Ideas - New Yorker Writer Calvin Trillin: A Warm Weather Nova Scotian

Episode Date: September 13, 2024

New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin calls himself one-sixth Canadian. For 55 years, he and his family have spent their summers in Nova Scotia — what he calls: The Home Place. IDEAS producer Mary Lynk spoke to the 88-year-old author about everything from Trump to the layered Yiddish word: Meeskite.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. There's an interesting species that has flopped to Nova Scotia every summer for decades.

Celebrated New York artists and writers. Sophisticated urbanites who first started coming to Nova Scotia in the late 1960s. Attracted to its startling beauty and back then, affordable oceanfront properties with room for studios and writing rooms. Everyone from the composer Philip Glass to the artist Joan Jonas, who's just had a major retrospective at the MoMA, New York's Museum of Modern Art, to the late sculptor Richard Serra, photographer Robert Frank, and actor Alan Arkin. This group ended up on the west coast of Cape Breton.

But on the opposite end of the province, far down on the south shore in the small village of Port Medway, is another summer transplant from the Big Apple. My name is Calvin Trillin. I live in New York part of the time and in Nova Scotia part of the time. He first arrived in the fishing community with his family on holiday 55 years ago and soon after bought a 19th century home there. Every year since, from July to August, he finds refuge there,

tucked away on Port Medway's back inlet. Trillin is well known for his wit and insight as a journalist, author, and a cherished New Yorker staff writer. His pointed memoir on his late wife, About Alice, is among his many books. His latest book, The Lead, Dispatches from a Life in the Press, is a collection of his writings over the years. Ideas producer Mary Link lives down the shore from Calvin Trillin, or Bud as his friends call him. In late August, Mary popped by Port Medway to ask Trillin a couple of questions for our upcoming documentary on Joan Jonas. Testing 1, 2, 3, testing, testing. Okay, can you say testing? Testing 1, 2, 3. Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3.

After a few minutes, Trillin had finished answering the questions about Joan. But then he kept talking, and at 88, he has a lot to muse on. So Mary kept the tape running as they sat on his sunny back porch, high on a grassy hill overlooking the ocean below. A dwelling that despite spending most of his time in New York, he calls the home place. Okay, so I just want to say something to the listening audience. Okay.

That you're like one of my writing heroes. Oh, thank you. And here I am finally sitting down with you, but I'm not prepared in the least. Instead, we're just having this accidental conversation. And I just have to say that because you're so incredibly insightful and delightful, that we're just going to make it what I did on my summer holiday essay for ideas. So that we'll air it for the first week in ideas or the first couple weeks.

So it's professional in one sense because I'm taping you. Right. But beyond that, it's a very avant-garde contemporary journalism. Right. Okay. I'm prepared for that. Here's our pop-up interview with Calvin Trillin on everything from what defines Americans if Trump wins to his love of the Yiddish word miskite and its intriguing double meaning. You came here first when? We came in 1969

and rented a place and went to the home of a man named Laurie Klatenberg. He happened to be outside working or something. And eventually, he said, is there anything for sale here? After about an hour, he said, well, Juanita Morine might sell you Dell's place. And I said, where is it? And he said, you can see it. See the roof. And you can't quite see our boathouse, which is down that hill. The first summer here was 1972. I actually wrote a column once saying that I lived in Canada two months a year, so I should be one-sixth of Canadian content. It's true.

Why do you think, like sometimes I wonder, like there's so many New York artists at that time and writers, Philip Glass, then Joan and Richard Serra are up in Cape Breton. You're here. So something that draws you here, is there something that, is there sensibility that fits in with a New Yorker? I don't think so. No? I think it's, I think it's, well, I have a cynical view of that. I think it's people having to find land somewhere. And then also, I think Canadians in general are very pleasant to be around. There was a description of Canadians as being Americans with the mean taken out.

