William Wright
Author
of Harvard's Secret Court talks with Robert Birnbaum about
a "hidden tempest" that destroyed the lives of many Harvard
students
In 2002, The Harvard Crimson came across
a restricted archive labeled "Secret Court Files, 1920."
They had uncovered a tragic scandal in which Harvard University
secretly put a dozen students on trial for homosexuality and then
systematically and persistently and, according to author of Harvard’s
Secret Court William Wright, "savagely" tried to
ruin their lives.
William Wright graduated from Yale University in 1952. He worked
at the legendary Holiday magazine in its heyday and was
editor of Chicago magazine and has contributed to Vanity
Fair, Town and Country, and The New York Times.
His books include Pavarotti, My World, Sins
of the Father, Lillian Hellman: The Image, The
Woman, and The Von Bulow Affair and now Harvard’s
Secret Court: The Savage Purge of Campus Homosexuals. He lives
in Bucks County, Pennsylvania and Key West, about which he is writing
a book.
My Identity Theory colleague and fellow canine lover and
novelist Christian
Bauman (who was recently listed as one of the 50 least significant
people in American Literature) once mentioned his neighbor Bill
Wright to me, extolling him as an engaging raconteur. When Wright’s
book was published, he again reminded me of Wright. Thus, the fun
(at least I think so) conversation that follows, which begins, of
course, with the story Wright fleshed out in his book—one
that seemed to (no surprise) fly under the radar of mainstream culture.
Thanks, Christian.
Robert Birnbaum: If you tried to write this book
today, could you?
William Wright: Well, I didn’t finish it
that long ago.
RB: If I read correctly, access to the information, the files have
been changed.
WW: Oh, I see what you mean. The files, as I understand it from
my friend at the Harvard Archives, are still there. It’s just
the listing on the database [changed], so nobody has any idea what
they are.
RB: So they can’t be found. [laughs]
WW: I hope enough people read my book so they know that they are
there.
RB: How did you come to do this story?
WW: I’d love to tell you because I want to make sure, being
a journalist, I like to give credit where credit is due. The
Harvard Crimson broke the story. They were looking for something
else and found this reference to the secret court of 1920. One top
official said to me later, if they hadn’t put the word “secret”
on them, nobody would have ever noticed. Of course, that’s
a red flag. And so a student journalist named Emmett Paley went
after it and saw what it was and realized it was a big story--82
years had gone by and it had been buried all that time. And so he
and six other undergraduates worked on this and did a really bang-up
job of researching it. I found out that there is so much there that
although they got the bare bones of the story, there was so much
more. There really was plenty more for a book.
RB: Were the names redacted in the files at that time?
WW: Yeah, they [the Crimson staff] even did that. I didn’t
even have to go through the terrible thing of calling up people
and saying, “By the way, I am here to tell you your grandfather
was thrown out of Harvard for being a homosexual.” The Crimson
did all the dirty work. They did all that. There was a young woman
at St. Martin’s Press, on their editorial staff, who had worked
on one of the Harvard publications, not the Crimson but she had
read those articles, and she suggested it to St. Martin’s
as a book idea. And they came to me because there was an editor—he
and I have been waltzing on the dance floor for a while, trying
to find an idea for a book. And he came to me with this and so I
was very lucky that he didn’t like any of my ideas and I didn’t
like any of his.
RB: [laughs]
WW: Until this one—we both thought it was terrific. As I
say, it turned out to be even more terrific than it appeared on
the surface. I was lucky to get onto it.
RB: Before we get ahead of ourselves, give me the gist of this
story.
WW: It started when a student was suspended, expelled—he
was probably not going to be let back in, in 1920—
RB: —Cyril Wilcox.
