Alden Mudge

Fiction

Kevin Baker

Interview by Alden Mudge

“‘Gyp the Blood’ was a real person who actually used to break men’s backs on a two-dollar bet!” says historian Kevin Baker about the most malevolent character in his novel, Dreamland. “He was eventually electrocuted for his role in the murder of ‘Beansie’ Rosenthal.”

So far as we know, however, “Gyp the Blood” was not whacked on the head with a shovel by “Kid Twist” just as he was about to break “Trick the Dwarf”‘s back in a dingy dive in lower Manhattan (thus setting the well-oiled wheels of our story in motion). Nor did he have a sister named Esther who worked at the infamous sweatshop, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Esther organized the women of the needle trades and fell in love with “Kid Twist” at Dreamland, the fantastical Coney Island amusement park that burned to the ground in 1911. No, the exhilarating loops and turns of plot that make Kevin Baker’s historical novel so entertaining are inventions of the author’s own imagination.

“One of the interesting dilemmas of historical fiction,” Baker says during a call to his home in New York, “is how much room a writer has to make things up. I think you can create composite characters and change chronologies just as long as you get the essence of the thing right. That’s pretty much the trick in any kind of fiction — to reach for that greater truth.”

One of the truths Baker reaches for in Dreamland is the emotional complexity of the immigrant experience in America. “We have this image now that everybody came here and suffered a little but worked hard and became great successes. In fact, this was a generations-long struggle. Even when immigrants were successful, it often meant separating themselves not only from their old culture and language, but from their families as well.”

Baker portrays the anger and anguish of this struggle perfectly in his depiction of Esther’s head-strong rebellion against her old-world father, a character readers will both pity and despise.

“Esther’s father,” Baker says, “is a luftmensch, which is a wonderful term that literally means ‘a man of the air.’ In part because Jews were banned from taking part in many professions and businesses in Russia and Eastern Europe, a large emphasis was placed on learning in that culture. Eventually this proved to be very important for success in America, but in the meantime you had all these people who were raised to be scholars of the Torah and the Talmud. They came over here and found that they had to go to work. It was tremendously difficult for them, both to find work and to actually work. So you’d have mothers and daughters going out to a job and these frustrated scholars and rabbis sitting at home. It produced a tremendous number of very independent, hard-working women, but it also led to ongoing conflict. America seemed unnatural to these pious old men, who were used to a village structure. It seemed to them that their children were getting away from them and getting into all these sinful ways.”

And, oh, what sinful ways! Baker fleshes out his tale of labor and love with wonderful characters from New York’s turn-of-the-century underworld — prostitutes and gamblers, opium addicts and heartless sweatshop owners, corrupt politicians and Coney Island con-artists. Some of these characters are imaginary, but just as many are real, rediscovered and brought back to life by Baker’s prodigious historical research.

Herman “Beansie” Rosenthal, for instance, was so notorious in his day and his murder was so scandalous that his story made its way into F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Who besides Baker knows Rosenthal’s story today?

Baker, who was chief historical researcher for Harold Evans’s recently published bestseller, The American Century, and has just been hired to write the History in the News column for American Heritage magazine, is a wonderful researcher. Somehow he finds exactly the right, unexpected detail to add life and authenticity to his narrative.

Dreamland hums with the lyrics of the era, and is filled with the smells and sounds of New York at the beginning of the century. Baker also has a good bit of fun with his details, sneaking “real, unnamed, historical personalities” into his story and naming one of his composite characters after his brother-in-law.

The most surprising real-life characters to appear in Dreamland are Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, passing through the story on their way to Worcester, Massachusetts, to deliver the famous Clark University lectures on psychology. “Most of their story is based quite closely on real life,” Baker says. “Freud actually did faint when he saw a column of German troops in Bremen. Jung’s dream is actually the dream that Jung had. The dialogue is almost verbatim.”

In Dreamland nearly everyone ends up at Coney Island. “Coney Island had all these extraordinary rides and exhibits — the Steeplechase ride, the All Dwarf City, tableaux of all the great disasters of the time. You could see an earthquake in Martinique or the Johnstown Flood. I was really inspired by Ric Burns’s great documentary on Coney Island. . . . I saw that Coney Island was a key part of the assimilation process, a sort of blank sheet on which these people projected their greatest hopes and worst fears about life in America. Coney Island was a sort of pageant of their lives.” And so is Kevin Baker’s Dreamland.


Alden Mudge is on the staff of the California Council for the Humanities.

"'Gyp the Blood' was a real person who actually used to break men's backs on a two-dollar bet!" says historian Kevin Baker about the most malevolent character in his novel, Dreamland. "He was eventually electrocuted for his role in the murder of 'Beansie' Rosenthal."

So…

Fiction

David Guterson

Interview by Alden Mudge

"It doesn't matter who you are, how many awards you've won, how popular you are, or how much critical acclaim you've had," says David Guterson. "When it comes time to sit down and write the next book, you're deathly afraid that you're not up to the task. That was certainly the case with me after Snow Falling on Cedars."

For Guterson the "amazing success" of that 1994 first novel also raised the specter of the dreaded second book syndrome. "I was aware that there is an expectation that writers inevitably falter at this stage, that they fail to live up to the promise of their first successful book, that the next book never pleases the way the prior one did. It simply increased my sense of being challenged."

But David Guterson's many fans have nothing to worry about. His second novel, East of the Mountains, not only lives up to the promise of Snow Falling on Cedars, but it suggests just how expansive David Guterson's maturing talent may be.

East of the Mountains describes the final hunting trip of Ben Givens, a 73-year-old retired surgeon recently diagnosed with inoperable colon cancer. Givens sets out from Seattle to revisit the rural, apple-growing region of Washington State, where he grew up and met his wife of nearly 50 years, Rachel, who has recently died. His plan is to kill himself and make it appear to be a hunting accident. Crossing the mountains into eastern Washington, Givens wrecks his car, and from there his real journey begins.

"I feel that I've written a story that is in the most long-standing tradition of human storytelling," Guterson says. "The journey story is pervasive across the planet and across time. I owe a debt to every story that's ever been told in that tradition. Don Quixote is one that comes to mind in comparison to mine, in that they both involve journeys undertaken by older men. That is unusual, because generally the hero of a journey story is very young."

As Ben Givens's hunting trip goes awry, as he encounters people on and off the roads and in the villages of the Columbia Basin, and as he erratically makes his way toward his boyhood home, he reflects on his past and on his decision to die. Through a series of flashbacks, Guterson presents us with a fuller portrait of the man. "I see Ben's life as dividing into three parts," Guterson says. "The first part takes us up until he is fighting in Italy in World War II. That is an innocent life in which he takes great pleasure in hunting with his brother and father, among other things . . . After the war, he is done with hunting, and he is done with guns. He puts them out of his life and becomes a surgeon and a healer. Then his wife dies 19 months before the book opens, and he returns to the recreation of his youth. In this third part of his life he reverts to an earlier self. So part of what this book is about is the tension between these two selves. Part of Ben's journey is to come to a realization of who he really is."

That journey takes Givens through a varying landscape that is beautifully described. "I was born in Washington State and have lived here for 42 plus years," says Guterson. "I have traveled the entire state and spent a lot of time out of doors. So I have known the landscape of the Columbia Basin for quite a while, and I have had this strong feeling about it for many years." He adds that the semi-arid steppe desert of central Washington, where Givens wanders and has a dramatic encounter with a pack of coyote-hunting wolfhounds, proved "advantageous because there is a long tradition of desert sojourns, and the desert is a place for meditation, solitude, wandering. It's just such a happy coincidence that I happen to have this desert here to work with, the same sort of landscape that Moses wandered through."

"I've only recently come to realize," he says, "that I start just as powerfully with a sense of place and, ultimately, with a love of place, which seeks expression, which wants to use me to express itself. I felt that way about western Washington when I wrote Snow Falling on Cedars, and I felt that way about eastern Washington when I wrote East of the Mountains. It's almost as if I'm compelled to sing these places. I can't seem to stop them from becoming central. Even though I may not intend it when I set out to write the book, these places just emerge as major players in what I'm doing, almost as if they are insisting on it."

Guterson lavishes attention on getting the details of his places and events correct. For a scene in which Givens's injured hunting dog is cared for, he visited a number of veterinarians. For the flashbacks of Givens's experiences during World War II, Guterson acknowledges a host of books and experts he consulted. It's a process Guterson says he enjoys, and he jokes that it takes him so long to write a book because he gets sidetracked by the enticing byways of his research. "It's amazing to find out what sort of things people do. Everybody has a world, and that world is completely hidden until we begin to inquire. As soon as we do, that entire world opens to us and yields itself. And you see how full and complex it is."