And Abigail was trying to get something done. Your daughter. Yeah, in New York. And Abigail was trying to get something done. Your daughter. Yeah, in New York. Something about the assessment of our house is a real sort of call and wait on the menu for a long time situation. And she lives in San Francisco. She was talking to this guy in New York on the phone. And she said, he was so nice that if he hadn't had that New York accent I would have thought he was Canadian and they and they loved the Halifax airport oh really yeah because

it's just laid back it's laid back everybody's pleasant and uh airports are usually such tense places particularly in New York. In our case, I think we just, we didn't want to go to one of the places where people like us, where it was a big summer thing or anything. Montauk. Yeah, and the Hamptons or anything like that. And it was great for us partly because I realized it was one of the places, about the only place where we had the girls to ourselves really

because we weren't going off to a party or anything. I mean, the changes in Port Medway are huge, and particularly these years when I've been by myself, better for me than the way it used to be. When at some point my family was basically this summer colony, all by ourselves, except all the smiths. There were some retired colonels here, but other than that. And we came back from the village

where Abigail had to give a pie plate back somewhere. And as we got to the thing, I thought, God, when we first got here, somebody called me from a Canadian magazine. It must have been Maclean's or Saturday Night, I don't know, one of them, and said they were doing a piece on American art colonies in Canada.

And they wanted to ask me about Port Medway. And I said, either you're having a little joke with me or somebody's having a little joke with you. And he said, no, I understand that there's a film festival that the various artists make films in your barn. It's called the Krillin Retrospective.

In other words, the family's home movies. And nobody else is allowed to show a movie in our barn. But now there's readings in Seilly Hall. It's changed Nova Scotia. It's been discovered.

I think that's, yeah. Port Bedway has changed somewhat from when the Trillins were one of the only summer residents in the village. The population undergoes a bump every summer when the come-from-aways, as we call them down here, arrive. Often from places such as Toronto or the States, there's now an annual writers' festival every August and a gift shop on the main street. But it remains a village of mostly long-time locals, and lobster fishing is still an important economic driver.

It's not the same as another so-short village a couple hours away, Chester, which is sort of Canada's version of the Hamptons, full of yachts and stately summer residents, a short drive to is sort of Canada's version of the Hamptons, full of yachts and stately summer residents, a short drive to the city of Halifax. But for the most part, rural Nova Scotia remains a down-to-earth place of random kindness, humor, and relatively modest incomes. And the Trillin's home has the unassuming wooden bones of a traditional East Coast host circa mid-1800s. Not flashy, very Nova Scotian. They fit in well. How has it impacted you, do you think, as a person living here all these years in the summertime?

Well, first thing is, this for us is what people in the Midwest would call the home place. There's a kind of a center. A lot has to do with Nova Scotia. And the girls used to bring boyfriends up here. And the question was, did he get Nova Scotia? Did he understand what we were doing here? And some of them passed and some of them didn't. doing here. And some of them passed and some of them didn't. And somebody who's actually just left town, but thought that instead of saying home of Carol Baker, which is what it says on the sign, it should say, Gordon Hath is what it says on the sign. It should say,

Gordon Hedway, it's not for everyone. And that's true. It's true. I mean, my sister came here and she hated it. Did she? What is she going to do here? There's no shopping. Well, you can shop at Frenchies.

You can go to Frenchies. Which I did a piece about. Frenchies is a famous secondhand, but very loosely secondhand place where they used to be in piles of clothes. Piles, yes. They're fancied up a little bit more. Now they hang them. Exactly.

They're on racks now. But there was a man between here and where you go to Gene's house who had scarecrows in his yard. In fact, he's in the book on Nova Scotia's Scarecrows. Have you seen that? It's a fantastic title. It's outstanding in their fields. This is a very personal question, but you wrote so eloquently about your wife Alice, who is very much the love of your life and beautiful, beautiful woman and brilliant and passed away. Do you feel her presence here more or more in New York?

More here. More here? Yeah. How come, do you think? New York? Or is it more here? Yeah. How come, do you think? Well, because we were, I think we weren't as,

there weren't as many things going on. But more here. There is an intimacy about summertime, too, isn't there? Well, I said that gathering blueberries with your grandchildren in the same place you gather them with your children is very satisfying.

