Professional Life Tags Used in Events

Yes. You've had a few little disappointments. Money has not been what it should be for you.

It's not been what?

As good as it should be.

Can't concur with you more.

Yes, oh good. Oh good. Now this is business. It's going to change for the better. You have a few people jealous of you. You've got to---you've got to find out.

Mhm, okay.

Par for the course though.

That's sudden good news and God's card. This is very good.

God's card is business?

Yes. Very good and that's good in around a month or two.

All right, good.

Definitely. Then a sandy-haired man older than you could be of help, whether he's an agent or whatever he is. He could be good, definitely. That's a big talk.

Big talk?

Are you signing a contract?

[Inaudible]

Don't know much about it yet.

Yeah. That's good.

No? It's going to turn out to be something good.

You think so?

Yeah. He's older.

Mhm, yeah, he is.

[Inaudible]

This one here?

That's right. You're moving. Are you moving to New York? Or the coast? It's a move.

Good question.

I don't think you're going to the coast.

No?

I think you'll make more here than any place.

Yeah, I think this is where---

[Inaudible]

Really?

Yeah.

[Inaudible]

Gonna hit! Yeah, that's what it looks like.

That's what it looks like. '83 is your year.

Ah, that's good.

Without doubt. I mean, it's going to be pretty good, definitely.

This one comes up outside of columns and it's a special one.

Yes. It came out very good.

Now let me do your business talent card. You see, the average person's business is a nine of diamonds, that's just a layman. But the person with talent like you have is a seven of clubs. That's how we can pull around back. It's like contract work, you know?

I see, I see.

That's how we can tell which is going to happen to you. The future is excellent. But it's taken a while to gel and now it's going to start and you're going to be surprised.

Yeah.

It's good news.

It is. It takes time, everything takes time. You have to catch on. Now, I need 20 cards from you. And then I'll circle them. So this is strictly business.

Strictly business?

Strictly business.

Yes.

[sound of pulling cards]

Strictly.

That's good. It's a big talk, you may get some response from last night too.

Yeah? Oh, hope so.

I have a very strange feeling. Yeah. Very good. Two days to two weeks, good news. By the 28th of this month, things should be pleasant for you.

Yeah?

Yeah.

The 28th.

I don't know what that is; that's in the past so we'll let that one go. That's in the past. This is your heart's wish this year.

Heart's wish?

[Inaudible]

Mhm.

This is very good news, I think things are going to start for you! Yes. And this man here, you're very good for him. You are very good for him.

It's me again.

It's you again.

Again, you have little tempers here and there, disagreements every now and then. But in the end, excellent cards. And that's a big move. I think you're gonna start moving your residence. I mean, you gotta make up your mind where you want to be. You can't be Billy to Jack you know, it's no good for you?

Billy to Jack? You're right.

Really, it's a move. '83 is your chance to get ahead. So you have to do it. '82 was nothing. Look at this! And this is real good. '83 is very good for you, and that's all the good things around.

What did we just come up with there? Those last two.

Things are gonna happen by the 18th through the 28th of this month. Very good. March is terrific for you, you're going to be way ahead of the game. When is your trip in March? Or are you going in February?

Short trip in February to Minneapolis, and then a longer trip to San Francisco in March.

March, yeah. Comes out very good.

Comes out well?

Very good. Now are you a writer?

Yes.

[Inaudible]

Really?

Oh, yeah, that's terrific. And good---very good writer. Excellent, that's very difficult to do. Up to now, you've had very good cards. Now do you want to ask me anything? I think I see a very big improvement.

Do you?

Yeah, you haven't been getting the breaks. Just when you were going to hit, something always intercepted.

Uh-huh, uh-huh. It's worked out for the better, maybe, but---

I think so too.

But they're due now, maybe.

Slow but sure.

Is there any J around you? That would be good for you. J or an M?

J or an M?

Yeah, in business. Or an R.

An R is good in business. J, M, R.

[Inaudible]

No. Although, my agent is the daughter of one of those---

This is a brand new young guy that can be very good for you. I don't know who he is. Oh, you know the man that worked with you last night. He was so good.

Mhm.

Yeah, one of those men.

Mhm, yeah, with the glasses.

This is a very good thing too. Don't lose him. This is the money card. You got the money card, finally, that's good. That's mom. Surprise. You're going to see her! Does she know it?

Eh, not for sure, yeah.

