Jane Smiley
Pulitzer
Prize winner, author of Good
Faith talks with Robert Birnbaum
Jane Smiley is the author of The Age of Grief,
The Greenlanders, Ordinary Love and Good Will, A Thousand Acres
(which was a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1992), Moo, Horse Heaven,
The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton and most
recently, Good Faith. She was born in Los Angeles and grew
up in St Louis, attended Vassar College and the University of Iowa
Writers’ Workshop. Jane Smiley taught at Iowa State University
from 1981 until 1996. She has written essays on politics, farming,
horse training, child rearing, impulse buying and a wide variety
of other subjects for magazines such as The New Yorker, The
Nation, Allure, Vogue, The New York Times Magazine and countless
others. Jane Smiley lives in California with her three children,
three dogs and sixteen horses.
Good Faith is the story of a group of small town real
estate people— builders, brokers, bankers and developers—who
are presented with the possibility of a big-time payoff. The protagonist,
Joe Stafford, is a middle-aged real estate broker on the mend from
a recent divorce. He is well liked, honorable and moderately successful.
He crosses paths with Marcus Burns, a former Internal Revenue official,
who has big dreams and big plans. It is the early '80s, one of the
periodic so-called golden ages in America, where acquisition and
consumption are more than economic indicators.
Robert Birnbaum: I noticed in Gail
Caldwell's review of Good Faith she said she was getting
irritated by the good mood that was manifested in this novel…
Jane Smiley: [laughs] I haven't seen that review,
so I don't know what kind of good mood I'm in.
RB: Well, her tongue was well placed in her cheek.
JS: It was definitely a good mood that I was in, last year, when
I wrote the book. Not necessarily that I am still in it.
RB: Of course. Although I think Caldwell was looking back two or
three books, to Horse Heaven.
JS: Well, yes I was in a good mood then.
RB: Okay, as long as we are dwelling on it [laughs], how does your
mood affect your writing?
JS: I actually consider myself…I have written in a lot of
forms but I consider myself a comic writer. And I didn't intend
for Good Faith to be taken as a comic novel, at least when
I was writing it. I was pretty sour. But the thing I found out when
I—even when I started rewriting the first hundred and fifty
pages or so was that it sort of went down easy. I found that about
All-True Adventures of Lidie Newton too. I wanted it to
be satiric and to have a streak of cruelty because that's what the
period had. But she had a kind of liveliness in her makeup that
gave the novel a streak of not so much of …it gave the novel
a….
RB: Buoyancy?
JS: Buoyancy. Because she was a buoyant person. It came out at
the same time as Russell Banks’ novel Cloudsplitter.
It was near in time to Cloudsplitter, and it was in the Charles
Frazier/Cold Mountain era. It came across to a lot of people
as maybe too light compared to their takes on the same period. I
hadn't meant it to be light at all. I had meant her to have some
vitality, which she would have needed to survive. So maybe I can't
be— maybe I'm like one of those clowns we used to have when
we were kids, the ones that popped up and you would smack them and
they would fall down and then pop up again. Maybe that's just the
way I am.
RB: Intending to write comically seems to be more difficult than
writing seriously, what I mean is…
JS: I do write seriously, but maybe intending to write soberly
is what you are getting at. But I do intend to write soberly. But
somehow after Moo I lost my really deep investment in sobriety
[both laugh] as a literary tone. And I became lively and satiric.
Some people would say that if you can't detach yourself from the
world we see around us then it would pretty much, pretty soon bury
you under.
RB: Would this admission of being a comic writer surprise anyone?
JS: Some would, some wouldn't.
RB: Okay. Well, I am playing a pigeon hole game here. You are mainly
called a social writer. References to Henry James and Charles Dickens
and even Tom Wolfe abound in talk about your work. Good Faith
may be identified as comical and satiric, but I don't see you called
that.
JS: No, I think I am essentially a realist writer. And with an
interest in social constructions, not necessarily social issues.
More the 'how does it work of the world' that we see around us.
