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Defining Style

Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
Emphasizing personal style, Joan Barzilay Freund’s Defining Style is a freeing, inspiring and extremely innovative look at interior design.
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Michael Sims

Interview by the editors of BookPage

While writing his delightful biography of E.B. White, The Story of Charlotte’s Web, Michael Sims gained a new appreciation for this childhood classic and its eccentric creator.

Do you remember reading Charlotte’s Web as a child?
Sadly, I didn’t read it in childhood, for two dumb reasons. First, I saw the cover and thought that it was about a girl and I wasn’t reading much about girls at the time. And second, I decided that I didn’t like the name Charlotte—although later my beautiful niece Charlotte changed my opinion of the name. So I was a teenager when I actually read Charlotte’s Web—and fell in love with it even at that late date.

I loved your vivid descriptions of young Elwyn’s adventures in barns and outdoors. What led you to write about his childhood in this almost novelistic way?
For me the theme of the book is the unpredictability of creativity. To recreate the unusual way that White’s imagination responded to the natural world, I had to take him out into it. His letters and essays provide all kinds of texture about his daily life, so I started with those. I also built on them from my other research and my own observations on numerous visits to Maine. For example, if White mentioned watching coots and loons on the cove, but didn’t describe them, it doesn’t matter; I’ve seen them there many times myself.

Your subtitle refers to E.B. White’s “eccentric life,” but he was a pretty successful writer and editor. What makes him so eccentric?
He was very successful, yes. I think that from early childhood White simply had to go his own way. The word eccentric comes from two Greek words meaning “off center,” and he was that way from birth. In young adulthood he was already nostalgic; he looked for nature in the city; he enjoyed being a husband and father and stepfather, but he spent most of his time in the company of animals. So by eccentric I mean, I think, that he was unconsciously original.

Why were Don Marquis’ stories about Archy and Mehitabel such a pivotal influence for White?
Marquis is at his best in these antic poems and sketches about a free-verse poet reincarnated as a cockroach in the Jazz Age. White read them when they were new, starting in 1916 when he was a teenager, and fell in love with Marquis’ combination of skepticism, humor and compassion. He kept reading them. Then in 1949 he was asked to write an introduction to them, and rereading the whole series helped kick-start Charlotte’s Web.

What was it like visiting the Whites’ farm in Maine? Did it look like Zuckerman’s barn?
Yes, it did. I found it surreal and thrilling. I enjoy literary pilgrimages; I’ve visited Green Gables and Darwin’s Down House and even the original Hundred Acre Wood. But walking through E.B. White’s barn, and hitting my head on the rope that Avery and Fern swing on, and seeing the barn cellar looking very much like Garth Williams’ illustrations of Wilbur’s home—those moments made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

E.B. White’s wife Katharine seems like an interesting and accomplished woman. Did she love farming and animals as he did, or was this something she tolerated in him?
Katharine White—she was Katharine Sergeant Angellwhen White met her, before her divorce—was a fascinating woman. At The New Yorker she was brilliant and formidable as editor of John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov and many other important writers. She liked animals and country life, but my general sense is that she agreed to move to the farm in Maine because she wanted her husband to be happy. Only later did he realize how much she sacrificed to move there.

I’m trying to imagine a connection between Charlotte’s Web and White’s The Elements of Style. Is there one?
Excellent question. Each represents White’s commitment to lucidity, to the elegance of simplicity, and demonstrates his argument that “style” is not a goal to be achieved but a side effect of a writer’s authenticity. Each book also began as a return to the past—to caring for animals in a barn as he had in the stable of his childhood; and to a favorite Cornell professor, William Strunk, whose homemade-style chapbook had come to White at an impressionable age, just as he became a busy undergraduate journalist on the Cornell paper.

You talk about the barnyard as “sacred space” for White. What can we learn from life in a barn?
White claimed that Charlotte’s Web is a straightforward report from the barn, but of course he himself was very sentimental about it as a place in which he had spent many great hours in contact with the most elemental aspects of life, with hunger and birth, with growth and death. He saw it as a miniature cosmos, but also as a place where he had always been innocently happy—on his own, nurturing an animal, minding his own business, thinking his own thoughts.