Guterson's ambition seems to be to portray the full complexity of these worlds, and his ability to do so grows with each new work. One of the big surprises of East of the Mountains is that it is so stylistically different from Snow Falling on Cedars. Yet in its fashion it is at least as lyrical as its predecessor.

"The style is leaner. There's less density to the prose than there was in the last novel," Guterson says. "There's more understatement, and there's something a bit more clear from sentence to sentence. That's something I did intentionally. I felt it was consistent with the particular themes and subject matter of this book."

He adds, "At one level you're condemned to the voice you have. But within those confines, you have a certain amount of freedom to range among your possible voices. There's also the matter of the maturation of your style, which happens concurrently with your maturation as a human being. Because you grow and change as a person, ultimately and inexorably your prose style grows and changes throughout your writing life."

With the publication of East of the Mountains, David Guterson proves that he continues to grow in exceptional ways.

 

 

Alden Mudge is a reviewer in Oakland, California.

 

"It doesn't matter who you are, how many awards you've won, how popular you are, or how much critical acclaim you've had," says David Guterson. "When it comes time to sit down and write the next book, you're deathly afraid that you're not up to…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Melinda Haynes

Interview by Alden Mudge

Two-thirds of the way through the writing of her luminous first novel, Mother of Pearl, Melinda Haynes started working on a second novel. The process that had taken her deep into Mother of Pearl had been so amazing and inexplicable that she was afraid it was just a one-time thing. She needed to test this new experience out.

"When I started the second book, I thought ‘Oh, man, I hope the same thing happens as it did with Mother of Pearl,’" Haynes says during a phone call to her home in Grand Bay, Alabama. "Then I thought, No, what I hope will happen is that I realize that I’m the force behind all this."

Well, Mother of Pearl is now in the bookstores. It’s a Book of the Month Club and Quality Paperback Club selection. It arrives with enthusiastic advance notices. And Melinda Haynes is pretty clearly the force behind it all. But at 44 years of age, the first-time novelist is still dumbfounded by what is happening to her.

Afflicted by panic disorder since childhood—before anyone even knew what panic disorder was—Haynes didn’t finish high school. "I would ride the bus to school at 7 in the morning and get off and walk back home. At the end of the 11th grade, I just couldn’t handle it anymore."

She dropped out of school and got married right away. "My dad is a preacher, a Baptist minister. He was the pastor of two small churches in Petal, Mississippi, and he was finishing up at New Orleans Theological Seminary while we were living in Hattiesburg. Well, I married another preacher’s kid. We were too young. It was the wrong thing to do, but I didn’t really admit it was a mistake until 20 years later. We were just dirt poor. I mean I was living the definition of poor Southern: three daughters in diapers, no education, and no job."

At some point during these years, a friend paid for her to study art, and she discovered that she had talent. "Basically, I just had a gift. My grandfather, Opie Braswell, painted baptistry scenes, and he taught me from the time I was real small about the values of light and color and how to really stand still and see things." The classes at a local gallery emboldened her. Haynes ended up supporting herself and her family by painting commission portraits. Her paintings and water colors won local and national awards. "By the time I crashed and burned, I was making $6,000 per portrait," she says. But "everything depended on pleasing someone else. I crashed is what happened, and I was in the hospital for a while. And Dad came in and told me ‘It’s time to take the pack off. You’re trying too hard to fix something that cannot be fixed.’ He was talking about my marriage, and I knew it."

Part of what Melinda Haynes calls her "crashing experience" led her to the Catholic Church, to a job as production manager for the Archdiocese of Mobile’s newspaper, The Catholic Week, and eventually to her current husband, Ray. "The news that I converted really hit my father hard. It was tragic. It was also a turning point in my life. I was practically middle-aged, and I was suddenly breaking away from everything I had done—painting, my husband, my father. I experienced independence for the first time. Even my children, who were grown, were completely shocked by it."

She also began writing fiction. A short story at first; then something longer. "I wrote the short story and I fell in love with one of the characters. I didn’t know if I could write. But the story was so big, I thought I would just try and meet it half way." Later, sounding perplexed, she adds, "This is such a puzzle. I’ve been thinking about this for days, trying to figure out where this came from. The story just fell into place. Is this a common experience with writers? I don’t have any way to measure it. There’s no measuring stick for Mother of Pearl. It’s like the story was waiting there in the weeds by the side of the road."

Set in Petal and Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in the mid-1950s, Mother of Pearl tells the intersecting stories of Even Grade, a 27-year-old black man who was orphaned at birth, and Valuable Korner, a 14-year-old white girl who is the daughter of the town whore and an unknown father. Raised by her grandmother, Valuable longs for a real family and turns increasingly to Jackson McLain, the neighbor boy she has grown up with, for emotional sustenance. Even Grade, who becomes the moral center of the book, falls in love with Joody Two Sun, the local prophetess/witch who lives in the woods by a creek, where she reads the future for visitors. When Valuable becomes pregnant with the baby she wants to name Pearl, she turns to Even and Joody for assistance. They draw a family of friends around themselves, and Mother of Pearl becomes a powerful novel about destiny, identity, family, forgiveness, and love.

"The location is completely real," Haynes says; "the visuality of it is real. The cemetery is real. I know the creek because of my dad baptizing down there. The way Joleb Green feels about life is similar to what I felt: he’s just your typical bungler, and that’s really the way I saw myself. The way he’s afraid of everything. I’m afraid of so many things, it’s just ridiculous. Everything I was afraid of, I put in the book. But other than that, it is not autobiographical. My mother wanted to know if anything had happened to me like what had happened to Valuable. And I said ‘No!’

"It’s a strange way of looking at it," Haynes continues. "Even though I created these characters, I feel like they created me. Any time I’m talking about the book, I feel they’re with me. It’s a new strength. I look for Even Grade in every person I meet. I owe so much to Even Grade, because he changed me. He taught me to take a deeper look."

Alden Mudge is a reviewer in Oakland, California.

 

Two-thirds of the way through the writing of her luminous first novel, Mother of Pearl, Melinda Haynes started working on a second novel. The process that had taken her deep into Mother of Pearl had been so amazing and inexplicable that she was afraid it…

Fiction

Francine Prose

Interview by Alden Mudge

During pre-publication readings from her sometimes lyrical, sometimes mournful, always enthralling 12th novel, Goldengrove, Francine Prose was amazed to hear her listeners laugh.

"People laughed!" Prose exclaims during a call to the Greenwich Village home she shares with her husband, the artist Howard Michels. Prose speaks in energetic, good-humored bursts of thought. "I was surprised. Because the book seems to me so grim. But then, apparently, it is not. So I'm delighted, really."

A wicked sense of humor has been a hallmark of most of Prose's novels. Blue Angel (2000), a National Book Award finalist, is a devilishly funny, politically incorrect send-up of academic life. And her widely praised novel A Changed Man (2005) is a gleefully pointed social satire in which a disenchanted American neo-Nazi seeks redemption by teaming up with a prominent Holocaust survivor.

But Goldengrove, which takes its title from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, is, as Prose says, "different from any of my other books." Its humor is rarer and warmer and arises from how well Prose inhabits the body and psyche of her immensely appealing narrator, Nico, who is 13 years old during the tragic events of the summer she describes. 

"Nico has a very lively mind," Prose says. "Getting her voice right was the hardest part of the novel. I wanted the language to be very elegant and very lyrical. But with a kind of raw emotion all the way through. That's a hard balancing act. It was also challenging to remember what it was like to be that age."

"I never had a daughter, but teenagers are teenagers, and I have spent a lot of my life around teenagers."

Prose, who is the mother of two adult sons and has recently become a grandmother, says, "I never had a daughter, but teenagers are teenagers, and I have spent a lot of my life around teenagers. My younger son has read the novel and he says 'God, you've ripped off everything about our family and put it in the book.' But no one except my kids and maybe my husband would think there's anything of our family life in this novel. This family is nothing like ours. Nothing. But being my kids, they assume the only way I could have found out there was such a thing as Grand Theft Auto was to have learned it from them, because I am so ignorant otherwise."

In fact, Prose is anything but ignorant of the particulars of family life or of the inner lives of teenage family members. Goldengrove is, among many things, a very wise novel about the family dynamics of grief and loss. Within the book's first 20 pages, Nico's older, artistic, athletic, much-idolized sister Margaret has leapt from the rowboat the two sisters share on a languid summer afternoon and swum toward their family's house on the shore. This Sunday tradition is fraught with the sibling tensions and affections that are resolved only when the sisters come together again on the family's dock. But this time Margaret does not make it to the shore. Instead, inexplicably, she drowns. The remainder of the novel is about the family's floundering, occasionally triumphant efforts to deal with the incomprehensible pain of Margaret's death.

