Alice Walker Interview, 12 October 2000 - C_4001_01_01_acc_20191119
00:00:07
Where are you coming from?
00:00:33
This was the late 60s when you were in there?
00:00:51
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.
00:01:31
It's probably right there.
00:01:41
When was your daughter born again?
00:01:43
69? So she was even a little bit younger than my son.
00:01:48
He was born in 67.
00:02:00
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…
00:02:09
Cheers.
00:02:17
Survived a lot as a matter of fact.
00:02:22
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.
00:02:28
The wall just fell down from our building.
00:02:30
Terrible. It was sort of like the end of the 60s.
00:02:34
Yeah. Right next door. Next door. To the so-called bomb factory.
00:02:55
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.
00:03:19
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.
00:03:55
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.
00:04:24
And not radical enough. What about social change?
00:04:35
It's easier to pick up a gun or a bomb.
00:05:01
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...
00:05:09
Well, you say, not only forgive him, I guess, but you adored him.
00:05:18
How is that possible?
00:05:29
I see.
00:06:13
You'd heard the stories before this.
00:07:47
And he was the role model for Mr. Herbert?
00:08:02
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.
00:09:35
Well, this is the question, I guess. Why isn't there blame?
00:09:51
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...
00:11:18
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.
00:12:18
And it was true in your father's day as well as your grandfather's day.
00:12:37
Have you been here before?
00:12:44
Everything.
00:13:11
Except for the spicy fried shrimp, oh boy, that's the one loser on the menu.
00:13:26
Did you say scallops?
00:13:44
Well, you can go out there.
00:13:52
Scallops as well.
00:14:18
Yeah.
00:14:20
Anyway, the new book, I realize that some of the stories go back to the earlier, mid-80s than today.
00:14:39
What provoked you to do it now? What brought it together with you?
00:15:53
The marriage was.
00:16:41
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?
00:16:58
Are they different people, would you say?
00:18:44
Olive oil as well, is that also restorative?
00:19:52
The first story came last?
00:20:14
Yes.
00:20:43
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?
00:21:05
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?
00:23:20
In any case, you haven't thought about publishing the book for a while.
00:23:38
It was sitting there.
00:23:53
Really?
00:24:04
In fact, you started writing 30 years ago. You started publishing 30 years ago.
00:24:15
It was published in 1970, so actually this is your...
00:24:19
Yeah, so it's 30 years.
00:24:22
Yeah, amazing. I mean, that's a lot of writing.
00:24:41
Yeah.
00:25:25
No choice?
00:25:56
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.
00:27:13
Was The Color Purple handed down to you?
00:27:59
Was there a moment when you were swimming?
00:28:05
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.
00:28:27
Could you go back and remember the actual moment when it began?
00:30:29
As members of your family or as characters?
00:30:39
With names attached to them?
00:31:18
Actually, you were not swimming or running through a field when you thought it was boring?
00:31:38
I mean, it's about serving your art.
00:32:23
Only through art they could survive?
00:32:26
Once you began to become very fast?
00:32:32
You heard it wrong?
00:32:39
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.
00:33:42
It was more practical than magical, maybe.
00:33:47
And the stories themselves, some of them came from your family's life.
00:33:56
Yeah. Well, the stories in the Color Purple, for example.
00:34:53
You were able to give more lives to her.
00:35:17
And your mother didn't actually get to read Color Purple. She was sick.
00:35:28
But anyway, you were saying that Color Purple and the Temple were the two books that you felt that about, that they came?
00:36:16
You said a while ago that, for about the 30 years, could you live without writing?
00:37:37
Well, you've produced a lot since Color Purple.
00:38:10
I mean, just really...
00:38:36
Oh, can you imagine?
00:38:56
The best part is the actual writing of it?
00:39:05
Like fame, success, wide readership. Yeah. You'll find this easily.
00:39:26
Well, it wasn't too long thereafter, when fame descended or ascended on you.
00:39:34
But it's true, I mean...
00:39:52
Well, there was mail, oh God, yes.
00:40:12
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.
00:40:31
And then there's Arthur Miller's another one, creating a table.
00:40:36
I don't find women I've talked to ever use such metaphors at all.
00:40:41
Well, there's a basic difference between men and women, right?
00:40:56
Very interesting.
00:41:07
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.
00:41:27
Well, I'll just say, beginning with Color Purple, you wrote the rules. You aren't supposed to write a novel like that.
00:41:37
Of course. But I mean, the craft is there, but it's your own adventure.
00:42:27
Yeah, oh yeah.
00:42:32
Oh, God.
00:42:40
Oh, yeah, sure.
00:42:49
I'm surprised he never, maybe he did, in fact, come back.
00:43:13
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?
00:43:39
You're welcome.
00:44:21
You were happy with it.
00:44:27
You've changed your mind several times about the movie though, too. Reading that book you wrote about it seems to have changed you.
00:44:34
Well, it wasn't exactly the book.
00:45:23
Doesn't that look good?
00:45:40
How about your publishers actually come in here?
00:45:57
They're in the neighborhood.
00:46:18
When was the last time you saw the movie?
00:46:22
It makes me cry.
00:46:31
Yeah, every time I see it.
00:46:50
I really, it's a very moving film.
00:46:58
And even though it wasn't a screenplay, it doesn't.
Alice Walker Interview, 12 October 2000 - C_4001_02_01_acc_20191119
00:00:49
I suppose how all three, book, screenplay, and movie all work and exist.
00:01:01
That book, screenplay, and movie can all exist independently.
00:01:06
Which are you very interested in?
00:02:01
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.
00:02:10
In which you said and how much you, not only did, but also learned about your grandfather.
00:02:23
I just saw him and he made a film of Hoosman and Lena.
00:02:34
It was very good.
00:02:36
Very different from other versions. It was him many times on stage and the other movie. But he's such a good actor.
00:02:43
Meridian, whichever book from the movie is here, never made.
00:04:50
Didn't you feel the danger that you were in? The actual threat of it all?
00:06:27
What's that about? Learning from adversity. And it seems to me that a lot of the art has come out of adversity.
00:07:28
Well, sometimes you put away the closet.
00:07:36
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.
00:07:54
Just bottled it up.
00:08:02
They could have told her in different ways.
00:08:15
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.
00:10:05
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.
00:10:56
How could you relate your poetry to your fiction? Are they connected to the whole world?
00:12:29
At what point in your life is that what you're talking about?
00:12:37
Okay.
00:13:16
Okay. When you're writing a novel or a story, do you stop writing poetry?
00:14:12
Which is also your poetry.
00:14:32
What did you talk about in Rosie O'Donnell's show today?
00:14:53
I was going to ask about that.
00:15:03
She gave you a hug, right?
00:15:06
I was kind of surprised what Mae West was doing there.
00:15:10
Yeah, I've come to like her.
00:16:19
I thought that was kind of interesting and unusual.
00:16:22
And then there was a reference to the movie The Bridges of Madison County where she said you love her.
00:16:31
That's impossible. Mary Tyler Moore maybe.
00:16:47
Well, there were books.
00:16:51
What did you read?
00:18:56
Well I guess the surprise is that his book seems so different from yours.
00:19:06
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?
00:20:38
And died alone?
00:20:42
And died alone?
00:20:48
Run away from home.
00:21:01
Haven't thought about it.
00:21:16
Human what? Human.
00:22:42
And your grandfather was a storyteller too.
00:22:48
It runs in the family?
00:22:55
How do you figure that? Is this partly a substitute for other entertainment?
00:23:02
What about radio though in the early days?
00:23:27
You were in the Amazon?
00:23:29
Not Amazon.com, the Amazon.
00:23:36
What were you doing?
00:24:05
What were you there for?
00:24:09
Just to study it?
00:24:46
You don't have to plug it in or anything.
00:24:57
What kind of vision did you have? Can you describe it?
00:26:47
And these drugs might be used for medicinal purposes?
00:27:00
They better do some good for you.
00:27:13
Have you been to the Amazon before?
00:28:49
Do you tend to write about it at all?
00:28:52
Do you intend to write about your trip?
00:28:59
I just read the piece that you wrote for the Times about meditation.
00:29:04
It came the other day. I was very impressed.
00:29:07
No.
00:29:13
Should I meditate?
00:29:17
What would it do for me?
00:29:33
How often do you meditate?
00:29:38
Oh, I see.
00:30:23
Exercise doesn't work the same way, does it?
00:30:51
Can't get rid of them.
00:31:17
Do you hate anyone?
00:31:22
Quickly, just like that? No.
00:31:24
You don't?
00:31:26
Oh, sure.
00:31:28
Yeah.
00:31:30
In varying degrees.
00:31:34
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.
00:31:48
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.
00:31:58
And you don't forget.
00:32:00
You think about it all the time, but you don't forget.
00:32:02
It's interesting. You said right away.
00:32:06
Have you always felt that way?
00:32:07
Maybe so.
00:32:09
Not when you were in Mississippi. No.
00:32:17
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.
00:32:44
Well, I don't think it will. And how do you know what they really are?
00:33:01
Some can.
00:33:40
Amnesty trials.
00:33:58
Okay.
00:35:33
Even those people who never fully recognized what they did?
00:35:58
You don't think so? You're telling me something. It's my only lifetime.
00:36:08
You're coming back?
00:36:13
What happens after we die?
00:36:18
What happens after we die?
00:36:42
It sure is. We don't know how, why, or when.
00:37:10
Don't drink it.
00:37:47
But you still want to live the life you have to the fullest, don't you?
00:37:51
You still want to live the life that you have to the fullest, don't you?
00:37:55
Yeah.
00:38:34
When you were a kid, did you have any idea about what you...
00:38:40
I mean, I know you were writing very early. I guess you had any idea that you would do what you're doing now?
00:39:00
Do you sing?
00:39:21
You've got to make your CD.
00:39:52
You live in California?
00:39:55
In Berkeley?
00:40:23
Where's your daughter now?
00:40:40
We moved one block away to 10th Street. We've been there for many years now.
00:40:46
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.
00:41:02
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.
00:41:14
You feel it sometimes.
00:41:21
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.
00:41:31
But there are no electric lights, just gas lights.
00:41:36
What about you? Where do you go?
00:41:39
Where do you live?
00:42:48
Sometimes, yeah.
00:42:52
Got the fog horn going outside usually.
00:42:59
Do you still write long hand?
00:43:12
And you use a computer?
00:43:15
I think you have to, I don't know.
00:43:35
Move things around.
00:44:08
Today I own large, beautiful houses.
00:44:12
And I was in a lot of compensation for the shacks in which I was raised.
00:44:42
Mexico.
00:44:52
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.
00:45:22
You were the youngest, huh?
00:46:52
So, in a sense, the word master is a positive side to that.
00:47:28
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.
Alice Walker Interview, 12 October 2000 - C_4002_01_01_acc_20191119 - C_4002_01_01_acc_20191119
00:00:46
It is. I agree. Yeah.
00:01:34
Right
00:01:45
The great nature of the controversy over it makes you want to write about it. Is that your follow up?
00:02:11
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.
00:03:45
Is that the sort of thing that you might want to write about?
00:05:04
What are the things that come across?
00:06:33
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.
00:07:03
Are you walking on a book tour? Is this a book tour?
00:07:27
What are you going to read today?
00:07:45
That's a good lesson. Can you always trust the moment?
00:07:51
Yeah.
00:07:55
I mean, someone might stand up and ask, you know, a very offensive question or something.
00:08:03
You don't respond with meditation, do you?
00:08:13
Tell me something. Why pretend? Do you point to any of the incidents?
00:08:29
One special dessert.
00:08:46
You're going to have anything?
00:08:48
Okay, I'll have tea. Do you have herbal tea?
00:08:51
Good. Chamomile.
00:09:08
Anyway, can you think of an incident?
00:09:21
Do you have any information about the incident?
00:10:37
Well, what about the people out there, including critics, who would say, why didn't you write another Color Purple?
00:10:57
You haven't been happy with your critics at all, have you?
00:12:38
Yeah.
00:13:52
Not to mention how painful it is to realize that you just almost completely misunderstood.
00:15:41
Well, that's a good sign.
00:16:29
Did you watch the debate last night?
00:16:42
Yes.
00:17:05
He is. He's a madman.
00:17:11
That's the point. He's going to kill three more. Actually, only two out of three had it wrong.
00:17:19
Yeah, no, no, that's really terrible.
00:17:44
They're not. Believe me. What's the interesting point?
00:17:53
Imagine what it would be like just to have ideas that are different and views that are different.
00:18:12
Why?
00:18:30
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.
00:19:05
I just wish Gore were a better person.
00:19:11
Sometimes I like him. You know, I mean, there's a way in which he's he can be very.
00:19:47
I know I even feel like I can identify maybe it's just because they come up to me.
00:20:45
More.
00:20:52
This is a very interesting interview that you did with the woman I know, Eleanor Wachtell from the Canadian Broadcasting Company.
00:21:03
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.
00:21:43
Could you describe yourself now?
00:21:57
Yeah. African-American, Native American and Euro.
00:22:03
You know, the Scotch Irish part.
00:22:09
Probably tri-spiritual as well.
00:22:26
You weren't Jewish when you were married to a Jewish man.
00:22:31
No. That would have made it quad right.
00:22:41
So that's three trees. They're all three. You can always hug a tree.
00:23:39
And always will move.
00:24:26
Yeah, as a matter of fact. And I wake up and I wonder where was that house?
00:24:39
And some whole other area. Is this Freud?
00:25:04
I'll think on that.
00:25:27
That's not what I dream about.
00:25:38
You mean that's what you have literally literally.
00:25:41
So you think that you said you were dreaming about the house that dream about a house somewhat emptied house.
00:25:47
Well that's interesting. It's possible. It's possible. It's probably more personal. I think you're probably right. You never know.
00:26:12
Are you reading anything now? Any book at all recently?
00:27:07
Your ex-husband has read the book.
00:27:13
What did he say?
00:27:57
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.
00:29:01
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.
00:29:45
How was your time at Sarah Lawrence.
00:30:58
You are.
00:31:28
Ten eleven.
00:31:47
I had a book out last year a biography of Edward Albee.
00:31:53
Edward Albee a singular journey. Simon Schuster wrote it.
00:31:56
You have a copy. I don't have with me.
00:31:59
I've done a number of books. That was the last one. Got very good reviews except in the New York Times.
00:32:06
Oh I was down in the country.
00:32:11
It's been a long time. Three and a half years on.
00:32:22
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.
00:32:50
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.
00:33:19
Well did they know what they had with you?
00:33:26
Maybe every artist is a singular journey. I think so. I think so.
00:33:51
Yes.
00:33:59
You don't with all of it but in fact it all does.
00:34:02
I tend to be more trusting of work like that. Because I know that there is no choice.
00:34:08
You are dealing with the stuff. You are dealing with...
00:34:13
Well you have what you have. Talk about your family heritage. That is your heritage.
00:35:12
Was that the first turning point? To Sarah Lawrence more than Spelman?
00:35:46
Right. It just felt more like home in that way.
00:36:16
When you say strange, what do you think?
00:38:05
In terms of work, the first novel came after Sarah Lawrence or during Sarah Lawrence?
00:38:10
After, yeah.
00:38:30
I do too.
00:38:36
Well, interviews aren't easy. I mean that's, having occasionally been on the other side of the fence.
00:39:09
It's working.
00:39:24
Martin Luther King Jr.
00:39:42
He was someone who had a lot of life, I mean a lot of spirit.
00:40:05
It's also a wonderful antidote to somehow great people you assume somehow they're more or less than human.
00:40:16
So yeah, I have been on the other side.
00:40:27
Really?
00:40:29
Oh fantastic.
00:40:30
He had a lot of lovers?
00:40:38
Go Einstein.
00:40:43
Oh yeah, I'm sure he was.
00:40:53
Yeah, well there you have it.
00:40:55
Rascal.
00:41:05
You have your driver outside.
Interview with Bill Irwin, 8 February 1983
00:02:25
Is that a special deck or?
00:05:10
This one comes up outside of columns and it's a special one.
00:06:05
Strictly business.
00:07:55
It's me again.
00:08:48
Yes.
00:08:51
Really?
00:10:00
How long have you been reading cards?
