Interview with Dorothy Gallagher, 4 April 2001

Going to a theatre-

He turned around. He was sitting at a table in front of me. And he said, Tresca? You're interested in Tresca? I said, yes. He said, what a subject. And after that, oh my God, this guy is fabulous. He can do it for me. He can give me an education. He can give me a wonderful book. And he did. It was thrilling. It was the most thrilling experience. And I also learned something I had not known, which was that I loved research. I always thought I hated research. I loved it. I loved it more than anything. I mean, it's like doing detective work, and it's just thrilling. And I worked on it for eight years. And it was a wonderful time for me.

And then he did stop

Yeah he did stop, of course

[Restaurant chatter]

Anyway, the driver came at 7:30 in the morning? Or is coming at 7:30?

No, they came at 7.30. They, uh, went down to the Bowery at 7.30 this morning.

She wanted to know why 7:30, she told them to me last night

Well, I don't know who said 7.30. I didn't say 7.30.

Cause we went through this whole thing, and I said, I can't imagine anybody would-

And I asked the photographer, did you say 7.30? And he said, no! So there we were at 7.30, cold, windy.

One reason why I liked your book so much is that it reminded me-

Excuse me, what may I get for you?

May I have a vodka, Gibson, straight up, please?

Could I get a glass of white wine, please

Sure. Brutus Foussey, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot grigio…?

I'll take the grigio.

And then there was a piece of shit. Who is this piece of shit?

You said vodka, right?

[Laughs]

Vodka, please.

It's because so much of it reminded me of my own family. I mean, Aunt Willie was - not exact, but pretty close to my Aunt Ruth. My mother had four sisters and two brothers.

Do give Bob my regards when you talk.

When I run into him. So you burned the book, and that's the end of the story.

Yeah.

I burned the book.

You know, It was good enough to think, maybe it's about time I sat down and wrote about that.

Rutgers? University Press.

No… Rutgers University Press published it. Finally. They gave me, I think, $2,000. And then Knopf wanted their money back. They had given me maybe $7,500. They sent me, they sent me, uh, Dunning letters. So I went up to see the lawyer at Knopf. Don't put this, don't say that I said, fuck you. I said, you sue me. You do anything you want. You are not getting a goddamn penny of this $2,000. And they didn't. They dropped it.

[Laughs]

But now it's been done. It can't be done.

Oh, everybody can do it.

What made you finally do it?

What made me finally do it. Well, I didn't set out to do it. I didn't do- I didn't have the idea that I would do a book. But I had the idea I wanted to do the first piece. Because my parents' decline and dying had gone on for so long, for five years. And I, all the time, because it was my habit to do so, I made notes. And I put the notes away. I put them in a drawer and forgot about them after. And then about two and a half years later, I came across them. And I started looking at them. And I thought, oh, you know, maybe it was an impulsive thrift - "don't throw anything away".

And you found another publisher, it came out and got that review -

It came out and then it... Actually, it did come out in paper, too. Viking published it. A thousand copies or so in paper.

[laughing] Thrift? Thirft thrift

Thrift thrift, yeah - well, I've got this stuff. I've got to do something with it. But I still had, I think at that time, even two and a half years, three years later, I still had, I still was full of the feeling I had while they were still alive. I mean, now it's eight years, nine years since they died. And that's abated somewhat. But I did have this strong, strong feeling that was with me all the time, every day. And then I had these notes. And I decided I would try and give them some form and order.

And sell it to the movies, then.

I tried. I thought it would be a great story for one of these Italian guys. For De Niro or Al Pacino or... No, nobody wanted to do a costume drama. Warren Beatty. But he had already done Reds. No. No movies.

It's been a long time between books.

Yeah, it's a long time. I don't get very many ideas. [Laughs]

There were several that I wrote down [indiscernible]

Notes about your parents or about the rest of the family?

About my parents -- No, no. Nothing about the rest of my family. Just about what happened during the last five years of my parents' lives, yeah.