Is Charlotte’s Web still relevant for 21st-century children?
Very much so, I think. First, of course, it’s a wonderful story, a mix of humor and lyricism and heartbreak; and it was one of the first children’s books to deal with death, the great taboo for so long. But also, over most of the world, especially the United States, the second decade of the 21st century is far more urbanized than the mid-20th century, when the book was published. As I researched E.B. White’s drafts of Charlotte’s Web, I realized that as much as anything else he wanted to immortalize a sense of natural rhythms—days, seasons, birth, death. What could be more relevant for our nature-starved children nowadays?

 

While writing his delightful biography of E.B. White, The Story of Charlotte’s Web, Michael Sims gained a new appreciation for this childhood classic and its eccentric creator.

Do you remember reading Charlotte’s Web as a child?
Sadly, I didn’t read it in childhood, for two…

NonfictionLifestylesArts & Culture

Elaine Sciolino

Interview by Trisha Ping

What do you think of when you hear the word "seduction"? Whatever it is, get ready to expand that definition after reading La Seduction, an insightful and timely exploration of French culture through its most enduring success strategy. New York Times Paris correspondant Elaine Sciolino has been living in France for nearly 10 years. She took time to answer a few of our questions about the way the concept of seduction informs just about every area of French life.

Your book is not the first to explore or explain French culture. How do you feel it fits alongside books like French Women Don't Get Fat and Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong? 
Don’t Get Fat is an impressionistic, light—and delightful—guide by a Frenchwoman to help other women become beautiful, thin and balanced in the French way. Sixty Million is a very solid, durable and readable primer on France and French life.

La Seduction is an examination of the importance of seduction in all aspects of French life. The tools of the seducer—anticipation, promise, allure—are powerful engines in French history and politics, culture and style, food and foreign policy, literature and manners. The book draws on years of reporting on and living in France. It includes interviews with Presidents and politicians; business executives and bureaucrats; writers, actors, students, professors, merchants, farmers, etc. My conclusion is that seduction is more than a game; it is an essential strategy for France’s survival as a country of influence.

One thing that struck me about the book is its even-handedness. What do you think America could learn from France's "seduction" strategy? what do you think that France could learn from America?
We Americans can learn to embrace what the French call plaisir—the art of creating and relishing pleasure of all kinds. The French are proud masters of it, for their own gratification and as a useful tool to seduce others. They have created and perfected pleasurable ways to pass the time: perfumes to sniff, gardens to wander in, wines to drink, objects of beauty to observe, conversations to carry on. They give themselves permission to fulfill a need for pleasure and leisure that America’s hardworking, supercapitalist, abstinent culture often does not allow. 

The French can learn American efficiency that leads to getting results. They can learn to acknowledge and embrace ethnic, religious and racial diversity.

"It is almost a civic duty to seduce." 

What is the biggest difference between the French and American worldviews?
The United States tends to resort to hard power, the use of force to resolve disputes—whether in Iraq or Afghanistan. The French were pioneers of soft power, the art of influencing others at the negotiating table and on the ground through attraction (translated into French as séduction). 

France’s capability to use force to subdue others disappeared long ago. It has had to rely more on powers of persuasion, learning how and when to woo the wider world. France is too weak an economic and military power to counterbalance the United States but too strong and too strong-willed to take orders from it. In a permanent wound to its pride, it has lost one of its most powerful weapons—the supremacy of the French language, which used to be the language of diplomacy and educated elites around the world. English is now the language of international business, the Internet and even diplomacy.

In recent months, however, the United States and France seem to have switched roles. Take Libya, for example. France took the lead in using military force to try to stop Colonel Kaddafi’s brutality against his citizens; it pushed through a strong resolution in the Security Council. The United States lagged behind.   

You write, "I'm convinced that American-style feminism has prevented me from easily absorbing" the reality of French culture. How would you describe French feminism? Do you think most Frenchwomen would call themselves feminists?
France is having its Anita Hill moment. When Anita Hill testified before a Senate committee in 1991 that her former boss Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her, he denied everything and was elevated to the Supreme Court. But the hearings were a turning point. Women suddenly said that the "Mad Men" style of behavior they had put up with for so long at work—the leering, the inappropriate touching, the sexual banter—was not acceptable. Legislatures expanded laws about sexual harassment, and businesses began enforcing strict codes of conduct covering sexual relations in the workplace.

France, where powerful men have traditionally treated sex as a right and used it as a weapon, is now embroiled in its own battle of the sexes, involving a powerful man who could have been President and a single mother who works as a hotel maid. Dominique Strauss-Kahn has denied the charges against him. But suddenly, some French women have begun to speak out about an atmosphere that condones sexual behavior that crosses the line and may even be criminal. Women in politics have been particularly vocal in deploring a culture that tends to treat women as objects. 

