For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (e.g. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large. These pieces are culled from the posts published during this decade.
-- Kevin Courrier, 2017.
In The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, critic Vito Russo examined the way gays and lesbians had been portrayed in the history of American movies. In his book, Russo moves from decade to decade, weaving into his narrative a chronological and thematic awareness of the various representations of gay life; that is, the attitudes that lay hidden and closeted in American culture. He examines with both humour and affectionate insight the early work of 'movie sissies' like actors Eric Blore, Edward Everett Horton and Franklin Pangborn, who gave form to what couldn't be acknowledged openly. Russo shifts from these 'buddy movies' of the Thirties and Forties to contemporary representations which often ranged from predatory and psychotic (Cruising, American Gigolo) to victims (Advise and Consent, The Children's Hour). He even delves into hidden homosexual dynamics not acknowledged such as the unspoken love between Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) and Messala (Stephen Boyd) in Ben-Hur (1959), the covert lesbian attraction that Elizabeth Wilson has for Kim Stanley's Marilyn Monroe character in The Goddess (1958), and the originally cut scene between Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960), where Olivier's Roman general admits his bi-sexuality to his slave Antoninus (Curtis) whom he's trying to seduce.
The Celluloid Closet was made into a fine documentary in 1995 by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman where they had the benefit of using Russo's book to select clips that supported his thesis. Since this interview with Vito Russo takes place just as the AIDS epidemic was first becoming national news, there isn't the sense of dread here that came to overshadow the rest of the decade. (Although he was a huge activist bringing awareness to the needs of the LGBT community, by the end of the decade, AIDS would also claim Russo himself.) Looking back to 1981, it was a year when dozens of Toronto police officers conducted simultaneous raids on Toronto's most popular bathhouses and arrested more than 300 gay men. Times may have indeed changed since those raids, but maybe certain attitudes haven't.
kc: By concentrating on American films in your book, are you specifically questioning American ideas of sexuality especially where it concerns masculinity and femininity?
vr: Absolutely. Molly Haskell in her book, From Reverence to Rape, said that the big lie about women in media is that women are weak and powerless. I think the big lie about gay people is that such creatures exist only on the fringes of society. They are no part of what we commonly understand as the American Dream. In particular, when I talk about Hollywood films, America is this pioneer country with a masculine pioneer heritage. But I think the movies, of all art-forms, has perpetuated this myth about what is masculine and feminine behaviour to the exclusion of homosexuality. When novels and plays were brought to the screen, homosexual characters were omitted. When biographies of famous people who were gay were made into movies, that person was made heterosexual. And this has never been seen as a serious offence against a person's identity. So the movies have dealt with the subject of homosexuality very gingerly. In the book, what I'm really trying to point out is not so much that homosexuals have been invisible – although they have been in both real life and on the screen – but the willful ways in which the movies have created a world in which homosexuals are really no part of the major culture.
kc: Given the long history of American movies, how did you plan to do this?
vr: Since American movies have provided a falsification of our national heritage, I wanted to write a book about the ways in which homosexuals did appear in the movies. And to show that, in a measure, homosexuals, when they do appear, they appear negatively – and when they appear positively, they are either removed, or deleted, so that the public, both straight and gay, has gotten a false image of who we are. The movies have presented gay culture as pure sexual exploitation where everything gets sexualized. Whereas, heterosexuality has been presented as in all its different facets. You have pictures about heterosexuals who are nasty and those who are nice, but you don't get that with gays. Gay culture is seen as depressing and violent, where gay men are either psychotic (as in Cruising), or sissies; and gay women are predatory, masculine creatures (as in Walk on the Wild Side) who are not really women but pretending to be men. It all gets mixed up with this idea that we have of what is it that a man behaves like? How is a woman supposed to act? I think the movies have hopelessly confused us about these things.
kc: Are you not also addressing the distorted ideas of sexuality that have been perpetrated generally in movies and that has affected all areas of sexual depiction on the screen?
vr: Oh yeah. I think we live in a tremendously sex-negative culture. People do think of sexuality, in general, as being a dirty thing. Whenever you have a movie with heterosexuals that has anything to do with explicit sex, the censors take care of it. With homosexuals, however, we end up defined by sex. It's almost as though a homosexual is nothing else but a person who has sex. Look at how films always show homosexuals in the context of sex, either looking for it, or where sex becomes their downfall. You would never think that these people get up in the morning and go to a job like everybody else. And when you say to people that you want to see more positive portrayals of homosexuals, they can't figure out what you mean.What I mean is simply that if you're going to have a picture that is about something there's no reason in the world why some of the characters shouldn't be gay and some shouldn't be straight. But I don't see Hollywood doing that.
kc: Is that because Hollywood has a long history of creating illusion?
vr: People have asked me: what do you expect of Hollywood? There's no answer to that because Hollywood is, as you said, set up to create illusion. In 1934, when they made Queen Christina, and Greta Garbo played the Queen of Sweden, everybody knew that she was a lesbian. And they knew that Greta Garbo was not going to play her as a lesbian. It's just illusion. That's what Hollywood is about. It's about making a dream for people to believe in. The sad truth is that most people would rather not discuss homosexuality. They would rather not see it. They don't want to know it's there. And the movie industry has done them the favour of creating a world on film in which such things do not intrude on that illusion. That's what The Celluloid Closet is about. It's about the creation of an illusion that had no room for homosexuals.
kc: I know that La Cage aux Folles is not an American film, but don't you think its huge and recent success has marked a change in attitudes that your book is calling for?
vr: La Cage aux Folles is an interesting case because it's the largest grossing foreign film in American history. It's an enormous success. That's why Hollywood is now getting interested in this subject because they see money. La Cage aux Folles does two things: It does not offend most gay people and it makes most straight people comfortable with the homosexual characters in the film. It makes you feel sorry for the characters because they're different, and they're charming. You like them. They're very funny. The actors [Ugo Tognazzi and Michel Serrault] are very, very good. I don't think it's such a great film, but I can see why it's popular. It doesn't challenge anybody's idea of what a homosexual is. People are comfortable with the idea that homosexuals are sort of sissies who are weak and helpless and not threatening anyone. They're never seen having sex. You can't even imagine them having sex. That's also a comfortable illusion. I think if you had made a film in which the characters were not fools and harmless and all that effeminate stuff, and you made them like in [John Schlesinger's] Sunday Bloody Sunday, for instance, with Peter Finch and Murray Head playing two very masculine men who have a love affair – and kiss on the screen – people would go nuts. They don't want to see it. That's the reality of the situation most of the time. La Cage aux Folles resembles some of the Hollywood films of the Thirties and Forties where the sissies, like Eric Blore or Franklin Pangborn, were the comedy entertainment. La Cage aux Folles repeats the success of those movies from the Thirties and updates it.
kc: We used to talk about the idea of mixed marriages on the screen making people uncomfortable. Are we any different here?
vr: The movies have to make people comfortable. It's an audience proposition. Hollywood knows and perceives correctly that the public does not want to see certain things. I actually still don't see white and black mixed marriages in the movies today. After all the discussions of the Sixties, and the Civil Rights movement, and all the marches, and all the protests, audiences still don't want to see a white woman kiss a black man, or a black woman kiss a white man on the screen. They don't want to see it. It still makes them nervous.
During the Eighties, England was going through the trauma of finding itself no longer able to maintain the power and the glory it once possessed when it was an Empire. So, as in the United States, England elected a leader, Margaret Thatcher, who (like Ronald Reagan in the U.S.) promised to restore those "glory days" at any cost. Of course, Reagan and Thatcher, both larger than life figures, ultimately didn't come close to restoring anything glorious. But they did both change the political landscape dramatically. Writers like Alan Sillitoe helped flesh out the past and the present of Britain's years of political turmoil by examining the class conflict that underlined England's despair. When Sillitoe died of cancer at the age of 82, The Guardian wrote that Sillitoe “was part of a generation of working-class writers who shifted the boundaries of taste. Not that Sillitoe, born into the deprived family of a tannery labourer, liked to be defined purely by class. He once said of his 1958 work Saturday Night and Sunday Morning that ‘the greatest inaccuracy was ever to call the book a working-class novel for it is really nothing of the sort. It is simply a novel'.” Part of that modesty towards his work, as well as his thoughts on mortality, made its way into our conversation in 1981.
Vito Russo (1981)
In The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, critic Vito Russo examined the way gays and lesbians had been portrayed in the history of American movies. In his book, Russo moves from decade to decade, weaving into his narrative a chronological and thematic awareness of the various representations of gay life; that is, the attitudes that lay hidden and closeted in American culture. He examines with both humour and affectionate insight the early work of 'movie sissies' like actors Eric Blore, Edward Everett Horton and Franklin Pangborn, who gave form to what couldn't be acknowledged openly. Russo shifts from these 'buddy movies' of the Thirties and Forties to contemporary representations which often ranged from predatory and psychotic (Cruising, American Gigolo) to victims (Advise and Consent, The Children's Hour). He even delves into hidden homosexual dynamics not acknowledged such as the unspoken love between Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) and Messala (Stephen Boyd) in Ben-Hur (1959), the covert lesbian attraction that Elizabeth Wilson has for Kim Stanley's Marilyn Monroe character in The Goddess (1958), and the originally cut scene between Laurence Olivier and Tony Curtis in Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus (1960), where Olivier's Roman general admits his bi-sexuality to his slave Antoninus (Curtis) whom he's trying to seduce.
The Celluloid Closet was made into a fine documentary in 1995 by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman where they had the benefit of using Russo's book to select clips that supported his thesis. Since this interview with Vito Russo takes place just as the AIDS epidemic was first becoming national news, there isn't the sense of dread here that came to overshadow the rest of the decade. (Although he was a huge activist bringing awareness to the needs of the LGBT community, by the end of the decade, AIDS would also claim Russo himself.) Looking back to 1981, it was a year when dozens of Toronto police officers conducted simultaneous raids on Toronto's most popular bathhouses and arrested more than 300 gay men. Times may have indeed changed since those raids, but maybe certain attitudes haven't.
kc: By concentrating on American films in your book, are you specifically questioning American ideas of sexuality especially where it concerns masculinity and femininity?
vr: Absolutely. Molly Haskell in her book, From Reverence to Rape, said that the big lie about women in media is that women are weak and powerless. I think the big lie about gay people is that such creatures exist only on the fringes of society. They are no part of what we commonly understand as the American Dream. In particular, when I talk about Hollywood films, America is this pioneer country with a masculine pioneer heritage. But I think the movies, of all art-forms, has perpetuated this myth about what is masculine and feminine behaviour to the exclusion of homosexuality. When novels and plays were brought to the screen, homosexual characters were omitted. When biographies of famous people who were gay were made into movies, that person was made heterosexual. And this has never been seen as a serious offence against a person's identity. So the movies have dealt with the subject of homosexuality very gingerly. In the book, what I'm really trying to point out is not so much that homosexuals have been invisible – although they have been in both real life and on the screen – but the willful ways in which the movies have created a world in which homosexuals are really no part of the major culture.
kc: Given the long history of American movies, how did you plan to do this?
vr: Since American movies have provided a falsification of our national heritage, I wanted to write a book about the ways in which homosexuals did appear in the movies. And to show that, in a measure, homosexuals, when they do appear, they appear negatively – and when they appear positively, they are either removed, or deleted, so that the public, both straight and gay, has gotten a false image of who we are. The movies have presented gay culture as pure sexual exploitation where everything gets sexualized. Whereas, heterosexuality has been presented as in all its different facets. You have pictures about heterosexuals who are nasty and those who are nice, but you don't get that with gays. Gay culture is seen as depressing and violent, where gay men are either psychotic (as in Cruising), or sissies; and gay women are predatory, masculine creatures (as in Walk on the Wild Side) who are not really women but pretending to be men. It all gets mixed up with this idea that we have of what is it that a man behaves like? How is a woman supposed to act? I think the movies have hopelessly confused us about these things.
 |
| Al Pacino in Cruising |
kc: Are you not also addressing the distorted ideas of sexuality that have been perpetrated generally in movies and that has affected all areas of sexual depiction on the screen?
vr: Oh yeah. I think we live in a tremendously sex-negative culture. People do think of sexuality, in general, as being a dirty thing. Whenever you have a movie with heterosexuals that has anything to do with explicit sex, the censors take care of it. With homosexuals, however, we end up defined by sex. It's almost as though a homosexual is nothing else but a person who has sex. Look at how films always show homosexuals in the context of sex, either looking for it, or where sex becomes their downfall. You would never think that these people get up in the morning and go to a job like everybody else. And when you say to people that you want to see more positive portrayals of homosexuals, they can't figure out what you mean.What I mean is simply that if you're going to have a picture that is about something there's no reason in the world why some of the characters shouldn't be gay and some shouldn't be straight. But I don't see Hollywood doing that.
 |
| Greta Garbo in Queen Christina |
kc: Is that because Hollywood has a long history of creating illusion?
vr: People have asked me: what do you expect of Hollywood? There's no answer to that because Hollywood is, as you said, set up to create illusion. In 1934, when they made Queen Christina, and Greta Garbo played the Queen of Sweden, everybody knew that she was a lesbian. And they knew that Greta Garbo was not going to play her as a lesbian. It's just illusion. That's what Hollywood is about. It's about making a dream for people to believe in. The sad truth is that most people would rather not discuss homosexuality. They would rather not see it. They don't want to know it's there. And the movie industry has done them the favour of creating a world on film in which such things do not intrude on that illusion. That's what The Celluloid Closet is about. It's about the creation of an illusion that had no room for homosexuals.
 |
| Ugo Tognazzi and Michel Serrault in La Cage aux Folles (1978) |
kc: I know that La Cage aux Folles is not an American film, but don't you think its huge and recent success has marked a change in attitudes that your book is calling for?
vr: La Cage aux Folles is an interesting case because it's the largest grossing foreign film in American history. It's an enormous success. That's why Hollywood is now getting interested in this subject because they see money. La Cage aux Folles does two things: It does not offend most gay people and it makes most straight people comfortable with the homosexual characters in the film. It makes you feel sorry for the characters because they're different, and they're charming. You like them. They're very funny. The actors [Ugo Tognazzi and Michel Serrault] are very, very good. I don't think it's such a great film, but I can see why it's popular. It doesn't challenge anybody's idea of what a homosexual is. People are comfortable with the idea that homosexuals are sort of sissies who are weak and helpless and not threatening anyone. They're never seen having sex. You can't even imagine them having sex. That's also a comfortable illusion. I think if you had made a film in which the characters were not fools and harmless and all that effeminate stuff, and you made them like in [John Schlesinger's] Sunday Bloody Sunday, for instance, with Peter Finch and Murray Head playing two very masculine men who have a love affair – and kiss on the screen – people would go nuts. They don't want to see it. That's the reality of the situation most of the time. La Cage aux Folles resembles some of the Hollywood films of the Thirties and Forties where the sissies, like Eric Blore or Franklin Pangborn, were the comedy entertainment. La Cage aux Folles repeats the success of those movies from the Thirties and updates it.
kc: We used to talk about the idea of mixed marriages on the screen making people uncomfortable. Are we any different here?
vr: The movies have to make people comfortable. It's an audience proposition. Hollywood knows and perceives correctly that the public does not want to see certain things. I actually still don't see white and black mixed marriages in the movies today. After all the discussions of the Sixties, and the Civil Rights movement, and all the marches, and all the protests, audiences still don't want to see a white woman kiss a black man, or a black woman kiss a white man on the screen. They don't want to see it. It still makes them nervous.
Alan Sillitoe (1981)
During the Eighties, England was going through the trauma of finding itself no longer able to maintain the power and the glory it once possessed when it was an Empire. So, as in the United States, England elected a leader, Margaret Thatcher, who (like Ronald Reagan in the U.S.) promised to restore those "glory days" at any cost. Of course, Reagan and Thatcher, both larger than life figures, ultimately didn't come close to restoring anything glorious. But they did both change the political landscape dramatically. Writers like Alan Sillitoe helped flesh out the past and the present of Britain's years of political turmoil by examining the class conflict that underlined England's despair. When Sillitoe died of cancer at the age of 82, The Guardian wrote that Sillitoe “was part of a generation of working-class writers who shifted the boundaries of taste. Not that Sillitoe, born into the deprived family of a tannery labourer, liked to be defined purely by class. He once said of his 1958 work Saturday Night and Sunday Morning that ‘the greatest inaccuracy was ever to call the book a working-class novel for it is really nothing of the sort. It is simply a novel'.” Part of that modesty towards his work, as well as his thoughts on mortality, made its way into our conversation in 1981.
kc: Considering the acclaim you've received over the years for your novels and their depiction of British working-class life, it's taken you some time to receive recognition for them.
as: That's right. It did take a long time! I started writing when I was about 21, and I didn't get anything published until I was about 30. During that time, I wrote about seven novels and they weren't connected to my early years growing up in Nottingham at all. But all through that period, there was a vein that I was tapping that came through in a number of short stories that were later incorporated into the novel, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. For nine years, I was sending those stories to every English-speaking magazine in the world with the hope of getting them published. But I never succeeded. And yet finally when they were published I felt that they received more praise than they probably deserved. Maybe it was a question of waiting for the time to be right.
kc: That praise though might be based on the authenticity of capturing your own working-class experience. What inspired you to get all this down in writing?
as: When I had to go into the hospital with tuberculosis, it was a catastrophe for a working-class boy. The only thing you really have of marketable value is your strength and your ability to labour. And this was taken from me. When you got told you had tuberculosis in those days it was like being told you had cancer. I mean, 25,000 people a day were dying from it. With those odds, I figured that I was probably going to die anyhow. Then the inactivity – which I couldn't stand – got me reading books and writing. I did that in order to take refuge from the nagging idea that I was finished. One of the first things I wrote about was my experience in Malaya when I was in the Air Force. I was there during the emergency when a communist insurrection failed. But before this time, I had read very little of what could be called mature or adult fiction. So for the next five years, I read every classic in the world and I started writing at the same time.
kc: When you started all this reading, where did you begin?
as: The first things I started reading were the translations from all the Latin and Greek classics. I became familiar with Latin and Greek mythology. I read the Bible inside and out. And then I moved on to the modern stuff. When I was living in Majorca, I had no connection or contact whatsoever with England. So all of my literary and intellectual contacts came from North America or Paris. They would bring the latest magazines and books with them. During the Fifties, I was nurtured on the modern works of Norman Mailer, J.D. Salinger and William Styron. Their work showed me that prose could be vigorous and full of good style. In other words, I realized that one had certain standards to meet. I was also reading a lot of Yiddish writers who wrote about living in a schtetel in Eastern Europe during the 19th and early 20th Century. That writing had a quality of tenacity and richness. If you were to amalgamate all of these influences, they'd connect very much to the first eighteen years of my life. So I was inspired by that amalgamation to keep on writing those stories which subsequently published and which I still write today.
kc: It seems that the imminent thoughts of possible death forced you to come to certain insights.
as: Well, it's like Dr. Johnson who said, "There's nothing that collects a man's mind more than the thought that he's going to be hanged in the morning." The poet Robert Graves, in Majorca, told me that it's useful for every poet if once in his life he dies. Graves had died on the battlefield and was brought back to life by pure chance. I considered that I had died when I was told I had tuberculosis. But then I was reborn in a sense. And being alone – spiritually, that is – in a hospital room was very good, as you surmised. When I got out of the hospital, it was continued by an exile. Every since I was young, I wanted to get out of England. Something about it made me feel that I loved it too much, or I couldn't stand it. So after having been in Malaya for two years, I had the pension from the TB. With that, I went to Spain and France so I could write about England. I had to be away from it - like looking through the wrong end of the binoculars – in order to understand it. Out of this, while sitting under an orange tree, I wrote Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. That was the best thing I could have done to get it right.
kc: How much perspective did having that distance give you on England?
as: You see, before the age of eighteen, I knew nothing about the English class system. There was nobody to tell me about it. If someone had told me that I was working-class, I would have told them to get lost. I didn't want to know about such things because I believed that everyone was an individual, or at least, an independent person. Simply, I wanted to distance myself from the idea of class. As a writer, if you get entangled with the class system and wonder where you fit in, it can ruin you. I just wanted to get out of it. And by going to Spain and France, I never had anything to do with this question. Living abroad on a pension, you became an exile and a traveler. You are pulled into your own psyche. So I came back to England when I was thirty. And I was completely formed. I still had nothing to do with the class system and that's what was really important to me.
kc: Wouldn't you say that view is shared by Colin Smith in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner? He doesn't fit into any class system, or want to be part of the working-class. He exists in the underground and is against all values, very much like the Dostoevsky protagonist in Notes From the Underground. Did you identify strongly with Colin?
as: I think The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner came from a very deep part of myself. Even though it is set in Borstal, you could say it's about a writer. But, of course, I put it into a different context since you shouldn't write a story about another writer. That's banal. A writer is an individual and shouldn't align himself with any class to the extent that his commitment to that class becomes political. I know it's difficult to avoid this altogether, but you must maintain an objectivity and an independence. You have to stand on the outside and then, as I discovered writing Saturday Night and Sunday Morning from Majorca, maybe you can depict it with more reality, more truth, and if you're lucky, more profundity.
kc: Recently at a party, someone suggested to me that when England lost its colonies, it ceased to be.
as: Well, in those days when England had an empire, the working-classes didn't benefit very much. In fact, they were in a desperate plight. But it had a purpose in those days because if the working people became restless at home, they could always have their energies channeled by going out to the colonies. All the excess energy could be tapped off, where today it's getting all bottled up at home. Therefore, we're getting more trouble now. It's a serious situation and the most important thing in the long term is to inculcate a way of showing people how to use their leisure time. Technology has now grown to the point where there are going to be less and less jobs in the future. More jobs will be done by automation. And I don't know, but perhaps it will be a good thing when people have less work because they will have more time to do things that are intellectually stimulating. But I also believe we have more tribulation to come before we reach that kind of enlightened period.
D.M.Thomas (1981)
The conventional biography was subverted in different ways during the Eighties. Wallace Shawn, for example, with playwright Andre Gregory and film director Louis Malle concocted My Dinner with Andre (1982), a film about two men having dinner and discussing philosophical issues set in the dramatic context of a performance piece. Author David Young, in his book Incognito (1982), stumbled upon a box of old photographs that he found in an attic of an old house he purchased. He decided to write a fictional biography based upon the sequence of photos he discovered. Thriller writer William Diehl (Sharky's Machine, Chameleon), a committed pacifist, wrote lurid pulp as a means to exorcise the violence within himself. What many of these artists in the Eighties were attempting to do was to link to their work to a larger collective memory; a shared mythology enhanced by an expansive popular culture.
In 1981, poet and novelist D.M. Thomas worked with historical fact to create a vivid and powerful work of fiction that would link the psychological insights emerging in the work of Sigmund Freud with the terror of the Holocaust during WW II. He did it in a novel called The White Hotel. The White Hotel was broken into three movements opening with the erotic fantasies of Lisa, one of Freud's patients, which overlapped with the convulsions of the early part of the 20th century leading to the Holocaust. Over the years, many film directors including Terrence Malick (The New World, Tree of Life), Bernardo Bertolucci, David Lynch (even Barbara Streisand) have attempted to put The White Hotel on the screen. But its dreamy horror has yet to be fully conceived as cinema. In one of my first professional radio interviews at CJRT-FM, D.M. Thomas explained how he created such a potent fiction out of this unsettling reality.
kc: Why did the fusion of Freud and the Holocaust become the central motif in The White Hotel?
dmt: There are these powerful events of the 20th Century: Freud's discovery of the unconscious, his marvelous case studies of individuals, and the way he mapped out this mythic territory of the mind; and there are those horrific historic events like the Russian Terror and the Holocaust. No one has thought of associating these events before but the idea for The White Hotel clicked when I saw a connection between them. I made the connection between a patient of Freud having some terrible hysterical symptom stemming from a traumatic event and something like Babi Yar, itself being a hysterical outburst based on anti-Semitic feelings. It seems to be that there is always a struggle – both personally and socially – between the death instinct and the life instinct, as Freud discovered. The contrast of the individual and the historic is the key to the book.
kc: You also create a link between the psyche of the character Lisa and her premonition of the historical events to come – Why make this link?
dmt: Well, Lisa, who is Freud's patient, does possibly have these hysterical symptoms not only from what happens in her childhood but also as a premonition of what is to come, which is the Jewish experience. It seemed to me that any sensitive person of the Jewish race being around in 1920 would have felt the future looming. They must have had intuitions because there was anti-Semitism already. It didn't seem unlikely for someone this sensitive to have those premonitions since you can find a mixture of hysterics and sensitivity going back to the Delphic Oracle or Cassandra.
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| Sigmund Freud |
kc: Why does history play such a dominant role in your writing?
dmt: Certain events just keep haunting me particularly the history of our own time. I think that the period of the thirties and forties were the most terrible in human history. Both Hitlerism and Stalinism were horrific things. Then after that we get Hiroshima. Anyone who was born during that time, as I was in 1935, is touched by the consciousness of those events even though those events didn't touch me personally. I'm a child of Babi Yar as much as anyone else. So my mind keeps coming back to these events, but I always try to relate it to individual lives because that's what interests me as a writer.
kc: How does your understanding of Freud though add to your understanding of human history and its impact on the individual?
dmt: I feel that Freud didn't take away dignity from human beings as some people claim. He gave us dignity back. Humanity was being reduced by the scientific studies of Darwinism and by doubts about religion. Freud saw in our minds a great battlefield between powerful forces. The Oedipus conflict is in itself an epic struggle of the child against the father. It doesn't matter if it's true. I don't know if I even have an Oedipus conflict. But it's a poetic drama unfolding. And basically what I like about Freud is that he was a poet more than he was a scientist. When the idea for The White Hotel came, it suddenly struck me that I could include a Freudian case study. And I enjoyed feeling my way into his mind and writing in that very dry and passionate style.
kc: Do your own dreams and fantasies have any bearing on the way you write about events like the ones cited in The White Hotel?
dmt: Not generally because one's dreams are usually only of interest to oneself. I do create waking dreams. Sometimes the poems I write are from dreams, but not in The White Hotel. I have used my fantasies, however. My own inner life I do draw upon.
kc: Maybe what I'm after here is whether or not that consciousness of the Holocaust is being worked out in your writing by exploring its very influence on the characters.
dmt: I suppose it is a way of exploration. One of my books of poetry is called Love and Other Deaths. All of my writing is about those two forces: love and death. I know they're very present in me, so The White Hotel is also an exploration of my own psyche. It grows out of me and somehow turns into Lisa. I explore even though I haven't yet found the answer.
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| White Hotel painting |
kc: Whether you've found the answer or not, The White Hotel has certainly touched a nerve in the public. Did you anticipate any of this controversy?
dmt: I think I was tackling dangerous territory. The Holocaust is very difficult to deal with and then you have the sexuality in the book which is the meaning of The White Hotel. It goes from a very personal and subjective study of the sexuality of a woman to then seeing her as an anonymous number in the mass of those wiped out. It was deliberate. But some people found that offensive and shocking. There are terrific polarities of feeling about this book which is disturbing in itself. It's a bit like having a perpetual suite in The White Hotel (laughs). There's been lots of milk and honey as well, like traveling to places I might not have gone to and where responses have been nice. Then there has been the bad side of being under the pressure of becoming so suddenly exposed and naked with people looking at me. Like The White Hotel, it's very interesting, but not very restful.
kc: Don't those intense reactions from readers go with the territory of using your imagination to make connections between people and their culture, or even between people and their understanding of sexuality?
dmt: I think so. Robert Frost once said that the writer has the freedom to fly off in wild connections. And that's the greatest freedom of all, to be able to leap from one image to another connecting metaphor that might be light years away. This is marvelous because you can do it whether you are in Britain, Canada, or the Soviet Union. And maybe it comes easier in a State where there is great oppression because you always get thrown back on your imagination. This is probably why Russia has produced greater artists than in the West in the last fifty or seventy years. Oppression forces you to be subtle. You have to make your point in invisible ink. That's often more effective.
John Cage (1982)
By the Eighties, contemporary composers like Philip Glass and R. Murray Schafer were now having their music felt in pop circles. John Cage was perhaps the most influential of those avant-garde composers who helped make that possible. He had a huge impact – both artistically and philosophically – on popular music (including Frank Zappa, Cabaret Voltaire, Yoko Ono and Brian Eno). Born in Los Angeles in 1912, Cage studied music with serialist composer Arnold Schoenberg and later with Henry Cowell to develop the notion of aleatoric music (or chance compositions), such as 4'33", where a pianist sits at the piano for that length of time without playing while allowing the ambient sound to form the basis of the composition. He also wrote piano pieces where the piano strings themselves would be "prepared" with applied wood blocks, or screws, to change the timbre of the work. In short, Cage made us aware of the role of sound in the conception of a composition.
When I spoke to Cage in 1982, he was in Toronto to perform a relatively new work at Convocation Hall called Roaratorio (1979), a work of ambient surround sound recorded in the streets of Dublin and played through multiple speakers while he read from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. The Eighties would be his last decade with us (he died in 1992) and in this interview he seemed to be in the process of summing up his work.
kc: How influential do you feel you've been on popular music?
jc: I don't like the notion of influence. Let's say someone is struck by something I've done, or something that someone else has done, then if he really does something that is lively himself, he'll have to translate that thing into his language. In that way, it'll come out true. You can't just be influenced. A person has to grow it in themselves.
kc: So a person has to open a different door for themselves much like you did when you decided to tamper with the piano?
jc: That's right. Just like my teacher Henry Cowell did before me. I frequently held the piano pedal down while Henry would run behind and play his banshee. I also once saw him use a darning needle on the bass strings of the piano to get a glissandi of overtones. So it was perfectly reasonable for me, after he opened that door, to put screws and weather stripping between the piano strings. The only change was that all the things that Henry did were mobile on the strings. For me, the main characteristic of the prepared piano was that they're stuck to the strings (laughs). And by the last work that I did for prepared piano, those pieces that had time length by title were grouped by the different objects I inserted – like wood blocks. That way, the preparation was in constant transformation.
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| John Cage in concert |
kc: This is one of the areas that fascinates me about your music. You not only see music as an evolution of technique, but also an evolution of our ability to accept different kinds of sounds as part of the music composition.
jc: You see, I was well aware early in my life, after I studied two years with Arnold Schoenberg, that I had no feeling for harmony. He was aware of this, too. And he told me that I would never be able to compose. I asked him why and he said that I would come to a wall that I could never get through. Now two years before I studied with him, I had promised to devote my life to music and composing. Since I felt obliged to continue, I figured that I would just have to hit my head against that wall (laughs). And what I think I've done in my work is to show alternatives to tonality and harmony as the structural means of music.
kc: What kinds of alternatives did you discover?
jc: On the one hand, the alternatives I discovered opened the doors to noise which tonality doesn't do. And the way it does this is by taking time as the basis of composition thereby replacing pitches and tonality and harmony. And time is hospitable to everything, whether it's musical, or not musical. So I would say that if you can hear something, it's natural for music.
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| Arnold Schoenberg |
kc: That would include hearing a pin drop, or someone coughing at a concert...
jc: Well, in New York, we now have concert halls where you can hear trucks passing by outside unlike others where formerly they made the architecture so you couldn't. Maybe the first music place where you heard extraneous noises was the Museum of Modern Art where you could always hear the subway going underneath (laughs).
kc: Many have claimed that you caused an upheaval in music with the prepared piano and your aleatoric pieces that were right in tune with the musical upheavals of the previous century when Schoenberg and the serialists challenged the excesses of Romanticism. True?
jc: What happened in Europe musically around the turn of the [20th] century was that you had the emergence of both Stravinsky and Schoenberg – not to mention Bartok. And music then divided itself into streams. What I chose was the stream of Schoenberg because his notion of the twelve-tones struck me as an open sesame. I got the notion that the twelve-tones were equal in importance to having just one tonal center. And I preferred that to the notion of major and minor scales where one tone is more important than all the others. I took that notion of equality and extended it to the world of noise and all sound.