Did he have a project at all that he was doing?

He's got a couple different things, but it's all very much down the line in due process. I guess he sized up is what I wanted to hear. I didn't want to be pressured into anything. Doing this musical, that---a young guy named Ken Robbins is creating a musical. It's an interesting premise, but I don't know anything about it and they don't really know much about me, I wouldn't say. Just between you and I, the public never really knows what's happening until it's on the stage. And I can tell you, we were supposed to be there once.

Is he sorry about that?

I think so. He's never become effusively apologetic, but he did, under my agent's pressure, he sent both Michael and Doug a $500 because of the scheduling mishap. That was the thing that came back to him. We can't just slide around after guys who have careers. I didn't want any money out of it but I would have been pissed, $1000 is an apology.

Money talks. Money talks.

Money does talk.

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.

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

I burned the book.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

There's an acknowledgement for Sergei...

Sergei Dovlatov.

For his masterpiece, Ours? Now, come on. What is his masterpiece I've never heard of?

Did you ever read it?

Sergei de Vlatov was a young Russian émigré, fairly young Russian émigré, and the first I heard of him was Ben publishing him in Grand Street. He published, I think he published two pieces, one about his dog, Glasha, and another, I don't remember the other one, but eventually these pieces were collected in a book called Ours, and it was about his family, his Russian family. And, um, I really recommend it, you'd love it. I mean, maybe you'd love it, maybe you wouldn't. But he was a wonderful writer. He died young. He wrote this book, short pieces, and when I read this book, when I had been thinking about it, after I wrote the first piece about my father's mother's death, the con and death, um, and was thinking about going on, and I didn't know how to do it, and I didn't know how I could make the whole thing, everything, cohere. I read this book, and I go, yes, you don't have to make everything cohere, you can do short pieces, and these are wonderful, wonderful short pieces about a Russian family, and its emigration, um, and they're stories, and they're stories. You don't have to write a, a whole memoir from beginning to end. Break it out in stories.

I could see that, that's interesting.

And it's a wonderful, wonderful book, and if you can't find it, I'd be happy to lend you my copy.

Yeah. Absolutely.

But who would be interested?

Now… somebody was interested. Somebody will be interested in yours.

Even if Bob Gottlieb is not interested, there are people out there.

There are people out there.

Have you been traveling with the book at all? On a tour?

No. Nobody sent me on tour. We just to read locally. I've done radio. I've done News Day. I've done readings. I did a couple of readings. But, no, I haven't been traveling. I'm going to travel to Missoula, Montana. My stepdaughter has arranged a reading for me there.

In Missoula?

[laughing] In Missoula.

They're interested.

Yeah.

Given all of that, why did you want to become president of Peru?

Because I was an idiot, you know? [laughs]

I don't think there is another explanation [laughs]

No you know, there were circumstances. I thought that I could help. I was very naive [laughter] very naive.

But I learned a lot. It was a very instructive experience.

Okay. What if you had won?

Well, I would have tried to do what I promised, you know? I want to think that if I had won, there wouldn't have been a Montecinos running the country for 10 years, nor all the tremendous corruption and brutality of these last 10 years in Peru, you know? But who knows? Who knows?

Well, one serious question. If you had won, would you have written the books that you've written since you didn't win? I mean, for instance, this book in fact?

Yes. Well, for five years, I would have stopped writing novels. I would have written a lot of speeches, I suppose. But since the first moment, I understood that I was not a politician, that that was something that I was imposing on myself.

And I never thought, never, that I would quit literature. No. I always thought that this was a temporary experience, because exceptional conditions. And in a way, I was relieved when I lost the election, and I could go back to my books and my vocation.

Except that once you realized what Fujimura became, there must have been a great regret in your heart.. that you didn't become...

Yes, it was a great regret. Well, one of the reasons why I went into politics was because I thought that democracy was so fragile, so fragile, so weak, that could collapse. And that it would be such a tragedy. It was very, very important to try to save democracy, to preserve it, to reinforce it.

And when in 1992 came the coup. Of course I.... But it was not totally unexpected. This was coming up. This was coming up.

Otherwise, I wouldn't have been a candidate. Certainly not, no.

You're also a critic.

Well, I am a novelist, but I do some.

You write criticism.

Si. Sometimes, yes. Yes, I like it. Yeah. I like it.

Do you have to like something to review it?