And what a man who I used to refer to as the only wise rabbi used to say, it's a matter of continuity. And you find things all the time that you're, oh yeah, I forgot about it. I mean, remember the time we did this and that. So yeah, it's been great for us. And yeah, she loved it. Here's an excerpt from the original article that Kelvin wrote about Alice,

first published in March of 2006. And it's the last paragraph in the essay, which, if you haven't read it, I suggest reading. A week and a half before, Alice had died of cardiac arrest. For a while, she seemed to be recuperating. We were able to spend the summer in Nova Scotia this time. But in late August, she began to feel weaker. She died while waiting in the heart failure unit of Columbia

Presbyterian Hospital to see if she would be eligible for a heart transplant. The doctor said that her heart had been destroyed by radiation. In other words, you could say that she died of the treatment rather than the disease. Presumably though, it was also the treatment that, against horrifying odds, gave her 25 years of life. I know what Alice, the incorrigible and ridiculous optimist, would have said about a deal that allowed her to see her girls grow up. 25 years, I'm so lucky. I try to think of it in those terms, too. Some days I can, and some days I can't. Is it melancholic to leave?

Is this time of the year when you're leaving? We're talking on a Monday, you're leaving on Wednesday to go back? I mean, it's wonderful. You're going back to New York City. I mean, that's another fantastic spot. But is there a melancholy at the end of the summer into leaving Nova Scotia or no? I don't think so. In those days, you could feel New York sort of coming alive in September, the new shows on Broadway and et cetera, et cetera.

So I was saying, yeah, we'll go back. And then I used to, for 15 years, all of those years we were here, I used to do a piece every three weeks for the New Yorker, except in the summer in July and August. And so I was sort of ready to start the pieces again. I would write longer things here. Yeah, I was sort of eager to get back to doing those stories. Well, you have a lot to be eager about going back to right now. Are you feeling a little bit relieved? Yes. Yes.

May the evil eye be too busy elsewhere with horrible schemes to hear this. I'm now, if I had to bet now, I would bet that Kamala Harris is going to win. I had to emcee an event just after Trump won in 16. I think it was the Nation or some left-wing thing. And I said, the election had just been a couple weeks after the election. And I said, if I seem less depressed than most of the people in this room, it's because I already have a house in Canada. But you know what?

I think there would have been a big exit. Well, we don't know what's going to happen. But if he does get in. That might be because now the people around him also know how to pull which levers and everything. And he doesn't have those people like those generals that he employed usually. Who actually have some moral compass. Well, you know, he's a unique character. And I'm thinking, okay, so if he loses his elections,

that's it for him for running for president. But he's hard to replace in terms of that kind of charismatic person that people will follow, I think, don't you? Like, he's rare. They're kind of rare, those creatures. Oh, he's definitely rare. So it maybe gives us more hope for the republicans that will maybe figure things out there's some elements of

huey long yes who always said you know they're making fun of us and they call us wool hats and and everything and uh yeah it's a resentment thing that, and he's just a dreadful human being. Jesus. Then he said at one point that he was prettier than. Oh, come on. Unfortunately, he is amusing. He's, you know, he's a showman in that sense. But it's not so much him that I worry about is that the fact that people vote for him that I worry about. No, exactly.

And I've said all along now, the first time he won, you could say, well, it was a quirk, and Hillary wasn't a very good candidate, might have been a good president, but wasn't a very good candidate, and there was the business with the emails, etc. But if he wins this time, that's who we are. That's who half of the country believes should run the country.

This bozo. But there's also, he never wins the, only I think Bush lately had the overall vote. It was always Democrats. But then you think of all the gerrymandering and the manipulation. Oh yeah, and the czar

electoral college. There's yeah. And the czar electoral college. There's a column in the Times by Rachel Maddow about what worries her most about the election, and that is Georgia made a rule basically that the county voting commission can ask for an investigation. Anyway, the way they've done it, it looks like they can delay it for a long time and then eventually not count those and so yeah it's part of that part of you know i don't know what what the percentage is about how many votes montana has compared to new york or california so, I don't think it's in the bag, but she seems to be inching ahead.

And also, I think he's going to get crazier and crazier. And the crowd size thing, where he says he had more people there than Martin Luther King, or that she had used artificial intelligence to create a crowd. I mean, that's really crazy stuff. But why, do you know what, my cousin lived in Cedar Rapids, and he's wonderful, and I just loved him. So his family's from here, originally Lebanese, so Muslim background.