I am interested in those things. The comic part comes in my desire,
for one thing, for the characters to connect with one another rather
than to feel isolated from one another. And also in my pleasure
in absurdity and in a good joke. I think a lot of things are hilariously
funny, and that's kind of the way I live my life. And I also believe
that it's only possible to live if you can detach yourself and detach
your sort of sense of what's going on a little bit and take a kind
of observational position on everything. "Is my marriage breaking
down?" "Well, let me watch that." "Is the country
falling apart?" "Well, let's observe it and see what we
can learn from it." "Over here at the race track have
we lost all our money?" "Well, yes but…"
RB: [laughs] Yes but?
Some
people would say that if you can't detach yourself from the
world we see around us, then it would pretty much, pretty
soon bury you under. |
JS: "Let's step back here and see what it
means." And so as you detach yourself, as soon as you are observing
from a state of detachment, then you are in the realm of irony.
Then you are moving toward the realm of the comic. Because irony
is about being detached. You can be detached and annoyed and you
can be detached and more lighthearted or you can be detached and
pensive. Being detached is the first step to being comic.
RB: You remind me of a
talk I had with Percival Everett, who mentioned something about
there not being any much gained from anger, that he couldn't engage
these things that angered him and that he was more inclined to step
back and poke at them.
JS: Well, yes that is a definite strategy. At the same time it's
no time to stop being angry. Maybe one should be angry as a citizen
and a little more detached as a writer? I think there is a lesson
in the work of Charles Dickens here. When Dickens was foaming at
the mouth enraged, he was beyond the power of his own eloquence
to express his rage at the Crimean War. He absolutely detested what
the War Office and the Foreign Office were doing in England during
the Crimean War. And the result of his upset was a series of essays
and also the novel Little Dorett. When we look at Little
Dorett we can see that his vision was very dark. And in some
sense, it has a very tangled plot, which he has to, at the end of
the novel, he has to write a few pages to tell you what actually
happened. To me that's a sign that his mind wasn't working with
the great efficiency that it always had before. He attempted to
pack too many themes into the novel. At the same time he didn't
totally lose his sense of humor. He didn't totally lose his ability
to view people and things from a distance. And to depict them. He
then went on to write different novels that were more successful
and were a bit lighter until finally he wrote Our Mutual Friend,
which is my favorite and in which the style is perfect, the characters
are fabulous and all the parts of the novel are beautifully integrated
with one another. So, we can say we have reached a stage of terminal
anger as citizens now, but then, years from now, we are going to
look back and say, "Did we revive and make another effort,
have another go at trying to make it better?"
RB: And that would be the value of literature, to encapsulate those
moments that others are fulminating about.
JS: Well, yes to me—people always talk about how Don
Quixote is the greatest seminal modern novel. But to me the
seminal piece of fiction for the modern era is not Don Quixote
but the Decameron by Boccacio. He wrote the Decameron
during the Black Death in Florence in 1348 to 1351. The very first
thing that the characters in the Decameron do is that they
look around themselves and say “we have to get out of here”
and they betake themselves to a beautiful, idyllic spot in the countryside,
away from the plague. And they begin to tell stories. And the Decameron
is really remembered by most people for the erotic content of the
stories. But to me that's not the interesting part about it. What's
interesting is the determination or the resolution of the people,
the characters to create a space inside the disaster where they
contemplate all kinds of things. Fun things, crazy things, tricky
things.
RB: Normally a role played by religion.
JS: Yes and many of the stories of the Decameron are about
how foolish the religious people around them have become and so
they substitute narrative for prayer. Though people think that the
Decameron runs over ten days actually it runs over fourteen
days because on Sundays and Friday they take a break to do religious
devotion. I think…
[Rosie, who is sitting at my feet, interjects]
Rosie: Rrrrrrrrrrrrr.
RB: [laughs]
JS: That's very…I'm glad we are not on the radio with this
chorus. I think it's very inspiring to know that you can write such
a lively book, a book with so much sensuous appreciation of beauty
and delight in what we generally look back on as one of the darkest
periods of human history.
RB: I'm trying to think of 20th-century books that attempted the
same thing. I am tempted to say Catch-22 but it took you
right there and it was quite dark.