Juliet Stuart Poyntz.

Oh, yeah! Juliet Stuart Poyntz.

Dolores…

Faconti?

So I made some- I wanted to make order out of them. Out of total chaos.

Faconti.

Yeah. Oh. Juliet Stuart Poyntz. That's another very interesting story. Except the material isn't available. I have a lot of material. Juliet Stuart Poyntz was an early member of the American Communist Party. And she was the kind of party member they liked a lot. American-born, no foreign history, from the Midwest. I wrote a piece about her when Ben had Grand Street. I consolidated everything I knew about her from the Tresca book and put it in a piece in Grand Street. She disappeared. She was a party member. She was working for... She had been... She was recruited to do special work, as they call it. Recruited for the Russian intelligence, military intelligence, and worked for them for a number of years. And recruited, in fact, Elizabeth Bentley. And she disappeared in... And she went to... She was... Recalled... She was called to Moscow in 1937. And was not... Disappeared there. But did come back and came back quite upset. And dropped out of the party. Dropped out of the special work. And disappeared from her hotel room in... On 57th Street, the American Women's Association. West 57th Street. Sometime in 1938. Just disappeared. Never heard of again. Bowl of Jell-O on the table. Everything. Her passport, everything. Disappeared. It's a mystery. I thought I would do... Another mystery. Tresca's was a mystery. Tresca's death was a mystery. I like doing mysteries. Mysteries are terrific structures. And you can put anything in there. You can put everything in there in the frame of a mystery. But I... And I got a lot of material from everything that... From the FBI, from what was in the American archives. But then Soviet Union collapsed. And the file... And material began to be available in Russia. And I knew that what I needed to know was there. I couldn't get it. Her files are in military intelligence sections. And those files... Those Russian files have never been opened. I tried to get them. I tried to get people there to look. I can't get them. And since the Soviet Union collapsed, you can't do a book anymore without knowing what's in their files. So I didn't have enough.

Do you think you wrote it differently now than you would have if you had written it when they were alive, or -?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. And I don't think I could write, at least the first story, I couldn't write again anymore. Because that emotion has abated. I mean, grief has lessened. Anger has lessened. So I couldn't do it again that way, anyway.

And the story about the story of the family, had you made notes on that?

Well, the stories about the family I had never, never written anything about. And never thought of writing anything about.

[to server?] Yeah. I'm too young! [laughs]

Close the bar.

Don't have my card.

I never thought of it, really, of doing any more.

It was Ben who said, you know, "you've got more stories. You've got another story." And I did another story. And Dick Poirier, who was editing Raritan at the time, was very interested in them. He published the first one. He published two more-- I think he published three in all.

First three in the book, actually?

I think it was the first three in the book, yeah. And by the time I'd done three, I, you know, I knew I could do a book.

Could we have some water, too, please?

Yes, sure.

Thank you.

Cheers.

Cheers.

Here's to success.

Thank you.

Well- you already have success with the book, I hear.

Not bad.

That was two nice reviews in the Times.

Two nice reviews in the Times. Nice reviews everywhere.

No more black hole.

Not this time, apparently. It's a black hole I'm used to.

We're all used to it! The writers get together… Black holes.

A black hole.

Publishers black holes - that's right.

Yeah. I was very lucky this time. I had a wonderful editor. I have a wonderful editor. And he did everything for the book, and I'm not used to that either. I'm not used to an editor really championing the book.

I want to get back to the book itself--

Yeah.

But mentioning editors, was Bob Gottlieb the first editor who turned down the other book?

Oh, yes.

Yeah, that's what I figured.

I remember-- we'll get back to-- he and I have had a long relationship, but when he was editor of New York, he published some of my pieces, and we got along just fine. We did get along fine. But sometime after my Ed Albee biography came out, I got a good review everywhere except the New York Times.

Oh, my God.