I'm not practicing, but Muslim background. But that was his identity, and his skin was a bit on the brown side like me and he voted for trump it's like he wouldn't sit down the table with you he's trying to kick them all like what what and it's it's almost like there's a cultish thing with politics it's more it goes deep to his father voted republican so he voted republican so they can't let go of that adherence to that party and and then just get swept into Trump. Yeah. Well, my high school friends in Kansas City, I just got an email from one of them who said,

who I think they may have voted for Trump the first time, but he said, we're voting for Kamala. So we don't say that to our friends who are still Trumpists because they all have guns. Have you gone to a dinner party in New York? No, I've never. I think in New York it would be an odd thing to say. Also, in New York, we had experience with him for a long time before. I mean, you know, he was somebody who pretended to be the PR guy who was saying that Trump

should be on the billionaires list or something. Did you ever meet him? I met him once. I was at, um, what was the name of that place? Japanese restaurant in Tribeca. Nobu? Nobu. It was Nobu.

And there were about five or six people at the table, and he passed by and he stopped to talk to, well, I guess he knew one of them. And so everybody was introduced. And what I remember about it is even then, this was way before he was running for president, I think it was Ruth Reichel's husband, Michael Singer, wouldn't shake hands with him, with Trump, because he says, he's a thief.

And the way he called her, the other day he called her a lunatic, Kamala. I mean, it's just such a playground, childish thing, and you think, God, why would anybody vote for somebody like that? What happened to America, do you think? What happened to your country in that sense? That someone like Trump is coming back for a second time. I think there's always been, and there are a lot of different elements in this. One of them is race. And I'm pro-immigrant because I'm from an immigrant family, really.

My father was born in Ukraine, and everybody, all my relatives were all immigrants. They fled Ukraine? I guess, yeah. They didn't talk much about it. It's interesting how that generation didn't talk about pain. And also, I spent the first year of having a more or less real job in the South covering the civil rights struggle. And I tend to think of things about the racial part of it. I mean, everything he said, I mean, like, close the door to Muslim country immigrants.

Stephen Miller assisted the same background I do. The only way to describe Stephen Miller is a Yiddish word, shanda. What does that mean? It means disgrace. Also a disgrace that you can't do anything about because it's just so

disgraceful. Or when he talks about immigrants from Norway. Anyway. do anything about because it's just so disgraceful or when he talks about immigrants from norway anyway uh oh yeah it's very and when he said when he went to the black journalist group yeah and he said you know we're going to stop the immigration because the mexicans and the various people coming are taking the black jobs yeah he can't help himself he doesn't understand even what's in what's insulting and what is no and and uh but yeah it's do you think he's smart i mean he says he's smart but do you think he's smart or do you think he's like what do you would like i'm trying to figure out his brain i've had those conversations i don't think he's smart although although who's the guy from Harvard who says there are seven types of intelligence, and you might have one and not the other, or half of one and two.

And so I guess maybe he's shrewd. Or he's charismatic. As you say, he's a good showman. And he's, I mean, to think of childish nicknames for your opponents, you say, is that smart? I'm not moving to Canada. That's the other thing about being close to immigration. You realize they had a lot of trouble getting here to start with. I'm not going to leave.

And I don't know how many people ever left for Canada, except during the Vietnam War. Right, right. I always said every village in Nova Scotia has one draft resistor. We had a wonderful guy, Kugler was his name. The painter? No, I don't know.

I think he became a dramaturg. Oh. We used to say he was the smartest guy at the fish plant. Ha! We used to say he was the smartest guy at the fish plant. And what do you think, in terms of, you know, today, when we're talking, in August, is the first day of the Democratic Convention in Chicago? I really think, I didn't feel this way about, say, the Bushes or something. I mean, I didn't vote for them,

but I didn't think it would be horrible if they won. It's still the same country. You know, they're regular people. But now I feel the only important thing is getting him out of there. It was interesting. I was listening to a discussion with Hassan. Is his name Hassan? He used to be with NBC. Hassan, you know, the journalist.

Yeah. And he's now doing his own thing. But he was saying that when we discuss, people discussing the nuances of, you know, Kamala's plan versus Trump, he said, the point is, you're going to have an authoritarian in there who's going to destroy this country. That's really all that we should be talking about, which I thought was interesting, you know, because as journalists, too, we try to be, you know, even-handed and all that stuff. Yeah, it's very hard to cover, because in effect, the system we have is based on people acting on goodwill and being regular people. Regular meaning that they act in a civilized manner. So if you have someone who doesn't do that, how do you cover it? Also, as you've said, he's a good entertainer. I mean, he sort of takes the oxygen out of the room.

