Annotations for Speakers: Mel Gussow

Where are you coming from?

This was the late 60s when you were in there?

It's strange because we've lived down the village for a long time and it's been a lot of time since we went outside and was very young around Washington Square Park and then down to Washington Square Village which we still all the time. Which would have struck in fact as we're leading to the late 60s.

It's probably right there.

When was your daughter born again?

69? So she was even a little bit younger than my son.

He was born in 67.

Again, we used to be down there a lot. It suddenly crossed my mind. We might have actually passed past. Anyway, I was curious as a…

Cheers.

Survived a lot as a matter of fact.

So I think about those early days in 1970. We were next door to that house that flew up on West 11th Street where the weathermen had their explosion. They were bombed out of our house that very day in fact.

The wall just fell down from our building.

Terrible. It was sort of like the end of the 60s.

Yeah. Right next door. Next door. To the so-called bomb factory.

It was a shock for my wife and for Dustin Hoffman's wife. They were both outside the building when it just blew up in their face. She just picked up our sign at nursery school and it was literally the end of the 60s and the end of a lot of... Well, not to get a one digression, but I must say the event itself then and thereafter had a strong effect not only on my family but also the people in the neighborhood.

About the 60s, there were so many of us. If we weren't radical, we certainly were borderline radical. After that, there was a lot of second thinking about whether the violence had any justification at all. Their mission when they blew up the house accidentally was to blow up the library at Columbia University. But you've gone through so much of this.

Well, that's part of it. It's your home and your private home. But that's what I was looking to. It's a strong theme in your work. I mean, your opposition to violence has been a little closer to the people I'm talking to.

And not radical enough. What about social change?

It's easier to pick up a gun or a bomb.

Let me also say this. It's sometimes hard to understand when I read your work the fact that you can love people who have been violent, brutal, perhaps even evil. I mean, you talk, for example, about your grandfather who was a devil, you say, in some way. And yet you...

Well, you say, not only forgive him, I guess, but you adored him.

How is that possible?

I see.

You'd heard the stories before this.

And he was the role model for Mr. Herbert?

Well, it's very interesting. I find it a lot that you seemingly not only forgive but also love. And I suppose just moving ahead to the new book, which obviously to me is inspired by your marriage, which was terribly happy, you say, and then over and being friends and whatever, it's hard to comprehend that, I guess.

Well, this is the question, I guess. Why isn't there blame?

Going back to your grandfather for a moment, with him I suppose it wasn't a matter of being tired but partly it was a matter of the...

Well, yes, but I was going to say also the acceptance, the traditionalness that this was an allowable approach in those times in that situation.

And it was true in your father's day as well as your grandfather's day.

Have you been here before?

Everything.

Except for the spicy fried shrimp, oh boy, that's the one loser on the menu.

Did you say scallops?

Well, you can go out there.

Scallops as well.

Yeah.

Anyway, the new book, I realize that some of the stories go back to the earlier, mid-80s than today.

What provoked you to do it now? What brought it together with you?

The marriage was.

Did you ever think about connecting the characters and keeping the same names of the characters, whether factual or not, and make it more novelistic?

Are they different people, would you say?

Olive oil as well, is that also restorative?

The first story came last?

Yes.

Could you describe what the, admittedly there are somewhat, there are different characters along the way, but sort of the arc of the characters, how they would change from 1984, or whatever the first one was, till now, in your eyes, is there really a big change?

It's a change in, you know, how they grow, and how they perceive the world. I'm thinking now, let's see, of Suni and Anne, who in the 60s were in love with the same man. One was married to him, and the other one wanted to be with him, and then they had this whole thing with, you know, doing the 60s thing, where you all go off together, you, the other woman, the man, and the baby. You're speaking from experience, right?

In any case, you haven't thought about publishing the book for a while.

It was sitting there.

Really?

In fact, you started writing 30 years ago. You started publishing 30 years ago.

It was published in 1970, so actually this is your...

Yeah, so it's 30 years.

Yeah, amazing. I mean, that's a lot of writing.

Yeah.

No choice?

You used the expression, no choice, but somebody came across one of the books where you said you called yourself a medium. I was wondering whether you feel that as well.

Was The Color Purple handed down to you?

Was there a moment when you were swimming?

Keep people with The Color Purple for a moment. I think you said at what point that it came while you were swimming, while you were running. It sounded quite almost mystical to me.

Could you go back and remember the actual moment when it began?

As members of your family or as characters?

With names attached to them?