Prose began writing Goldengrove two months after the death of her mother, to whom the novel is dedicated. "Its origins were completely related to my mother's death," Prose says. "I knew it was a narrative about grief. I wanted it to be about, partly about, how one recovers from grief. But since I had no idea how to do that when I began writing the novel, I thought maybe I'd find out by the time I finished. One of the things Nico says to her father is that she walks around thinking everyone else is walking around pretending to be normal but they are suffering. That was something that was much on my mind when I was writing the book: walking down the street and thinking, yikes, everyone may be in horrible pain."

"It's not accidental that people talk about sex and death in the same sentence so often. Life does assert itself in a certain ways, especially in highly pressured circumstances."

Goldengrove is also about a 13-year-old girl coming into sexual and intellectual self-awareness under trying circumstances. Throughout the course of the novel, Nico struggles to find her authentic self in countless ways, including her relationships with boys and men. "Nico is coming of age under the worst possible circumstances," Prose says. "It's not accidental that people talk about sex and death in the same sentence so often. Life does assert itself in a certain ways, especially in highly pressured circumstances."

Prose, a fastidious stylist who is also somehow astonishingly prolific, calculates that Goldengrove went through 130 drafts before completion. She spent months changing and rechanging the adjectives in the last transporting sentence of the book. "I write every minute I can, which unfortunately is not as many minutes as I would like. The paradox is the less well received your work is, the easier it is to write because you have more time. Plus, I'm knocking on wood, I actually have a life. If my son and daughter-in-law ask me to babysit for my granddaughter, I drop everything. I would much rather hang out with her than do anything else."

Prose says she chose the book's title "about five minutes before she sent it to the publisher. I knew that Goldengrove would be the name of Nico's father's bookstore because her parents are former hippies, romantic, idealistic and poetic in a certain way. Hopkins is such a nutty writer. I love him. I remember reading him in college and not having the faintest idea what he was about. Nico reads the poem ["Spring and Fall: To a Young Child"] and doesn't have the faintest idea what it's about. And she doesn't like it. It was fun writing about it from her point of view."

"One of my hopes for the book, " Prose says at the end of our conversation, "is that Nico's search for what will help her get through her grief and loss will help others who are experiencing something similar. It certainly helped me."

Alden Mudge writes from San Francisco.

 

During pre-publication readings from her sometimes lyrical, sometimes mournful, always enthralling 12th novel, Goldengrove, Francine Prose was amazed to hear her listeners laugh.

"People laughed!" Prose exclaims during a call to the Greenwich Village home she shares with her husband, the artist Howard Michels. Prose speaks in energetic, good-humored bursts of thought. "I was surprised. Because the book seems to me so grim. But then, apparently, it is not. So I'm delighted, really."

HistoryAmerican History

Winston S. Churchill

Interview by Alden Mudge

Name recognition just wasn't an issue when Winston S. Churchill began a 27-year career in Parliament in 1970. But being the grandson and namesake of the great World War II-era British leader hasn't opened every door. When the young Winston identified himself to two burly, disbelieving Chicago police officers amidst the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention, he got a swift nightstick on the noggin for his trouble. A New York cabby once told him,  "If you're Winston Churchill, then I'm Marilyn Monroe."  And then there are always the daunting comparisons.

"My grandfather's life is a constant reproach to me and to everybody,"  Churchill says during a call to Belgium, where he is on summer holiday.  "How little one is able to achieve by comparison! Not only did he produce some 50 volumes of history, biography, and speeches, but nearly 500 canvases as an artist, some of them of remarkable quality. And in his spare time he managed to beat the daylights out of Adolf Hitler as well."

Four of the volumes Sir Winston produced make up his massive A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, for which he received glowing reviews and the 1953 Nobel Prize for literature. Buried within these volumes is a fresh and vigorous account of the development of the United States, which Winston S. Churchill has seamlessly edited into the very enjoyable and very readable The Great Republic: A History of America.

"I had long known of my grandfather's writings about America and his love of America,"  Churchill explains,  "and it just struck me as amazing that the history of America which he had written had never been published in this format. To this day mainstream American readers are probably oblivious to the fact that Winston Churchill wrote a rather good history of their country."

Rather good indeed. Sir Winston writes with wit and verve and a capacious understanding of politics and governance. As his grandson says,  "It certainly isn't the work of an academic historian who has scribbled in his ivory tower. This is somebody who knows the world." The American world Sir Winston presents to the reader is just unfamiliar enough to be exceptionally interesting. Although the son of an American mother and proud of his American blood, Sir Winston escaped the hypnotic pull of our founding mythologies. So, for example, while acknowledging the contribution of George Washington and his heroic struggle to keep a revolutionary army in the field, he attributes British losses not to Washington's generalship but to larger strategic matters, such as Britain's inability to bring overwhelming force against the colonial armies because the French dominated the sea and bottled up the British navy in port. What we get is certainly a recognizable version of our history, just not the one we're likely to hear from other historians. That The Great Republic is so cleverly written is simply an added pleasure.

Sir Winston's writing is probably best when describing the battles of the Civil War. Such gruesome and heroic struggles clearly energized him. According to his grandson, he tramped many of the battlefields on foot during a 1929 visit to the United States. He impressed into service somebody who as a small boy had witnessed some of the heaviest fighting. He brings to his descriptions all of his knowledge as a soldier who had fought in many battles on four continents, as well as his power as a strategist, politician, and historian.

Churchill's history of the United States ends about 1900. His grandson fills the void by presenting a fine selection from Churchill's articles and speeches about 20th-century America. Some of these are the expected ones the famous Iron Curtain speech delivered in Fulton, Missouri, and his speeches before Joint Sessions of the U.S. Congress. But there are surprises here, too—a review of Upton Sinclair's book, The Jungle, in which Churchill displays an unexpectedly intense social conscience, and a very funny 1933 article on American food called  "Land of Corn and Lobsters."

The Great Republic concisely demonstrates what an exceptional writer Winston Churchill was, something that may surprise Americans who think of him primarily as a politician. According to his grandson, Sir Winston derived virtually all of his income from his pen, which is why by the end of the war six years when he had been unable to earn anything he was effectively bankrupt. When Churchill announced that he had to sell his beloved home, Chartwell, wealthy friends and well-wishers purchased the place for posterity. Churchill lived there until he died in 1965 at the age of 90.

Winston S. Churchill has vivid memories of his grandfather standing at his upright desk at Chartwell correcting page proofs. "It was a literary factory there. When he was at home he had a large team two or three researchers, mostly Oxford historians who would be preparing material, looking up facts and figures, and a relay of two or three secretaries that he kept busy until the early hours. He really drove himself."  Sir Winston had no speechwriters, and according to his grandson, put "approximately one hour of preparation into each minute of delivery. And that's why the speeches are so damn good!"

Like his grandfather and father, the mercurial Randolph Churchill, Winston S. Churchill has had a dual career as a politician and a journalist. In the 1960s he spent a number of years working as a war correspondent and notes that the only time he sustained any injuries was "in a place called Chicago in 1968." He and his father co-authored a book on the Six Day War which remains the standard work on that war. Since retiring from politics, he has written a well-regarded biography of his father and continues to contribute articles to the Wall Street Journal and various European newspapers and magazines.

Winston S. Churchill remembers his grandfather not as the awesome personage of history, but as wonderfully warm and approachable, intensely human, with a lively sense of humor. He adds,  "I learned quite a bit as a journalist from my grandfather and various things as a politician from him. But above all, I learned about independence of mind to stand up for what you believe, come what may."  

Alden Mudge is a reviewer in Oakland, California, and a regular contributor to BookPage.

Name recognition just wasn't an issue when Winston S. Churchill began a 27-year career in Parliament in 1970. But being the grandson and namesake of the great World War II-era British leader hasn't opened every door. When the young Winston identified himself to two burly,…

Thomas Cahill

Interview by Alden Mudge

"Orgies in a world ruled by fate are not as much fun as you might think they would be," Thomas Cahill says during a call to his residence in Rome, where he and his wife now live for about a third of the year.

Cahill is being deliberately provocative, of course. And playful. But he is also pointing toward the origin of the questions he’s been wrestling with for almost 30 years now.