JS: Well, there hasn't been a book that I know of that has said,
"I'm going to take us away." Though even as I say that
I think [pause]— something comes to mind, something is fluttering
in my mind —but the other wonderful thing about the Decameron
is that served as a source for early fiction writers. There are
stories from the Decameron in Don Quixote and
it was a quite fertile source for early novelists and fiction writers.
RB: Any new translations of the Decameron?
JS: The one that Penguin used by T.K. Williams is fairly new and
it's quite good.
RB: Dante seems as a classic reference point to overshadow everyone
from that period. It's almost like a religion.
JS: Not to me.
 RB:
This could be a new wave.
JS: Anybody can be revived. That's the wonderful thing about earth's
biggest bookstore, and we are not just talking about Amazon.com.
We are talking about the kind of rush by the publishers and academia
to pull everything out of the basement and put it on the shelf.
I think that's an unalloyed good. Because it makes every book revivable.
I was just in New York, and I was interviewed right after three
guys from the New York Review of Books who were pushing
their series of revivals, and so revival is good. Revival is something
that has to be done.
RB: I hate to throw a wet blanket on this; I am told that the NYRB
series isn't doing well.
JS: It doesn't matter. It matters if it is on a shelf. Because
then the person can be revived again.
RB: You are taking a longer view.
JS: Yeah, I am. I am taking a medievalist's view. That's what I
studied in graduate school. And when you are a medievalist you don't
study what's good you study what's left. And you try to find good
things in it. So you come to appreciate every fragment of every
bit that's left. And try to glean something from that fragment,
whatever it is.
RB: Let's get back to Good Faith. I am a little confused
about the fictional town of Portsmouth, which is supposed to be
90 miles from New York and also it is referred to as being located
in the Rust Belt, which I don't think of as being proximal to NY…
JS: Want me to tell you what that little town is?
RB: Yes, eventually. But having said that, something about the
way I read it this book made me feel like it was Midwestern.
JS: Oh, I don't know what can I say. I'm from the Midwest. I don't
know where you grew up, but the Midwest is not the Midwest. I grew
up in St. Louis, which looks like the Midwest.
RB: It's the South.
JS: Yeah and if you grew up in one of the middle-sized towns in
Illinois it's not the same as growing up in a middle-sized town
in Iowa or Kansas.The Midwest is really quite diverse, historically
and ethnically and religiously.
RB: And it's quite large.
JS: Yes.
RB: Being transplanted, I have spent years observing the ignorance
of coastal people about points west.
JS: [laughs] That's true and one of the things that the characters
in Moo talk about, one of the older women in the novel
says, "Yeah, they went out to one of those places that they
have slaughter houses. Where would that b e?"
RB: [both laugh]
JS: So anyway the town that Portsmouth is meant to be has a motto
“It's what blank blank, makes the world takes." So there
is a town like that not far from New York. An old, industrial town.
You are just thinking about the wrong side of the river. You have
to think of the Rust Belt on the East Side of the Hudson River rather
than on the West Side.
RB: I was fascinated by your setting a novel in 1982 which marks
another land rush towards brand orientation and conspicuous consumption
and you mention only one brand.
JS: Well, I had also mentioned Diet Coke but Diet Coke didn't come
in until the end of the year. Can you believe that? Didn't you think
that Diet Coke was with us forever? I thought about that, was I
going to do that. And I thought, "No, I didn't want it to be
a costume drama of a particular era." Where the reader was
constantly saying, "Oh I remember that. Oh, I remember that."
I don't even remember that. I got a book that said what the movies
were and what the popular music was and the fashion. I looked at
the pictures and stuff but somehow it just didn't fit in. That's
not what these people were thinking about. They weren't hip. That
was the point. They weren't hip.
RB: Joe the protagonist listens to ten-year pop songs and actually
does—what seems to be— ballroom dancing.
JS: It's kind of retro. But I thought it would be distracting to
have a lot of…
RB: It would be. So after reading Good Faith and also
Independence Day I feel like I might as well get my broker's
license.
When you are a medievalist,
you don't study what's good, you study what's left. And you
try to find good things in it. So you come to appreciate every
fragment of every bit that's left. And try to glean something
from that fragment, whatever it is. |
JS: Well, you and everyone else. That is one of
the commonest things that people do, is a get a real estate license.