00:10:12
Do you use tarot cards, too, or---?
00:15:18
Does it help to know someone or is it even better, is it easier when you don't know someone at all?
00:15:23
Same thing.
00:17:22
Her cards.
00:22:43
Do you have time to do a meeting hour sometime?
00:22:46
Another time.
00:22:51
Yeah, you've got somebody coming in. And what did you say, 82?
00:23:29
I didn't know that at all. For a second I thought he was somebody who had written---
00:23:53
I don't know about it all.
00:23:59
The title of that book is that novel is---
00:24:17
That's an interesting project.
00:24:29
Your sandy-haired older man?
00:24:34
Oh yeah, you mentioned her.
00:25:15
But also somewhat changing it to suit one's response. With your wife, I gather she did.
00:25:28
[Inaudible]
00:26:18
You watched the show last night first?
00:27:08
Things I did, too.
00:27:11
Michael's reaction to the Shakespeare, to Shakespeare used as a crucifix. Reaction shots of you, yeah, were suddenly very funny.
00:27:50
Maybe that's why it's so funny. There was a real antagonistic thing set up, which is so funny.
00:28:27
What did you think of his performance? Just off the cuff without any...
00:29:10
I think it's quite good, and it set up that whole sort of threat which you need. You really felt that it was in fact a chase, which is why, for example, one thing that I did again last night is---is that trampoline going, it's not there, it's not in the way. A gag obviously didn't set up, but still, because of the good build-up---
00:30:11
Exactly. And Doug's sort of going out on a limb and then later...
00:30:24
It's all a trick.
00:30:44
Yeah. He shot the shit with me a couple times. Interesting little guy, and in some ways, he's a little self-conscious with each other, we don't have a whole lot to say, but... he's a really interesting character. A very good man. Probably be around, you'll want to see him.
00:31:12
How did your thing with Pat go?
00:31:28
He struck me as possibly sandy-haired.
00:31:40
Did he have a project at all that he was doing?
00:32:29
Is he sorry about that?
00:33:14
Money talks. Money talks.
00:34:20
Turn your head.
00:35:07
Oh, it's heavy.
00:35:12
It's big too.
00:36:34
One of the things that seemed to, seemed to get better and better as I watched is the marionette that went across.
00:36:48
Uh huh.
00:36:49
Fine. I'd like to find something somewhere between this hat and that. This one is just too flimsy.
00:37:51
George Carle does hat moves too?
00:38:46
Below the waist?
00:41:03
Do people really watch him though? I mean after the strippers or?
00:43:19
Jacket.
00:45:32
Do you write music?
00:45:36
Write music. Yeah, that song you sang. That little song.
00:45:48
That's where Kathy's technique became the most transparent.
00:46:50
You watch Caesar on Saturday Night Live?
00:46:53
Dude---
00:46:55
I thought it was very sad. That's crazy.
00:47:28
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:47:31
It's a little sentimental, but there's something behind it. What I thought was sad was the rest of the show. He was a victim of that show. What, the writing was awful, and I would guess if he knew it...
00:47:52
Yeah, yeah.
00:47:55
He's also much less than a lot of people, but it's true. He is caught in his era. It's very hard to...
00:48:05
Although, on the other hand, you see those, some of the tapes or whatever, the broadcasting, you can say, it's still terribly funny.
00:48:34
It seems like he did the silent movie and also the, there was The German Professor.
00:48:42
Neither of which were funny at all, and yet both of those appear very frequently over there. In other words, if you're writing a silent movie, it's funnier. And the other actors have fun, I think, over there. I mean, you may be right about the, you know, frozen or victim of time, but I think maybe---in different circumstances---
00:49:54
Did he and Eddie Murphy do anything earlier on? I know some---
00:50:02
They should've. Well, when I tuned in, Eddie Murphy was standing next to him, and the rest of the cast looked like they had just met.
00:50:15
It's one of those shows where he gave me a warning that he wasn't gonna be that good. He's wearing his dungarees besides.
00:50:24
He's wearing his dungarees, it's like, his leisure suit.
00:50:30
You didn't see his opening monologue.
00:50:32
[Inaudible]
00:51:28
I know the professor was kind of like he was a little sedated.
00:51:59
Actually, I didn't see the best of him.
00:52:04
Right.
00:52:07
Sure, he was in a great movie, but he was really something.
00:52:43
His best work, actually, was onstage, and at some point he decided he just was so terrified of working on stage, that he wouldn't do it anymore. He got physically sick at every performance. He couldn't do it. So you keep reading about him coming back.
00:53:00
That's what he said.
00:53:03
We've seen.
00:53:54
Which is why you'll never work again, right?
00:55:04
That's your tap class, I take it.
00:55:08
[Inaudible]
00:56:23
Caesar did a, we might have talked about it, a seminar over at the Museum of Broadcasting.
00:56:35
I couldn't get in. I did leave him a note.
00:57:01
You're right.
00:57:09
You know, when you talk about Arkin, I thought for a minute you were going to say Erwin Corey, who is somebody on occasion---I've never seen him live.
00:57:21
Oh, yeah?
00:57:23
Really?
00:57:24
That's great.
00:57:27
I don't know. I thought some of his stuff was great. He got into Playboy Club bookings for a while. And one time I saw him on TV, looking Heffneroid. Although that may have been a projection of mine.
Interview with Dorothy Gallagher, 4 April 2001 - Interview with Dorothy Gallagher, April 4, 2001 - 1
00:00:00
Going to a theatre-
00:00:04
Yeah he did stop, of course
00:00:15
Anyway, the driver came at 7:30 in the morning? Or is coming at 7:30?
00:00:23
She wanted to know why 7:30, she told them to me last night
00:00:30
Cause we went through this whole thing, and I said, I can't imagine anybody would-
00:00:43
One reason why I liked your book so much is that it reminded me-
00:00:50
Could I get a glass of white wine, please
00:00:56
I'll take the grigio.
00:01:00
[Laughs]
00:01:02
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.
00:01:08
When I run into him. So you burned the book, and that's the end of the story.
00:01:13
You know, It was good enough to think, maybe it's about time I sat down and wrote about that.
00:01:16
Rutgers? University Press.
00:01:19
But now it's been done. It can't be done.
00:01:23
What made you finally do it?
00:02:01
And you found another publisher, it came out and got that review -
00:02:09
[laughing] Thrift? Thirft thrift
00:02:12
And sell it to the movies, then.
00:02:37
It's been a long time between books.
00:02:47
There were several that I wrote down [indiscernible]
00:02:53
Notes about your parents or about the rest of the family?
00:02:56
Juliet Stuart Poyntz.
00:03:00
Dolores…
00:03:02
Faconti.
00:03:10
Do you think you wrote it differently now than you would have if you had written it when they were alive, or -?
00:03:32
And the story about the story of the family, had you made notes on that?
00:03:50
Close the bar.
00:04:17
First three in the book, actually?
00:04:27
Could we have some water, too, please?
00:04:35
Cheers.
00:04:37
Here's to success.
00:04:38
Well- you already have success with the book, I hear.
00:04:43
That was two nice reviews in the Times.
00:04:49
No more black hole.
00:04:54
We're all used to it! The writers get together… Black holes.
00:05:01
Publishers black holes - that's right.
00:05:15
I want to get back to the book itself--
00:05:17
But mentioning editors, was Bob Gottlieb the first editor who turned down the other book?
00:05:22
Yeah, that's what I figured.
00:05:29
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.
00:05:45
And the Sunday Times gave it a pretty good review, but a small review.
00:05:49
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.
00:05:50
Dolores Faconti is another story.
00:05:56
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.
00:05:56
xI want to hear it.
00:06:21
Yes. He actually turned down the book, and it got that review, after-
00:06:33
Well, the Kaysen[?] Review was very good.
00:06:44
But it disappeared.
00:06:46
Well, here you're thinking about dealing with… I'm still again with these...
00:06:50
That's publishing for you. Any case, go back to the editor. This book, you said, he really was very good about it.
00:06:51
Melodramatic figures in the world scene. Melodramatic figures in the world scene. And now you do... just this family?
00:07:09
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" -
00:07:26
Yeah. Which is one discouragement from doing it. That I've always felt
00:07:31
Who wants another memoir? Who wants another--
00:07:32
Well, did you have to gather lots of, I mean, you do say you're quoting from that one.
00:07:47
Did that really exist?
00:07:49
I wondered whether you made that up, or -
00:07:56
Not published -- turned down by Rob Gottlieb
00:08:14
And your father saved your mother from drowning?
00:08:19
[singing] One good deed.
00:08:23
He's watching up there.
00:08:25
What do you think, in the end, the book is saying about your family?
00:08:27
You think he was sorry about… You know…
00:08:34
Well… I just think that one never really knows one's parents.
00:08:58
Would you have felt more freedom if it were a novel?
00:09:05
Including your father?
00:09:10
No.
00:09:10
I'm not sure from reading the book, the extent you felt it-
00:09:14
Yeah.
00:09:22
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.
00:09:45
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.
00:09:48
All true.
00:10:01
I wouldn't accuse you of sentimentality, no.
00:10:02
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.
00:10:13
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]
00:10:16
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.
00:10:33
You said that in a m--
00:10:34
When you weren't fighting?
00:10:35
Well, in my family now, there's, those sisters, sometimes for decades, some of them didn't speak to one another.
00:10:35
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-
00:10:42
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.
00:10:49
Wars!
00:10:52
You had wars, too, obviously, or, or private battles among, the various relatives.
00:11:02
Well, large families, anyway--
00:11:15
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.
00:11:22
Attachment?
00:11:25
You know, it's typical.
00:11:27
No, Neither one. Never liked me, anyway. No loss.
00:11:32
No loss.
00:11:32
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?
00:11:47
True story?
00:11:55
Told in the family.
00:12:11
Well, this is a question, though.
00:12:14
I mean, it's true as far as you know, but are all stories true as, as told by families?
00:12:32
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.
00:12:43
But he was actually close to being a Golden Glove boxer.
00:12:47
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.
00:12:59
Okay.
00:13:04
Well, if they told it to you, there was a, a good measure of truth in it, you'd say.
00:13:09
I mean, it's a question of how many, how many sales, I suppose, Lily actually made.
00:13:33
Were there any…. Suprises? Revelations? As you thought about your family, Or your own growing up, or…?
00:13:34
What did you leave out?
00:13:51
Your parents don't kiss. Is this a revelation?
00:14:00
You mentioned briefly an earlier marriage, but.
00:14:28
Some great tragedy you left out of there
00:14:34
Even your father?
00:14:42
I don't love him, from the book.
00:14:44
Don't love him, yeah.
00:14:54
Would you like another?
00:14:59
Your inheritance.
00:15:05
By inheritance, you don't mean money, property…
00:15:09
Heritage.
00:15:21
He ran a series of garages here? That was -
00:15:26
And they're all dead now?
00:15:27
And he would come home and your mother would run the garage, and not know what she-- [laughter] I mean, that's pretty strange.
00:15:38
How did your father let himself get fooled by the, con-man. Was that a characteristic trait, or…?
00:16:00
Always a mistake.
00:16:43
Would your father have cared about grandchildren?
00:16:49
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.
00:16:56
An only kid, an only goat…
00:17:08
What about, uh, how do you pronounce your name? Szymborska?
00:17:16
Yes. You liked her poetry very much.
00:17:33
Adored?
00:17:34
Not in Polish -?
00:17:35
A daughter.
00:17:37
Only child?
00:17:50
She has a feeling I can draw on.
00:17:55
In such a large family
00:18:04
Did you ever meet Ben's father?
00:18:05
It's amazing why that generation had so many, I mean that's…
00:18:13
I was once in that house, I remember. Some Brendan Gill event.
00:18:16
And had a lot of sex.
00:18:18
I was in that house, which was one of the most amazing houses I've ever, ever been in.
00:18:20
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.
00:18:29
Amazing.
00:18:36
They're all dead. Yeah. Some cousins are, some cousins still alive. But yeah, that's about it.
00:18:38
You never saw the house? It's still there.
00:18:41
Yeah, they're all gone. Maybe I could write it, now.
00:18:43
With the royalties on your book, you can buy it back, right?
00:18:47
that's too much malevolence going on in my family [laughs]
00:18:51
What are you working on now?
00:18:53
Good stories. But, but you didn't have lots of letters and journals and things like that to help you along?
00:18:54
You're not going to wait another ten years for a book, are you?
00:19:01
Other people with memories, that would stimulate your memories?
00:19:10
Yeah I know the name, but-
00:19:26
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-
00:19:44
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.
00:19:44
What's the piece for the Book Review?
00:19:46
Oh!
00:19:48
Ok.
00:19:53
Oh, a review. A review of a book.
00:19:58
Two years. It didn't matter. We'd sit there and we'd talk about, like, who's got different boyhoods, it was amazing.
00:20:04
Of course, you didn't have that by not having a sibling. So it wouldn't-
00:20:11
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...?
00:20:46
Her mother, or your mother?
00:20:52
Maybe so.
00:20:57
This is what I would like to do.
00:21:02
One basic difference between our families is the politics.
00:21:05
Which was an essential element of your family. Could you talk about that, about how committed they were, or?
00:21:07
He's still just edits some books for Knopf and he writes about a dance for the Observer.
00:21:25
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.
00:21:33
Why did they join? Or what was their interest?
00:21:44
Actually, speaking of my Aunt Ruth, my wife and I gave him a couple of her plastic purses.
00:21:52
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-
00:22:01
So he has two of Aunt Ruth's [laughing] plastic purses. I'll get them back.
00:22:13
They sure are
00:22:27
that's good.
00:22:33
Well, I think I probably will too, though in fact he did publish two profiles for me in the-
00:22:34
And what years were they coming here?
00:22:38
Mitigates a little bit. And I like Maria Tucci, but that's okay.
00:22:47
Really?
00:22:51
Wow.
00:22:53
But there are all levels of grudges, too, I think. Let us keep that in mind. There are grudges and grudges.
00:23:06
No, this is, I'm really listening, because it's curious. My mother came at the same time, pretty much, and they were, in a sense, so relieved to be here, that they never looked back on Russia whatsoever. And my, my, my father, for example, he was really young, he must have been 12 or something. He immediately learned English so fast, that he never spoke with an accent his entire life.
00:23:13
That's good.
00:23:20
I haven't seen him lately.
00:23:23
And actually, whenever he'd left the New Yorker, I'd stopped writing for them, so that's something I guess.
00:23:25
Yeah. He just obliterated every bit of the past. When he finally went back to Russia, there was another- that's for my book. But, but, uh, it was a total break. And anything that would at all smack of an earlier country, they were not in- not any of them- they were not interested. Some of them would tell stories about it, but y'know-
00:23:34
It's somewhat better than it was in Tina Brown's day.
00:23:38
He's done a good job - though he doesn't want me to write for him, so-
00:23:42
Whereas it seems to me that, at least in terms of the politics, it's quite different.
00:23:52
Yeah.
00:23:53
But also, the feeling of wanting something more than what they found here, at that very time, or-
00:23:54
Do you know Elizabeth Colbert?
00:24:06
Well, I'd like to write for them again, but he's not interested, I guess he's…
00:24:34
And, uh, this was around Harlem, wasn't it, in Manhattan?
00:24:35
There's an acknowledgement for Sergei...
00:24:37
For his masterpiece, Ours? Now, come on. What is his masterpiece I've never heard of?
00:24:59
Well, this is what, again, what a major difference.
00:25:04
And, and as a child, you used to read The Daily Worker?
00:25:23
But you said you, you, at some point you said in the book that you didn't feel you were a red diaper baby, as such. I mean, it would mean that you were-
00:25:29
I thought you said it. You were!
00:25:31
Very much so.
00:25:34
I see.
00:25:49
Mhm.
00:25:51
so not babies, essentially
00:25:56
It's very interesting that politics was such a, such a strong element.
00:26:19
I could see that, that's interesting.
00:26:26
I'll look it up. Tell me about, uh, is it Lily's husband Ben? Is that his name?
00:26:28
Well, it wasn't strange in some circles, but as I said, that would be very divergent from what, uh, what I remember.
00:26:33
Ben.