But the conversation will be long and torturous. The French tend to blur the line between what is acceptable—and even desirable—in the workplace and what is not. For them, flirtation and much that is forbidden in post-Anita Hill America, is part of ordinary interaction. And it doesn’t matter whether French women use the term “feminist” to describe themselves. 

Regarding appearance, you say that in France, "the sin is not the failure to meet a standard of perfection but an unwillingness to try." This sounds somewhat similar to the American obsession with physical perfection. How do the ideas about what is achievable differ in the two countries?
[In France] It is almost a civic duty to seduce—or if one cannot appear seductive, at least not to take a prominent spot on the public stage. By no means does everyone play along, but what is striking is how many people do. During the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal in the United States, both men and women in France questioned Bill Clinton’s judgment. That he was sexually aroused by a woman other than his wife was less of a shock than the fact that Monica Lewinsky was not especially attractive—and seemed to lack style and elegance. Men in public life, too, may be judged on their physical appearance. One reason that Barack Obama appeals to the French is his beauty. I was surprised that men—straight and gay alike—appreciate his good looks even more than women do.

The paradox is that the American quest for perfect looks is often viewed with disdain in France. A too-put-together look is a turn-off, a sign that someone is insecure and has tried too hard.

After so many years as a Paris correspondent, do you consider yourself "seduced" by France?
It depends on the day! I still get exasperated by the rigidity of so much of French life—the demand for still another obscure document to complete a dossier, the   compartmentalization of jobs that may make it necessary to be visited by three different repairmen before an oven can be fixed; the inclination to i"t’s-not-my-jobism" rather than how do I get a job done.

But I never, ever have taken living in Paris for granted. There has never been a day when I haven’t reveled in its beauty, or felt fortunate to live here. So in a sense, perhaps I have been seduced. I love to quote a character in a play by the 19th-century poet and playwright Henri de Bornier: “Every man has two countries, his own and France.” 

In my years living here, I have tried to make the country our own, even though I know that will never entirely happen. I will never think like the French, never shed my Americanness. Nor do I want to. And like an elusive lover who clings to mystery, France will never completely reveal herself to me. Even now, when I walk around a corner I anticipate that something pleasurable might happen, the next act in a process of perpetual seduction.

 

 

What do you think of when you hear the word "seduction"? Whatever it is, get ready to expand that definition after reading La Seduction, an insightful and timely exploration of French culture through its most enduring success strategy. New York Times Paris correspondant Elaine Sciolino has…

NonfictionMemoir

Alexandra Fuller

Interview by Katherine Wyrick

After chronicling her African childhood in Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller turns to the adventurous and sometimes tragic lives of her parents in Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness.

What compelled you to return to the subject of your parents’ lives in Africa?

In the decade since I wrote Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, I think age has worn me down a little and I am both kinder and less judgmental. For one thing, I have made plenty of messy mistakes with my life—it’s not easy to have dreams of your own and to make room for the dreams of your children and spouse, I see that now. If someone were to make a memoir out of my life and to focus on the messy parts, instead of the dreams that inspired the mess, I can see how hurtful that would be.

Now, with a little wisdom and time on my side, I can see that my parents’ dreams became inextricably tangled in their culture and with their core values and beliefs (many of which I don’t share—but many of which I admire). That was what drove them, and if it got us into the occasional tragedy or mess, it certainly wasn’t their intention. In that way, it seemed remiss—given the hindsight I now have—not to write another book that explored my parents’ story from their point of view: their childhoods, dreams, aspirations and beliefs.

Your mother often refers to your first memoir as “The Awful Book.” What does she think of this one?

It’s never easy to read about yourself. You think, “Well, yes, I said something like that, but that wasn’t the whole context, truth, intention of what I meant. . . .” So I can understand Mum’s hesitation at being too enthusiastic about this book, although she does seem to prefer it to Dogs about which she was initially furious!

How did you go about learning more about your parents’ younger selves? Did they cooperate in the research and writing of this book?

Mum was so cross about the first memoir. She said, “You really know nothing about me. You have no idea why I did the things I did.” And it was true—I knew very little about her family or childhood beyond the conversations that she would have with my grandmother or the things my grandmother had told me about Scotland and Kenya. So I offered to hear Mum’s side of the story and the result was a marathon multi-day interview which I taped in 2002 in Scotland.

