Adam Gopnik
Author
of Paris to the Moon
talks with Robert Birnbaum
Posted: (Unknown Date), 2001
Copyright 2001 by Robert Birnbaum
All photos by Red Diaz / Duende Publishing
Print this interview.
New Yorker staff writer and author of the recently published
Paris
To The Moon, Adam Gopnik lived in Paris with his family
from 1995 to 2000 and wrote the magazine's "Paris Journals," prompting
the French newspaper Le Monde to regard him as a "witty and
Voltairean commentator on French life." His work has won awards
from the National Magazine Award for Essay and Criticism to the
George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting. While some of the essays
in Paris
To The Moon come from his New Yorker filings, there
is also much new material from Gopnik's very engaging and original
take on being an American in Paris and more. Adam Gopnik has returned
to New York, where he now resides with his wife, Martha Parker,
and their children, Luke and Ollivia.
Robert Birnbaum: What was the end-of-the-millennium in Paris
like?
Adam Gopnik: It was a very successful thing. It just was
beautiful and successful, and I think everyone admired it...with
what panache it was celebrated. So it was a big deal, but
it wasn't a heavyweight deal.
RB: It wasn't a spectacle?
AG: Yeah, it was a spectacle. We had this amazing fireworks
show at the Eiffel Tower. I was comparing it to the millennial celebration
in London, particularly. And that was very hyped, and then all of
the elements of it — the Ferris wheel they had built
didn't work — and the Millennium Dome, though a very
beautiful building, was a failure. So in the long-range competition
between Paris and London, we won the millennium.
RB: Is it the case that you don't much care for the British?
AG: No, no, not at all. We thought of moving to London,
in fact, after Paris. No, we love it. I guess I have inherited some
of the French prejudice against them. I am a patriotic Parisian.
If you are a patriotic Parisian, you root against London, as when
you are a patriotic Bostonian, you root against New York a little
bit.
RB: Towards the end of the book, your wife, Martha, makes
the distinction between a beautiful existence and a full life.
AG: In Paris we had, not just we had, but one has a genuinely
beautiful existence. That is to say, all of the little details of
life — or nearly all — are pleasing.
Some that aren't...one gets exasperated with the bureaucracy...So
every detail of one's daily life — from the place
you go to get breakfast to how you shop for Brussel Spouts, is pleasing
to the eye, pleasing to the soul, in some sense. But we didn't have
a full life in the sense that we weren't fully connected. It wasn't
home. It wasn't the place were we had — where on
a banal level — where the people we were closest
to lived. But on a deeper level it wasn't where our life took place.
In my years in Paris — if you are a writer in English — your
primary nationality is the English language, and Paris is not the
capitol of that country.
RB: You wrote that you breathe in your first language and
you swim in your second.
AG: I think we felt that. So all of that deep sense of connection,
of being plugged into things, was something that we missed in Paris,
finally. In that sense our life wasn't as full, though our existence
was much more beautiful than any that was available to us in New
York. Or any that we found in New York.
RB: If you tie this to a linguistic condition, then would
you have had a fuller life in London?
AG: No, I don't think so. I think it goes deeper than that.
One of the lessons that I think we learned — one
of the morals of the book, in a sense — is that home
is home. It's not that there is no place like it. Or rather the
way to say it is, "There is no place like it." Which is not to say
that there is no place better. There are lots of places better,
but there is no place like it. I was telling someone this morning
that a eureka moment for me was when I was taking a bath with our
son Luke and I started singing to him that Sam and Dave song, "Land
of a Thousand Dances." You know, "Na — na na
na — , na ..." and he said, "Daddy, what is that?"
I said, "Oh, it's 'Land of A Thousand Dances'" "What is 'Land of
A Thousand Dances?'" "It's a song." "Why its called, 'Land of a
Thousand Dances?'"...In that little five syllable chant was encoded
a hundred associations, facts about life. Everything about Stax
records to going on vacations. And that full life was not one that
one could have in Paris. He would have it in Paris, growing up in
Paris.
RB: Where is home for your [six year old] son?
AG: New York. Somewhat to my shock and even a little bit
to my sadness. He loves being in New York and doesn't seem to miss
Paris at all. Even though Paris was the only place he'd ever lived.