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| Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, John Cage, Morton Feldman. |
kc: Wasn't there a group of you that worked together reshaping music in this manner?
jc: Yes. It was much later in New York. There was Morton Feldman, David Tudor, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown and myself. And we saw many possibilities. It was Feldman who created music on graph paper that listed the number of tones to be sounded. That was the first piece composed with the intention of being genuinely indeterminate. I found it very inspiring to a great deal of my work.
kc: What kind of audience did you originally attract to your music?
jc: Suitably, it wasn't other musicians, but painters. You see, the upheaval in painting had already taken place, so that they welcomed this upheaval in music. We never had large audiences – maybe 120 people could be counted on to come to one of our concerts – but they were all visual artists. There were only a few exceptions. Henry Cowell, of course, and also [the electronic music composer] Edgard Varèse.
kc: You might not want to think of the influence that you have on contemporary composers, but it still exists. How could we think of Brian Eno and his ambient music without what the group of you did?
jc: Yes. But what would the group of us have done without the furniture music of Erik Satie? He thought of music that should be in the environment and which could be ignored. Of course, no one ignored it (laughs). He did at least suggest that we could.
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| Erik Satie |
kc: Are we to expect then that musical standards are always being created to be broken down?
jc: When we least expect it, a new idea will come to us. We seem to be surrounded by possibilities that get into our awareness and we act upon them. It happens when you least expect it. I remember a book by Alan Watts. He wrote a great deal on Zen Buddhism. In one book, he put a bunch of scrambled letters on a page and suggested to the reader that we try to figure it out. What did those letters mean? Naturally, you couldn't figure it out if you tried, but if you forgot about it, the answer would come to you. The mind can block us from doing the next thing that we don't yet know. It does it by the means of our memory and our tastes. So if we can free ourselves, as Duchamps once put it, by reaching the impossibility of transferring from one image to the like image – from one Coca-Cola bottle to the other – by eliminating our memory imprint of the former image, each Coca-Cola bottle will be new to us. And from a Buddhist point of view, each one would be at the center of the universe. But also at a different center because the light doesn't fall on two Coca-Cola bottles in the same way. Therefore, they do look different.
kc: I see. It's just like Schoenberg's twelve-tones where there's no tonal center.
jc: That's right. There's a multiplicity of centers. At least, that's the view I find most refreshing.
kc: What has been the greatest benefit for you by opening up the world of music to noise?
jc: My own experience, now having opened the doors to that music, is that I really enjoy the noise –almost more than any music. It's sufficient for me.
kc: Do you think that even now at 70 years of age there are still new areas of music for you to tap into?
jc: I'm sure that not only that there are, but there always will be. I really don't think we'll come to the end (laughs). Life consists, for many people, of opening doors. Perhaps there are some people who prefer to have them shut, but I'm not one of those. I like to open a door. And if I don't do it today, I hope to do it tomorrow.
William Diehl (1982)
The interview with author William Diehl (Sharky's Machine, Chameleon, Primal Fear), a writer who wrote luridly powerful pulp with a political tinge, became a fascinating exercise in self-examination. When I discovered that Diehl was a pacifist who once marched with Martin Luther King in the South during the demonstrations against segregation, I was compelled to find out how such a peaceful man reconciled his polar opposite. To both my surprise and satisfaction, he was more than happy to comply while providing a vivid examination (through his thriller Chameleon) of the growing political mercenary movements in the Eighties that would ultimately lead to Waco and Oklahoma City. Diehl would die at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta on November 24, 2006, of an aortic aneurysm. At the time of his death, he was working on his tenth novel.
kc: I get the impression that when you sit down to write there's quite a war going on in your head.
wd: That's quite true. I find that subconsciously things from my past keep getting in and coming out of the books. A lot of the critics in reviewing Chameleon have called it one of the most violent books ever written. Yet I'm basically a pacifist. I don't own weapons. I don't even have a gun in the house. I live alone on an island. No doubt that it's a throwback to World War II when I served as a ball-turret gunner. All of those latent aggressions and violence are surfacing now. It has to be that because I'm certainly not interested in becoming active in the things I write about. But I should say that there's nothing about the violence and the weaponry that I depict in Chameleon that isn't really happening today.
kc: In this book, you examine an assassination squad – a secret terrorist organization that trains at "The Farm" – What is that?
wd: I knew that "The Farm" existed. I've known about it for several years and I met the man who runs it. He's a guy named Mitch Warbell. One night, we started talking about the place and he told me that while a lot of mercenaries go through the training course, many of these people are bankers and folks going to countries where terrorism is prevalent. They take the course as a self-protective device. That's what triggered the idea. Then I went out and took the course. Over a period of six months, I spent time talking to the instructors. Their stories gave me the basis for the book.
kc: When you were describing a moment ago those latent aggressions and the violence, how does it manifest itself when you are writing a book like Chameleon?
wd: The first chapter of the book was triggered by the Doobie Brothers' song "What a Fool Believes," which I heard on the radio as I was driving home. The song started a lovely little romantic story going in my head. Suddenly, it turned very dangerous and it got very violent. I don't know where it came from. All of a sudden, as I'm working on this romantic idyll, it got very tough. It was then that the story took off.
kc: At the heart of this violent story is a particular code of honour. Where does this come from?
wd: Chameleon is a story about honourable people versus dishonourable people. And I've put at the heart of it the Oriental philosophy of honour. My belief is that the Oriental philosophy of honour is a very positive and uncompromising belief. Whereas in my country, you have to struggle just to be a little bit honest. That's why in my novel Sharky's Machine you have four cops who are basically losers who become winners in the end because they couldn't be corrupted. That's also the story of Chameleon where you have two or three people who are honourable. I'm dealing with knights on white horses slaying dragons. And I still believe that's possible.
kc: Does the writing of action fiction though become a safety valve for your own violent fantasies?
wd: It's indeed a great release. What it is, is playing out your fantasies on paper. For instance, in Chameleon, I developed my own brand of martial arts. What I did was draw stick figures where I could try out the moves – sometimes in front of a video camera – and describe them. I really got into it. Then I also got into the method of trying to remember things without taking notes which is what these people in the book could do. I never took it as far as them but I found that if I went into a restaurant and found it fascinating enough to use in a book, I can remember every little detail of it. Then I file it away in my word processor. Often I tell people that I'm a method writer because I actually act things out in the room because you deal with your psyche on paper.
kc: How do you act these things out?
wd: If I'm angry, I go in and write a violent passage for a book. When I come out, I don't even want to step on an ant. If I'm writing about a character that I really like, and I know that the character is going to be killed, I can get depressed for a couple of days. In Sharky's Machine, when Nosh, Sharky's best friend, gets killed, I got into a funk over that and I couldn't write for over three days. I was so upset over having to kill that character. When certain things happen, I react emotionally as it is really happening. It can be draining at times. It's a good thing that I live on an island where my house is a hundred feet from the Atlantic Ocean. A lot of times after writing a passage I'll go down to the beach just to calm myself down. What happens is that I get hysterical inside and I can't translate that on paper. How do you describe to anybody the feelings and thoughts that go through your head at times like that? The best thing to do is find a way to get rid of it, once you've used up the part you need to put on paper.
kc: I'd like to take that a step further. If you resolve certain conflicts within yourself, does it also mean that your writing will change?
wd: Absolutely. My writing changed radically from Sharky's Machine to Chameleon. And a lot of it is in the emotional content of the book. I think Chameleon is a better book than Sharky even though it feels colder. Maybe that's because of what some of the characters do in the story.
kc: Has living on the beach provided the sanctuary needed?
wd: Yeah. I remember when the film of Sharky's Machine had its world premiere in Atlanta. All of the movie stars came and it seemed like the biggest thing since Gone With the Wind. As a result of it, I started to get a celebrity status in Atlanta. I was expected to be places and doing things. This started to really disturb me because I started to lose the independence that I had gained by writing these books. One day, I got on this airplane and flew down to the coast of Georgia and told this real estate agent that I wanted an island. The agent found me one immediately. Now I don't even go to the mainland. I don't even want to leave this place. There's one place there that is like Cannery Row restaurant filled with expatriates and people who just go to escape like me. I go there in the morning, read the newspaper and chat, then I don't see them until the next day. Since I moved there my writing productivity just jumped.
kc: I guess the biggest distinction some would have to make meeting you – or knowing you – is to separate the man from the writer?
wd: Probably most writers become very involuted and difficult to deal with when they're working. And I feel that I'm difficult to deal with because I vague-out. I can hold a conversation without even knowing what I'm saying. I'm so used to doing it. When I'm through, I wake up one morning and the book is finished and I have nothing to do. It's a bit of a downer because I've been living with it for so long. Then I go and do crazy things like scuba diving for weeks at a time. It's a schizophrenic way to make a living, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I love the isolation. Nobody can invade it. What other occupation is there where you can be totally isolated and deal with yourself in whatever terms you want to deal with yourself in?
Allen Ginsberg (1982)
My thinking was (and still is) that it’s difficult taking into consideration the political landscape of the Eighties without examining aspects of the Sixties. Many ghosts from that period (i.e. Vietnam, the Cold War, civil rights) continued to linger as unresolved arguments that underscored political and cultural actions in the eighties. If cynicism became more the common coin twenty years after the idealism sparked by JFK’s 1960 Inaugural address, some voices including poet Allen Ginsberg was set out to uncover what the political lessons of the Sixties were. While historically Ginsberg had emerged as part of a group of writers and artists in the early Fifties tagged by the media as The Beat Generation, his voice continued to be a large part of the Sixties counter-culture (a voice that continued to loom large until his death in 1997). As part of this collection of American post-World War Two non-conformists, such as William Burroughs (Naked Lunch), Jack Kerouac (On the Road) and Gregory Corso (The Vestal Lady on Brattle), Ginsberg rejected materialism and embraced new forms of expression partly inspired by William Blake and Walt Whitman. This involved an interest in Eastern religion, alternate forms of sexuality, and experimentation with drugs. Most famously known for his epic 1955 poem "Howl" ("I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.") in which he celebrated the hedonism of his generation while denouncing the destructive forces of American capitalism, Ginsberg also became a champion of anti-censorship after "Howl" became part of a famous obscenity trial in 1957 (documented in the 2010 film Howl). Eventually, Judge Clayton W. Horn declared that "Howl" was not obscene while adding, "Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?"
Throughout the Sixties, Ginsberg (who was a practicing Buddhist) continued to write and perform and was highly active in the political unrest of the period. When I met him in 1982, he was in Toronto to give a reading and perform some songs he wrote with the local punk band, The Diodes. He was also promoting a book that addressed the demise of the underground press, once again speaking out against censorship. As he walked into the studio, dressed sharply in a custom made suit and tie, he didn't look like the bearded, long-haired bard who once confronted an army troop train of soldiers bound for Vietnam with chants of "Hare Krishna!" At which point, with cultural change in mind, the interview began.
kc: Some of the key figures of the Sixties in recent years have either died, faded away, or become born again like Bob Dylan, or...
ag: Many of the pop figures have. But not the literary figures! The literary figures, in fact, have grown in power. William Burroughs has just finished a best seller called Cities of the Red Night which I think is one of his best books. Gregory Corso, another of the so-called Beat Generation, has just published a fascinating new book of poetry.
kc: So you're saying people haven't disappeared at all.
ag: Oh no. That's just cornball mythology. Kerouac is dead. Neal Cassady is dead. Yet there are endless numbers of great poets still teaching, writing and becoming more mature and powerful. That's how it should be. Most artists ripen and get stronger if they're real artists and have a true fix on life and death in eternity.
kc: Most people today though continue to believe that the counter-culture of the Sixties died out by the Seventies.
ag: Yeah. But you could equally say that the United States died out as well. It's still in its death throes, too, with the current war in El Salvador and the paranoiac Cold War policies of Reagan which are ruining the nation and bankrupting it.
kc: But why do you think those policies have grown more popular today?
ag: I don't think they have. Those views are very much bought and paid for by the multi-nationals. There was a story in the New York Times in 1979 by David Burnham accounting for the PR campaign of the nuclear industry. He said that nuclear groups like Exxon spent $470 million for public relations and propaganda, advertising and brain-washing, while only $4 million was spent by anti-nuclear activists Ralph Nader and Helen Caldicott. So it's a bought consciousness that the media has unfortunately co-operated with.
kc: How do you account for this kind of national sleepwalking then?
ag: America is so egotistic. It's so insistent on being Number One. I mean, if a guy in a bar went around saying that he was Number One, he could beat up anyone, he was stronger than anybody, more important than anybody, and wanted to run the bar, everybody would shrink away realizing that they were dealing with a big neurotic. It's even worse when he's drunk on a $170 billion budget.
kc: If American culture has changed so dramatically since the Sixties, what kind of view does the media today have of the literary movement you were part of?
ag: There's a certain stereotyping in newspapers. I don't know whether it's dumbness or the lowest common denominator, but they're not so interested in good news. They're certainly no longer interested in the continuity of art. They're now interested in the superficial giggle. I just went to a radio program where the fellow interviewing me asked how I'd changed and why I was wearing a suit and tie – as if it were some awful betrayal of beatnik beard! There was no inquiry as to the gentleness at the base of the literary movement that was called the Beat Generation.
kc: But does the Beat Generation still even exist?
ag: It still exists – nameless – but probably more influential than before.
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| poet Allen Ginsberg chanting in the Sixties |
kc: Is it really important that it has a name?
ag: No. It was invented by newspapers to begin with. So it was their poem and nobody wants to write their poem necessarily. We all did our best to make sure their poem was a good one though.
kc: Besides the perceived disappearance of many Sixties figures into obscurity, one thing that did literally disappear was the underground press. When did you begin to get concerned for its survival?
ag: I was very much concerned in the late Sixties and early Seventies with the future of the underground press. That's a big part of why I'm now visiting Toronto. I'm attending the Amnesty International convocation where I'm presenting a report from PEN (ed. an independent, non-profit organization that is committed to defending freedom of opinion). We found that there was a concerted attack on the underground press in the United States by the FBI, in co-operation with the CIA. The attack took the form of the burning and bombings of underground newspaper offices. There was constant harassment of vendors, distributors, and printers, and banning from college campuses. There were also phony drug busts by agents planting marijuana as a way to bust the office and seize all the records and mailing lists, and smashing the typewriters and typesetting machinery.
kc: How deeply entrenched were the police in this sabotage?
ag: There were police spies constantly. They were always spreading disinformation. If there was going to be a peace march, the spy would call in and report that it was happening at a different time, and in a different place. There were anonymous letters sent from a "concerned taxpayer," or a "concerned citizen" – or even better – a "concerned student." The Great Speckled Bird, an underground newspaper in Atlanta, was put on trial for obscenity. They won the case but it drained the paper of money because they were operating on a shoestring. The FBI also had landlords raise the rent for these places by telling them that subversives lived and worked there. It was a great network of conspiracy which reduced the number of underground publications from 400 in 1968 to 60 in 1975.
kc: How long did it take you to accumulate all of this information?
ag: Twelve years. All of this information comes from the files of the FBI and your own RCMP who was doing the same things here as in the States. When I started investigating this, as I said, back in 1968, the mainstream media said I was paranoid because that sort of thing didn't happen in America. And they kept that line until they started getting harassed by Spiro Agnew. The underground press was more vulnerable though. So all of this information was collected and, with the help of PEN, put into a book called Un-American Activities: The Campaign Against the Underground Press.
kc: Besides the obvious reason for having this knowledge available, what do you think this book could do for those wishing to understand the counter-culture that was at work during the Sixties?
ag: It would be very useful for younger people of this new wave generation who wonder why the Sixties radical consciousness movement seemed to diminish as you suggested earlier. It would be important for them to realize that it was a concerted effort of the government to squash the movement because the government found the counter-culture interesting and important. It was so important that they spent millions of dollars to sabotage the counter-culture intellectual news organs. This book is for those who have yet to realize that if you don't know your history, you're doomed to repeat it.
Jerry Goldsmith (1982)
Where the original Hollywood composers who pioneered film music, such as Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Waxman, Bernard Herrmann and Alex North, either came from classical music backgrounds, or continued to do concert work while plying a trade scoring movies, Jerry Goldsmith always wanted to be a film composer. Born in 1929 in Los Angeles, he studied piano at six and by the time he was thirteen began having private lessons with the legendary concert pianist Jakob Gimpel. While studying counterpoint and theory with the Italian composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (who also tutored Henry Mancini and John Williams), Goldsmith happened to see Hitchcock's Spellbound which was scored by Miklós Rózsa and he was hooked. Goldsmith would soon enrol and attend lectures Rózsa gave at the University of Southern California until he began more practical studies in scoring at Los Angeles City College. By the Fifties, Jerry Goldsmith began work in radio and later scored live CBS television shows such as Climax!and Playhouse 90. Soon he was scoring multiple episodes of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. In 1961, composer Alfred Newman became deeply impressed with Goldsmith's work on Thriller and recommended him to Universal Pictures who needed a composer for their new modern western Lonely are the Brave (1962). From there Goldsmith mapped out a career that spanned over 40 years.
When I spoke to Jerry Goldsmith in 1982, he had just finished scoring the Tobe Hooper/Steven Spielberg horror thriller Poltergeist and was in Toronto to speak at a Film Music Symposium. At one point in the interview, we started discussing his thoughts on a variety of pictures and that section is what's included below.
kc: Your music for John Huston's Freud is one of my favourite scores. How did you come to work on that picture.
jg: It wasn't easy. I'd done this picture at Universal called Lonely are the Brave with Kirk Douglas, the first major feature film that I'd scored. My work on that project was largely due to the insistence of pressure by Alfred Newman who was a huge fancier of my music. Universal was so pleased with my work on that picture that their musical director Joseph Gershenson continually urged John Huston to have me do the picture. I was very keen to do it because it was one of the most talked about movies about to come out. So when I got it, it turned out to be a big breakthrough for me after six months of pressure on Huston.
kc: Did you find Huston musically sensitive to your ideas?
jg: Yes and no. But I learned a great deal working with him. One of the most important things John taught me was during the time we were spending hours spotting music for the picture. One scene in particular took three days to figure out. There wasn't even that much music in the film, or very much in the way of dialogue either. So I didn't want to force music into the story. But we went back and forth as to whether we should put music there, or shouldn't we put music there, and John kept leaning towards including it and I kept leaning away from using music. At one point, he finally told me, "If you don't feel it, then don't waste your time trying to write something you don't feel. It won't work." That's something I've never forgotten. When I get into another situation like that with another director, I always tell them what Huston told me – and he was sure right. That settles the discussion.
kc: If Freud showed your imagination at work learning how to spot music in a movie, A Patch of Blue reveals something of your delicacy as a writer.
jg: A Patch of Blue, a movie about a man (Sidney Poitier) who falls in love with a blind woman (Elizabeth Hartman), was that kind of delicate and sensitive picture. It's also the kind of film that I prefer to do. People don't tend to remember that I can do those things. They concentrate more on the big epic movies and I have to remind them of the little ones like A Patch of Blue and Lillies of the Field.
kc: Why are these smaller dramas so much more satisfying for you?
jg: I prefer the kind of dramatic situation where there is someone you're trying to get inside of with the music. To try and write music for machinery doesn't appeal to me very much. Some people find character in automobiles. I don't. It's human situations that are attractive to me. That's why A Patch of Blue was a very special project.
kc: Your job is to find a way to write music that supports the drama while the audience gets inside the drama after your work is done. But do you ever try and imagine yourself as part of the audience while you're composing?
jg: Before I begin to write, I try and view the picture the very first time as if I were one of the audience. What am I feeling from this movie as part of an audience? Then, as I ruminate over my responses, I try to think about whether I'd feel those situations even deeper if I added music to it. That's how I try to approach any film. Many times there are certain emotions that got into the picture that may not have been what the director intended, but on the other hand, the music has the power to change that around. There's a marvellous example of that which happened in Logan's Run. The whole last part of the movie was done very romantically and lushly. The producer told me, "You made this into a love story." And I said, "Wasn't that always apparent?" He said, "No." I sometimes wonder how people make these films and not understand what they're doing. Some projects get so overwrought and overproduced that the studio heads are not aware of what it is. I try to think of what's apparent and what's not. In Poltergeist, there's a scene I just scored that's terrifying, but I thought it could have gone two ways musically. I could have played the terror and been done with it. But I didn't think that was quite enough. By inserting the emotional conflicts the characters were feeling brought a whole other element to it.
kc: What was the first truly epic Hollywood picture you worked on?
jg: The Sand Pebbles was the first 70mm and six-track stereo movie I had done. And I loved the story and found it very moving. It was also the first time I worked with director Bob Wise, a wonderful person who is also very sensitive to music, and the story afforded me a larger extended palette to work on.
kc: How difficult is it working on such a large project as The Sand Pebbles?
jg: The difficulties have nothing to do with size. You're concerned more with what are the dramatic and emotional problems of the characters in the story. On the other hand, you write an hour, or an hour and ten minutes of music for a film and that's the way it goes now. I'm longing for the days when there's twenty-eight minutes of music in a picture (laughs). Then there's an epic film like Patton which has only thirty minutes of music in it.
kc: For me, that opening march you wrote for Patton is one of the most fascinating pieces you've composed. You start with these echoing trumpet triplets that seem to invoke war through the ages, but you do it also to play into General Patton's belief in reincarnation. Then you introduce a pipe organ playing the main theme in a liturgical tone as if to reflect his religious beliefs before you give us a quick history of the marching band beginning with the fife and drum and leading up to the modern full scale orchestral march.
jg: That's it exactly. There's three basic elements that I built into the opening theme: the archaic, the religious and the military. That's what made the picture intriguing as a composer. It was to spot these individual character traits of a man and to use them by themselves and also combine them contrapuntally in whatever fashion you wanted. And that's what I did there. Sometimes I used the corral, or at other times a fanfare, or I'd put them altogether.
kc: Speaking of mixing and matching musical styles, in Chinatown you mix jazz and atonal classical music.
jg: The producers were always talking about providing a period sound, but I didn't want to approach it that way. I felt that would only be redundant given what was on the screen. After all, I knew that period having grown up in Los Angeles at that time. Chinatown was a situation again where I was trying to get inside the characters and the opening theme itself became a period piece with more updated harmonies. The jazziness only came about because of the trumpet player interpreting it as a blues which was very nice. But the unorthodox orchestral scoring came to me after seeing the picture. It just called for a tapestry of sound before I had any musical ideas whatsoever. This was strange for me. Usually the musical ideas dictate the orchestration whereas this time I heard the orchestration without any ideas musically. Chinatown is one of my favourite scores and one of my favourite pictures, too.
kc: You finally won your Academy Award for The Omen. Were you surprised that you got recognized for this particular score?
jg: I was surprised about everything on that film! Who knew it was going to take off like it did? I think the score is super. The producer had asked me while they were still shooting the picture, and I'd only read the script, what was I hearing in the orchestra? I told him, "I hear voices." He said, "Wonderful. Love the idea." And then I thought, what did I say? Now I'm stuck with this. It was a departure using a Latin text with that choral arrangement. It turned out to be quite a lot of fun.
kc: Star Trek: The Motion Picture reunited you with Robert Wise. Happily?
jg: Yeah. Tough, though. There was nothing much to write to in the beginning – or to the end. I was working for twenty weeks on this picture because the special effects were so slow in coming in. It just took forever. The last piece I recorded was the Klingon scene which I did on a Thursday night and the movie was supposed to open a week later in Washington. We decided to put the soundtrack album together as we were recording the music for the film so it came out at the same time as the movie. But I had fun writing the music. I actually think it's one of the best things I've done. It was one of those great moments for a composer where there wasn't enough time to build the sound effects so the music had to take it all. We didn't have to worry about being killed by the sound effects. But that's also an intelligent choice because when you're floating around in space, there is no sound. It's a vacuum. You either play it silent, or let the music carry it. Whether you liked what Kubrick did with music in 2001, when the music played, by God, you heard the music.
The interview with author Jerzy Kosinski (The Painted Bird, Being There) took place in 1982 while he was promoting his novel, Pinball. The book was written in response to the murder of John Lennon a couple of years earlier. It's the story of a female fan who hunts down a popular rock star by seducing a former classical pianist to help her in the search. The novel examines the motivations of the pop fan: Is she moved more by the artist, or his art? Our talk also came shortly after the release of Warren Beatty's Reds (1982), which examined the life of the American Communist journalist John Reed (Ten Days That Shook the World) who covered the Russian Revolution. In the film, Kosinski played the Soviet ideologue Zinoviev.
Jerzy Kosinski was a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust by living under a false identity. He wrote about that experience in The Painted Bird (1965). Many of his books took up the theme of anonymity and invisibility which, ironically, came to a head in the late Eighties when he was being accused of plagiarizing some of his work. He ultimately committed suicide in 1991. His final note read: "I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call it Eternity." Before Eternity knocked, we discussed the subject of anonymity and visibility.
kc: Is anonymity a theme you love to explore?
jk: Anonymity and visibility, both. Particularly in Being There where the invisibility of the character was uninvited. The world didn't expect Chauncey Gardener and Chauncey Gardener didn't expect the world.
kc: In light of this particular theme, don't you find it rather ironic that a brief appearance in Warren Beatty's Reds has given you – the writer – a certain kind of visibility?
jk: Yes. It's interesting. Twenty minutes of Reds increases one's visibility far more than twenty years of writing fiction. Very recently in New York, I went out with two friends of mine wearing one of my silly disguises and they asked me if I wanted to go to some favourite place of theirs. So I went with this disguise that had a different hairline, mustache and sideburns. For some reason, when we arrived at this place, they ran into a student they knew from Yale, and he was a student when I was a professor there. He wasn't my student, but we were there at the same time. In any case, my friends steered the conversation towards Jerzy Kosinski and whether or not this person had met him. And this guy went into this negative tirade about what his friends – who were my students – thought about this silly man. Meanwhile, there I was sitting right next to him drinking my beer, not contributing to the conversation. He turned towards me only once and then left me alone. Clearly, he didn't think I was interested in the subject matter of Kosinski.
kc: That is a lot stranger than being a fly on the wall. What was your reaction to this?
jk: I found myself absolutely fascinated by the whole experience. I was dramatized from within. Even though some of the things he said about me were very unpleasant. Unfortunately, some of the things he said were true, so I found myself wanting to argue with him about some of his points and accepting the others. All together this was a negative experience. I was crushed by some of his comments. I like to think I'm popular. But obviously, I'm not. Still, it was very rewarding.
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| Kosinski as the Soviet bureaucrat Zinoviev in Reds |
kc: You make it sound as if there are both benefits and dangers to exploring anonymity.
jk: I still can't resolve what is better. Is it better to be visible? For an artist, who needs it? Who needs to suffer the consequences of visibility which is always negative? You have to deal with the rumours, the innuendos, the jealousy of people who feel that you became visible for the wrong reasons. All of this debunking could lead to an assassination. I'm not just talking about physical assassination, but character assassination as well. That's very common when you are visible. But maybe visibility is just another experience. Maybe one should go through this. Maybe an artist deserves to set himself up as a target. Let's be hit! This is part of the creative process. It's not a popularity contest. Art by nature is adversarial. It demolishes certain notions of morality. Most of the characters we remember from drama, or literature, are characters that are adversaries. They bring something new into life and therefore they are not popular at all.
kc: I assume that you've put this adversarial quality to good use in your personal life?
jk: Those are the kinds of characters I grew up on. And yes, it gave me the courage to be an adversary as well. It got me out of Eastern Europe, to oppose the communist system, and to oppose the things in my life that I don't like. To be an adversary is the essence of the Protestant doctrine. The very basic credo of the Protestant message is that you have to step out from vital existence. You can't allow yourself to be bound by it. As a spiritual being, you have to step outside of it and cast judgment upon it – to protest, hence protestant. Either say yes, or no, to it.
jk: George Harrison came to visit me once in Switzerland at a ski resort. And I was convinced he was going to be mobbed. This was at the height of his visibility. He called me to say that he was coming and that he'd never been to a ski resort. I told him that he must be kidding, that they'd kill him here...they'd kill me here! But he told me, "Jerzy, they won't recognize me." So he arrived at the resort where I spend my winters and nobody recognized him. There I was walking with George Harrison, the Beatle, and people would come up to me and say, "Hi, Mr. Kosinksi, how are you?" There he is dressed in his trench coat, looking the way he always looks, and nobody recognizes him. I asked him why nobody would and he told me, "Because they would never assume that I was here." He said, "I could make myself visible if I looked at them a certain way, or stared at them, then I would invite recognition." So even if you are a big rock star, you can be invisible.
kc: Oddly enough, even with this struggle over visibility resting right at the heart of your novels, as well as your life, does intimacy still become a prime objective?
jk: It's very important. Sexuality is a prime mover of my characters. This could have something to do with my growing up in Eastern Europe at the time of the war. In the post-war period, when society manifested itself at its worst, where life meant nothing and people were gassed and killed for no reason at all, the only force that brought people together was the sexual instinct. The worst love affair is better than the best war – there's no doubt about it. The worst lover is better than the best bureaucrat. The worst love letter is certainly better than being rejected by the Communist Party and ending up in a prison camp. My point is, we all became sexually driven. And I remember when most of us came to the West, we encountered this hostility. The critics would say, "These are sexually driven and obsessed people." And we would say, "Well sure, don't you think it's better to be sexually obsessed than to be ideologically obsessed?" Look what those who are ideologically obsessed do to those who they don't like. This theme has been very much part of my fiction from The Painted Bird through Steps, Cockpit, Blind Date and Pinball.
kc: Are you saying that your experiences in Europe during and after the war had some bearing on your life because then you would have had to be invisible?
jk: Right. And sex offered the few areas of being entirely yourself without the scrutiny of society and its institutions. Therefore, you could be profoundly human, close to life, and in no way in conflict with your spirituality. It requires acknowledging your own humanity. This can only be accomplished through the force of life.
kc: Now that your appearance in Reds has given you some form of visibility, where do you think it's going to take your writing?
jk: Well, this is a very temporary visibility. It will end up in some wounding articles about me and some rumours spread as well. It's unavoidable. Like any other "star," I'll go through an interesting period of apprehension, of the debunking of my novels, and suffering because of my performing as an actor. There are some who think that if you write novels, then you write novels. You don't make yourself visible. But I like to think that experience matters, no matter what. To this novelist, to Jerzy Kosinski, experience is all I have. It may be a very painful process, but it will end soon. And I will disappear again.