No, it's a cult thing. But I think it's breaking. Yeah, I sort of agree. I think it's a little around the edges. If you get the edges, then that's what's going to win the election. the edges. If you get the edges, then that's what's going to win the election. You're listening to Calvin Trillin, a warm weather Nova Scotian, on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on US Public Radio and Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also hear ideas wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyad.

My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. Let's return to Ideas producer Mary Link in conversation with author, journalist, and New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin at his summer home in Port Medway, Nova Scotia. Trillin's latest book, published in 2024, is called The Lead, Dispatches from a Life in the Press, a collection of his writings over six decades that are sometimes wry, always astute, and exquisitely written. Pieces on everything from pivotal moments in his journalism career, including covering the civil rights movement in the South, to

the remarkable colleagues he has lost. For you, journalism, especially local journalism, which is the heart of democracy, is completely under attack and is no longer seen as profitable. What are your thoughts on journalism these days, the state of journalism? Well, I've always thought there's nobody who knows less about the sort of business part of journalism, including survival, than reporters. including survival, than reporters. Over the years, I've noticed these scenes where the managing editor stands on a desk in the newsroom and announces that the paper that they came to work on that morning again doesn't come the next morning. It's gone. So the book really doesn't deal with sort of the state of journalism, I realized it ended up to be sort of a memoir

done by articles rather than just straight prose. So they're pieces with a lot of difference in approach. They're profiles. There's a long piece on Conrad Black's effort to be a member of the House of Lords. I've heard of him. Yes, I'm afraid so. Well, I think that in a way, he was everything that people don't think Canadians are. I mean, he was like the opposite. In a way, he was backwards to the general impression of Canadians. And there's a quote from Fulford.

Oh, Robert Fulford. Robert Fulford. Yes. Who Black originally asked if he wanted to be the editor of Saturday Night, which sort of came along with a paper he had bought or something like that.

And so he went to lunch with him, and Fulford talked about the names he'd dropped, and he said something like, the world's record for name dropping in one lunch. I hope it was a fair piece. I mean, we obviously don't agree politically, but I think I heard, you know, he thought it was relatively fair.

But of course, at the same time, people were writing really nasty things about him. Well, he ended up in jail. He had all that stuff happen to him. Yeah. He's cozied up to Trump. Oh, yeah. But a very bright man, very knowledgeable historian. I've done peace with him.

No, he's a— But controversial. There's a quote in there when he says something like, I don't know, the number of ships and some landing. I mean, some really obscure figure to Margaret Thatcher. And she says something like, yes, Conrad, we know. I think he had an obsession with toy soldiers and doing reactments of battles, as I remember. There was a famous picture of him and one of his friends, whose name I've now forgotten, doing one of those battle things. It looks like a pool table.

Yes, and they have all the little soldiers and they move things around to battles. I thought he was an interesting character. I haven't really done that many profiles in The New Yorker. They used to pay more for a profile than for a reporter at large piece or something like that. I always wondered why. And then there's also some, not exactly obituaries, but sort of

tributes to people in journalism fields who have died, like Russell Baker and Morley Safer, died, like Russell Baker and Morley Safer, a Canadian. I was going to say Canadian. Yeah, Canadian. Did you know him well? Morley? Yeah. Yeah, we were friends.

What are your thoughts on him? He was very interesting because he had strong opinions about things, and he didn't have sort of wishy-washy feelings about anything. He didn't have sort of wishy-washy feelings about anything. I don't know why it just occurred to me, but Morley Zafer told me two things about what was called the Canadian government in exile. Have you ever heard of Canadian government in exile? There were these guys in New York who, Morley and Lionel Tiger, who's an anthropologist at NYU,

Annal Tiger, who's an anthropologist at NYU, and apparently Mort Zuckerman was allowed in because he had suggested that the national bird be the black fly. And they were very much for bilingualism, except they thought that the two languages should be English and Yiddish. English and Yiddish. There's a profile of N.W. Cannon, the crime reporter for the Miami Herald. Oh, yes. And there's a eulogy for Johnny Murphy, who was the makeup guy at the New Yorker.

The makeup guy. He would be part of a team that would physically put together, piece together the magazine before it went to the printing press. Johnny Murphy, who never wrote anything for the New Yorker, but comes from a tradition in Ireland. They say the definition of a writer is a failed talker. they say the definition of a writer is a failed talker. And Johnny Murphy was...