To a degree that I didn't quite acknowledge he had a sense of himself
as an outsider. He once said to us — at one point
he had some sort of altercation with a kid. I said I would go talk
to him. And he said, "Oh don't bother, Daddy, I know the way these
French kids think."
RB: You grew up in Philadelphia, lived in Montreal, but
you still talk about New York City as your home?
AG: Yeah, we moved there 20 years ago. So it feels like
home in that way.
RB: What has it been like since you have been back?
 AG:
Difficult. Not unhappy. It's wonderful being back. And I'm trying
to write about New York now. When you have young children, the children
are the world. So things stay very much the same. One of the reasons
we had a less full life was because of the children, because having
small children will do that. When I was in Paris, I missed New York
a lot. Now that I'm in New York, I miss Paris a lot. That's a function
of forever yearning for the other place. Also, to some degree — I
don't want to make too much of this — I got radicalized
in Paris even though we had a very beautiful existence and that
was the essence of it. Things that I had always taken for granted
in America, forgive me this is sounds like the same fairly weary
stuff — violence, incarceration, capital punishment,
free-for-all medical care — you may deplore them,
curse them, but they seem to you to be part of the normal realm
of existence in America. Well, they are not. They're the exception.
They are the very strange exception to the general role of prosperous
societies at the end of the twentieth century, the beginning of
the third millennium. So I was genuinely shocked, the debasement
of American discourse — for lack of a better word — is
startling to me.
RB: Even though you had been watching CNN while living in
Paris?
AG: CNN Europe is a different thing. It's like a headline
service. I'm talking about the local news and American television.
For the first time the United States has a proletariat, permanently
depressed underclass. Maybe I was just inexperienced or something.
I don't know what it is. I genuinely find it shocking to turn on
American television and see how sordid...
RB: Reality television?
AG: All those things, Temptation Island, XFL. I know
it's ever been thus... I remain very patriotic about the United
States, and being in France made me feel that way more strongly.
The other thing — I can say this as an observation
not as a polemic because I saw the other side — in
France, legitimacy lies on the Left. The things you have to say,
the taboos you have to avoid, the shibboleths you have to pay homage
to are all on the Left. Sometimes that can be quite wild. Because,
for instance, the French Communist Party is not fully de-Stalinized
and is still is treated with a good deal of respect. That can be
very exasperating at times. The French Left still doesn't want to
take responsibility for their long flirtation with Stalinism and
on and on. But it's shocking to come back here to America and see
that legitimacy lies exclusively on the Right. That is to say pretty
much all of the media is owned and controlled by large corporations,
and some corporations have extremely radical Right-wing agendas
which they are perfectly happy to push. Again, this is an extremely
banal observation, but it came as a shock to me.
RB: You did make much of the free health care in Paris when
your son came up with salmonella poisoning and nobody asked you
about insurance as a prerequisite for treating him. Even resident
aliens don't pay?
AG: Yeah, well we pay French taxes. The point is that nobody
asks that when you come in. The assumption is that everybody gets
free medical care on the point of delivery not that you check first
to see if you can pay for it.
RB: Amazing!
AG: It's true in Canada, in Great Britain.
RB: Your book is doing well, in its eighth printing. So
while you point out the debasement of American culture, a charming,
intelligent, funny book is doing well. Why is that?
AG: (laughs) I thought about that myself whenever I start
one of these screeds to my spouse. My wife says, "If it's such
an awful society, then go and explain why they made your book a
bestseller." I can give you the self-serving hypothesis or
the accurate hypothesis.
RB: Let's go for both.
AG: The self-serving hypothesis is that there is still a
real audience of people who listen to NPR and read The New Yorker
and so on, an audience who responds to a certain type of writing.
That's the self-serving hypothesis. The accurate hypothesis is I
think that — not through any conscious plan, but
just as a happy serendipitous thing — that the idea
of elsewhere, precisely for the reasons we are talking about because
American culture seems so troubled in so many ways to people, the
idea of elsewhere is particularly appealing. I have a good friend
who said, when the book got on the bestseller list, "It's A
Year in Provence meets Tuesdays with Morrie." It's an
exotic setting plus little life lessons. I was watching one of those
shout shows on television where everyone shouts at everybody else
about things. And they were all talking about what a brilliant job
George W. Bush had done, what a commanding presidential...and I'm
not even that highly politicized — I am perfectly
willing to believe that there is something to be said for a conservative
point of view — I can even imagine voting for John
Mc Cain. But you have a here a man who is so transparently...