Toni Morrison (1982)
After the murder of Martin Luther King Jr, in the late Sixties, the momentum of the Civil Rights movement seemed to wane. No leader could fill that vacuum and black voices in the Eighties became fragmented. Often the question of black identity came up during interviews. While many of the individuals I spoke to were male, author Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon, Beloved) brought perspective on black culture from a woman's point of view. On the day she came in, we discussed her then new book Tar Baby. The novel portrays a love affair between Jade and Son, two blacks who came from different worlds. While Jade is a Sorbonne graduate and fashion model who was sponsored into wealth and privilege, Son is a poor, strong-willed man who literally washes up on the shore of the wealthy white family home in the Caribbean where Jade's uncle and aunt work as servants. Although Jade and Son try to make a home in the United States, the compromises each makes (dictated by their class differences) doom the affair.
kc: Does it bother you that often you are categorized as both a black and female writer?
tm: Yes. But I'm not sure that it's the readers that do it. It's probably more the critics who make a point of pigeonholing writers. Although they never seem to identify someone as a "white male" writer. But they do talk about women writers, or Mexican writers, or black writers, in that fashion. It sets up artificial barriers in the minds of people who choose the books. They think that it must be about feminism, or it must be about how hard it is to be a black person. They end up developing attitudes about whether they'll pick up the book. So it's difficult for an author to write within the pigeonhole and out of it at the same time. You see, sometimes when they call you a "black female writer" it's meant in the pejorative. It means you're pretty good...considering (laughs).
kc: But black culture is the basis for all of your work?
tm: Precisely. Always. I never concentrated on any other culture but my own. I try very hard to create a style that is unquestionably black, and I invent and employ all of the characteristics that universally make up black art – whether it's dance, music or sculpture. I'm using what my sensibilities have been formed by. And I think that it is a legitimate pursuit because there still is something called the "French novel" and the "19th Century novel" where people simply use what they're interested in and what they have. But it is not diminishing; it is enhancing to fully realize your scope. It's like saying to Faulkner that he should stop writing that regional literature and write about London and New York. You shouldn't penalize a writer for doing what he does.
kc: What you seem to be writing about is both the culture and the exploration of the personality.
tm: But that's similar. The writers that I read explored culture and their regions. After all, there is such a thing as a white culture and an American culture. But it doesn't stop there. These writers also talk about the differences between this character and that character. That's precisely what is most compulsive in my efforts to be a writer. How do people get on, what is their crises and what do they learn. In other words, fiction is about people. That's one of the art forms that must be about people. The others don't have to be.
kc: But black culture is the basis for all of your work?
tm: Precisely. Always. I never concentrated on any other culture but my own. I try very hard to create a style that is unquestionably black, and I invent and employ all of the characteristics that universally make up black art – whether it's dance, music or sculpture. I'm using what my sensibilities have been formed by. And I think that it is a legitimate pursuit because there still is something called the "French novel" and the "19th Century novel" where people simply use what they're interested in and what they have. But it is not diminishing; it is enhancing to fully realize your scope. It's like saying to Faulkner that he should stop writing that regional literature and write about London and New York. You shouldn't penalize a writer for doing what he does.
kc: What you seem to be writing about is both the culture and the exploration of the personality.
tm: But that's similar. The writers that I read explored culture and their regions. After all, there is such a thing as a white culture and an American culture. But it doesn't stop there. These writers also talk about the differences between this character and that character. That's precisely what is most compulsive in my efforts to be a writer. How do people get on, what is their crises and what do they learn. In other words, fiction is about people. That's one of the art forms that must be about people. The others don't have to be.
kc: Your characters are always confronted with cultural attitudes. Much like Jade in your new book Tar Baby, the reader can discover many different corners of what it means to be black.
tm: I felt that in Tar Baby I wanted to explore male/female relationships. And in order to examine the turning point, or conflicts in that relationship, it didn't seem to me that you could talk about the conflicts in marriage or love and just say it was domestic battles that go on in gender. It wasn't just about male this and female that. There were much more profound differences operating and those differences were cultural. So the young, lovely, well-educated international model would have to leave her background in order to make it. You have to go away. And when you go away, you leave perhaps a stultifying environment, but you also leave behind family and friends – the things that nourish you. So you pay a little penalty. The man she falls in love with – and who falls in love with her – has never left anything. He's very romantic and stubborn in the sense of an expatriate who is away from home and always thinks it was better that it ever was. You discover that they can't really speak the same language in spite of my urging them to be permanently happy. The differences were enormous and they're both right. It's just that she's in the 20th Century and he's not.
kc: Those differences that cause misunderstandings are also the little things that make things in life so unresolvable, right?
tm: Oh, indeed. It's hard to know what to do about the habits that are so different. But I like to put my characters in situations that are stressful and under duress so that I can see what people will do when their backs are against the wall. And then I let them act it out. It gives a tragic and melancholy cast to the books, but I mention it because people really want a happy ending and to have everything solved. I'm not able to provide it though because it would be fraudulent.
kc: What responsibilities then do you feel you have to your readers?
tm: I think my responsibility as a black writer is to illicit a visceral reaction from those who might not read very much, and to also have enough there to be provocative for people who are fastidious readers. I think my best analogy is what happens with black music. There are certain aficionados of jazz who really understand what the music is about. And they're very amused and thrilled by the risks that the musicians take, the innovations they make and their echoes of other musicians within. But then there are other people who don't know anything about that, but they love it anyway. They come to it with a different, or limited appreciation, but it doesn't make it any less real. Just because they haven't the vocabulary for it, or they haven't the insight in order to describe it, doesn't mean that the pleasure is any less. Yet that's what's interesting about black art. It can do both things.
kc: What do you think makes a book a thing of great value?
tm: I think a book ought to be unremittingly beautiful as well as unremittingly useful – politically useful, at the same time. I don't think you have to abandon one thing for the other. I get very distressed when people talk about art as if it has no political or cultural function. It's as if the novel were not a form developed for a specific class. The aristocrats had theirs, and the peasants had theirs, and this new breed of middle-class people didn't have to read novels, but the form was devised for them to guide them about manners. That's why we talk about the novel of manners. Shakespeare was writing very political theatre. The best art is, in that larger sense, very political art. I know it's not fashionable to do this anymore. Today it's stripped down language and characters who become clusters of words that move through pages and not being sentimental or whatever it is that's opposed to being in vogue. I think it means that they don't want people to feel anything. It's a reduction to minimalism and it reduces the intelligence and scope of the reader. And I won't – at the great risk of diminishing readers – do that. I think the best thing to do is to make the literature better. You enhance it, not abandon it.
David Cronenberg (1983)
The horror film genre in the Eighties had grown significantly more popular because horror writers, like Stephen King, were pumping out books that were already infused with a film sensibility. But the success of thrillers like Friday the 13th and The Nightmare on Elm Street also brought on a deluge of dread-inducing suspense pictures that were essentially about people bent on what my friend Alex Patterson once called head-pulling rampages. Although these films and their imitators were often lauded for their subversiveness, they were actually quite morally conservative, fitting snugly into the Reagan era. After all, in those movies, why was it the sexually active teenagers who always got snuffed out and it was the virgin who became the hero that vanquished the killer? Many of these horror movies did more to re-enforce our fears and prejudices than help us come to terms with transgression.
What true horror became in the eighties and what it began to mean in artistic terms was part of a discussion I had with one of its practitioners, David Cronenberg (Shivers, Rabid, The Brood), in 1983. As a Canadian director who began his career in the Seventies making low-budget thrillers, Cronenberg was just about to release his first big-budget commercial movie, The Dead Zone, which was adapted from a best-selling Stephen King novel. He was also about to be honoured at the Festival of Festivals (the original name of the Toronto International Film Festival) and had programmed a series on science-fiction films for that year's event. We began the interview talking about the changing face of horror right at that moment when, in retrospect, he was beginning to move beyond the genre.
kc: Horror is a genre that often hasn't been taken very seriously as art. But today it seems to be more so than ever before. Has this change enabled you to be taken more seriously as a film director?
dc: I think there have always been horror films that were taken seriously, if only for the fact that they made a lot of money. The Exorcist was taken fairly seriously. Back in the Sixties, Rosemary's Baby was taken seriously by both the audience and critics – and for good reason – but I do wonder about things like this. I wonder if I should worry about becoming a member of the establishment, or should I worry about being too accepted. But there are always people who will remind you that you are not. Just a while ago, Jeremy Ferguson was reviewing two of my films in a television guide – Shivers and Rabid – and he was not very kind. So there will always be people out there who will remind you of how untalented you are.
kc: I suppose what I'm getting at here is that, although there have been a glut of horror movies in recent years, they have done little to be considered works of art. Do you know what I mean?
dc: Sure. I think there is that attitude. But when you begin to define what you mean by a horror film and you start to put films on your list of great horror classics, you might end up with Ken Russell's The Devils or Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver. And I think you could include those movies with justification. Then you would really have to expand on what most adult's understanding of what a horror film is, what it's about and why it exists. Kids, on the other hand, get very excited about horror films because it touches a certain part of them and their imagination. It touches their fear and their general enthusiasm about life, which many adults lose very quickly. I think kids understand why horror films are art because what it does to them is what art does to a human being. It illuminates them. That is justification enough for the existence of the horror genre.
kc: It's funny that these attitudes exist because horror has always been with us.
dc: Sure it has. Since man began to first tell stories around the campfire, horror existed. You can also go back to The Odyssey, or The Iliad, which are full of things that would today qualify as science-fiction or horror. There are witches, demons and a cyclops – grotesque creatures who kill. But there is in the film business a strange feeling about horror that separates you from the mainstream even if now horror films are regularly produced and distributed by major studios.
kc: How's that?
dc: When I did The Brood, which was not that long ago, we didn't even try to find distribution with a major studio because they were too aloof. They wouldn't touch a horror film unless it was The Omen with Gregory Peck. Shortly thereafter, they started to buy up all the most awful schlock in the world. They realized that for the money, after the success of films like Halloween and Friday the 13th, they couldn't afford to ignore even the lowest of the low within the genre. Now that barrier and sanction against horror films has definitely broken down. But there's still a feeling that, God, if you really could do what you wanted to do, you'd probably make Sophie's Choice rather than Videodrome.
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| Samantha Eggar in The Brood |
kc: If there is one idea that links your own films, and the horror within them, it's the notion that the body is mortal and it rebels against you. What got you interested in that side of horror?
dc: My predilection when I went to university was towards the biological sciences and bio-chemistry. But, for me, the essence of a horror film is the fact of human death. That's a very physical thing rather than an abstract spiritual concept – even though those aspects are involved. That means I have to start to really contemplate what physical existence means to human beings and how absolute or not our physical existence is. That's why I got into some strange areas in my films.
kc: Because of your background in science, does that also mean that you bring a more clinical feel to your work?
dc: There's an understanding of the clinical mind. Although, to tell you the truth, you can certainly find that in other disciplines within the walls of academia besides science. One of my favourite novels is [Vladimir Nabokov's] Pale Fire, which is about a crazed scholar who is a professor of literature. I think there's a great affinity between this man who dissects the poem and my crazed scientists who dissect bodies and societies. I see them as being very similar. So it's not really so much the clinical, or medical approach, but rather just an approach to the world where one wants to make order out of chaos and logic out of illogic. If you follow a rational argument to the end, you end up with madness. It happens all the time. It certainly happened to Descartes.
kc: It happened to Goya, too...
dc: Yes it did. But there are many roads to madness and one of them is sanity. You might be sane and logical, but if you persist very rigorously in logic, you end up in madness. That's a very strange paradox, but it's also partly what I explore in my films.
kc: You have also made some curious casting choices in your films. When I see actors like Barbara Steele, or John Saxon, or Oliver Reed, I bring a whole world of associations from B-horror films, as if they were part of a collective memory. When you mentioned a moment ago the "lowest of the low' in referring to Friday the 13th, or Halloween, I wonder if those films bring those same larger associations.
dc: I agree with you. And it's not just a question of casting although that's part of it. It's also about creating a certain mythology. When Martin Scorsese made Mean Streets, he didn't use actors that were well known, or brought larger associations. But in retrospect, they are now well known. When you see Mean Streets now, you realize that you're seeing Robert de Niro and Harvey Keitel. It will never be the same as it was when it first came out and you saw those actors for the first time. But for the very young audience that exists for most horror films, this past that you describe doesn't exist. There are some kids who are very knowledgeable about the past and watch re-runs of The Twilight Zone. This is a puzzlement to me. It means that there is a division between where I am going and this audience that you're talking about. Part of that division is this absent knowledge of history. Not just film history, but literary history as well.
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| Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel in Mean Streets |
kc: Yet most of this history of horror is literary. Frankenstein and Dracula were originally novels.
dc: That's right. There are also kids who aren't aware that The Rolling Stones go back as far as they do. I remember this young lady discovering that there were twelve albums that preceded the first one she ever heard. She had no idea that they existed at all – and this is something as pervasive as pop music! So this dilemma occurs to me as I work.
kc: With this science-fiction retrospective that you're preparing for the Toronto Film Festival, I think it's possible to make some of those historic links – and leaps – that we've been discussing. How did you plan a science-fiction retrospective that could include the obvious like This Planet Earth, yet also include Taxi Driver and Don't Look Now, films not commonly considered science-fiction?
dc: I took my cue from Fellini who once said that Fellini's Satyricon was a science-fiction film that was projected into the past, not the future. For him, a man who has been struggling with his own Catholicism and his rejection of it, to try and create a world that preceded Christianity was as difficult as imagining an alien society on another planet. I've tried to keep that sense about me when I considered Taxi Driver. I asked myself if this really is New York. Or is this the creation of another planet? Right from the opening shots of the smoke coming out of the manhole covers, you are in an alien world. I'm not saying that some people don't feel as though they live in that world, but there are some people who feel as though they live where Forbidden Planet takes place (laughs). We'll have to discount those people.
kc: I'm happy to see – yet not surprised – that you inserted David Lynch's Eraserhead into your retrospective.
dc: Well, I happen to like that film a lot. It distressed me in a way because it is such an inventive film that connects to a strong tradition of surrealist imagery. Programming that film led me also to some of Bunuel's work like L'Age D'or and Un Chien Andalou. But here again we have that historical perspective and the link to the horror of the past. To me, as someone who has lived through some of this history, I have to take account of that. And it disturbs me that Lynch would go on to do something like The Elephant Man, which I thought was a straight-forward Victorian moralist drama. Much more could have been made out of that story. All it wanted to do was demonstrate that this man was disgusting on the outside, but beautiful on the inside. That was basically it. The morals were very clear and Victorian. I think the actual story is a lot more interesting. But it bothers me to see the difference between the two Lynch films.
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| David Lynch's Eraserhead |
kc: Why would this bother you?
dc: Well, now he's about to go off to do Dune for Dino de Laurentis, who also produced the film I just finished called The Dead Zone. Dune is so incredibly expensive that I wonder how it's going to turn out. And it has such a mish-mash of a cast, from Max Von Sydow to Sting, that I don't know how it's going to work together. So it worries me that the kind of talent that Lynch showed with Eraserhead can't flourish and flower within the confines of commercial cinema. It's a real paradox.
kc: You've become the fifth director to work with material from horror novelist Stephen King. How did you find working with The Dead Zone?
dc: Despite the title, The Dead Zone is a very bittersweet and strangely sad movie that I'm very fond of. It's about a man who has a car crash and wakes up five years later from a coma to realize that he's traded those five years for the gift of clairvoyance. It's a mental and physical experience that changes his life totally. I have no idea how it will do – especially if people want to see something where people get their throats ripped out. The Dead Zone is a film that an older audience might like, but I wonder if they would even bother to come out and see it. The title and the fact that it comes from Stephen King makes me doubtful.
Pauline Kael (1983)
New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael's career began at a fortuitous time in movie history during the Sixties when Godard, Truffaut, Bertolucci and Arthur Penn dramatically changed the face of the art form. Her reviews also changed the intent and style of criticism. She fought the auteur school of Andrew Sarris that was worshipful of film directors. She created instead an intuitive and personal approach to criticism based on examining her responses to the work and illuminating that experience in the context of art, politics, popular culture and literature. In a sense, she acted on D.H. Lawrence's sharp observation in his Classic Studies in American Literature: "Never trust the artist, trust the tale."
When we met to talk at the Windsor Arms hotel in Toronto, during her book tour for her compendium, 5001 Nights at the Movies, the Reagan decade was already beginning to have its deadening impact on the movie industry. I had only been reviewing professionally for about three years and was already beginning to witness a decline in quality pictures as well as the decline of a critical and discerning audience. With that question rattling in my brain, we began the interview.
kc: You once wrote in the Seventies, a great decade for movies, that the hardest job for a critic to do is to convince a movie audience that certain visceral entertainment like The Towering Inferno and Death Wish were not good films, but crudely manipulative ones instead – Is it becoming even more difficult to be that convincing today?
pk: Oh yes. I think it's still true that if people are emotionally moved by a movie they think it is a great movie. They can't believe that those emotions were pulled out by very simple tricks. It's funny...if you reduce it to its simplest and let's say you see a boy, and the boy loses his dog, and the dog gets run over, of course, it's going to make you cry. Well, there are certain kinds of romantic stories that will have the same effect. I'd say there is a terrific example in An Officer and a Gentleman. I've gotten very hostile mail from people who thought that it was so realistic and true to the life of poor people. They couldn't understand why I took that side of it with a grain of salt.
kc: I responded similarly with On Golden Pond.
pk: (laughing) I responded negatively all the way! That film exploited the public's knowledge that Henry Fonda was dying and the material itself was such obvious phoniness. It's such a prettied-up view of old age with the man and the wife so supportive and loving. Have you ever known an old couple even remotely like this? There were none of the hostilities coming out that would have developed in that marriage over the years. It didn't even come out in relation to their daughter. You know, if the father had mistreated the daughter all those years and made her miserable, and if the mother loved her, surely this would have been a bone of contention between the parents. And if you're the daughter and you've had this rejecting stink of a father, I don't know if you're going to come out in the end and say, "I love you."
pk: Oh yes. I think it's still true that if people are emotionally moved by a movie they think it is a great movie. They can't believe that those emotions were pulled out by very simple tricks. It's funny...if you reduce it to its simplest and let's say you see a boy, and the boy loses his dog, and the dog gets run over, of course, it's going to make you cry. Well, there are certain kinds of romantic stories that will have the same effect. I'd say there is a terrific example in An Officer and a Gentleman. I've gotten very hostile mail from people who thought that it was so realistic and true to the life of poor people. They couldn't understand why I took that side of it with a grain of salt.
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| Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn in On Golden Pond |
kc: I responded similarly with On Golden Pond.
pk: (laughing) I responded negatively all the way! That film exploited the public's knowledge that Henry Fonda was dying and the material itself was such obvious phoniness. It's such a prettied-up view of old age with the man and the wife so supportive and loving. Have you ever known an old couple even remotely like this? There were none of the hostilities coming out that would have developed in that marriage over the years. It didn't even come out in relation to their daughter. You know, if the father had mistreated the daughter all those years and made her miserable, and if the mother loved her, surely this would have been a bone of contention between the parents. And if you're the daughter and you've had this rejecting stink of a father, I don't know if you're going to come out in the end and say, "I love you."
kc:...or do back-flips in the pond to get your father's approval.
pk: I mean, if you have to do back-flips in order to be accepted by a parent, I think it's hopeless anyway.
kc: I wonder if this change in both movies and the audience follows up on that piece you wrote in The New Yorker in the late seventies called "Fear of Movies." In this piece, you stated that audiences were becoming afraid of exciting movies, or violent ones, because of what it stirred up in them. Audiences, according to your piece, were starting to embrace more banal, or safe pictures. This revelation touched a nerve in me because there were some pretty interesting pictures that I couldn't get certain friends to see because they'd say, "I don't need that." How pervasive is this attitude today?
pk: I've been jumped on and attacked for that article more than anything I've ever written. Now I'm being accused of being...oh...pro-violence, or pro-blood and guts. People completely misread what I was trying to say. I think a lot of people want to misread anything on the subject of violence because they don't want to deal with it analytically. They want to reject all violence instead of realizing that it's a basic part of all dramatic, literary and film art. It's as if, once people reject the really bloody revenge fantasies, or the street western movie, or even the horror movie, they transfer it also to movies that upset them, or really get them excited. They think that film art is a polite foreign film like Truffaut's The Woman Next Door which is like a situation comedy being treated very seriously. A lot of mediocre fillms from Europe are getting great press and marvelous response in North America because they're safe. They don't have the kind of churning emotion that you get in The Godfather, Mean Streets, or Taxi Driver.
kc: Why do you think we are getting this kind of timidness now?
pk: I think it's partly because our whole society seems so violent and fraught with danger. In the United States, we still have a lot of unresolved racial problems in the cities. Put simply: People want safety at the movies. They don't want anything that reminds them of the horror on the streets.
kc: But if some movies have the ability to get us to confront our fears, why would we choose to reject them?
pk: I think many people feel that they're rejecting them for their own peace of mind. And you can't convince them otherwise. If you say it's a great movie and it intensifies your experiences without in any way exploiting violence – in fact, it makes you hate the violent characters – people still want to remove that entire experience. Many people thought The Godfather was a violent movie and didn't want to think of it as a piece of film art. It was easier to make fun of it as a cheap gangster movie than admit that it did excite them.
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| Angie Dickinson in Dressed to Kill |
kc: This reminds me of another film from a couple of years back that also inspired strong negative reaction and that was Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill. At the screening I attended, feminist groups were outside encouraging people to walk out because they felt the movie was celebrating violence against women.
pk: They did that in the States as well. I thought that was a very naive reading of the movie because the Angie Dickinson character (ed. a housewife who is murdered by a psychopath in an elevator after having had sexual relations with a man who she just met) is darling. You feel so sorry for her. Here is this sweet woman who isn't harming anyone and this hideous irony happens where she steps out and tries to have some sexual pleasure and she gets killed after it. It's so subtly funny in the way that it's handled. Somehow the feminist critics have treated it as if she's being punished for her sexual transgression. I don't think that's remotely what's going on in the movie.
kc: Why then do you think political groups would get so incensed about Dressed to Kill if it doesn't eroticize the murder of women?
pk: I think that there often is a misreading of a movie in terms of issues. Certain people, when they are organizing, homosexual and feminist groups, almost willfully misread what is going on in a movie in order to feel that they are being insulted. Some black pressure groups have been this way about the portrayal of blacks on the screen. Now producers are afraid to have any black characters who aren't the greatest thing you've ever seen because people will get upset. It's unfortunate. I've been criticized by certain feminist groups for not calling for legal censorship which I happen to think it's the last thing that movies need. The point is, they are so upset over the violence issue that I don't think they look at how violence functions within the movie. They just decide that any acts of violence against women have to be protested against.
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| Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy |
kc: But there are some movies that have exploited violence against women, don't you think?
pk: Sure. There are also movies that gloat about the killing of men, too. Often those films aren't the ones that are protested. It's generally the best work – the work that really doesn't do that, the kind that involves people emotionally. After all, why was it D.H. Lawrence who got people so upset that they wanted to censor him? They don't censor somebody who doesn't make them feel anything. I think it's because Brian de Palma does get at very basic emotions, as well as some rather subtle intellectual concepts, that they're offended by him. On the other hand, something like...oh...that Hitchcock film from the sixties where that woman is strangled....
kc: Frenzy?
pk: Yes. Frenzy. It's amazing. I found that film rather offensive because the woman is made to look ridiculous right at the point where she was being killed. I thought there was something very ugly –spiritually – about that. It's very odd that no one protested that. I've seen Clint Eastwood movies, and I'm thinking of [Magnum Force] where a black whore is made to swallow Drano. There was nothing in the scene to excite the audience except the brutality. It's generally the hacks that do that and nobody protests them. I think the movie Cruising was probably mangled by the protests because I think the movie-makers weakened the idea. The book that the movie is based on has a terrific subject for a movie. There is a legitimate idea there that a man who is that interested in hunting a killer of homosexuals becomes a killer of homosexuals. Even though it was an ugly book to read, there was some psychological validity to it. By the time they made the movie inoffensive to homosexual pressure groups, they had nothing left.
kc: This brings me back to what we were discussing around the fear of movies.You wrote another piece earlier in the Seventies about the audience watching Arthur Penn's Alice Restaurant as an audience that was trying to feel its way through that movie. From what we've been talking about, audiences today don't seem that willing to take a chance on a film that doesn't spell it all out.
pk: It's true. People today are more closed off. I think in the Seventies they were more open to movies, as they were also in the Sixties. It's harder now to get them to go out and see something a little unusual. I even think they resent it when they have to sit back and feel their way in. I don't think they want to anymore. Who knows if it's the influence of television, or the Reagan era, or what it is? They just seem hostile if it isn't a movie that just lays everything on the line like On Golden Pond. That's the kind of movie that makes me resentful because I feel like I'm being treated like an idiot. Unfortunately, quite a few people want movies to be as simple as TV.
Thomas Keneally (1983)
The concept of heroes and villains was greatly simplified in the Eighties. One individual who brought more complexity to this paradigm was Australian author Thomas Keneally (The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, The People's Train) who took on the inexplicable subject of Oskar Schindler. In his book, Schindler's List (originally titled Schindler's Ark), he tells the story of how Oskar Schindler, a Nazi Party member, became the most unlikely of heroes. By the end of the Second World War, Schindler saved 1,200 Jews from concentration camps all over Poland and Germany. Just like The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Schindler's List is also a historical novel that describes participants and events with fictional dialogue and scenes added by the author. Schindler's List won the Booker Prize for fiction in 1982. While in 1993, Steven Spielberg would make a largely faithful and successful adaptation that won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
kc: You have written many biographical and historical novels. But what elements of Oskar Schindler's life fascinated you?
tk: I think it was the pervasiveness of the character. It was the fact that he was paradoxical. It was the fact that he was both a hedonist and a saviour. This was a man who had a passion for both branches of activity. Now, for a lapsed Catholic, I'm making a lot of references to God in this, but there are figures who seem to be manifestations and incarnations of a divine impulse. Oskar was a lot like that.
kc: How did these contradictory impulses combine themselves in this man?
tk: A Jew, who Schindler saved, said to me in Boston the other night that Oskar wasn't in charge of himself, that it was some impulse instead. Many of the Schindlerjuden I interviewed told me not to idealize him because he was a scoundrel. They told me that if he was a saint, we'd be dead and so would he. Now the Greeks have a word for that kind of impulse which is daemon. It was the daemonic quality in Oskar combined with the divine impulse to deliver these people; his unabashed way in which he played God. Oskar Schindler could play cards for the life of a slave labourer with Amon Goeth, the commandant of Plaszow, and be totally unabashed about that. This is totally unlike a philosopher who would have an impulse to say: Come on, Oskar, stop playing God! What if you lose? It didn't occur to him to lose. Like all compulsive people loss didn't seem probable. But he did carry inside him a basic primitive – and human – moral disgust at what was happening. Those are appealing characteristics. Frankly, I don't think I could have made up a character as complex as Oskar Schindler.
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| Oskar Schindler |
kc: Did you also feel by telling Schindler's story that you were adding something new to the literature written about the Holocaust?
tk: Oh, yes. In documentary terms, this story gives us something new in popular literature. What it gives us is the economics of the Holocaust. You see the machinery of the Holocaust when you look at the Oskar story. If you look at other popular writing, often what you see is the confusion of the individual prisoner as they arrived in the great railway concourse of Auschwitz or some other camp. You'd also see the confusion on the faces of the prisoners as they stare at the psychopath who is putting them to death. These stories don't show the machinery stretching all the way back to Orianienburg. Oskar's story shows that machinery because he was oiling every joint of it. He oiled it with money, with lies, and by also compromising officials at every joint in the machinery. His story displays the machinery and shows what lies behind the concourse at Auschwitz. After D.M. Thomas's book [The White Hotel] and [William] Styron's Sophie's Choice, there didn't seem much point in taking another individual story and looking at it purely from the subjective point of view of the victim turning up and going on to either physical or moral destruction.
kc: So what you're examining here is the nature of virtue in the face of overwhelming evil.
tk: Of course. Here you have a man who has been officially declared righteous – with a capital 'R' – by the Israelis. And yet he was a most spectacularly unrighteous person … I have always been taken by the question of what virtue is because I grew up in the Catholic Church at a time when we were all given an institutional conscience. They were handed out as if they were general issue. You know what I mean? They weren't ours. They were handed out as if they were the institution's conscience. And we slotted them into a cavity in our head and carried them around with us. Then we'd use them whenever there was an emergency. The remarkable thing I discovered was that virtue is an individual exercise. Oskar Schindler most spectacularly demonstrates that.
kc: Would you say that part of the reason why the subjective point view of the victim makes more popular reading is because we can all identify with being a victim? On the other hand, if you explore a character who demonstrates a certain complicity with evil and struggles to maintain his humanity, that's a lot harder. I mean, who wants to identify with that?
tk: It certainly is difficult to write. I confessed at the head of the book – practically on the first page – that it's a dreadful thing for a modern novelist to have to write about the pragmatic triumph of good over evil because most writers are used to working from the other end of the beast. They write from a point of view where the virtuous end up with the imponderables like dignity and self-knowledge, but the malicious end up with all the real estate of the novel (laughs). I've got a friend in Los Angeles who was driving his 11-year-old daughter home the other day. She had just acted the part of Snow White in a play. She told her father, "I don't want to play any more good dames. They're not very interesting and nobody sympathizes with you." The great thing about Oskar Schindler's virtue is that it's so ambiguous.
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| Schindlerjuden |
kc: Is it safe to say that without his demons Oskar Schindler would have never saved all those Jews?
tk: Let me put it this way. I know that I could not have matched him in the same situation if I had been in Poland at that time. I might have found the moral courage to shelter one family. But to deliver the numbers he did, you had to be Oskar. You had to have a heroic liver to start in order to drink SS inspectors into a state of geniality if not stupefaction. You had to have an enormous access to the black market and play it with gusto and finesse. You needed the money to bribe because the SS were corruptible but expensive. Ordinary people could perhaps, at enormous risk, shelter one family. But the question of informers all around you and the question of having the money to buy them off was a problem.You also had to buy food for them off the black market because they had no ration books. They were totally out of society and were not supposed to exist. As a result, ordinary people found it very difficult to shelter Jews. You had to be an outrageous person to be able to deliver back to Western society the numbers he did deliver. And in circumstances like these, it's of no use being a martyr because the martyrs of the Holocaust didn't deliver quantitatively. They delivered in those imponderables I mentioned earlier like dignity, the qualities that make us human. But in terms of effective and pragmatic good, a good that has a bottom line measurable in statistical terms, Oskar Schindler was triumphant.
Gloria Steinem (1983)
In the early days, when feminism was still called "women's liberation," the emphasis was on equal rights for women, the control over reproduction and challenging existing stereotypes. But between 1980 and 1990, a number of different economic and political issues rose to the surface. As freedoms were won, questions began to be raised about what happens to the spirit of the struggle itself. Feminism (like any political organism) was faced with the difficulty of evolving and diversifying its views in order to accommodate different voices and the possibilities of continued reform.
Before her leadership was challenged by reformists like Camille Paglia, Katie Roiphe and Christina Hoff Summers, though, Gloria Steinem was still the most outspoken feminist to be heard in the eighties. Steinem had earlier been a columnist for New York magazine and co-founded Ms. magazine in 1972. Her first piece of significant writing had come three years earlier with her article, "After Black Power, Women's Liberation," which first brought her and the modern feminist movement to national attention. This talk with Steinem foretold the growing impact of the American right's so-called Moral Majority in the Eighties with its attempts to undermine the feminist reforms of the previous decade.
kc: Did the issues that prompted the beginning of contemporary feminism also propel you to be a writer?
gs: Becoming a writer came first. And I'm sorry to say that I spent a lot of years being an imitative writer precisely because I didn't understand my own issues. I had a kind of unconscious emotional identification with discriminated against groups, so I very often found myself writing about farm workers or civil rights groups. But I didn't understand why I felt that. After all, I was a middle-class person who had always been white. So I regret a lot of those years where I was trying to imitate what a serious magazine writer was supposed to be instead of using my own experience.
kc: Was "Sisterhood," which you wrote in 1972 and include in your new collection Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, the beginning of finding your own voice?
gs: You're quite right. That was the first article where I consciously connected that there was a sexual caste system in society just like there was a racial one. I realized that there was a reason why I had this emotional identification with all the wrong groups (laughs).
kc: How much progress do you feel we've made in male/female relations since the last decade?
gs: In a general way, relationships between the sexes are better because at least women are not encouraged to marry men in order to be supported. In the past, we looked not for a friend whose values we shared, but for a meal ticket. We also had to find someone who had good job prospects and was older because men were supposed to be paternal. He also had to be tall enough and was the right race or religion. By the time we finished with all of those requirements, it was a wonder we even liked each other. Even though today we are less in need of economic support, the old habits of mind are still strong. For instance, I notice today that when women tell me that they can't find a good man who will appreciate them as an equal partner that they are still eliminating men who are younger, who are shorter, and who are the wrong race or religion. We have to get out of that. It's an old groove in our brains that was worn for other purposes.
kc: Is that groove reinforced by the threat that men feel towards advances made by women?
gs: Oh, I think absolutely. Men have been born into a society – through no fault of theirs – that tells them that the very definition of masculinity has, at a minimum, to do with not being female. So to discover that there's this human being who is female, who is as smart and can make as much money in the job force, can be very threatening. In that, we are getting some polar responses.
kc: What kinds of polar responses?
gs: Some men are welcoming this change and see it as a path to wholeness itself. They are grateful for having another income in the family so they don't have to be solely responsible. At the same time, there are other men who in flight from change. Rita Mae Brown always says that among those men who are in flight from change, there are always two kinds of reaction. The very best ones are into nostalgia, talking about the Fifties when women knew their place. The worst ones are into sadomasochism. But I also see an awful lot of men who say to me – and other feminists – thank you for saving my marriage so now I can take care of my kids. They have become feminists because they care about their daughters and wives and lovers. I think – as in all things – progress probably lies for each of us in the direction we haven't been.
kc: How do you think feminism has changed the way women vote for political parties?
gs: It's more about issues now than party labels. Women have been more likely to vote against military spending, or anything to do with violence. They tend to vote for health education spending, or anything to do with anti-discriminatory laws. This is a pattern that used to be called conservative, but is now called radical. This pattern hasn't changed. It's just the reason it wasn't perceived as partisan in the past was not because it didn't exist on issues, but because the two major parties were close enough on those issues of foreign policy and domestic spending. The fact that women felt strongly about a particular issue had no place to go and the political analyst didn't care about how women felt unless it could influence which man got into office. Now Reagan has made it seem partisan – for the first time – by identifying what is in fact an ultra-right wing view with the Republican Party. He is not really a Republican because even most Republicans don't agree with his basic positions, especially if you look at the surveys done of the delegates that elected him in 1980.
kc: Is that also true of certain women's issues like pro-choice?
gs: Most Republicans are more likely to be pro-choice on abortion than Democrats are. But you would never know that from Ronald Reagan. He's the first Republican to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment. So he temporarily at least made the gender-gap appear partisan.
kc: Isn't that due to the fact that he's currently aligned the Republican Party with fundamentalist Christians?
gs: Yes. And let's not forget that most Republicans used to be Democrat. Reagan used to be a Democrat. So did Jesse Helms. It's just that the move towards racial representation and other liberalized elements of the Democratic Party forced these ultra-right wing men to take over the post of the Republican Party.