WW: Yes. Of a middle-class family, in Fall River. He was sent back
from Harvard—nothing about being gay. But he committed suicide
two days after he got home. And some letters arrived from classmates
that made it clear that he was an active, enthusiastic member of
a gay group on campus. Well, as someone said to me recently, and
I understand this, a lot of families would have burned the letters
and that would have been the end of it. Cyril Wilcox had an older
brother named Lester who went ballistic. He stormed up to Boston
and found his brother’s lover, a man named Harry Dreyfus who
ran a small bar here on Beacon Hill. And went to see Dreyfus and
got as many names as he could from him, and beat Dreyfus up and
stormed up to the Dean’s office and didn’t beat the
Dean up, but he demanded that Harvard [take some action]—the
way Lester saw it was that his beloved brother had been seduced
into this group that Harvard harbored. So it was Harvard’s
fault that his brother was all screwed up and committed suicide.
There were a lot of steps in this story where a temperate response
could have ended it. Or at least kept it from becoming the major
scandal it became. The dean also got very excited.
RB: When you say major scandal, wasn’t it kept a secret?
WW: You’re right, that’s a misuse of the word scandal
because it wasn’t out in the open. But enough of a major deal
for Harvard to form this court.
RB: So a kind of subterranean scandal. People knew about it.
WW: Yes, it was a tempest—a hidden tempest. But it ruined
a lot of lives and precipitated three suicides. The dean, Greenough,
he went to the president of Harvard, in 1920 it was Lawrence Lowell.
Lowell also reacted very strongly to this. The subtext to this whole
story—Harvard had a reputation, even in those days, for having
a lot of gays. A lot of people light on their feet and all that
stuff. And to what extent these deans were aware of that or motivated
by that I have never been able to ascertain because they never would
say such a thing. But their reactions were excessive and there is
no arguing that. They expelled eight guys—one committed suicide
the day he was expelled and it didn’t slow this court that
was formed by Lowell in the slightest. They were writing letters
and calling boys in the next day for interrogation.
RB: My favorite of your references to Lowell was at first Amy Lowell
was referred to as his sister, and later in their lives he was referred
to as Amy Lowell’s brother.
WW: Right, first she was famous for being the sister of Harvard’s
president and now the only reason people know him is that—he
had a couple of other missteps. He set up the quota system at Harvard,
which he has never been forgiven for, and he was on the Sacco-Vanzetti
final review board, that the governor of Massachusetts set up. Basically
she’s [Amy Lowell] famous now and he’s not.
RB: Some irony that it was his lesbian sister. What’s Harvard's
reaction to this book?
WW: They have been very cooperative.
Yeah,
it was a tempest — a hidden tempest. But it ruined a
lot of lives and precipitated three suicides. |
RB: Now that it’s out?
WW: I don’t know, I guess I‘ll find out.
RB: Perhaps you know of Alston
Chase’s book on Theodore Kaczynski, Harvard and the
Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist.
WW: I’ve heard about it.
RB: Unfortunately, it was published at the beginning of the Iraq
war and was no doubt overshadowed, as was everything. Chase exposed
some concerns about the psychological testing that was going on
campus in the 50s. That and the curriculum, he argues, adversely
affected someone like Kaczynski. Apparently Harvard was not happy
with his work and denied him access to a key psychologist’s
papers.
WW: I had an interesting interview with Sidney Burba, who is head
of all the Harvard Libraries. Do you know how many there are?
RB: Nineteen?
WW: Twenty-nine. He said something that I thought really was commendable.
I had tried to be provocative. I asked, “Why when these files
were discovered, why didn’t you just deep six them, get rid
of them, burn them?”
RB: Something the Germans wouldn’t even do.
WW: Unlike the Americans, like Richard Nixon. Anyhow, he said that
they take very seriously their responsibility as the custodians
of Harvard, because they see Harvard as the history of American
culture. He didn’t quite say it that grandiosely, but it was
that idea. “We feel we don’t have the right to tamper
with history.” Very commendable, if true. But of course I
have my punch ending at the end of the book—they seem to have
changed that opinion a little bit. But not too much.
RB: Coincidentally, there is a new book called The Chosen Ones
dealing with the Ivy League quota system.