And the Sunday Times gave it a pretty good review, but a small review.

An in-brief?

Well, not in-brief, it was two columns, but it was in the summertime, and I considered it a really long effort that I went through.

Dolores Faconti is another story.

She...

How much of this do you want to know?

Yeah.

A couple weeks later, Simon and Schuster published the Esther Williams biography, and Bob reviewed it for the book review. A full page, or two pages, absolute rave review. And I ran into him sometime later, and I said, "Bob," I said, "Esther Williams?" And he said, "Well..." he said, "she's more important than Edward Albee." You know? Just dismissing it.

xI want to hear it.

Dolores Faconti was a U.S. Attorney in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Manhattan. She was a girlfriend of a Mafia figure, Frank Garofalo. And he is connected with the murder of Tresca. When I was doing the Tresca book, I tried to get to her. She was still alive and living in New Jersey. And I tried many routes to get to her. She was... Through many people... I couldn't. She wouldn't respond. Yeah. She refused to respond. But she was always an extremely attractive figure. Literarily. And I... But... She's dead now, I'm sure.

Yes, Bob is very interested in popular culture.

Yes. He actually turned down the book, and it got that review, after-

Turned down the book, and it got a couple of really good reviews in the New York Review and in the Times.

Well, the Kaysen[?] Review was very good.

The Kaysen Review was very good, and Daniel Allen reviewed it in the New York Review. And… then it disappeared. Immediately disappeared.

But it disappeared.

But it-- and, no, and.

Well, here you're thinking about dealing with… I'm still again with these...

That's publishing for you. Any case, go back to the editor. This book, you said, he really was very good about it.

Yeah.

Melodramatic figures in the world scene. Melodramatic figures in the world scene. And now you do... just this family?

Oh, yeah. He's actually, he's a very old and dear friend, so I knew he wouldn't abandon me.

Just family. Yeah. Well, it was the origin of... Of everything. And at a certain... I mean... Doesn't everybody... When everybody... When all those large figures in your life are gone. And you're the one who's standing at the abyss. You're the generation of the abyss now. I mean... You... Everybody... Everybody... Who writes must have that impulse. In fact, they do. Bookstores are full of them.

But he was terrific. I mean, he really liked the book, and he really stood up for it, and he really tried to push it and promote it.

But, but, but the book grew. I mean, you didn't sit down and say "I'm going to write a lot of stories, and it'll all fit together, and it'll deal with my entire family, and this is gonna be a good one" -

No, it went story by story. They just came, once I started, you know, I thought I don't remember anything.But once you start typing, then it all, then it comes back.

Yeah. Which is one discouragement from doing it. That I've always felt

But listen...

Who wants another memoir? Who wants another--

Well, did you have to gather lots of, I mean, you do say you're quoting from that one.

Exactly. That's what I thought too. I said, who wants another memoir? And... What happened was... That I found a voice to do it in. The first... The first piece in the book which was... I wrote... I wrote... Three or four times. And each time it was about 150 pages. I didn't have the voice to do it in. I found the voice finally. I found the voice for anger, for love, for... That gave me the right distance. That... And then... Everything came. So... People do want another memoir. If you know... If you can figure out how to do it.

I had very little material. I had a couple of letters. I had my mother's letter to her typing teacher, and I had my cousin Meyer's autobiography.

Did that really exist?

That really exists.

I wondered whether you made that up, or -

No. it exists, it's a 90-page piece of work.

Not published -- turned down by Rob Gottlieb

Oh [laughs] probably.

It was 90, 100 pages, and I had read it at the time he did it, which is probably about 15, 20 years ago, and I put it away, too. I just had it in my, and then I came on it again, and I thought, my God, I can boil this down and boil it down and really have a something, and it's all, I mean, it's his, I added a few things here and a few things there to round it out, but it's all his.

And your father saved your mother from drowning?

Yes. He did.

[singing] One good deed.

[laughs] I'm sure he-

He's watching up there.