RB: Brilliant would not be a word that I would associate
with President Bush.
AG: Yes, exactly, and so you feel, like Solzhenitsyn said,
"Live not by the lie." And you feel like there are so many organized
lies in American life that it's painful. But there are organized
lies in French life, too. It's just that I am newly sensitive to
the lies of American life. When I get in this black mood about coming
home I also remind myself of the other side of American life, that
we can pat ourselves on the back for, innovation, love of newness,
even the resurgence of American cooking. These things are real,
too. My friend Wilfred Sheed said, "This is a very big country.
Everything fits into it and it's always a mistake to get hysterical
about anything in America because it will just sort of fade off
into the prairie at some point and there will be another possibility
as well."
RB: What a happy thought.
AG: I remember the particular context in which he said it
to me. It was right after the Oklahoma bombing, and I wrote a somewhat
hysterical comment for The New Yorker about it. He was right
in a sense...obviously that was a horrific thing but that it's a
mistake to have a counter-hysteria about American life. It's a very
big country, lots goes on. That it hangs together at all as a country
is miraculous. It does change...well, my book. It sounds hypocritical
if I chide my own nativity which has bought my hardcover.
RB: Any sense of the Francophobia in this country?
AG: There is obviously both. There is a Francophiliac streak
or people wouldn't enjoy the book. And not so much Francophobic,
as Franco-ignorant.
RB: Well, there are those jokes about a country that offers
so many cheeses. And honors Jerry Lewis and Mickey Rourke.
AG: This is a bit of a myth. They honor Jerry Lewis because
they honor every American film star of that vintage. They honor
him considerably less than Robert Mitchum or Charles Laughton or
many other people. There is a strong Franco-phobic streak in Washington.
They see the French as being the people who are reflexively anti-American.
Which is not entirely false. There is an idealized notion of France
and Paris which is the alternative place. The urge to idealize France
is probably stronger than to deprecate it.
RB: You are not doing that. I was struck by your observation,
"The unsentimental efficiency of French civilization of which
the French cafe is the highest embodiment is so brisk that it disarms
Nostalgia. History keeps wiping the table off and asking you, a
little impatiently, what you'll have now."
AG: Did I write that? I honestly didn't remember that. I
was trying to say that one of the things that is wonderful in Paris
is that even a place like the Cafe de Flore does not become a tourist
trap because it remains part of the contemporaniety of French life.
That's one of the great joys in France is that the division we make
between the visitable past and the living present, you don't make
that much. You can have a usable past in France. That's something
we don't have to the same degree here. There's an enormous available
past in France. You don't have to make a choice between nostalgia
and...the feeling of just how shallowly rooted the American past
is is something you learn when you live abroad. I have a friend
who when I left for Paris wrote to me and said that he could never
understand the appeal of this. "..it's a narrow centuries old happiness...it's
confining and stifling."
RB: 'This' meaning the need to go to Paris?
 AG:
I understood that. I could see that. I hope one of the morals of
the book is to address that question. How do you love the past?
How do you love continuity without simply becoming a nostalgist?
For me, that was trying to do in that moment in the book at the
Millennium. When Luke and I were watching the Eiffel tower [fireworks].
As long as human consciousness is recreated, then the world is made
new all the time. The Eiffel tower is as old as Luke is, in that
sense as he just stands there and watches it now. One of the things
I'm struggling with in the book, exploring, not resolving in any
way, is how do you passionately love the past and still be of your
time?
RB: When you use the word 'shallow' about America's sense
of history, I think that may be generous. It would seem to be regularly
trivialized...
AG: I was stunned by that when Saving Private Ryan
opened in France. The Americans did all the fighting. Not only were
there no French people involved in the war, but no Canadians, no
Brits. One of the things about Omaha Beach is that it was a horrible
fuck up. It was the one fuck up on D-Day. The Canadians took their
beaches. In a relatively untroubled way the British took theirs.