WW: And The New Yorker recently had an article about Harvard’s
admissions policy. And they said, and I really have to pick up on
that, that one of the things they learned to do in the 1930’s
and even in the late 20s was to detect signs of homosexuality.
RB: [laughs]
WW: One of the questions you had to, I had to ask in my book, was
how could Harvard throw students out for fraternizing with boys
that they had accepted? They mumbled something about how all they
got was their grades and we asked the head masters of their schools
if they were good guys—we don’t know about things like
that. But I can’t help feeling that his change of policy at
Harvard was a result of this 1920’s scandal.
RB: Do they still give physical exams to the incoming students?
WW: They did when I was at Yale in the 1950's. I don't know if
they still do it at Harvard. But at least in the 1930's they were
definitely on the lookout for limp wrists.
RB: Right, there's obviously a physical test. Were people named
Bruce not allowed to register?
WW: [laughs]
RB: People who sang show tunes?
WW: No Judy Garland records, absolutely.
RB: The really bizarre thing is that Harvard really continued to
send out bad references.
WW: Yeah, to me that's one of the two things that sets this story
apart. One is that it's Harvard and you expect something better.
And the other is the way they pursued these boys for as long as
thirty years afterwards. That shows a moral zeal that is really
hard to explain. They are so afraid that these homosexuals or people
who are friendly to homosexuals—some were expelled just for
that, as I alluded to—that they would go out into the world
and contaminate other areas. A lot of universities would have been
happy just to get rid of them, sweep it under the carpet and get
it off their backs. You'll love this —the irony of the FBI
coming to Harvard in 1953 to ask why Joe Lombard was asked to leave
Harvard in 1920—he was up for a federal judgeship. They told
him in chapter and verse that he was known to fraternize with these
known homosexuals. He was expelled but he was let back in. And the
FBI guy said, "This will go no further." In other words,
the FBI considered it irrelevant to a federal judgeship. Harvard
did not consider it irrelevant in 1953, 33 years later.
RB: Wasn't Lombard involved in the founding of the OSS?
WW: Wild Bill Donovan took the job but he said he wouldn't take
it unless Joe Lombard would come and help him with it.
RB: A guy with immaculate credentials—
WW: —and a high security clearance. I am convinced that Lombard
was a heterosexual. A number of these boys were. They were just
opportunists. I say that in the most affectionate way. They couldn't
get girls so they would let these guys down the hall—
RB: Spending a few days immersed in this story one has to think
about sexuality and identity and it strikes me that Americans are
badly adapted to dealing with the whole subject of sexuality.
WW: Right. That's why in my chapter on homophobia at the end of
the book I say that it is an area we are most confused about. Even
now, even today.
RB: You present that gem, that people who are most vociferously
homophobic test highly aroused in studies that present homosexual
images.
WW: A fascinating study. It's almost an old truism the most homophobic
people are the guys who are—it turns out from that study from
the University of Georgia, that that's true.
RB: I didn't understand—the eight accused guys were expelled
from Harvard. Why do they still get listed in the class rolls?
WW: I was struck by that too. I'm not sure. I guess whoever organizes
the class anniversary books—students. And they apparently
don't have this vindictive feeling that the administration of Harvard
had. But you are right, all these boys who were expelled, including
Ernest Roberts, who was the ringleader of these gays, he was the
most outrageous. And I think Ernest Weeks Roberts would have given
today's college presidents a few problems because his parties were
really over the top, with sailors in uniform and queens in drag.
RB: He was the one who continued on apparently leading a wonderful
life on three continents.
WW: No, that was Wolff. Roberts married his girlfriend in Brookline
and led a totally heterosexual life as far as anybody knows. He
wrote in his class book that he had such a happy marriage with his
son and that he was very bad about keeping up with old friends.
RB: Was his son a source for you?
