“English,” and which for most means spelling and very practical exercises: how to write an essay with an introduction, conclusion, etc. The teachers don’t even know about literature, because they were only born thirty or forty years ago. They don’t even know what they are missing.
Adriana Babeţi: But what about those who study literature at college?
Michael Heim: That is a very small group, as I said. Of course, there will always be such a group. Parents read literature, children see their parents read literature, or they have a professor to convert them, to send them to the libraries—the many, immense public libraries in America—and make them read novels. The number of passionate readers remains tragically small. What can we do? As a professor, I for one know what I have to do. How can I make students fall in love with literature? Instead of talking about sophisticated theories, I get them going with a simple question, such as: why did you read this book, what can a classic work say to you? What does literature mean to you? How can it change your life?
Adriana Babeţi: Did a book change yours?
Michael Heim: I’d just as soon say no particular book changed my life, but books did. What would my life be like without books? Absolutely bland and uninteresting. I can’t say this is true for everyone. Just that many, many people in the United States live flavorless lives, and they don’t even know it. Maybe they sense something is missing, but they don’t know what. They watch television, work, stay home, see a movie, most often they simply lead empty lives. Many people believe they can fill their lives by shopping. This is truly a disease for us. For some, going to the mall is the highlight of their week. I don’t believe that literature is for everyone, but it can offer everyone a more meaningful existence. Still, people don’t know this, because we didn’t tell them when they were children. The French novelist Daniel Pennac wrote a fantastic book about reading and the way literature should be taught. It’s called Comme un roman. Pennac holds that every child, every person has an almost physical need for stories. The stories that children watch on TV are colorless, repetitive, and stereotypical. Unsatisfying. All it takes is the plot of one good novel, or reading a fragment aloud, to win an entire class of children over to literature.
Heim and his granddaughter Jenny, 1995.
Adriana Babeţi: Do you have any children?
Michael Heim: I have three stepchildren, my wife’s children. Twin girls and a boy. I even have grandchildren. Seven. I am a grandfather already. We are a large, mixed family, in every sense. For example, one of the twins is married to a Chinese man who grew up in Thailand. Except for the boy, I haven’t been able to attract any of them to literature. My wife has a principle that I share: we stand alongside our children, we don’t tell them what to do.
Cornel Ungureanu: We’ve been pleasantly surprised by your calmness and serenity. Is there anything that upsets you?
Michael Heim: I am worried by the enormous amounts of garbage we produce. Every day, when I walk to the university—not always a pleasant walk, but even so, I’ve done it for seven or eight years—I collect empty bottles and cans in large plastic bags. I take them home to some Mexican workers, and it’s probably enough material for them make a living by recycling. I collect 60 or 70 every day, so I have probably helped recycle millions of bottles and cans. But I don’t feel any more optimistic for doing it.
Adriana Babeţi: You wrote me once about books you’ve lost while doing this. Which ones? Tell us about the lost books, because what you said sounded almost supernatural. We couldn’t understand what garbage you were carrying, what bags of scrap metal you collected . . .
Michael Heim: It’s ridiculous. There’s so much waste in America . . . If you’ve never been there, you can’t imagine it. There are vending machines every hundred meters where you can buy juice or mineral water. They are restocked every three hours. No one packs a lunch. All the restaurants sell food in plastic containers, which are then thrown away. Mounds of cans are thrown into plastic garbage bags that, in turn, are thrown away. I read somewhere that if we didn’t use plastic bags, we would save six million barrels of oil per day. And you can’t do anything about it, because people refuse to think. In fact, you don’t need any of it. You can make a sandwich and take it to work in a box that will last you forty years.
Adriana Babeţi: When we were in kindergarten, we had little metal lunchboxes . . .
Michael Heim: Made of sheet metal, yes, that was the way to do it.
Daciana Branea: You’ve been reading too much Hrabal!
Michael Heim: You may be right.
Adriana Babeţi: Or Klíma, Love and Garbage. Have you read Love and Garbage? It’s a book about the author’s time as a garbage collector.
Michael Heim: You asked how I lose my books. On my way to school, I study foreign languages. I did this with Romanian. It’s not part of my research, so I study while I walk. But when I read while I’m picking up garbage, sometimes I put my book in the trash.
Adriana Babeţi: You wrote once that, perhaps at the same moment you were writing me, the lost book was being recycled.
Daciana Branea: How long ago did you lose your Romanian book?
Michael Heim: Not long. I got another copy, but I had to promise I wouldn’t take it out of the house. I didn’t, and so I never finished it.
Ioana Copil-Popovici: Michael, do you have any other obsessions besides recycling?
Michael Heim: Yes, I do. What I’m about to say might make you think I’m a little odd. I’ve noticed that, in the last twenty, thirty years—I’ve been teaching at UCLA almost three decades—people have become obsessed with photocopies. I remember when I was in college and I bought a book from the bookstore, I would feel, subconsciously, that owning the book was as good as reading it. Obviously that’s not true, but I kept the book on my shelf and I could open it whenever I wanted or needed to. Photocopying today creates the same sensation, but much worse: when you make a copy, you feel you know that book. In Germany I once saw a sticker over a Xerox machine that said: “Kopiert is nicht kapiert,” that is, “copying is not understanding.” For us, the problem has another, more pernicious side: in college, rather than have the students buy books, many professors use photocopied anthologies. Let’s say you are teaching a course on the Russian novel. You make a course pack that includes the ten novels you will cover. It seems like a good idea, because the students will have the material, and it’s cheaper than buying six or seven books. But in my opinion, it’s very dangerous. In the first place, the students will never buy those books. This means they will never have those books on their bookshelves. Even if they don’t read all that many stories by Chekhov or Pushkin in the class, when they have the books on their shelf, they can always come back to them, loan them to their friends . . .
Ioana Copil-Popovici: But books, at least for us at this moment, have become too expensive for students to use.
Michael Heim: That may be. When we talk about Central Europe, we have to put the question differently. We all know there were no Xerox machines under the totalitarian regimes. Because, in general, copy machines were considered subversive: you could make hundreds of copies