00:26:35
I mean, one of my grandfathers that was supposed to be the intellectual of the family, I mean, read the Daily Mirror. I mean, that was like, that's a step ahead. Some intellectual. It was a tabloid.
00:26:35
Lily's husband Ben.
00:26:40
Was he a strong character in your childhood, or just a…?
00:26:46
But I couldn't imagine having come across the Daily Worker, or anything.
00:26:50
In fact, I remember once, was it, at college? Our fraternity wanted to subscribe to the Daily Worker. It was a major incident on campus. And out of curiosity, they wanted to get it. And y'know, an incident.
00:27:03
Middlebury College.
00:27:06
No, no.
00:27:06
Picks up the background, yes.
00:27:11
I do.
00:27:13
Really?
00:27:14
Is there a party?
00:27:30
As a girl growing up, then, politics was an interest to you, more than many things? Were you reading a lot, or were you writing, or...?
00:27:35
Did it?
00:27:50
What were you reading?
00:28:00
Real communist book.
00:28:07
I think I remember him from the movie.
00:28:10
Was it the tape recorder, maybe?
00:28:14
Let me tell you. What I think is the classic tape recorder story. My favorite tape recorder story. Joe Lelyveld, now the editor of the Times, when he was at the London Bureau, decided to do a piece on John Le Carré, went to interview him, drove all the way up to Cornwall, interviewed him, came back, and the tape didn't work. Called him, said "I'll have to do it again," saw him in London, did it again, came back.
00:28:37
Twice. Went back a third time. Finally, it worked the third time, and he wrote his piece for the Times magazine.
00:28:41
What did you think about writing at that point?
00:28:44
You went to Hunter College and left after a couple years?
00:28:47
He didn't know how to work a tape recorder. Now he's the editor of the Times. You figure it out.
00:28:48
Two years.
00:28:51
I did a piece on John Le Carré a couple of months ago, and the first thing I asked him was, "is it true, this legendary story?" He said,"absolutely." He said, "my children thought that he was a spy, and he had no intention of tape recording anything." Three times, and he's the editor, well, you know.
00:28:52
What?
00:29:07
So, it happens.
00:29:10
And you traveled the country- I'm probably getting all the chronology wrong, but you traveled the country and lived in a commune somewhere? Is this later- that's much later?
00:29:11
When I do books, there's an actress friend of my son who transcribes everything for me.
00:29:17
I- well, I don't do everything, but… a lot of tapes.
00:29:20
Isn't that what it said in the-?
00:29:23
Another book.
00:29:24
That's the advantage of doing a memoir, you see.
00:29:25
There was a point in which you traveled around America, though.
00:29:30
Make it up.
00:29:34
Do you keep a journal of things like that? No?
00:29:48
Then at some point you went to a career blazers agency.
00:29:51
When did your title come? What did you think of that?
00:29:52
I got my first job at career blazers.
00:29:54
I remember them well
00:29:54
Title of the book.
00:29:57
I don't remember. I got a job at Newsweek Magazine through career blazes.
00:29:57
Just like that
00:30:11
About what year are we talking about, here?
00:30:30
okay, I think it was about 1959 that I went to them.
00:30:35
Why I Ma-- Say it again?
00:30:38
I couldn't get a job out of the army with a master's degree in journalism. I couldn't get a job anywhere. I went to career blazers. They got me a job in Newsweek. And they got me a job at magazine management. I couldn't get a job anywhere. I went to career blazers. They got me a job in Newsweek. And they got me a job at magazine management. I couldn't get a job anywhere. I went to career blazers. They got me a job in Newsweek.
00:30:41
Shorter than I Am.
00:30:42
Not Blacker than I am?
00:30:46
So, while you were making that up, I was interviewing Sammy Davis Jr. in this - they bought a-
00:30:47
All right, tell me about that.
00:30:50
You made up stories.
00:30:51
Yeah, true. They bought a townhouse uptown. He was two hours late in the interview. Yeah. I was furious. Yeah. It was the first time I heard about CPT, Colored People's Time, as he referred to it as.
00:31:04
"Oh, sorry. Oh, sorry."
00:31:07
It was a wonderful interview when we finally sat down and talked. He couldn't have been nicer. He was great, actually.
00:31:11
But it was literally two hours late. I was just -
00:31:15
Outside his apartment. I finally left. I was going to leave. It was like close to dark-
00:31:18
What kind of jobs?
00:31:19
Yeah, I was just waiting. And he finally showed up. Breezing in. Had to do the story. And it was a very good story. That was when his autobiography came out.
00:31:30
Yes.
00:31:31
They were married and he had written, or, his autobiography had been written by this couple that wrote it. Called "Yes I Can."
00:31:39
What are their names? Their names…
00:31:42
Sure. And he was actually a wonderful interview, in fact, but… Never waited longer for anything in my life, I don't think. Better to make it up.
00:31:52
I think so. Well, I think that's probably, I think, what I left here…
00:32:03
Well, yeah, your trip back five years after your parents died, you went back. You went to Romania.
00:32:06
"She'll be right there."
00:32:09
So, daffing your other hat - or, donning is the word.
00:33:12
Which, you actually weren't making up - I mean, were not interviewing people for stories and things.
00:33:22
But you didn't actually go to where your mother was from.
00:33:33
So, then, I was interviewing for Newsweek at that very time.
00:33:34
Well, I wonder what it would tell you, honestly. My brother actually went back to the town where my father was born and grew up in, in Lithuania - Pumpénai Lithuania, he went back to it.
00:33:39
Real interviews, without bylines, so nobody knew I did it anyway, so.
00:33:44
That's definitely served me right.
00:33:46
They were, they were fun years?
00:33:47
And found the mud huts and therefore decided his father-
00:33:49
Well, kind of like it.
00:33:52
Similar, similar.
00:33:54
There was one still like it, he thought, and he decided his father was, therefore, a peasant. And he came back and, like, he was born a peasant and, therefore, and I said, our father was not a peasant in any sense of the word. He was, he was kind of, he was a, he was dapper. He was a dandy. He wasn't a peasant. My brother couldn't understand that. He was born a peasant and, therefore, he always had this sort of peasantry - I said "you've got it all wrong"
00:34:04
Was Mario Puzo working on the Godfather at the time?
00:34:19
which was one of his best novels. Talk about black holes.
00:34:20
Well, it is. I mean, actually, he was born there. It is. I must go back sometime, myself.
00:34:28
Just a generation ago.
00:34:30
And what if they hadn't come over?
00:34:33
You weren't working on a novel at that point, right?
00:34:34
Yeah, that's fair. Or, if we were here, we'd be there.
00:34:39
We wouldn't be here at all.
00:34:43
Well, it's fiction, so.
00:34:44
Same category.
00:34:44
Well, in my case, they were flying from the Cossacks, I guess, is what it was.
00:34:45
And this led directly to your first book?
00:34:51
Indirectly to your first book?
00:34:52
My father actually wrote his autobiography.
00:34:55
What's the transition from that to-
00:34:55
Yeah.
00:34:59
It's, it was published-
00:35:00
It's my water, you're having some and that's fine.
00:35:02
And it did fairly well. He self-published it and then Ballantine re-published it for him.
00:35:09
How many times have you been married?
00:35:09
It was called Chaia Sonia, and it was about his mother.
00:35:10
Twice? Three?
00:35:12
Chaia, C-H-A-I-A. Chaia Sonia, which is his mother's name.
00:35:18
Russian, immigrating to America, fleeing the Cossacks.
00:35:21
Going through Warsaw with him and his brother, leaving all the daughters behind to abandon them.
00:35:28
He wrote his book.
00:35:30
But he made it up.
00:35:32
Well, no, partly. I mean, he reconstructed, reconstructed conversations. It was a good book, but it was, we always thought it was partly invention.
00:35:42
Oh yeah.
00:35:45
I always thought about cannibalizing his books [laughing].
00:35:50
Mmhm.
00:35:55
But who would be interested?
00:36:00
And you edited it?
00:36:02
Even if Bob Gottlieb is not interested, there are people out there.
00:36:06
Have you been traveling with the book at all? On a tour?
00:36:17
I remember the name, but -
00:36:34
In Missoula?
00:36:35
They're interested.
00:37:01
But that's probably why, in fact.
00:37:02
Was Walter Goodman there then?
00:37:04
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.
00:37:07
Don't know Sam Blum, but Walter was a good friend over the years. In fact, I always remember when I was at Newsweek, he was both at Playboy and Redbook, which I thought was one of the great double hitters. I used to write play reviews about Playboy without bylines. He hired me as a theater critic way back.
00:37:23
How he doubled on both and also wrote about the House Un-American Activities Committee-
00:37:30
Yeah, right. You needed money, so.
00:37:33
No, he's it's great about that.
00:37:44
I haven't talked to him in a few weeks now. Last time I did, he didn't seem well. He never- unlike Maxine[?] - he never wants to talk about anything. About any problems or illnesses…
00:37:55
At home. He hasn't been in the office in a long time. He had a couple of notebooks that haven't run, In fact. I can't remember what his last piece was.
00:38:05
Well, he didn't look, it must be a good two or three months ago he came in because he did not look well. And as always, I try to get him talking about anything and he, you talk about, you know, meeting us at the theater some night and he hasn't.
00:38:07
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?
00:38:18
And I surmised that he was not well, but he never verified that at all. I don't know.
00:38:18
No, but it is true sometimes.
00:38:21
Yeah, but sometimes the very specific can evoke all sorts of things.
00:38:28
All happy families are alike, I dunno.
00:38:30
But no, but he was, he is, I mean, he has been a very good friend for many years. Yeah. Both he and his wife. Quite often went to the theater and dinner together and I feel guilty now as we're talking because I haven't called him. Feels like I don't wanna call him.
00:38:47
What'd you say?
00:38:56
I don't know.
00:39:01
Say it again, what was that?
00:39:06
Oh.
00:39:14
Would you sign my book?
00:39:16
Thank you. Oh, that is you. No?
00:39:23
And that's your mother's father?
00:39:24
At the end here?
00:39:30
Well, and before you knew you'd about that.
00:39:38
Yeah.
00:39:50
That's very sad.
00:40:00
How is Ben [Sonnenberg] doing?
00:40:02
Well, at his memorial, she was just wonderful.
00:40:07
I've never met her, but was just
00:40:08
Just devoted to him.
00:40:15
Where was this taken, the picture?
00:40:21
Well, that's a sad thing.
00:40:24
In the end, I guess I have to say: I didn't know him that well, I suppose, but it seems to me that after Penelope [Gilliatt], that was really, uh…
00:40:35
Was it
00:40:36
I remember seeing them, we had dinner one night in London with the sister and Vincent, I remember
00:40:43
I had seen her and I was there.
00:41:06
He's still writing whatever he wants to write.
00:41:24
Anyway, back to Redbook, and then comes this book about a 99-year-old woman and her entire family. How did that come about?
00:41:24
He didn't want to know about the book? Is that-
00:41:30
And they would argue, and Vincent would be very testy.
00:41:45
But, um, illness just shrinks you into a world of your own.
00:42:00
It was good they finally, slowly, somehow appreciated him at the Times, but I begrudge the fact that years ago when, you know, Martin Segal, his editor, pushed him for a Pulitzer Prize, and somehow the Times did not give any backing for it.
00:42:14
Yeah. They should have.
00:42:16
As a film critic, he - without question he should have won a Pulitzer.
00:42:24
For money.
00:42:31
And you read some of them now, I mean it's just…
00:42:37
Oh, I always said that, sure. Absolutely.
00:42:44
No, they'll never do anything about it. At one point, Marvin Segal's son, who was at the Modern Museum, had talked about maybe doing some sort of collection, "Vincent on Directors" or something like that. But he was - Vince was never interested in doing it, and he should have been. But someone still should, I think.
00:43:02
Because he really was very, very influential in terms of…
00:43:07
…film through those years.
00:43:09
But… somebody should.
00:43:16
Okay.
00:43:23
Unless you have something else to say?
00:43:24
About your family?
00:43:29
Would your father have read the book?
00:43:34
You mother would have said, "your father likes it, but he hasn't told me that"
00:43:41
Number one, number one.
00:43:57
"In a more personal sense, I know more their history than I do of my own family. I have a stronger sense of their continuity." About that family, the afterword-
00:44:03
They were live, you said.
00:44:08
Yeah. But now they're alive in your book again.
00:44:15
Not true - okay.
00:44:17
Aunt Lily lives.
00:44:23
Aunt Sally lives.
00:44:27
Okay.
00:44:42
So then you thought about another book.
00:45:57
Had you heard the name before?
00:46:16
…switch this out….
00:46:23
Uh, it's almost done.
Interview with Mario Vargas Llosa, 25 February 2002
00:00:29
Anyway, perhaps if we could start talking about the new novel, first of all
00:00:35
And the obvious question is, why Trujillo? Why now you go to the Dominican Republic after writing so many books about Peru?
00:00:44
I realize that one was about Brazil and so on....
00:03:10
Had-had you ever met him in his lifetime?
00:03:22
Mhm. When did you start writing the book then?
00:03:57
Time had passed, in other words.
00:04:28
How close does the novel cue to the reality of the events?
00:06:10
And whether in fact or fiction, I guess we can't believe it.
00:06:14
Um--Urania and her father are the principal invented characters, yes? Is that
00:06:19
Urania and her father.
00:08:38
How would you compare him to other dictators... his record compared...
00:09:20
Money did not?
00:09:39
She was salting away money and switching things like that
00:10:22
And in his life, his sexual potency was an important thing.
00:12:07
Well, then certainly you have the father actually giving his daughter, which is sort of the only thing It's the first choice, not just the one.
00:13:43
Sounds like something out of the Middle Ages. I mean king and...
00:14:53
Is there one reason why the people loved him so much?
00:15:57
I think you're saying in passing that one of his worst crimes, in a sense, was taking away the free will of the people.
00:17:18
Colombia had a story today, in fact.
00:17:19
Colombia had a story today in the paper about it. I was telling Colombia about holding back the rebels and all the Colombians.
00:19:10
Given all of that, why did you want to become president of Peru?
00:19:36
Okay. What if you had won?
00:21:03
Except that once you realized what Fujimura became, there must have been a great regret in your heart.. that you didn't become...
00:21:56
In writing this book, did you put any of yourself into your characterization of Balaguer?
00:22:05
Your characterization of Balaguer?
00:22:13
Was he really like that?
00:23:03
A poet!
00:24:45
Well. Well, you also say in passing that the phrase was never for any reason lose your composure was his motto.
00:24:49
Never lose your composure. With all this happening around you?
00:25:25
It was such a quiet colorless. Withdrawn....
00:25:51
But he really did, though, didn't he?
00:26:06
In direct contrast, you have your characterization of the, what's his name, Hugo Romero.
00:26:13
Who should have been the leader of the revolution, and then suddenly he froze and was not able to. What is his story?
00:26:59
He was a sewage, for example.
00:28:41
But the expectations were there. I mean, he had so many moments at the point of the assassination when he could have acted, could have done something. And he's just unable to...
00:29:26
[inaudible]
00:29:46
Did you change your mind about Trujillo as you wrote the book at all? Did you get any different feelings about...
00:32:09
And in many cases, they walk into a vacuum, so to speak.
00:33:04
Or Hitler and you got the...
00:33:08
The autobahns are there.
00:33:14
In any case, as a non-politician, as a writer, you've been able to do more about politics, would you say, through your writings?
00:33:23
You've been able to do more and say more about political matters than if you were a politician yourself? I mean...
00:33:45
You don't think that it causes revolutions, though at all so the literature will not....
00:36:27
But you said that half the people in Spain have never read a book.
00:36:39
And probably true in many other countries.
00:36:55
Libraries?
00:37:35
Well, there is the important question, too. What people are reading?
00:38:27
Is it wrong to read trash, to read entertainment?
00:39:15
You're also a critic.
00:39:19
You write criticism.
00:39:25
Do you have to like something to review it?
00:39:27
Yes.
00:39:47
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.
00:40:08
All very valid. But I was wondering, could you define what Vargas--Llo-Llosean would be?
00:40:57
Well, could you say what you're trying to do in your...
00:43:23
Does that mean they're in effect two different personalities or?