WW: I tried desperately to find his son. He would be in his upper
seventies now—no, I was not able to find him. The Internet
is wonderful for tracking down people and I had some real victories
and the Crimson was helpful. Lester Wilcox's son, who is
77 and lives in North Conway.
RB: Interesting that you chose to open the book with this eerie
scene with an institutionalized patient
WW: I have a wonderful friend, Allison Lurie, the writer, and she
was very cross with me about that. She said, "Bill, you don't
say who it was. You're in an insane asylum and—”
 RB:
That's the point, yes? That's how that scene derives its fascination.
WW: I said, “Alison, writers do this to me
all the time. They lead me down the garden path. They set up a thing
and don’t tell me until later. Much later. You don’t
find out who it is.” There is an allusion to the fact that
he had been to Harvard. But the of course everybody in my book had
been to Harvard.
RB: The opening worked for me.
WW: Oh good. Yes, I liked the fact that one of the characters you
are about to read about spent the rest of his life in a nut house
and I think it is a nice black cloud to waft over—
RB: Not to mention that he seemed to have serious chemical dependencies
and none of that seemed to bother the Harvard authorities.
WW: Yes, he was a cocaine addict and it was interesting to me how
incredibly understanding Harvard was in 1920 about cocaine addiction.
RB: Was cocaine illegal then?
WW: No, but it was still not a good thing in the eyes of the universities.
You’re right, though, they looked on it more as a medical
problem than a character problem. With homosexuality, that was pure
character. That was immorality, a weakness of character. Which I
always thought was amusing in that it gave a hidden endorsement
to homosexuality in that they were implying everyone would do it
if they didn’t have a backbone of Christian morality going
for them.
RB: I like your Gore Vidal citation about how—
WW: If statistically, if the normal thing is to be heterosexual,
that is wrong because masturbation is practiced by more people than
any other form of sex. Only Gore Vidal could have come up with that.
RB: Is it too early to gauge the Harvard response?
WW: The Coop has a big window display of the book—maybe that’s
an in-your-face thing. But I don’t think Harvard cares. They
were very quick to admit that they had made mistakes over the centuries.
RB: It would be fun and perhaps funny to put together a list of
Harvard’s crimes against humanity.
WW: Hasn’t anybody? Well, I’m off to a good start.
RB: This and the Unabomber story.
WW: The whole ROTC thing, this bad news. I don’t see that
as my mission but maybe I‘ll change.
RB: Have you been accused of harboring anti-Harvard sentiments?
WW: No, they really haven’t. And as far as Harvard is concerned,
all the interviews I‘ve had in the past two years, the fact
that I went to Yale was of absolutely no interest to them at all.
That was like Podunk State Teacher College as far was they are concerned.
To Harvard, there is Harvard and everything else. I say that sort
of disdainfully but I am full of admiration for the overall history
of Harvard. Especially when I read the history in those early years.
They were lots of times that Harvard could have knuckled under to
the Commonwealth and they stood their ground, especially the religious
efforts to take over—well, it was briefly a religious school.
RB: These long-standing, well regarded institutions, generally
well regarded. The New York Times, The New Yorker,
Harvard comes up against really bitter criticisms and animus and
belligerence, but in any case you must acknowledge their intelligence
and excellence—the people who run them are really smart. It’s
not dummies who are making these kinds of errors.
WW: That’s right.
RB: The criticism seems always a leveling attempt. As when Tina
Brown went to the New Yorker, howls of protest. Did the
magazine become crap all of a sudden?
WW: Well, I thought it did.
RB: Crap?
WW: Not crap. I mean articles about Mike Ovitz’s in and outs.
Can you imagine what Wolcott Gibbs and the old New Yorker
crowd would have thought about that? It’s nice to have one
magazine that doesn’t care about Mike Ovitz and the ins and
outs of MGM.
RB: Sure, they have that forgettable stuff, but as some major publishing
houses publish whatever the current lowbrow authors are but they
also publish stuff that has no apparent commercial viability. Tina
Brown brings the pinnacle of celebrity journalism to The New
Yorker, but under her watch they also published a full issue
on Mark Danner’s work on the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador
in the 80s.