The Americans just fucked up. Yet, we represent that fuck up as
the only event and as in itself heroic.
RB: You coined the law of inverse natural appeal?
AG: Yes, at the Cafe de Flore. It's always true. If you
have ever been at Elaine's in New York. Still is where celebrities
go, writers and so on. It's got the worst food, the ugliest decor
and the most unhospitable people. New York is filled with beautiful
restaurants with wonderful food, and charming servers, right? But
if you went there what would be the accomplishment, right? So you
go to a place with terrible food and horrible decor and then it
can only be your presence that's gracing that is lending it significance.
RB: You talk a lot about the French habit of abstraction.
You find this to be key to their culture...
AG: Absolutely, I think it is the biggest... I wrote a lecture
and I said that the three biggest differences between France and
America were: attitudes towards youth and age, attitudes as your
role as producer and consumer, and finally the weight you give empirical
evidence in everyday argument and conversation. And I do think that's
the biggest one. It's thrilling and exhilarating in lots of ways.
One of the good things about it is that everyone is always searching
for the real significance, the philosophical significance of an
event. It means you have a much more reflective turn of mind. It's
a society that values philosophers over lawyers. I like that about
it very much. It also means that people can live in absolute isolation
from reality. It's very hard to produce counter-evidence for an
argument in France. You just make up another argument. I give the
example in the book of fact-checking. No one I ever spoke to in
Paris could understand what the point was of having a fact checker
call to check the facts. The lovely thing about it is the tendency
to always look for a way around it all.
RB: Where does this characteristic come from?
AG: Education. People will say that it's the Cartesian tradition.
The difference between Descartes and Locke in the 17th century...the
difference between rationalism and empiricism. We rented Apollo
13 when we were in France. I thought of the time when Ed Harris
says, "Gentlemen, let's work the problem. Let's not make things
worse by guessing." It wouldn't happen in France.
RB: Tell me about the way the book was put together.
AG: Sixty percent was published in The New Yorker
and almost all those pieces are intact...tiny changes. They only
represent about half of what I wrote about France while I was in
France. I made a rule of writing two third-person pieces for every
first piece that I wrote. Very few of the third-person pieces were
right for this book. I was conscious as I began writing them that
some would be for the book and some would not.
RB: Why did you make that rule?
AG: This is sort of a preoccupation of mine. Readers — I
seem to have been proven entirely wrong by the success of this book — would
welcome you, allow you to write in the first person, to write your
own preoccupations if they were sure that you were doing it with
a reason. It wasn't something you reflexively did every time out.
There are some writers who are simply incapable of taking any tone
but their own. I thought if you could demonstrate that you were
perfectly well in control of a much more distanced and impersonal
view of things than when you begin a piece, "I've been trying to
get some exercise..." or however that piece begins about the gym
then the reader would know, "Oh, he must have something to tell
me..." You use the first person when there's a story. You begin
in mental state A and end in mental state B. A third-person piece
isn't like that. Somebody else begins in mental or physical state
A and ends mental or physical state B. That was my theory, that
readers wouldn't tolerate first-person pieces. I turned out to be
completely wrong about that. Also, of all forms of literature, I
like best the personal essay. I like the personal comic essay. Thurber,
Trillin, Montaigne. The line between invention and schtick is more
delicate in that form than any other. The line between when you
are actually speaking from the heart and making people laugh and
touching them and when you are doing schtick — essentially
doing stand-up of a literary kind. It falls over very quickly into
that so you have to have to be really careful.
RB: I find that Trillin does cross that line. But I thought
Killings was great...
AG: He's one of the writers that's influenced me the most.
I read US Journal when I was ten or so. I felt that because
he could do the straight reporting that you were always ready, when
he wanted to talk to you in the first person, to hear what he had
to say. He was kind of a model in that way. I'm trying to write
a new thing, New York Journal and I was determined to do
the whole thing for the next five years as a series of impersonal
vignettes of New York life. I'm going to break that rule [laughs]
next week. I think I have a funny story to tell, so I'm going to
go ahead and tell it. Rules for writing are unreal and arbitrary
in that way.
RB: That doesn't seem to be a rule for writing but more
a guideline or focusing principle...