"In 1970," he says, "I went to what turned out to be a prehistoric fertility festival called Puck Fair in the west of Ireland. It was pretty wild and raunchy and quite unlike anything I ever expected. Except that I found myself connecting it to classical literature, to what you might call pre-Biblical literature. The world I found at Puck Fair and also, I believe, in Greek and Roman literature was a sort of cyclical world, ruled by fate. There was a kind of doom over everything, a fatalism, an inevitability. The experience made me start asking questions about the whole of Western history. I began to think about where my own values, so different from the values of that ambiance, came from."

If all goes as planned, the results of Cahill’s quest will body forth in a seven-volume series called the Hinges of History, through which the author means "to retell the story of the Western world as the story of great gift-givers, those who entrusted to our keeping one or another of the singular treasures that make up the patrimony of the West." Cahill refuses to talk about upcoming volumes because, he says, he has worked very hard to ensure that each book can be read independently. He does not want a reader to feel that buying one book "suddenly puts one under an obligation to read seven. This is not a series of textbooks!"

Most definitely not. The first two books in the series, How the Irish Saved Civilization and The Gifts of the Jews, have been published to popular and critical success, hailed both for their bold historical synthesis and for their engaging and entertaining style. Brisk sales of the books have enabled Cahill to buy his apartment in Rome (he and his wife live the rest of the year in New York, where they both grew up), to retire from his post as director of religious publishing at Doubleday, and "to get on a book-every-two-years schedule, which means, if my nerve holds, I can get the whole series done within one lifetime."

Cahill’s third offering, published this month, is, if anything, bolder and more engaging than his previous books.

At its most basic, Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus is a book about the New Testament, "an historical work that inevitably touches on theology," he says. But Cahill’s larger ambition is nothing less than to attempt to answer the questions that are the on the minds of most people—what was Jesus like, what would it have been like to have been in the crowd that listened to Jesus, what would it have been like to have been one of the apostles, and how can we find the answers to these questions in these materials?"

It helps if you read the New Testament in the original Greek, as Cahill did while working on Desire of the Everlasting Hills. And it helps if you familiarize yourself with the major biblical scholarship on any given point, figure, or period you are concerned with, as he has done. "But all that scholarship taken together doesn’t add up to the story as I want to tell it," Cahill cautions. "You need to project yourself—or retroject yourself—back into the whole cultural ambiance of first century Palestine . . . You need to scrape off two millennia of bad sermons and wretched Sunday schools and, in many cases, the hypocrisy that goes with it, as if they were barnacles on a ship."

The impact of such an approach can be profound. For example, it is terrifying to see the crucifixion in the context of the times. Stripped of its rosy iconic glow, it is a horribly brutal act, so traumatizing to Jesus’ followers, Cahill writes, that for almost 400 years, they could not "depict the stark reality of his suffering except in the accounts of four gospels, which are as clipped and precise as the four authors knew how to make them."

And it’s somehow liberating to grapple with the implications of Cahill’s assertion that "Paul wrote all these letters for specific occasions that are long gone," which in Cahill’s book means that Paul has been seriously, if piously, misread for nearly 2000 years. It’s just plain startling to fully comprehend that "to appreciate the atmosphere of first-century Judea we must understand that the ‘religion’ that Jesus preached was, in its time, one of many alternative Judaisms."

No doubt, Cahill means to be provocative. "If you can’t entertain people, you have no right to ask them to read what you’ve written," he says lightly. But with such bold (and often witty) strokes Cahill strips away the pious accretions of 2000 years so that a picture of Jesus as an actual human being emerges.

"Jesus was a man who sweat and spit and did everything that everybody else in the world does," Cahill says. "You have to imagine that he was an extraordinary individual but that he would have appeared to everyone as a human being who talked the lingo of his time to pretty rough-hewn people, who would not have been impressed by your typical clergyman." Only through such an act of re-imagining, Cahill indicates, can a reader experience the full force of Jesus’ message, which Cahill characterizes as "the revolutionary insistence on kindness."

He adds, "To be a Christian should mean to be in solidarity with the poor and the miserable. Very seldom in history have Christians done that. People who call themselves Christians really haven’t understood what their identity is supposed to be. But every once in a while someone gets it right, and when they do, it makes an enormous difference."

Hence, it seems, the Hinges of History.

"I think Desire of the Everlasting Hills can be appreciated on two different levels," Cahill says at the end of our conversation. "On an intellectual level, I hope readers come away feeling that they have met Jesus, that they know who he is, that they know what his followers were trying to do, and that they understand the effect this had on the culture we live in. But in the end I would like people to close the book having had more than just a titillating intellectual and emotional experience. On a moral level, I would like to move readers in the direction of what Jesus says at the end of the story of the Good Samaritan, ‘Go and do likewise.’ "

Alden Mudge is a reviewer in Oakland, California.

"Orgies in a world ruled by fate are not as much fun as you might think they would be," Thomas Cahill says during a call to his residence in Rome, where he and his wife now live for about a third of the year.
…

Memoir

Mary Gordon

Interview by Alden Mudge

It's a relief, really. Mary Gordon seems no more inclined to answer deeply personal questions than I am to ask them.

Of course, the questions flutter at the periphery of our conversation about her collection of meditative, autobiographical essays, Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity. How can I not wonder about the pain of a child who dreams of fairy princesses and kisses the knee of "Grandpa" Haubrecht in hopes of forming some sentimental connection with the old man, only to recognize in his unbending silence that she is not the magical child of her imagination, and probably not even a child at all? Or the desperation of a 15-year-old living alone with her alcoholic mother in increasing dishevelment, who hears a bird trapped in her closet struggling toward death and reacts by pulling her clothes from the closet, laying them on a chair, and never opening the closet again until it is time to go to college?

But, really, what more could I actually learn by asking Gordon about her implacable grandmother or her cruel aunt? Her mother and the priests who "embodied her idea of the desirable male"? Or the fact that her father, who died when she was seven, was the only person she liked to play with?

In these eight linked essays about the places that have shaped her sensibility—as in her recent memoir about her father, The Shadow Man, and her novels Final Payments and The Company of Women—Gordon writes with such brilliant specificity and with such sensitivity to the fine gradations of human emotion that readers simply infer the answers to such questions. To actually ask them is a betrayal of one of the deepest pleasures of reading writers as good as Gordon: that sense of one mind and spirit connecting with another's. To ask also invites a kind of reductive pop psychologizing. Or worse, the commodification of spirit, which is a sorry hallmark of our era, and an increasing concern for Gordon.

"What makes me nervous," she says midway through our conversation, "is that even people's interest in religion has become a commodity. I mean, the corporate world is now getting spiritual advisors so that their executives can be more productive, because they need to be in touch with their spiritual roots in order that they can make a better Web page . . . There's no other narrative, except commodity and profit. I find myself wondering, is there anything that is not commodifiable?"

Religion has never been a commodity for Gordon. She was raised in a family that "took deep pleasure in the liturgical world of the church" and assembled at her grandmother's on Tuesday nights to watch Bishop Sheen on television. But in the 1960s, in a moment described in the essay "The Architecture of a Life with Priests," a young priest's well-meaning remark "demolished the walls of the confessional," and led her to realize that she "would have to leave the church, because to live with this new sense of lightness and clarity I would need a dwelling that let in the light."

Thirty-some years later, Gordon has returned to the church. "Those sacred spaces were very formative, and irreplaceable," she says. "I began to understand that the habit of mind that was generated by those sacred spaces was very important to who I am, and that if I didn't honor my hunger for that, I would be less than truthful about who I really am. This is another reason why the metaphor of place is so important to me. I needed to be in the psychic space that only church ritual and the ethical framework that is expressed in ritual could give me. Nothing else would substitute for that."

But sacred spaces are not the only places Gordon reflects on in Seeing Through Places. There are also the houses of her grandmother and her babysitter and the neighbors next door, the public places of New York, and a forsaken house on the Cape. Seeing Through Places developed "without an intentional arc," Gordon says. At some point she realized that the essays she was writing were about place and that she wanted to "talk about where I am, I mean literally where I am and metaphorically where I am. So I organized the book around the motif of a journey." That journey spans only a short distance in miles—from Valley Stream, Long Island to Manhattan—but it is an immense psychic journey from a seemingly cloistered life in a working class neighborhood to public life as a best-selling novelist and English professor at Barnard.