When I got home, I put the tapes in my office and didn’t listen to them until 2009 when I had whooping cough and was in bed for 100 days, too sick to read much, and bored of the radio. So, over the course of that illness, I lay in my bed with a slight fever, eyes closed, and listened to Mum’s voice for hours and hours and gradually the shape of this book took place. I began to write it while I was still recovering from whooping cough, and then I realized that I needed Dad’s side of the story too. So a few months later, we met in South Africa and my parents talked to me for a week—again, I taped the conversations—and their story was just so much more poignant and wonderful told in their inimitable voices than I ever could have imagined.

Subsequently, as I was writing and rewriting the book, if I had questions or problems, Mum was very good at answering the phone and clarifying. I gave them the finished manuscript and they read it and were able to make objections and corrections. Mostly, though, I think they feel the book is “all right.” But I know it’s hard for them to revisit some of the very painful material—and I know Dad would prefer that wasn’t part of the book. He likes “nice” books with “happy stories,” he says.

Did you learn anything about your parents that surprised you?

I don’t think I was surprised by what they told me—some of these stories are the old standards that come out at dinner parties—but what I was surprised by was how much they have lived. “Never a dull moment,” as Dad often says.

And now with nearly 20 years of my own marriage to look back on, I am surprised—or maybe more impressed—by my parents’ unflagging commitment to one another and their support of each other nearly 50 years after they first met in Kenya. Given their lives—the death of children, war, the loss of so much, the occasional really bad decision—their continuing, dare I say deepening, love seems so miraculous.

This book is partly my parents’ love story; the way they have always been so delighted in one another, so deeply impressed by one another’s gifts, even as drought, war, madness, tragedy and bad luck ensued.

How did becoming a mother change the way you view your own childhood and see your parents?

I think I am kinder and certainly slower to judge my own parents now than I was before I had children. I also have more compassion for them: I can’t imagine surviving the loss of one of my children, let alone surviving the loss of three.

Your parents lived as expats in Africa; now you live as an expat in the United States. How are those experiences similar or different?

The whole point of Cocktail Hour is to show how my parents have made a decision to relinquish their expat status and live in Africa as Africans. This is essential: As long as they lived as expats and fought Africa (literally), their losses accumulated. Once Dad accepted that he was African (fundamentally, Mum has always been African), their lives took on something approaching peace.

I am not an expat here in the United States. I have become an American citizen. That being said, I don’t feel “American” (whatever that is), but also I don’t think living in the United States has forced me to relinquish the lessons and values I learned from my African childhood. Partly, this is because I am not an ethnic minority in this country: I am white so it is easy for me to fly under the radar as an “American.”

No one yells at me to “speak English” and no one insists that I “assimilate” because I already speak English and, at least on the surface, I appear to have assimilated just fine. In actual fact, I think I am still more African than American in my belief systems, but since “belief systems” rarely come up in casual conversation, I don’t often have to defend my values the way an obviously Hispanic or Asian or Arabic immigrant might have to.

My parents had to work at becoming African—their journey from expats to Africans is the major theme of the book. But I have not had to work at becoming an American nearly as hard. A lot of people question the place of whites in Africa but no one in America (except a wonderfully outspoken Lakota woman I met recently) has ever questioned my right to be in America as a white woman.

Of course, if I were Hispanic, or Asian, or Islamic or another obvious ethnic or religious minority, a lot of people (not just indigenous Americans) would question my right to be here. I think this is a major failing of the American culture, and one that has kept us arm-wrestling ourselves into an exhausted heap, even as the environment and the economy collapse around us.

Please tell us what animals you now have in your family—horses, dogs, hermit crabs?

I have had a tragic couple of years, so am reduced to two horses and a dog. It’s manageable, but I miss the chaos of all the animals.

You briefly allude to certain writers in your book—Isak Dinesen, Beryl Markham—how do you see yourself fitting in with this literary tradition, if at all?

I attempt to be the antidote to Isak Dinesen and Beryl Markham: the white writer who refuses to swallow the nostalgic view that it was all so wonderful under colonialism. In that way, I would hope that my African work falls more under the tradition of writers like Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Bessie Head and Chenjerai Hove.

RELATED CONTENT
Review of Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness.

After chronicling her African childhood in Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller turns to the adventurous and sometimes tragic lives of her parents in Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness.