AG: I did the Paris thing, with a certain tone. But I have
to give it up. New York demands something else. You can't over-rationalize
writing. It's like saying, "I'm a short man with a bald spot
and now I'm coming back and they've seen the short man with the
bald spot so now I'll become a tall thin elegant man with a full
heads of hair." That's not one of the options that is open
to you...
RB: I had a talk with essayist Ted Hoagland; he offered
the opinion that in the next few decades that the personal essay
would flourish, both for readers and writers.
AG: I think it's already been true to some degree. I've
been reading the Diaries of Kenneth Tynan. He said that he the thought
that the strong forms of our time, the forms that would be remembered
were all personal essay, memoir, diary. I can't think of two writers
more unlike than myself and Dave Eggers. But Eggers' book is not
really a novel. Part of its strength is you "believe" — with
however many quotation marks around it — you believe
that it is a true story. There is a play between truth and artifice
in it. That is what we respond to. It's a treacherous form because
the line between entertainment and egomania is particularly fine
and difficult. Essayists generally — and certainly
me particularly — tend to be more like performers
than novelists. Novelists are like architects or builders. They
are willing to sit in a room for five or six years and build something
and they at some level don't give a damn what the public thinks.
They want to make a cathedral for themselves to live in and then
they open the doors. If you come in to worship that's fine. And
if you don't that's fine, too. Essayists aren't like that. At least
this one isn't. You have to have a bit of the ham in you. You like
to do the thing and feel that the people are reacting.
RB: It's more social? More engaged.
AG: More performative.
RB: Which means you are conscious of an audience.
AG: That's right. Obviously essays have always had a deep
connection to journalism. Dr. Johnson was a miscellaneous journalist.
Hazlitt was. The essay is one of those forms...it has to be alloyed
by something else. When you want to write a literary essay, you
find a book to review.
RB: How long have you been at The New Yorker?
AG: 15 years.
RB: That's through three editorial regimes?
AG: Four, I was there at the end of Shawn's. I published
for Shawn's magazine from the outside.
RB: Why this ongoing publication of books about life at
The New Yorker, unlike any other literary entity? What's
so compelling about it?
AG: There is a good reason and a bad reason. I wrote an
introduction to a new edition of Thurber's book My Years With
Ross, one of the first books about The New Yorker back
in 1960. The bad reason is that it seems like either a very churchy
club or a very clubby church. That's the unattractive part. The
good reason, I like to think, is because the magazine for good or
ill has been a place that has been hospitable to a particular kind
of American writing, a particular kind of American voice. And I
try in that introduction to itemize, to catalogue some of things
I think in particular about that kind of American voice. There is
a particular American tradition that probably starts with Twain's
Life on The Mississippi, a particular American tone. It doesn't
belong to The New Yorker, it doesn't belong to any magazine
as a brand. It exists outside The New Yorker. Some of the
best New Yorker writers, some of the great masters of a particular,
casual and yet contemplative vernacular have not written for The
New Yorker. My hero, Randall Jarrell, for instance. I could
name many other writers. It's not a brand that The New Yorker
owns, but it is a voice that The New Yorker has helped keep
in existence. There is a good reason to be fascinated because it
represents a particular line or tradition in American writing, and
if it [The New Yorker] disappeared tomorrow, it would be
very hard to re-assemble all of it in one place.
RB: Why have and are the critiques of The New Yorker
so nasty?
AG: I been away for a while, so I haven't dealt with much
of that. The Tina Brown years were a real change in the magazine.
The DNA of a magazine generally, tends to be fairly strong; a magazine
is what it is not so much because of the people who run it but because
of the readers who read it. It has to be one thing or another. What's
remarkable about The New Yorker is not how different it is
but how much alike it is and the similarities come from the attentions
of the readers. I really do believe that.
RB: The magazine does seem revitalized.
AG: The last ten years have seen an enormous revitalization.
To return to my own petty little garden, I think that the fact that
people read these pieces and then wanted to have them in a book
is a good sign for the magazine. For a while the rule was that a
collection of New Yorker pieces wouldn't work anymore as
a book.
RB: Are your ambitions small ambitions? Do you have a big
book in mind? A novel?