Actually, you were not swimming or running through a field when you thought it was boring?

I mean, it's about serving your art.

Only through art they could survive?

Once you began to become very fast?

You heard it wrong?

That was part of why I read that, and why I thought the medium thing struck me again, as if you're possessed, in a sense.

It was more practical than magical, maybe.

And the stories themselves, some of them came from your family's life.

Yeah. Well, the stories in the Color Purple, for example.

You were able to give more lives to her.

And your mother didn't actually get to read Color Purple. She was sick.

But anyway, you were saying that Color Purple and the Temple were the two books that you felt that about, that they came?

You said a while ago that, for about the 30 years, could you live without writing?

Well, you've produced a lot since Color Purple.

I mean, just really...

Oh, can you imagine?

The best part is the actual writing of it?

Like fame, success, wide readership. Yeah. You'll find this easily.

Well, it wasn't too long thereafter, when fame descended or ascended on you.

But it's true, I mean...

Well, there was mail, oh God, yes.

Really. It's sort of funny, a number of women who are novels that I've talked to have said something similar in Buggy the Bird. A number of male novelists and playwrights that I've talked to regard the creative act almost as if it were carpentry. Something like, for one, Athol Fugard is going on, a great letter. He gets out his tools, his utensils, and he sits there.

And then there's Arthur Miller's another one, creating a table.

I don't find women I've talked to ever use such metaphors at all.

Well, there's a basic difference between men and women, right?

Very interesting.

And I understand the love of craft, you know, I mean, that's also a joy. But what I like is when you get the craft and you kind of, you know, you know you have it.

Well, I'll just say, beginning with Color Purple, you wrote the rules. You aren't supposed to write a novel like that.

Of course. But I mean, the craft is there, but it's your own adventure.

Yeah, oh yeah.

Oh, God.

Oh, yeah, sure.

I'm surprised he never, maybe he did, in fact, come back.

Certainly what my surmise is that the book, the test of the book, including the prizes, changed your life. But then the movie also did that, don't you think?

You're welcome.

You were happy with it.

You've changed your mind several times about the movie though, too. Reading that book you wrote about it seems to have changed you.

Well, it wasn't exactly the book.

Doesn't that look good?

How about your publishers actually come in here?

They're in the neighborhood.

When was the last time you saw the movie?

It makes me cry.

Yeah, every time I see it.

I really, it's a very moving film.

And even though it wasn't a screenplay, it doesn't.

I suppose how all three, book, screenplay, and movie all work and exist.

That book, screenplay, and movie can all exist independently.

Which are you very interested in?

I was going to say one of the most moving things about the book you wrote about the movie was your letter to Danny Glover.

In which you said and how much you, not only did, but also learned about your grandfather.

I just saw him and he made a film of Hoosman and Lena.

It was very good.

Very different from other versions. It was him many times on stage and the other movie. But he's such a good actor.

Meridian, whichever book from the movie is here, never made.

Didn't you feel the danger that you were in? The actual threat of it all?

What's that about? Learning from adversity. And it seems to me that a lot of the art has come out of adversity.

Well, sometimes you put away the closet.

I know a number of people whose parents were hollering about victims of one way or another who somehow never talked about it. They find out, this one actress that I knew, she's a good friend of my son's, found out much later in life that her father was survived in the situation that he never told her.

Just bottled it up.

They could have told her in different ways.

Well, it has many possibilities. Shame is one of them, but refusal to sort of face it, confront it, refusal to say, consider how it might have changed his life, and it probably did. I don't know. But shame and embarrassment would be probably high on the list, I don't know.

I would think it would be things like that that keep you writing, that that inspired a book. And I suppose other times it would come across to me.

How could you relate your poetry to your fiction? Are they connected to the whole world?

At what point in your life is that what you're talking about?

Okay.

Okay. When you're writing a novel or a story, do you stop writing poetry?

Which is also your poetry.

What did you talk about in Rosie O'Donnell's show today?

I was going to ask about that.

She gave you a hug, right?

I was kind of surprised what Mae West was doing there.

Yeah, I've come to like her.

I thought that was kind of interesting and unusual.

And then there was a reference to the movie The Bridges of Madison County where she said you love her.

That's impossible. Mary Tyler Moore maybe.

Well, there were books.

What did you read?

Well I guess the surprise is that his book seems so different from yours.

In fact I couldn't think of almost anything more, well I think it was something more. Is there a connection at all? I mean, how do you put towards the land, the people, and the land that connects you?