What do you think, in the end, the book is saying about your family?

[laughing] I know it.

You think he was sorry about… You know…

I don't know. That was much earlier. You mean, you think he's sorry now?

I don't know. I hope it's saying that they were, I mean, everybody is mythological in it to me. I mean, they were my gods when I was growing up, and I hope it's saying they were brave, they were quarrelsome, they were spectacular people, part of a spectacular generation. I hope it's saying I loved them, because I did. I loved them very much.

Well… I just think that one never really knows one's parents.

I really don't know them. I don't know what their private relation was. Even now. I really have no idea. I know that my mother loved my father. I don't know why. I don't know what they were like together alone. When all the doors were closed and the lights were off. No idea.

Would you have felt more freedom if it were a novel?

No. I don't know how to write fiction. No. No. But you know... It felt like fiction. Even though it wasn't. I mean once I found... Once... I heard the voice in my head... That told me how to tell the story. Then it was like fiction. Even though it wasn't.

Including your father?

Not, not at the end.

No.

I'm not sure from reading the book, the extent you felt it-

Yeah.

Yeah.

I, I, I was very angry at him at the end. We were very angry at each other, and, and we clashed as we had clashed all my life. And, um, although when I was a kid, I adored him, you know, one of those things.

I always remember one thing Vincent said when he began writing novels. He said what a relief it was. Because he didn't have to tell the truth anymore. When he was reviewing a movie it had to be factually correct. Where in a novel he could invent not just characters but rivers and countries if he felt like it.

Um, but I, yeah, and I hope it's, um, I don't know, people have read it as being a work of love and, of deep love, even though I know that I take a pretty snippy tone.

I don't think I could invent. I don't think I could invent whole cloth. No. I don't have that kind of imagination.

Yeah, well, it, it is apparent in some cases, particularly with your father -- and to a certain degree with your mother, though, it's clear in the end that you did have great love for her, but still, the portrait is, is not exactly, you know, an valentine.

All true.

Yeah. All true. It's all true.

No, it's not sentimental, and I, and I don't do sentimentals.

Did you read the Tresca book?

I wouldn't accuse you of sentimentality, no.

Some of it. I haven't finished it yet I read at it, I confess. I read the first and last chapters and then I was going into the middle of it. I felt it would make a great movie, is what I thought.

No.

But, um, but I think she would have been pleased with it. I mean, I think she, I think she would have been very proud and, and very pleased. And, um…

Reminds me of one line I wrote down about your - "Daddy and I are very proud of you, even if Daddy has never mentioned it" [laughing]

Anyway, when that came out, I guess you said that- in little piece in The Times, "Biography is a near-perfect form." You said, "biography allows you to draw close to a subject and also back away for an overview of his time, meaning Tresca.

[laughing]

Yeah, and they were funny. I mean, everybody was funny in my family. We all laughed a lot when we weren't fighting.

Did I say that?

You said that in a m--

When you weren't fighting?

That's good.

Yeah.

Well, in my family now, there's, those sisters, sometimes for decades, some of them didn't speak to one another.

mini-interview with The Times. It's good. But I was wondering: how about autobiography, and how that applies to it? "Biography allows you to draw close to a subject and also back away for an overview of his time." Now this is- I said biography, but it is Autobiography. Could you compare the two? How it-

Yeah.

Some of the children didn't speak to the parents. One, one cousin, in fact, never knew his mother died. Because they hadn't spoken for 20 years.

Really? That's serious.

Wars!

That's really serious.

You had wars, too, obviously, or, or private battles among, the various relatives.

Yeah. Yeah. It's inevitable. And it happens in, in all families. And they're--

Well, large families, anyway--

In all large families, yeah. But I, I have, I have a friend who hasn't spoken to her sister in 15 or 20 years. So it happens even in small families. Two children.

Well, I think that what I... Strove for was the kind of attachment that I brought to a biography.