"I really wanted to meditate on a place being at the center of a consciousness," Gordon says. "The accidents of place, the pressure of place that enables certain kinds of behaviors and makes other behaviors impossible. So that place becomes an agent in ways that are practical, in ways that can be tyrannical, and in ways that are very atmospheric and hard to pin down. . . . Often when people write about place it's from a sensibility that believes that place is divorced from people and has a kind of life of its own. I was brought up to think that people were more important than place and more important than things. I was even brought up in a sensibility that said that the invisible is more important than the visible. So the way that I come at place is not the way that Protestant males come at place. If this were an equation, I would be talking about place minus Thoreau."

In the most poignant essay in the book, "Places to Play," Gordon writes that as a child, she was not good at playing and always felt that she "was only masquerading as a child." Desperate to be taken seriously, she couldn't wait for childhood to end. Gordon later writes that she graduated from college younger than when she entered, and credits Barnard and the 1960s for teaching her the value of play.

"Far from being a '60s basher," she says, "I am so grateful for them. Because we were all allowed to play and to be serious. . . . The playful and the serious were able to flow in and out of one another in a way that for me was extremely freeing. And at Barnard, my mind was given play. I was given tremendous attention, a debt I can never repay."

Little wonder, then, that she has returned to Barnard to teach and that she writes of the place in her final essay with such affection. "I'm always afraid that with one false move, which I can't predict or name, I could be back at that old place I was in when I was young," Gordon says near the end of our conversation. "But I also feel a tremendous sense of gratitude and amazement that life has had so much more pleasure and amplitude and graciousness than I ever believed it would have when I was a child."

 

Alden Mudge is a reviewer in Oakland, California.

 

It's a relief, really. Mary Gordon seems no more inclined to answer deeply personal questions than I am to ask them.

Of course, the questions flutter at the periphery of our conversation about her collection of meditative, autobiographical essays, Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and…

NonfictionCrafts, Hobbies & Home

Kenneth T. Jackson, editor

Interview by Alden Mudge

It’s not often that an encyclopedia is a popular success. “Usually you’ll see encyclopedias in multivolumes and priced for many hundreds of dollars, and clearly the marketing plan is to sell to libraries,” says Kenneth T. Jackson, editor in chief of The Encyclopedia of New York City during a call that catches him in San Francisco as he is heading home from Shanghai, where he has been during sabbatical leave from Columbia University.

But from the day in 1982, when Edward Tripp, the late, great head of Yale University Press, drove down from New Haven to discuss an idea for a book about New York with Jackson, a prominent urban historian with near-encyclopedic knowledge of the history of New York City, the plan was to create a book for the general reader that was both authoritative and quirky. The idea, Jackson recalls, was “to put it all in one volume, make it relatively inexpensive, and see if it would sell.”

The first edition of The Encyclopedia of New York City, published in 1995, has gone through seven printings, sold tens of thousands of copies, and spawned a host of imitators in cities and regions around the country. President Clinton took it along as a gift for his hosts during a trip to China. It was part of the bet between mayors when the New York Giants played the Baltimore Ravens in the Super Bowl. As reference books go, it has been a smash hit.

Another measure of its success are the hundreds and hundreds of letters Jackson has received from readers—New Yorkers and non-New Yorkers alike—offering opinions and suggestions about the book. Some requested factual corrections—“it’s on the northwest corner not the southwest corner.” Some suggested additions. Some excoriated Jackson for omissions. Joe DiMaggio, for instance, is mentioned a number of times in the first edition, but he doesn’t have an entry all his own. What? No entry for the Yankee Clipper? “I was hammered for leaving out Joe D,” says Jackson ruefully.

Well, DiMaggio fans, Yankee fans and New York City fans can rejoice. Joe DiMaggio has his own entry in the extraordinarily appealing new edition of The Encyclopedia of New York City. And so do hundreds of other people, places and events.

“Generally, you had to be dead to be in the first edition,” Jackson says. “Now we have more living people. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, and the Subway Hero [Wesley Autrey, a construction worker who leapt onto the tracks in 2007 to save a 19-year-old NY Film Academy student who had fallen after a seizure], for example. We have several entries on the World Trade Center 9/11 attack. There are a lot of things like the E-ZPass and the MetroCard that didn’t exist when the first edition came out and which are huge issues today. Clearly one of the biggest stories, maybe the biggest story in New York in the last 20 years, has been the spectacular decline in crime. I mean 75 percent. It’s not just a few percent; it’s massive. And that has happened mostly since the first edition appeared.”

The new edition is more than 200 pages longer than the first edition, contains over 5,000 entries and more than 700 luminous photos, maps, charts and illustrations. “Amazingly they [Yale University Press] are holding the price at the same place it was 15 years ago,” Jackson says of the $65 book. “I still don’t know how it’s as inexpensive as it is.”

According to Vadim Staklo, Yale University Press’ in-house editor on the project, Jackson himself played a major role in keeping the price of the new edition down. “Ken Jackson raised a significant amount of money, which for the most part went into editorial development. That’s where the huge cost is. He paid for permissions to use photographs. He paid for the hours that his team of editors devoted to this project. He paid for the compensation to the contributors.”

That may be more inside baseball than even the most avid Joe DiMaggio fan might like, but the hard work of putting together a 1560-page encyclopedia lies in ceaseless attention to detail. Working within a editorial framework he established in the first edition, Jackson orchestrated the work of roughly 60 assistant editors and 800 contributors, many of them prominent scholars and writers who, at 10 cents a word, wrote mostly for love of the project. “You’d have to live on a pretty limited budget to make a living writing for an encyclopedia,” Jackson says wryly.

The editorial team reviewed and revamped most of the entries from the first edition, added hundreds and hundreds of new entries, and removed some outdated entries. “We got rid of entries on things like law firms, which we found people didn’t look up. They changed so fast that people were really using the Internet for that.”

And speaking of the Internet, Jackson says, “The difference between an encyclopedia like this and the Internet is that when people go to the Internet to look something up they only get what they’re looking up. But so much of what you find in this book is serendipity. Say you’re looking up Sandy Kofax and near it is an entry on the Ku Klux Klan. Who thinks of the Ku Klux Klan in New York City? But there it is. There are so many things like that throughout the book, where you look up one thing and your eye falls on another.”

Jackson’s own eyes have fallen on every single word of the new edition, a prodigious accomplishment in and of itself. He has also written numerous entries for the book, drawing on his vast knowledge of the city after years of exploring it and teaching its history. For decades, Jackson has taught a course on the history of New York City that includes field trips by bus and subway to the far reaches of the city and an immensely popular all-night bike ride from Morningside Heights to Brooklyn. The class still usually draws more than 300 students. “The university prides itself on small classes, so it doesn’t really like the fact that it’s so large,” Jackson says. “But it’s a very large class. It’s huge.” Big and popular, much like The Encyclopedia of New York City itself.

“So many people have been through the New York City grinder,” Jackson says. “They come as a young person, they leave or retire and now live in Las Vegas or Florida or Vermont or wherever but they retain that feeling of having lived in New York. They know where the D train goes and the Shuttle. They know all these things and they feel a little piece of New York will always be inside them. That’s why I think this sells well even outside the city.”

After living and working for 42 years in New York, Jackson still retains his Tennessee drawl. But when he is enthusiastic, as he is about The Encyclopedia of New York City, he talks a mile a minute, like any good New Yorker. At the end of conversation, however, Jackson slows down to make a point. “Obviously you can say more or write more specialized books about this city. But there is no other book that does what this one does.”

And that, dear reader, is the unvarnished truth.

It’s not often that an encyclopedia is a popular success. “Usually you’ll see encyclopedias in multivolumes and priced for many hundreds of dollars, and clearly the marketing plan is to sell to libraries,” says Kenneth T. Jackson, editor in chief of The Encyclopedia of New…

NonfictionPolitics

Molly Ivins

Interview by Alden Mudge

It has the subtitle Politics in the Clinton Years. Trouble is, in the week since first arranging to talk with newspaper columnist Molly Ivins about You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You, politics and Clinton both have done a wild 360, and neither Ivins nor anybody else knows if the truck stops here . . . or keeps on spinning.

Brash, funny, sharp-penned, and liberal, Ivins has never been happy defending Clinton. "If left to my own devices, I’d spend all my time pointing out that he’s weaker than bus-station chili," she writes. "But the man is so constantly subjected to such hideous and unfair abuse that I wind up standing up for him on the general principle that some fairness should be applied." Besides, Ivins adds, "No one but a fool or a Republican ever took him for a liberal."

Now she tells me that in light of Clinton’s recent troubles, she’s rewritten the book’s introduction. "Remember that metaphor that the Republicans keep trying to hang Clinton but the rope keeps breaking? It may be that this rope isn’t going to break. I thought I should go back and acknowledge that."