Yes.

Yes.

Oh, yes.

Only in exceptional circumstances I write against books. I write against ideas, but against poems or novels. I usually don't do it. I write when I am enthusiastic about something, you know?

I was curious. In one of your pieces, this was one about literature. You said you were defining words, Borgesian as an entry into a fantastical universe, Kafkaesque as the impetent feeling of the isolated individual, Orwellian, the terrible anguish generated by dictatorships.

Mhm

All very valid. But I was wondering, could you define what Vargas--Llo-Llosean would be?

Oh, well, I can answer with a Borges quotation. Say, when you look yourself at a mirror, you don't know how your face is. You don't know if you are handsome or very ugly. It's very difficult. You don't really know. I would like my books to have the same influence that the great writers that I admire, but I really don't know what my own books are, you know? I don't know. I cannot measure them with the minimal objectivity that I can value, books of others.

Well, could you say what you're trying to do in your...

Oh, yes. Yes.

Oh, I think there is an autobiographical element in all novels.

I think it's impossible to fantasize 100% on a story.

And it's also true of Flaubert and Faulkner

Oh, of Flaubert and Fau-- except it's obvious.

I think all of the, maybe those writers are the writers I prefer because I feel so close to them in the way I create, I build my stories.

What are you reading now as a reader?

Well, I'm reading a lot of books because the novel I am writing. I am writing about Flora Tristan and Paul Gauguin.

About what?

Flora Tristan and Paul Gauguin. Flora Tristan was the grandmother of of Paul Gauguin, the painter.

A very interesting character, 19th century woman who was a social agitator. Very courageous, very idealistic, and with a tragic history.

And his personality was very similar to the--to her grandchild because Gauguin was, as her, so stubborn and also idealistic, you know.

They were looking for the paradise, different kind of paradises.

She wanted a paradise of social justice, of equality, no more discrimination of women, total equality. But it was a paradise, you know?

So she went into all the anarchist sects and she was a San Simonian, a San Simon follower, a Charles Fourier follower.

And finally, as she couldn't fit, you know, exactly in any of these movements and sects, you know, she created her own sect.

But it was this persecution of paradise. And I think Gauguin was the same you know. Gauguin went to La Martinique, to Panama, and then to Tahiti, and finally to the Marquesan Islands looking for the paradise.

Not a social paradise. He was not interested at all in social justice, on the contrary. [laughter]

But a paradise of beauty.

Beauty is something which was shared by the whole society. And he saw that this was impossible to reach in Europe because art, beauty had become in Europe a monopoly of a very small coterie of artists, collectors, critics.

And that art was completely cut from the common people. And he had this idea that only in primitive cultures, beauty was still as religion, as a common patrimony, a common expression.

And he went to look for this and looking for more primitive cultures. And as he didn't find it, he invented it in his paintings.

But the personalities of both were very, very close, you know?

Could you say where the idea for the book came from?

It came when I read. It came when I was young, a university student, and I read a book by Flora Tristan called Peregrinesiones de una Paria. Well, a French book, Peregrinesiones de un Paria. How do you say that? Pilgrims of a Paria?

Pilgrim of a Paria.

No, Peregrinaje.

Peregrinaje, pilgrim.

Pilgrimage of a Paria.

Fantastic book in which she tells about a year that she spent in Peru in 1830.

It's a fantastic description of what was a new Latin American republic still deeply contaminated by the colony from the perspective of a French, let's say, liberated woman.

And I became fascinated with her case, you know, because she decided in Arequipa, a southern Peruvian city, to change the world.

She decided there to declare war to this unjust world, which was discriminating women, treating women as second-class citizens. And it was a real declaration of war. And she started an incredible life.

For 10 years, she was fighting, you know, injustice. And in a crusade, a fantastic, from a moral point of view and from an intellectual point of view, it was a total political failure. But probably she was the first real feminist in Europe.

It sounds to me like the ideas gestate a long time. If this goes back to your school days, if Feast of the Goat goes back to 1975, you don't just suddenly invent an idea.

Oh, no. No, no, no.

At some point you said, in all great literary texts, often without their authors intending it, a seditious inclination is present.

Yes.

You said things like that quite a lot. But I was curious about the phrase, without intent, without the authors knowing--

Oh, because there are authors who are not in any way enthusiastic with the idea of changing the world? No. Balzac, for example, he was a real reactionary.