WW: Oh no, she did some good things.
RB: It was the cover and the whole issue was basically Danner’s
book, which was an expose of US culpability that I think Ray Bonner
was either fired or reassigned for at The New York Times.
WW: She did some good things but her real enthusiasms were great
for Vanity Fair—who’s in and who’s out.
She had a predilection for criminality too.
RB: She brought Anthony Lane to The New Yorker. He’s
wonderful.
WW: To me, you judge a magazine by their worst writers, not their
best.
RB: [laughs]
WW: There are a lot of magazine writers—I’m an old
magazine snob and got my start at Holiday
magazine
when we wouldn’t have anybody who wasn’t a really superb
prose stylist and so a lot of famous people like Rona Jaffe and
Garson Kanin wanted to write for us. But my boss wouldn’t
hear of it. He didn’t think they wrote well enough. And then
you’d have some Oxford don who nobody’s ever heard of
but a beautiful prose style doing a piece. Anyhow, I don’t
want to dump on Tina Brown but basically her vision is pretty crass.
She has some good taste in writers but a lot of times people don’t
know if it’s well written until they see the byline.
RB: [chuckles]
WW: And then she says I’ve heard of him and he is one of
the good ones.
Anyhow, he said
that they take very seriously their responsibility as the
custodians of Harvard, because they see Harvard as the history
of American culture. |
RB: I loved and love magazines—but to use
a pretentious word, Brown is the zeitgeist of current magazine
culture.
WW: Yes, she has changed everything. Except that I have heard that
no magazines she has edited have ever made money. That’s a
shocker when you think how thick [Vanity Fair was]. She
was a big spender. I know because she gave me assignment that never
ran and they paid handsomely for it.
RB: She was SI Newhouse’s darling, apparently
WW: For awhile, but I am sure he was responsible for her leaving.
RB: You think?
WW: I don’t know.
RB: I thought she was anxious to do the late and unlamented Talk
magazine with the Weinstein Brothers.
WW: It’s always hard to figure that out. We all thought Norman
Pearlstine left the Wall Street Journal voluntarily
until it was brought out that he was fired. They often try to fig-leaf
it up.
RB: So in the scheme of your work, this book was accidental.
WW: It is really is. As I say, he just handed it to me St. Martin’s
Press, the whole story.
RB: I know Douglas Shand-Tucci from his book on Isabella Stewart
Gardner. His next book was on homos at Harvard.
WW: Yes, I took him to lunch and we had a great old time. We were
over at the Harvest for about three hours. I don’t understand
his book [The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the
Shaping of American Culture] really. It’s building a
case that this professor was gay and he has just got you convinced
and he moves to the next one. So to me it was an elaborate game
of “gotcha.”
RB: He struck me as a kind of gay chauvinist, almost wanting to
argue that really everyone was gay.
WW: He knew about this whole episode. His book was published by
my same publishers. And he didn’t feel it was worth mentioning.
Or maybe didn’t fit in with his chauvinistic dream for gayness
and Harvard. One of the gay activists at Harvard who was cooperative
with me said she had one misgiving—he was afraid that it would
make Harvard look like place that beat up on gays. He said that
they had been terrific to the gay and lesbian groups. It’s
changed totally in recent years.
RB: Other than places like Wyoming and such, is there blatant homophobia
afoot in the land?
WW: This is a whole new area, but I spoke at Yale the other day
at their gay and lesbian group—the director of their organization
feels that Harvard is still very homophobic in hidden ways. He wants
a big gay and lesbian building there. It’s a gays thing.
RB: In the same way I joke—and maybe I am not joking about
everybody being anti-Semitic—I think everyone is homophobic.
I am not that concerned about anti-Semitism unless it’s shoved
in my face. So it’s possible to argue that everyone hates
everyone else.
WW: Oh yeah, I’m not crazy about redheads.