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| Jerry Falwell and Ronald Reagan |
kc: How would you account for the right-wing reaction in the United States right now?
gs: Well, it's perfectly logical from their point of view. There's a way in which the right-wing understands feminism better than the liberals do. The right-wing is very clear that there is a system in the world. It's put there by God and capitalism and it makes men the head of the household and women the subservient ones. There was a cartoon that we published in Ms. magazine that I thought explained this connection very well. It shows Reagan in a cowboy hat and he's saying, "A gun in every holster. A pregnant woman in every home. Let's make America a man again." This is a classic mark of authoritarian groups. They want to enforce an authoritarian family because it is the microcosm for the training of the rest of society.
kc: Are you starting to get the feeling that they're slowly turning the clock back?
gs: Sure. What they perceive as "anti-family" legislation began, for them, when women were granted property rights, removed from the authority of their husbands and given the right to vote. Now they see all of these upstarts turning the other way – and they are in terror and backlash. These people understand what feminism is saying. But there are also a whole group of liberals who are embarrassed by reproductive and family issues. They know how to talk about NATO, yet they think family and reproductive issues are unimportant. Liberals have bought a limited definition of politics. They believe that politics is only the electoral system and foreign policy. Feminists understand that this has to change. Right-wingers understand what happens if it does change.
Margaret Atwood (1984)
Author Margaret Atwood (The Edible Woman, The Handmaid's Tale) is often noted for her fiction and poetry, but rarely for her criticism. In 1983, with her critical anthology, Second Words, she discussed -- from an author's perspective – the value of criticism and how it was changing for the worst during the Eighties.
kc: How important do you think it is for a writer of fiction, non-fiction, or even poetry, to take up the task of doing critical writing about these genres?
ma: I think that writers have a different slant on reviewing than people who do nothing but critical work. People who have to review books for a living get very sick of books. Maybe they should take a breather every few weeks because I think they just get saturated. But if you are a writer, you are less likely to dismiss a book because you know how long it has taken to write it. Even a very bad book has taken a lot of time and investment on the part of the writer. And if you write that it's a very bad book, you won't muse at the expense of the writer.
kc: Sometimes though I read reviews and all I seem to get is the plot of the book, or consumer reporting, but a good critic opens me up to why the book matters or not. What is your approach to reviewing?
ma: When I review a book, I like to read all the books that the person has written to that point. That means that I don't take the assignment to review a book lightly. I don't like to say that I'll review it unless I read it and find that it's the kind of book in which I have something useful to say. The general standard of reviewing in Canada is not at present up to the standard of the writing. Once upon a time, I would have said that it was the reverse, as in the late Fifties and early Sixties. The reviewers were often better than the books in many instances – in fact, quite a lot better. You had people like Northrop Frye reviewing books by Joe Schmoe – or someone you never heard from then or since –and he's bringing all that critical intelligence to bear on this rather ephemeral material. But I think now the writers have surpassed the standard of reviewers. You're hard pressed to assemble something like The Sunday New York Times Book Section.
kc: You would think that if you had a book that could startle readers and reviewers...say, Timothy Findley's The Wars...it would inspire some critics to some of their best analysis.
ma: Some were inspired. Others definitely were not. But you'll find that in every country. In England, though, where people have been reading and writing for a long time and the idea of writing and reviewing is nothing new, you generally have the sense that the people who are reviewing have read more. The reason I reviewed The Wars in the Financial Post was that it had received a really wrong headed review in The Globe and Mail. They got someone to review it who wrote comic novels about the First World War and this person said that Findley's book wasn't funny enough. It was the wrong choice of reviewer. So I was impelled into reviewing the book, not just because it was unfairly treated, but that it was out of the traffic lane. But I have to tell you: I hate reviewing books (laughs). It's the hardest thing for me to do.
kc: Since you are both a writer and a critic, what do you as a writer try to bring to your role as a critic?
ma: When you commit yourself to reviewing the book what you're trying is to do some kind of justice to the book. You want what you say to reflect as accurately as you can what is in that book. Some reviewers go off on a tangent because they have some little axe to grind. They end up reviewing what they think the writer's personality is like. Or they take an idea that they think the writer has and give forth their ideas about what they think the writer's idea is. And I don't think that is what reviewing should be so I try to deal with the book as much as it is.
ma: I think that writers have a different slant on reviewing than people who do nothing but critical work. People who have to review books for a living get very sick of books. Maybe they should take a breather every few weeks because I think they just get saturated. But if you are a writer, you are less likely to dismiss a book because you know how long it has taken to write it. Even a very bad book has taken a lot of time and investment on the part of the writer. And if you write that it's a very bad book, you won't muse at the expense of the writer.
kc: Sometimes though I read reviews and all I seem to get is the plot of the book, or consumer reporting, but a good critic opens me up to why the book matters or not. What is your approach to reviewing?
ma: When I review a book, I like to read all the books that the person has written to that point. That means that I don't take the assignment to review a book lightly. I don't like to say that I'll review it unless I read it and find that it's the kind of book in which I have something useful to say. The general standard of reviewing in Canada is not at present up to the standard of the writing. Once upon a time, I would have said that it was the reverse, as in the late Fifties and early Sixties. The reviewers were often better than the books in many instances – in fact, quite a lot better. You had people like Northrop Frye reviewing books by Joe Schmoe – or someone you never heard from then or since –and he's bringing all that critical intelligence to bear on this rather ephemeral material. But I think now the writers have surpassed the standard of reviewers. You're hard pressed to assemble something like The Sunday New York Times Book Section.
ma: Some were inspired. Others definitely were not. But you'll find that in every country. In England, though, where people have been reading and writing for a long time and the idea of writing and reviewing is nothing new, you generally have the sense that the people who are reviewing have read more. The reason I reviewed The Wars in the Financial Post was that it had received a really wrong headed review in The Globe and Mail. They got someone to review it who wrote comic novels about the First World War and this person said that Findley's book wasn't funny enough. It was the wrong choice of reviewer. So I was impelled into reviewing the book, not just because it was unfairly treated, but that it was out of the traffic lane. But I have to tell you: I hate reviewing books (laughs). It's the hardest thing for me to do.
kc: Since you are both a writer and a critic, what do you as a writer try to bring to your role as a critic?
ma: When you commit yourself to reviewing the book what you're trying is to do some kind of justice to the book. You want what you say to reflect as accurately as you can what is in that book. Some reviewers go off on a tangent because they have some little axe to grind. They end up reviewing what they think the writer's personality is like. Or they take an idea that they think the writer has and give forth their ideas about what they think the writer's idea is. And I don't think that is what reviewing should be so I try to deal with the book as much as it is.
kc: Some people complain that we just don't read books as much anymore.
ma: Yeah. But there have always been lots of people who don't read much. At one time it was because they couldn't. They were illiterate. Literacy became more widespread in the 19th Century and idealists at the time thought that literacy would make everyone nicer, better, more intelligent, and more progressive. But along with the rise of literacy, you had the rise of penny dreadfuls – shocking tales and minimal language. In fact, that's what what most people read (laughs). So the situation hasn't changed. Some people only read nurse novels, or Harlequin romances. So when you talk about readerships, you're drawing from a large pool.
ma: They've never been very accessible, if we're talking about the numbers of books they've published, or books that they sell. But they do serve a very important literary function and should be encouraged. They're the place where young writers get their start. These are the people who publish many books of poetry and short stories. And if you trace these writers back and ask them where they got their first break, they'll tell you it was one of those little magazines, or a small press. They may not be important in terms of numbers – and no one makes a million dollars running them – but they're very important in terms of allowing new writers entrance to the market. And for that reason alone, they should be supported by anybody interested in the state of writing in this country.
kc: Speaking of Canada, one of the things you address in Second Words, this collection of literary reviews, is the exploration of the Canadian character in our writing. This concept has always been open to debate as to whether we have a character, or even a culture capable of defining.
ma: You're right. And it has been debated for years and years. This idea of no Canadian culture has been around for years and years. But surely by now it must be out of date. Anyone who believes that surely hasn't caught up. To me, it has been proven just like the Earth has been proven round. I think that the dissemination of knowledge hasn't taken place altogether, but there are also a lot of people around who don't know anything about the Second World War, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.
ma: (Laughing) Something may not be! Especially in the eye of the universe. Sitting on the planet Pluto, it probably doesn't make much difference whether Canada continues to exist or not. But for people who actually live here, it does. This is one of the leit motifs of not only our literature, but our politics as well. When you go to India and you come back, you might wonder what the fuss is about because compared to other people's problems ours are not that large. But they're ours. Survival aroused a great deal of controversy when it got published. There were people violently for and violently against it. I remember some folks writing in and saying that they were so glad to have read this book because they were told in school that there was no Canadian literature except Stephen Leacock. I think the popularity of the book meant that readers were interested in their own literature. If they could get somebody to talk about it in an understandable language that wasn't just abstract footnote making. So it was a fairly direct and to-the-point book. And, for that reason, the academics didn't like it.
kc: Why do you think academics – Canadians or otherwise – largely write in labyrinth theories that seem out of touch with the experience of what art and popular culture can offer people?
ma: Some people don't like to connect their field of study with real life. They don't like to feel that if they're studying the curve of a sculpture that it would have anything to do with how much money the subway workers are making. The two things have to be kept completely separate. But my feeling about literature – even more than any of the other arts – is that it's very connected to where people live, how they live, what they think, how they view themselves, how they view themselves in relation to other countries, and whether they feel big or small. All of those things are reflected in a literature. Not everything in each book, but if you look at literature as a whole, it's not just taking place in a never-never land. It's taking place here.
June Callwood (1984)
Author June Callwood was (until her death in 2007) a Canadian journalist, activist and author, who wrote Emma: The True Story of Canada's Unlikely Spy (Stoddart Publishing, 1984). It was the story of Emma Woikin, the daughter of a Doukhobor family in Saskatchewan and a child of the Depression years, who became a spy for the Soviet Union. Woikin's life was complicated by a husband who committed suicide and her losing her only child at birth. When she left the prairies to work in Ottawa, she became entangled with Soviet agents and was arrested, along with thirteen others, in the Igor Gouzenko affair in the fall of 1945. Gouzenko had escaped the Soviet Embassy with over 109 documents that proved there was an existence of a Soviet spy ring in Canada. Emma Woikin would eventually come to serve three years in prison. These revelations and arrests contributed to the beginning of the Cold War.
kc: Why do you think espionage books have become so popular?
jc: I saw a very interesting interview with John le Carré recently where he said that the spy genre has come to replace the Western. Our own inability to be absolutely sure what's good and what's evil is more prominent in the espionage books where the spies are alike – no matter what side – and where they are operating in a moral vacuum. He thought somehow that was a reflection of our interest there today.
kc: In your book, Emma, it's not even as clear-cut as that. There's a larger tragedy here.
jc: There's indeed a great tragedy for all thirteen people involved in Gouzenko's defection. But there's a special tragedy where Emma is concerned. I was very drawn to her life story. There was so much despair that she had to live with. And she lived with it in a way that was typical of certainly women of the Fifties who pretended that nothing was wrong. You find a lot of that valour today especially in older women. That style of woman is essentially to be an actress. And Emma was a consummate actress. So I was drawn to the play between her outward appearance of being enthusiastic and confident and the black sorrow of her heart.
kc: We all know that the world of espionage is a brutal place where betrayal is pretty much common place. But in Emma you create a more personal story.
jc: I wasn't interested so much interested in the espionage angle as I was in the area of civil liberties. There was no period in all the times we have suspended civil rights – and I'm even thinking of the odious War Measures Act in 1970, as well as the Japanese-Canadian internment – where we did the damage done to those thirteen people of whom Emma was one. If we don't know what we do, how can we improve our behaviour? It's our reaction when the government behaves badly that worries me more than the government. Instead of automatically asking, when there's a War Measure's Act, whether the government is justified in doing this, we tend to think instead that the government must be right. Over 83% of Canadians supported these thirteen people being arrested and held. Even though, when this material was moving around, Russia was our ally then. They were not giving it to any enemy government. It was also innocuous material. Since the RCMP would never have to reveal in open court what the material was that these people had given, they could let the country and let the world assume that it was powerful stuff – maybe as powerful as the UK physicist and spy Alan Nunn May passing uranium to the Soviets.
kc: How did the Americans react?
jc: The State Department leaned on Prime Minister MacKenzie King to such an extent that I think there's good reason to believe that they were glad this happened because they knew that we could suspend civil rights in Canada. So they knew we could get them. The State Department could then say to all of North America that Russia was plotting to kill us. This flipped North Americans from thinking of Russia as the heroes of Stalingrad to becoming our enemy. So Emma was at the crux of a massive shift in consciousness that began the Cold War. That's why she matters.
 |
| Emma Woikin |
kc: The poverty of the Depression years created a lot of idealists who embraced the Communist cause – How much of a role did that play in her choices?
jc: She was in a part of the country where that came quite natural. When World War II was declared, the Mounties just rounded up most everybody on the prairies. That was because the prairies' vision of the Depression was quite different from those living in Ontario. The people in the prairies saw the worst part of the Depression – the dust, the grasshopper plagues, the farms abandoned and the women who went crazy. But they tended to blame the East. The East represented to them capitalism. So they were very drawn to the idea of a socialist world in which people didn't suffer this way. Those who were Ukrainian, or Doukhobor – Russian-speaking people –began to mythologise the worker's world of the Soviet Union where they believed this injustice didn't occur. None of them had been in Russia since the turn of the century. So they were operating without any information about the 1917 Revolution and some of the dreadful things that happened. Living in as much despair as they did, it was understandable that they just didn't know the truth.
kc: You could perhaps compare that despair you raise in the prairies to the American black experience that led to actor and singer Paul Robeson to make similar claims for the Soviet Union because of racism in the U.S..
jc: The thing is these assumptions couldn't be refuted because there was a wall between the Soviet Union and the democracies. No one went through that wall except people they thought were already converted and wouldn't blow the whistle. Whereas the most committed communist in Canada had great reason to doubt their orders particularly after the pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939. The Jewish communists were appalled because they knew what was beginning to happen about anti-Semitism even if they didn't know about the death camps. Yet they still felt compelled to defend this perceived ideal even when it was behaving badly. You could say that another tragedy was how these followers were so ultimately duped and betrayed.
Leonard Cohen (1984)
When I spoke to poet and singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen, he had just come out of a relatively long period of contemplation that dated back to 1979. The culmination of that hermitage was a collection of prayers, psalms, meditations, and contemplative texts he wrote called Book of Mercy (McClelland & Stewart, 1984). Little did any of us know, perhaps not even Cohen himself, that shortly after the publication of this book, his music career would once again catapult him back into the larger public arena.
kc: This new work, Book of Mercy, seems like a culmination of a long, quiet and contemplative period.
lc: That's a good way to put it. It certainly wasn't a book conceived out of choice. You don't find yourself sitting down deciding to write a book of prayers. Sometimes the only voice you can find is the voice of prayer. So it's that kind of book. I found myself in a contemplative predicament for a number of years and I studied and looked into these matters. This is the book that came out of that activity.
kc: What prompted this activity?
lc: I think you just find yourself shattered without any other recourse but to address the source of things. Everybody finds themselves at that place from time to time.
kc: So this is the kind of book that you can only write when you've had some years to consider those sources?
lc: I think that's true. I think you have to have the experience of loss and misdirection, or a sense of failure to do this.
kc: That's curious. When I was reading it, I could feel with each prayer a stripping away of illusion.
lc: That's what I was trying to do. After all, you're not on the stand when you are praying. You can't come with any excuses (laughs). And you don't really have a deep belief in your own opinions any longer, or your constructions about the way things are. That's why you pray. You don't have a prayer (laughs). You're trying to locate a source of strength that you just don't command.
kc: But didn't you sometimes find that strength earlier in your career through your songs, poems and novels? Or has that just changed?
lc: Let me put it this way. When I was operating an elevator once in New York, at least ten people a day used to make that joke, "How's business? Up and down?" And I think that's the way it is.
kc: Do you think though that your past work has prepared you, too, for things you find yourself contemplating now?
lc: Yes. I think that's very true. In fact, in a tiny way you find that your work becomes prophetic for yourself. I don't mean prophetic in the big sense. But you find that you write about things that haven't happened yet. And they unfold as you have written them.
kc: Perhaps the hardest part of that process is coming to terms with being emotionally naked.
lc: I don't think those are risks that you choose. You find yourself in the predicament where you can't use any of your clothing. You can't use any of your armor. It doesn't mean that one shouldn't have clothing or armor. You need that to operate in this veil of tears...
kc: ....But you're almost suggesting that your hand gets forced.
lc: Yeah (laughs). You can't use any of the things you're used to using.
kc: When you started Book of Mercy was there at least a conscious attempt to write a series of psalms?
lc: I had a secret hope that I might make something out of it. The activity was so intense that I didn't end up with plans for it as it was being written. From time to time, I thought, you know, maybe I'm still a writer and maybe this is a book, but most of the time it was conceived from a place where you can't plan.
kc: How much of an influence did the Torah have on the collection?
lc: I was studying a lot at that time especially the last four years. That kind of writing has always touched me more than any other kind of writing. Those rhythms definitely crept into the style of it. Some people have criticized the book on that level saying that the language is too antique. But it's the tradition I grew up in and it's natural for me to speak that way. We do have a devotional language that we've learned although I haven't stayed totally within that kind of expression. But Book of Mercy has those echoes certainly.
kc: How connected then are these prayers to your music given how the language of the Torah has influenced so much of your music's rhythms?
lc: Those are considerations after the fact if it's your habit to express yourself in rhythms and with musical qualities as it is mine. At the same time, I was writing a number of songs which I'm soon going to put out in an album [Various Positions]. But Book of Mercy, unlike an album of songs, is not a book of poems. It's something else. I think it would only be accessible to somebody who is in a kind of trouble. It's also a very tricky kind of trouble to promote it. Here I am peddling a book in the market place because you want the book to survive. But I know that it can only be useful to somebody who needs to open their mouth in that kind of way.
Coda: I was aware during our talk that Cohen seemed to be contemplating (and accumulating) more and more unexpressed thoughts as the interview was progressing. So after our chat ended, he asked if he could play me something that he felt might best fully answer some of the questions that the interview kept raising. He was my last guest that morning so all I had was my lunch waiting. Since I had my whole life to eat lunch, but little time to spend with Leonard Cohen, we went into the control room that had just been vacated by my technical producer. He handed me a cassette that was obviously a promo tape with no writing on it and asked me to fast forward it to the concluding song on side two. As I cued the tape titled Various Positions, I brought up the volume on the control board while he lounged back in his chair as I did in mine. As the song began gently, he looked over to me and said, "I think this song best answers your questions during our talk." What he played was "Hallelujah." Once it ended, I gave him back the tape, but I forget now what my initial response was. We shook hands and I thanked him for the opportunity to hear this new unreleased song. After escorting him to the door, I went to heat up my lasagna never considering that the song I first heard with Leonard Cohen would turn out one day to be such an enduring one.
During the Eighties, feminism (like any political movement) was faced with the difficulty of evolving and diversifying in order to accommodate different views and the possibilities of reform. One of those eclectic voices to emerge in feminism was author Erica Jong. In the Seventies, Jong put herself on the literary map with her controversial roman à clef Fear of Flying (1973), which took on sexual taboos with complete irreverence. Her novel was narrated by its protagonist, Isadora Zelda White Stollerman Wing, a twenty-nine-year-old poet who had published two books of poetry. On a trip to Vienna with her second husband, she decides to indulge her sexual fantasies with another man. When I spoke to her in 1984, she had just published a sequel titled Parachutes and Kisses. The idea of sexual independence for women was the centerpiece of Fear of Flying, but the notion of sexual freedom and what that means in the eighties became the basis of our discussion of Parachutes and Kisses.
lc: That's a good way to put it. It certainly wasn't a book conceived out of choice. You don't find yourself sitting down deciding to write a book of prayers. Sometimes the only voice you can find is the voice of prayer. So it's that kind of book. I found myself in a contemplative predicament for a number of years and I studied and looked into these matters. This is the book that came out of that activity.
kc: What prompted this activity?
lc: I think you just find yourself shattered without any other recourse but to address the source of things. Everybody finds themselves at that place from time to time.
kc: So this is the kind of book that you can only write when you've had some years to consider those sources?
lc: I think that's true. I think you have to have the experience of loss and misdirection, or a sense of failure to do this.
kc: That's curious. When I was reading it, I could feel with each prayer a stripping away of illusion.
lc: That's what I was trying to do. After all, you're not on the stand when you are praying. You can't come with any excuses (laughs). And you don't really have a deep belief in your own opinions any longer, or your constructions about the way things are. That's why you pray. You don't have a prayer (laughs). You're trying to locate a source of strength that you just don't command.
kc: But didn't you sometimes find that strength earlier in your career through your songs, poems and novels? Or has that just changed?
lc: Let me put it this way. When I was operating an elevator once in New York, at least ten people a day used to make that joke, "How's business? Up and down?" And I think that's the way it is.
kc: Do you think though that your past work has prepared you, too, for things you find yourself contemplating now?
lc: Yes. I think that's very true. In fact, in a tiny way you find that your work becomes prophetic for yourself. I don't mean prophetic in the big sense. But you find that you write about things that haven't happened yet. And they unfold as you have written them.
kc: Perhaps the hardest part of that process is coming to terms with being emotionally naked.
lc: I don't think those are risks that you choose. You find yourself in the predicament where you can't use any of your clothing. You can't use any of your armor. It doesn't mean that one shouldn't have clothing or armor. You need that to operate in this veil of tears...
 |
| Leonard Cohen performs "Hallelujah" |
kc: ....But you're almost suggesting that your hand gets forced.
lc: Yeah (laughs). You can't use any of the things you're used to using.
kc: When you started Book of Mercy was there at least a conscious attempt to write a series of psalms?
lc: I had a secret hope that I might make something out of it. The activity was so intense that I didn't end up with plans for it as it was being written. From time to time, I thought, you know, maybe I'm still a writer and maybe this is a book, but most of the time it was conceived from a place where you can't plan.
kc: How much of an influence did the Torah have on the collection?
lc: I was studying a lot at that time especially the last four years. That kind of writing has always touched me more than any other kind of writing. Those rhythms definitely crept into the style of it. Some people have criticized the book on that level saying that the language is too antique. But it's the tradition I grew up in and it's natural for me to speak that way. We do have a devotional language that we've learned although I haven't stayed totally within that kind of expression. But Book of Mercy has those echoes certainly.
kc: How connected then are these prayers to your music given how the language of the Torah has influenced so much of your music's rhythms?
lc: Those are considerations after the fact if it's your habit to express yourself in rhythms and with musical qualities as it is mine. At the same time, I was writing a number of songs which I'm soon going to put out in an album [Various Positions]. But Book of Mercy, unlike an album of songs, is not a book of poems. It's something else. I think it would only be accessible to somebody who is in a kind of trouble. It's also a very tricky kind of trouble to promote it. Here I am peddling a book in the market place because you want the book to survive. But I know that it can only be useful to somebody who needs to open their mouth in that kind of way.
Coda: I was aware during our talk that Cohen seemed to be contemplating (and accumulating) more and more unexpressed thoughts as the interview was progressing. So after our chat ended, he asked if he could play me something that he felt might best fully answer some of the questions that the interview kept raising. He was my last guest that morning so all I had was my lunch waiting. Since I had my whole life to eat lunch, but little time to spend with Leonard Cohen, we went into the control room that had just been vacated by my technical producer. He handed me a cassette that was obviously a promo tape with no writing on it and asked me to fast forward it to the concluding song on side two. As I cued the tape titled Various Positions, I brought up the volume on the control board while he lounged back in his chair as I did in mine. As the song began gently, he looked over to me and said, "I think this song best answers your questions during our talk." What he played was "Hallelujah." Once it ended, I gave him back the tape, but I forget now what my initial response was. We shook hands and I thanked him for the opportunity to hear this new unreleased song. After escorting him to the door, I went to heat up my lasagna never considering that the song I first heard with Leonard Cohen would turn out one day to be such an enduring one.
Erica Jong (1984)
During the Eighties, feminism (like any political movement) was faced with the difficulty of evolving and diversifying in order to accommodate different views and the possibilities of reform. One of those eclectic voices to emerge in feminism was author Erica Jong. In the Seventies, Jong put herself on the literary map with her controversial roman à clef Fear of Flying (1973), which took on sexual taboos with complete irreverence. Her novel was narrated by its protagonist, Isadora Zelda White Stollerman Wing, a twenty-nine-year-old poet who had published two books of poetry. On a trip to Vienna with her second husband, she decides to indulge her sexual fantasies with another man. When I spoke to her in 1984, she had just published a sequel titled Parachutes and Kisses. The idea of sexual independence for women was the centerpiece of Fear of Flying, but the notion of sexual freedom and what that means in the eighties became the basis of our discussion of Parachutes and Kisses.
kc: Looking back on the publication of your novel Fear of Flying back in the Seventies, were you surprised that it had the kind of impact that launched you into the sort of notoriety you still have as a novelist today?
ej: You know, I started life as a poet and I always thought that it would be my fate to produce slim volumes of verse and earn my living as a college teacher of English. I didn't think my work would be published anywhere except in tiny little editions and my name would not be widely known. But I thought I would be considered a serious writer. As you suggest, fate dealt me a different hand. You see, my work came to prominence in the early Seventies when women were all the rage and it seemed to be important at that point to define the relations between men and women and how they got that way. But the notoriety came into it when I wrote about the war between the sexes where the battle was nothing if not funny. What can be serious about a battle where the combatants go to bed together? Nobody seemed to realize that you could be funny and also be a feminist.
kc: What led you to become a novelist?
ej: I had always wanted to write a novel. And because I was a woman who grew up in an age when writers were mostly men, the writers I admired were men. Saul Bellow's novels were male and the main characters in Philip Roth's novels were male. Every time I sat down to write a novel, I would create the protagonist as a male. As a result, I was forever writing these novels that didn't quite work. I didn't think anyone would give a damn about a woman's point of view which shows you how brainwashed I was. Now I had an editor at Holt, Rinehart & Winston who published my first two books of poetry and he read some some of those early drafts of my novels. He said, "Why don't you go home and write a novel out of the same female consciousness that I find in your poems?" And I said, "No one would be interested in a woman's point of view. Novels aren't about women." This is around 1972 when we're having this conversation. It isn't the Middle Ages! So I told him that I had this idea for a novel about a young woman who goes to a congress of psychoanalysts with her husband and she falls in love with a guy who turns out to be impotent. That turned out to be Fear of Flying. I wrote it and handed it to him by dropping the entire manuscript on a pile on his desk –clunk! – and ran out the door. I was so terrified that it wasn't a proper novel and so sure that no one would ever publish it. About two weeks later, he called me and said, "We'll publish it. It's wonderful." And that's how Fear of Flying came to be bought.
kc: What was the initial reaction when Fear of Flying came out?
ej: It was thought to be a rather literary first novel about a rather literary graduate from New York who wanted to be a writer. It was published with very little fanfare. The early reviews said, "Another whiny feminist novel." You know, when are these women going to shut up? And then about three months after publication, it was discovered by John Updike in The New Yorker who decided that it wasn't a whiny feminist novel and rescued the book from oblivion. The word of mouth spread and nine months after publication Henry Miller discovered it and decided that it was a female Tropic of Cancer. By then, the books were nowhere to be found. But the subsequent reaction to Fear of Flying was that suddenly I'm not seen as a literary poet who wore spectacles and was thought to be non-commercial. I had suddenly become the Erica Jongs of this world. And it the Erica Jongs of this world had their way, women everywhere would be jumping from bed to bed and producing total moral degradation. So I had gone from obscurity to being multiplied into an entire tribe of viragoes who were bringing the downfall of Western Civilization.
kc: So what aspect of this "moral degradation" do you think touched a nerve?
ej: Well, it seemed a radical idea in 1973 that women liked sex. I remember people shouting me down on talk shows in the States. they were saying that women don't enjoy sex. Women don't have sexual fantasies. And a measure of how far we've come in the last ten years is that this dialogue would never occur today. I think this is partly the result of Fear of Flying and other books like it. But it was published to a storm of criticism and controversy and every one of my books – except Fanny, my retelling of the 18th Century novel Fanny Hill – has been published to that storm of controversy and criticism.
kc: Why do you think Fanny escaped the wrath that your other books encountered?
ej: People could deal a lot easier with Fanny. There were petticoats and bodices. And it seemed to be only about the 18th Century, so it was safely distant from people's concerns. But even that book, as much as anything I've written, was a comment on women today. Parachutes and Kisses is even more so about the women of the Eighties.
kc: Well, I was going to suggest that between Fear of Flying and Parachutes and Kisses, we seem to have experienced a pendulum swing...
ej: Except I'm one of those people who thinks there never was a sexual revolution. I'm not denying that there were people who hopped from bed to bed and said that they'd slept with forty thousand people and then discovered that it was very empty. But I don't think that is a sexual revolution at all. I think a sexual revolution is having more open and healthy attitudes about towards sexuality. We went from having puritan repression to people doing quantity rather than quality. Americans have this distressing tendency to live their lives by Time magazine covers. And if Time says the sexual revolution is here, then they think they can sleep with as many people as possible. Then they get disappointed, or worse, and get herpes. They'll say, "Well, the sexual revolution is over." Why didn't they think in the first place that sex shouldn't be as complicated, as subtle, or as interesting as life's other important activities? Sex is an enormously powerful force in life. And what I'd like to see is people open to their own sexuality and open to their feelings, but not necessarily indiscriminate about sex.
kc: That's obvious from the changes that Isadora goes through from Fear of Flying to Parachutes and Kisses. The decades are different and the times have changed. It's like coming out of adolescence.