00:44:43
I was partly thinking something along those lines when I asked before whether you changed your mind about Trujillo when you were writing the book. And I wondered, does the book change as you write it? Are you surprised by things that come up?
00:45:45
When you started, you had the three stories planned.
00:46:59
The other thing is here you're dealing with real historical characters.
00:47:03
I mean, they're totally a work of the imagination. I mean, it's a work of the imagination, but it's not.
00:47:47
Does that mean that there's an autobiographical element in all the books?
00:48:31
And it's also true of Flaubert and Faulkner
00:48:54
What are you reading now as a reader?
00:49:02
About what?
00:52:13
Could you say where the idea for the book came from?
00:54:08
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.
00:55:19
How do you actually write? On a computer? Or..
00:55:39
Mhm
00:55:41
At some point you said, in all great literary texts, often without their authors intending it, a seditious inclination is present.
00:55:53
You said things like that quite a lot. But I was curious about the phrase, without intent, without the authors knowing--
00:56:18
He didn't know what he was doing in effect?
01:00:27
One of the curiosities of Trujillo in the book is the fact that he has such a dislike of the arts broadly, has no appreciation or understanding.
01:00:40
Clothing, his dress.
01:01:00
It was an ode to Trujillo.
01:02:22
She didn't write them, though.
Interview with Stanley Kunitz, 24 April 2002
00:00:00
Have you lived here a long time?
00:00:07
Mhm. Well, that's pretty long. For many years we lived on 11th street.
00:00:37
That was 1970.
00:00:43
Yeah, where were you?
00:00:49
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?
00:01:01
You and Elizabeth Cray?
00:01:29
I didn't know her but I...
00:03:33
There must have been poetry sections though in the various libraries.
00:05:31
Poetry, Poets as an adjective, not a possessive.
00:05:44
And it started small.
00:07:39
Let me ask a silly question. Why do we need poetry?
00:09:23
I mean, you say poetry you mean poetry. Not poetry in the sense of fiction being poetic, or anything else.
00:09:59
It's right--at the same time, you said before that you don't think of yourself as a political poet in which politics hasn't been your territory.
00:11:22
You've also said that the choice of being a poet was itself a political act.
00:11:47
It reminds me of Harold Pinter, who's a friend, who always says that he's a playwright but he's also a citizen.
00:12:08
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?
00:13:27
New words you may have learned from other poets.
00:13:38
Aren't poets born? You were born a poet, weren't you?
00:15:46
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?
00:16:30
I was curious, going through your collected poems, I found a number of poems about suicides. It did strike me. And it was Rothko and Levy and...
00:17:02
Rothko's?
00:17:05
We're getting far away from Poets House but can you understand suicide? What provokes people to--
00:17:29
I would say in your own life you've been the perfect antithesis to that, with a long life still going on.
00:17:54
Well , except, would you agree these suicide bombers...
00:18:11
Right. But in terms of killing yourself, that's your own decision.
00:18:21
That's a good point. But from early on you decided to be a poet.
00:18:55
And you believed them.
00:18:59
Well, teachers are important.
00:20:02
Tall, petite?
00:20:16
Have then you felt in your life that it's necessary to pass on such encouragement to others?
00:20:27
Stir the old pot, I guess.
00:20:39
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--
00:20:57
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.
00:21:00
Same block, between 5th and 6th, until our house blew up.
00:21:37
Sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn't.
00:21:44
Did you write a poem today? You did write a poem today?
00:21:52
How often do you write a poem?
00:22:21
What provokes you to write a poem?
00:23:42
Sound comes first, meaning can come later. Do you still, when you write a poem, you speak it, you say it?
00:24:12
Writing is rewriting.
00:24:28
Do you go back and revise older poems too?
00:24:56
Do you keep those poems or do you dispose of them?
00:25:15
Cleaned up your desk? Put it in order?
00:25:29
Now, did you ever go down there and look up something? Would you ever go down there to look up something?
00:25:37
It's probably so neat and orderly.
00:25:47
That's all the past. You're focusing on today. That makes sense. Do you go to Poets House, then?
00:25:58
What do you do when you go to Poets House?
00:26:31
How do you feel about young poets today?
00:26:35
How do you feel about young poets today?
00:28:03
Was it imitative of the English, then?
00:28:15
Where as today it's alive and well-known.
00:29:04
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.
00:29:35
Longhand. Not even a typewriter?
00:30:09
Do you go from pencil to pen? Is that the nature of transition, or...
00:30:33
Hard to get it repaired, probably.
00:30:45
The moment I stopped using my electric typewriter was when I couldn't get it repaired anymore. I decided to use the computer.
00:30:55
Well, probably some place. I used to go to the one in the flat iron building and they closed. They decided to repair printers, instead.
00:31:20
Do you write mostly here or in your summer place? Or is there no difference there.
00:31:39
Do you still have your garden up there?
00:31:59
Part of your alliance with the natural world.
00:32:19
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.
00:32:28
But I can reflect on that and then the idea that you talk about. You as the house poet. Would be really interesting. Why is April Poetry Month? It's the cruelest month as we know. Why is April Poetry Month? Do you know? Where did that choice ever come from?
00:32:50
Why is April Poetry Month.
00:32:56
We know it's the cruelest month.
00:33:17
What are the things they were looking forward to again at the Poetry House? Was there a walk across the bridge?
00:33:32
Do you still go on that?
00:33:45
Well, that's the privileges of age.
00:33:54
No other privileges of age?
00:34:43
You suffered from diffidence at one point. You outlived diffidence.
00:35:27
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.
00:35:47
It was very patronizing.
00:36:08
But the rare time they would put a book of poetry on the front page, I would have expected they would have had a real poet or a student of poetry review it.
00:36:20
This was like patronizing such a thing. Well, you folks out there might not understand what poetry is about, but you know, instead of roll up your sleeves, and...
00:36:51
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--
00:37:22
Okay, I won't keep you too long.
00:38:34
Are there many poets downtown here?
00:38:36
Are there many poets around here? Downtown here?
00:39:34
Did you come to the village?
00:41:12
And so I remember Marianne Moore used to live on 9th Street. Didn't she? And E.E. Cummings and Patchenplace and other poets.
00:41:26
In our house on 10th Street, at one point, Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles both lived there.
00:41:36
This was in the late 40s, about '48, '49. They both lived there and Dashell Hammet lived in our apartment at that point. Did you know them at all?
00:41:52
But you did know Marianne Moore and E.E. Cummings.
00:43:10
Very good.
00:43:20
Would you mind signing here?
00:43:31
Yes, right here.
00:43:59
Gussow. Yes.
00:44:07
Right. And it's basically Russian derivation.
00:44:17
M-E-L. One L.
00:44:26
Okay.
00:48:13
I don't know what it is.
00:48:33
Thank you so much.
00:48:40
Tell me, do you--Thank you so much--Do you shop at Jefferson market?
00:49:00
Well, thank you so much.
C_4001_01_01_acc_20191119
00:00:07 - 00:00:12
Where are you coming from?
00:00:33 - 00:00:35
This was the late 60s when you were in there?
00:00:51 - 00:01:06
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.
00:01:31 - 00:01:38
It's probably right there.
00:01:41 - 00:01:42
When was your daughter born again?
00:01:43 - 00:01:44
69? So she was even a little bit younger than my son.
00:01:48 - 00:01:49
He was born in 67.
00:02:00 - 00:02:07
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…
00:02:09 - 00:02:10
Cheers.
00:02:17 - 00:02:20
Survived a lot as a matter of fact.
00:02:22 - 00:02:26
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.
00:02:28 - 00:02:29
The wall just fell down from our building.
00:02:30 - 00:02:31
Terrible. It was sort of like the end of the 60s.
00:02:34 - 00:02:46
Yeah. Right next door. Next door. To the so-called bomb factory.
00:02:55 - 00:03:14
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.
00:03:19 - 00:03:39
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.
00:03:55 - 00:04:13
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.
00:04:24 - 00:04:27
And not radical enough. What about social change?
00:04:35 - 00:04:44
It's easier to pick up a gun or a bomb.
00:05:01 - 00:05:08
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...
00:05:09 - 00:05:14
Well, you say, not only forgive him, I guess, but you adored him.
00:05:18 - 00:05:19
How is that possible?
00:05:29 - 00:05:39
I see.
00:06:13 - 00:06:18
You'd heard the stories before this.
00:07:47 - 00:07:53
And he was the role model for Mr. Herbert?
00:08:02 - 00:08:25
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.
00:09:35 - 00:09:44
Well, this is the question, I guess. Why isn't there blame?
00:09:51 - 00:11:09
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...
00:11:18 - 00:11:31
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.
00:12:18 - 00:12:20
And it was true in your father's day as well as your grandfather's day.
00:12:37 - 00:12:38
Have you been here before?
00:12:44 - 00:12:45
Everything.
00:13:11 - 00:13:17
Except for the spicy fried shrimp, oh boy, that's the one loser on the menu.
00:13:26 - 00:13:31
Did you say scallops?
00:13:44 - 00:13:49
Well, you can go out there.
00:13:52 - 00:13:55
Scallops as well.
00:14:18 - 00:14:19
Yeah.
00:14:20 - 00:14:32
Anyway, the new book, I realize that some of the stories go back to the earlier, mid-80s than today.
00:14:39 - 00:14:43
What provoked you to do it now? What brought it together with you?
00:15:53 - 00:16:00
The marriage was.
00:16:41 - 00:16:47
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?
00:16:58 - 00:17:04
Are they different people, would you say?
00:18:44 - 00:18:48
Olive oil as well, is that also restorative?
00:19:52 - 00:19:53
The first story came last?
00:20:14 - 00:20:24
Yes.
00:20:43 - 00:21:00
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?
00:21:05 - 00:21:49
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?
00:23:20 - 00:23:30
In any case, you haven't thought about publishing the book for a while.
00:23:38 - 00:23:45
It was sitting there.
00:23:53 - 00:23:56
Really?
00:24:04 - 00:24:08
In fact, you started writing 30 years ago. You started publishing 30 years ago.
00:24:15 - 00:24:16
It was published in 1970, so actually this is your...
00:24:19 - 00:24:20
Yeah, so it's 30 years.
00:24:22 - 00:24:31
Yeah, amazing. I mean, that's a lot of writing.
00:24:41 - 00:24:47
Yeah.
00:25:25 - 00:25:28
No choice?
00:25:56 - 00:26:08
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.
00:27:13 - 00:27:16
Was The Color Purple handed down to you?
00:27:59 - 00:28:03
Was there a moment when you were swimming?
00:28:05 - 00:28:19
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.
00:28:27 - 00:28:32
Could you go back and remember the actual moment when it began?
00:30:29 - 00:30:31
As members of your family or as characters?
00:30:39 - 00:30:46
With names attached to them?
00:31:18 - 00:31:23
Actually, you were not swimming or running through a field when you thought it was boring?
00:31:38 - 00:31:41
I mean, it's about serving your art.
00:32:23 - 00:32:25
Only through art they could survive?
00:32:26 - 00:32:27
Once you began to become very fast?
00:32:32 - 00:32:34
You heard it wrong?
00:32:39 - 00:32:52
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.
00:33:42 - 00:33:43
It was more practical than magical, maybe.
00:33:47 - 00:33:52
And the stories themselves, some of them came from your family's life.
00:33:56 - 00:34:02
Yeah. Well, the stories in the Color Purple, for example.
00:34:53 - 00:34:55
You were able to give more lives to her.
00:35:17 - 00:35:21
And your mother didn't actually get to read Color Purple. She was sick.
00:35:28 - 00:35:36
But anyway, you were saying that Color Purple and the Temple were the two books that you felt that about, that they came?
00:36:16 - 00:36:26
You said a while ago that, for about the 30 years, could you live without writing?
00:37:37 - 00:37:53
Well, you've produced a lot since Color Purple.
00:38:10 - 00:38:13
I mean, just really...
00:38:36 - 00:38:40
Oh, can you imagine?
00:38:56 - 00:38:59
The best part is the actual writing of it?
00:39:05 - 00:39:20
Like fame, success, wide readership. Yeah. You'll find this easily.
00:39:26 - 00:39:28
Well, it wasn't too long thereafter, when fame descended or ascended on you.
00:39:34 - 00:39:38
But it's true, I mean...
00:39:52 - 00:39:54
Well, there was mail, oh God, yes.
00:40:12 - 00:40:25
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.
00:40:31 - 00:40:34
And then there's Arthur Miller's another one, creating a table.
00:40:36 - 00:40:38
I don't find women I've talked to ever use such metaphors at all.
00:40:41 - 00:40:45
Well, there's a basic difference between men and women, right?
00:40:56 - 00:41:02
Very interesting.
00:41:07 - 00:41:12
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.
00:41:27 - 00:41:35
Well, I'll just say, beginning with Color Purple, you wrote the rules. You aren't supposed to write a novel like that.
00:41:37 - 00:41:46
Of course. But I mean, the craft is there, but it's your own adventure.
00:42:27 - 00:42:30
Yeah, oh yeah.
00:42:32 - 00:42:37
Oh, God.
00:42:40 - 00:42:41
Oh, yeah, sure.
00:42:49 - 00:43:01
I'm surprised he never, maybe he did, in fact, come back.
00:43:13 - 00:43:23
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?
00:43:39 - 00:43:50
You're welcome.
00:44:21 - 00:44:24
You were happy with it.
00:44:27 - 00:44:31
You've changed your mind several times about the movie though, too. Reading that book you wrote about it seems to have changed you.
00:44:34 - 00:44:53
Well, it wasn't exactly the book.
00:45:23 - 00:45:36
Doesn't that look good?
00:45:40 - 00:45:51
How about your publishers actually come in here?
00:45:57 - 00:46:01
They're in the neighborhood.
00:46:18 - 00:46:19
When was the last time you saw the movie?
00:46:22 - 00:46:24
It makes me cry.
00:46:31 - 00:46:45
Yeah, every time I see it.
00:46:50 - 00:46:56
I really, it's a very moving film.
00:46:58 - 00:47:05
And even though it wasn't a screenplay, it doesn't.
C_4001_02_01_acc_20191119
00:00:49 - 00:00:59
I suppose how all three, book, screenplay, and movie all work and exist.
00:01:01 - 00:01:05
That book, screenplay, and movie can all exist independently.
00:01:06 - 00:01:10
Which are you very interested in?
00:02:01 - 00:02:09
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.
00:02:10 - 00:02:18
In which you said and how much you, not only did, but also learned about your grandfather.
00:02:23 - 00:02:32
I just saw him and he made a film of Hoosman and Lena.
00:02:34 - 00:02:35
It was very good.
00:02:36 - 00:02:41
Very different from other versions. It was him many times on stage and the other movie. But he's such a good actor.
00:02:43 - 00:02:55
Meridian, whichever book from the movie is here, never made.
00:04:50 - 00:04:56
Didn't you feel the danger that you were in? The actual threat of it all?
00:06:27 - 00:06:44
What's that about? Learning from adversity. And it seems to me that a lot of the art has come out of adversity.
00:07:28 - 00:07:30
Well, sometimes you put away the closet.
00:07:36 - 00:07:54
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.
00:07:54 - 00:07:57
Just bottled it up.
00:08:02 - 00:08:05
They could have told her in different ways.
00:08:15 - 00:08:42
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.
00:10:05 - 00:10:17
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.
00:10:56 - 00:11:16
How could you relate your poetry to your fiction? Are they connected to the whole world?
00:12:29 - 00:12:34
At what point in your life is that what you're talking about?
00:12:37 - 00:12:38
Okay.
00:13:16 - 00:13:28
Okay. When you're writing a novel or a story, do you stop writing poetry?
00:14:12 - 00:14:14
Which is also your poetry.
00:14:32 - 00:14:45
What did you talk about in Rosie O'Donnell's show today?
00:14:53 - 00:14:55
I was going to ask about that.
00:15:03 - 00:15:04
She gave you a hug, right?
00:15:06 - 00:15:09
I was kind of surprised what Mae West was doing there.
00:15:10 - 00:15:11
Yeah, I've come to like her.
00:16:19 - 00:16:22
I thought that was kind of interesting and unusual.
