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