ej: Most of the literature we've read, including books by women, has been literature that's dealt with women coming out of adolescence into their twenties, or women at their 29th birthday and heading into their thirties. What we don't have is a lot of literature about women coming of age, coming to middle-age and coping with death and the new generation coming up to replace you. I think that my generation, the baby-boom generation, has had this strange experience which is that we were raised in the puritanical Fifties, we came to adult consciousness during the Vietnam War in the sensual Seventies and in the age of feminism, and now we are raising our children in the Reagan Eighties. We are having the curious experience of finding the younger generation being more conservative than us. I imagine that it must have been like this for the feminists during the time of the First World War.
kc: What do you think has created this new wave of conservatism in the younger generation today?
ej: It has a lot to do with economic retrenchment. I think it also has a lot to do with this apocalyptic gloom that hangs over the earth. When I was a little girl, I didn't feel that the atom bomb was going to destroy us all. The generation that has been born since the mid-fifties and the early Sixties have this apocalyptic consciousness. And what they're doing is becoming rather selfish. Let's get rich and drive around in limousines and let's go to black-tie parties and drink champagne. I mean, why save the world? Let's read Ayn Rand again. Bring back The Fountainhead. You Sixties people wanted to save the world and you thought that doing good – doing a mitzvah – was a good thing to do. That's what I hear today from many people in their twenties.
kc: But don't you think that maybe we didn't leave them much of a legacy? Maybe we disappointed them.
ej: I think maybe the world disappointed them. We went into a recession. Money wasn't available and I think there was a sense that liberalism was a disappointment and a sense developed that sexual freedom was a disappointment. I mean, there's an astonishing swing back to a fascistic form of values. It's rather terrifying.
kc: Do you think that feminism has fallen victim to some of the same kinds of pendulum swings?
ej: Yes. When I was pregnant with my daughter Molly in 1977 and 1978, it was very unfashionable to be pregnant in New York. There were many feminists who were saying that pregnancy was a patriarchal trap. Then a whole bunch of women writers and celebrities got pregnant in their mid-thirties and it became a trend. I had a baby, then Nora Ephron had a baby and suddenly all of these starlets were having babies in their thirties. It seemed like another baby boom was upon us. But I remember walking down the streets of New York, with my belly out to here, with these hostile stares greeting me. People just looked daggers at my belly as if we don't do that anymore because it's kind of messy. I tell you it was a very funny time to be pregnant.
kc: Given that you don't follow trends and you don't play to the crowd, what tradition do you find yourself comfortable writing in today?
ej: You know, I started life as a poet and I always thought that it would be my fate to produce slim volumes of verse and earn my living as a college teacher of English. I didn't think my work would be published anywhere except in tiny little editions and my name would not be widely known. But I thought I would be considered a serious writer. As you suggest, fate dealt me a different hand. You see, my work came to prominence in the early Seventies when women were all the rage and it seemed to be important at that point to define the relations between men and women and how they got that way. But the notoriety came into it when I wrote about the war between the sexes where the battle was nothing if not funny. What can be serious about a battle where the combatants go to bed together? Nobody seemed to realize that you could be funny and also be a feminist.
kc: What led you to become a novelist?
ej: I had always wanted to write a novel. And because I was a woman who grew up in an age when writers were mostly men, the writers I admired were men. Saul Bellow's novels were male and the main characters in Philip Roth's novels were male. Every time I sat down to write a novel, I would create the protagonist as a male. As a result, I was forever writing these novels that didn't quite work. I didn't think anyone would give a damn about a woman's point of view which shows you how brainwashed I was. Now I had an editor at Holt, Rinehart & Winston who published my first two books of poetry and he read some some of those early drafts of my novels. He said, "Why don't you go home and write a novel out of the same female consciousness that I find in your poems?" And I said, "No one would be interested in a woman's point of view. Novels aren't about women." This is around 1972 when we're having this conversation. It isn't the Middle Ages! So I told him that I had this idea for a novel about a young woman who goes to a congress of psychoanalysts with her husband and she falls in love with a guy who turns out to be impotent. That turned out to be Fear of Flying. I wrote it and handed it to him by dropping the entire manuscript on a pile on his desk –clunk! – and ran out the door. I was so terrified that it wasn't a proper novel and so sure that no one would ever publish it. About two weeks later, he called me and said, "We'll publish it. It's wonderful." And that's how Fear of Flying came to be bought.
kc: What was the initial reaction when Fear of Flying came out?
ej: It was thought to be a rather literary first novel about a rather literary graduate from New York who wanted to be a writer. It was published with very little fanfare. The early reviews said, "Another whiny feminist novel." You know, when are these women going to shut up? And then about three months after publication, it was discovered by John Updike in The New Yorker who decided that it wasn't a whiny feminist novel and rescued the book from oblivion. The word of mouth spread and nine months after publication Henry Miller discovered it and decided that it was a female Tropic of Cancer. By then, the books were nowhere to be found. But the subsequent reaction to Fear of Flying was that suddenly I'm not seen as a literary poet who wore spectacles and was thought to be non-commercial. I had suddenly become the Erica Jongs of this world. And it the Erica Jongs of this world had their way, women everywhere would be jumping from bed to bed and producing total moral degradation. So I had gone from obscurity to being multiplied into an entire tribe of viragoes who were bringing the downfall of Western Civilization.
kc: So what aspect of this "moral degradation" do you think touched a nerve?
ej: Well, it seemed a radical idea in 1973 that women liked sex. I remember people shouting me down on talk shows in the States. they were saying that women don't enjoy sex. Women don't have sexual fantasies. And a measure of how far we've come in the last ten years is that this dialogue would never occur today. I think this is partly the result of Fear of Flying and other books like it. But it was published to a storm of criticism and controversy and every one of my books – except Fanny, my retelling of the 18th Century novel Fanny Hill – has been published to that storm of controversy and criticism.
kc: Why do you think Fanny escaped the wrath that your other books encountered?
ej: People could deal a lot easier with Fanny. There were petticoats and bodices. And it seemed to be only about the 18th Century, so it was safely distant from people's concerns. But even that book, as much as anything I've written, was a comment on women today. Parachutes and Kisses is even more so about the women of the Eighties.
kc: Well, I was going to suggest that between Fear of Flying and Parachutes and Kisses, we seem to have experienced a pendulum swing...
ej: Except I'm one of those people who thinks there never was a sexual revolution. I'm not denying that there were people who hopped from bed to bed and said that they'd slept with forty thousand people and then discovered that it was very empty. But I don't think that is a sexual revolution at all. I think a sexual revolution is having more open and healthy attitudes about towards sexuality. We went from having puritan repression to people doing quantity rather than quality. Americans have this distressing tendency to live their lives by Time magazine covers. And if Time says the sexual revolution is here, then they think they can sleep with as many people as possible. Then they get disappointed, or worse, and get herpes. They'll say, "Well, the sexual revolution is over." Why didn't they think in the first place that sex shouldn't be as complicated, as subtle, or as interesting as life's other important activities? Sex is an enormously powerful force in life. And what I'd like to see is people open to their own sexuality and open to their feelings, but not necessarily indiscriminate about sex.
kc: That's obvious from the changes that Isadora goes through from Fear of Flying to Parachutes and Kisses. The decades are different and the times have changed. It's like coming out of adolescence.
ej: Most of the literature we've read, including books by women, has been literature that's dealt with women coming out of adolescence into their twenties, or women at their 29th birthday and heading into their thirties. What we don't have is a lot of literature about women coming of age, coming to middle-age and coping with death and the new generation coming up to replace you. I think that my generation, the baby-boom generation, has had this strange experience which is that we were raised in the puritanical Fifties, we came to adult consciousness during the Vietnam War in the sensual Seventies and in the age of feminism, and now we are raising our children in the Reagan Eighties. We are having the curious experience of finding the younger generation being more conservative than us. I imagine that it must have been like this for the feminists during the time of the First World War.
kc: What do you think has created this new wave of conservatism in the younger generation today?
ej: It has a lot to do with economic retrenchment. I think it also has a lot to do with this apocalyptic gloom that hangs over the earth. When I was a little girl, I didn't feel that the atom bomb was going to destroy us all. The generation that has been born since the mid-fifties and the early Sixties have this apocalyptic consciousness. And what they're doing is becoming rather selfish. Let's get rich and drive around in limousines and let's go to black-tie parties and drink champagne. I mean, why save the world? Let's read Ayn Rand again. Bring back The Fountainhead. You Sixties people wanted to save the world and you thought that doing good – doing a mitzvah – was a good thing to do. That's what I hear today from many people in their twenties.
kc: But don't you think that maybe we didn't leave them much of a legacy? Maybe we disappointed them.
ej: I think maybe the world disappointed them. We went into a recession. Money wasn't available and I think there was a sense that liberalism was a disappointment and a sense developed that sexual freedom was a disappointment. I mean, there's an astonishing swing back to a fascistic form of values. It's rather terrifying.
kc: Do you think that feminism has fallen victim to some of the same kinds of pendulum swings?
ej: Yes. When I was pregnant with my daughter Molly in 1977 and 1978, it was very unfashionable to be pregnant in New York. There were many feminists who were saying that pregnancy was a patriarchal trap. Then a whole bunch of women writers and celebrities got pregnant in their mid-thirties and it became a trend. I had a baby, then Nora Ephron had a baby and suddenly all of these starlets were having babies in their thirties. It seemed like another baby boom was upon us. But I remember walking down the streets of New York, with my belly out to here, with these hostile stares greeting me. People just looked daggers at my belly as if we don't do that anymore because it's kind of messy. I tell you it was a very funny time to be pregnant.
kc: Given that you don't follow trends and you don't play to the crowd, what tradition do you find yourself comfortable writing in today?
ej: I feel myself to be working in the tradition of Henry Miller and Walt Whitman, and to some degree, Allen Ginsberg and William Blake. I'm on the side of the liberators. I'm on the side of the Dionysians and not the Apollonians. When I'm on talk shows like The Today Show, they always ask me, "How can you write like this? Won't your mother disapprove?" And I look in amazement and say that a writer is supposed to be a liberator. A writer is not supposed to worry about those disapprovals. I mean, that's what we're put on Earth for. The world does not applaud you for writing openly. People more often slam you than applaud you. So you have to have a strong sense of your own vision. And maybe it's the brickbats that make that sense even stronger.
Heather Robertson on William Lyon MacKenzie King (1984/86)
One genre that came into prominence in the Eighties was the pop biography. Due to the growing influence of celebrity shows on television and tabloid journalism, the pop biography transformed the literary form into an open field of speculation where we could imagine aspects of the life told, not just read about the facts in the subject's life. If Christina Crawford's shrill and exploitative examination of being Joan Crawford's daughter represented one pole of this change, there were other writers who brought a playful and more thoughtful perspective to biographical journalism. Heather Robertson's fictionalized biographies on former Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King (Willie: A Romance in 1983, Lily: A Rhapsody in Red in 1986, Igor: A Novel of Intrigue in 1989) fall into that more sportive vein. King, a member of the Liberal Party who was first elected Prime Minister in 1921, came under scrutiny in the Eighties for his claim to having clairvoyant powers along with the rather bizarre relationship he had with his mother. Rather than skirt the claim, Heather Robertson's trilogy, drawn out of both fact and fiction, delved into the psychological underpinnings of the Canadian leader without exploiting any of the prurient fascination in the subject. In this interview, I've cheated somewhat by editing together two different conversations with Robertson in order to provide a wider scope of her perspective on King.
kc: Before I get into your view of William Lyon MacKenzie King, what kind of view do you think we have of our former Prime Minister?
hr: We usually think of King as an old man. An old fuddy. He wasn't though. In his thirties, he was fairly attractive, a very vigorous man, and a very sensual man with a certain amount of charisma. So what I tried to do in Willie: A Romance was develop a portrait of the kind of man who covets political power. It's a portrait of a man who was written off. He had been defeated in the election of 1911 and left basically unemployed. King was a Liberal hack doing a little bit of dabbling here and there. In other words, nobody took him seriously as a potential Prime Minister. Thanks to his diary, I developed this intimate personal portrait of a politician. It's not just King; it's a politician. And as a basically inept man, he became the most successful Prime Minister in the British Empire. He dominated Ottawa political life for over fifty years.
kc: But how strange a man did you find him to be as you were researching your subject?
hr: Psychiatric reports as early as 1916 suggest that he was not only profoundly neurotic but he also had psychopathic tendencies. He was certainly subject to severe nervous breakdowns and depressions. At those times, he would withdraw from public life. As he grew older, he even became more and more remote. So here we are with a man, who by all standards would be considered borderline psychologically, who develops into a successful politician. The psychiatric theory behind King was that he sublimated his personal problems into politics, so that politics and being Prime Minister became his entire life. King was obsessed with political power without being an ideologue who had ambitions or goals, or even theories. He just wanted to stay in office.
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| William Lyon MacKenzie King |
hr: King saw himself more and more as Sir Galahad, or Parsifal. You know, the pure Knight of the Round Table? He was deeply into Tennyson and the whole romantic myth of the Victorian era, whereby he had to keep himself pure in order to fulfill this holy crusade. He's the most extraordinary political animal that I think we are never likely to see again in the Western world.
kc: You put a woman into his life in Willie: A Romance named Lily Coolican. Was that done to humanize him?
hr: No. You have to look at him from the point of view of a woman because they were so central to his concept of political power. His whole relationship with women is central to his psychology and to his political success. How did he seem to women? How did he relate to women? Why was it impossible for him to develop what might be an ordinary married life? Obviously, if he had, he would have been a failure as a politician.
kc: You give Lily a modern consciousness though.
hr: Well the [first] book isn't just about Willie King, it is about a social history. It's a history of the period. And the period in this first volume, which covers 1914 to 1918, is a great turning point in Canadian history. The First World War liberated us from the British Empire. It was the beginning of our national identity. But it was also a very important time for women. It was the beginning of the modern age. It was a time that brought women out of the drawing rooms and into the factories. These were middle-class respectable women moving into the garment and lumber factories and munition plants. Women became politicized then. And, for the first time, they began to earn money. As I was writing Willie, I read diaries from these women so I could capture the voice of that time. My aim was to write this book as Lily Coolican's diary which would be a counterpoint to Willie King's diary. It's she who Willie is in love with and who returned his strange affection.
kc: What was King's relationship to women? We're certainly now more aware of his relationship to his mother.
hr: King was very interested in women. Women liked him. This was something that fascinated me from the very beginning. He had a large circle of female friends so there was nothing about him that suggested that he was gay. But I was always amazed at the admiration and regard from all these women when he would treat them badly. King would send them gifts and flirt with them. But then he would drop them cold. So I developed an idea of what his attraction would be for women. Most of it was intellectual because he was well-educated and an intelligent man. King had an intuitiveness that was very feminine. He had no use for the rituals of masculine society. He didn't like the clubs, the horse racing, or the gambling. But he did like the rituals of female conversation. It was the kind of things that women build a romance on.
kc: Do you think you might raise the ire of certain historical purists by writing your books on King and the period as novels?
hr: But they're novels about history. I'm really grasping at historical truth, not historical fact. You see, I don't trust historical fact because I've done enough research myself in archives to know that papers are laundered, documents are missing, locked up, or destroyed. So what the straight historian has to do is ignore the stuff that is not there. I've done a lot of work in oral and popular history and that's the area I move into. For instance, simple facts about Canadian history are not known. How many Canadians know for a fact that Leon Trotsky was here during the First World War? Some say that he was not in Kirkland Lake, but there were a lot of people who would swear that he was there during the teens. So let's put him in Kirkland Lake. I also suggested that Charlotte Whitton [the former Mayor of Ottawa] was possibly a lesbian and that is strongly suggested in her papers because she had a thirty-year relationship with another woman. Yet these things are not commonly known.
kc: You changed the style of the second book in the trilogy [Lily: A Rhapsody in Red] from Willie: A Romance. Why was that?
hr: What I've been trying to do in these novels is recreate the style of the time. Willie was set in the time of the First World War, so I used the diary technique which was the style of the day. Now I'm into the Twenties and Thirties, so I've written Lily in the style of a movie, a silent movie like those wonderful Lilian Gish films where everything moves very quickly. I'm very fond of those movies and I even have segues where I hold up a sign that says, "One Day Later." (laughs) This is the movie that Lily would have made, if she had made a movie. At one point in the book, she says to Willie, "Let's make a movie. We'll call it Death of a Nation." This, of course, is a play on Birth of a Nation. But it is also a key to the novel because it is about the death of Canada at that time. It's about the corruption of the government and the selling out of big business and the Depression. The Twenties and Thirties were about chaos and also a very traumatic time in Canadian history.
kc: Your books remind me a little of the kinds of games that Doctorow played in his novel Ragtime where historical figures keep slipping in and out of the fictional narrative. Why play these games with history?
hr: It's a way of forcing people to look at their recent past. I've also learned a lot from television today. It's in the way that television turns news into drama. The news is shaped for television by the camera, the journalist, the editing process and the host. So when you turn on the national news to try and figure out what is really happening, how do you know? The little snippet you see on the screen is an incredibly distorted perception of what is happening out there. So what I'm trying to do is challenge people's perceptions, too. We have many assumptions about what is right and what's wrong. What happened and what didn't. We all know that MacKenzie King was a Prime Minister, and as a novelist, I say to them...you know that fact, what if? Let's assume that this happened instead of that. You're right when you suggested that this is a game. My books are like Trivial Pursuit without the answer cards (laughs).
Robert Stone (1984)
While the final American evacuation of Vietnam took place in 1975, the fallout from that war continued in the Eighties. The obsession with Latin America during the Reagan years appeared (in many ways) to be a playing out of the lost cause of Vietnam. American author Robert Stone (Dog Soldiers, A Flag For Sunrise) had been writing political novels since 1967 when he published A Hall of Mirrors, a book about right-wing paranoia, that was badly adapted into the terrible movie WUSA (1970) with Paul Newman. In 1971, he went to Vietnam as a correspondent for a British publication and his time there inspired his second novel, Dog Soldiers (1974), which centered on a journalist who smuggled heroin from Vietnam. This story about the drug culture and loyalty borne out of the war inspired a rather good movie, Who'll Stop the Rain (1978), with Nick Nolte, Tuesday Weld and Michael Moriarty. When we spoke, his most recent novel was A Flag For Sunrise (1981) which examined a number of political and social issues in Latin America. Although it was a work of fiction, the realism of American supported dictators and corrupt Marxist revolutionaries also echoed themes dating back to U.S. involvement in Vietnam which is where we began our discussion.
kc: When you look at most movies, or even books, that deal with Vietnam, you get the sense that this was a psychedelic war. They often avoid the politics and make the war look like a bad drug experience. You speak about Vietnam in a different way.
rs: When I went to Vietnam, which was for only four months, I went with a lot of received information and conventional pieties. By the time I left, however, my attitudes were much more complicated. It didn't turn me into a supporter of the war. It seemed to me to be one of history's great tragedies. The Vietnamese lost, the Americans lost, everybody lost. That's the way all wars are when you get right down to it, right?
kc: But these days, who wants to face the idea of loss? Look at the mood of the United States currently under Reagan. Don't you think this swing towards "feeling good" is a way of burying those unresolved wounds about the Vietnam War?
rs: I think what you say is true because the United States sees itself as about something. It's not a nation of blood, or ethnic entities, it has this wonderful constitutional document behind it. And we have to live up to it. That war changed America very much and not only for the worst. But the cost was great. The appeal of Reagan in the face of all this is still puzzling to me. Reagan is a guy who is as close to not existing as you can be and still occupy space. His life revolves around things like brunch. Maybe, at this time, there is something reassuring in that blandness. People might agree with the policies of democrat Walter Mondale, but I tell you, they'll vote for Reagan because it is reassuring.
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| President Ronald Reagan |
kc: Are you finding that people are feeling so hopeless today that they'll vote for the reassurance of order?
rs: I think that there is a terrible craving for order today. It's as though, since the Kennedy assassination in 1963, things went absolutely haywire. This was a country like any other until that murder. There has been nothing but crazy stuff happening since. I think it has undermined our sense of self. It's behind our craving for religion of the fundamentalist kind. People are looking for stability. Should it be any surprise that a vulgarizer like Jerry Falwell should have appeal right now? After the assassinations and Vietnam, people want stability and order.
kc: Since we have experienced the purple haze aspect of Vietnam, what were the actual politics of the war?
rs: I have arrived at the opinion that the American government never believed it could win in Vietnam. Its purpose was simply to inflict a casualty rate on enemy forces that would be acceptable. There was no way, without risking the involvement of China, for the United States to win a war like that. Lyndon Johnson was looking for a deal since he believed that every man had his price. But Ho Chi Minh was an extraordinary and ruthless individual. The Vietnamese ended up accepting a casualty rate that was in excess of the casualty rate suffered by the Japanese in the Second World War. They also knew that just as the French would refuse to tolerate the war, the Americans would and did. We didn't have to be defeated on the battlefield like the French were at Dienbienphu. If there was a military engagement where the American troops were defeated by a larger in-company strength, I am unaware of it. But we experienced it as a loss. Who lost it for us? The press? In some ways, we are like the Germans at the end of World War One. We felt sold down the river by our government while we raised our flag of nationalism. All of this is ironic because most of the younger generation in college doesn't even remember the war.
kc: ...or doesn't wish to.
rs: ...No, I mean they literally don't remember it because it was a long time ago and they are too young. To people who wake up every morning dreaming about Vietnam, it was like yesterday. It doesn't matter that it ended in 1974 which is now ten years ago. The twenty-year-olds of today were only ten at the time it was winding down. They are not repressing it; they literally don't remember it.
kc: Do you see a legacy of Vietnam now continuing in Central America?
rs: Sure. Reagan talks about "standing tall" in that disgusting fashion while we knock over some little country like Grenada. Where does all of this breast-beating come from? It seems that we did them a favour, but it is so shameless for the greatest military power in the world to congratulate itself for winning a battle over this tiny island. It's absurd. Yet sadly it plays to a lot of people.
kc: In your novels like Dog Soldiers and A Flag for Sunrise, you don't get any of that reassuring tone that we're discussing here.
rs: I really write to raise questions. I want to demonstrate the difficulty of being alive and human and decent. I think it's much harder than most people realize. People find out what they are about in conditions of extremity. They find out things about themselves that sometimes they don't want to know. That's the purpose of my writing. I don't have answers. I have questions. Andre Malraux once asked an old priest about what his views on human nature were after many years of hearing confessions. The priest told him that, first of all, people were generally not as happy as you might think. Secondly, there was no such thing as a grown-up. (chuckles) I rather agree with that.
Robertson Davies (1985)
The idea of where writers attempt to link themselves to the collective memory of the audience by creating a shared mythology out of their experiences is pretty much the domain of the renowned playwright, scholar and novelist Robertson Davies. Besides bringing his personal fascination with Jungian psychology into his 1970 book Fifth Business (which would form the basis of The Deptford Trilogy including the 1972 The Manticore and, in 1975, World of Wonders), Davies continued to provide psychological inquiry as a means to examining academic life in The Rebel Angels (1981), the conclusion of which became the starting point for Davies's next work, What's Bred in the Bone (1985). This book which would then become part of The Cornish Trilogy, an examination of the life of Francis Cornish, an art restorer with a mercurial past, whose demons become part of a larger mythology. Since myth plays such a huge role in the dramas of Robertson Davies, we began the interview with the question of just how big a part destiny plays in shaping a character.
kc: How much would you say that character is destiny?
rd: Character is destiny to a tremendous extent. You are born with a certain hand of cards that you have to play. But the way in which you play them is extremely important. What happens to you is so much the effect of who you are and how you handle the experience that you get. For instance, I said to some students some time ago that it's a mistake to try and plan your career too carefully because much more interesting things could happen to you if you let them happen, than if you insisted in imposing some kind of pattern on what you wanted to do.
kc: I think Northrop Frye wrote about you once that you weren't content with writing books that stayed within a particular genre or format, but rather you pushed against genre, maybe even found the means to recreate it.
rd: I really appreciate that. When I first started writing people said that I was a terribly old-fashioned writer and wrote like a Victorian novelist as if there had been no advance in the novel since before Henry James. I don' t think that's true. I try to do rather innovative things but they're not spectacularly innovative. I don't write in a peculiar language, or perform special tricks to make it seem new, but certain things I do write are new in their own way. What I do is allow the plot to emerge out of the character which might not be new except that I do it in my own way.
kc: You begin your new book with an old proverb...
rd: Well, yes! 'What's bred in the bone will not out of the flesh.' What you have when you are born is something which is your hand of cards, or your destiny. It's not completely controlled but it is to some extent. I mean if you're born in Canada, it isn't as if you're going to live the same kind of life as if you grew up in Mexico. That's obvious. But the amount of freedom that you have is considerably restricted. I mean I could never become a great operatic soprano. We're born with a number of things we are never meant to be and with a number of things we have to discover about ourselves to become.
kc: Maybe that's why your novels seem to be less about the collecting of facts and more about the accumulative power of self-discovery.
rd: That's true. And at the beginning of What's Bred in the Bone, a man is attempting to write a biography of the principle character and the thing that has him almost defeated is that he cannot find out what he regards as most important. And he'll never find it out because it was concealed. It was within the man's life. Then I tell the man's life and what could not be discovered is to some extent shown to the reader.
kc: Francis Cornish is an art restorer. Did you have a particular interest in this area?
rd: Oh, I've always been interested in it all my life. There have been in the last forty years a surprising number of art scandals about art fakes, and fake old masters that were tinkered with. One such scandal in the mid-Forties involved a man named Han van Meegeren who had painted a number of pictures that were taken for the great Dutch master Vermeer. They were accepted as Vermeer's and galleries bought them, and experts even praised them. But then when it was discovered that they were all fakes, the experts high-tailed it and retracted their comments claiming that they thought all along ' there was something funny about them. In one of them [ed. Jesus Among the Doctors], they said they knew something was wrong because Jesus appears to look like Greta Garbo [laughs]. Now don't you think they would have noticed that from the beginning?
kc: Given your interest in Jungian psychology, you have a portion of the book where you talk directly about the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. It seems that you write about our desire to do things with a complete consciousness of what we're doing, but the unconscious is still always present in our actions. It's what you even call in What's Bred in the Bone, the most conscious. Why is it most conscious?
rd: It is what wells up from deep within us and often what we cannot resist. All of us live rather on the surface of our minds. A lot of our thinking and the ideas we express which we think are our best are not our best work. If you are an artist, what is best is what comes to you and cannot be resisted. Painters certainly have that view. If they are artists of any great talent, they paint pictures that they just can't help painting. They feel that they must do it. The real artist is the kind of man who has no choice.
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| Han van Meegeren's Jesus Among the Doctors (1945) |
kc: What about Francis Cornish? Does he have a choice?
rd: He has too much choice [laughs]. He is an artist who is inhibited by some things which most people would regard as good luck. One of them is that he is very rich. So he isn't driven by necessity to work, but he's driven by his artistic impulse to work. But what I tried to deal with, but not completely, is that he's pulled two ways. He's brought up half a Protestant and half a Catholic. That is, half of his mind is rooted pretty much in the Middle Ages; the other half is pulled towards rationalism. This makes trouble in his life.
kc: Indeed. Even though I was baptized a Catholic, I never really went to Church, or even lived in a Catholic home. But when I examine certain behaviour patterns in my life I can still feel something of being a Catholic. Does that make sense?
rd: Of course! It is not the things that you say and that are foremost in your mind. It is the things you are brought up to take for granted that shape you. Catholicism is something that is very much bred in the bone. That's what it was in Frances. He could not escape it. And it had very beneficial effects on some parts of his life and a difficult effect in others.
Louis Malle (1985)
The American obsession with Latin and South America during the Reagan years seemed to be an ill-advised attempt to exorcise the ghosts of the earlier conflict. In the case of French film director Louis Malle, though, his country had been involved in a colonial war with Vietnam earlier in the Fifties, but it didn't have the impact on the psyche of France as the later conflict in Algeria would. So Malle, whose work was as diversified as it was probing, whether it was film noir (Elevator to the Gallows), dealing with the Second World War (Lacombe Lucien), autobiographical (Au revoir, les enfants) about the family romance (Murmer of the Heart), the romantic crime drama (Atlantic City), documentary (Phantom India), slapstick comedy (Zazie dans le métro) and theatrical (My Dinner with Andre and Vanya on 42nd Street), decided to tackle the experience of Vietnamese immigrants in the 1985 melodrama, Alamo Bay. Alamo Bay is about a Vietnam War veteran (Ed Harris) who clashes with Vietnamese immigrants who begin a fishing trade in his Texas bay hometown. Sadly, the picture lacked the fine detail for dramatic nuance and keen observation in Malle's greatest films, but it did provide an opportunity for me to talk to him about what was compelling about the theme of the story.
kc: In the last few years, you've been making a number of movies in America such as Pretty Baby, Atlantic City, My Dinner with Andre, and more recently, Crackers. What do you find so appealing about American culture?
lm: If you're not born and raised in America, it's very striking. It's a country made up of immigrants from all over the world. For a long time, it was strictly Europeans, but now people are coming from literally every part of the world. So it's interesting to see how America is growing further and further away from the experience of the Mayflower. Given the number of films I've now made here, I'm not even so sure I can be considered a foreigner in America. I'm not just a visiting director. I've been living in America since 1976. When I go back to France, I feel like an American in Paris sometimes (laughs).
kc: It's curious that you've chosen in your new film Alamo Bay to look at the American experience in Vietnam through its aftermath when your own country had its own Vietnam War.
lm: I don't think the Vietnam experience has been as traumatic for the French as it was for the Americans. We had an experience in Algier – a colonial war – that resembled the American involvement in Vietnam. But that war didn't last very long for the French. We never sent drafted soldiers to Vietnam, only the professional army. A cousin of mine was actually killed in Dien Bien Phu which was the last battle lost by the French in Vietnam. But what I found interesting in talking to those Vietnamese down the coast in Texas was that a lot of them were Catholics from North Vietnam. The very first Vietnamese priest I spoke to talked to me in perfect French. He had actually been raised by French priests. So I saw quite quickly that these folks left North Vietnam because they didn't want to become Communist in 1954. They had settled in Saigon and then twenty years later they had to leave again when the Americans pulled out in 1975. As for my own experience, I'd gone to school all my life with Vietnamese children, plus a lot of the technicians in the French film industry are also Vietnamese. So as a Frenchman, I became very close to the Vietnamese.
kc: Alamo Bay actually takes up a theme you explored earlier in your career with Lacombe Lucien where you delve into the motivations of individuals who get caught up in a political tumult that's out of their control.
lm: Absolutely. I was actually thinking about Lacombe Lucien when I was investigating this project. While the historical circumstances are quite different, the premise was similar. The story is about what happens to people who are perfectly normal citizens until they are exposed to a certain accident in history that changes them. In the case of Alamo Bay, it's about a little isolated town of fishermen who are invaded by people they cannot relate to. They are shocked by cultural differences and they don't speak English. These people not only keep quiet, but they build their boats and compete directly with the local fishermen. You could see that it was inevitable that there would be trouble. But that the violence would be so quick and extreme, where they would burn Vietnamese boats, and showed how explosive the circumstances were.
kc: The country music shared by the Texans who live there seems to celebrate American roots that don't truly exist for the people of that area who feel economically dispossessed. Then you get an exodus of Vietnamese who don't have homes any longer. They've severed the roots to their homeland and now find roots in a place where people feel severed from their country. Is that perhaps why such normally law-abiding citizens suddenly feel threatened and powerless and attack the Vietnamese who they see as invaders?
lm: That's exactly what's happening in America now. I remember that one of the most virulent and anti-Vietnamese fishermen where we were shooting had a Polish name and his father was an immigrant. This guy had even been a fisherman originally in another part of the United States before he came to Texas. So his roots there didn't go very deep. But he was always going on about "we Americans." In a way, the Vietnamese are the perfect immigrants, don't you think? They cannot go back. They have to settle down. All their determination and work ethic will also make them more American than true Americans would be in a few years. But isn't that what's always made the American melting pot work in a way?