And died alone?

And died alone?

Run away from home.

Haven't thought about it.

Human what? Human.

And your grandfather was a storyteller too.

It runs in the family?

How do you figure that? Is this partly a substitute for other entertainment?

What about radio though in the early days?

You were in the Amazon?

Not Amazon.com, the Amazon.

What were you doing?

What were you there for?

Just to study it?

You don't have to plug it in or anything.

What kind of vision did you have? Can you describe it?

And these drugs might be used for medicinal purposes?

They better do some good for you.

Have you been to the Amazon before?

Do you tend to write about it at all?

Do you intend to write about your trip?

I just read the piece that you wrote for the Times about meditation.

It came the other day. I was very impressed.

No.

Should I meditate?

What would it do for me?

How often do you meditate?

Oh, I see.

Exercise doesn't work the same way, does it?

Can't get rid of them.

Do you hate anyone?

Quickly, just like that? No.

You don't?

Oh, sure.

Yeah.

In varying degrees.

Well, on two levels. People on a level of, say, Adolf Hitler, and people in my personal life who have done injustices to me or people who are close to me.

People in my life who have done injustices of one sort or another to me or people who are close to me. And maybe it's not really hate, but it's pretty close to it.

And you don't forget.

You think about it all the time, but you don't forget.

It's interesting. You said right away.

Have you always felt that way?

Maybe so.

Not when you were in Mississippi. No.

One of the more interesting political things the world, I think, was the... What happened in South Africa when they allowed all these terrible criminals to come out. If they confessed, and if they truly confessed, and they can measure the truth in a confession, they were given amnesty. But wait a minute.

Well, I don't think it will. And how do you know what they really are?

Some can.

Amnesty trials.

Okay.

Even those people who never fully recognized what they did?

You don't think so? You're telling me something. It's my only lifetime.

You're coming back?

What happens after we die?

What happens after we die?

It sure is. We don't know how, why, or when.

Don't drink it.

But you still want to live the life you have to the fullest, don't you?

You still want to live the life that you have to the fullest, don't you?

Yeah.

When you were a kid, did you have any idea about what you...

I mean, I know you were writing very early. I guess you had any idea that you would do what you're doing now?

Do you sing?

You've got to make your CD.

You live in California?

In Berkeley?

Where's your daughter now?

We moved one block away to 10th Street. We've been there for many years now.

I just moved off the curb around 11th or 10th. I've always been there. I was fascinated by the fact that in our house many years ago, there was a time when Jane and Paul Bowles both lived there on different floors.

And Dashiell Hammett lived downstairs at the same time. Many years later, Marcel Duchamp lived there. So, it was just filled with sort of echoes of artists who lived there. It's true of the whole neighborhood, in fact.

You feel it sometimes.

We have a house in Maine on an island, but it's so far away we only go there maybe twice a year. We were just up there at that school, you know, for a week.

But there are no electric lights, just gas lights.

What about you? Where do you go?

Where do you live?

Sometimes, yeah.

Got the fog horn going outside usually.

Do you still write long hand?

And you use a computer?

I think you have to, I don't know.

Move things around.

Today I own large, beautiful houses.

And I was in a lot of compensation for the shacks in which I was raised.

Mexico.

When your mother was dying, she said, you're a little mess, ain't you? Still not quite clear what she meant, what you thought she meant by that.

You were the youngest, huh?

So, in a sense, the word master is a positive side to that.

I sort of remembered, and I think this is before, when Whoopi Goldberg first did her show in New York, in my review of the play at the Times, I said that she should be in The Color Purple. This is very old-time. I remembered about a couple of years ago she did it.

It is. I agree. Yeah.

Right

The great nature of the controversy over it makes you want to write about it. Is that your follow up?

So, yeah. And then if you add to that, that there are subjects that are literally taboo. I mean, they kill people in some countries who even talk about female genital mutilation.

Is that the sort of thing that you might want to write about?

What are the things that come across?

Exactly, yeah. I have such admiration for her. You know, I don't watch television, but, you know, you don't have to. She's such a force, you know. You can't miss her.

Are you walking on a book tour? Is this a book tour?

What are you going to read today?

That's a good lesson. Can you always trust the moment?

Yeah.

I mean, someone might stand up and ask, you know, a very offensive question or something.

You don't respond with meditation, do you?

Tell me something. Why pretend? Do you point to any of the incidents?

One special dessert.

You're going to have anything?

Okay, I'll have tea. Do you have herbal tea?

