Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Exile on Pain Street

Episode Date: October 6, 2020

Six months later and still in France your host tries to make sense of his situation: Refugee? Exile? Retiree? Plus a conversation about the writing life with novelist Todd London whose new book was published just as the Coronavirus shut the world down.

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called Exile on Pound Street. It's been six months since we left New York. And now, I'm in school. I'm taking French immersion at the University of La Rochelle. It's a class for foreigners like me who might stay in France. There are 13 of us in the class, and we come from all over the world. Nigeria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Syria,

Colombia, Georgia, Mongolia, Poland, and the USA. When the teacher's out of the room, we all speak to each other in English. We talk about who we are and where we come from. Everyone wants to know why I'm here in La Rochelle if I live in New York. I've yet to find the correct words in French or in English. Arcto's in school as well. We've enrolled the kid in the elementary school here on the island, the Ekholmaternal.

But on the first day of class, I had to bring him on my own, because Mathilde was working in Stockholm. There are 23 kids in his class, and on that first day, 23 sets of parents standing outside. And as we waited for the doors to open, Arcto pulled me down and whispered, Please, Papa, don't speak. This way, no one will know you can't parler français. I shared this story with my classmates as an answer to the why are you here question,

but I'm not sure it translated. We all wear masks, so I only have access to their eyes. And sure, while the eyes may be the window to the soul, I'm finding it impossible to read people who have half their face blocked off. The other day, during one of our breaks, Fauzi, the Indonesian, took off his mask to smoke, and it was as if I saw him for the first time. It was shocking. For the first time, I felt like I was on the other side of something I know very well. The disappointing and confusing discovery that the person attached to a voice doesn't look anything like you imagined. It's unclear how long the university will remain open.

The numbers are shooting up all over France. There are even rumors that there will be another shutdown. Next week, they're going to set up a mobile COVID testing lab for the entire campus. Someone in the class across the hall has been coughing for almost a week and a half now. But I don't think the students are the problem. The university students all seem to understand the need for social distancing and masks. Even the ones on bicycles,

riding by themselves, wear a mask. It's the high school students who are the problem. Every morning I drive past the high school and I see two to three hundred kids horsing around piled up on top of each other and no masks. I know I must sound like a ranting old man, but thanks to these selfish and irresponsible kids I can't take the bus to school. Yeah, there's a bus with a stop one block from my house and a stop five minutes away from my classroom. And the schedule is perfect.

I could even use my time on the bus to do my homework. But on the one day I took this bus, on the way home, 50 of these high school kids boarded with me. And they crammed into all the seats and the aisles. And of course, all of them took their masks off once they paid their fare. This is when I realized the bus doesn't have any windows. So I drive. I drive in traffic. I drive in provincial early morning traffic.

It's totally absurd. I feel like a refugee, an exile from my real life. I feel like Joseph Roth. In February 1933, the day Hitler became Chancellor, the writer Joseph Roth fled Germany for France. Soon after, he wrote to his friend, the writer Stefan Zweig, who had yet to accept the severity of the situation. Dear Stephen, Joseph wrote, Don't fool yourself. Hell reigns. I first read this story in a book of Joseph Roth essays last year.

It was a Sunday morning. I was hungover and sitting on my floor. And when I put the book down, I thought to myself, I wonder if I would be able to see the signs and know when it would be time to flee. And just as I had this thought, I looked out the window and I discovered that the Humvee-driving, Trump-loving guy across the street was hammering a giant, big-ass American flag into the balcony railing of his building. You might remember this story. I talked about it in an episode of the podcast I did last December called The Great Divide.

My downstairs neighbors sent me a few photos the other day. The flag is still there. The other day in French class, our teacher had each of us stand up and describe the flag of our country. My flag is red, white and blue, with 50 stars. I've returned to Joseph Roth, curious about what he wrote after landing in France in 1933. In 1934, he wrote what I think is one of his best pieces on the Nazis. It's called The Third Reich, Agency of Hell on Earth. This is how it opens. For 17 months now, we have got used to the fact that in Germany, more blood has been spilled than the printer's ink required to write about it.

