Public Life Tags Used in Events

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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]

[laughing]

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…

But, you know, just one last thing. The odd thing about this book is that you recognized your relatives in it, but people who are Protestant from the Midwest say, "it was like you were writing about my family." That is an odd thing to me. I thought I was writing a very particular… I mean, so particular that there would be, nobody would identify with me.

But that's probably why, in fact.

Maybe so. Maybe-

Particular to the genera, that people realize that there really are - in terms of the family rivalries and everything - that that really goes on all over the place.

Yeah.

It's been so gratifying. People have loved this book. Really, people love it. I'm - as I wrote each story, our friend Michael Train read it to Ben. So that each, and then, and then Ben, he would say, "oh, this is right, this is wrong." Ben was really - not that he had many suggestions, but he was my first editor on the book. But, we all thought it was so particular that, you know, maybe there'd be 15 or 20 people, maybe, like Tresca, there'd be 15 or 20 people who were interested.

And if you write a musical like Fiddler on the Roof, it's gonna play in a small theater somewhere and no one's gonna come, right?

[Laughing] That's right. That's right.

I did not write Fiddler on the Roof. I wrote something…

No, but it is true sometimes.

...more severe than that.

Yeah, but sometimes the very specific can evoke all sorts of things.

Yeah, apparently so.

All happy families are alike, I dunno.

Would your father have read the book?

[whispered] I don't know.

You mother would have said, "your father likes it, but he hasn't told me that"

[Laughs] "Daddy li- I know that Daddy likes it, because he said something to somebody that you'd written a book, but..." No. He would never have said anything. And he wouldn't have been happy with his last, with his last, with the first story. He would not have been happy. But you know, I don't know. Who knows? I don't know. They're dead. I mean, I can do what I like with them.

They were live, you said.

Yeah. They were alive. And now they're dead. And now I can do what I like with them.

Yeah. But now they're alive in your book again.

Yeah, I hope so. I hope so. I meant to make them live.

Aunt Lily lives.

Aunt Lily lives. Aunt Sally lives, you've forgotten my Aunt Sally.

Aunt Sally lives.

Well, I don't, well, it's difficult to answer this question because we don't know what is the real influence of literature in life.

I think there is an important influence of literature in life.

You don't think that it causes revolutions, though at all so the literature will not....

Well, I know that it's impossible to prove this influence.

But I don't believe that literature is only entertainment, even a very sophisticated entertainment. No, I think literature is something that transforms itself in behavior, in morals, in attitudes, in a very subtle way through the rivers. But I am convinced that what I am now is something that owes a lot to the great writers I have read. And that without these books and without these readings, I would be a poorer person than I am, more mediocre. My life would be much more restricted.

My vision, my horizon, my sensibility would be much more mediocre than what they are. Because the great writers I have read, you cannot prove this. But at least in one aspect, I think literature is extraordinarily influential on people's life, the critical attitude towards the real world.

I think if you can be contaminated by the great fictitious words of literature, you are much less prepared to accept the real world as it is. I think you are much more in a critical, even in a rebellious attitude towards the real world, towards reality.

And in this sense, I think literature is a very great, how can I say, a great instrument for dignity, for freedom. I think literature gives you all the time, very concrete demonstrations that the world is bad made. That the real world cannot really fulfill all the expectations.

So that is the reason why an estate, an ideology, has the ambition of total control of society, of the mind, of behavior. Fiction becomes immediately under pressure, censored, controlled, forbidden. And in a way, they are right because fiction is a danger for total control. It's always escaping and demonstrating that the world is badly made, that the world could be different. Maybe not better, but different, you know?

And this is seditious. This is rebellious.

I think so. Not necessarily dislike of a poem. There are critics who are essentially negative for almost any poet or any poem that is not in a familiar track. And I think they have that privilege, too.

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--

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.