AG: I'm madly ambitious, but I don't mind working on a small
canvas. At some point as a writer you learn it's not what you want
to do, it's what you are capable of doing, what you do well. I think
the four-to-five-thousand-word essay is the thing that I'm...
RB: What about when you dream?
AG: Dream of doing other things? I have finished a long
adventure story for children, or not for children. A long adventure
story set in Paris called The King in The Window. That will
be very different than this. I wish I could say that I was a humble
and modest writer. In fact, I am a very ambitious writer, but I
do believe ambition at this moment finds reasonable release in,
if not fragmentary if not constrained work which slowly over time
becomes a coral reef of sensibility. One of the writers that I admire
the most of my generation is Nicholson
Baker, among fiction writers. Baker works out of tiny observed
details, out of a very small canvas. But unambitious is the last
thing that he is.
RB: What in addition to writing do you do?
AG: I teach. I lecture. There was a bad moment in my life
just before we left for Paris when I was trying and failing miserably
to be a pundit of a kind. I wrote about the crisis of the press
and all those kinds of terrible thing. And I appeared on a couple
of those panels. That's one of the things that impelled me to go
to Paris. That's living death for a writer when you become a person
on panels. I like to give lectures and I love the hammy side of
it, too, but I never want be somebody who gives opinions on general
subjects.
RB: What are some of the books you read?
AG: I hesitate because I'd leave something out...though
who would care? (laughs). Trollope. Trollope's political novels
seem to me to be the most wonderful in the language. Updike is,
too, evidently, and embarrassingly a model for what I do. I never
find a dead line in his work. There is not a piece of it that is
not alive on the page. I read and reread Bill James, the baseball
analyst. A wonderful writer, one of one of the really wonderful
American forensic writers. I have a liking for the form I do. I
like Henry James' letters more than I like his novels. A terrible
admission to make but to be truthful I do. I think they are amazing.
And I like James' two volumes of autobiography. Those are my two
favorite American books. I like Virginia Woolf's essays which strike
me as the high point of literary writing of that kind. So it's not
simply an expression of my limitations abut also an expression of
my prejudices.
RB: Do you need to have a lot of information coming in to
you?
AG: Uh huh! I'm an addicted reader. My wife teases me because
I read in the shower, when I'm shaving. I read incessantly. I need
to be reading a lot. A lot of what I write — I hope
it's not too bookish — comes from other books. When
I was younger I was too allusive a writer. Not in a self-conscious
way, but it was the natural way things came to me. One of the things
I have been struggling to do is not to need that much allusion.
I'm trying all the time to be a much simpler writer. And that's
a hard thing to do. When I was writing the Thurber introduction,
I had this moment of revelation when I realized that Thurber writes
almost uniformly with one or two syllable words.
RB: There's lot's to say about this book... a final thought?
AG: I tried to give the book a certain structure — not
so much the structure of a story unfolding — but
of a set of emotions developing. The moral of the book is meant
to be fairly clear. Which is that you have to take civilizations
and people whole. You cannot make them be what you want them to
be. The struggle between civilization and culture, in France is
meant to be resolved at the end by saying, "You can't have
the civilization without the culture. You can't have the little
shops without the big buildings. That's the nature of existence.
You take things whole." The reason French life gives you so
many positive libidinal yes's is because there are so many damning
no's around it, too. Through all the vignettes that's the moral
of the story, the theme of the pudding. I worry that it's easy to
miss in this kaleidoscope of French moments. I meant it to have
another moral. This is the thing about the birth of my daughter.
As long as you still have new consciousnesses in the world then
old things never get old. As long as there are new people to see
them, they remain new. I wanted the book to have these two governing
notions or feelings at the end of it. It's not meant to be a travel
book to make you go to Paris. It's about the experience of a different
place. It's really about...
RB: You.
AG: Yeah. It's about me. It's also about difference. What
would it be like to live differently.
RB: You seemed to have handled the challenges of Paris so
gracefully. I would have been pulling my hair out.
AG: I was pulling my hair out, I must say that the urbane
and organized person on the page is a persona very different from
the...
RB: Something to aspire to...
AG: Yes, the reason to write. So that the annoyed, bad-tempered,
morose person at four in the morning is exorcised.
RB: Thank you.
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