He wanted the world to remain as it was.

He didn't know what he was doing in effect?

Well, he didn't know that he was producing a very explosive image, which was tremendously critical of the real world. It was not his intention at all.

He was for the establishment. But I don't think there is a great fiction that is not an essential contradiction of the world as it is, you know?

I think if you produce a great, great novel, what you are producing is an alternative world, a kind of world that is not the real one because the real one is something that you are rejecting through this alternative world.

But I don't think this is an explicit mechanism which is pushing you, not at all.

And I think that is the richness of literature because these alternative worlds are this devastating criticism of the real world because they embrace all perspectives, all points of views, depending on the personality of authors, of the personal demons of authors, you know?

In some cases, yes. In some cases, you can say, yes, of course,

In some cases, you can say, yes, of course, there is an explicit critical attitude, or political or cultural. But I would say that in most cases, no. A writer is trying to materialize a vision or a dream without knowing that in this vision and in this dream, there is a very deep rejection of life as it is, of the world as it is, of humankind as it is.

For me, this is the great contribution of fiction, of the novel, to human progress.

And I think priests knew it before critical intellectuals. You know that the Inquisition forbade the novel for 300 years in Latin America.

I think they were very lucid. I think they understood very well this seditious consequence that fiction can have in the human spirit.

If you are too much contaminated with the idea of different worlds, perfect worlds, beautiful worlds, coherent worlds, and you are comparing this with the real world, the real world always loses the match, you know?

In any case, let's start with the poet's house, why you started the poet's house. This was back in the mid 80s?

And I had been associated with Betty for a good many years in her various activities and she came down to see me with an idea. And her idea was very simple. She thought it was time for New York City to have a public library devoted solely to poetry. In other words, a poetry library. And it was amazing really to realize that New York didn't have one. It never occurred to me, actually.

And she didn't have a name for it and I said it's not to be called a library. It should be called a, it should be called Poets House. And without an apostrophe because nobody owns poetry. It belongs to civilization. That was it.

And that no country is great unless its poets agree that it is so. So in any sense that's pretty much what we started with.

Oh I'm intensely interested in politics, but I don't feel that I've been committed to writing political poetry if you define it narrowly. But I think my poems are political in the largest sense. In that they deal very much with the problems of the individual in relation to the state. And I have an essay, actually, on poet and state that I think expresses my feeling of how the poet is always, in a sense, an adversary of the state and yet absolutely essential to the survival of the state.

Yes a political act. And I think it is also important to realize that one of the functions of the poet is as a citizen. And we tend to forget that.

Ok. I was interested that one purpose of the Poets House is to give poets a place to work and read. Can poets learn from other poets? And what do they learn?

Where else are they going to learn? It is largely from other poets that one begins to be a poet. You're not going to become a poet through learning prosody. That's certainly true. But through the energizing force of the word. That is essential to one's education. I think every poet begins by simply being enchanted by the sound of words. Like other poets, I remember walking, running rather, through the woods shouting new words that I had learned.

Aren't poets born? You were born a poet, weren't you?

They are born in the sense of what they are born with the capacity for becoming poets. But what fortune deals to them in their early days, their early years, is I think an important factor. Maybe more important than your genes. I think the sense of the natural world, for example, the delight in being alive, and the knowledge of one's mortality, are all involved in the making of the poet.

You've written, so I gather, often about mortality and I wonder if I can ask you a somewhat personal question. How much does the fact of your father's death, how much of that makes you a poet or made you a poet?

Very early, yes. And I was lucky in a way, aside from the misfortune of my talk of suicide, in that I had teachers who told me I was going to be a poet from the fourth grade on.

Well, teachers are important.

I have written about my fourth grade teacher who assigned a composition on the father of our country. And I worked very hard at it. And the next day, after turning it in, she appeared in class and she was glowing and she had one of the composition papers in her hand, and she said, "I'm going to read you something, starkly. It's like a poem." And she read my piece. And, and--the first sentence of which was, "George Washington was a tall, petite, handsome man."

Have then you felt in your life that it's necessary to pass on such encouragement to others?

And then I had a succession of teachers who told me that through the years, even in college.

I would have thought that, with the possible exception of being an actor, that being a poet was the most difficult occupation to sustain. To be a poet and to not--

But obviously even people like Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams who had other occupations, presumably to sustain and survive their poetry. That would seem to be built into it just as actors go do something else, but you've been a poet all your life. Teaching, but yes.

