaker Charlie Scholem’s probably more.
Speaker So when did you use him at all to represent your point of view of not yourself?
Speaker Well, I’ve been asked, you know, do I use characters as spokespersons for myself, it’s possible. Let’s say I’m against slavery at the South and I have an abolitionist talking in the book called Lincoln, and his views will be my views, but if he’s any character at all, he’ll speak in his own voice, which won’t sound like mine, which is, after all, a 20th century voice. And he would be a 19th century voice. In other words, I don’t need surrogates for myself, that’s why I’m in SS, I want to speak ex cathedra, I write an essay and there I am in the first person that is my voice.
Speaker I don’t feel any need to impose myself on a fictional character. He’s got quite enough to do carrying the fiction. You know, he’s got a story to enact. It’s like telling an actor, oh, and don’t forget the fact that that I had measles at that time. Is he to get measles in the middle of the performance? Just play King Lear, for God’s sake, and forget the author’s problems.
Speaker Which book was the most difficult to write?
Speaker Some have been made difficult by difficult publishers’. I had a publisher made me cut 10000 words out of creation, which I now plan in a new edition to restore. All because the publisher hated the book, didn’t think the American public would like it because it’s all about people with funny names like Mahavir and people they didn’t know about except as jokes like Confucius, and they just said American people won’t like this.
Speaker And I said, well, I happen to know what they like. And they they buy these books of mine and you just publish it. We had a big fight and it said, well, the paperback people want 10000 words out. So I cut 10000 words cravenly, which were all part of the beginning of the book, setting up the character of my narrator who was brought up at the court of the great king of Persia, Xerxes. And didn’t help the book, but the book. To the amazement of the publisher immediately went on the bestseller lists, The New York Times at number two, which happens very rarely come on that high in those days. And that was difficult. That was difficult in my writing. It was difficult in my having to deal with the publisher. I was a fool.
Speaker You run into the more and more now publishing the sort of people who used to go into it because they had a love of literature and a knowledge of it now from the Harvard Business School or should be selling units of pasta in Milano rather than being head of publishing houses. So any difficulties I’ve had have come from that.
Speaker I read something you said about how writing description is very difficult and.
Speaker That writing in the third person is more difficult than writing in the first person?
Speaker No, I never said that. Writing description was difficult. It’s a matter of fact, it’s rather easy and it has a lot of charm for certain kind of writer who like sentences.
Speaker In my lifetime as a writer description have grown smaller and smaller and everyone’s novels.
Speaker And audiences are just readers skip over them to get to the dialogue or the sex, and they sort of zigzag their way through the book. So with the passage of time, you tend to describe rather less. Also, you learn how to create a picture without much description. A line or two can suddenly illuminate a whole vista that you could waste five pages on giving detail after detail. As for what person to write in first person.
Speaker Is easy, but it’s it’s dangerously easy.
Speaker It’s a fallback for the nonexperts writer or the uncertain writer. Anybody can write in the first person, particularly if it make it pretty close to their own way of telling a story. And you can leave out a lot of difficult stuff. However, you are limited, obviously, by the boys that you’ve chosen and value that one character. That’s why when I came to Julian, I had four different characters speaking. So you get four points of view.
Speaker The other problem.
Speaker Is that first person? Well, you can’t be everywhere. So you’re going to have to leave out an awful lot of narrative or you end is going to have to come to you as hearsay, third person is the most difficult because now you’re playing God and what you elect to show is the only thing the reader is ever going to know.
Speaker Well, that really can tear it, unless you’re one of those marathon writers like James Michener who could just do a million words on Hawaii and tell you more than you ever wanted to know about Hawaii.
Speaker But he was satisfied with what he was doing and a certain kind of reader was satisfied of what he was doing. But third person takes more art. And first person takes more talent. Even genius to make it interesting and to make it variable, to make it unexpected. Almost anybody’s first person, it’s going to be pretty much like anybody else’s first person, so you’ve got to find new ways of projecting your voice.
Speaker I know it’s coming to the end. I could hear it.
Speaker Are we changing take notice of this flipping fiction.
Speaker Be.
Speaker Is there such a thing as a writer’s temperament?
Speaker Is there such a thing as a writer’s temperament?
Speaker I think that temperaments vary from writer to writer. Some are benign and sunny, and some are dour and misanthropic.
Speaker I think I’m fairly cheerful. But.
Speaker I think the true writer is. Spends a lot of time inside himself. Which most people never do for fear of what they’ll find. I had a biographer of not great talent. Who was talking to the widow calvina about me? And she said.
Speaker And this person writing about me is a very, very simple person and doesn’t understand he’s not used to the conversation of intellectuals. He’s never known any. It’s an academic. And she made an interesting remark. She told me about it later than I was told what he had written about it.