I have this one cousin who stopped speaking to us when we didn't go to her husband's funeral. And then she got married two months later.

[laughs]

Attachment?

Detachment. Detachment, yeah. I wanted for my own family what I could do as a scholar, what I could do for a historical figure. I wanted to do the same thing. So you weren't researching it in the same way at all? No, it wasn't research, it was distance. It was the... In photography, I used to do a lot of photography. Oh, okay. And you talk about focusing on the middle distance or the far distance or the near distance. And I think I strove through the middle distance to get far enough away from the overwhelming effect of family. Just far enough away so that I could see them clearly. The kind of distance that history gives you. That time passing gives you. And have them in the focus. Have them... Yeah. Have them in the focus that you get in the middle distance. When the background is clear, the subject is clear, and the foreground is clear as well. I used to... I loved photography. I used to... I loved to be in the darkroom, and I loved... I loved walking around with a camera, because it gave you an aim when you were walking around. It was like, oh, there's a picture, there's a picture, there's a picture. It was a great pleasure to me, and I loved it, and I loved the actual development. And I... And I... And distance was everything. Up close was one thing. Middle distance, far distance, you... I mean, the things you could do were astonishingly different with the same piece of equipment.

You know, it's typical.

Did you go to the wedding?

No, Neither one. Never liked me, anyway. No loss.

Yeah, right - never liked her anyway.

No loss.

As I said, Lily was one character that came across rather vividly, partly because she reminded me of my aunt Ruth. But the stories about her selling the negligees and things? Door-to-door to prostitutes?

Yes, it was in the Depression--

True story?

True story. True story. I, before my time. But I, I was told, all of these things are things I was told about.

Told in the family.

Told in the family. Yeah. They were family stories. Except for the times when I was present. Later on, when I got a little older, everything is, is hearsay.

Well, this is a question, though.

Is it true?

What?

I mean, it's true as far as you know, but are all stories true as, as told by families?

Oh, not literally, perhaps, true, but, but in their essence, I think, true. People embroider, people change details. But, in essence, I think, it's not whole cloth.

I'm wondering, I won't get back to my family too much, but my, my uncle, legend, always had it, was a, was a, a boxer at some point. He ended up was cutting cloth somewhere in the garment district.

Yeah.

But he was actually close to being a Golden Glove boxer.

Yeah.

I accepted that on faith. But I, I, I've never seen a picture of him in a boxing ring, y'know? He's long dead now. But, that was a family legend.

Well, if they told it to you, it was true.

Okay.

Maybe he wasn't as good as they said. Maybe he didn't get that close to Golden Gloves

Well, if they told it to you, there was a, a good measure of truth in it, you'd say.

Yeah. I think so.

I mean, it's a question of how many, how many sales, I suppose, Lily actually made.

That's right. But my, but my mother claimed, and my mother was not, would not have said that she, she took over Lily's route when Lily went to California. did pretty well. She made a good living.

Were there any…. Suprises? Revelations? As you thought about your family, Or your own growing up, or…?

What did you leave out?

[Laughs]. Well, I stopped at a certain point. I mean, I stopped, I think, I stopped when the last member of my family died, which was… I stopped with my family. I mean, I didn't go on, I did, you know, I did some of my own life, but not very much, and I didn't do anything about, I didn't go on to my marriage to Ben, and I didn't go.

Revelations.

Your parents don't kiss. Is this a revelation?

[laughs] No, they didn't kiss, they never kissed in public. But you know, I think it was a reticence of that generation. There was very little public affection, very little, even in members of my family who were more affectionate in public than my parents, there wasn't that much of that. Revelations, you know, I think, I think the revelation to me was how much I had loved them.

You mentioned briefly an earlier marriage, but.

Yeah.

But I don't think I gave away too much for the store.

Jim Salter gave me a blurb, for which I was very grateful, and I asked him when he called me, I said, "did I tell too much?" and he said, "no, you didn't give away the store." So…

I left out --- what did I leave out?