RB: [laughs]
WW: That’s—now I’ll get on my real soapbox—it’s
the glory of the human, we have these nasty little impulses. Like
murder [laughs]. I can’t walk down the street in Manhattan
without wanting to murder about three people. But then we have this
other network of impulses for fairness and decency.
RB: There are a number of places where you suggest that humans
are this roiling, volatile, barely contained pot of emotions and
impulses.
WW: We are not a particularly nice species but we do have this
one thing that edits our selves a little and controls us. And I
guess that’s what the deans at Harvard in my story were doing.
They felt that we all have these impulses but the good guys don’t
give in to them. And the weak immoral ones do. I think they are
wrong. There are plenty of men who have no homosexual impulses at
all.
RB: Your writing career has been mostly magazine journalism?
WW: My jobs have. I was editor of Chicago magazine in
about 1970 but I have been writing books since then. I’ve
done magazine pieces right along but mostly books. My agent said,
and I agree, that getting a magazine assignment 10 or 12 years ago
was as hard as getting a book contract, and of course, book contracts
are much more lucrative. And I like the focus on one thing for like
a year or two.
RB: Are there times that you want to write essays or think pieces?
WW: No, I really don’t. But when I write on a subject like
the Harvard Secret Court of 1920, I think there is a lot of Bill
Wright editorializing in each paragraph [laughs]. An editor once
told me, I wrote a book about the Von Bulow murder case. He said
you never use the first person but you are in every paragraph, and
I like to think that happens—I am happy to hear that. I think
if people pay 25 bucks for a book they are entitled to know what
the author feels—this mask of this impartial journalist that
is sort of the Wolf Blizter thing— I don’t go for at
all. I like a little passion and anger, indignation.
RB: This claim of impartiality and lack of bias is kind of a straw
man. You edit by choice and verbiage and –
WW: That’s right.
RB: The Fox Network’s flying monkeys like to go, “Some
say…”
WW: I fall back on that myself as a way of avoiding using the “I”
word. I’ll say, “There are many who might say that…”
and anybody would know that’s me saying what my objection
is. The whole thing about whether you have to come out from behind
the screen and say, “I think this and I think that…”
Or you do it the way I do, sort of cowardly.
RB: What’s with this fetish for “full disclosure”?
As if that clarifies and relieves one of responsibility. Anyway,
are you doing what you wanted to when you imagined your future as
a child?
WW: I went to Yale because I had seen that musical version [Night
and Day] of Cole Porter’s life.
RB: [laughs]
WW: And I thought writing musical comedies in Technicolor for four
years would be a pretty good way to go. But I don’t know why
I deviated from that. I think it was going to Holiday in the 60s.
There they venerated good writing. My boss used to say that you
can take a writer and make him a journalist but you can’t
take a journalist and make him a writer. We got all kinds of people—like
Truman Capote. The first nonfiction he ever wrote was for Holiday.
RB: I get this sense that there is a pall over the idea of the
kind of nonfiction that is called speculative nonfiction. I don’t
understand that.
WW: I thought that if you were a literary writer writing nonfiction,
you were still obliged to tell the truth. I thought you were implying
that they invented—
RB: Isn’t the bedrock of all this about telling good stories?
WW: Yeah——but we have two forms, fiction and nonfiction.
You can tell any story any way that you want in nonfiction and it
can be 99% true and you can make little changes. But I think when
you call it nonfiction as I do in my books, you are under an obligation
to get it as right as possible. God knows, we all make mistakes
but there is this unspoken obligation and that’s why when
I had my big battle with Alan Dershowitz [over the Von Bulow case]
—he implied I was in the hire of the other side because I
had the audacity to say Klaus was guilty. Or again, I didn’t
say, “Klaus was guilty.” But anybody reading my book
would know I agreed with the jury in the first trial. He went for
the jugular —to me that is a writer or journalist’s
jugular, if you say that they are not trying to get it right, they
are trying to sell you a bill of goods. I received the full horror
of the dark side of Alan Dershowitz. He was out to destroy me and
my book. He is not a nice man and he has no integrity and he is
a liar and all those things. But I find myself now on the same side
[laughs] of a lot of issues as Alan Dershowitz.