What compelled you to return to the subject of your parents’ lives…

NonfictionFilmArts & Culture

Susan Orlean

Interview by Alden Mudge

Author Susan Orlean says she “certainly did not set out to write a book about a dog.” And, in a way, she hasn’t.

Yes, a dog—and not just any dog—is the grain around which this pearl of a book grows. But Rin Tin Tin: The Life and Legend is about so much more—world wars, movies, television, luck, devotion, the quest for immortality—that to call it simply a book about a dog is to diminish its nature and its appeal.

“Any book is a leap,” Orlean says during a call to the home in Columbia County, New York, that she and her husband and their young son will soon leave to spend a year in Los Angeles. “You have to go with your gut feeling that your curiosity is big enough and—fingers crossed and toes crossed—that the subject is big enough. An idea has to dilate the more you learn about it. There has to be the feeling of being off-kilter, of finding out things that just were not at all what you had expected. With Rin Tin Tin it felt instantly enormous. I went from thinking, oh, the television show from the 1950s, my god what a nostalgic moment, to oh my god, there was a real Rin Tin Tin? He was born in 1918? He was a silent film star? The idea grew and grew.”

Orlean traces the rise of a canine cultural hero, from the real-life pup found on a WWI battlefield to starring roles in movies and TV.

It grew so big, in fact, that the book offers a strangely riveting perspective on 20th-century America. Who knew, for example, that shortly after Pearl Harbor thousands of people donated their dogs to Dogs for Defense? One young donor, now an 81-year-old veterinarian in Louisiana, received a surprise call from Orlean, an intrepid reporter if ever there was one.

“Actually, my husband found him,” Orlean says. “He’s amazing at finding people. I thought he was probably dead. But all of a sudden my husband just handed me this phone number.” Orlean’s husband, John Gillespie, was a literature major who strayed into finance and became an investment banker. He is her first reader, shares her love of Faulkner and is the reason for their move to the West Coast.

Orlean, a staff writer for the New Yorker and author of seven previous books, including the bestseller The Orchid Thief, spent considerable time in Los Angeles researching her latest work. The original Rin Tin Tin and his descendants track the rise of American popular entertainment, from silent movies, to talkies, to television, and Orlean finds a way to swiftly and entertainingly chart the arc of those changes.

The Los Angeles area was also home to the two human stars of the book. Lee Duncan, who spent part of his childhood in an orphanage, found the original Rin Tin Tin as a newborn pup in a bombed-out German kennel in the waning days of World War I. The find transformed Duncan and gave him a single-minded sense of purpose to make his extraordinary dog into a star. Years later, Herbert “Bert” Leonard became similarly entranced by the idea of Rin Tin Tin and developed the popular television program. In Orlean’s telling, their stories are remarkable and moving.

“I felt enormous tenderness toward both of them because they were very flawed people with a tremendous capacity for loyalty and a kind of devotion that sometimes seemed very wrongheaded,” she says. “But I think what happens in life is that there are certain people who turn their lives into a vessel for carrying something forward that the rest of us then enjoy. I think Lee had a fundamental loneliness; even when he was an old man he seemed like the same little boy who lost his dog. Bert was a character, a very different type of guy with a messed-up personal life. But his principles were really admirable. They were both amazingly principled. They felt that there was something really special about this idea and this dog and it shouldn’t be cheapened or sold to the highest bidder.”

Orlean says she, too, came under the spell of Rin Tin Tin, the silent film actor. “When I read all these reviews saying he was an amazing actor I thought, well that’s so silly. Seeing the movies was amazing, because he really is credible. There are scenes where he’s suffering and you think, oh my god how could they do this to a dog? I mean, he is really good. And his face is very intelligent. German Shepherds are not goofy. They have a pretty serious face and it’s a really different emotion they convey just looking at you.”

Not only are German Shepherds not goofy, but Orlean discovered that they were bred into existence in 1899, and that their breeder fell afoul of the Nazis, who wanted to control the pedigree of their favorite dog.

“Isn’t that weird!” Orlean exclaims. “I almost died. You think of them as so classic, the ur-dog. And you think they’ve been around forever. The idea that they were engineered and within recent history was just amazing to me.”

It’s stories within stories like this one that make Rin Tin Tin such a compelling read. And thinking about these stories, she says, “resonated in a much deeper—forgive me if this sounds pretentious—sort of spiritual way. The only things that last forever are ideas that keep being carried forward, ideas that move us in some way. The first Rin Tin Tin lived a normal dog life, but the idea of this character and the idea that you could feel inspired and moved by this character kept being carried forward.