00:16:22 - 00:16:28
And then there was a reference to the movie The Bridges of Madison County where she said you love her.
00:16:31 - 00:16:34
That's impossible. Mary Tyler Moore maybe.
00:16:47 - 00:16:49
Well, there were books.
00:16:51 - 00:16:53
What did you read?
00:18:56 - 00:19:04
Well I guess the surprise is that his book seems so different from yours.
00:19:06 - 00:19:21
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?
00:20:38 - 00:20:40
And died alone?
00:20:42 - 00:20:44
And died alone?
00:20:48 - 00:20:50
Run away from home.
00:21:01 - 00:21:03
Haven't thought about it.
00:21:16 - 00:21:18
Human what? Human.
00:22:42 - 00:22:45
And your grandfather was a storyteller too.
00:22:48 - 00:22:49
It runs in the family?
00:22:55 - 00:22:59
How do you figure that? Is this partly a substitute for other entertainment?
00:23:02 - 00:23:05
What about radio though in the early days?
00:23:27 - 00:23:28
You were in the Amazon?
00:23:29 - 00:23:30
Not Amazon.com, the Amazon.
00:23:36 - 00:23:37
What were you doing?
00:24:05 - 00:24:08
What were you there for?
00:24:09 - 00:24:10
Just to study it?
00:24:46 - 00:24:47
You don't have to plug it in or anything.
00:24:57 - 00:25:01
What kind of vision did you have? Can you describe it?
00:26:47 - 00:26:50
And these drugs might be used for medicinal purposes?
00:27:00 - 00:27:04
They better do some good for you.
00:27:13 - 00:27:15
Have you been to the Amazon before?
00:28:49 - 00:28:51
Do you tend to write about it at all?
00:28:52 - 00:28:53
Do you intend to write about your trip?
00:28:59 - 00:29:03
I just read the piece that you wrote for the Times about meditation.
00:29:04 - 00:29:06
It came the other day. I was very impressed.
00:29:07 - 00:29:08
No.
00:29:13 - 00:29:14
Should I meditate?
00:29:17 - 00:29:18
What would it do for me?
00:29:33 - 00:29:35
How often do you meditate?
00:29:38 - 00:29:39
Oh, I see.
00:30:23 - 00:30:25
Exercise doesn't work the same way, does it?
00:30:51 - 00:30:52
Can't get rid of them.
00:31:17 - 00:31:19
Do you hate anyone?
00:31:22 - 00:31:23
Quickly, just like that? No.
00:31:24 - 00:31:25
You don't?
00:31:26 - 00:31:27
Oh, sure.
00:31:28 - 00:31:29
Yeah.
00:31:30 - 00:31:31
In varying degrees.
00:31:34 - 00:31:47
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.
00:31:48 - 00:31:57
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.
00:31:58 - 00:31:59
And you don't forget.
00:32:00 - 00:32:01
You think about it all the time, but you don't forget.
00:32:02 - 00:32:04
It's interesting. You said right away.
00:32:06 - 00:32:07
Have you always felt that way?
00:32:07 - 00:32:08
Maybe so.
00:32:09 - 00:32:11
Not when you were in Mississippi. No.
00:32:17 - 00:32:39
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.
00:32:44 - 00:32:47
Well, I don't think it will. And how do you know what they really are?
00:33:01 - 00:33:03
Some can.
00:33:40 - 00:33:41
Amnesty trials.
00:33:58 - 00:33:59
Okay.
00:35:33 - 00:35:38
Even those people who never fully recognized what they did?
00:35:58 - 00:36:05
You don't think so? You're telling me something. It's my only lifetime.
00:36:08 - 00:36:10
You're coming back?
00:36:13 - 00:36:17
What happens after we die?
00:36:18 - 00:36:21
What happens after we die?
00:36:42 - 00:36:47
It sure is. We don't know how, why, or when.
00:37:10 - 00:37:12
Don't drink it.
00:37:47 - 00:37:50
But you still want to live the life you have to the fullest, don't you?
00:37:51 - 00:37:54
You still want to live the life that you have to the fullest, don't you?
00:37:55 - 00:37:56
Yeah.
00:38:34 - 00:38:40
When you were a kid, did you have any idea about what you...
00:38:40 - 00:38:46
I mean, I know you were writing very early. I guess you had any idea that you would do what you're doing now?
00:39:00 - 00:39:02
Do you sing?
00:39:21 - 00:39:24
You've got to make your CD.
00:39:52 - 00:39:54
You live in California?
00:39:55 - 00:39:56
In Berkeley?
00:40:23 - 00:40:24
Where's your daughter now?
00:40:40 - 00:40:44
We moved one block away to 10th Street. We've been there for many years now.
00:40:46 - 00:41:01
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.
00:41:02 - 00:41:12
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.
00:41:14 - 00:41:15
You feel it sometimes.
00:41:21 - 00:41:28
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.
00:41:31 - 00:41:33
But there are no electric lights, just gas lights.
00:41:36 - 00:41:38
What about you? Where do you go?
00:41:39 - 00:41:40
Where do you live?
00:42:48 - 00:42:49
Sometimes, yeah.
00:42:52 - 00:42:54
Got the fog horn going outside usually.
00:42:59 - 00:43:01
Do you still write long hand?
00:43:12 - 00:43:13
And you use a computer?
00:43:15 - 00:43:17
I think you have to, I don't know.
00:43:35 - 00:43:36
Move things around.
00:44:08 - 00:44:09
Today I own large, beautiful houses.
00:44:12 - 00:44:15
And I was in a lot of compensation for the shacks in which I was raised.
00:44:42 - 00:44:43
Mexico.
00:44:52 - 00:45:01
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.
00:45:22 - 00:45:23
You were the youngest, huh?
00:46:52 - 00:46:54
So, in a sense, the word master is a positive side to that.
00:47:28 - 00:47:49
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.
C_4002_01_01_acc_20191119
00:00:46 - 00:00:48
It is. I agree. Yeah.
00:01:34 - 00:01:34
Right
00:01:45 - 00:01:53
The great nature of the controversy over it makes you want to write about it. Is that your follow up?
00:02:11 - 00:02:27
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.
00:03:45 - 00:03:51
Is that the sort of thing that you might want to write about?
00:05:04 - 00:05:07
What are the things that come across?
00:06:33 - 00:06:46
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.
00:07:03 - 00:07:09
Are you walking on a book tour? Is this a book tour?
00:07:27 - 00:07:29
What are you going to read today?
00:07:45 - 00:07:49
That's a good lesson. Can you always trust the moment?
00:07:51 - 00:07:52
Yeah.
00:07:55 - 00:07:58
I mean, someone might stand up and ask, you know, a very offensive question or something.
00:08:03 - 00:08:06
You don't respond with meditation, do you?
00:08:13 - 00:08:17
Tell me something. Why pretend? Do you point to any of the incidents?
00:08:29 - 00:08:31
One special dessert.
00:08:46 - 00:08:47
You're going to have anything?
00:08:48 - 00:08:50
Okay, I'll have tea. Do you have herbal tea?
00:08:51 - 00:08:52
Good. Chamomile.
00:09:08 - 00:09:10
Anyway, can you think of an incident?
00:09:21 - 00:09:23
Do you have any information about the incident?
00:10:37 - 00:10:47
Well, what about the people out there, including critics, who would say, why didn't you write another Color Purple?
00:10:57 - 00:11:01
You haven't been happy with your critics at all, have you?
00:12:38 - 00:12:39
Yeah.
00:13:52 - 00:13:58
Not to mention how painful it is to realize that you just almost completely misunderstood.
00:15:41 - 00:16:16
Well, that's a good sign.
00:16:29 - 00:16:31
Did you watch the debate last night?
00:16:42 - 00:16:42
Yes.
00:17:05 - 00:17:07
He is. He's a madman.
00:17:11 - 00:17:15
That's the point. He's going to kill three more. Actually, only two out of three had it wrong.
00:17:19 - 00:17:23
Yeah, no, no, that's really terrible.
00:17:44 - 00:17:47
They're not. Believe me. What's the interesting point?
00:17:53 - 00:17:58
Imagine what it would be like just to have ideas that are different and views that are different.
00:18:12 - 00:18:17
Why?
00:18:30 - 00:18:53
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.
00:19:05 - 00:19:11
I just wish Gore were a better person.
00:19:11 - 00:19:20
Sometimes I like him. You know, I mean, there's a way in which he's he can be very.
00:19:47 - 00:19:52
I know I even feel like I can identify maybe it's just because they come up to me.
00:20:45 - 00:20:48
More.
00:20:52 - 00:20:59
This is a very interesting interview that you did with the woman I know, Eleanor Wachtell from the Canadian Broadcasting Company.
00:21:03 - 00:21:26
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.
00:21:43 - 00:21:53
Could you describe yourself now?
00:21:57 - 00:22:03
Yeah. African-American, Native American and Euro.
00:22:03 - 00:22:09
You know, the Scotch Irish part.
00:22:09 - 00:22:13
Probably tri-spiritual as well.
00:22:26 - 00:22:30
You weren't Jewish when you were married to a Jewish man.
00:22:31 - 00:22:34
No. That would have made it quad right.
00:22:41 - 00:22:47
So that's three trees. They're all three. You can always hug a tree.
00:23:39 - 00:23:43
And always will move.
00:24:26 - 00:24:34
Yeah, as a matter of fact. And I wake up and I wonder where was that house?
00:24:39 - 00:24:54
And some whole other area. Is this Freud?
00:25:04 - 00:25:08
I'll think on that.
00:25:27 - 00:25:32
That's not what I dream about.
00:25:38 - 00:25:41
You mean that's what you have literally literally.
00:25:41 - 00:25:47
So you think that you said you were dreaming about the house that dream about a house somewhat emptied house.
00:25:47 - 00:26:12
Well that's interesting. It's possible. It's possible. It's probably more personal. I think you're probably right. You never know.
00:26:12 - 00:26:21
Are you reading anything now? Any book at all recently?
00:27:07 - 00:27:10
Your ex-husband has read the book.
00:27:13 - 00:27:15
What did he say?
00:27:57 - 00:28:08
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.
00:29:01 - 00:29:45
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.
00:29:45 - 00:29:49
How was your time at Sarah Lawrence.
00:30:58 - 00:31:07
You are.
00:31:28 - 00:31:47
Ten eleven.
00:31:47 - 00:31:50
I had a book out last year a biography of Edward Albee.
00:31:53 - 00:31:56
Edward Albee a singular journey. Simon Schuster wrote it.
00:31:56 - 00:31:59
You have a copy. I don't have with me.
00:31:59 - 00:32:06
I've done a number of books. That was the last one. Got very good reviews except in the New York Times.
00:32:06 - 00:32:11
Oh I was down in the country.
00:32:11 - 00:32:16
It's been a long time. Three and a half years on.
00:32:22 - 00:32:45
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.
00:32:50 - 00:33:05
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.
00:33:19 - 00:33:23
Well did they know what they had with you?
00:33:26 - 00:33:32
Maybe every artist is a singular journey. I think so. I think so.
00:33:51 - 00:33:52
Yes.
00:33:59 - 00:34:02
You don't with all of it but in fact it all does.
00:34:02 - 00:34:08
I tend to be more trusting of work like that. Because I know that there is no choice.
00:34:08 - 00:34:13
You are dealing with the stuff. You are dealing with...
00:34:13 - 00:34:19
Well you have what you have. Talk about your family heritage. That is your heritage.
00:35:12 - 00:35:16
Was that the first turning point? To Sarah Lawrence more than Spelman?
00:35:46 - 00:35:54
Right. It just felt more like home in that way.
00:36:16 - 00:36:18
When you say strange, what do you think?
00:38:05 - 00:38:09
In terms of work, the first novel came after Sarah Lawrence or during Sarah Lawrence?
00:38:10 - 00:38:11
After, yeah.
00:38:30 - 00:38:32
I do too.
00:38:36 - 00:38:50
Well, interviews aren't easy. I mean that's, having occasionally been on the other side of the fence.
00:39:09 - 00:39:10
It's working.
00:39:24 - 00:39:25
Martin Luther King Jr.
00:39:42 - 00:39:47
He was someone who had a lot of life, I mean a lot of spirit.
00:40:05 - 00:40:11
It's also a wonderful antidote to somehow great people you assume somehow they're more or less than human.
00:40:16 - 00:40:19
So yeah, I have been on the other side.
00:40:27 - 00:40:28
Really?
00:40:29 - 00:40:30
Oh fantastic.
00:40:30 - 00:40:32
He had a lot of lovers?
00:40:38 - 00:40:39
Go Einstein.
00:40:43 - 00:40:45
Oh yeah, I'm sure he was.
00:40:53 - 00:40:55
Yeah, well there you have it.
00:40:55 - 00:40:57
Rascal.
00:41:05 - 00:41:07
You have your driver outside.
Interview with Bill Irwin, February 8, 1983
00:02:25 - 00:02:26
Is that a special deck or?
00:05:10 - 00:05:14
This one comes up outside of columns and it's a special one.
00:06:05 - 00:06:05
Strictly business.
00:07:55 - 00:07:55
It's me again.
00:08:48 - 00:08:49
Yes.
00:08:51 - 00:08:51
Really?
00:10:00 - 00:10:02
How long have you been reading cards?
00:10:12 - 00:10:13
Do you use tarot cards, too, or---?
00:15:18 - 00:15:22
Does it help to know someone or is it even better, is it easier when you don't know someone at all?
00:15:23 - 00:15:24
Same thing.
00:17:22 - 00:17:44
Her cards.
00:22:43 - 00:22:45
Do you have time to do a meeting hour sometime?
00:22:46 - 00:22:47
Another time.
00:22:51 - 00:22:54
Yeah, you've got somebody coming in. And what did you say, 82?
00:23:29 - 00:23:33
I didn't know that at all. For a second I thought he was somebody who had written---
00:23:53 - 00:23:55
I don't know about it all.
00:23:59 - 00:24:03
The title of that book is that novel is---
00:24:17 - 00:24:20
That's an interesting project.
00:24:29 - 00:24:29
Your sandy-haired older man?
00:24:34 - 00:24:36
Oh yeah, you mentioned her.
00:25:15 - 01:20:00
But also somewhat changing it to suit one's response. With your wife, I gather she did.
00:25:28 - 00:25:40
[Inaudible]
00:26:18 - 00:26:20
You watched the show last night first?
00:27:08 - 00:27:09
Things I did, too.
00:27:11 - 00:27:32
Michael's reaction to the Shakespeare, to Shakespeare used as a crucifix. Reaction shots of you, yeah, were suddenly very funny.
00:27:50 - 00:27:56
Maybe that's why it's so funny. There was a real antagonistic thing set up, which is so funny.
00:28:27 - 00:28:46
What did you think of his performance? Just off the cuff without any...
00:29:10 - 00:29:36
I think it's quite good, and it set up that whole sort of threat which you need. You really felt that it was in fact a chase, which is why, for example, one thing that I did again last night is---is that trampoline going, it's not there, it's not in the way. A gag obviously didn't set up, but still, because of the good build-up---
00:30:11 - 00:30:18
Exactly. And Doug's sort of going out on a limb and then later...
00:30:24 - 00:30:26
It's all a trick.
00:30:44 - 00:31:07
Yeah. He shot the shit with me a couple times. Interesting little guy, and in some ways, he's a little self-conscious with each other, we don't have a whole lot to say, but... he's a really interesting character. A very good man. Probably be around, you'll want to see him.
00:31:12 - 00:31:14
How did your thing with Pat go?
00:31:28 - 00:31:31
He struck me as possibly sandy-haired.
00:31:40 - 00:31:42
Did he have a project at all that he was doing?
00:32:29 - 00:32:31
Is he sorry about that?
00:33:14 - 00:33:19
Money talks. Money talks.
00:34:20 - 00:34:22
Turn your head.
00:35:07 - 00:35:08
Oh, it's heavy.
00:35:12 - 00:35:13
It's big too.
00:36:34 - 00:36:39
One of the things that seemed to, seemed to get better and better as I watched is the marionette that went across.
00:36:48 - 00:36:49
Uh huh.
00:36:49 - 00:37:12
Fine. I'd like to find something somewhere between this hat and that. This one is just too flimsy.