Some great tragedy you left out of there

I don't think so.

Even your father?

Even my father, yeah. I mean, he was really some guy. He was something else.

I don't think so. I think I pretty much said what my family's life was about, and how, [sighs] and what… and what it gave me. Which is the title, of course.

I don't love him, from the book.

You didn't love him

Don't love him, yeah.

He was, he was, but I used to say when I was, when I was younger, "my father, he has integrity."

Would you like another?

No. "He has integrity." And I, and I was right. He had integrity in the sense that he was what he was and nobody-- and he made no concessions to anybody for what he was. And that wasn't an un-important thing to know, to learn. I mean, to, to have learned as a child, that you can be what you are, and get along in the world.

Your inheritance.

I mean, my, yes, my entire inheritance came, comes from there.

By inheritance, you don't mean money, property…

No, I mean, well, money--

Heritage.

I mean, heritage, yeah, and it, and it's centered on, and it, and it, the first story is about an actual inheritance, but I think everything is my, from them is my inheritance, and it's how I, how I know the world, or knew the world early on, anyway.

He ran a series of garages here? That was -

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. He had a series of garages-

And they're all dead now?

They're all dead, yeah, they're all dead. My cousins are alive, but, uh, my last aunt died about three or four years ago.

And he would come home and your mother would run the garage, and not know what she-- [laughter] I mean, that's pretty strange.

I know it's strange. He, he would come, he worked 12-hour, 15-hour, 20-hour days, and he'd have to have a nap. So he always lived near the garage. And, um, he couldn't afford to have a helper. So he'd send my mother down. And she couldn't drive. I couldn't drive myself until I was 40 years old. I didn't know how to drive. Um, and the reason I didn't know how to drive is my father tried to teach me how to drive.

How did your father let himself get fooled by the, con-man. Was that a characteristic trait, or…?

Well, I think, I'm surprised, I was very surprised, at old age and infirmity, um, had some effect. The guy was, the guy knew what he was doing, and he knew how to get to my father, and the, and the, the sadness for me was, not only that he was giving everything to this guy, but that I didn't know how to get to my father. This guy knew how to do it. He knew how to flatter him, he knew how to play on his, on my father's greed, and, and, and miserliness. Um, he knew how, and also, also, the fact of the matter is, that if I'd had children, it would have been different. I think, if I'd had children, I, or my children, could have gotten to my father, and it wouldn't have happened. I think the fact that I denied him of grandchildren.

Always a mistake.

Always a mistake. Bigger mistake in this case. Uh, so he would send my father, my mother down to the garage. And, uh, she would watch. She would sit in the office and she would, and she would say, "Oh, well, just leave your car there. I can't get you. No, you can't get your car now. You have to wait till the boss comes home." It was quite amusing. And I don't think I told a story in the book of the time, uh, he had a goat. He took a goat in lieu of payment. Some farmer came in and parked his car and couldn't pay. And had a goat in the truck and couldn't pay. And my father took the goat and kept it in the toilet. And for several days that was a great attraction for my schoolmates and me, we would go and, and, and see the goat in the toilet.

Would your father have cared about grandchildren?

Oh, yeah. Very much.

Very, very much. He, um, at some point in my life, I called them to tell them that I'd gotten a good job, or I'd gotten a raise at work, and he's, and I, talking to my mother, and he, I heard him in the background say, I said, Mom, I've got good news, and she said, the kid's got good news, and he said, she's pregnant. So, yes, he cared.

An only kid, an only goat…

And I hope he fed it. I hope he didn't die. I don't know… if he fed it.

What about, uh, how do you pronounce your name? Szymborska?

Wisława Szymborska.

Yes. You liked her poetry very much.