In the hope that they will fall into some good luck.
RB: Real estate seems to be a huge preoccupation.
JS: Some places in the country that's one of the few things that
it is safe to talk about. Like in the Midwest you can talk about
sports and you can talk about your house and what the kids are doing
at school. That's about it. Otherwise, you might end up being intimate.
RB: There is the weather too. But you see this as a tendency to
avoid intimacy with safe topics?
JS: Yes there is the weather, always a fecund
topic of conversation. I think its true in the Midwest, not so much
elsewhere. Houses are the way you talk about—I was listening
to an old Garrison Keillor tape the other day. And what happens
is the guy who owns the SidetrackTap buys a boat, and he is so happy
and he loves his boat. And yet when they ask him about it down at
the bar, He says, "Aw, it's a pain in the neck. Have to do
this and I have to that." I was laughing so hard. I think that's
the way people talk about their houses. They love them and are proud
of them and they pay a lot of attention to them and fix them up.
And yet when they come up in conversation, it's really important
not to seem to be bragging about it.
RB: Or to engage in another American pastime, complaining.
JS: That's true, but we don't complain in California.
RB: Because of what, the air?
JS: I don't know. Peer pressure.
RB: [both laugh] What's the transition been like for you to move
from Iowa to California?
JS: I love California. It was like the lid opening up and the flowers
blossoming.
RB: Could I infer that you didn't love Iowa?
JS: I did like Iowa in many ways. I always thought and I said this
at the time—nobody can accuse me of saying this in retrospect—I
said living in central Iowa was very similar to living in Siberia.
There wasn't a tremendous amount of stimulation, but friendships
were warm and I got a lot of work done and from the point of view
of a parent, schools were good and the children were safe on the
bus and it had a lot of virtues. But it certainly wasn't California.
You didn't wake up every morning and look out the window and gasp.
RB: Which is what you do now?
JS: Yeah. My house has nice view and the sun is shining.
[Rosie again]
RB: Rosie, no. Sit down.
JS: How old is she?
RB: Six.
JS: She's really a good-looking dog. I haven't seen a Lab I thought
was good looking in ten years.
RB: She is a very good dog.
JS: I can see that.
RB: Can we also infer that your good mood will continue?
JS: [laughs] It's just going to get better. I wrote a piece for
the Washington Post and it was published on Sunday, September
10 (2001) and they asked me to write about autumn. And I wrote about
now having moved to California that I now felt that I could dispense
with all the pleasures of the seasons. I didn't care about summer.
When autumn came around I didn't care. I just liked to wake up every
morning with the same thing going as went on the day before. And,
of course, the next day everybody's life changed. But it's still
my dream.
RB: Is that true?
JS: Yeah.
RB: Not about your dream but about everybody's life having changed.
 JS:
On September 11th? Well, I don't think history changed. But I think
that the way most Americans experienced themselves and their lives
changed. At least for the time being. And even if the average person
was to kind of get back to other way he or she was before. The government
has changed. The government is still resonating with the fears of
that period and is responding to its ever-deepening fears by getting
more and more aggressive. So the government will force change upon
us, even if we don't want it. I think that it's a pity, but I also
think that the hijackers in some sense achieved their goal, because
they changed the way the government looks at itself and its duties
and responsibilities towards its people. And not for the better.
RB: Yeah. Though I question whether this particular regime would
have looked at its responsibilities to its constituency with any
sense of beneficence.
JS: It would not have looked differently with regard to domestic
policies, but it would have been less fearful and aggressive with
regard to foreign policy. Bush didn't even have a passport, so what
did he care?
RB: Would you write a political satire?
JS: No, because I don't know anything.
RB: What did you know about real estate and development? You went
to lawyers for advice (who didn't want to be named in your acknowledgements).
JS: I bought a bunch of houses [laughs] over the years. I knew
at least that much about real estate.
RB: It troubled me little that Joe is a decent and smart guy and
that Marcus Burns euchres him. Everybody seemed to see what was
coming except him. How does this happen?