00:37:51 - 00:37:54
George Carle does hat moves too?
00:38:46 - 00:38:48
Below the waist?
00:41:03 - 00:41:06
Do people really watch him though? I mean after the strippers or?
00:43:19 - 00:43:20
Jacket.
00:45:32 - 00:45:34
Do you write music?
00:45:36 - 00:45:38
Write music. Yeah, that song you sang. That little song.
00:45:48 - 00:45:52
That's where Kathy's technique became the most transparent.
00:46:50 - 00:46:52
You watch Caesar on Saturday Night Live?
00:46:53 - 00:46:54
Dude---
00:46:55 - 00:46:57
I thought it was very sad. That's crazy.
00:47:28 - 00:47:29
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:47:31 - 00:47:49
It's a little sentimental, but there's something behind it. What I thought was sad was the rest of the show. He was a victim of that show. What, the writing was awful, and I would guess if he knew it...
00:47:52 - 00:47:53
Yeah, yeah.
00:47:55 - 00:48:05
He's also much less than a lot of people, but it's true. He is caught in his era. It's very hard to...
00:48:05 - 00:48:12
Although, on the other hand, you see those, some of the tapes or whatever, the broadcasting, you can say, it's still terribly funny.
00:48:34 - 00:48:41
It seems like he did the silent movie and also the, there was The German Professor.
00:48:42 - 00:49:04
Neither of which were funny at all, and yet both of those appear very frequently over there. In other words, if you're writing a silent movie, it's funnier. And the other actors have fun, I think, over there. I mean, you may be right about the, you know, frozen or victim of time, but I think maybe---in different circumstances---
00:49:54 - 00:49:57
Did he and Eddie Murphy do anything earlier on? I know some---
00:50:02 - 00:50:10
They should've. Well, when I tuned in, Eddie Murphy was standing next to him, and the rest of the cast looked like they had just met.
00:50:15 - 00:50:23
It's one of those shows where he gave me a warning that he wasn't gonna be that good. He's wearing his dungarees besides.
00:50:24 - 00:50:28
He's wearing his dungarees, it's like, his leisure suit.
00:50:30 - 00:50:31
You didn't see his opening monologue.
00:50:32 - 00:51:17
[Inaudible]
00:51:28 - 00:51:37
I know the professor was kind of like he was a little sedated.
00:51:59 - 00:52:02
Actually, I didn't see the best of him.
00:52:04 - 00:52:05
Right.
00:52:07 - 00:52:09
Sure, he was in a great movie, but he was really something.
00:52:43 - 00:52:58
His best work, actually, was onstage, and at some point he decided he just was so terrified of working on stage, that he wouldn't do it anymore. He got physically sick at every performance. He couldn't do it. So you keep reading about him coming back.
00:53:00 - 00:53:01
That's what he said.
00:53:03 - 00:53:04
We've seen.
00:53:54 - 00:53:57
Which is why you'll never work again, right?
00:55:04 - 00:55:05
That's your tap class, I take it.
00:55:08 - 00:55:12
[Inaudible]
00:56:23 - 00:56:35
Caesar did a, we might have talked about it, a seminar over at the Museum of Broadcasting.
00:56:35 - 00:56:37
I couldn't get in. I did leave him a note.
00:57:01 - 00:57:01
You're right.
00:57:09 - 00:57:17
You know, when you talk about Arkin, I thought for a minute you were going to say Erwin Corey, who is somebody on occasion---I've never seen him live.
00:57:21 - 00:57:22
Oh, yeah?
00:57:23 - 00:57:24
Really?
00:57:24 - 00:57:25
That's great.
00:57:27 - 00:57:47
I don't know. I thought some of his stuff was great. He got into Playboy Club bookings for a while. And one time I saw him on TV, looking Heffneroid. Although that may have been a projection of mine.
Interview with Dorothy Gallagher, April 4, 2001 - 1
00:00:00 - 00:00:03
Going to a theatre-
00:00:04 - 00:00:06
Yeah he did stop, of course
00:00:15 - 00:00:18
Anyway, the driver came at 7:30 in the morning? Or is coming at 7:30?
00:00:23 - 00:00:25
She wanted to know why 7:30, she told them to me last night
00:00:30 - 00:00:33
Cause we went through this whole thing, and I said, I can't imagine anybody would-
00:00:43 - 00:00:46
One reason why I liked your book so much is that it reminded me-
00:00:50 - 00:00:51
Could I get a glass of white wine, please
00:00:56 - 00:00:57
I'll take the grigio.
00:01:00 - 00:01:02
[Laughs]
00:01:02 - 00:01:12
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.
00:01:08 - 00:01:12
When I run into him. So you burned the book, and that's the end of the story.
00:01:13 - 00:01:19
You know, It was good enough to think, maybe it's about time I sat down and wrote about that.
00:01:16 - 00:01:18
Rutgers? University Press.
00:01:19 - 00:01:21
But now it's been done. It can't be done.
00:01:23 - 00:01:25
What made you finally do it?
00:02:01 - 00:02:04
And you found another publisher, it came out and got that review -
00:02:09 - 00:02:10
[laughing] Thrift? Thirft thrift
00:02:12 - 00:02:15
And sell it to the movies, then.
00:02:37 - 00:02:39
It's been a long time between books.
00:02:47 - 00:02:49
There were several that I wrote down [indiscernible]
00:02:53 - 00:02:55
Notes about your parents or about the rest of the family?
00:02:56 - 00:02:58
Juliet Stuart Poyntz.
00:03:00 - 00:03:01
Dolores…
00:03:02 - 00:03:03
Faconti.
00:03:10 - 00:03:13
Do you think you wrote it differently now than you would have if you had written it when they were alive, or -?
00:03:32 - 00:03:36
And the story about the story of the family, had you made notes on that?
00:03:50 - 00:03:51
Close the bar.
00:04:17 - 00:04:18
First three in the book, actually?
00:04:27 - 00:04:28
Could we have some water, too, please?
00:04:35 - 00:04:36
Cheers.
00:04:37 - 00:04:37
Here's to success.
00:04:38 - 00:04:39
Well- you already have success with the book, I hear.
00:04:43 - 00:04:45
That was two nice reviews in the Times.
00:04:49 - 00:04:50
No more black hole.
00:04:54 - 00:04:59
We're all used to it! The writers get together… Black holes.
00:05:01 - 00:05:03
Publishers black holes - that's right.
00:05:15 - 00:05:16
I want to get back to the book itself--
00:05:17 - 00:05:21
But mentioning editors, was Bob Gottlieb the first editor who turned down the other book?
00:05:22 - 00:05:23
Yeah, that's what I figured.
00:05:29 - 00:05:37
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.
00:05:45 - 00:05:48
And the Sunday Times gave it a pretty good review, but a small review.
00:05:49 - 00:05:56
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.
00:05:50 - 00:05:53
Dolores Faconti is another story.
00:05:56 - 00:06:17
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.
00:05:56 - 00:05:58
xI want to hear it.
00:06:21 - 00:06:25
Yes. He actually turned down the book, and it got that review, after-
00:06:33 - 00:06:34
Well, the Kaysen[?] Review was very good.
00:06:44 - 00:06:45
But it disappeared.
00:06:46 - 00:06:50
Well, here you're thinking about dealing with… I'm still again with these...
00:06:50 - 00:06:54
That's publishing for you. Any case, go back to the editor. This book, you said, he really was very good about it.
00:06:51 - 00:06:57
Melodramatic figures in the world scene. Melodramatic figures in the world scene. And now you do... just this family?
00:07:09 - 00:07:17
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" -
00:07:26 - 00:07:31
Yeah. Which is one discouragement from doing it. That I've always felt
00:07:31 - 00:07:33
Who wants another memoir? Who wants another--
00:07:32 - 00:07:37
Well, did you have to gather lots of, I mean, you do say you're quoting from that one.
00:07:47 - 00:07:48
Did that really exist?
00:07:49 - 00:07:50
I wondered whether you made that up, or -
00:07:56 - 00:07:56
Not published -- turned down by Rob Gottlieb
00:08:14 - 00:08:17
And your father saved your mother from drowning?
00:08:19 - 00:08:20
[singing] One good deed.
00:08:23 - 00:08:24
He's watching up there.
00:08:25 - 00:08:28
What do you think, in the end, the book is saying about your family?
00:08:27 - 00:08:30
You think he was sorry about… You know…
00:08:34 - 00:08:38
Well… I just think that one never really knows one's parents.
00:08:58 - 00:09:01
Would you have felt more freedom if it were a novel?
00:09:05 - 00:09:06
Including your father?
00:09:10 - 00:09:10
No.
00:09:10 - 00:09:12
I'm not sure from reading the book, the extent you felt it-
00:09:14 - 00:09:14
Yeah.
00:09:22 - 00:09:38
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.
00:09:45 - 00:09:57
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.
00:09:48 - 00:09:49
All true.
00:10:01 - 00:10:03
I wouldn't accuse you of sentimentality, no.
00:10:02 - 00:10:16
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.
00:10:13 - 00:10:21
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]
00:10:16 - 00:10:32
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.
00:10:33 - 00:10:34
You said that in a m--
00:10:34 - 00:10:35
When you weren't fighting?
00:10:35 - 00:10:41
Well, in my family now, there's, those sisters, sometimes for decades, some of them didn't speak to one another.
00:10:35 - 00:10:55
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-
00:10:42 - 00:10:48
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.
00:10:49 - 00:10:50
Wars!
00:10:52 - 00:10:55
You had wars, too, obviously, or, or private battles among, the various relatives.
00:11:02 - 00:11:03
Well, large families, anyway--
00:11:15 - 00:11:23
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.
00:11:22 - 00:11:24
Attachment?
00:11:25 - 00:11:26
You know, it's typical.
00:11:27 - 00:11:29
No, Neither one. Never liked me, anyway. No loss.
00:11:32 - 00:11:32
No loss.
00:11:32 - 00:11:46
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?
00:11:47 - 00:11:47
True story?
00:11:55 - 00:11:55
Told in the family.
00:12:11 - 00:12:12
Well, this is a question, though.
00:12:14 - 00:12:19
I mean, it's true as far as you know, but are all stories true as, as told by families?
00:12:32 - 00:12:43
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.
00:12:43 - 00:12:47
But he was actually close to being a Golden Glove boxer.
00:12:47 - 00:12:56
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.
00:12:59 - 00:12:59
Okay.
00:13:04 - 00:13:07
Well, if they told it to you, there was a, a good measure of truth in it, you'd say.
00:13:09 - 00:13:12
I mean, it's a question of how many, how many sales, I suppose, Lily actually made.
00:13:33 - 00:13:44
Were there any…. Suprises? Revelations? As you thought about your family, Or your own growing up, or…?
00:13:34 - 00:13:36
What did you leave out?
00:13:51 - 00:13:55
Your parents don't kiss. Is this a revelation?
00:14:00 - 00:14:02
You mentioned briefly an earlier marriage, but.
00:14:28 - 00:14:32
Some great tragedy you left out of there
00:14:34 - 00:14:35
Even your father?
00:14:42 - 00:14:43
I don't love him, from the book.
00:14:44 - 00:14:45
Don't love him, yeah.
00:14:54 - 00:14:54
Would you like another?
00:14:59 - 00:15:00
Your inheritance.
00:15:05 - 00:15:07
By inheritance, you don't mean money, property…
00:15:09 - 00:15:09
Heritage.
00:15:21 - 00:15:23
He ran a series of garages here? That was -
00:15:26 - 00:15:27
And they're all dead now?
00:15:27 - 00:15:31
And he would come home and your mother would run the garage, and not know what she-- [laughter] I mean, that's pretty strange.
00:15:38 - 00:15:43
How did your father let himself get fooled by the, con-man. Was that a characteristic trait, or…?
00:16:00 - 00:16:00
Always a mistake.
00:16:43 - 00:16:45
Would your father have cared about grandchildren?
00:16:49 - 00:17:18
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.
00:16:56 - 00:16:56
An only kid, an only goat…
00:17:08 - 00:17:15
What about, uh, how do you pronounce your name? Szymborska?
00:17:16 - 00:17:19
Yes. You liked her poetry very much.
00:17:33 - 00:17:34
Adored?
00:17:34 - 00:17:35
Not in Polish -?
00:17:35 - 00:17:35
A daughter.
00:17:37 - 00:17:38
Only child?
00:17:50 - 00:17:52
She has a feeling I can draw on.
00:17:55 - 00:17:56
In such a large family
00:18:04 - 00:18:06
Did you ever meet Ben's father?
00:18:05 - 00:18:09
It's amazing why that generation had so many, I mean that's…
00:18:13 - 00:18:17
I was once in that house, I remember. Some Brendan Gill event.
00:18:16 - 00:18:17
And had a lot of sex.
00:18:18 - 00:18:21
I was in that house, which was one of the most amazing houses I've ever, ever been in.
00:18:20 - 00:18:26
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.
00:18:29 - 00:18:30
Amazing.
00:18:36 - 00:18:41
They're all dead. Yeah. Some cousins are, some cousins still alive. But yeah, that's about it.
00:18:38 - 00:18:40
You never saw the house? It's still there.
00:18:41 - 00:18:46
Yeah, they're all gone. Maybe I could write it, now.
00:18:43 - 00:18:45
With the royalties on your book, you can buy it back, right?
00:18:47 - 00:18:49
that's too much malevolence going on in my family [laughs]
00:18:51 - 00:18:52
What are you working on now?
00:18:53 - 00:19:00
Good stories. But, but you didn't have lots of letters and journals and things like that to help you along?
00:18:54 - 00:18:55
You're not going to wait another ten years for a book, are you?
00:19:01 - 00:19:03
Other people with memories, that would stimulate your memories?
00:19:10 - 00:19:11
Yeah I know the name, but-
00:19:26 - 00:19:43
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-
00:19:44 - 00:19:57
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.
00:19:44 - 00:19:45
What's the piece for the Book Review?
00:19:46 - 00:19:46
Oh!
00:19:48 - 00:19:48
Ok.
00:19:53 - 00:19:53
Oh, a review. A review of a book.
00:19:58 - 00:20:04
Two years. It didn't matter. We'd sit there and we'd talk about, like, who's got different boyhoods, it was amazing.
00:20:04 - 00:20:09
Of course, you didn't have that by not having a sibling. So it wouldn't-
00:20:11 - 00:20:18
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...?
00:20:46 - 00:20:47
Her mother, or your mother?
00:20:52 - 00:20:52
Maybe so.
00:20:57 - 00:20:59
This is what I would like to do.
00:21:02 - 00:21:05
One basic difference between our families is the politics.
00:21:05 - 00:21:10
Which was an essential element of your family. Could you talk about that, about how committed they were, or?
00:21:07 - 00:21:12
He's still just edits some books for Knopf and he writes about a dance for the Observer.
00:21:25 - 00:21:39
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.
00:21:33 - 00:21:36
Why did they join? Or what was their interest?
00:21:44 - 00:21:50
Actually, speaking of my Aunt Ruth, my wife and I gave him a couple of her plastic purses.
00:21:52 - 00:22:01
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-
00:22:01 - 00:22:08
So he has two of Aunt Ruth's [laughing] plastic purses. I'll get them back.
00:22:13 - 00:22:13
They sure are
00:22:27 - 00:22:32
that's good.
00:22:33 - 00:22:37
Well, I think I probably will too, though in fact he did publish two profiles for me in the-
00:22:34 - 00:22:36
And what years were they coming here?
00:22:38 - 00:22:44
Mitigates a little bit. And I like Maria Tucci, but that's okay.
00:22:47 - 00:22:47
Really?
00:22:51 - 00:22:51
Wow.
00:22:53 - 00:22:58
But there are all levels of grudges, too, I think. Let us keep that in mind. There are grudges and grudges.
00:23:06 - 00:23:24
No, this is, I'm really listening, because it's curious. My mother came at the same time, pretty much, and they were, in a sense, so relieved to be here, that they never looked back on Russia whatsoever. And my, my, my father, for example, he was really young, he must have been 12 or something. He immediately learned English so fast, that he never spoke with an accent his entire life.
00:23:13 - 00:23:14
That's good.