Oh, I loved it. Yeah. And I'm not a reader of poetry. But it's so direct. It's like, I mean, it's like listening to somebody sitting across from you. It's beautiful, yeah, I loved it. And when I read it-

But, you know, when I think about it now, and not having children, I think about the fact that I was so much a daughter. I didn't -

Adored?

A daughter.

Not in Polish -?

A daughter.

A daughter. I didn't want to be other--

Not in Polish, no. When I read it, I thought, she has the same feelings about her family and death of family.

Only child?

Yeah, an only child. I didn't really want to bedisplaced as a daughter. It, I think is one aspect of, of not having children. Because I was a veryimportant child. I was the child.

She has a feeling I can draw on.

Unsentimental. And direct. And-- yet: deeply felt.

In such a large family

In such a large family. Well, my grandmother had nine or ten. My, and, but the next generation, my mother's generation, only had one or two.

Did you ever meet Ben's father?

It's amazing why that generation had so many, I mean that's…

No, he was dead. I'm really sorry about that. Did you know him?

They couldn't avoid it. I mean, they didn't have contraception. They didn't, uh

I was once in that house, I remember. Some Brendan Gill event.

And had a lot of sex.

Must have been quite an astonishing thing.

And, I guess, a lot of sex. At least nine or ten times. it would have been, they couldn't afford it if they had this

I was in that house, which was one of the most amazing houses I've ever, ever been in.

It's hard to imagine what this -- Grandparents, yeah, sure, but the idea that they couldn't afford it, yet they had this enormous family. On both sides, in fact.

[Laughs]. I am so sorry I didn't know his father. If I'd known his father, I think I would have, I would understand Ben better. I don't, I never met him. And his mother, I didn't meet his mother either. And I never saw the house.

Yeah.

Amazing.

Everybody in your family is dead? I mean, of your, of your parents' generation. Your aunts and uncles?

They're all dead. Yeah. Some cousins are, some cousins still alive. But yeah, that's about it.

You never saw the house? It's still there.

I know it's there, it had just been sold.

Yeah, they're all gone. Maybe I could write it, now.

With the royalties on your book, you can buy it back, right?

Yeah, that's--

Oh, right. [Laughs]

that's too much malevolence going on in my family [laughs]

Well, it's good material. Malevolence is, it's fun to work with.

What are you working on now?

I'm just doing short--

Good stories. But, but you didn't have lots of letters and journals and things like that to help you along?

You're not going to wait another ten years for a book, are you?

I hope not. I don't have another ten years. Just short pieces. I just did a piece on the vagina monologues for a guy, for Craig Raine. You know him? He's a poet. He runs a-

No.

Other people with memories, that would stimulate your memories?

No. In fact, I didn't want to ask my cousins. Because I knew that their memories would interfere with mine. And I wanted- and, uh, and they would differ from mine. Uh, and they would have a different take on what happened. And, um, I didn't want that. So I- I, so I just... I relied on mine.

Yeah I know the name, but-

He's a poet and an essayist. And he has a small magazine in England called Arate. He was a, he loved the first story. And he's been a wonderful champion of the book. And he asked me to go to the vagina monologues and write a piece for him. And I did. I went to the vagina monologues and wanted to run shrieking into the streets. And I'm doing a piece for the book review [sighs] now. I don't have another book.

What's the difference? I mean, in a sense, I have to say, all childhoods are different. I mean, it depends who's telling the story. Like, I was just reading the, this Margaret Travels book. I was going to write a piece about her. And the idea that she and her sister would have such divergent views of what the-

They don't speak, you know.

Yes, right. What the parents' life was like. Yeah. And I think that my brother, who's dead now, as well, my older brother - he and I were like, it was two separate childhoods. Our views towards our parents were totally different.

What's the piece for the Book Review?

I can't tell you!

Oh!

I'm not allowed to say.

Ok.

I mean, another piece - a review.

Oh, a review. A review of a book.