“I do think everybody is striving either overtly or not so overtly to live forever,” Orlean says. “Whether it’s by having children, writing a book or making a lot of money and naming something after themselves. The human impulse is to fight against mortality. So I think Lee and Bert were right, that Rin Tin Tin did live forever. And now I feel in my own way that I’m carrying it forward.”

Author Susan Orlean says she “certainly did not set out to write a book about a dog.” And, in a way, she hasn’t.

Yes, a dog—and not just any dog—is the grain around which this pearl of a book grows. But Rin Tin Tin: The Life…

NonfictionPop CultureLiteratureArts & Culture

Stephen Greenblatt

Interview by Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Stephen Greenblatt, perhaps best known for his Shakespeare biography Will in the World, now takes readers on a journey to the philosophical heart of the Renaissance in his latest book, The Swerve.

At the center of your book is the Roman philosopher and poet Lucretius and his poem De Rerum Natura (“On the Nature of Things”). What led you to focus on this poem?
I’m fascinated by the fact that the great ancient speculations about the nature of the material world—the existence of atoms, the creation of the universe through random collisions, the absence of a providential design, the absurdity of any fear of the gods—were carried by a magnificent poem.

What do you mean by “the swerve”?
Lucretius uses the term (his favorite Latin word for it was clinamen, as in the root of English words like inclination, declination, etc.) to describe a shift in the direction of the atoms. It only takes the tiniest such swerve—as in the famous example of the wings of butterfly—to bring about enormous and unexpected changes. For Lucretius the existence of such swerves is what makes human freedom possible—since otherwise, everything would move in lockstep.

The Swerve takes up in many ways from your groundbreaking earlier book, Renaissance Self-Fashioning. What led you to write this new book now?
You are certainly right that in one way or another I’ve been thinking for many years about the strange events that lead from one cultural epoch to another. How does a whole culture alter its deepest assumptions about the world? What happens to change the way men and women live their lives? Such questions are at once tantalizing and very difficult to answer—so I’ve returned to them again and again.

The other hero of your book is a little-known Florentine notary and papal secretary named Poggio Bracciolini. How did Poggio discover Lucretius’ manuscript, and how did he preserve it?
Poggio was a book-hunter, the greatest of his age, perhaps the greatest who ever lived. He discovered a 9th-century manuscript of the poem in the library of a German monastery. He ordered a scribe to transcribe it and send the transcription to Florence, where it was copied more carefully by a learned friend.

Did you follow in Poggio’s footsteps in your research? What were some of your favorite places for research?
I did spend time in some of the places dear to Poggio: his birthplace Terranuova (now Terranuova Bracciolini), though that is now, thanks to World War II damage, a sad relic of what it once was; nearby Arezzo; his beloved Florence (including Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library); the Vatican. My favorite place for the writing was the elegant library of the American Academy in Rome, on the top of the Janiculum Hill overlooking the whole city.

Did you learn anything that surprised you while writing The Swerve?
I was constantly surprised: by the way in which ancient books were copied; by the organization of the great classical libraries; by the monastic cult of pain; by the vitriolic loathing of early humanists; by the intellectual daring of a few Renaissance readers of Lucretius who were willing to risk persecution and death.

You first read Lucretius on a summer vacation from college. What led you to pick up the poem after all these years?
I had actually had it in mind to work on Lucretius for many years, but I always held back because I felt I did not know enough. I still don’t, but I knew that I was running out of time!

How has “On the Nature of Things” influenced the thinking of writers and artists beyond the Renaissance?
Probably the most direct influence was on the writers and artists of the Enlightenment, people like Diderot or Voltaire or Locke who were able to encounter the excitement of the poem without so intense a fear of imprisonment and death. But the influence has extended well beyond the 18th century. For example, in the modern era, Lucretius was a powerful influence on the great Portuguese poet Pessoa, the Italian novelist and short story writer Italo Calvino, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges and the French intellectual Michel Foucault.

What does Lucretius have to say to us today?
I will not try to say in a sentence or two everything that it has taken me a whole book to write. But perhaps at the center of what Lucretius has to say—to me at least—is a calm acceptance of mortality conjoined with the enhanced experience of wonder and pleasure.

What’s next for you?
At the moment I’m writing a short book about Shakespeare and the idea of life—a book influenced more by contemporary evolutionary biology than by the ancient Lucretius.