00:23:20 - 00:23:20
I haven't seen him lately.
00:23:23 - 00:23:28
And actually, whenever he'd left the New Yorker, I'd stopped writing for them, so that's something I guess.
00:23:25 - 00:23:42
Yeah. He just obliterated every bit of the past. When he finally went back to Russia, there was another- that's for my book. But, but, uh, it was a total break. And anything that would at all smack of an earlier country, they were not in- not any of them- they were not interested. Some of them would tell stories about it, but y'know-
00:23:34 - 00:23:36
It's somewhat better than it was in Tina Brown's day.
00:23:38 - 00:23:41
He's done a good job - though he doesn't want me to write for him, so-
00:23:42 - 00:23:46
Whereas it seems to me that, at least in terms of the politics, it's quite different.
00:23:52 - 00:23:52
Yeah.
00:23:53 - 00:23:58
But also, the feeling of wanting something more than what they found here, at that very time, or-
00:23:54 - 00:23:55
Do you know Elizabeth Colbert?
00:24:06 - 00:24:10
Well, I'd like to write for them again, but he's not interested, I guess he's…
00:24:34 - 00:24:37
And, uh, this was around Harlem, wasn't it, in Manhattan?
00:24:35 - 00:24:37
There's an acknowledgement for Sergei...
00:24:37 - 00:24:44
For his masterpiece, Ours? Now, come on. What is his masterpiece I've never heard of?
00:24:59 - 00:25:01
Well, this is what, again, what a major difference.
00:25:04 - 00:25:06
And, and as a child, you used to read The Daily Worker?
00:25:23 - 00:25:28
But you said you, you, at some point you said in the book that you didn't feel you were a red diaper baby, as such. I mean, it would mean that you were-
00:25:29 - 00:25:30
I thought you said it. You were!
00:25:31 - 00:25:32
Very much so.
00:25:34 - 00:25:34
I see.
00:25:49 - 00:25:49
Mhm.
00:25:51 - 00:25:52
so not babies, essentially
00:25:56 - 00:26:00
It's very interesting that politics was such a, such a strong element.
00:26:19 - 00:26:21
I could see that, that's interesting.
00:26:26 - 00:26:32
I'll look it up. Tell me about, uh, is it Lily's husband Ben? Is that his name?
00:26:28 - 00:26:33
Well, it wasn't strange in some circles, but as I said, that would be very divergent from what, uh, what I remember.
00:26:33 - 00:26:34
Ben.
00:26:35 - 00:26:46
I mean, one of my grandfathers that was supposed to be the intellectual of the family, I mean, read the Daily Mirror. I mean, that was like, that's a step ahead. Some intellectual. It was a tabloid.
00:26:35 - 00:26:36
Lily's husband Ben.
00:26:40 - 00:26:43
Was he a strong character in your childhood, or just a…?
00:26:46 - 00:26:50
But I couldn't imagine having come across the Daily Worker, or anything.
00:26:50 - 00:27:02
In fact, I remember once, was it, at college? Our fraternity wanted to subscribe to the Daily Worker. It was a major incident on campus. And out of curiosity, they wanted to get it. And y'know, an incident.
00:27:03 - 00:27:04
Middlebury College.
00:27:06 - 00:27:08
No, no.
00:27:06 - 00:27:07
Picks up the background, yes.
00:27:11 - 00:27:11
I do.
00:27:13 - 00:27:14
Really?
00:27:14 - 00:27:16
Is there a party?
00:27:30 - 00:27:36
As a girl growing up, then, politics was an interest to you, more than many things? Were you reading a lot, or were you writing, or...?
00:27:35 - 00:27:37
Did it?
00:27:50 - 00:27:51
What were you reading?
00:28:00 - 00:28:00
Real communist book.
00:28:07 - 00:28:08
I think I remember him from the movie.
00:28:10 - 00:28:11
Was it the tape recorder, maybe?
00:28:14 - 00:28:35
Let me tell you. What I think is the classic tape recorder story. My favorite tape recorder story. Joe Lelyveld, now the editor of the Times, when he was at the London Bureau, decided to do a piece on John Le Carré, went to interview him, drove all the way up to Cornwall, interviewed him, came back, and the tape didn't work. Called him, said "I'll have to do it again," saw him in London, did it again, came back.
00:28:37 - 00:28:45
Twice. Went back a third time. Finally, it worked the third time, and he wrote his piece for the Times magazine.
00:28:41 - 00:28:43
What did you think about writing at that point?
00:28:44 - 00:28:46
You went to Hunter College and left after a couple years?
00:28:47 - 00:28:50
He didn't know how to work a tape recorder. Now he's the editor of the Times. You figure it out.
00:28:48 - 00:28:49
Two years.
00:28:51 - 00:29:06
I did a piece on John Le Carré a couple of months ago, and the first thing I asked him was, "is it true, this legendary story?" He said,"absolutely." He said, "my children thought that he was a spy, and he had no intention of tape recording anything." Three times, and he's the editor, well, you know.
00:28:52 - 00:28:52
What?
00:29:07 - 00:29:08
So, it happens.
00:29:10 - 00:29:18
And you traveled the country- I'm probably getting all the chronology wrong, but you traveled the country and lived in a commune somewhere? Is this later- that's much later?
00:29:11 - 00:29:15
When I do books, there's an actress friend of my son who transcribes everything for me.
00:29:17 - 00:29:21
I- well, I don't do everything, but… a lot of tapes.
00:29:20 - 00:29:21
Isn't that what it said in the-?
00:29:23 - 00:29:23
Another book.
00:29:24 - 00:29:26
That's the advantage of doing a memoir, you see.
00:29:25 - 00:29:27
There was a point in which you traveled around America, though.
00:29:30 - 00:29:31
Make it up.
00:29:34 - 00:29:35
Do you keep a journal of things like that? No?
00:29:48 - 00:29:49
Then at some point you went to a career blazers agency.
00:29:51 - 00:29:53
When did your title come? What did you think of that?
00:29:52 - 00:29:54
I got my first job at career blazers.
00:29:54 - 00:29:54
I remember them well
00:29:54 - 00:29:55
Title of the book.
00:29:57 - 00:30:00
I don't remember. I got a job at Newsweek Magazine through career blazes.
00:29:57 - 00:29:57
Just like that
00:30:11 - 00:30:12
About what year are we talking about, here?
00:30:30 - 00:30:36
okay, I think it was about 1959 that I went to them.
00:30:35 - 00:30:35
Why I Ma-- Say it again?
00:30:38 - 00:30:44
I couldn't get a job out of the army with a master's degree in journalism. I couldn't get a job anywhere. I went to career blazers. They got me a job in Newsweek. And they got me a job at magazine management. I couldn't get a job anywhere. I went to career blazers. They got me a job in Newsweek. And they got me a job at magazine management. I couldn't get a job anywhere. I went to career blazers. They got me a job in Newsweek.
00:30:41 - 00:30:42
Shorter than I Am.
00:30:42 - 00:30:43
Not Blacker than I am?
00:30:46 - 00:30:51
So, while you were making that up, I was interviewing Sammy Davis Jr. in this - they bought a-
00:30:47 - 00:30:48
All right, tell me about that.
00:30:50 - 00:30:51
You made up stories.
00:30:51 - 00:31:01
Yeah, true. They bought a townhouse uptown. He was two hours late in the interview. Yeah. I was furious. Yeah. It was the first time I heard about CPT, Colored People's Time, as he referred to it as.
00:31:04 - 00:31:04
"Oh, sorry. Oh, sorry."
00:31:07 - 00:31:10
It was a wonderful interview when we finally sat down and talked. He couldn't have been nicer. He was great, actually.
00:31:11 - 00:31:13
But it was literally two hours late. I was just -
00:31:15 - 00:31:18
Outside his apartment. I finally left. I was going to leave. It was like close to dark-
00:31:18 - 00:31:19
What kind of jobs?
00:31:19 - 00:31:28
Yeah, I was just waiting. And he finally showed up. Breezing in. Had to do the story. And it was a very good story. That was when his autobiography came out.
00:31:30 - 00:31:30
Yes.
00:31:31 - 00:31:38
They were married and he had written, or, his autobiography had been written by this couple that wrote it. Called "Yes I Can."
00:31:39 - 00:31:40
What are their names? Their names…
00:31:42 - 00:31:52
Sure. And he was actually a wonderful interview, in fact, but… Never waited longer for anything in my life, I don't think. Better to make it up.
00:31:52 - 00:31:58
I think so. Well, I think that's probably, I think, what I left here…
00:32:03 - 00:32:07
Well, yeah, your trip back five years after your parents died, you went back. You went to Romania.
00:32:06 - 00:32:07
"She'll be right there."
00:32:09 - 00:32:12
So, daffing your other hat - or, donning is the word.
00:33:12 - 00:33:15
Which, you actually weren't making up - I mean, were not interviewing people for stories and things.
00:33:22 - 00:33:25
But you didn't actually go to where your mother was from.
00:33:33 - 00:33:37
So, then, I was interviewing for Newsweek at that very time.
00:33:34 - 00:33:46
Well, I wonder what it would tell you, honestly. My brother actually went back to the town where my father was born and grew up in, in Lithuania - Pumpénai Lithuania, he went back to it.
00:33:39 - 00:33:41
Real interviews, without bylines, so nobody knew I did it anyway, so.
00:33:44 - 00:33:44
That's definitely served me right.
00:33:46 - 00:33:47
They were, they were fun years?
00:33:47 - 00:33:48
And found the mud huts and therefore decided his father-
00:33:49 - 00:33:51
Well, kind of like it.
00:33:52 - 00:33:52
Similar, similar.
00:33:54 - 00:34:17
There was one still like it, he thought, and he decided his father was, therefore, a peasant. And he came back and, like, he was born a peasant and, therefore, and I said, our father was not a peasant in any sense of the word. He was, he was kind of, he was a, he was dapper. He was a dandy. He wasn't a peasant. My brother couldn't understand that. He was born a peasant and, therefore, he always had this sort of peasantry - I said "you've got it all wrong"
00:34:04 - 00:34:06
Was Mario Puzo working on the Godfather at the time?
00:34:19 - 00:34:22
which was one of his best novels. Talk about black holes.
00:34:20 - 00:34:24
Well, it is. I mean, actually, he was born there. It is. I must go back sometime, myself.
00:34:28 - 00:34:28
Just a generation ago.
00:34:30 - 00:34:31
And what if they hadn't come over?
00:34:33 - 00:34:35
You weren't working on a novel at that point, right?
00:34:34 - 00:34:37
Yeah, that's fair. Or, if we were here, we'd be there.
00:34:39 - 00:34:40
We wouldn't be here at all.
00:34:43 - 00:34:44
Well, it's fiction, so.
00:34:44 - 00:34:45
Same category.
00:34:44 - 00:34:46
Well, in my case, they were flying from the Cossacks, I guess, is what it was.
00:34:45 - 00:34:49
And this led directly to your first book?
00:34:51 - 00:34:53
Indirectly to your first book?
00:34:52 - 00:34:54
My father actually wrote his autobiography.
00:34:55 - 00:34:56
What's the transition from that to-
00:34:55 - 00:34:56
Yeah.
00:34:59 - 00:35:00
It's, it was published-
00:35:00 - 00:35:02
It's my water, you're having some and that's fine.
00:35:02 - 00:35:08
And it did fairly well. He self-published it and then Ballantine re-published it for him.
00:35:09 - 00:35:10
How many times have you been married?
00:35:09 - 00:35:11
It was called Chaia Sonia, and it was about his mother.
00:35:10 - 00:35:12
Twice? Three?
00:35:12 - 00:35:16
Chaia, C-H-A-I-A. Chaia Sonia, which is his mother's name.
00:35:18 - 00:35:20
Russian, immigrating to America, fleeing the Cossacks.
00:35:21 - 00:35:26
Going through Warsaw with him and his brother, leaving all the daughters behind to abandon them.
00:35:28 - 00:35:29
He wrote his book.
00:35:30 - 00:35:30
But he made it up.
00:35:32 - 00:35:40
Well, no, partly. I mean, he reconstructed, reconstructed conversations. It was a good book, but it was, we always thought it was partly invention.
00:35:42 - 00:35:43
Oh yeah.
00:35:45 - 00:35:46
I always thought about cannibalizing his books [laughing].
00:35:50 - 00:35:51
Mmhm.
00:35:55 - 00:35:56
But who would be interested?
00:36:00 - 00:36:02
And you edited it?
00:36:02 - 00:36:05
Even if Bob Gottlieb is not interested, there are people out there.
00:36:06 - 00:36:09
Have you been traveling with the book at all? On a tour?
00:36:17 - 00:36:19
I remember the name, but -
00:36:34 - 00:36:34
In Missoula?
00:36:35 - 00:36:35
They're interested.
00:37:01 - 00:37:03
But that's probably why, in fact.
00:37:02 - 00:37:04
Was Walter Goodman there then?
00:37:04 - 00:37:16
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.
00:37:07 - 00:37:23
Don't know Sam Blum, but Walter was a good friend over the years. In fact, I always remember when I was at Newsweek, he was both at Playboy and Redbook, which I thought was one of the great double hitters. I used to write play reviews about Playboy without bylines. He hired me as a theater critic way back.
00:37:23 - 00:37:28
How he doubled on both and also wrote about the House Un-American Activities Committee-
00:37:30 - 00:37:32
Yeah, right. You needed money, so.
00:37:33 - 00:37:34
No, he's it's great about that.
00:37:44 - 00:37:53
I haven't talked to him in a few weeks now. Last time I did, he didn't seem well. He never- unlike Maxine[?] - he never wants to talk about anything. About any problems or illnesses…
00:37:55 - 00:38:03
At home. He hasn't been in the office in a long time. He had a couple of notebooks that haven't run, In fact. I can't remember what his last piece was.
00:38:05 - 00:38:17
Well, he didn't look, it must be a good two or three months ago he came in because he did not look well. And as always, I try to get him talking about anything and he, you talk about, you know, meeting us at the theater some night and he hasn't.
00:38:07 - 00:38:10
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?
00:38:18 - 00:38:22
And I surmised that he was not well, but he never verified that at all. I don't know.
00:38:18 - 00:38:19
No, but it is true sometimes.
00:38:21 - 00:38:25
Yeah, but sometimes the very specific can evoke all sorts of things.
00:38:28 - 00:38:30
All happy families are alike, I dunno.
00:38:30 - 00:38:44
But no, but he was, he is, I mean, he has been a very good friend for many years. Yeah. Both he and his wife. Quite often went to the theater and dinner together and I feel guilty now as we're talking because I haven't called him. Feels like I don't wanna call him.
00:38:47 - 00:38:48
What'd you say?
00:38:56 - 00:38:57
I don't know.
00:39:01 - 00:39:03
Say it again, what was that?
00:39:06 - 00:39:06
Oh.
00:39:14 - 00:39:16
Would you sign my book?
00:39:16 - 00:39:21
Thank you. Oh, that is you. No?
00:39:23 - 00:39:23
And that's your mother's father?
00:39:24 - 00:39:24
At the end here?
00:39:30 - 00:39:31
Well, and before you knew you'd about that.
00:39:38 - 00:39:38
Yeah.
00:39:50 - 00:39:52
That's very sad.
00:40:00 - 00:41:01
How is Ben [Sonnenberg] doing?
00:40:02 - 00:40:06
Well, at his memorial, she was just wonderful.
00:40:07 - 00:40:08
I've never met her, but was just
00:40:08 - 00:40:10
Just devoted to him.
00:40:15 - 00:40:16
Where was this taken, the picture?
00:40:21 - 00:40:21
Well, that's a sad thing.
00:40:24 - 00:40:34
In the end, I guess I have to say: I didn't know him that well, I suppose, but it seems to me that after Penelope [Gilliatt], that was really, uh…
00:40:35 - 00:40:36
Was it
00:40:36 - 00:40:42
I remember seeing them, we had dinner one night in London with the sister and Vincent, I remember
00:40:43 - 00:40:44
I had seen her and I was there.
00:41:06 - 00:41:08
He's still writing whatever he wants to write.
00:41:24 - 00:41:33
Anyway, back to Redbook, and then comes this book about a 99-year-old woman and her entire family. How did that come about?