Yeah. You know we can't…. We're under an oath. We have to take an oath not to say. But I don't have another book. Although, this is what I'm thinking. There are the, the, the American Communist Party sent all its archive to Moscow. It's all in Moscow. It's all in Moscow. It is now on Microfilm and been sent back to the Library of Congress. What I want to do, what I would like somebody to pay me to do, is to go to the Library of Congress and troll through it. It's not indexed. It's all totally chaotic. I would like somebody to let me do that and pull a thread from it somewhere.

How much older was he?

Two years. It didn't matter. We'd sit there and we'd talk about, like, who's got different boyhoods, it was amazing.

Yeah.

Of course, you didn't have that by not having a sibling. So it wouldn't-

Yeah. No, I didn't have that.

But at least you have different points of view, I suppose, from other relatives and so on. I mean, in your mind anyway, you see that people might see them differently, or...?

Well, I have, I have, I have, I have alive, um, all my cousinsare alive. Um, and they, and one of my cousins, uh, was relieved, was, was, was, uh, my cousin Raheel's daughter was relieved because her mother was really a horror. But nobody in the family ever acknowledged how much she suffered because her mother was a horror. And she was relieved that she was relieved that-

Her mother, or your mother?

Her mother. Yeah. So she has something that, so when her children say to her, "was it really like that? Was your mother really like that?" She can say, "yes, this is what it was like."

Maybe so.

Write it down.

This is what I would like to do.

Tell Bob Gottlieb. Maybe he'd be interested. [Laughs]

One basic difference between our families is the politics.

Where is Bob Gottlieb these days and what is he doing? Not that I wish him well.

Oh, the politics.

Which was an essential element of your family. Could you talk about that, about how committed they were, or?

He's still just edits some books for Knopf and he writes about a dance for the Observer.

They were really committed. Um, I don't know if my mother was an actual party member, but my father was, at some point, probably in the 20s. He was not somebody who liked following orders, so I think by the 30s he had dropped out. He didn't like party discipline.

Right, he writes, this is an irony. A guy reviewed my book for the Observer on one page and on the back, on the other side of the page was Bob Gottlieb's reviewing some dance thing.

And he also writes these books, he's got a book about lyrics, Broadway lyrics, which got fantastic reviews in the New York Book Review- The New York Times Book Review, and other places.

Why did they join? Or what was their interest?

Well, you know, it was a generation of people who'd come from Russia, for whom Russia was hell. Uh, that being, being Jews in Russia was, uh, was really to, to suffer enormously in, in anti-Semitism and confinement in professions, confinement in the pale. Uh, very few, very few Jews escaped that, as Isaiah Berlin's thought parents escaped. But, um, and also to know something of the politics of revolution, to know something of the, of the, of the Polish Bund and, and the 1905 revolution, and to have a sense that things, that there was a, it was a time when people believed in utopias. And when they came here -

Sorry to hear that. And plastic purses. Let's not forget the plastic purses.

Actually, speaking of my Aunt Ruth, my wife and I gave him a couple of her plastic purses.

You gave Bob her plastic purses?

Yeah, when I was writing profiles in the New Yorker, we were getting rid of Aunt Ruth's estate. She died in a nursing home, and she had all these great purses, so I thought, well, Bob's kind of a friend-

I'm sorry to hear that.

So he has two of Aunt Ruth's [laughing] plastic purses. I'll get them back.

I think that grudges are enlivening. In my family- .

They sure are

Yeah. Yeah. And I was really glad to see that in my family, grudges never ended. People would die, and the surviving person would maintain the grudge. And it animated her life. And I intend to maintain this grudge against Bob Gottlieb-

that's good.

for the rest of my life.

Well, I think I probably will too, though in fact he did publish two profiles for me in the-

And what years were they coming here?

My mother came, they both came at the same time, before the First World War. My mother came just before the war broke out, and my father came a year or two before. And then, a few years later, was the revolution. Uh, which promised everything. Promised, uh, uh, heaven on earth. And many of their generation. Not your family?

I know, that mitigates