JS: This happens because he was the last on the boat rather than
the first. Also his friends and his family and his partners, they
were sucked in first. And so what is he going to do? Then, it becomes
a social question, "What are you going to do?" Are you
going to say, "No I'm not going to do it"? That is Marcus
Burns' stroke of genius, to get himself accepted in the Baldwin
family.
RB: The patriarch of the family doesn't accept him. Although he
does view everyone with suspicion.
JS: Burns solved his tax problem, what was he going to do? I think
everybody in the family knew that the boom was coming down on that
tax problem. And so then once the guy has solved your tax problem,
it's not just that you are beholden to him. It's that he can go
back and unsolve it again.
RB: A happenstance that one son, Norton, the voice of doom continually
suggests.
JS: Because Norton has always been a malcontent and a crab and
a sourpuss, nobody wants to listen to him. That often happens. The
thing that fascinates me always about social groups is the lens
that each person brings to every discussion of what could happen
or what might happen. And the way that that allows the other people
that they know to discount what they are saying, even if the are
telling the truth. I think of in the Iliad, the figure of Cassandra.
Clearly her family were standing around saying she always says that
kind of thing, you know. She was always waking up with some kind
of dream; saying disaster is in the making. "C'mon, get it
off it! Don't be so crabby." I think that is a funny and interesting
thing about people that know each other, is that the better they
know you the less likely they are to pay attention to you and what
you are saying. [laughs]
RB: Have you ever written a sequel to a book?
JS: No.
RB: Ever intended to?
JS: I was going to write two sequels to the All-True
Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton, but my agent said,
"No the first one tanked, don't you dare."
RB: [laughs] And you listened. Maybe a prequel? I bring this up
because I found the most interesting character to be Betty, the
Baldwin mother, the most admirable. She has this Cheshire cat, sphinx-like
quality.
JS: I'll tell you a story about that. After Horse Heaven
came out, I was up in Saratoga at a fundraiser for the Thoroughbred
Retirement Foundation and they said we would like to auction off
the opportunity to be a name of a character in your next book. I
said, "Okay." So I was sitting around at the fundraiser
and they auctioned off that privilege or ten thousand dollars. And
to the wife as it turned out of the Culver Golf club fortune and
her name was Betty Bazzance. So afterwards, I said, "What do
you want your character to be like?" She said, "First
of all, my maiden name was Betty Baldwin and want it to be that.
And second of all, I want the character to be like a woman I used
to know and was really fond of who even at seventy or seventy five
would go surfing and was just game for anything." And so I
came home and I knew that she had to be of a certain generation
to be named Betty. And I already had the name for the main character
and so having that name Betty Baldwin and that little bit of a characterization
from Betty Bazzance, sort of got my mind percolating and that's
how the Baldwin’s got their name and that's how Betty got
her nature, from that Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation auction.
RB: That is a little odd, isn't it? But how do you start a story?
The government has
changed. The government is still resonating with the fears
of that period and is responding to its ever deepening fears
by getting more and more aggressive. So the government will
force change upon us, even if we don't want it. |
JS: Anything can be an inspiration. Sometimes
life is the inspiration. In this case it was, because someone had
told me the story of some real-estate dealings in the '80s and that
was the inspiration. In another case, literature can be the inspiration,
which is the case in A Thousand Acres--King Lear
was the inspiration. And sometimes language itself can be the inspiration,
and in this case, the name Betty Baldwin was an inspiration for
making things a certain way. For me I only write—I will not
say only write—I have a great pleasure in improvisation when
I write. And so I don't have to plan everything ahead of time. I
really like the idea of picking up this piece and picking up that
piece and holding these three or four pieces in my hands and then
seeing what is generated from that. Dickens was similar. He might
have an idea in his head about what a character might do, but he
combed directories and graveyards for name and a lot of what the
character was like would rise out of the names that he found. And
he also, he was a great improviser.
RB: He serialized. He didn't complete something and then break
it up…
JS: No, no, right. One time when he was writing David Copperfield,
he went into a store to buy some paper and the woman ahead of him
in line was asking for the next episode and he, alone in all of
the world knew that he hadn't even begun. He wasn't even worried
or intimidated by that. He told Forester it was kind of exciting.