00:41:24 - 00:41:25
He didn't want to know about the book? Is that-
00:41:30 - 00:41:31
And they would argue, and Vincent would be very testy.
00:41:45 - 00:41:46
But, um, illness just shrinks you into a world of your own.
00:42:00 - 00:42:14
It was good they finally, slowly, somehow appreciated him at the Times, but I begrudge the fact that years ago when, you know, Martin Segal, his editor, pushed him for a Pulitzer Prize, and somehow the Times did not give any backing for it.
00:42:14 - 00:42:15
Yeah. They should have.
00:42:16 - 00:42:20
As a film critic, he - without question he should have won a Pulitzer.
00:42:24 - 00:42:26
For money.
00:42:31 - 00:42:34
And you read some of them now, I mean it's just…
00:42:37 - 00:42:39
Oh, I always said that, sure. Absolutely.
00:42:44 - 00:43:01
No, they'll never do anything about it. At one point, Marvin Segal's son, who was at the Modern Museum, had talked about maybe doing some sort of collection, "Vincent on Directors" or something like that. But he was - Vince was never interested in doing it, and he should have been. But someone still should, I think.
00:43:02 - 00:43:06
Because he really was very, very influential in terms of…
00:43:07 - 00:43:08
…film through those years.
00:43:09 - 00:43:13
But… somebody should.
00:43:16 - 00:43:17
Okay.
00:43:23 - 00:43:24
Unless you have something else to say?
00:43:24 - 00:43:26
About your family?
00:43:29 - 00:43:30
Would your father have read the book?
00:43:34 - 00:43:37
You mother would have said, "your father likes it, but he hasn't told me that"
00:43:41 - 00:43:44
Number one, number one.
00:43:57 - 00:44:07
"In a more personal sense, I know more their history than I do of my own family. I have a stronger sense of their continuity." About that family, the afterword-
00:44:03 - 00:44:05
They were live, you said.
00:44:08 - 00:44:09
Yeah. But now they're alive in your book again.
00:44:15 - 00:44:15
Not true - okay.
00:44:17 - 00:44:19
Aunt Lily lives.
00:44:23 - 00:44:24
Aunt Sally lives.
00:44:27 - 00:44:27
Okay.
00:44:42 - 00:44:44
So then you thought about another book.
00:45:57 - 00:45:58
Had you heard the name before?
00:46:16 - 00:46:17
…switch this out….
00:46:23 - 00:46:24
Uh, it's almost done.
Interview with Mario Vargas Llosa, February 25, 2002
00:00:29 - 00:00:32
Anyway, perhaps if we could start talking about the new novel, first of all
00:00:35 - 00:00:44
And the obvious question is, why Trujillo? Why now you go to the Dominican Republic after writing so many books about Peru?
00:00:44 - 00:00:48
I realize that one was about Brazil and so on....
00:03:10 - 00:03:12
Had-had you ever met him in his lifetime?
00:03:22 - 00:03:25
Mhm. When did you start writing the book then?
00:03:57 - 00:03:59
Time had passed, in other words.
00:04:28 - 00:04:34
How close does the novel cue to the reality of the events?
00:06:10 - 00:06:14
And whether in fact or fiction, I guess we can't believe it.
00:06:14 - 00:06:18
Um--Urania and her father are the principal invented characters, yes? Is that
00:06:19 - 00:06:20
Urania and her father.
00:08:38 - 00:08:42
How would you compare him to other dictators... his record compared...
00:09:20 - 00:09:21
Money did not?
00:09:39 - 00:09:43
She was salting away money and switching things like that
00:10:22 - 00:10:25
And in his life, his sexual potency was an important thing.
00:12:07 - 00:12:13
Well, then certainly you have the father actually giving his daughter, which is sort of the only thing It's the first choice, not just the one.
00:13:43 - 00:13:45
Sounds like something out of the Middle Ages. I mean king and...
00:14:53 - 00:14:58
Is there one reason why the people loved him so much?
00:15:57 - 00:16:02
I think you're saying in passing that one of his worst crimes, in a sense, was taking away the free will of the people.
00:17:18 - 00:17:19
Colombia had a story today, in fact.
00:17:19 - 00:17:27
Colombia had a story today in the paper about it. I was telling Colombia about holding back the rebels and all the Colombians.
00:19:10 - 00:19:13
Given all of that, why did you want to become president of Peru?
00:19:36 - 00:19:38
Okay. What if you had won?
00:21:03 - 00:21:10
Except that once you realized what Fujimura became, there must have been a great regret in your heart.. that you didn't become...
00:21:56 - 00:22:03
In writing this book, did you put any of yourself into your characterization of Balaguer?
00:22:05 - 00:22:07
Your characterization of Balaguer?
00:22:13 - 00:22:15
Was he really like that?
00:23:03 - 00:23:04
A poet!
00:24:45 - 00:24:48
Well. Well, you also say in passing that the phrase was never for any reason lose your composure was his motto.
00:24:49 - 00:24:50
Never lose your composure. With all this happening around you?
00:25:25 - 00:25:27
It was such a quiet colorless. Withdrawn....
00:25:51 - 00:25:53
But he really did, though, didn't he?
00:26:06 - 00:26:12
In direct contrast, you have your characterization of the, what's his name, Hugo Romero.
00:26:13 - 00:26:19
Who should have been the leader of the revolution, and then suddenly he froze and was not able to. What is his story?
00:26:59 - 00:27:01
He was a sewage, for example.
00:28:41 - 00:28:50
But the expectations were there. I mean, he had so many moments at the point of the assassination when he could have acted, could have done something. And he's just unable to...
00:29:26 - 00:29:27
[inaudible]
00:29:46 - 00:29:51
Did you change your mind about Trujillo as you wrote the book at all? Did you get any different feelings about...
00:32:09 - 00:32:12
And in many cases, they walk into a vacuum, so to speak.
00:33:04 - 00:33:06
Or Hitler and you got the...
00:33:08 - 00:33:09
The autobahns are there.
00:33:14 - 00:33:22
In any case, as a non-politician, as a writer, you've been able to do more about politics, would you say, through your writings?
00:33:23 - 00:33:24
You've been able to do more and say more about political matters than if you were a politician yourself? I mean...
00:33:45 - 00:33:48
You don't think that it causes revolutions, though at all so the literature will not....
00:36:27 - 00:36:31
But you said that half the people in Spain have never read a book.
00:36:39 - 00:36:41
And probably true in many other countries.
00:36:55 - 00:36:56
Libraries?
00:37:35 - 00:37:38
Well, there is the important question, too. What people are reading?
00:38:27 - 00:38:29
Is it wrong to read trash, to read entertainment?
00:39:15 - 00:39:16
You're also a critic.
00:39:19 - 00:39:20
You write criticism.
00:39:25 - 00:39:26
Do you have to like something to review it?
00:39:27 - 00:39:28
Yes.
00:39:47 - 00:40:07
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.
00:40:08 - 00:40:14
All very valid. But I was wondering, could you define what Vargas--Llo-Llosean would be?
00:40:57 - 00:40:59
Well, could you say what you're trying to do in your...
00:43:23 - 00:43:27
Does that mean they're in effect two different personalities or?
00:44:43 - 00:44:55
I was partly thinking something along those lines when I asked before whether you changed your mind about Trujillo when you were writing the book. And I wondered, does the book change as you write it? Are you surprised by things that come up?
00:45:45 - 00:45:48
When you started, you had the three stories planned.
00:46:59 - 00:47:02
The other thing is here you're dealing with real historical characters.
00:47:03 - 00:47:07
I mean, they're totally a work of the imagination. I mean, it's a work of the imagination, but it's not.
00:47:47 - 00:47:50
Does that mean that there's an autobiographical element in all the books?
00:48:31 - 00:48:33
And it's also true of Flaubert and Faulkner
00:48:54 - 00:48:58
What are you reading now as a reader?
00:49:02 - 00:49:10
About what?
00:52:13 - 00:52:16
Could you say where the idea for the book came from?
00:54:08 - 00:54:20
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.
00:55:19 - 00:55:22
How do you actually write? On a computer? Or..
00:55:39 - 00:55:41
Mhm
00:55:41 - 00:55:52
At some point you said, in all great literary texts, often without their authors intending it, a seditious inclination is present.
00:55:53 - 00:55:58
You said things like that quite a lot. But I was curious about the phrase, without intent, without the authors knowing--
00:56:18 - 00:56:20
He didn't know what he was doing in effect?
01:00:27 - 01:00:36
One of the curiosities of Trujillo in the book is the fact that he has such a dislike of the arts broadly, has no appreciation or understanding.
01:00:40 - 01:00:43
Clothing, his dress.
01:01:00 - 01:01:02
It was an ode to Trujillo.
01:02:22 - 01:02:22
She didn't write them, though.
Interview with Stanley Kunitz, April 24, 2002
00:00:00 - 00:00:04
Have you lived here a long time?
00:00:07 - 00:20:00
Mhm. Well, that's pretty long. For many years we lived on 11th street.
00:00:37 - 00:00:39
That was 1970.
00:00:43 - 00:00:43
Yeah, where were you?
00:00:49 - 00:00:53
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?
00:01:01 - 00:01:01
You and Elizabeth Cray?
00:01:29 - 00:01:29
I didn't know her but I...
00:03:33 - 00:03:37
There must have been poetry sections though in the various libraries.
00:05:31 - 00:05:33
Poetry, Poets as an adjective, not a possessive.
00:05:44 - 00:05:45
And it started small.
00:07:39 - 00:07:43
Let me ask a silly question. Why do we need poetry?
00:09:23 - 00:09:28
I mean, you say poetry you mean poetry. Not poetry in the sense of fiction being poetic, or anything else.
00:09:59 - 00:10:09
It's right--at the same time, you said before that you don't think of yourself as a political poet in which politics hasn't been your territory.
00:11:22 - 00:11:27
You've also said that the choice of being a poet was itself a political act.
00:11:47 - 00:11:58
It reminds me of Harold Pinter, who's a friend, who always says that he's a playwright but he's also a citizen.
00:12:08 - 00:12:22
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?
00:13:27 - 00:13:31
New words you may have learned from other poets.
00:13:38 - 00:13:43
Aren't poets born? You were born a poet, weren't you?
00:15:46 - 00:16:01
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?
00:16:30 - 00:16:43
I was curious, going through your collected poems, I found a number of poems about suicides. It did strike me. And it was Rothko and Levy and...
00:17:02 - 00:17:03
Rothko's?
00:17:05 - 00:17:12
We're getting far away from Poets House but can you understand suicide? What provokes people to--
00:17:29 - 00:17:38
I would say in your own life you've been the perfect antithesis to that, with a long life still going on.
00:17:54 - 00:17:59
Well , except, would you agree these suicide bombers...
00:18:11 - 00:18:13
Right. But in terms of killing yourself, that's your own decision.
00:18:21 - 00:18:27
That's a good point. But from early on you decided to be a poet.
00:18:55 - 00:18:56
And you believed them.
00:18:59 - 00:19:01
Well, teachers are important.
00:20:02 - 00:20:03
Tall, petite?
00:20:16 - 00:20:23
Have then you felt in your life that it's necessary to pass on such encouragement to others?
00:20:27 - 00:20:30
Stir the old pot, I guess.
00:20:39 - 00:20:51
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--
00:20:57 - 00:21:15
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.
00:21:00 - 00:00:25
Same block, between 5th and 6th, until our house blew up.
00:21:37 - 00:21:40
Sometimes it comes, sometimes it doesn't.
00:21:44 - 00:21:48
Did you write a poem today? You did write a poem today?
00:21:52 - 00:21:53
How often do you write a poem?
00:22:21 - 00:22:23
What provokes you to write a poem?
00:23:42 - 00:23:50
Sound comes first, meaning can come later. Do you still, when you write a poem, you speak it, you say it?
00:24:12 - 00:24:13
Writing is rewriting.
00:24:28 - 00:24:31
Do you go back and revise older poems too?
00:24:56 - 00:25:00
Do you keep those poems or do you dispose of them?
00:25:15 - 00:25:19
Cleaned up your desk? Put it in order?
00:25:29 - 00:25:33
Now, did you ever go down there and look up something? Would you ever go down there to look up something?
00:25:37 - 00:25:41
It's probably so neat and orderly.
00:25:47 - 00:25:57
That's all the past. You're focusing on today. That makes sense. Do you go to Poets House, then?
00:25:58 - 00:25:59
What do you do when you go to Poets House?
00:26:31 - 00:26:35
How do you feel about young poets today?
00:26:35 - 00:26:36
How do you feel about young poets today?
00:28:03 - 00:28:04
Was it imitative of the English, then?
00:28:15 - 00:28:19
Where as today it's alive and well-known.
00:29:04 - 00:29:27
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.
00:29:35 - 00:29:40
Longhand. Not even a typewriter?
00:30:09 - 00:30:13
Do you go from pencil to pen? Is that the nature of transition, or...
00:30:33 - 00:30:37
Hard to get it repaired, probably.
00:30:45 - 00:30:51
The moment I stopped using my electric typewriter was when I couldn't get it repaired anymore. I decided to use the computer.
00:30:55 - 00:31:03
Well, probably some place. I used to go to the one in the flat iron building and they closed. They decided to repair printers, instead.
00:31:20 - 00:31:25
Do you write mostly here or in your summer place? Or is there no difference there.
00:31:39 - 00:31:42
Do you still have your garden up there?
00:31:59 - 00:32:03
Part of your alliance with the natural world.
00:32:19 - 00:32:22
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.
00:32:28 - 00:32:48
But I can reflect on that and then the idea that you talk about. You as the house poet. Would be really interesting. Why is April Poetry Month? It's the cruelest month as we know. Why is April Poetry Month? Do you know? Where did that choice ever come from?
00:32:50 - 00:32:53
Why is April Poetry Month.
00:32:56 - 00:32:56
We know it's the cruelest month.
00:33:17 - 00:33:23
What are the things they were looking forward to again at the Poetry House? Was there a walk across the bridge?
00:33:32 - 00:33:34
Do you still go on that?
00:33:45 - 00:33:47
Well, that's the privileges of age.
00:33:54 - 00:34:00
No other privileges of age?
00:34:43 - 00:34:51
You suffered from diffidence at one point. You outlived diffidence.
00:35:27 - 00:35:43
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.
00:35:47 - 00:35:48
It was very patronizing.
00:36:08 - 00:36:17
But the rare time they would put a book of poetry on the front page, I would have expected they would have had a real poet or a student of poetry review it.
00:36:20 - 00:36:31
This was like patronizing such a thing. Well, you folks out there might not understand what poetry is about, but you know, instead of roll up your sleeves, and...
00:36:51 - 00:37:04
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--
00:37:22 - 00:37:27
Okay, I won't keep you too long.
00:38:34 - 00:38:36
Are there many poets downtown here?
00:38:36 - 00:38:38
Are there many poets around here? Downtown here?
00:39:34 - 00:39:36
Did you come to the village?
00:41:12 - 00:41:21
And so I remember Marianne Moore used to live on 9th Street. Didn't she? And E.E. Cummings and Patchenplace and other poets.
00:41:26 - 00:41:31
In our house on 10th Street, at one point, Paul Bowles and Jane Bowles both lived there.
00:41:36 - 00:41:46
This was in the late 40s, about '48, '49. They both lived there and Dashell Hammet lived in our apartment at that point. Did you know them at all?
00:41:52 - 00:41:55
But you did know Marianne Moore and E.E. Cummings.
00:43:10 - 00:43:12
Very good.
00:43:20 - 00:43:23
Would you mind signing here?
00:43:31 - 00:43:52
Yes, right here.
00:43:59 - 00:44:00
Gussow. Yes.
00:44:07 - 00:44:11
Right. And it's basically Russian derivation.
00:44:17 - 00:44:19
M-E-L. One L.
00:44:26 - 00:44:27
Okay.
00:48:13 - 00:48:17
I don't know what it is.
00:48:33 - 00:48:34
Thank you so much.
00:48:40 - 00:48:45
Tell me, do you--Thank you so much--Do you shop at Jefferson market?
00:49:00 - 00:49:05
Well, thank you so much.