That's a great line. Johnny Murphy would call you over, walking down the hall, and tell you what happened to him on the commuter train. He lived close to the city, but he took the train. And for some reason, even if you'd been fooled by this and realized not that many things could happen to one person on the train, it would be like an old joke that you might tell at a nice Columbus bar or something like that. I spent a year doing just nothing but race stories. What is one that comes to mind that particularly seared in you a memory of? I think, oddly enough, a story that I was still working for Time.

Oddly enough, a story that I was still working for Time, I'd spent some time outside the schools in New Orleans during the school integration of New Orleans, where this pack of women were yelling awful things to these six-year-olds. A pack of white women yelling to the kids who were being bussed in? They weren't being bussed in, I think, or maybe they were, but there was the first integration. Right, of bringing black children to schools that are white.

And what were they yelling? Racist slurs and... We don't want to have a Bible out here. Tell me where it's going. I ain't made integration in here yet. I mean, there were some of those people who just wanted to be treated like anybody else, but they were sort of student heroes without having done anything, just showing up. It's remarkable how much has changed.

Again, they would say not enough. So tell me about your family. So your family was Jewish from Ukraine. What was their name? I don't think it was Trilinsky. I think, although Judy Comfort, who used to live here and now lives in Vancouver, started getting interested in genealogy. She used to send us stuff, including an immigration document about my grandfather, Kulinski, when he applied for citizenship. And it says, date of naturalization denied.

So I sent a copy to my cousin Keith, the last living D.H. Lawrence scholar, who has the same grandfather, and I said, does this make you feel a tiny bit undocumented? They came. But what did that mean in the end, that he wasn't? I don't know. I guess he maybe later. Did he get denied and then just swam over from Ellis Island?

He wasn't in Ellis Island because my family, when I say my family, I mean my father's family, came from Ukraine or caught the boat in Hamburg or something. When was that? In about 1902 or 1903 or 1904, something like that. And my father was an infant. And they got to Galveston with something called the Galveston Project, which was funded largely by Jacob Schiff, who was a German Jewish financier. And at that time, the German Jews in places like New York were doing pretty well.

I mean, they were prosperous. And then this horde of Eastern European riffraff, including my family, came. And Jacob Schiff, I always knew they landed in Galveston, but I didn't know why. I didn't think about it. And I was reading a book by a guy I knew, Eli Evans. know why i didn't think about it and i was reading a book by a guy i knew eli evans and he said embarrassed now concerned with conditions on the lower east side and embarrassed by these people jacob schiff gave five hundred thousand dollars to the galveston movement to take them to galveston and uh spread them out jobs to what it is now now. Now they said Texas is sending everybody to New York and back then.

That's right. So would your grandfather go to Galveston? Yeah. Texas. Texas. And what did he do? My grandfather came with his brother-in-law, my uncle, Benny Danofsky, and they were in the Galveston movement,

which meant that there were jobs set up to spread them out so they wouldn't clot up. So I said, who is Jacob Schiff to be embarrassed by my Uncle Benny Donofsky? I said, when it comes to rapacious 19th century capitalism, my family's hands are clean. There's nothing embarrassing about that. And so then I wrote a piece that started, Who is Jacob Schiff? To Be Embarrassed by My Uncle Benny Donowski. Oh, my gosh. And I sent it to New Yorker.

It came back like a tennis serve. And so just then, God was watching this all and decided that a letter would be sent to my agent saying that there's a new magazine of Jewish affairs, and does he have any manuscripts that might be appropriate? So it was in the first issue, and also the New Yorker didn't have pictures then, but... For a long time. Yeah, but Moment Magazine, which had... So it showed Jacob Schiff looking a little bit frumpy, So it showed Jacob Schiff looking a little bit frumpy, and my Uncle Benny.

It must have been his only suit. I mean, I think it was the—there was a Russian language stamp on the back of this picture that I have, and it said, Who is Jacob Schiff to be embarrassed by my Uncle Benny Donosky? One of my cousins, one of his sons, my cousin is, I said, I hope you get this piece in before Uncle Benny's 90th birthday party in St. Joe. And my cousin said, don't mention his name. The Russian army is still looking for him. So then your grandfather was in Galveston and then went to? St. Joe, Missouri. Missouri. My father grew up in St. Joe and moved to Kansas City as a young man.