Speaker She said, look, with Gore Vidal, you are not looking at somebody who has a secret raging life, who’s filled with neurosis and all sorts of demons.
Speaker He uses everything, and that is what a certain kind of writer uses everything like Calvina, like Vidal.
Speaker Don’t go looking for what isn’t going to be there because he uses everything in his work.
Speaker He does not have a raging unconscious, whatever it is there is used up in the work. This poor fool came up. Gore Vidal has no unconscious, says Mrs. Covino. Imagine the author of Myra Breckinridge has no Unconscious Mind.
Speaker I mean, when you’re up against that, to me, is really the basic stupidity of so much of the academic world and there’s nothing you can do about it, you can’t tell them things because they can’t conceive of it. And they have about five cliches they work on. And, oh, well, you see, L’Ecole mother or he had an absent father or he has he was enraged because his SAT scores were so low. This guy was actually interested in my school grades. I said, what are you interested in that for? Well, he said it’s very important. So that’s very important to you. So that you didn’t have to end up driving a taxicab, which is what nature intended you for, you had to rise in the academic world, you had to get good marks in school. I was going to go to Harvard as long as I could just pass my courses in prep school so I never got above a C. And I said and I said that took some effort because I was bored to death, I wanted to know so many more things that I was going to be taught in these schools. And you allegedly the best school I might just as well have been for saying the pledge and heresy will never take place in Afghanistan. I mean, what I was saying was just a while to him. So there’s a whole section that now occupies the English departments, the history departments, the liberal, the humanities in every university of people who think in terms of grades.
Speaker God knows they don’t think in terms of subjects because they don’t know any.
Speaker How does it feel when you finish a book, do you are you relieved or do you miss writing that book?
Speaker Do you miss those characters in my youth? When I finished the book. I will say I finished, I can remember I’ve finished. Well, I forget which one it was, but I finished the book on a Sunday and on a Monday I took the train to New Orleans and on the train I started to write Dark Green, Bright Red about Guatamala longhand on a yellow pad legal pad as I was going back to Guatemala. And I had a house there then and I already had a novel in mind. So the second I finished one book, I go straight on to another one. Mind you, I lived on advances in those days, but at the same time, I would have written that even if I hadn’t been poor.
Speaker Because what I mean is.
Speaker What are you writing, Julian? I’m writing creation, you’re living in a certain century and you’re steeped in it, you’re thinking in those terms, you’re finding voices that. Would be appropriate and you get to know your characters so well. And do you miss them when you finish?
Speaker No, you’ve got to rewrite. When you have proofs, you have galley’s goes on forever. You’re relieved when you’re done with them.
Speaker And let’s talk about SARS a little bit, not in particular at the moment yet, but we could. Why do you write about this?
Speaker Well, it’s I want to speak in my own voice and not in the voice of an invention or of a historical figure. And I’m not about to cheat and make my invention into another version of myself, because I have the essay for that. And I’m certainly not going to. Have Abraham Lincoln start sounding like me, which indeed he did not, and it would be inappropriate. My favorite 20th century word, which is now leaking into the 21st century, the essay is is, I think, the only necessary form of prose, but really necessary. And as we begin to lose the novel, it’s gradually inspiring. Poetry is healthy, but it’s minor, and it’ll probably be replaced by popular music of some sort. But for poetry, I can see having a long, long time ahead ahead of it. The novel, I don’t see narratives that people want to see. They will always want narratives, but they will get them through film, digital or otherwise. The essay is the moment in which it comes from the French SCCA to try to try and attempt the attempt to get through to another person. I want to tell you something that I have discovered about the Twelve Caesars. And it was their normality to be bisexual and that any male in that situation in which he is the Lord of the Earth will do both. And that is loud and clear from Suetonius on to anybody who’s ever thought about it. This for 1950 was heresy, it was a novelty. There will be people listening to me right now who will say it’s not true, it’s not true, and of course it’s true. And I am saying I make my case and that what they say is I attempt a case. But what I have discovered on rereading Suetonius in a new translation brought me the obvious insight so obvious that nobody noticed. Occam’s razor can be used to cut many throat.
Speaker And is the process for writing to order the process for writing essays?
Speaker Is that a different writing process for you than writing fiction?
Speaker Yes, it is different. It’s it’s sentence’s again, but they’re coming from you. And you really are in your own voice. And I like to circle the subject before I get my knife out, so I do a lot of circling and setting up false leads and I play with the reader. And then I started to move in. And my image as I start to really hit my subject.
Speaker I have a sort of inner image that is the line between two gongs and I’ve got two and I hit one and then I come back back and a rhythm that begins as you make your case.
Speaker And it should be just it should be inexorable. I told Kenneth Tynan, the critic that once said, well, yours may be hitting a pair of gongs. My image as a critic is I’m up there with a sword and and losing a battle. I said, now you’re in a duel with yourself.