Since the gruesome arrival of the Third Reich, truth always climaxes in not being exposed. And in contradiction to the famous proverb, the lie gets you a whole lot further. It no longer follows on the heels of truth. It precedes it. In a way, this essay is an extension of the letter Joseph Roth wrote to his friend Stefan Zweig. But this time, Roth is penning a eulogy not just for their personal writing careers, but rather a eulogy for all writing. Thank you. A couple of months ago, a friend of mine told me about a friend of his, a writer named Todd London, a writer who was distraught over his novel's publication date. Todd's book came out just as the coronavirus shut the world down. It's hard for me in a way even to talk about it, Benjamin, because I think the struggle

for me personally has been not putting myself out there the way I encourage other writers to. So even being the center of the story seems a little strange. Todd London heads the MFA playwriting program at the New School. And for many years, he was the artistic director at the New Dramatist Guild. And while he spent a lot of time working with playwrights, his debut novel was his first chance to step into the spotlight as a writer. My terror in life as this kind of facilitator, artistic director, was that I would be a shadow artist my whole life. One of the great things about the immediate response to the novel was that the writers who I was working with

just showered me with love for it. So I was in a writing community in which I was not the writer, but I was the facilitator leader. And suddenly I was a writer among writers. So you really felt like this was going to be a successful debut. Oh, this was, it was huge.

We had a big party at Neutromatist. There were maybe a hundred people there. I was doing book signings and appearances, all that sort of stuff. Reviews in the Washington Post, the LA Times. So it was a moment of great emotion and expectation around the book. And then, then September 11th happened. Yeah, Todd London's written two novels. And his first, which is called The World's Room, was published just before September 11, 2001. So I know this is kind of a crazy question, but I'm curious.

When you think back to that day, which I know was mostly terror, confusion, alarms, stress. Was there ever a moment when you were able to think about what this meant for you, you know, in relation to your book and your debut? I don't think so. I think that everything was overwhelmed that day. I mean, I thought about, I went to work, I saw the towers burning from the F train. My son and then wife walked, tried to walk to his school, which was in like two neighborhoods away, and turned back when people started walking from Brooklyn Heights with masks covering their faces because the dust of the towers was crossing the river there.

I don't think I had a thought for myself in my book. I think I had been an underground writer and I went underground again. I mean, immediately. I think there was no, it felt in bad taste, as it does now, in a way, to think about, oh, well, what about my book signings? Well, what about my review? Well, what about my readings? I love to read. I mean, I know, I know, and I understand like how, you know, you want to make sure you qualify that. But I also feel that tragedies affect all of us. Tragedies affect everyone in different ways. only really gets you know one shot to be a debut writer yeah you know and and and for someone who spent you know years maybe even if not a decade toiling on yeah work i feel it's pretty fair

to be worried about that i feel it's pretty fair to feel like this is a tragedy. I do. Yeah. Well, that wasn't how I dealt with it. I dealt with it by burying, I think, my ambitions. I mean, it took me 18 years to write this new novel. And it is a book about buried trauma and its effect on the next generation. But I never allowed myself ambitions for the second book after the first experience. Well, let's talk about the new book. It's called If You See Him, Let Me Know. I read the whole thing in one sitting the other night. But there's one scene in particular that kind of stood out for me. So most of the new novel takes place at this summer camp, and there's this competition, like a talent show. And two of the boys, two characters, write this skit,

and they think it's going to be like the most funniest, amazing, award-winning thing ever. But they don't get to perform it because on the night before the talent show, the theater goes up in flames. And, you know, I have to say, like my eyes kind of like bugged out when I came to this part. I'm like, huh, I've heard this story before.

That's amazing. It's a connection I haven't made, but of course it's true. And so even though it's unlike me, the character takes this incredibly personally and the loss of the opportunity to do this skit, which is really what it is, becomes the thing around which all of his disappointments

and his trauma and his grief and his fears for his father and everything sort of coagulate. And he carries it seemingly for a long time. Well, you know, it seems a little absurd to me that this is a connection you're just making from September 11th. It's kind of amazing that you made that connection and I didn't. Okay. So, you know, you didn't give up. You spent 18 years writing a new book.