RB: You strike me as a happy, contented writer.
JS: Is that impossible? [laughs]
RB: No, but there is something of an effort to attach suffering
and deprivation and misery to the task of writing….not for
you?
JS: When I was writing The Greenlanders. I began to see
my writing in a different way. I began to see it as not a possession
of mine. But as something that came to me and then went away from
me. And I began to see it as a lake or a river or an ocean of material
I dipped into that was always there. So as long as I could dip into
it I could keep going with it. And that gave me a great sense of
the richness of the material and the interesting nature of the material
around me, and it demoted my sense of my responsibility. All I had
to do was dip into what was out there. I didn't have to be constantly
be pulling it up, bucket by bucket from my own probably narrow and
shallow little basin. I think many writers feel some kind of, the
burden of origination or at least the burden of originality. But
I feel it's more that, you are standing there and literature makes
a swing through you. And you can't help coming up with something
original because you are you. And so I think originality is the
default. For the novel—I don't know about other stuff.
RB: That sounds right but it seems to require experience and confidence
JS: One of my experiences was teaching. I would get undergraduates
who were eighteen or nineteen years old and the first time they
handed me their fifteen papers and I read through them I knew their
names because those fifteen papers were all very distinct from one
another. They weren't good. They weren't even minimally competent
in many cases. But being who they were was not a problem with them.
The question is then if you are teaching writing isn't, "Are
they original?" it's "Can they put the parts together?
Do they have any sense of where they are going? Is their imagination
rich or is it thin? How do I propel them forward toward writing
something that is worth reading?”
RB: I find this an astounding conclusion. The forces that weigh
against originality are so great in this society that I think it
very hard for people to individuate themselves. Maybe when someone
decides to go into writing they have already unshackled themselves
somewhat.
JS: I never mixed up one student with another. Sometimes I could
tell that they had been reading a lot of a certain kind of science
fiction or thriller or whatever. But as soon as I invited them to
engage, to bring some of their own personal experience to the stuff
they had been reading [snaps her fingers] the work changed and they
got better. So what I tell students or workshop people now is, don't
worry about being original, worry about telling the truth with conviction.
If you tell the truth with conviction whatever you write will be
interesting, if it's interesting then someone will want to read
it. It may not even be true. You might turn around in ten years
and say, "Well that wasn't true" because I was mistaken.
But if you tell what you think is true with conviction that it is
true, then people want to read it. And they will follow your writing
until you actually know what you are doing. And they will keep reading
it. I have written a lot of novels over the years, and they have
been quite different from one another. My stepfather used to say
that you can please all of the people some of the time and some
of the people all of the time. My experience is, you can't please
some of the people some of the time. Every reviewer, every reader
will throw out Good Faith and say, "What a piece of
dreck," and read Horse Heaven and say, “This
is fabulous.” Or throw out the Greenlanders and say “How
could I possibly make my way through this horrible piece of writing?”
but love The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton.
Or even not like my work at all. So you can't ever think that you
are going to write this universally acclaimed, beloved, marvelously
understood novel. Because the novel is too particular for that.
And so what you can do is, you can try a little bit of this and
a little bit of that and have some fun. And recognize that even
though the Christian Science Monitor reviewer panned every
other book you ever wrote, he liked this one.
RB: [laughs]
 JS:
And so, Hallelujah. My other essential principle of fiction writing
or novel writing is that everyone who is engaged in art is free.
That is their most essential quality. And for a novel writer and
reader, you are free to do what ever you want. And the novelist
has to respect the reader's freedom to not like the novel, to not
finish the novel, to not buy the novel because it is the freedom
that is essential to art. There is a woman going around talking
about a book she wrote, called Reading Lolita in Tehran.
I heard her on the radio a couple of weeks ago. And she said this
very thing. That the young women that she was reading Lolita
with, in secret in Tehran—that was their only experience of
freedom, was how they felt about Humbert Humbert and how they felt
about Lolita and whether they could keep reading the book or not.