It’s not the only tough-minded acknowledgment Ivins makes in this vastly entertaining collection. In a piece called "What I Did to Morris Udall," she remembers an unfair profile she wrote about Representative Udall during his 1976 presidential bid, and concludes, "My continuing regret is that what I wrote was accurate, but it wasn’t true. I was trying too hard to be a major-league, hard-hitting journalist that I let the real story go hang itself."

Why don’t her colleagues seem to share her regard for truth and accuracy? "We are seeing the effect of the fractionization of the audience," Ivins says. "Because the audience can be divided into those who needlepoint and those who knit and those who like monster trucks and because they all have separate channels, we’re getting television that appeals to the lowest common denominator. I hold Rupert Murdoch largely responsible for that. But it’s also a function of the way technology and the market works: when you get tabloid television, it drives what we used to call the establishment media."

Often, says Ivins, both the media and politicians "assume that people are dumb. When you dumb down public discourse on the theory that people are just a bunch of boobs who don’t know anything, you do real harm to people. There are two mistakes made in politics. Usually they take a very complex subject and oversimplify it. Every now and again, they take something really simple and make it sound complicated. I don’t do that. Part of what I try to do is prove that this is fascinating stuff. It’s hilariously funny, full of high drama — and low drama — and it affects your life."

The pieces collected here pretty much prove Ivins right. Culled from the hundreds of articles and columns she has written over the past four years, they cover everything from the disastrous effects of Timothy McVeigh’s poor taste in literature to the need to teach Bob Dole to smile. For good measure Ivins also includes a couple of wildly funny pieces on Texas politics and the general weirdness of people in all parts of our great nation, as well as some touching "tributes to souls passing." Never dull, usually hard-hitting, and always vividly written, they leave no doubt why she gets fan letters from truck drivers — as well as political foes.

"My all-time favorite fan letters began: ‘Dear Miz Ivins, I’ve been reading you for ten years now and this is the first time I ever agreed with you,’" Ivins says, then adds, "Great! Keep reading and it might just happen again."

If there’s an overriding theme to You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You, it is the need for campaign finance reform. "Money was always part of politics," Ivins says, "It’s just that in the last decade or so the amount has become staggering. I’m convinced this is the root of the rot in American politics. The quality and kind of legislation we’re seeing reflects increasingly how indebted politicians are to the people with money. It’s really fouled up democracy."

Ivins is someone who "actually likes politicians, which is so socially unacceptable these days that I’m looking for some other perversion — perhaps inter-species breeding — so that people might not look at me so askance." But politicians "spend half their lives kissing somebody’s rear end. It’s a dreadful situation for a public servant to have to be in. It is a little ironic that they won’t get off the dime and help themselves out, since they know what the penalties are."

One of those penalties is to feel the scorching heat of Ivins in high-dudgeon. But for all her sharp-tongued barbs, Ivins says, "I have never been able to permanently piss off a politician. It used to amaze me when I first started writing about the legislature for a small progressive publication called the Texas Monthly. I would regularly cuss legislators out and say things like they were egg-sucking child molesters who ran on all fours. I actually hoped to become a martyr for journalism. I couldn’t wait to be horsewhipped. But all that ever happened was that I would see them in the capitol the next day and they would cradle the article in their arms and croon ‘Isn’t that nice? You put my name in your paper.’ They were discouragingly civilized."

In conversation, so is Molly Ivins. She’s also a "congenital optimist" who thinks "we should be cheerful about the here and now on the principle that it can always get worse and then we will never have been cheerful at all."

But the true key to her success? "One of the things that probably makes me worth reading is that I stay the hell away from Washington, D.C. It’s a city where everybody says exactly what everybody else says. And I don’t have to spend more than ten minutes in Washington before I find myself saying exactly the same thing too."

So let the campaign begin: For the sake of journalism, for the sake of that odd endangered species — the American liberal — and for the good of the nation’s political funnybone, keep Molly Ivins the hell out of Washington, D.C., and deep in the heart of Texas instead.

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California.

 

It has the subtitle Politics in the Clinton Years. Trouble is, in the week since first arranging to talk with newspaper columnist Molly Ivins about You Got to Dance with Them What Brung You, politics and Clinton both have done a wild 360, and neither…

Nonfiction

Jon Krakauer

Interview by Alden Mudge

"His voice sounded like a record played at half speed. It was slow and creaky. I was three thousand feet below him. I was lying in a tent inside a sleeping bag with everything I had on, and I was unable to get warm. Just think of what he must have suffered that first night in those hurricane force winds. With no oxygen. With the wind chill at, I don't know—160 degrees below zero. It was horrifying to think of him up there. It was sad. He was our leader."

That's journalist Jon Krakauer recalling one of the more wrenching and surreal episodes in last year's disaster on Mount Everest. Krakauer's own voice slows as he talks about the radio transmissions from head guide Rob Hall, stranded and slowly freezing to death at 28,700 feet. "Rob Hall was a great person and, by all accounts, the best guide up there. . . . That this happened to him is a sad and cruel irony."

In all, nine climbers perished on Mount Everest in the second week of May 1996. Since then, numerous magazine and newspaper accounts have appeared, including Krakauer's own initial firsthand report in Outside magazine, completed just five weeks after his return from Nepal. Versions of events have varied. Climbers and commentators have pointed fingers, traded accusations, absolved themselves of responsibility.

Krakauer's extraordinary new book about the disaster, Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster, does something different. Meticulously researched and exceptionally well written, Into Thin Air avoids the hype and easy condemnation that have infested other accounts. The book offers instead vivid details told matter-of-factly, almost quietly. The result is a deeply moving narrative that honors the courage of the people on the mountain while raising profound and possibly unanswerable questions about human behavior in a crisis. "People performed badly at times," Krakauer said in a recent phone conversation. "But like everything in life, it's more complicated than that. Everyone up there was a complicated personality. There were no heroes and there were no villains. It was just this really sad disaster."

Of course there were contributing factors, errors and weaknesses that compounded the effects of the "rogue storm" that blew across the mountain, catching the climbers high on the peak unawares. Recent attention has focused on the fact that the clients on this expedition had paid as much as $65,000 each to be guided up the mountain, the belief being that these "trophy climbers" were unworthy and unprepared for the lofty summit.

But even here Krakauer holds to his complicated view. "No matter how much you pay, even with all the assistance the Sherpas and the guides provide, it's still an incredible amount of work. No one can haul you up Everest. You can't just buy the summit. You've got pay with sweat and puke and maybe with your life. That is worth some grudging respect."

In fact, nothing is more evident from reading Into Thin Air than how physically and mentally debilitating the extreme altitudes near Everest's summit are for all climbers. "I've done a lot of hard climbs," says Krakauer, a passionate mountaineer since boyhood, "but climbing Everest was by an order of magnitude the hardest thing I've ever done. It's mostly just slogging up slopes that aren't particularly steep, but it's day after day of hard painful work and putting up with headaches and throwing up. "On May 10, the day we set out for the summit, most of us were in such bad physical condition that if we had been home we would have been in bed, wouldn't have gone to work, wouldn't have answered the phone, would have just been lying there in agony. And here we were, having not slept or eaten in a couple of days, setting out for what is probably the hardest physical thing we've ever done. You really have to have this puritanical streak, this belief in the nobility of suffering and work, or you'd never do it. The drive to climb is extremely irrational. It defies logic."

But even skill and a fine madness are not enough for Everest, according to Krakauer. "The statistics I quote at the end of the book are constant: for every four people who summit, one dies; for every 30 people who even attempt the mountain, one dies. Being a brilliant climber doesn't ensure your safety; as many brilliant climbers have died as stumblebums. Much of it is the roll of the dice."

And the most spectacular roll of the dice last May was that of Dr. Seaborn Beck Weathers. One of the wealthy clients, a voluble doctor from Texas whose conservative politics were in stark contrast to Krakauer's own, Weathers was stricken on the mountain during the storm. After a night without shelter or oxygen, he fell unconscious, was judged too weak to survive, and was abandoned by his companions. "He remained comatose for more than twelve hours," Krakauer writes in the book. "Then, late Saturday afternoon, for some unknowable reason a light went on in the reptilian core of Beck's inanimate brain and he floated back into consciousness." Not only that, he staggered into Camp Four and somehow survived the horrible complications of severe frostbite.

"It's an incredible tale, and Beck's an incredible guy," Krakauer says. "He lost a hand and all his fingers, and he just tells it like it is. He doesn't try to embellish his story or put a spin on anything. His story is horrible but it is also uplifting. It may be the one uplifting part of this whole sordid mess."