Julia Reichert/James Klein (1985)
The Eighties was the decade that book-ended the arc of the Cold War, where we witnessed both its peak during the Reagan era and its final decline when the Soviet Union would dissolve in December 1991. In their film, Seeing Red, documentary filmmakers Julia Reichert and James Klein examined the roots of the Cold War by looking at the early years of the American Communist movement, with its beginnings in the Thirties, its rise in the WW II years, and the later disillusionment with Stalin. Of course, I was also interested in the legacy the old communists left in the Eighties.
kc: When you started researching your documentary, Seeing Red, what attracted you to the communists of the Thirties and Forties?
jk: Well, in the States, there's such a wall between the generation of the Thirties and Forties and our generation. We know nothing about that past period because of the McCarthy period and the Cold War. You see, all of the history books were re-written at that point. And all of the people who could have told us about the different roles that people played in history were silent and not speaking out. It was very much of a surprise to us to discover this older generation of communists. Then we thought it was a story that people had to hear about. Besides these people are dying. They are not going to be around forever. So it was quite an opportunity to meet this generation.
kc: You also decided not to look at the hierarchy of the Communist Party. Your film examines the true rank and file members.
jr: That's exactly what we were looking for. We felt that the lives of people who formed the backbone of the movement, rather than the people who were at the top, would be much more interesting. We also realized that a little bit unlike the movement of the Sixties, this generation was working-class. So we found sailors, people who worked in factories and people who rode the rails – all kinds of fascinating working-class characters. These are very articulate people and that's what got me interested in making this film. They were so eccentric. They had such interesting and varied lives coming out of poverty and then becoming very articulate writers and speakers. They had been through so much. They had the tremendous joys in the Thirties, the union activity and the war in Spain, but then got heavily attacked during the Fifties. They also became disillusioned by the policies of Joseph Stalin, who they thought was this great leader until the Fifties. At which point, they had to figure out what to do with their lives once the ideals that they built their lives on had fallen apart.
jk: The other reason that we stayed away from the leaders was that we were not really interested in doing history. History can be pretty dull. I mean, it's very important and history works great in books, but we are filmmakers. And because of that, we were more interested in what it felt like for these people to get up on a soapbox and express their ideas. We wanted to explore what it felt like to have the police charging down on you from horseback, or what did it feel like in the Fifties to stand in front of the HUAC committee? That, for us, made for more interesting movie-making. And we think that you learn something about history in the film by learning about character, as well as something about the human spirit. To me, we were after a very human story that transcended the ideology of communism.
jr: We wanted to look at people who joined the Communist Party and follow them through their major life turning points: joining the Party, getting attacked, and somehow resolving their political life in the Eighties. So we thought it was very important to bring these people up to the present. The basic question was: Could they maintain their political commitments and ideals for their whole lives, or would they turn conservative in their old age? Would they look back and say, "Weren't we cute in our youth"?
kc: The people you interview in Seeing Red don't become conservative like some of the Sixties generation have today. Could that maybe be because of what you said earlier about these people knowing hardship and poverty and not coming from pampered middle-class homes?
jk: That had a lot to do with us making our film. Even though you could say that the people in our film came out of economic poverty in the 1930s, Julia and I came out of the intellectual and cultural poverty of the Fifties. But what we had in common with their generation was a sense of longing and a belief that the society was not right. They had a strong sense that something was wrong with society because they were all out of work and suffering hunger. We had the sense that nothing was nourishing us spiritually.
kc: So what did you both learn most from making this film?
jk: When we started, we had real questions about what was going to happen to our lives. It was the end of the Seventies and we saw a lot of people not active in the political movement as they had been earlier. And when we saw this other generation of activists, we thought they were going to answer for us the question about what we were to do now. They couldn't answer that for us. They couldn't do that in the least. But what they could give us was a sense of courage that leading a socially committed life – a life that looks outward at the society you live in, rather than at just your personal possessions and well-being – was a good life. They taught us in the end that you're going to feel good about that.
jr: That was the most important lesson for our lives! It's that sense of living your life according to your beliefs. And taking the consequences of that. They certainly found out what that was like. It is very inspiring to discover that living a political life is a good life to lead. It's not like you're going to lead a revolution. We might not even have an affect on our country's policies in Central America, although, I hope so. But it's a better life choice than advancing my career. To me, that would be a very narrow life to lead. I'd rather be involved in my society and try to make changes in my society. That's the sense of life we got from these old Reds (laughs).
Samuel Z. Arkoff (1986)
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kc: When people think of the B-movie they often think cheap in every sense of the word. But you have often said that it only pertains to the budget. How did the B-movie evolve then?
sa: Before the anti-trust decrees had begun in the late Forties that separated theatres from distribution and production, it all used to be uniform. The studios used to sell fifty or sixty pictures at one time. They would say when they announced the pictures to the exhibitors who were supposed to buying that they were going to make five A-films and twenty-five B-pictures. These were all referring to budgets. The C-pictures might be westerns, for instance, so it had nothing to do with quality. It had to do with budget. And if you recall correctly, Warner Brothers' best movies – at one point – were its B-pictures. They had the young Cagney, the young Bogart, Bette Davis and Edward G. Robinson. Those were the budget pictures in the early days. And they have lasted even longer than their ponderous prestige pictures like The Life of Emile Zola. So I'm quite proud to say that I produced B-movies.
sa: We had to have a specific audience. We started in the Fifties and, as you know, the Fifties was the beginning of the television era. As a consequence, it was the nadir of the theatrical age. In the first place, the anti-trust decrees forced the studios to give up their contractual lists. That applied not only to the actors, but the people in back of the camera, too. In addition, the original moguls were either dead or retiring and professional managers took over. Television became a tremendous competitor and, as a consequence, you had an era where virtually seventy-five hundred theatres out of eighteen thousand went out of business. You see, the population had shifted from the downtown areas out into the boondocks. So when we came in, people didn't think that there was a market any longer for the B-picture because television would take over that sort of programming. The only way we survived was based on several concepts. Some of which were delivered and others were accidental. As the older people were moving out into new homes, and away from downtown, we figured the only audience would be the young kids who were dying to get out of the house. Young people have to get away from their parents. There's a clan instinct and desire to be with your own sex at a certain age. There is also a desire to be with the opposite sex at a certain age. Those instincts are primal and we went after them.
kc: This doesn't sound too different from today when I see Hollywood studios constantly stuffing the theatres with youth movies. How were your intentions any different back then?
sa: To begin with, a lot of these people making youth movies today don't know what the hell they're doing. If you're thirty today, you really don't know what an eighteen-year-old thinks. If you're forty, you certainly don't know. The other big problem today is that the production departments do pictures without ever telling the sales department. It's as though things are made in limbo. Well, that's nonsense. I mean, General Mills doesn't make a new breakfast cereal unless they try it out on the public. But pictures get made today without any concept of who the market is, or even if there is a market. I'll give you an example. There was one week last summer when three youth science-fiction pictures came out. One was a Disney film called My Science Project. Another was Real Genius. And the third was Weird Science. All in the same week! How are you going to get enough of an audience when you break it up like this? You'll die on your backside.
kc: But why do you think the studios today are so infatuated with youth pictures?
sa: They've been driven to youth pictures out of desperation. The trouble is they never understood them then and they don't understand them now. I can remember during the days of our beach party films, United Artists acquired the rights to a Pepsi-Cola jingle called "For Those Who Think Young." They tacked it on to a beach movie and they never understood why nobody came. I knew from the moment I looked at the film. All I had to do was show it to the kids at home. As soon as they saw the title, they booed. They thought they were being taken advantage of by adults and they were right. That was a slogan Pepsi intended for older people – for those who think young.
kc: As opposed to "For Those Who Are Young"?
sa: That's exactly right. And to a degree today it's the same thing. The youth pictures they are making today are not really indigenous to youth.
kc: What inspired you to market your films to a young audience?
sa: Our greatest inspiration – given that we were making pictures inexpensively – was getting away from the concept of parents in our films. You see, before the Fifties, the so-called youth film was really not a youth film. It was a child's film. When people talked about family pictures they had glowing in their minds the little kiddies going with their parents to see Disney. There were really no films for teenagers. Basically, the only teen films around were ones with morality lectures. Have you ever seen any of those Andy Hardy movies?
kc: Sure.
sa: Okay. You've got Mickey Rooney as an irrepressible young fellow who gets into trouble all the time. His father is Lewis Stone who's not only a father but he's also a judge. Now think about that. It couldn't have been accidental. He's a judge-like figure, a parent who's not the fun-loving kind of guy. He's judicial. So Mickey says to his dad, or his friends, that he wants to go do something. His father tells him that if he does something, he's going to get into a lot of trouble. Mickey goes off with his friends anyway and does something. He gets into trouble and can't get out of it. So he comes back at the end and tells his dad. He pleads to his father to get him out of trouble and this judicial father gets him out of trouble. At the end, Mickey looks up at his dad adoringly and promises never to do that again. And the audience creams in their pants.
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| Mickey Rooney and Lewis Stone |
kc: (laughs) So the films were really civics classes aimed at kids?
sa: Yeah. It was a morality lecture aimed at the kids. What the producers didn't realize, though, was that by the Fifties the kids weren't going to take it anymore. Also, it was those kids in the Fifties – the dating crowd – that were the only ones going to the theatre. Their parents were at home watching television. So here we come with American International Pictures and we didn't have any dough for big stars, books to option, or big directors, so what are we going to make? We did films for an audience of young people to identify with. This didn't mean doing another remake of Treasure Island, for God's sake! It meant doing films about what was happening to them in their community in their day. And during the late Fifties, we did films like Drag Strip Girls and Hot Rod Girl. In the Sixties, we invented the beach party pictures with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. And there were never any parents in those pictures. They were just stick people to be mocked. It wasn't a child's world; it was a youth's world. They got into trouble and they got themselves out of trouble. They never had to look up to Lewis Stone, and say, "Judge, you got to get me out of trouble and I'll never get into trouble again." We ended that bullshit.
kc: It was carnival time.
sa: Yeah. It was carnival time. It had to be fun to go to because it needed to become an event. Now the drive-in was the perfect locale for those pictures. They were indigenous to the times. The drive-in was perfect because it was a certain kind of event for people who lived in small towns.
kc: Today it seems that the executives running the studios have every kind of instinct except the kind that knows how to make movies. What do you think has gone wrong?
sa: We have a lot of people in the motion picture game who are basically arrogant. They are also snobs. We have quite a few young people – and not the kind who come off the street – who go to Sarah Lawrence and have no concept of what is reality. They've never been to a drive-in and they've become pseudo-intellectual. Basically, they don't understand fundamental drives because of their whole economic status. So your production departments are filled with people who don't understand the people who go to pictures. They're not just the Upper East Side people in New York, or the Westwood people in Los Angeles. I'm talking about the people who go to the movies regularly. They don't have the gut instincts and gut reactions that you need to cater to the public that is really out there.
Ann Beattie (1986)
It’s difficult taking into consideration the political landscape of the Eighties without examining aspects of the Sixties. Many ghosts from that period (i.e. Vietnam, the Cold War, civil rights) continued to linger as unresolved arguments that underscored actions in the Eighties. In the work of fiction writer Ann Beattie, questions were raised as to whether those of us who were part of that decade were now trapped in nostalgic reverence for our lost youth; or, were we slowly coming to terms with the hard political lessons of that era? One of her key novels that delved deftly into those issues was Chilly Scenes of Winter (1976), which was made into a 1979 movie by Joan Micklin Silver re-titled Head Over Heels. The story revolves around Charles, a civil servant, who is struggling in the seventies with his ideals from the Sixties while trying to maintain his relationship with Laura, the love of his life. With his droll best friend Sam, Charles comes to grips with the ghosts of the past which is where I began my talk with Ann Beattie.
kc: Your first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter, certainly struck a nerve with those who came of age in the sixties only to become disillusioned later.
ab: I was only trying to be ironic about that. Looking at that book now, I can see why it struck people as strongly as it did. I was writing it in the early Seventies and I didn’t quite have that perspective on just how dramatic the Sixties were. At the time, I didn’t think it was a social history. I actually hope that isn’t what it primarily is. I think it’s about people who are kidding themselves and who know that they are kidding themselves. The Sixties become a convenient backdrop for that.
kc: Even as a backdrop, though, you can still feel the pop culture of the Sixties seeping into the characters’ lives. The main protagonist, Charles, is like a walking jukebox of the era.
ab: So true. But he does have the personality of someone who does what is expedient. Charles is obsessive, and that transcends the particulars of the time. That’s a psychological problem that he has and it’s maybe masked by the fact that many people had so much in common in the Sixties.
kc: Those masks have definitely slipped away since then.
ab: Sure. For instance, if I were to mention a record, or a book, to you from that time, you certainly would have read it. In the Eighties, the mere quantity of pop is so abundant that if I knew about the Eurythmics and you knew about Duran Duran, what would be the meeting point? Cyndi Lauper, perhaps? In the Sixties, there were The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and Dylan, and you could really say that everyone heard and shared it. It was the same with books. Chilly Scenes of Winter is about that, too. It’s about somebody who ironically stumbled into a time that masked his own problems from himself and that allowed him to function pretty logically.
kc: I remember one part in Chilly Scenes of Winter where Charles played Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” and he started finding these connecting points in his life. He thought about Dylan having his kids in Malibu and thought about whether he’d have kids as well. As much as your characters do have an inner life, that shared culture of the Sixties also fed it.
ab: That makes sense. Sounds good. I don’t think I ever wrote about a character the way I wrote about Charles. And he was totally hooked into the culture because he was petrified to be otherwise. He needed a lot of touchstones so he got them altogether and made a big rockpile.
kc: The music of the culture is certainly a thread that runs through many of your stories.
ab: In Chilly Scenes, there were a lot of records being played. I had to pay something like $500 to get permission to quote from some of those songs. The publisher wouldn’t even pick up the bill because there were so many songs mentioned. The truth is, at the time, I was married to a musician who played music all day long on the stereo. I just put in the novel whatever I remember him playing. I did use some selectivity however. After all, I didn’t put in the song “Hand Beats All Meat” without realizing what the literary implications would be. But people think I have this rarefied sense of music so DJ’s keep sending me these priceless records and tapes. And I don’t even know what they are!
kc: Whether the characters you write about are having difficulties or not, they come from an era that is anything but boring.
ab: Their lives are full of surprises. How they cope with those surprises is what interests me. I don’t sit down knowing what the surprise is going to be either. When I wrote “The Burning House,” the title story from a collection of short stories, I had no idea what would be revealed there. I was pretty appalled when I found out. Even I’m open to surprises.
kc: In the two books that go into the eighties, The Burning House and Falling in Place, we have the same generation as the one from Chilly Scenes, but the problems are now domestic ones. They’re now the older generation. Did you consciously set out to trace their disillusionment?
ab: No. I didn’t think of doing something that was au courant where everybody is having a baby this year. I do suppose that it does creep into my thinking because I’m always writing about what’s right under my nose. It’s a logical extension of what I have always been trying to do.
kc: In your short story, “Jacklighting,” you have some people of the sixties who lose someone who matters to them – much like in The Big Chill. It seems that you view this generation as one that is constantly trying to define and measure themselves by what is valuable to them.
ab: I would take that even further. Once again, I come back to irony. In the Sixties, what happened a great deal among the people I knew was that they made heroes and heroines of each other, as well the cultural icons that were raised to that level by the media. That game was being played for the first time in a big way in the Sixties. The outcome of that was that people started to mythologize each other. Most people will now tell you – often with great embarrassment – who they thought was worth listening to circa 1965. Then you wonder about the further ironies of them telling you those stories over coffee on Wall Street.
kc: Your latest novel, Love Always, certainly demonstrates that different aspects of pop culture do drive you and your characters.
ab: Yes. Eccentricity, too. What put the whole thing in my mind was the fact that I’m addicted to the National Enquirer and The Star – you know, the tabloids – and not for the same reason that a lot of people are. I don’t watch television at all. So I know all about the life of Victoria Principal, or people that I haven’t even seen, so it’s a doubly vicarious existence. And I think without realizing that my obsession would find its way into my fiction, I just noticed that here was all this hype and junk culture all around. So I found myself writing about a forty-year-old unemployed soap opera star. It was frightfully easy to get inside the mind of such a person after numbing myself on all that junk (laughing). I couldn’t even make polite conversation. Just ask my friends.
kc: Isn’t it also true that pop culture itself has changed dramatically in the Eighties?
ab: Oh yeah. The most telling aspect is that things are now obvious parodies. People know it and love it. I mean, just look at Boy George! There was a time when I had to look for irony to put in my stories. Pop culture in the Eighties is playing right into my hands now.
Barbara Branden on Ayn Rand (1986)
Novelist Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged) and her philosophy of Objectivism illicits a strong reaction from just about everyone who reads her work (especially young adolescents who identify with her heroes' battles against conformity and mediocrity). Yet most of us know little of Rand's personal life. Barbara Branden, who along with her husband Nathaniel, became one of her early followers and closest friends in 1950. (Branden and her former husband also co-founded the Nathaniel Branden Institute which gave courses on Rand's philosophy.) In 1954, however, Nathaniel began a secret romantic affair with Rand with the reluctant permission of both their spouses (Barbara and Frank O'Connor). Rand terminated her association with Nathaniel Branden by 1968 however after she discovered that he had become involved with actress Patricia Scott more than four years earlier. She likewise disassociated herself from Barbara Branden for keeping this fact from her. In 1986, Barbara Branden wrote a memoir, The Passion of Ayn Rand (Doubleday), that not only unveiled this polarizing figure, she also illustrated the perils of blind faith and idolatry. The book later became an Emmy-award winning film in 1999 with Helen Mirren portraying Ayn Rand, and Eric Stoltz as Nathaniel and Julie Delpy as Barbara.
kc: Both you and your husband met Ayn Rand in the early Fifties when you were studying at UCLA. What was it that attracted you to her ideas?
bb: We both had separately read The Fountainhead when we were fifteen years old and fell in love with it. As a matter of fact, we met because of it. A friend of mine told me that there was a man visiting Winnipeg, where I was brought up, who was the only person he knew who talked about The Fountainhead the way I did. When we were at UCLA, we learned that Ayn Rand was living in California. He wrote her a letter asking a number of philosophical questions and she answered it. That lead to a meeting with her. Whether one agreed with her, or didn't, she was the most incredibly fascinating human being I've ever met. A miraculous mind. I don't know quite how to define genius, but when you're with someone who has it, you know it. We had all the questions that adolescents have. Is there free will? Is there a God? What can we achieve in this world? And she had brilliantly logical painstaking answers. It was exciting.
kc: But I also get the feeling reading this book that because her mind and strong personality developed a philosophy that, for her, defined individuality, it also masked something else. Maybe because her thinking was deliberately designed to be so rational, it deflected you from something darker, something more irrational.
bb: You're right in one sense. It deflected you from noticing certain things about Ayn Rand, the person. Her intelligence was so hypnotic and the rationality so fascinating that one tended to think, or to assume, that the person knows what she is doing, even if it isn't immediately clear. But one can carry that much too far, which I did.
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| Novelist Ayn Rand |
kc: I remember reading The Fountainhead when I was in high school and it certainly stoked a particular view of the world that is very appealing at that age. Here you have a righteous hero filled with integrity versus a culture that sets out to render him ordinary and mediocre. The notion is quite attractive when you're a teenager. But what about when you grow into adulthood and discover that the world isn't quite as black and white as it is presented in her books?
bb: It's been very interesting for me to see people of all ages who are influenced by her ideas. I think to young people the interest is primarily the enormous passionate idealism in her work. Young people tend to be idealistic. They live in quite a cynical world. And I think what they find in her work is a sanction for that idealism. In fact, she tells them great things are possible for you. If you think rationally the world is wide open to you. That's a message that I think young people are starved for. However what I see as the single most enduring thing to most people seems to be her emphasis on reason, the idea that the world is intelligible and that we can understand it
kc: It's curious to me though that Ayn Rand came from the Soviet Union, a nation that had a revolution built on an ideal, but it was a utopian vision that very quickly turned into a reality of horror and oppression.
bb: Yes. But she understood in a deeply philosophical way what was wrong with Communism. What she always resented was the idea that it's a wonderful ideal but it doesn't work in practice. She thought it was a terrible ideal, the whole concept that man must live for the State. At 12-years-old she knew that was evil. She never lost sight of that and believed, like an American would believe (but most don't know to), that man lives for his own happiness, for his own goals, for his own purposes. And no one has the right to tell him what to do with his life. That was present in her before the Revolution yet it was the concept that enabled her to understand the Revolution.
kc: But doesn't her own ideals, especially her view of the ideal man in The Fountainhead, become deeply flawed when measured against the reality of her world?
bb: This concept of the ideal man was really her motivation for her writing. There are writers in love with language. There are writers who are in love with different aspects of their work. For Ayn, though, it was a means to an end. The whole purpose of it for her was to create her concept of the human ideal. Her husband, Frank O'Connor, was very much like Howard Roarke, the architect hero of The Fountainhead, but he was not an intellectual. He was not particularly ambitious. He was not many of the things that Ayn's heroes were. But she romanticized him in her own mind. She would talk about him as if he were one of her heroes. I think she truly loved the man she married, but sometimes when she'd talk about him, one would wonder if she saw the man she married, or was she seeing an abstraction?
kc: When she began her affair with your husband, did he begin to represent more to her?
bb: Yes he did. We were two young students who first started as her protégées and became very soon close friends. About a year and a half after we were married, she saw Nathan as a great mind who was studying psychology and would do great things. But she saw us as having attributes that anyone at twenty could have. We were not giants of the universe. So she romanticized us as she had her own husband. We struggled to live up to her ideal, failed, and then we walked around with considerable guilt. It had also been becoming clear that Nathan and her were feeling more for each other than just friendship. So she sat everybody down and said that she and Nathan wanted to have a love affair. Ayn believed that it was reasonable. She believed that it would not affect either marriage. Her love for Frank was an absolute and would not change. Nathaniel's love for me would not change, or would not be damaged. There was 25 years difference in their ages so it would not be a long lasting relationship, either, perhaps a year or two. Ayn didn't think anyone would be hurt. Now it made intellectual sense to me. But it never emotionally rang a bell. Yet I said yes and Frank said yes. And it was a disaster from beginning to end. It should never had happened and it came to involve thousands of other people who were hurt by it.
kc: This is what I meant earlier when I mentioned the irrational side that gets masked by her rational reasoning.
bb: My greatest disagreement with her today is in the area of psychology. I think there were many things about human beings that she simply didn't understand. Therefore, her expectations of people were not what I would consider to be rational. What I quarrel with is her view of human beings. And it was based on a concept of what four people could do that was simply not valid. Years later, Nathaniel and I were getting a divorce and he fell in love with another woman [Patricia Scott] and he did not tell Ayn. When she learned of it, she was bitterly hurt. Ayn's tendency was to instantly transform pain into anger. So what one saw on the surface was rage. She broke with him instantly and permanently. Never saw him again. That's when it began to have its impact on other people. Nathan and I, after all, ran an institute that gave lectures on various aspects of Ayn Rand's philosophy. They were given all over the country in about 80 different cities. When this break came, we decided to close the institute. But what do we tell people? We swore that no one would know the truth. Ayn said that she would be happy to have it published in the New York Times, that it was nothing she was ashamed of, and she wasn't ashamed, but she felt it was very private. So we felt very much bound by that secret. We could not tell the truth and she didn't. All that our students and our friends knew was that people who they idolized were at each other's throats and had broken completely. For all those people, I felt they had a right to know what had happened. And that was one of the reasons why I wanted to write this book.
kc: Has your book had any effect on people's beliefs in Objectivism?
bb: You know, she has been seen so much as a symbol – either a goddess or a devil – and I wanted to say in my book that she was a human being and a woman about whom nothing was known. I very much disliked the fact that she was always seen as a symbol. I felt that she had a right to be a human being and worlds shouldn't topple if she made a mistake for her admirers. She faced the same human problems that all of us face.
kc: But isn't it also a problem when someone who stressed individuality influences a mass movement of like-minded thinkers?
bb: Yes. In a way. It's a problem when a formalized intellectual movement is organized. That can lead to all sorts of cultism. I think it's very good now that people read her works, take what's valuable in them, and then go on to live their own lives. That's the way it should be. And that's what is happening.
Oliver Stone (1986)
The American obsession with Latin and South America during the Reagan years seemed to be an ill-advised attempt to exorcise the ghosts of the earlier conflict. One filmmaker who has continually dealt with the legacy of Vietnam and the Sixties in general is Oliver Stone. Although Stone began a profitable career as a screenwriter (Midnight Express, Scarface, The Year of the Dragon) when we met he had just written and directed a low-budget drama called Salvador, with James Woods as print correspondent Richard Boyle. In fact, by the time Salvador finally found release, Stone had already completed his Vietnam War drama Platoon which dealt with his own personal experiences in the Vietnam War.
kc: Recently there have been many movies featuring journalists, mostly American, dealing with topical issues. We had The Killing Fields a couple of years ago which dealt with Sidney Schanberg's experience in Cambodia. Under Fire recently showed us journalists in Nicaragua. All of those journalists portrayed were basically decent people attempting to do decent things. In your film, Salvador, you pick a correspondent, Richard Boyle, who is more of a scoundrel....
os: Yeah. I portrayed him in the film as a complete rascal, but he's also a provocateur. He goes after a story, but he does it in a manner that isn't a method endorsed by The New York Times. He's scrounging for money and working independently for CNN Cable News. He's always borrowing fifty bucks. So I know him. He's real. He even borrows money from me (laughs). The guy is outrageous, always looking for a new girlfriend or another bottle of tequila. But yet through all of this fooling around he does ultimately get to the truth. And that's what interested me about the character.
kc: What did you know about Richard Boyle before making Salvador?
os: I knew that he'd been to Salvador seven times basically because he found it fun and he had a girlfriend there. Ultimately though, he got involved heavily in covering the death squads, saw the truth, and he brought it to the forefront. He was one of the first journalists to discover the murdered nuns at the sight where they were buried. I found out that he had also done similar kind of reporting in Vietnam covering the Thieu government in Saigon. He was thrown out of Vietnam because he was involved with the Buddhist peace demonstrations. He also did coverage of the first mutiny of American infantry troops in 1971 at Fire Base Pace. But that's what I like about him. Nothing could stop him. He was like a terrier for the truth.
kc: After seeing Salvador, I was amazed at how little I knew about the country and the conflict.
os: It's an untold story. I'm amazed at America...at how so little people know about it. Most people don't even know about the assassination of Oscar Romero. They know about the four nuns because they were Americans. But they don't really know the story of Salvador. I think if Shakespeare were alive today he would want to tell this story. It's big, it's bloody and it's bold. And it deals with life and death issues concerning democracy and freedom.
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| James Woods as Richard Boyle in Salvador |
kc: One of the most ironic aspects of American foreign policy is that when they try to prevent countries from going communist inadvertently, they end up supporting the regimes that drive these folks right into the communist camp?
os: Precisely. That seems to be the case currently with the contras in Nicaragua. And it's certainly the case with Salvador with Honduras probably going next. The coming turmoil will probably be in Honduras because they're also trying to militarize the country. I was there recently and it reminded me of Saigon in 1965. The populace is starting to turn against us and there are more whores, there's more troops, and the inflation is ruining the currency. All the tell-tale signs of a tragedy are starting up there.
kc: You've written the remake of the gangster film Scarface, which featured a vindictive and insatiable killer. You wrote Michael Cimino's Year of the Dragon which focuses on a cop – an ex-Vietnam vet – who's obsession with breaking the Chinese-American mafia turns him xenophobic. Now you have Richard Boyle in Salvador. You really seem attracted to extremists.
os: That's good. I believe in anarchy. Anarchy always goes beyond the defined limits and reaches for something new. Only by reaching for something outrageous – and new – do you sometimes get that next stage of evolution. I've been called everything from a racist to a right-wing sexist hack. I've had every bad review in the world. Salvador has gotten its share of knocks. But the new film I just finished in the Philippines called Platoon is about my own experiences in Vietnam in 1967. It took me ten years to get this film made because I wrote the script back in 1976. Now this picture has a softer character than Richard Boyle. He's a young man who goes to war at the age of 19 who's played by Charlie Sheen. Platoon will come as a surprise to those who think I just write about people that are extremists in their behaviour. I tend to go towards issues that attract various forms of behaviour.
kc: What are the views on Vietnam that you explore in Platoon?
os: I felt that the war had been a tragic mistake – a misguided mistake – made by politicians and military people.
kc: Vietnam is a subject – both directly and indirectly – in American films that refuses to get resolved. How ready do you think audiences are now to deal with that experience?
os: I think it is the time for it. When I wrote the script for Platoon, it was merely history. The resonances now in 1986 are such that after Beirut, Grenada and Nicaragua, it's an antidote to such films as Top Gun that promote the idea that we can win World War III. So maybe there's an irony here that I had to wait so long to get that story made.
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| Charlie Sheen in Platoon |
kc: You tend to write about other people. It sounds like Platoon is more autobiographical. Was it your intention to make Platoon a very personal story?
os: Most definitely. All of the characters in the film are based on real people that I knew. The sergeants are two people who will stay with me for the rest of my life. Many of the incidents in the film are real. There is a scene in the film when Charlie Sheen almost shoots a retarded Vietnamese civilian with one leg. That actually occurred. I went nuts one day and I wanted to kill this guy because he didn't understand me and he wouldn't come out of the hole he was hiding in. Some guy said to me, "He's scared, man!" In the movie, Sheen says, "He's scared? What about me? I'm scared!" I'm glad I didn't kill him, but I went right to the edge – and that edge could easily be crossed. And that was the point of the scene. In Platoon, I wanted to remember what it was like in a place and time. I felt that if I didn't make the picture then those kids would have died for nothing.
Douglas Adams (1987)
When I interviewed author Douglas Adams in 1987, who knew that, besides his vastly eclectic interests, he would also be something of a pioneer in technological innovation with his fascination for Apple Macintosh computers. He saw the decade as a launching pad for a number of technological feats which would bear fruit in the years to come. Adams, who died suddenly of a heart attack in 2001, had an equally diverse career as an English writer, dramatist (which included being a script editor of Doctor Who) and a humourist. Most people know him as the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a best selling 'trilogy' of five books (selling over 15 million copies), which began as a BBC Radio comedy in 1978. (His contributions to British radio are commemorated in The Radio Academy's Hall of Fame.)