RB: I usually don’t read him but he I read a piece where
he accused Noam
Chomsky of being a Holocaust denier—which is not true.
WW: We did one show together in Providence when my Von Bulow book
came out and they put us on a love seat together. He has already
attacked me all over the mat and just before the little red light
went on, on the camera, he turned to me and he said, “You
know you have written about one of my favorite people, Pavarotti.”
And then the light goes on. He was trying to throw me off-guard
I’m sure. As soon as the little red light went on he went
for my jugular again.
RB: So what’s next for you?
WW: I live down in Key West in the winter and I have this thing—I’ve
suddenly decided I would love to write a book about Key West.
RB: No one has written about Key West?
WW: There are about fifty books out there but they are all guidebooks.
Or books on Ernest Hemingway.
RB: [laughs]
WW: I’ve now counted four books about Hemingway and Key West.
I’ve read three of them and they are good and fun to read
but it makes me realize as I have read some of the other histories
of Key West—there is an impulse in historians to gussy up
and to dignify the history of whatever they are writing and Key
West’s history is all scoundrels and mavericks and deadbeats.
RB: Funny, I have always enjoyed Provincetown and the last book
by Peter Masnso was just way off the mark.
 WW:
Provincetown is probably very similar to Key West.
RB: Right. It’s the end of the earth. It has the same kind
of constituencies: smugglers, fishermen, artists, gays, actors,
and real estate crooks.
WW: One difference is that Key West is more of a year-round town.
We have a fire department and a PTA.
RB: So does Provincetown—it just swells up ten-fold in the
summer. Michael Cunningham wrote a little book on P-Town.
WW: Key West is also very old. It was a very prosperous town in
the 18th century. When there was no way to get there except by boat.
Nantucket might be a good parallel.
RB: So are you going to do this book?
WW: I’ll have to find a publisher will pay me anything to
do it. There’s a lot there and we have had so many really
great characters there. Not just Tennessee Williams and Hemingway,
but many, many more—I don’t want to sell one of your
readers on the idea of doing the book.
RB: Barbara
Ehrenreich lives there?
WW: She still has a house there. With the great and deserved success
of Nickel and Dimed she has bought herself a house in Charlottesville
because her daughter is there and Barbara’s granddaughter.
It’s hard to think of Barbara having a granddaughter. Now
I heard that her daughter Rosie might be going up here, to Cambridge
to teach. She went to Harvard.
RB: Someone sent me a copy of a film called Tarpon that
has Tom
McGuane and Jim
Harrison and Richard Brautigan, fishing off of Key West—a
crew of odd and wild characters.
WW: There is a scene in Panama which is a very similar book to
92 in the Shade, where the hero—his girlfriend had
thrown him over and he goes and nails himself to her door. Now to
me that is McGuane at his—he had an affair with Elizabeth
Ashley, she called him Captain Berserk. And he lived up to it. I
don’t know if he ever nailed himself. A good friend of mine
says that the writer group that I am part of down in Key West now
has gotten very staid and I thought about it and I can’t think
of one of them who would ever nail themselves to a door.
RB: I think that group still fish down in the Florida Keys.
WW: Yeah, he shows up every once in a while. He’s a really
nice guy. What a wonderful writer.
RB: Have you read anything interesting or exciting recently?
WW: I’m reading Alison Lurie’s new book [Truth
and Consequences]. It’s fun to read. She has really such
a sharp take on things. And I read Sam Harris’s The End
of Faith—a fascinating book. I am quite atheistic and
this angry snarling book by a brilliant young philosopher, not only
about religion being bunk, but it’s going to destroy civilization.
RB: Not a new claim.