Yeah. Well, it is not always, say, in your permanent posession. You cannot count on being a poet every time you sit down at your desk with a pen in hand, or a pencil more likely.

It's usually a phrase, an image. It's a rhythm more than anything else. And I've always felt that poetry begins with sounds rather than with sense. And you ride on that rhythm until your own being takes possession of it. And really, the sound and the sense combine and then you have some sense of where you're going, aside from riding on that rhythm. But, to a large degree, I think the poem is more interested in perpetuating a flow of sound than it is of producing a meaning.

Not after I have determined that it's the best I can do. And I never publish a poem unless I believe that. You know, I have written ten times as many poems as I have published. I'm a very hard critic of my own work.

Oh, they're lying around or in my manuscript collection at Princeton, which, Princeton Public Library, who took over everything in my desk.

Well, they brought, they sent a truck, and they had room and they wanted to fill the room. I gave them everthing I had.

I've never been there, no. Never been to look at my own.

That's all the past. You're focusing on today. That makes sense. Do you go to Poets House, then?

What do you do when you go to Poets House?

Oh, usually I'm there because there are important issues and they want to talk to me about it. So, I'm still very much concerned with what goes on at Poets House and feel very much a part of its day to day activities.

How do you feel about young poets today?

How do you feel about young poets today?

I am pleasantly surprised. I think that poetry in this country today is amazingly active and good, much to my surprise. And if I compare it, as I have done in the past, with the poetry, let's say, in this country in the 19th century, there are extant anthologies, of course, from that period. And, except for a handful of poets, including great ones like Whitman and Dickinson, the work that was being published generally throughout, let's say, the whole 19th century, was mediocre beyond words at a general level.

Where as today it's alive and well-known.

Well, I often think, despite the academic system, the academic control of poetry, but there's no question in my mind that it's superior. And it may be superior in numbers to that of any other culture. Although I'm beginning to think that Poland is now the great country for poetry. There are so many really superb Polish poets. You know, it's accident in a way.

But if you spend enough years...One thing I was surprised at Poets House was so many small printings, privately printed things, people using their computers to print their poems. I mean, there's so much, really, proliferation of small publications of poetry, which I was not aware of before, and perhaps computers are the root of some of it.

Well, I want to do some sort of piece about Poets House and I missed most of the, sort of, celebrations in April, which is Poetry Month.

Why is April Poetry Month.

Well, so is poetry. Maybe that---I hadn't thought of that affinity. But obviously the springtime association is essential to understanding that.

What are the things they were looking forward to again at the Poetry House? Was there a walk across the bridge?

Did you have to read the cover review in the Times Book Review last Sunday of a book of poetry by, what's his name, Maria Ponsa. Is that her name? I thought that was a very strange review.

Yes. Well, that's also the issue, that poets would suffer from not being reviewed by major institutions like the Times and the New York Review of Books and so on, and they'd be sliding in there. But that's always been--

Of course most poets, I think, feel that the Times is not as supportive of poetry as it should be. And I tend to agree with that.

I'm glad you're doing this piece, and I know that it means a great deal to Poets House and therefore to the perpetuaton of poetry in New York, which after all is the capital of poetry in the United States. And there are so many fine poets living in this city. I'm really amazing whenever I'm part of a gathering of poets, how superior they are to any comparable group that might have gathered here in any other period in our history. And I think nearly all poets feel that New York is the capital of the poetry world.

Yes. I don't know all of them but many of them meet me in the street and invent themselves or present themselves. Who knows what. But it's an extraordinary experience to be walking in the village here these days and the number of persons who greet you. And I don't think of myself as a public person but obviously poetry is part of the life in this village, as I guess it always has been, and it's the reason I came here in 1928, which is a long time ago.

Both of whom I got to know eventually. Both of them.

Cummings I knew very well. He was a good friend. And Marianne Moore was one of the first to publish me in The Dial. I've ever been grateful for her. I'll tell you another story about her.

When I was in the Army, World War II, my last year in the army, '45, I received a communication from the Guggenheim Foundation that they were giving me a grant. And I couldn't imagine, because I'd never applied for it, why I was getting a grant. Eventually, I plucked up my nerve and did inquire. It turned out that Marianna Moore had, on her own initiative, applied for me, while I was in the service. That was a dear gift.