The day he came in to talk, he had just written Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency which he described as a "thumping good detective-ghost-horror-who-dunnit-time travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic." In Adams' hands, Gently is not your typical private detective. He's more interested in quantum mechanics, conjuring tricks and consuming pizza than fiddling with fingerprint powder; a "Holistic Detective" who believes in the "fundamental interconnectedness of all things." (The book was followed by a sequel The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul in 1988. He began working on another novel, The Salmon of Doubt, but he died before completing it.) Naturally with someone whose interests are so vast, we began our interview discussing obsessions.
kc: When I first read Hitchhiker's Guide and now the new book, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, I began to think that your interests were much bigger than what the page might contain.
da: (laughter) There are often more ideas at work than I can comfortably handle. I'm someone who proceeds by a sequence of obsessions. I get incredibly enthusiastic about one idea and then about another. Every now and I then I discover I don't have an obsession and then I go into a catatonic state because I don't know what to do.
kc: Maybe you're just not satisfied with the obvious things that sustain most people. I read somewhere that you came up with the idea for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy while lying on the grass and looking up at the stars and wondering where can I go from here?
dc: Yeah. I did. In 1971, just before I went up to university, I was hitch-hiking around Europe and I had The Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe. On one occasion I found myself lying drunk in a field in Innsbrook – as one does there – and it occurred to me as I looked up at the stars (which were swirling somewhat) that someone ought to write a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. It didn't even necessarily occur to me that it would be myself who would write it. Now I have a friend who suffers from something he calls 'nubism' which is the idea that whatever is going on there's always something more interesting going on somewhere else. You're never quite at the nub of things.
kc: Well, that leads me directly into Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency for the very reason that in detective work everything gets deduced by what becomes evident to the eye, or the nub of things. But in this book you might as well just throw out the magnifying glass because the technology has changed, the world has changed, and there's far more going on that connects us to things that we don't even know about. Given all this, did you think it was time for a whole new type of detective?
da: What attracted me to the idea of doing a detective story came when I was writing Hitchhiker's Guide and I became fascinated with the idea that the tiniest little insignificant detail could have earth-shattering consequences. This is the stock and trade of the detective novel. Every insignificant detail could provide the key to the whole thing. The big event would become a complete smokescreen and a blind to distract you from what is going on. Those are the things I felt very much at home in trying to deal with.
kc: You're also at home with the idea that the characters in this story are dwarfed...no, let me rephrase that, fascinated by the technology.
da: That comes completely from my own recent fascination with computers. For instance, in this particular book, I wrote it on an Apple Macintosh computer in which I'm deeply – and tragically – in love with. The book, as you see it now in your hands, is exactly how I laid it out on the computer. So that's my fascination. Another recent fascination of mine, one that did find its way into the book in a major way, is what happens the day when computers invade the field of music. People have always known instinctively that there's a connection to be explored between music and math. It's already established that good mathematicians generally make good musicians. So here we are today beginning to realize that everything in a piece of music can be described in numbers and those numbers are susceptible to some kind of understanding and manipulation. And for those, like myself, who don't know how to play the piano well, technology has come to the rescue in the most astounding way. If you have a synthesizer, there are programs – particularly on the Mac – where you can write music of whatever complexity you like. The computer can play the instruments for you. You can edit every last note of the performance. This is the first technology I've come across which allows me to do fundamentally something I could never really do before. This is incredibly exciting to me.
kc: I can see why. In Dirk Gently, you continually get the sense of another world that can be accessed through a machine.
da: Right. Yet it's all set in the here and now – except for one scene set in Bermuda in Four Million Years BC – but besides that it's all taking place in the present. You know, one of the frustrations for me writing Hitchhiker was doing this terribly reckless thing which was that I'd blown up the world in the first chapter (laughter). Then I was stuck with that. But I did it because I was tired of those hokey stories where everyone is trying to save the world, so I thought let's just get rid of it right off the top.
kc: Besides being a detective story, though, featuring time travel, it's also a ghost story. Why did you want to mix these genres?
da: I always wanted to do a ghost story from the point of view of the ghost. You never get to see things from the ghost's point of view. So I thought for all of time that man has lived on this planet, we've always speculated about what will happen to us after we die. Is there a Heaven? Is there a Hell? But one thing we do assume is that at the point we die then we'll find out.
kc: Which is the dilemma of one of the main characters, the CEO Gordon Way, who gets shot to death and his spirit then tries to come to terms with whether he's really dead at all. So you get the crime and you get the search for clues and the solution – but that doesn't really seem to be the point of Dirk Gently.
da: No. The journey is at least as important as the destination. But what I was trying to do was catch the readers of my previous books somewhat by surprise. My previous books say one damn thing after another because I began as a sketch writer who gradually found his way into writing more connecting story lines. But in books like Hitchhiker's Guide, the narrative was really an excuse for a collection of sketches. With Dirk Gently, I thought it was time that I really addressed myself to the problem of plot. So I began it with a series of events that are so disparate that you can't believe that they are all coming from the same book. And just when people think there is no point where it can be all brought together, I surprise everyone by bringing it all together and resolving it. And it does that. Just.
kc: You talk about looking for the connectedness of things yet the bigger picture always keeps getting bigger. How do you find ways into this expanding picture?
da: Oddly enough, that became one of the reasons it became impossible to write Hitchhiker any more. Simply because, you keep on increasing the level you're dealing with until you have nowhere else to go. In Dirk Gently, I think I want to do one more book to make amends to readers for the four-part trilogy of Hitchhiker. Thereafter, I'm going to do something dramatically different by going off with a friend (ed. Mark Carwardine) on a zoology expedition to make a series of wildlife programs for radio which will be different than any wildlife show you've ever heard (ed. Last Chance to See). I also want to do a computer game based on Hitchhiker. But then I have this great idea for one called Bureaucracy. This is a game featuring a series of escalating adventures, crises, catastrophes, all taken to nightmarish proportions. But the object of the game, quite simply, is to get your bank to acknowledge your change of address card.
JG Ballard (1987)
JG Ballard (Crash, The Unlimited Dream Factory), a British novelist, short-story writer and essayist sometimes wrote fiction to get inside aspects of his own life and experience. Born in the Shanghai International Settlement in 1930, Ballard wrote about the Japanese attack on the city in 1943 in his 1984 book, Empire of the Sun (which Steven Spielberg would turn into a film in 1987). During the Japanese occupation, Ballard lived in an internment camp with his family where he would also do his schooling. In the film, however, his family gets separated from him and the story recounts his survival without them.When Ballard came in to talk with me, he had just published The Day of Creation. In this book, a doctor with the World Health Organization in Central Africa discovers how a civil war deprives him of patients so he devotes himself instead to bringing water to the region which ultimately forms a dangerous obsession. Both books are about the effects of war on the individual and the trauma of loss, but finding truth in personal experience is where we started our conversation.
kc: It obviously took some time for you to write out your own memories of war and separation in Empire of the Sun and yet there are similar issues at work in your new novel. How long did it take for these memories to gestate into something you could write about?
jgb: A lot of people asked me why I waited almost forty years to write Empire of the Sun and I didn't really have a convincing explanation even for myself. But let's just say that it took a very long time to forget the things that happened and a long time to remember. I think writing the book opened a hatchway into a part of my mind that I think I'd closed for a very long time. You're right that perhaps bits of it have also come out in the new book as well.
kc: Inanimate objects come up in your stories quite prominently like the time in Empire of the Sun when young Jim is sleeping in a dentist's office with people's teeth all around him. Feelings tend to come from objects rather than people.
jgb: Part of the reason for that in Empire of the Sun is that Jim, a thirteen, or fourteen-year old boy, is alone a great deal of the time. He hasn't been captured by the Japanese and he's moving through these abandoned houses and apartment blocks and trying to construct some reality out of these mysterious objects that are all around him. When he moves into the camp, he does then begin to develop more personal relationships with others.
kc: Right. You establish very early the fact that in wars, especially when you're in the middle of one, it's hard to perceive a good and bad side to it. It all gets confused.
jbg: Well that was very true of how I experienced the Second World War. I had very ambiguous feelings towards the Japanese because in many ways the Japanese guarding our camp were our protectors. When the war ended, and the Japanese disappeared overnight, we were faced with a great deal of danger because the landscape was not under the control of the Americans who were hundreds of miles away across the China Sea. Nor were we under the control of the Chinese nationalists who were five hundred miles away. We had these roving bands of peasant gangs abandoned by the Japanese and looking for food. It was a dangerous time and it was the Japanese who provided us with our only security. That was the paradox. Empire of the Sun is about those confusions. I was trying to get to the truth about war which is never black or white. It's much more a whole series of greys and pluses that become minuses.
kc: Movies also play a big role in Empire of the Sun in scenes where you have Jim watching war films that make him eventually come to terms with what he has to face which, at the end, becomes the reality of the war experience versus the myths.
jgb: The whole thing was a strange mix-up of endless war newsreels that I remember seeing as a boy of nine or ten after 1939 when Britain was at war with Germany. There were huge fund-raising drives to buy a Spitfire and these newsreels presented a very upbeat view of how Britain was doing against the Germans. They were constantly being shown in the British clubs in Shanghai. Meanwhile, the Germans, in their clubs, they were showing their newsreels which were also very upbeat. After the Americans arrived, when the war ended, they would show their newsreels which they would screen on public buildings. The way the experience of war can be fictionalized is a large part of my book.
kc: The Day of Creation could invariably be compared to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, where Conrad was dealing with the primitive fear that colonialists have of entering the colonies in darkest Africa and losing their veneer of civilization. In the character of Mallory, the doctor, in The Day of Creation, it's not so much about his fear of going savage, but instead, it's about a man obsessively imposing his idea of civilization on this African nation.
jgb: That's so true. Things have moved on from Conrad's time. Africa is now being colonized by the TV companies, by the wildlife safari merchants who are trading on an image of Africa that they can sell to networks all over the world. My book is about the struggle between this doctor who has created this extraordinary river in the middle of a desert and transforms it into a new Garden of Eden. His problems with this TV documentary director, who follows him, is that he wants to present this river as just another wildlife safari. The filmmaker imposes all the convenient fictions with its homogenized sentimentalities. Nature is a bushy-tailed mammal to him, an idyllic place. The Day of Creation is an adventure story on one level where this doctor's obsessive quest is to find the source of this river which he sails up. But it's also about the way in which it's very difficult these days to establish the truth of anything because we are living in a relative universe where other people's fictions begin to overlap everything you do. If you tried to fly a manpowered airplane across the Atlantic, you could become a documentary character in somebody's film about you. This changes behaviour and the way you possibly see yourself.
kc: A lot of the fight for reality in this book also seems to be part of the fight for reality that you had growing up in China. It's as if you were trying to put your own experience up against what everybody else was telling you was true. You have a professor in The Day of Creation trying to tell Mallory about what his documentary on him is going to be like, but it runs completely counter to Mallory's experience of what he thinks is happening.
jgb: Mallory's problem is that he finds it increasingly difficult to understand what the truth is. This documentary director is like a Mephistopheles who tells him that sooner or later everything turns into television. He tells him that there are no truths anymore, just different kinds of lies.
kc: Are you afraid of that happening?
jgb: But it already is happening. I'm a great watcher of television back in England. I can see the way the media landscape can bombard us with an endless stream of fictional material. Other people's fantasies fill the air we breathe. We are living inside an enormous novel. It is very difficult today to discover what is the truth. If a hotel were to burn down in Toronto, the media people would be there immediately talking about moments of heroism and grilling the man who they think is responsible for it. They'd interview the hotel manager next, plus his wife and kids. The whole thing becomes a movie even while the fires are still burning.
kc: Dreams become so central in this new book. It's not just the dream of one man building a river and naming it after himself. We're also talking about dreams that are illusions and hallucinations. Your writing seems to suggest that you parse through dreams to sort out what is real and true from what isn't.
jgb: You've absolutely described it. It's very difficult even in our ordinary lives to make a clear distinction between our imaginative lives, which go on inside our heads, from the everyday world of our living rooms and kitchens. They've now started to merge together because we all have such powerful imaginations. So you've got to except the world of dreams, the world of the imagination, because it's what sustains us. But since we live out our own personal mythologies, we also have to enter that world and meet it on its own terms.
Margaret Drabble (1987)
During the Eighties, England was going through the trauma of no longer being able to maintain the power and the glory it once possessed when it was an Empire. So (just as in the United States) England also elected a leader, Margaret Thatcher, who (like Ronald Reagan in the U.S.) promised to restore those "glory days" at any cost. Of course, Reagan and Thatcher, both larger than life figures, never came close to restoring anything glorious. But they did both change the political landscape dramatically. In their midst. many spoke out against their policies – including author Margaret Drabble (The Radiant Way).
Margaret Drabble was a writer who crossed over from both the Seventies to the Eighties. She not only became an outspoken critic of the Thatcher government, she also understood the price her policies would exact in the future. In this 1987 interview, Drabble delved into the effect of Thatcherism on human values. The Radiant Way was her study of three friends begins right on the eve of the Thatcher era. It was her first work of fiction in seven years.
kc: Your novel The Radiant Way, spanning the years 1980 through 1985, covers the Thatcher years in England. But more than just covering that era in terms of time, you seem to get inside more of the moral and economic issues that clarify Margaret Thatcher's impact on England.
md: I think there's a very close connection between the way you live and the economic framework of the government you're living under. You don't always perceive it, however, because the shift is very gradual. What Margaret Thatcher has been trying to do is to shift us into an anti-welfare, anti-public spending economy. She wants a share-owning economy. But what has happened is that we now have to think very deeply about our position on welfare, the size of the cake, how do you cut it up and who gets what bits of it. Today we have a high unemployment rate in England and this has been used as an instrument in policy by the Thatcher government to keep wage claims down and keep inflation down. I think that is immoral.
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| Margaret Thatcher |
kc: But what do you think has contributed to this type of policy in England?
md: I think it was the sense that money was running out and there was a decline of the manufacturing industries. The car industry is now in decline and the steel industry is also receding. It is as if the market was glutted and there was no more need for any more big steel plants. Three-quarters of the steel industry was put out of work over the last five years. That's a lot of people out of work and I feel that they're permanently gone. This is because nothing's being done to rescue them. So there have been very big changes in the way that Britain earns its money and therefore spends its income. Those of us on the left who feel that you could go on spending public money, while believing that you generate public money by spending it, have had to re-think this policy very hard. We've been told that money isn't there and it can't be spent on roads, hospitals or education.
kc: Was writing The Radiant Way an attempt to portray the human price paid by these policies on a generation that has probably had its hopes dashed?
md: For me, it was very much a question of that. I began writing this book in the winter of 1984 and '85 as the miners strike came to an end – which, as you probably know, was one of the bitterest, prolonged strikes of recent history and based on class war. I was very consciously trying to sort out what I felt about that. I hadn't written a novel for five, or six years...I just couldn't write fiction. Oddly enough, I met over the last year or so several writers in Britain who've said that they found that they couldn't write at all for two or three years after Mrs. Thatcher came to power. You see, everything was different. It was as though a gear had changed, or perspective had gone wrong. They couldn't see and they couldn't write. Gradually though, people began re-assembling their forces. So this was my attempt to work out what was happening to the world that I lived in, to my characters, to their attitudes towards British society and the class system. I wanted to work out what it is that's gone wrong and why it is that Britain looks so shabby and dissatisfied.
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| The miners strike in 1984 |
kc: You have one character in the novel, Liz, who is a psychiatrist and she is like one of those people who, in times of great turmoil, feel that their job is all that they can hang on to because it defines them.
md: It's the work ethic, eh? But she is the one least dependent on the National Health Service. She has a job with considerable private practice and therefore she is free to go on operating. Several of the other characters in the book – as in the rest of Britain – became dependent on public spending. They're dependent on educational budgets and on health care. And they now find that their jobs are all disappearing.
kc: Another character, Otto, at one point in the book says, "Class dominates people's thinking. This is the most class-divided society in Europe. It's a question of going on because if we don't, we're done for." Do you feel that way yourself?
md: I sometimes do. I think we are very class-ridden. I think that class divisions begin in early infancy. You're taught that certain kinds of behaviour are acceptable and some aren't. Children must go to such and such a nursery school, then they must go to a private fee paying school or they might learn the wrong kind of accent. Then they'll never get into university and never get a job. This goes right through the whole of society. I don't know if this will ever change until – now I'm going to say something very unpopular – we get rid of the monarchy.
kc: How does the monarchy become a roadblock to change?
md: This image of the Royal Family sometimes seems to me to be very out of date. You open the cheap press and there are always two stories running. One is the Royal Family and one is the pop stars. And they're both treated with the same scurrilous contempt by the press. It's a kind of adulation that is almost prurient. I feel that is very bad for a society. We have these very false role models: pop stars and the Royals. Neither need have any talent at all.
kc: Do you think that they become figureheads because Britain was once an Empire and people need some larger symbol to hang onto?
md: (sighs) I suppose so. I mean...I have nothing against the Queen. She is a hard-working woman who works hard for her money. Underneath that, though, there is a whole layer of little Royals and lesser Royals; Eaton and Cambridge and Oxford, and that last image of an elite. This has nothing to do with performance, or achievement, or even excellence. It's a dead weight that we cling to. Perhaps you're right, we cling on to it because we have nothing else to hang on to. We're not world leaders as we were so we cling to these things for their symbolic value.
kc: You also have a serial killer at work in your book who decapitates women – in fact, severed heads turn up a great deal in The Radiant Way. I wonder if you included this character because you're saying that in a culture experiencing moral decay, any kind of behaviour, especially psychopathic behaviour, can become permissable?
md: I think it's very interesting the amount of urban violence in the West. In Canada, you haven't quite caught up to the United States...
kc: (laughs) We're working on it.
md: Well, in Britain we're trying, too. We haven't got there yet, but I find it both worrying and fascinating. Maybe these crimes are an expression of the psyche of all of us living in an unnatural and overheated way.
kc: Well, when I think of the term "losing your head," it's like a metaphor...there's no control left.
md: The chicken with its head cut off?
kc: Something like that. Yeah.
md: To be honest, I don't know why I embarked on that bit of the plot. It seemed to come out of some dark reach of myself that I feel in touch with when I'm walking in some parts of London. The area of London where the murders take place is an area that I've come to know well over the last five years and it really is quite a spectacular mixture of dereliction with a certain kind of street wit. There's some very amusing graffiti and very elaborate jokes with things hanging from lamp posts. I wanted to use that feeling of mingled fear and a kind of admiration for somebody who's fighting back somewhere against the environment.
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| Upstairs, Downstairs |
kc: Do you think this kind of political and social polarization that you explore in your novels has anything to do with the proliferation of the tasteful and decorative British films about England's past and the fading of the Empire...
md: ...Oh, God!
kc: ...on the one hand and these other British films where characters flagellate themselves because of their "loathsome" values?
md: These nostalgic portraits of British India, the Raj, when England was great...and Upstairs, Downstairs, and all of that...I can't understand how people always read themselves into the upper row. I know where I would have been. I would have been a servant. I would be dead by now. That's my class background. So I find that to have a very selective view of the past is absolutely infuriating. And it's definitely linked up with the Royal Family. The self-castigating element in British society, I find more healthy in a way. I mean, we ought to castigate ourselves in order to move on instead of endlessly looking back. It's been traumatic for Britain trying to adjust to the size of the country in the globe. When you used to look at the old maps, the whole of the world was pink. It was the Empire where the sun never set. Now we're a little country. We're an off-shore island. To me, that's a very pleasant place to be. We could have that if we weren't so worried about other kinds of politics – if we weren't spending a fortune on the Falklands war. We could have a perfectly successful and happy economy of decent people, decent hospitals, good roads, good schools, and all the rest of it. Unfortunately, it's not even our aim anymore.
Neil Bissoondath (1988)
Author Neil Bissoondath, the nephew of authors V.S. Naipaul and Shiva Naipaul, is from Arima, Trinidad and Tobago. Although he came from a Hindu tradition, he was schooled in a Catholic high school. During the Seventies, political upheaval brought him to Canada where he initially settled in Ontario and studied at York University achieving a Bachelor of Arts in French in 1977. But Bissoondath went on to teach English and soon became an award-winning author. When I spoke to him in 1988, his first book of short stories, Digging Up the Mountains, was just being published. In the book, he examines (as director Paul Mazursky did in Moscow on the Hudson) the pain endured when people are uprooted from their homeland. Curiously, in 1994, he would stir up a significant amount of controversy with his book, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada, which called into question the validity of Canada's 1971 Multiculturalism Act. There are noticeable hints leading to his views towards defining ethnicity in our opening remarks.
kc: Considering our preoccupation with the notion of what it means to be a Canadian, do you find it interesting that whenever you come from another land, it's hard to be defined as a "Canadian" writer?
nb: When people say I'm not really a Canadian writer...I don't know...what is a Canadian writer? Is Mavis Gallant a Canadian writer? Alice Munro, maybe. But it's not an easy thing to define, as many things Canadian are not easy to define.
kc: Well, it is interesting to discover when reading your recent short stories that the world isn't just perceived solely through your own ethnic view but instead from many cultural viewpoints.
nb: (laughs) But you know, when I wrote the stories, I never really thought of the characters as "ethnic." They're people. Ethnic is not a word I really like. I reject it because I don't know what an ethnic writer is. I like to think of myself as being a writer who writes about people.
kc: Many of those people you write about in Digging Up the Mountains are from somewhere else, much like yourself, looking for a new world. Did you feel enclosed in Trinidad?
nb: Oh yeah. It's a very small place with just over a million people. Trinidad is also pretty far from anything. I didn't get the kinds of things I needed. I got books from my parents. As I grew older, though, I wanted to read more widely but it was impossible. When I was last there in 1980, I felt at one point that I wanted to read something and I hadn't brought any books with me. So I went looking for some in the local stores and I found all of these Harlequin Romances. There were titles like Wild Rose and Passion with women in various states of undress on the cover. Finally I found a bookstore where they had a little corner with some classics and I found a copy of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. I picked it up and I had to blow the dust off of it. That's a true story. The romance stories impress people more.
kc: When you talk about dust on Dostoevsky, it seems that the things that once had lasting value are getting usurped by a more transitory kind of popular culture. Does that also account for the desire to leave home?
nb: Oh yes. There's an undeniable sense of having to flee. People are preparing to leave the island. Things are not good. So when you start living day to day with the idea that the place you've grown up in is not going to support you, it creates a schism in the mind, except for that day when you get up and leave. As a result, people stop reading. What's popular in Trinidad now is scandal sheets that make the National Enquirer look very good. There's now a lack of serious thought because people are too busy preparing to flee.
kc: That's interesting because in one of the stories in Digging Up the Mountains, a man comes to Canada, makes a lot of money, and then goes back to enlighten his homeland
Timothy Findley (1988)
Author Timothy Findley (The Wars, Famous Last Words), who died in 2002, had written towards the end of the Eighties a book of short stories called Stones (1988) that explored both the emotional and physical geography of Toronto, Canada. It is a city that we both grew up in that, by the Eighties, was undergoing a dramatic change with the beginnings of a massive urban sprawl. That growth would cause Findley to leave for more rural surroundings. While I think some of what he predicted in 1988 didn't come to pass, the interview did indicate how the climate of commerce, the elevation of the term 'taxpayer' over 'citizen,' did reflect a city losing sight of itself. What Findley, I fear, saw coming was a Toronto where its inhabitants lived to work rather than work so they could live.
kc: Most of the stories in Stones concern themselves with Toronto, a city I grew up in. And one of the fascinating aspects of your book is the way you illustrate how the architecture of this city -- what some are now calling a "world class city" – hides some things that aren't so perfect or world class.
tf: Yeah. I grew up here, too. I was born in 1930 so my memory of the city extends back to a time when none of what we now have was evidently in the future. I don't think people saw Toronto becoming the city it has become, so it has been extraordinary as a witness to watch it grow – and grow in more ways than merely physically. It is, I think, a magical city in many ways, but I have great concerns for its future.
kc: What kinds of concerns?
tf: Toronto reminds me now so vividly – almost like flashing double images – of the New York I first encountered in the late 1940s and early 1950s when New York had this look and was still a magical city. And now, less than forty years later, it has become a nightmare city. And I think that's what maybe causes some of the stories in Stones to have a sense of nightmare, a nightmare lying in wait for the people who inhabit the book.
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| Toronto at night |
kc: I think the clearest example of that nightmare you describe is found in the story "A Gift of Mercy" where the Queen Street Mental Health Centre is featured. Here's a place that is supposed to be devoted to helping people who are emotionally disturbed. But when reading this story, we get a sense of something completely different.
tf: What's sad about that building and for those who work there is their sense of alarm about the situation. They feel that society is not willing to deal with the problems that are encountered because that building is there; and also, because of the flood of people who pass through those doors who are beyond help. You can't just go on building larger and larger institutions to house these people. There has to be some way for people with schizophrenic problems to live whatever version of a normal life is possible amongst the rest of us – but in some dignified way. Part of what's going wrong is that Queen Street is spilling over with people who are regarded as being the dregs and not worth paying attention to.
kc: The overwhelming impression I got from Stones is that the architecture of the city dwarfs the individuals that live there. It intimidates them. In one story ("The Sky"), which takes place mostly at a concert in Roy Thomson Hall, one character is waiting for the sky to fall – metaphorically and literally! The architecture you describe in these stories reduce people to such a size that they feel helpless. They feel that there is no way to be human.
tf: Well, I think...now that's a good point...because the other way that size and architecture are dominating our lives and making it impossible to make human contact in the city, or any large city, is the domination of the financial aspect of all of this. It becomes way beyond anyone's reach. Most of us who live here have nothing to do with that world of money.
kc: In what sense do you think that becomes intimidating?
tf: Well, if you live outside of Toronto, like I do, you get to see it growing towards you rapidly. You can take a route into Toronto and encounter a subdivision that wasn't there four months ago. And when you encounter these subdivisions, you are encountering houses that have a lowest price in the $350 thousand range. Those are the El-Cheapo houses, by the way. But they're all crammed together! There are no gardens. The trees are gone entirely. If you want trees, you have to plant them. We have no responsibility for putting green back in this landscape. We only take it away. So if you're going to go forever and ever into debt in order to live in these places, you're still going to live inches from somebody else. It doesn't gain you any biological contact with the planet. You're still not human. That's the other part of Stones, the sense of architecture gone mad. I don't mean just the great ups and downs and the widths of the huge buildings that are rapidly going up. I'm talking about the price of all of it.
kc: You're speaking of the human price we pay?
tf: Sure. We're now required – supposedly – to live in them at the most expensive levels. If we don't drive the Mercedes and patronize all the people who are bringing in all this money, then it's all going to fail. So everybody's struggling for absolutely meaningless things. In one story in Stones, I write about somebody having a walk along Bloor Street looking at all the glitzy stores and seeing the faces. It's something I've done when I've been walking there. And one of the things you immediately see is that all of these people are avoiding going home. I don't want to be with my wife, or husband, or to be with my children. I don't want to be with other known people. I need this hiding place out here in the street with all these other strangers because going home is horrible. It's the last thing I want. And, do you know what, it's increasingly becoming a way of life.
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| Roy Thomson Hall |
kc: In a story like "Dreams," where the landscape is the psyche, it becomes even scarier.
tf: Yes. In fact, there's one character who is a paranoid schizophrenic who has started invading other people's dreams. The real world is so appalling to him that his own dreams provide him with a landscape that he can endure. So he goes into other people's dreams and kills people in those dreams. That's where he moves, he moves into this other. That intrigues me. We become the dwelling places of other people's horror stories.
kc: I suppose since we haven't provided real homes for ourselves we've left a door open to anything.
tf: Sure. But we also haven't provided proper homes for them. I know that sounds condescending, but what I mean is that we haven't made it part of our civic duty to see that everyone in our city lives as well as can be expected of reality.
kc: But how do we come to define that reality?
tf: Kevin, this city is not real. Look out the window. It's not made for real people. It is a city made of commerce with buildings made of glass where you can't see in the windows. You get nothing but a sense of glare. They're ugly. I don't know what other people's dreams and nightmares are, but this is the landscape of my nightmares...The politics of this continent does not deal with the way people are. You look at the people in parts of America, like Bed-Stuy, or the little towns and villages that exist between the major centres in Florida that are totally populated by Blacks and Hispanics. And you can see that they are truly despised. This bullshit about what America is all about is getting really boring. If they really believed it, they'd alter the face of the country and they haven't. It's getting worse. So if we're going to change things, we're going to have to drag the Brian Mulroneys and the George Bushs into the truth of our countries and force them to see that they're there.
David Horowitz on Henry Ford (1988)
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| (Photo by Gage Skidmore) |
kc: You and Peter Collier have written previous biographies of the Rockefeller family, the Kennedy family, and now the Ford family. What is it that attracts you both to the elite families in American culture?
dh: It's a long tale. We were both working for a radical magazine in the sixties called Ramparts and we started hustling a story on the Rockefellers, and on their children. It seemed like an interesting story to look at the children of the ruling class. And while we were researching the piece, we discovered that they weren't the members of the executive committee of the ruling class controlling America and the world. We found that they couldn't even control their own family and we got a whole different story out of it.
kc: What kind of story did you get?
dh: It was the story of identity and a family dynasty that's created and the difficulties of maintaining the family ethos through the generations. Some of their kids just didn't feel that they had earned the power that was given to them. We were also searching for a story where we could tell a multi-generational tale like The Forsyte Saga that would tell us something about about the way were are living now.
kc: Your biography of the Kennedys certainly did that.
dh: Yeah. That was ambitious (laughs). With the Kennedys, we found the creation of the family myths, how people feed off the myth, or are destroyed in their attempts to live up to it. But in both the Rockefellers and the Kennedys, after the first generation, the family industry tended to be just manipulation of the family image. There wasn't anything really substantial after that. With the Fords, however, we hit upon the story we originally set out to do.
kc: What did you discover about the Ford family that set them apart from those other elites?
dh: Basically Henry Ford was about making cars which are now so central to the way we live today. More than any other person, he created the modern world as we know it. That's what sets the Ford family apart from the others. It's not that he invented the car – which he didn't – it was his idea that everyone should have a car. Early auto manufacturers saw it as a luxury item for the rich. Henry wanted to design a car that would be cheap enough so that everyone could own it. That mobility and freedom we now have and the movement between urban centres has everything to do with that idea. Modern industry was born out of this, too. You could call him a modern industrial messiah.