And it was a sufficient experience of freedom to maintain their
sense of integrity and to maintain their sense of hope. To me that
is the essential characteristic of art. So if I am a novelist and
I want to write whatever I want, then I have to accept the reader
and the reviewers' freedom to throw it out the window. And I think
that's great. I think that is the most great thing.
RB: Would you be saying the same thing if had an unsuccessful career
as a novelist? How would you know?
JS: I don't know [both laugh]. But I hope so.
RB: I hope so too, otherwise you would be of a type familiar on
the American landscape…
JS: Exactly. But if I have an unsuccessful career as a novelist,
I am still on the shelf. With some of those guys who are waiting
for revival and I can always have a successful posthumous career
as a novelist.
RB: Artists do make something and in one way or another leave a
trail. As opposed to the great majority of people that make nothing
except the sometimes tortuous effort of feeding and clothing and
sheltering themselves and their loved ones.
JS: That's right.
RB: So in that way you can say "Artists, writers, are really
lucky."
JS: That's what I say everyday.
RB: You live on a ranch?
JS: I live on acre of land with a house. The horses live at somebody
else's ranch. That is a couple of miles away. And those are the
people who are luckiest, the horseback riders. But the second luckiest
are the artists.
RB: Right. What about the horses?
JS: You know, we can't even get in to that. That's a long, long
conversation.
RB: In Good Faith there is a way in which you point out
that people see their lives as defined by their occupations.
JS: How many businessmen do you know?
RB: Enough to think that is true.
JS: Yeah that is the temptation of American life. I remember noticing
this quite a few years ago. That I knew people who had gone to law
school and then I woke up to the fact that fifteen years later they
were talking like lawyers and thinking like lawyers. That's the
fallout of working a forty-eight-hour week or a sixty-hour week
or whatever. It's not that you want to become your job. It's that
in some sense that's the result. But the great thing in America
is that when you are forty-eight or fifty or whatever, you can wake
up and look around and say, "I have another plan." I met
a guy and he was the head of Middle Eastern Studies at Berkeley.
He had literally written the textbook on the Middle East at Berkeley.
And the University of California came to him and said, “We
can't afford to keep you on because you have such a high salary.
But the pension plan can afford to keep you on, if you want to retire."
So at something like fifty-two he retired and took up the violin.
And he was really happy. When I met him he was in is early sixties,
he had been playing the violin like mad for ten years and he went
all around the world and joined little quartets and chambers groups.
And every so often he updated his Middle East textbook and he was
happy. And that's what people get to do in America. If they want
to.
RB: Yes, that's the source of admiration and fascination around
the world, our great Second Chance society. On the other hand these
days, many people are reengineered out of work and seem not to be
able to find gainful employment.
JS: He is not paid for playing the violin either. He's lucky in
his pension plan. I don't discount the resilience and originality
of any single individual. The question is not, "Are these individuals
themselves unable to recover from the blows that government and
the economy are dealing them?" The question is, "Does
the government and the economy have the right as well as the ability
to deal them these blows?" And who decides?
RB: I'm with you.
JS: I was reading about the prime minister of France administering
the bad news to all the future pensioners that it's not going to
work and he has demographics on his side, I am sorry to say. But
there is something gratuitous about what is going on with our government.
There is something gratuitous about the government handing a trillion
dollars to the million most wealthy people in the country and telling
everyone else essentially go figure something out.
RB: 'Gratuitous' seems to me to be a mild word here. What's next
for you?
JS: I am finishing up another book about horses, a non-fiction
book. A book about the nature of equinity interwoven with a few
of my experiences in the strange alternate universe of the race
track and then I am also working on a non-fiction book about the
nature and history of the novel. It's lots of fun.
RB: Do you write all the time?
JS: Um huh.
RB: Always to publish?
JS: Oh sure.
RB: I was thinking about the demands and pressure of publishing.
JS: I find the more that comes the easier it comes rather than
vice versa. I tried to slow down and the energy got attenuated and
fell off. If I give myself permission to be lazy pretty soon I am
lying around in bed reading books and not doing anything. So I have
to give myself a little kick and get out and do it then I find my
energy rising rather than getting tired.
RB: Well, good. Thank you.
JS: Oh, you are welcome.
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Posted:
June 18, 2003