Stephen Greenblatt, perhaps best known for his Shakespeare biography Will in the World, now takes readers on a journey to the philosophical heart of the Renaissance in his latest book, The Swerve.

At the center of your book is the Roman philosopher and…

MemoirArts & Culture

Stephen Sondheim

Interview by Jay MacDonald

It is well-nigh impossible to take composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim out of the theater or the theater out of Stephen Sondheim.

At 81, the august talent behind such indelible Broadway musicals as A Little Night Music, Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum has just completed Look, I Made a Hat (Collected Lyrics 1981-2011), his second and final compendium of reflections, digressions and harangues that began with last year’s bestseller, Finishing the Hat (Collected Lyrics 1954-1981).

Neither conforms to the conventions of memoir. Instead, ever the showman, Sondheim places his lyrics center-stage, preferring to confine his comments and observations to expansive play introductions, boxed marginalia and occasional carping from the cheap seats. It’s a wonderfully theatrical way of describing his artistic process without revealing overly much about the personal life of a very private artist.

“If I’d wanted to write a memoir, I would have, but I don’t, and I didn’t,” Sondheim teases in what he calls volume two’s “reintroduction.” Later in the same chapter, he warns us, “Writing is a form of mischief.”

Having just completed what he admits was an arduous and sometimes uncomfortable diversion into introspective prose, how does it feel to be free of it?

“Funny you should ask; curiously enough, very depressing!” he replies in a voice that sounds half its age. “No, I’m suffering; I’m having post-partum. I didn’t expect it but there it is. I guess I enjoyed it more than I thought.”
Sondheim’s journey to Broadway began at age 10, when he became best friends with Jamie Hammerstein, son of Broadway musical legend Oscar Hammerstein II (South Pacific, The King & I, Carousel, The Sound of Music). In high school, Sondheim began writing musicals and would ask the elder Hammerstein to critique them. His big break came when he was hired to write the lyrics to Leonard Bernstein’s score that became West Side Story.

He was 27 when the Jets and the Sharks rumbled onto the Great White Way in 1957. What was it like to be a Broadway rage at such a tender age?

“I wasn’t ‘a rage’ after West Side Story; I was strictly treated like a minor player,” Sondheim recalls, speaking by phone from his home in New York City. “I wasn’t ‘a rage’ until Company [1970]. Prior to that, I got terrible reviews and was dismissed and condescended to.”

Ironically, West Side Story, perhaps his best-known musical, remains an embarrassment for its lyricist.
“I liked the show, but my own work is very self-conscious and florid,” he says. “It’s the kind of lyric writing I don’t cotton to; it’s so written with a capital W. It’s what Lenny [Bernstein] wanted; he wanted poetry with a capital P, and his idea of poetry and mine were just two different things. But I was 25 years old and I wanted everybody to be happy.”

Sondheim became the toast of Broadway in the 1970s as a result of hit collaborations with producer/
director Harold “Hal” Prince, including Company, Follies, A Little Night Music (which produced 1975’s Grammy Song of the Year, “Send in the Clowns”) and Sweeney Todd, Tony winners all. In 1981—the dividing point between his two volumes—Sondheim broke from his own traditions to embark on more experimental fare, beginning with the breakthrough Sunday in the Park with George, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1985.

When asked to name his favorite musicals, Sondheim says, “If I had to choose one to take on a desert island, it would be Forum because I never failed to have a good time at it. I could see that every night if I were on a desert island.” As for those he’s proudest of, Sondheim expresses a preference for his more experimental works.
“Sunday in the Park with George is one. Assassins is another, which is Americana, which I never thought I could really get my arms around. And Pacific Overtures, which is one I was sure I couldn’t do. The more exotic ones are the ones that I was surprised that I was able to do.”

With an embarrassment of industry honors that includes eight Grammys, eight Tonys, a Pulitzer and an Academy Award for Best Song, Sondheim would seem, in the words of his boyhood idol, to have climbed every mountain. Might retirement be tempting at 81?

“No. At the moment, I’m not working on anything, but now that the book is finished as of three weeks ago, I’m getting restless and I’ve got to get to work,” he admits. “Work is part of life. The important thing is to get to the piano. That’s the important thing.”

It is well-nigh impossible to take composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim out of the theater or the theater out of Stephen Sondheim.

At 81, the august talent behind such indelible Broadway musicals as A Little Night Music, Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd and A Funny Thing Happened…

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