“to say a man has been drunk is to say a thing from which the reader instinctively recoils.” (Less reticent, Twain remarked of Howells’s chatterbox wife Elinor that when she entered a room “dialogue ceased and monologue inherited its assets and continued the business at the old stand.”)
I don’t want to pick on Howells, whom I read with respect, if not ardency. (Gore Vidal’s appreciation “William Dean Howells” is superb.) Howells lived for a time under the Buckeye Sun in Columbus, as did Phil Ochs, who wrote: “I’ve been all over the country/But I don’t believe I’ve had more fun/Than when I was a boy in Ohio.” (Howells preferred Boston, but to each his idyll.)
William Dean Howells was a friend of Twain’s and others he profiled; for the most part, I have been not friend but interlocutor of the almost famous, which carries a less burdensome set of obligations. I’ve been lucky to have conducted lengthy Q&A’s with several dozen writers and politicians and historians and even football coaches (Joe Paterno: I liked him, so no Sandusky jokes) over the last quarter century.
The only person I’ve ever interrogated while he was in his cups was my old boss Pat Moynihan, during a memorably bibulous lunch shortly before his death. Among my favorite interviewees was novelist and Civil War epicist Shelby Foote. I showed up at his stockbroker-Tudor home in Memphis about noon. Foote, long-haired, wearing ratty pajamas, answered the door and drawled, “Ah wuz jes’ fixin’ ta go ta thuh whiskey stoah.” He had more cool in one grey hair than every Southern expatriate writer in Manhattan combined.
My first interview was back in 1985, when Lynn Scarlett, an engaging New Leftist who wound up in G.W. Bush’s subcabinet, and I traveled to Berkeley to spend the day chatting with Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver for Reason. When Eldridge—a loquacious and fascinating guy—got up to take a whizz, we glanced at his files. The two I remember were devoted to “Sperm” and whether Jim Morrison was extant or extinct.
I also interviewed a one-time Panther sympathizer, Clarence Thomas, who impressed me as friendly and intellectually curious. I liked the Booker T. Washington-Marcus Garvey-Malcolm X self-help streak in Thomas, then EEOC chairman.
Ted Kennedy later used that interview in the Thomas hearings to paint the nominee as a radical libertarian. If only! (In fairness, Senator Kennedy was kind to me when as a callow legislative assistant I had to explain to him some long-forgotten—and surely profligate—amendment. The two most polarizing members of the 1980s Senate—Ted Kennedy and Jesse Helms—were so much more genial than abrasive “moderate” jerks such as Lowell Weicker, Joe Biden, and Arlen Specter.)
My single-day round trip record was to and fro San Angelo, Texas, where I had lunch with Elmer Kelton, whose The Time it Never Rained is among the finest Western novels. We went to a steakhouse, San Angelo being cattle country. I have very few eccentricities—ask my wife!—but I disdain forks. For an instant I considered whether to eat that steak with knife and spoon, but I took one for the tine.
I have many more interview memories, but nothing as scandalous as Samuel Clemens getting tipsy. I suppose I should hustle over to the vicarage. Maybe via the whiskey stoah.
Friendly Ghosts
The American Conservative, 2009
Ours is an October house, shrouded by spreading maples. Its creaky floorboards of pine and chestnut were hewn in the 1830s, as Upstate New York was ablaze with the religious and reform manias through which we earned the appellation of the “Burned-Over District.” Ancient spiderwebs lattice the basement. (I really should knock them down, but then where would the ancient spiders live?) The previous owner, a willowy eccentric, assured us that “pixies and fairies frolic in the garden,” but aside from a few house guests, I’ve yet to see that. Nor have I seen a ghost, even though for nigh unto a century our county’s leading spiritualists called this their earthly home.
When we moved in seventeen autumns ago, my wife and I read aloud Dracula. The only other auditor was our lab-mutt puppy, who, thus forewarned, never did become a biter. (When our infant daughter came home from the hospital two winters later, I walked her to sleep to Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. Okay, so it’s not Goodnight, Moon, but at least it ain’t Blood Meridian.)
My parents order the same breakfasts at the same diners on the same days every single week, and I suppose I have inherited this orderliness in my seasonal reading habits. Come October, I take the same old friends off the bookshelf. I could no more grow tired of them than I could be bored by the resplendent reds and oranges of an Upstate fall.
First up is always Stephen Vincent Benet’s The Devil and Daniel Webster, in which the Godlike Dan’l defends a New Hampshireman who has sold his soul to Scratch. (No, it wasn’t David Souter.) As my daughter and I read it this year, I thought about Webster, re-elected to Congress in 1814 on the “American Peace Ticket”—a name reeking of treason in our twenty-first-century America of perpetual war. William Dieterle made a superb film of Benet’s story, but why has no movie ever been made of Webster’s gargantuan life?
We read Poe, of course, and after the House of Usher collapses into the tarn, I eye the fissure in our foundation with a certain foreboding. Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” with its sumptuous description of a Dutch repast, confirms my taste for oly koeks (whatever they are) over Little Debbies. Next up is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s allegory “Young Goodman Brown,” in which a Salem Puritan finds—or does he?—that “There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil; for to thee is this world given.” The Cheney family motto, I’ll bet.
Why has no American novelist written about the strange yet fortifying friendship of Hawthorne and President Franklin Pierce? We’ve such a fantastically rich history, yet men drain away their days watching the living dead wrestle animated corpses on MSNBC and Fox.
I had approached Russell Kirk’s ghost stories with dread, fearing that on the scare-meter they’d register even lower than the supernatural tales (Turn of the Screw aside) of Henry James, in which, at most, a spinster’s petticoats are rustled by a draft. Yet Kirk’s ghostly tales, collected in Ancestral Shadows, cast a spell. I annually read “Saviourgate,” in which a harried man has a restorative whiskey and chat at a small hotel on the borderland between this world and the next; and “An Encounter by Mortstone Pond,” wherein a used-up man meets and emboldens his younger sorrowful self. There is, in Kirk’s diction and pace, a fustiness which in other writers might seem an affectation, but hey, who am I to complain about stylistic idiosyncrasies?
Here’s another book that ought to be: Ghost Stories by Reactionaries. To the finest of Kirk and James add tales (from Black Spirits and White) by the architect Ralph Adams Cram, who designed that most Octoberish of campuses, the Hudson River Gothic West Point. And throw in H.P. Lovecraft, upon whose headstone is incised one of my favorite epitaphs: “I AM PROVIDENCE.” Forget the Old Ones. The horrors of Cthulhu pale before this Lovecraft observation:
A man belongs where he has roots—where the landscape and milieu have some relation to his thoughts and feelings, by virtue of having formed them. A real civilization recognizes this fact—and the circumstance that America is beginning to forget it, does far more than does the mere matter of commonplace thought and bourgeois inhibitions to convince me that the general American fabric is becoming less and less a true civilization and more and more a vast, mechanical, and emotionally immature barbarism de luxe.
Now that is terrifying.
My Pen Pal Gore Vidal
The American Conservative, 2012
Now he belongs to the Ages. . . .
Well,