As for Krakauer's own sense of why things went so horribly wrong? "We had never climbed together, there was a disparity in strengths among us, so, wisely, we were taught to rely on the guide if things went wrong. Not only that, we were never ever roped together. Everyone climbed independently, at their own pace, which was good. But when you're roped to someone you develop this weird intimacy; every time you take a step, they have to take a step. You develop a bond that was just lacking on Everest. We weren't encouraged to look after our fellow clients and certainly not after the guides.

"And that's inexcusable to me. It's the thing that eats at me most. If I'd been up there with a bunch of friends, instead of guides and fellow clients, I can't imagine that I would have left [guide] Andy Harris up there in a storm when I clearly should have seen that he wasn't feeling well. And having gotten down to the South Col, I just wouldn't have crawled into my tent and into my sleeping bag without accounting for each of my partners. Climbing is a subculture that prides itself on the purity of its ideals. It has these weird rituals and rules that most people wouldn't understand. Some of it is kind of sick, because it idealizes boldness and risk-taking to such a degree. But its ideals about respecting your partner and about 'how you climb being more important than what you climb' are really good. I betrayed those ideals. For that I really beat myself up," Krakauer says sadly near the end of our conversation. "I can't think of a single good thing that came out of this climb."

No single thing, perhaps, except this extraordinary book.

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

"His voice sounded like a record played at half speed. It was slow and creaky. I was three thousand feet below him. I was lying in a tent inside a sleeping bag with everything I had on, and I was unable to get warm. Just…

FictionHistorical Fiction

Howard Bahr

Interview by Alden Mudge

Time has moved in mysterious ways for writer Howard Bahr. It wasn't until 1973, when he was 27 years old, that he became a college freshman at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, "so deeply moved by the writing of Mr. William Faulkner that I wanted to be where he had written about." He then spent much of the next two decades working at Rowan Oak, Faulkner's home, and writing "a real cheap imitation of Mr. Faulkner's baroque prose." He then spent a good deal more time learning how not to write like William Faulkner. And finally, last year, well along in life, he published his first novel, The Black Flower: A Novel of the Civil War, a darkly radiant work, released this month as a Henry Holt Owl paperback. It blossomed in the shadow of the extravagant success of another first novel set in the South during the Civil War, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain.

About these and the other odd turns his life has taken, Mr. Bahr is philosophical. "Nothing happens before it's supposed to," he tells me during a telephone call to his home in Tennessee, where he has lived for the last five years, teaching English at nearby Motlow State Community College. "It just took me all this time to get ready, to prepare, to learn enough to be able to do it."

The "it" in question — The Black Flower — is a wonderfully compact novel with authentic emotional power. Set during the Battle of Franklin (Tennessee) in November 1864, the novel's action spans barely a single day and ranges over a narrow corner of one of the bloodiest battlefields of the Civil War. At the story's center is Bushrod Carter, a 26-year-old veteran soldier from Mississippi, and his two boyhood friends, Jack Bishop and Virgil C. Joining them in the line of battle are two conscripts, the memorably evil Simon Ropes and the dull-witted Nebo Gloster. There is humor in Mr. Bahr's depiction of the friendship of the soldiers, and a terrible beauty in his description of the chaos of battle and its effects on his characters. But The Black Flower only reaches its full force when the armies have moved on and the wounded Bushrod Carter meets Anna Hereford.

According to Mr. Bahr he had always wanted to write "a realistic but pretty Civil War story," working on The Black Flower as a short story for nearly three years. "Then I got to a certain point — specifically where Virgil C. gets shot in the back of the head — and I ended it there. But the characters were not finished. They kept clamoring and clamoring. And so I commenced to writing some more, and pretty soon Anna showed up. She's based on a student I had here that I loved very deeply and who was eventually killed in a car wreck. When Anna showed up I didn't have anything but trouble after that. The characters started taking off in all directions, and suddenly I had a novel. Suddenly after three years."

Mr. Bahr's manuscript was rejected — apparently unread — by several reputable publishers. He sent it finally to the Nautical and Aviation Publishing Company, a small press that usually specializes in military nonfiction but was seeking first novels about the Civil War and other historical topics. The Black Flower was published with excellent reviews and limited sales, and almost simultaneously with Cold Mountain, the runaway bestseller and National Book Award winner.

The comparisons are inevitable: both are love stories, both take place during the Civil War, both are written by writers with an ear for language.

Mr. Bahr has the formal, gracious manners of the 19th-century South, using "Yessir" and "Nossir" to reply. He refers to writers who have influenced him as "Mister" — Mr. William Faulkner, Mr. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mr. Loren Eisley, Mr. T.H. White, and Mr. Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose The Scarlet Letter includes the sentence that gave Mr. Bahr his title, "Let the black flower blossom as it may."

"Cold Mountain is a beautiful book," Mr. Bahr says without reservation. "But the two books are about two different things. His is a journey novel, not a war book at all. His [central] character is much different from mine. He is so much more attuned to nature and the Indians, and he doesn't believe in God. He's an almost New Age person. So while I thought Cold Mountain was a lovely book, I would not trade books with Mr. Frazier."

In fact, Mr. Bahr is entirely proud of his book's authenticity. "I believe it to be a true representation of the human experience, of people in a bad situation finding redemption and love." For its details, Mr. Bahr walked the Franklin battlefield, explored the McGavock house — around which most of the fictional action takes place — drew on 20 years of experience as a Civil War re-enactor for his vivid depictions of smells and sounds of battle, and mined his own experiences of the Vietnam War to capture the startling disassociations of battle.

"There is a mystical quality to the experience because it is so awful. When people are in a situation like that, their minds push away from it. The Archbishop of Canterbury [a character who loses his mind on the battlefield] just refuses to accept it and shifts to another identity. And when Bushrod gets into battle, his 'other' takes over. Although I was never in really bad combat, whenever we'd get in ticklish situations, I found that to be true. It was like I was watching somebody else doing it. Only later did I realize, or remember, that it was me."

But the most remarkable achievement of The Black Flower may be the 19th-century sensibility that informs it. This is due to an oddity of Mr. Bahr himself. He is certain that he would have been more comfortable in the last century than his own. He adheres to "what Mr. Robert Penn Warren called the threshold principle: in my own house I have the world the way I want it." That means no television and no computer, something he considers "a great evil." He even has a rotary phone. "But," he adds dryly, "not long ago I did buy caller ID because I realized that it is the greatest weapon against technology I have ever encountered."

"I have never felt comfortable in my own time," Mr. Bahr says. "Now in the late 20th century I sometimes feel like I'm on another planet. But eventually you tell yourself you've got to accept the world you've been given — because there's no alternative. And I do find plenty of wonderful things in this world."

Lucky thing. Because with the paperback release of The Black Flower, and with a little good fortune, Mr. Howard Bahr's time may have come at last.

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California, and a frequent contributor to this publication.

Time has moved in mysterious ways for writer Howard Bahr. It wasn't until 1973, when he was 27 years old, that he became a college freshman at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, "so deeply moved by the writing of Mr. William Faulkner that I…

Audio

John Irving

Interview by Alden Mudge

"I hold a novel accountable for a good story," says John Irving during a conversation about A Widow for One Year, his ninth and most intricately crafted novel yet. "And by a good story, I mean one that’s a little too complicated and twisted and circumlocuitous to be easily encapsulated in a newspaper or television story."

It’s no surprise, then, that A Widow for One Year defeats easy summary. In fact, so lush and energetic is the branching and leafing of plot and subplots (which take us from Long Island in 1958, to Amsterdam’s red light district in 1990, to Vermont in 1995), and so tightly woven are the stories and stories-within- stories, that Irving and I can actually differ on what the book is really about — and both be right.

"I wanted to write about a woman’s sexual past and the choices in her sexual past that make her uncomfortable," Irving says, recalling the development of the novel’s central character, Ruth Cole. "I wanted to deliberately choose things that, were she a male, would discomfort her hardly at all. I wanted, in other words, to work on that double standard that Ruth herself is so aware of. I wanted to keep positioning Ruth vulnerably — sexually vulnerably — while giving her considerable esteem for her toughness, her work ethic, her success in her career. I wanted her to be a thinking woman and a self-critical one."

Irving also wanted to return to telling a chronological story for the first time in 15 years. "The Hotel New Hampshire and The World According to Garp were linear narratives, and I felt very strongly that I wanted to write a linear narrative again." This time, he decided to "structure the story in the manner of a play, with three distinct and separate moments of time: We see Ruth as a four-year-old girl, we see her as a 36-year-old unmarried woman — successful in her career but struggling in her relationships — and we see her five years later when she is a 41-year-old widow with a child who, not coincidentally, is the exact age Ruth was when we first met her and when her mother abandoned her."