Good. Chamomile.

Anyway, can you think of an incident?

Do you have any information about the incident?

Well, what about the people out there, including critics, who would say, why didn't you write another Color Purple?

You haven't been happy with your critics at all, have you?

Yeah.

Not to mention how painful it is to realize that you just almost completely misunderstood.

Well, that's a good sign.

Did you watch the debate last night?

Yes.

He is. He's a madman.

That's the point. He's going to kill three more. Actually, only two out of three had it wrong.

Yeah, no, no, that's really terrible.

They're not. Believe me. What's the interesting point?

Imagine what it would be like just to have ideas that are different and views that are different.

Why?

You know, the only future. There's no, you know, nothing there for him in a sense. But, you know, there is and it's for him and it's for all of us is to see that there is someone who represents us, because just as he's not permitted to speak in that forum, we aren't.

I just wish Gore were a better person.

Sometimes I like him. You know, I mean, there's a way in which he's he can be very.

I know I even feel like I can identify maybe it's just because they come up to me.

More.

This is a very interesting interview that you did with the woman I know, Eleanor Wachtell from the Canadian Broadcasting Company.

A couple of things. One was referred to your advantageous heritage, which we probably pretty much talked about. Sometimes you think that struggles about identity will never will never end. That was that. Do you mean that on a personal level as well as a.

Could you describe yourself now?

Yeah. African-American, Native American and Euro.

You know, the Scotch Irish part.

Probably tri-spiritual as well.

You weren't Jewish when you were married to a Jewish man.

No. That would have made it quad right.

So that's three trees. They're all three. You can always hug a tree.

And always will move.

Yeah, as a matter of fact. And I wake up and I wonder where was that house?

And some whole other area. Is this Freud?

I'll think on that.

That's not what I dream about.

You mean that's what you have literally literally.

So you think that you said you were dreaming about the house that dream about a house somewhat emptied house.

Well that's interesting. It's possible. It's possible. It's probably more personal. I think you're probably right. You never know.

Are you reading anything now? Any book at all recently?

Your ex-husband has read the book.

What did he say?

I don't know if that's in the notes but there seems to be more of a tolerance for just trying to cut things off.

Except you could talk about it in your writing in some way. Well you know I could. But you know what. When you don't have somebody who that you talk to that remembers. So you just kind of. You know it loses something even even in the writing. I mean I have written a lot and I think he he tends to he really love the folk language in Mississippi. He started talking like we used to see that we said well you actually sound more like a cracker. But he would you know he would talk the talk. And I think that was his way of trying to remember.

How was your time at Sarah Lawrence.

You are.

Ten eleven.

I had a book out last year a biography of Edward Albee.

Edward Albee a singular journey. Simon Schuster wrote it.

You have a copy. I don't have with me.

I've done a number of books. That was the last one. Got very good reviews except in the New York Times.

Oh I was down in the country.

It's been a long time. Three and a half years on.

Well I began by liking his work and just found out so much more about his life. Among the playwrights incredibly interesting. And as in the title of Singular Life a singular journey a very lonely life in many ways. Adopted the age of two weeks and brought up by a very rich couple in Westchester and never never tracked down his natural parents. And so much of his work comes out of the life that he led up there in Westchester with his family.

Gosh I had no idea but I dealt pretty deeply into it. It was not authorized but he was very cooperative. I've known him a long time. We talked just endlessly about his alcoholism. Just everything he wants.

Well did they know what they had with you?

Maybe every artist is a singular journey. I think so. I think so.

Yes.

You don't with all of it but in fact it all does.

I tend to be more trusting of work like that. Because I know that there is no choice.

You are dealing with the stuff. You are dealing with...

Well you have what you have. Talk about your family heritage. That is your heritage.

Was that the first turning point? To Sarah Lawrence more than Spelman?

Right. It just felt more like home in that way.

When you say strange, what do you think?

In terms of work, the first novel came after Sarah Lawrence or during Sarah Lawrence?

After, yeah.

I do too.

Well, interviews aren't easy. I mean that's, having occasionally been on the other side of the fence.

It's working.

Martin Luther King Jr.

He was someone who had a lot of life, I mean a lot of spirit.

It's also a wonderful antidote to somehow great people you assume somehow they're more or less than human.

So yeah, I have been on the other side.

Really?

Oh fantastic.

He had a lot of lovers?

Go Einstein.

Oh yeah, I'm sure he was.

Yeah, well there you have it.

Rascal.

You have your driver outside.