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| Henry Ford |
dh: That's right. And there's a tragic tale at the center of this epic about the Fords. That tragedy is the relationship between Henry and his son Edsel. Henry Ford's identity became invested in his company, then he became a billionaire. Then he became somebody that everyone wanted to interview. They wanted his wisdom on everything under the sun, just because he had one spectacular idea. One woman, Rosa Schwimmer, persuaded him to hire a 'peace ship' to help stop World War One. Of course, it failed, and it made him an object of ridicule. So he became convinced that there were conspiracies against him and, as a result, he turned paranoid in that American crack-pot way. In particular, he thought the Jews were persecuting him – like Rosa Schwimmer – and he published things like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion which talked about a Jewish conspiracy to control the world. In fact, he is the only American mentioned in Mein Kampf – a figure even Adolf Hitler admired. His son, Edsel, revered his father, but he was appalled by all this and he tried to soften and temper the old man's anti-Semitism..He also tried to modernize the company because Henry became attached to his Model-T's – he never wanted to change them. Because of this, the company started to go downhill. He tried to control 60% of the market and it dropped to 20%. So Edsel tried to temper the madness he saw in his father, but his father saw him as a threat.
kc: How did his father respond to this threat?
dh: Henry had an alternate family. He had a mistress and an illegitimate son by the mistress he set up in an estate in Dearborne. He also had a surrogate son named Henry Bennett who was a thug that he put in control of the Ford Motor Company. His own son, Edsel, died tragically of stomach cancer at a young age. And then the irony is that Edsel's name was put on the automobile that was supposed to honour him, but it's now a synonym for failure. You can look it up in the dictionary! Edsel means failure. If you were writing a novel, you'd be hard pressed to find anything more literary.
kc: But don't you and Peter Collier treat biographies in a novelistic manner?
dh: True. But it isn't because of any invention on our part. It's because the strategy we use going in is that we inhabit the characters. Most biographies tend to be analytic and they compare all of the stuff that has been written on the subject. We try to tell a story and start out with a character and then we look on institutions as revelations of character. That was a problem with the Rockefellers after they created Standard Oil. They became so hated that they withdrew from their institutions so there was a disjuncture there. As a result, they didn't express their characters through them. It was through people they hired and so on. With the Fords, that company was very central. It was the company and the struggle over it that caused the founder to crush his own son.
kc: You mentioned earlier this notion of becoming paranoid in an American crack-pot way and it made me think that there is something in your biographies that attempts to define some characteristics that are part of an American obsession, an American madness, and an American dream.
dh: Just let me add something else: We learned something about ourselves. There was a moral teaching involved. Henry Ford taught us something as middle-aged males (laughs). Peter and I had these radical roots and intellectual biases against the heartland in America and against business. Our first surprise was that the automobile industry was complex. The second was how open the family was in giving us access to material. When we were doing the Kennedys – who are liberal politicians –they ran their show like the Mafia. People were really frightened to talk to us. In doing the Fords, we gained an appreciation for what makes the country go. Also our central figure in The Fords was not an intellectual, didn't read books, and yet we saw in his story a guy who gained everything, revived a company, made tragic mistakes, and embarked on an odyssey that led to a peace where he finally discovered what he really wanted. It's like in King Lear where you have the stripping away of royalty and the pertinence of power down to the naked man. And in the end, Henry was this naked man confronting the elemental and the basic. This was quite a discovery for us. And to come through this book dealing with these nuts and their empires and still arrive at something like this, that was just great.
bp Nichol (1988)
Canadian poet bp Nichol whose life work in both narrative and experimental poetry was almost always autobiographical in nature. Whether it was his epic poem, The Martyrology, which he began in the Seventies, or the more compact Selected Organs (Black Moss Press, 1988), Nichol never lost touch with his personal attachment to language which became a living organism in his work. One might call Selected Organs a body of work and a work of the body. It was also only a portion of a larger volume (planned over eight years) to be titled Organ Music, which featured autobiographical chapters focusing on the organs: The Vagina, The Mouth, The Chest, The Tonsils, The Hips, etc. Given that bp Nichol was a poet, he was a great inheritor of an oral tradition, a process we begin to examine as the interview begins.
kc: Selected Organs is a slim book considering the eight years taken planning it. Why so short?
bp: Partly it has to do with the style. It's the least forgiving form I've ever worked in. Unless I get the rhythm absolutely right in the first sentence, the thing won't go on. It just stops dead in its tracks. So I have to abandon that particular take and try another one. So that's one problem. Secondly, once you begin to focus on a part of the body and take on, let's say, the nose – which I haven't written about yet, but is massing [laughs] – it's a matter of accumulating incident. These pieces don't follow a narrative structure, they're episodic and anecdotal, which is very much the form that oral storytelling takes. I'm thinking now of sessions sitting around with my grandmother with my brothers and sisters and maybe a great-aunt and uncle and then people start telling stories. There's an element of game to it where someone tells a funny tale and then someone tells another one, maybe that trips off a sad story, or maybe it trips off an observation with jokes, and you go on to another one. Though there are narratives within the individual episodes, there is no overall narrative. So I accumulate these little sections and let them reach critical mass.
kc: Why did you decide to take on that oral storytelling tradition of your grandmother?
bp: It began because I had certain stories and anecdotes that I've always told. Over and over again, I found myself in certain situations telling a tale from my childhood like the one where I hated my toes when I was a kid. This incident made me feel quite suicidal when I was about 15 which seems hardly the thing to inspire teenage suicide, but in my case, it definitely pushed me towards the edge [laughs]. A true out-of-body experience except it didn't go anywhere but into self-loathing [laughing]. In doing that, I decided one day to start writing these things down. I would just take a flyer at it. The form of the thing then started to announce itself. Which is often the way it happens. But this was also a different process. In my poetry, I always start from the ear. It'll start with a word, or a phrase, or a whole line. But I'd never taken something which had existed purely in an oral format and tried to translate that into a print medium. That was interesting for me.
kc: As I was reading the book, I was struck by how certain phrases concerning the body have entered into common use in the language, as slang, or in phrases like 'a slip of the tongue.'
bp: Yes. One of the things that interested me from the very beginning was how we use the body metaphorically. Susan Sontag's terrific book, Illness as Metaphor, talked about disease in our time like cancer being a metaphor for things. Probably, in time, AIDS will be as well. Right now, it's just terror. But it will soon have that metaphoric transformation just as TB did in the 19th Century. But you're right. It's also true, just in general, of the body. Look at the way we say things like 'I have to get this off my chest,' as if we were carrying a huge stone there. Something like 'he really touched me' doesn't mean physical touching, but we are using it metaphorically. The language is full of metaphor all the time in common expression. As I began to get into using an oral storytelling form, I saw how this metaphoric aspect of language became part of the text.
kc: How so?
bp: I was able to recover memories, or things I hadn't thought about in years, by approaching them through metaphor. When you're a kid, you tend to take those things quite literally. For instance, I wrote an episode about the hips where I fall in this ditch. I remembered the incident, but I never really thought about the position of my body, or what kept me afloat. The slush, for instance, had a quicksand consistency. In that same section of the book, I told stories about 'Boxcar Annie' who I saw as a child as this Queen of the Hobos. But I'd never focused before on what was so impressive about her besides her log-chopping capabilities. And the memory that I hadn't thought of in years was the one about going to the jazz clubs with Sandy and the whole business of 'being hip.' My mother also had expressions about the hips. I'd totally forgotten those. "Too bad you've got the workman hips," she used to say.
kc: You begin the book with The Vagina, which is probably no accident since we all begin there [both laugh].
bp: [laughing] Yeah, well, this just happened to be the first one I started to write down. When I finished that piece, which is about seven sections long, Daphne Marlatt, who was editing Periodics Magazine at the time, said to me, "Boy, I really like this piece. Can I publish it?" So right away, I had very direct feedback on it and that was highly encouraging. I think that made me realize that there was something that I was doing in this work that was interesting and beginning to approach the issue of autobiography.
kc: In what way?
bp: I had always been interested in how you write an autobiography. Most autobiographies tend to be about self-serving brushes with greatness, and I was fascinated more with finding a form in which one could indeed be autobiographical and at the same time not talk about brushes with greatness. I wanted to go back to the oral storytelling methods which deal with the business of being.
kc: In that sense, you could call your book Beyond Narcissism [both laugh]. You start with the body, which is your own, but you then move beyond that into something we can all identify with even if you were the only one to fall in that ditch as you did.
bp: That's right. I found when I did readings from the book, too, I would touch off memories in the audience. I have one portion in the section on the toes where I talk about toe jam. I remembered that whole mystery as to how dirt ever got into your feet. That was a quintessential mystery. You had your shoes and socks on. So how did dirt ever get in there because you were covered? People really identified with that or knew someone with a parallel experience.
kc: That makes for a different kind of autobiography. In a sense, it becomes everybody's autobiography.
bp: [laughs] Now there's a perfect Gertrude Stein title: Everybody's Autobiography. Now autobiography was an issue that Gertrude Stein also explored a lot. In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, she was always attacking the question of what is the shape and form of autobiography.
kc: I know it may be awhile yet before we see the complete Organ Music, but will there be further sections to come?
bp: Oh, yeah. There's one section I'd done called The Lily, which isn't included here, I wanted one held back to keep me going.
kc: I see. It's like those new CD box sets featuring unreleased tracks.
bp: That's right. This will be like the complete Eric Clapton [laughs]. It will probably take me another seven years to get them all done.
kc: I hope I'm still around here at the time it's released [laughs].
bp: Yes. I hope you are, too.
Coda: Unfortunately, time ran out on both of us. For bp, who had already been diagnosed with cancer, he would die from the disease a few months after our conversation. In fact, this turned out to be the last time I saw him alive. Since I knew how sick he was during our interview, maybe I suffered from 'a slip of the tongue' when I concluded our talk by expressing the hope that I'd still be there when the book would be finished. Within the year, I moved on from CJRT-FM to CBC Radio to work as one of the producers on Prime Time.
Josef Skvorecky (1988)
In 1984, Paul Mazursky made a profoundly funny (and poignant) film called Moscow on the Hudson which starred Robin Williams as a Russian musician touring with the Moscow circus who spontaneously defects in New York. The movie ostensibly dealt with the complex set of emotions set loose when he finds his freedom. Since the Cold War era was in its twilight years in the Eighties, many exiles were left reflecting on the mixed blessings that come when, because of political and ethical issues, they were forced to leave home. Czech author Josef Skvorecky was one of those defectors who had written about the legacy of Stalin (The Engineer of Human Souls) and the impact of jazz on Czech culture (The Bass Saxophone). In 1988, Skvorecky had just written a book called Talking Moscow Blues, a book of essays on jazz, literature and politics. Our talk came at a significant time when Gorbachev was ushering in the thaw of the Cold War during perestroika.
kc: One of the things that occurred to me as I read your latest book, Talking Moscow Blues, is that although you are an exile in Canada, you bring a world view that is different from other exiles.
js: Well, you know, Czechs are the most Western of Slavic tribes. In fact, we've always been very Western. It's just the language that's Slavic. Also, the Czechs have lived for centuries with the Germans so we are a very mixed race. About one-third of the Czech people have German names without necessarily speaking German. So I didn't experience the cultural shock that most people go through when they come to a strange place like Canada. I was also very well prepared because I studied English and American literature in university. I even wrote my thesis on Tom Paine (laughing). In any case, that is why my world view might be different from other immigrants.
kc: Why do you think immigrants who come from totalitarian countries sometimes feel that we in the West take freedom for granted rather than simply embracing their new freedom?
js: But people in the West do take freedom for granted. Canadians have experienced depression and wars, but they've never experienced a totalitarian dictatorship. And what you say about some exiles, you have to take into account different traditions. For instance, the Russians feel that there is too much freedom here. They look at it as chaos. In their case, you have to remember that Russia has never had democracy. But the Czechs and the Slovaks lived between the two great wars in a state of liberal democracy not unlike Canada today. I remember when the Nazis marched into my country because I was fifteen years old. And there are others born after the war who have it in their bones because their parents told them about it. So I think the Czechs are better prepared for a Western style democracy than the Russians are. Those who haven't tasted freedom are always suspicious of it.
kc: I can't help but think that maybe it was also your exposure to writers that gave you a true window on the world.
js: They certainly were a strong influence. But again the Czech tradition is that we publish more foreign editions than any other country. The Czech language almost became extinct by the end of the 18th Century because the whole kingdom of Bohemia became part of Austria. So educated people and patriots brought back the language mainly through the translations of other works. Edgar Allan Poe, a major influence for me, is probably the most translated Western writer in Czechoslovakia. Thankfully, my father had Poe's books in his bookcase. But they were locked up. One day, he forgot the key in the lock and I helped myself to those books. I read Poe at night under the blankets with a flashlight. Almost all the American classics – James Fenimore Cooper and Hawthorne – were available in my homeland. This was my exposure to the West.
kc: Speaking of Western culture, jazz is also a major influence in your life. It has also been a target of totalitarian regimes over the years. Why do you think that is?
js: Totalitarian regimes want control over everything. And when something like jazz, which celebrates spontaneity, comes along, it's immediately suspect. In a free culture, someone like Elvis Presley can have a few chords and from there music can develop and become sophisticated. But in totalitarian states, they only like the traditional kinds of music that they can control. There's also a political reason for this. These 20th Century types of popular music – jazz, rock & roll and country music – came from America. Nothing has come out of Russia, for instance, that would have become internationally popular. But America is a capitalist country, a democratic country, and the communists consider jazz to be "bourgeois." And it was this "bourgeois" music that was poisoning the minds of Soviet youth.
kc: One of the biggest misconceptions that I made when I was an active radical in my teenage years was that communist revolution represented rebellion against the established order. What I discovered, or course, was that it was actually a call to mass conformity. Aside from some very obvious differences, is there really much that's different though between the ultra-conservatism today of the Republican Party and the Soviet politburo?
js: You know, if you read the Soviet writings on jazz in the Twenties and Thirties and compare it to the ultra-conservative newsman in the United States, it's the same kind of attitude. The only difference is that the American newsman doesn't order someone to stop playing jazz like in Russia. Very recently, the Czech government tried to suppress rock & roll and their reports on punk music were no different than the conservative press comments on punk in England. You're right, once they get to power the communists are more conservative than those conservatives in the West.
kc: There's an essay in your book about a journalist from Winnipeg who attends a peace conference in Czechoslovakia where you ponder as to whether this Canadian is being politically naive by attending. Rather than be angry with her, your tone is one of sadness. Why is that?
js: The tone is one of sadness because I think a journalist who goes to a peace conference in a communist country should do their homework. There are many excellent books on the technique of treating important guests from the West. These Westerners are often fooled. And these often include some very famous people. George Bernard Shaw was fooled by the Soviets who showed him "model prisons." So he writes in an article that the difference between prisons in Britain and the Soviet ones is that once you've served your sentence in Britain you are happy to get out, but in Soviet prisons they decide to stay because they like it so much. What naivety! He wrote this at a time when they already had gulags. So that's what I'm sad about because journalists should be intelligent people. And if they know nothing about a country, they should do some homework and learn.
kc: Some people, though, would paint you as being reactionary and intolerant for criticizing her attending a peace conference.
js: Look. I try to be as open as I can about everything. And besides, what is a reactionary? I always quote this beautiful answer by the British author Evelyn Waugh who was a conservative person. In the Paris Review, when asked by an interviewer why he was a reactionary, he replied, "A writer must be a reactionary. Someone has to go against the tenor of the times." But we have to define what is a reactionary. I'm not against progress. I don't want to turn the clock back. But some of the more liberal-left journalists are simply too trusting. They have no historical memory. Many people know that Gorbachev is in power, but they forget everything that came before. They forget, for instance, that he came from a police background. They forget that he made his career in the KGB. I'm not saying that this determines his future, but I would be more cautious. And that has nothing to do with reactionary thinking. It's only that exiles like myself know totalitarianism and Canadians fortunately do not.
kc: Do you think that when we deliberately forget history that we make totalitarianism possible?
js: I think that's very true. Some people still believe that communism can work. How many millions of people have to be murdered before people realize that it doesn't work? It doesn't even work economically. If communism worked as a cultural phenomenon then I might be able to close my eyes to the economic side. But they have no culture and anything vital in Soviet society has been created in spite of the government. When I was in Czechoslovakia, three of my novels were banned and I had to write under a pseudonym. Nobody knew the books were mine because a friend had lent me his name. So what is so great about communism except the idea which is Utopian? I prefer democracy which doesn't promise such paradise. At least you can improve things by participating in the political process.
By 1988, screenwriter Robert Towne had become one of Hollywood's most gifted, intelligent and in-demand writers. He emerged out of the Sixties as a key "script consultant" on Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and in the Seventies on The Godfather (1972). Towne soon became an influential screenwriter himself as that decade went forward (The Last Detail, Chinatown, Shampoo) and turned to directing in the eighties (Personal Best, Tequila Sunrise). When we chatted in 1988, while he was promoting Tequila Sunrise, an entertaining romantic melodrama starring Mel Gibson, Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell, neither of us could guess that he would make only two more movies (Without Limits, Ask the Dust) in the next couple of decades.
kc: Let's go back to your beginnings as a budding screenwriter in the early Sixties. I didn't realize until recently that you were part of that Roger Corman low-budget finishing school that included Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese. How did you get involved?
rt: When I knew Roger, he was taking an acting course with Jeff Corey in the late Fifties. There was Roger, Jack Nicholson, James Coburn, Sally Kellerman, dancer Barry Chase and myself. It was a time when Jeff had been blacklisted and not acting and his teaching had a degree of intensity about it that was rare. And the people that gathered there worked hard and learned from one another. I was always intending to write and Roger knew it. He came up to me in class one day and said, "Kid, I hear you want to be a writer." And I said, "Yeah." He said, "Okay, how would you like to write this for me for fifty cents, or the equivalent thereof?" That's how I got started. He just gave me opportunities where none previously existed.
kc: But what was it that made this milieu so openly collaborative?
rt: It was a collaborative effort in the sense that our ambitions, being shared ones, were healthier. You work in a certain way and you have common goals. It's all about the quality of the work. You believe in a certain kind of work and a different level of reality in it. We thought that when we grew up, we would make movies more real and they'd be better. And through our aspirations, we developed a common language about movies. Then, as we started to work together, we really did change them.
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| Bonnie and Clyde |
kc: The first major film you were part of and listed as a "special consultant" was Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde. How did you get involved in that film?
rt: It was through Warren Beatty. I had written a script for Roger that Warren had read. He didn't want to do my film, but he liked it and he asked Arthur about letting me do re-writes on Bonnie and Clyde. So I did.
kc: What kinds of suggestions did you give?
rt: The initial script featured a menage a trois with Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway and Michael J. Pollard, but because of it and the amount of action, it was very difficult to bring those relationships to a conclusion. It tended to be a little static. This was less a function of censorship since things were expanding rapidly in terms of what was permissive. It was more a function of what was dramatically more dynamic. So we ended up returning to the relationship between Bonnie and Clyde. And once we determined that, the real dynamic structure in the movie revolved around not if Bonnie and Clyde were going to get killed, but when. We had to decide whether their relationship, in one way or another, would be resolved before that happens. Now as simple as that sounds, that was the basic change in the directing of the course of the story.
kc: Was there any one scene that you altered in order to bring that aspect of the story out?
rt: Yeah. There was a wonderful scene that Robert Benton and David Newman had written which is in the script intact. It's the scene where Bonnie and Clyde kidnap the characters played by Gene Wilder and Evans Evans. When Bonnie and Clyde take them on this joyride, they ask them during a moment of camaraderie what this guy did for a living. When Gene says that he's a mortician, Bonnie orders Clyde to get him out of the car. Now that scene had originally come after a reunion with Bonnie's mother. I made the suggestion that the scene should come before the reunion and make that inadvertent. Picking up the mortician had reminded her of her immanent death and provided a motive for her to go back to her mother and have the reunion. Unlike in the original script, where the mother was happy to see her and has fun, the scene now has this moment where Clyde tells her mother that they'll live just a few miles from her and the mother tells that she doesn't think so because they'll end up dead. It's just providing a little emphasis to the audience that the road they were travelling on was heading to one place. Aside from what other writing I did, that was the main thrust of my suggestions.
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| Al Pacino and Marlon Brando in the garden in The Godfather |
kc: You also contributed a similar shift of emphasis during a scene in The Godfather. Which scene was that?
rt: It was the scene between Vito and his son Michael in the garden. It was done to illustrate the passing of power from one generation to the other. I was called in to do it because it was a longer scene that required a good deal of talk between the two men. In the novel, there wasn't a scene between Michael and his father at that point in the story. Francis [Coppola] realized that he needed something in the movie where Vito tells his son that he loves him. But that wasn't very dramatic. So when it came to that part of the movie, I invented a scene where the father, in a rambling discourse, is trying to tell his son that he's sorry that he hasn't been able to free them from his gangster past and that Michael will have to continue as Vito had.
kc: Ironically, when you wrote the screenplay for Roman Polanski's Chinatown, you were suddenly the one who had a key scene altered by the director. At the end of the movie, the detective Jake Gittes is unable to save the abused heroine, or her daughter, from her land baron father. I gather you had a different idea in mind.
rt: What I wanted was something a little more complicated. I wanted the Faye Dunaway heroine to kill her father and go to jail for it because she wanted to protect her daughter from her father. But she didn't want to reveal that her daughter was part of the incestuous relationship the father and she had. Since Dunaway knew that the old man was completely corrupt and perverse, she knew the only way to protect her daughter was to kill their mutual father and have Gittes get her daughter to Mexico. In fact, in the back-story that's part of the sequel I plan to make called The Two Jakes, you discover that he did get her to Mexico. I mean, it was in a certain way as bleak as Roman's ending was, but I wanted a little leavening to the darkness of the story. I thought it needed a little innocence, or an attempt to preserve something and not as relentless as that ending actually was.
kc: At the time, I couldn't decide whether or not that ending was just a reflection of the darkness in Roman Polanski, or a reflection of that whole post-Watergate mood?
rt: I think that it was part of a feeling that all of us had. It's just that Roman took it to the clearest extremes that he could. And I was notorious for shading even black visions. I was always one for giving a shade of grey – if only to make it more credible.
kc: Part of that shading you describe is very evident in the way you created Gittes.
rt: That's very true. Gittes is a man who knows better but can't help acting as if there's the possibility that someone will do something decent. He's both a pragmatist and a smart-ass, yet he's also a romantic. He's always hoping for the best knowing that he should expect the worst.
rt: I think that it was part of a feeling that all of us had. It's just that Roman took it to the clearest extremes that he could. And I was notorious for shading even black visions. I was always one for giving a shade of grey – if only to make it more credible.
kc: Part of that shading you describe is very evident in the way you created Gittes.
rt: That's very true. Gittes is a man who knows better but can't help acting as if there's the possibility that someone will do something decent. He's both a pragmatist and a smart-ass, yet he's also a romantic. He's always hoping for the best knowing that he should expect the worst.
kc: In The Last Detail, you wrote another character with complex shadings who was also played by Jack Nicholson. Nicholson is a blowhard sailor who is taking some young turk to the brig. But what's interesting is that we come to see that he's more imprisoned than the guy he's taking to jail.
rt: That's right. He's locked into the conventions of his life. He is a blowhard and he swears like a sailor should. But what's underneath it is that he's a lifer in the navy. He is imprisoned by the regulations and simply lacks the belief in his own ability to affect a change. Therefore all he can do is swear about it. He can only express his feelings of impotence with strong language, but with no actions. He'll still take that kid to jail. The kid will still unjustly serve eight years for stealing twenty dollars. And there's nothing this navy lifer will do for him ultimately because he's trapped in a jail of his own. Freedoms are illusory. And by inference, those of us who do jobs that allow us to rationalize our behaviour by saying we're just doing our job, are also imprisoned. That's also part of the theme of The Last Detail.
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| Julie Christie and Warren Beatty in Shampoo |
kc: You wrote another picture for director Hal Ashby – who did The Last Detail – and that was Shampoo. One of the peculiar things about this movie is how misunderstood I think it is. I have friends who feel that the film was just Warren Beatty proving that he's a stud. I know others who feel that George's sexual escapades should have warranted punishment, in fact, they thought that the ending provided it. But I got the feeling that you weren't making those kinds of moral judgments.
rt: No. I wasn't. You want people to come to an understanding of these things for themselves. If you look at Shampoo, you'll see that George is not an exploiter. He's not even being exploited. George is just caught and lost in a time when there was a great deal of sexual and political hypocrisy. The corruption is pervasive and he's a good-natured and sweet kid. Some serious critic, I forget who, was struck after a passage of time about how sad the movie was. I think it is sad. It's like a European comedy of manners. When you think about it, nobody really gets what they want. In the end, the characters are left entering an era when everybody started settling for less. That's what makes it so sad and nobody is really blamed for it.
rt: True. It was a film that depended more on the action. I felt that the characters had to be depicted for the way they moved. I wanted to depict character through movement as Jody Anderson, the black athlete, moved like a female John Henry. Mariel Hemingway moved like a graceful but ungainly colt. Patrice Donnelly embodied the title "personal best" because she attained a certain perfection within the limitations of her own body. I mean, she was all she could be, which was not a world champion, but the maximum of her potential. Now because of the amount of time needed to depict character through movement – rather than dialogue – I felt that I had to direct it.
kc: Yet there is a casualness in the dialogue you did write which I enjoyed for both its humour and how it revealed the strength and weaknesses of the two women – How important is that casualness in your work?
rt: It's very important. You can take certain chances with dialogue. If you know you're not going to be harsh in the way the actor says it. For instance, Julie Christie has that famous scene in Shampoo where she tells someone at a dinner table that she wants to fellate Warren. Those lines could be crude, strictly speaking, but coming out of her mouth with her face registering pain and resentment over how she's being treated as Jack Warden's mistress, it means something entirely different. It's an act of defiance and rebellion from someone who is very hurt because she feels degraded. Paradoxically, the scene becomes funny rather than lewd. You're in sympathy with her.
kc: In Tequila Sunrise, which resembles a number of Forties melodramas, did you want to add more complexity to a genre that seldom accommodates it?
rt: I wanted to take a melodrama and show, while still keeping the characters' emotional lives clear and easy to follow, the practical complexities of what they're dealing with. Kurt Russell plays a good cop who thinks that drugs are a scourge that has to be obliterated. As a practical matter, there is a very real possibility that all he'll do by trying to affect a change in the situation, is to get his best friend, played by Mel Gibson, a former drug dealer who is innocent, put in jail and the woman he loves killed. All of this in the name of doing his job. He's also dealing with a villain who will be replaced by someone else. And that villain will probably have the support of the United States government. A good cop like Kurt Russell runs the risk of being privately corrupted. He lies about what he's doing to the people he cares about most. Sooner or later, he has to corrupt his own feelings. He perverts traditional human values and the strongest human feelings – friendship and love – in the name of a job that won't bring him any more progress than Gittes archived in Chinatown. He may think he knows what's going on, but in fact, he doesn't know what's going on. Whatever his set of assumptions, he's forced to make choices. And, in life, our actions always catch up with us at odd moments.
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| Mel Gibson, Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell in Tequila Sunrise |
kc: What constitutes loyalty and friendship is certainly a large part of what concerns you then?
rt: In Tequila Sunrise, the Gibson character is manipulated by the villain and the cop. Both claim his allegiance as fast friends. Kurt, as the cop, suggests to Mel that if he's really his friend, he'll turn in his other friend and get him busted. The villain, on the other hand, thinks that if he really was a friend he'd kill the girl so that he won't get busted. I mean, the kinds of things that are evoked in the name of friendship is one of the central themes in Tequila Sunrise. I wanted to look at the idea that your job is more important than your personal life. And once you accept that, you can use your personal life to do your job. You can either get a guy busted, or get a girl killed – or do whatever you want. Once you feel that what you do is more important than who you are, or what traditional values you uphold, you can manipulate and pervert any values that you want.
kc: That sounds like a ripe metaphor for the movie business and what has happened to the quality of movies this past decade.
rt: I come from a town that is making movies in a time when the thing they understand best, because they've done it so much, or the times demand it, is a Rambo, a Superman, a Chuck Norris and they feel that they need a low-key Superman like Crocodile Dundee who's never wrong. They need a high-key comedian like Eddie Murphy who – as bright and as brilliant as he is – has an unsettling underlying facet in his work. And that is, that the joke is on everybody else but Eddie Murphy. I mean, he is always right. He's a smart-ass who is the absolute reverse of Chaplin's tramp. We've gone a long way. Comedians used to play victims and now we need superheroes and super villains. I don't think it's a healthy view of life and it's ultimately not healthy for movies. If you want to get rid of a problem like drugs, you're going to have to accept the proposition that there won't be super villains doing the dealing. It's far more complex. There's goodness in the darndest places. Unless you're willing to deal with that kind of complexity, you're either not going to solve the problems, nor in my view, are you going to make movies that will hold your interest indefinitely. Sooner or later, you're going to get tired of seeing Superman.
Richard Ford (1989)
One of my favourite books of criticism is D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature (1924) in which he addresses the varied works of American writers James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. In this panoramic and illuminating study, Lawrence examines how a number of gifted authors came to terms with the experience of a young country still in the process of finding its identity. "The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything," Lawrence wrote in the opening chapter. "It can't pigeon-hole a real new experience. It can only dodge. The world is a great dodger, and the Americans the greatest. Because they dodge their very own selves." What he was describing was the elusive spirit of place invoked in the American literary experience. Some sixty years later, another American writer, Richard Ford, was also trying to invoke some idea of the American identity in the bleak landscape of Montana. It was there that he explored the sensation of being rootless and what that revealed of the American character in the Eighties. In one of my last radio interviews at CJRT-FM, Richard Ford and I discussed that spirit of place in a series of short stories he wrote titled Rock Springs.
kc: One of the ironic things about the stories in Rock Springs is that these places you write about are rooted while the people aren't – Why is that?
rf: I suppose that's because America has always seemed to me to be a place where people are constantly going somewhere else. It's been true of my life and some of the lives I've seen around me. This idea of place – either geographical or some place in your heart – seems to be the one thing that fixes you. That is one of the dramatic edges that my stories have. People are in search of some kind of place. If it turns out to be on the landscape, or if it turns out to be in your affections for other people, that's what causes these stories to be.
kc: Were you prone to moving around when you were a kid?
rf: I did in a circular kind of way. My father was a traveling salesman in the South who covered seven states and I always went with him. Then my grandparents ran a big hotel in Little Rock, Arkansas. So even when I was fixed in their hotel, everything and everybody around me was in motion. Basically, I lived through the Fifties and the early Sixties by going and coming, and coming and going.
kc: This is probably why the stories in Rock Springs read like a writer who picks up hitchhikers along the way.
rf: In literal truth, I have! There have been many times when I've picked up a hitchhiker and as soon as he got out of the car, I've pulled over into the turn-out and wrote down something that he said. It's always been the way I've saved stuff to write about. I collect and write things in notebooks. Most of the conversations we have as human beings don't come off as dissertations; they don't come off like little essays. We're trying to make sense out of things we only understand half of.
kc: That desire to make sense out of things is very clear in stories like "Sweethearts," where a woman tries to deal with her feelings about her ex-husband going to prison; or in "Children," where a father is on the run with his daughter in a stolen car. Are these characters far removed from your own life?
rf: No, I don't think they're far removed from my own life. In fact, growing up in that sprawling hotel, I was always seeing something that I shouldn't have seen. In the middle of the night, the phone would ring and my grandfather would get me up. We'd then go and discover a suicide. This actually happened when I was twelve years old. Sometimes I'd go into the basement of the hotel where my grandfather would be breaking up a secret union meeting because he was a union-buster. That was the stuff of my childhood. I'll always remember it.
kc: How important is the reconciliation of those observations that sometimes become secret and the more public parts of our lives?
rf: Everybody's life is caught up with reconciling the things that are secret with the things that are public. Most people would credit trying to live a good life – or being a good person – with trying to have their unannounced life add up to their announced life. This is the stuff of drama and part of America's Puritan tradition. Why am I interested in those things? I'm always, like most writers, looking for something dramatic to write about.
kc: Does giving yourself over to drama also sometimes mean that you identify with characters who aren't like yourself?
rf: I try to bring a generosity of spirit to my stories. I believe that someone, who we conventionally know as a criminal, might have a life more like ours than we'd believe. When I was a young man and started reading literature, I was reading Dostoevsky....
kc: (laughing) A good place to start for writing these stories in Rock Springs.
rf: It was a good place to start. There are all kinds of people in Dostoevsky that you wouldn't want to be. But their lives in some ways imbue your own with some greater affection.
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| Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
kc: It's interesting that the human conflict you write about in Rock Springs comes out of a country that in the Eighties likes to see itself as an idyllic place. It seems to me that the utopias of America always eventually become nightmares. Does this landscape influence the way people act out their dramas in your work?
rf: I can't write a story until I can say where it takes place. And I don't know if that's because of the actual landscape that exists, or whether it's the names of places that interest me. If Mississippi was called Canada for some reason, I would think very differently about it. If Montana were called Florida, those names would have a distinct relationship and call up associations. Also, as most writers do, I came to literature out of a love of language. So I want to start a story with the knowledge of what words make it up. There's no sky, or real dirt, in these stories. But the words make it so.
kc: Are the words sometimes enough to call up the landscape you're trying to evoke?
rf: There's a story in Rock Springs called "Fireworks" which I really wanted to set in Montana when I wrote it. I couldn't make any Montana words go into the story though. So I went up to my room and started looking on the map for places that had words which gave pertinence to what went on in that story. I ended up setting it in the Sacramento Valley in California just because the Sacramento Valley had the right words in it. Landscape for me is an illusion metaphor for words.
kc: Speaking of words, all of the stories in Rock Springs are told in the first person. Is this a deliberate attempt to make the stories your own?
rf: I don't know if that's true because none of these character essays claim to be me. People have asked me in a way that I've found oddly appealing whether I grew up in Montana – when I actually grew up in the South. I think these stories are told by personified characters because that seems to be the way we make our lives up. We make our lives up through saying it. We say something about ourselves and then we try to make that convincing to ourselves and others.
kc: With all the disruption caused by not being rooted in any one place, does your writing then take the form of an anchor looking for a place to dig in?
rf: Well, I don't know. I mean I really don't know. I can create a logic that says to me that a literal place on the landscape is very changeable in my life so I wasn't rooted in a place. When I grew older, I put up with not being set in one place. What then took its place, in an emotional way, was affection. That is to say, the fact that I've been married to the same girl for the last 23 years, and my relationship to people like my mother and my grandparents took the place of a geographical location. And what I think I write about is the way I think affectionate relationships hold life together when geographical roots fail to.
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