But, Irving says, he did not hit upon the novel’s comic masterstroke — making Ruth Cole a writer — until quite late in his work on the book, until he had populated A Widow for One Year with almost everyone in it. Then, with one of those typical inventive exaggerations that endow his books with so much of their energy, Irving made almost everyone else in the book a writer, too. Ruth’s father, Ted, writes and illustrates haunting little children’s books and seduces the lonely mothers of his young models. Ruth’s mother, Marion, abandons her husband and four-year-old daughter and eventually writes well-received mystery novels in which she mourns the deaths of her two teenage sons. Marion’s 16-year-old lover, Eddie, grows up to be a good man who writes bad novels about the love between younger men and older women. Ruth’s best friend, Hannah, is a journalist who writes celebrity profiles and is lonely and sexually self-absorbed. Ruth marries an editor but falls in love with a reader.

"I wrote Garp when I was a decidedly unfamous writer and a writer who always expected to support myself by teaching and coaching," Irving says. "I’ve often found it puzzling that I wrote that book about not just one famous writer, but two — Garp and his mother — when I didn’t give being a famous writer a second thought. Once I decided to make Ruth a writer, I had a lot of fun with areas of being a writer that I didn’t know anything about when I wrote Garp. I didn’t know publishers had publicists until my fourth novel was published. I didn’t have book tours. Nobody interviewed me. The public life as a writer, which Ruth is so uncomfortable with, is something I wasn’t able to give attention to before because I hadn’t had the experience. That and Ruth’s obdurate denial that there is any truth to Hannah’s accusation that Ruth is an autobiographical writer. It is enduringly fascinating to me how simplistically that subject is treated, both by writers themselves and by people writing about writers. When the writer is any good, it’s complicated. It’s a subject I think can be fascinating — and very funny."

Of course, this barely scratches the surface of a novel whose sorrows and delights depend heavily on time and the anticipation of its passing. "From the very beginning," Irving says, "I was aware that I was writing a love story, and that it was a dual love story. It was Marion and Eddie’s love story, and it was Harry and Ruth’s love story. But I wanted that love story to feel so distant and take so long to get there, that you don’t know what it is until it’s almost over. . . . You want the reader to guess what’s going to happen next — and guess it right. But not always. You want things to happen that they don’t see coming. The balance between the two is very delicate. It has to do with the interconnectedness of people’s lives, and that has to do with plot and with carefully making a character stay true to himself or herself."

"Composing a novel," Irving concludes, "is like constructing the interior architecture of the house you live in. Other people will pass through and say, ‘Oh, it’s a nice house but what a hideous window over the kitchen table.’ Only a writer really lives in a novel. So much of what works best about it are things that people who come to dinner never know about or see."

It’s a fitting analogy. A Widow for One Year is wonderfully constructed, and its characters and their interrelationships are, indeed, even more interesting on return visits.

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California, and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

 

"I hold a novel accountable for a good story," says John Irving during a conversation about A Widow for One Year, his ninth and most intricately crafted novel yet. "And by a good story, I mean one that's a little too complicated and twisted and…

History

Gary Kinder

Interview by Alden Mudge

Late last year, when Gary Kinder read about some guy named James Cameron and a forthcoming movie called Titanic, he was devastated. It wasn’t just that Cameron had decided to embellish the actual story of the sinking of the Titanic by adding a romance between two star-crossed lovers, but he’d also framed his story with a tale of high-tech, modern-day treasure hunters. Cameron’s fictionalized account mirrored the true-life story Kinder had just spent the last 10 years scrupulously researching and getting down on paper. "I figured it was going to destroy everything I’d done," Kinder says.

By the time we talk in late April, Kinder seems to have accepted his agent’s assurances that the success of the movie can only add luster to Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea, Kinder’s book about the 1857 wreck and recent recovery of a ship carrying gold from the California Motherlode. Kinder has even been to see Titanic with his mother and his two daughters (who have seen it twice!) and loved it. But he’s not quite ready to trust the early praise for Ship of Gold, which likens it to such riveting accounts of peril and adventure as Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air and Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm.

In Ship of Gold, Kinder interweaves two dramatic stories. The first is the story of the S.S. Central America, a sidewheel steamer that shuttled passengers and cargo between New York and Panama, taking California-bound goldseekers on the outward journey and making the nine-day journey back to New York with those who had struck it rich in the goldfields, as well as those who had struck out. Between 1853, when it was launched, and 1857 Kinder discovered, the Central America "had carried one-third of all consigned gold to pass over the Panama Route." Not to mention the untold millions in gold dust, nuggets, coins, and bars that had "traveled aboard her in the trunks and pockets and carpetbags and money belts of her passengers."

On the fateful journey from Panama to New York in September 1857, the Central America carried its full complement of 500 passengers. Among them were newlyweds Ansel and Adeline "Addie" Easton (sister of one of the richest men in California); Judge Alonzo Monson, who was legendary for his gambling losses in the gold fields; and a disappointed young goldseeker named Oliver Manlove, who had recorded in his diary every mile of his journey west. The ship was captained by William Lewis Herndon, a legendary sailor and explorer who several years before had written a classic of 19th-century adventure, Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, about his experiences in South America.

Kinder estimates that he read hundreds of contemporary accounts, interviews, diaries, and reminiscences of Central America passengers to construct an almost moment by moment account of the ship’s encounter with a hurricane off the coast of the Carolinas; the heroic efforts of passengers and crew to keep the ship afloat (for hours and hours and hours, male passengers formed a bailing line to keep the rising water away from the steam boilers); the desperate transfer of some of the women passengers in storm-tossed waters to ships that had come to assist the foundering Central America; the heartrending separation of the Eastons; the steely last moments of Captain Herndon, who went down with his ship; and the horrible days adrift of the few others who ultimately survived. It is a wrenching and thrilling account, and any writer would be proud of the power of its telling.

But, as fascinating as it is, the story of the sinking of the Central America is not Kinder’s main story. Instead, it is the search for the wreck and the recovery of its treasure that make up the bulk of Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea. And in Kinder’s hands, this story — even with all its technological and legal details about deep sea recovery efforts — is at least as riveting as his historical account of the sinking.

As Kinder tells it, after he had finished writing his previous book (a bestseller about a man who claimed to have had contact with aliens), he was looking for a project that would involve him physically. Kinder had gone to law school in Florida and learned to scuba dive there, and somehow these facts made him tegin to think about treasure hunting as a subject for his book. When he first heard about the Central America, he says, "it didn’t interest me even a little bit. I wanted something sexy. I wanted lots of jewels and gold reliquaries and the romance of the high seas in the 1600s and 1700s."

But that was before he met the team and crew of the Columbus-America Discovery Group, led by the extraordinary Tommy Thompson, whose personality dominates Ship of Gold just as it dominated the ultimately successful efforts to find the Central America and its cargo. Thompson was both the technological innovator, who could think his way through the awesome dangers and difficulties of working at great depths in the ocean, and the steely operator, who could stare down his competitors during tense encounters on the high seas and direct the Herculean efforts of a large recovery team of experts and crew members.

"The biggest problem I had in writing this book," Kinder says, "was trying to tell this story exactly as it happened without making Tommy seem too perfect. It was a very, very big problem, because everybody I talked to said Tommy was perfect. I began to wonder how to make this guy seem real."

Of course, Tommy has his defects. He exercised rigid control on the project, for example, not allowing certain crew members to even see the gold and artifacts as they were being brought to the surface. That engendered some deep anger, Kinder says.

Thompson eventually allowed Kinder unprecedented access to the project records and personnel, and Kinder has put that access to good use. His account is informative, dramatic, and even funny. It didn’t come without effort and a big dose of frustration. The book was scheduled to be published for the last three or four years, but publication had to be delayed while competitors’ lawsuits against Thompson and Columbus-America wound through the courts. Kinder used the time to rework the book. "As things turned out, it ended up being a much better manuscript," he says with characteristic grin-and-bear-it good humor.

As Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea at last arrives in bookstores all across the country this month, Gary Kinder sits in Seattle (where he runs a business teaching lawyers to write) waiting for his ship to come in.

Alden Mudge is a writer in Oakland, California, and a frequent contributor to BookPage.

Late last year, when Gary Kinder read about some guy named James Cameron and a forthcoming movie called Titanic, he was devastated. It wasn't just that Cameron had decided to embellish the actual story of the sinking of the Titanic by adding a romance between…

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