WW: He puts it forward better than anybody I have heard. Interesting
thing to me is that book is getting some [a lot of] advertising
support. I think someone like George Soros has come in and said
this guy is finally telling it like it is. Richard Dawkins, the
British geneticist, said that this book is telling all of us to
wake up. It's a very powerful book. The only part that disappointed
me, he goes into the second half—in the first half he pokes
at and debunks all religious belief and shows how dangerous they
are, how pernicious nowadays because of the weapons we have and
the way we can vent our religious angers and the dangers of masses,
millions of people feeling they have a special road to god. And
they know what god wants. We are certainly dealing with that in
this country too. But I just can’t believe a book on such
a controversial subject would be getting the play—ads over
and over again in The New York Times. The book has been
out awhile and just now it’s getting a big push. My fantasy
is that George Soros reads it, somebody with pots of money.
RB: Do you read both fiction and nonfiction?
WW: I tend to read mostly nonfiction. Except I have a good many
friends in Key West who write fiction—like Robert
Stone is one of my best friends. He is such a superb novelist
and just to keep up with my friends novels fills up my fiction hunger.
But given my druthers I would generally prefer nonfiction. That’s
what I do. I tried to write fiction and I am no good at it. I thought
about how wonderful it would be to write a book without having to
call people and intrude in their lives.
RB: Maybe you really like doing that?
WW: I think I do. I always saw nonfiction as a stepping stone to
writing fiction when I started out. But then I thought there was
something kind of wonderful about writing Gone With the Wind
and calling up Scarlet O Hara and saying, Let’s have lunch,
I don’t understand why you did what you did.
RB: The British refer to fiction as the senior service.
WW: [laughs] I didn’t know that. God knows that the novel
has an incredible history that nonfiction doesn’t really have.
The great novels certainly outnumber the great works of nonfiction,
if there are any.
RB: In Cold Blood?
WW: That’s superb. I ‘m pretty much an admirer of John
McPhee. I just read one of his early books, I just happen to have
read—The Pine Barrens—a terrific book. When
I was at Holiday we got all these great writers like John
Steinbeck and Lawrence Durrell to write nonfiction and Steinbeck
wrote Travels with Charley. Ted Patrick, the editor at
Holiday, my boss was a friend of Steinbeck’s out in Long Island
and he talked him into doing it. That’s a superb book on America.
De Tocqueville would be considered a great work of nonfiction. Matthew
Arnold wrote some wonderful travel books about America. There have
been a lot of [good books] recently. But none of them can hold a
candle to Jane Austen, and Thackery and all the great novelists,
all the great Russians. A friend of mine is teaching a course on
literary nonfiction at University of Pennsylvania and I have been
trying to coach him because I am much older and I have been through
it a lot more. And one of the things you have to zero in on is what
makes Susan Orleans or one of the really good ones—when does
it leave solid journalism and become literary? And is that a good
thing or a bad thing? As you suggest some people think it might
be a bad thing. When I wrote the Lillian Hellman biography, I did
a little essay at the end about “so what if she lied?”
She tells great stories. But there are answers to that.
RB: She was alive when you wrote it.
WW: I take full credit for courage. She was very litigious. Nobody
would mess with Lillian. I wrote her a very respectful letter saying
that because of my great admiration for her, which I had, Simon
and Schuster had asked me to write a biography of her. I made it
very clear in this letter that “Lady, I am writing this book
whether you like it or not. The contract is signed and I am off
and running.” She did answer and I end my book with it. She
is very enigmatic. She said, “As I do not wish a biography
written about me, I cannot see you.” Even the word choice
is strange. “So I see no point in seeing each other.”
But she typed her personal phone number at the top [laughs] She
wanted to negotiate a bit. She was a piece of work.’
RB: Well, I hope we talk again for your next book.
WW: I’d love to, I enjoyed it.
RB: I hope it’s the Key West book.
WW: That might be a sleeper. It’s full of
rich characters.
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Posted:
May 3, 2006