Yeah. And this time I'm curious as you start to see your publication date coming up and the news starting to bubble up about this thing called COVID-19. What is going through your head? Yeah. Take us back to January, February. Well, we're getting ready for February 28th. Yeah. Publication. And I think this is where me being a theater person really comes in. What I realized was the most exciting thing to me, and one of the things that I loved most in the world after the first book came out, was doing readings of it. Because it was my chance to theatricalize, in a way, the writing that I'd been doing so privately. And one of my actual regrets about the first book was that I didn't read it at my big book party, that I had an actor read it, because

I love reading my work. So part of what was happening in February this year was like, okay, it's coming out. And I was just so excited to put the book in the world and then read from it. So I was ready for that moment, which was going to be March 1st. And then slowly, gradually, it begins to dawn on us that none of it's going to happen. The friends I know who are touring books come off the road, go home, stay home. There are no signings. There are no bookstores. There are no bookstores. There's no bookstores. So anyone who's going to find out about it has to find out about it

from me on the internet. Even the publisher, everybody goes home and they put out of office replies on the marketing department. It's like, we'll get back to you as soon as we can we know you're really concerned about all this so are we but we're working from home do you know so everything kind of involutes or collapses in some way this must be giving you just crazy flashbacks you, it's almost like it's just... So 1988 to 2020, the trajectory of these two books, what is that, 32 years? That, to me, is just the experience of being a novelist. That is my experience of being a novelist. That is my experience of being a novelist, that it doesn't, it isn't even dramatic. I mean, I made, my voice got all pumped up and I sounded, you know, like it was leading up to

something and then it fizzles. But the fizzle is the all in a strange way in my mind. You're really selling the writing life here everyone who hears this is going to go rush out and be like you know what I'm going to be a novelist right I'm not saying you should stop writing Todd in fact I hope you do

keep at it but oh, what's going to happen when your next book comes out? Yeah, really. I got a message from an old friend of mine, I hadn't heard from in years, who remembered the timetable of the first and he was like, I just bought your novel. Don't write another, please. The world can't take it. Well, let's go back to that book reading that you didn't get to do. How about we end our conversation with you doing a little reading right here? Fantastic. So the book has been out since the end of February. This is actually my first reading, so thank you. The book takes place at a musical theater camp in the Midwest, in Wisconsin. The camp is called Friedkin, and the crossroads moment of the book is the resignation of Richard Nixon in August of 1974.

What I'm going to read takes place right after they've dragged a big black and white television into the lobby of the main building, which is, as everything there is named after musical, it's called Anatevka, after the place in Fiddler on the Roof. And the older kids and the counselors and the staff watch Nixon resign, and then all hell breaks loose on the campgrounds. I think that's all you need to know. Nixon's resignation and the air of festivity surrounding it looses the spirit of anarchy on the grounds of Friedkin. There are shadows everywhere, among the trees guarding the camp perimeter,

in the fields where the red ash glow of cigarettes mimics the wink from the thousand stars that pierce the black sky with thrilling light, the archery pit, train tracks, deadly butcher's house in the woods, arts and crafts barn, a.k. Plain and Fancy, Waterfront Cops, Stacks of Hay Behind the Cabin, My Fair Lady. In these crevices and others you can hear breathing, footsteps, soft laughter, feverish whispers, teenagers galore, dispersed and dispersing,

jazzed as bees and juicy as mouths full of fruit-striped gum. Bottles have been opened, shirts have been unbuttoned, lips are being kissed, souls bared, and retainers stowed in plastic snap cases. It's like something out of Shakespeare's Arcadian plays, where the young flit and dart, plot and become objects of plotting, fall in and out of love, and wait desperately, rocking on their heels for some magic to touch their achy hearts, and all because Nixon is gone. History has trumped protocol, and even the counselors have gone errant. They celebrate over beers in town or mill in clumps around

Tobacco Road and green fields in the center of the campgrounds, talking excitedly. They were young teenagers when Nixon was first elected, and they recount rallies they attended and eulogized friends of friends who were arrested marching on the Pentagon or at the Dow Chemical protest at Madison. They pepper their conversation with phrases from Jefferson Airplane songs. In other words, they revel in the president's downfall because they helped make it happen, if not by direct action, then, at least, by their choice of clothes and tastes in music. No, tonight belongs to any dreamer willing to grab it.

You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called Exile on Palm Street. This episode was written and produced by me, Benjamin Walker, and Andrew Calloway, and it featured Todd London, the author of the new book, If You See Him, Let Me Know. Yours truly also has a new book. It's called Convolution, and it's my very first work of audio fiction. You can find it on Audible. It's one of their Audible originals, and it features this incredible cast,

including Ray Sehorne and William Jackson Harper. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts. You can find them all at Radiotopia.fm. Radiotopia. From PRX.