My mother was already in Kansas City, but from immigrant parents. Right. And they all ran little grocery stores and stuff. Of course, corner stores and grocery stores. Same thing for the Arabs. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so we never had the sort of Lower East Side experience. But what I think of about immigration in those days is sort of the luck of the boat.

I mean, where you end up. That's right. I did a piece once on an anniversary of a cooperative building in the Bronx. It was kind of left wing. They're more than left wing. They're mostly communists. And I realized at one point these people came at the same time my people came. My people are discussing farm prices or something in Kansas City,

and they're organizing basketball teams named after Soviet generals. How old were you when you went to New York? Well, I was out of college. I was just after college, 22 or something like that. Where did you go to college? Yale. Oh, I've heard of that. It's not in Missouri.

Well, my father didn't go to college, and he read a book called Stover at Yale. He must have read it when he was a sort of preteen. at Yale. He must have read it when he was a sort of preteen. It came out, I think, in 1911 and decided that that's where his son was going to go. Really? Why he didn't decide he was going to go, I don't know. And so when Alice met my father, she thought it was sort of a joke. She thought my father said, how did Bud happen to go to Yale from Kansas City? And my father said, I read this book. What was the book about? It was Stover at Yale was about a guy named Dink Stover.

They all had names like that, little kind of puppy dog names. And it was a novel about saving the harvard game at the last minute and and refusing the tap from skull and bones i mean uh heroic things and i think my father thought of yale as um that it was like an escalator that once i got on i was set that's right and did he think you'd become a writer or did he hope you'd be something a little bit more? I always say that he hoped I would become the President of the

United States and his fallback plan was that I not become a ward of the county. But there was a range. That's right. I wrote a book about him and I think being a writer was okay with him. I mean, I have some clues that we didn't have a lot of heart-to-hearts, my father and I.

I mean, we got along fine. Do you write every day? Do you try to write every day? No, not necessarily. I'm really not an organized person. And I don't know if you've read a lot of things by John McPhee, who's the New Yorker. He's a

wonderful writer. And so I'm interviewing on television a few months ago, maybe a year ago, and the camera pans up to where these black sort of folders are and triple triple things and the interviewer says what it was he said those are notes from each one of my stories i told him i said i said

god damn mcphee i mean and he writes not just kind of workman-like stuff. I mean, he writes really easy, gifted writer. But you don't approach your work that way? No. I mean, I would if I could, I guess. It's just not in my nature. Do you know what the best piece of advice a friend of mine ever told me when I was trying to write a piece for a book, like an essay, and he said, write, don't think.

Yes. I can't think of who who but somebody had a city editor who did that said the same thing right don't think well i i used to have a method before computers that much is true i when i got home one of them being usually took me sort of a work week to report one of these things and when i got home the next day, I would do what was unfortunately called in my house the vomit out. And without even looking at my notes, I would start writing the piece and sometimes get to about two-thirds length or half a length with the language deteriorating the whole way. with the language deteriorating the whole way. And I always thought that the cleaning women at the New Yorker might find one of these vomit outs and say,

he calls himself a writer. And they whack their brooms against the desk like hockey players. But would you do that? Would you vomit out initially without looking at your notes? And then you go back and— Then I often didn't ever look at that thing again. Oh, really? Yeah.

Somebody who was very wise said, what you're doing is getting an inventory of what will work and what won't work. And then the next day I would do half of the rough draft. This was all on a typewriter, but that was white paper. The vomit was done on yellow paper. And then— So you had a method to your matter. So the vomit's on the yellow paper.

Yeah. I had been accused of stopping in the middle of a word when I got half of it done to go to the movies or something, but I didn't do that. And then the next day was the second half of it done to go to the movies or something, but I didn't do that. And then the next day was the second half of the day, and the next day was what was called the yellow draft. It was on yellow paper. You went back to the yellow paper that you had started with? Yeah. That was the part I liked the best because I could just sort of straighten sentences out.

It's a fun part. Yeah. the best because I could just sort of straighten the sentences out. It's a fun part. Yeah, and it's basically done. Because I think the hard part of writing is the structure of a piece that

you can write a sentence as well as you can write a sentence if you're willing to go back and play with it and everything. Maybe not as well as John Updike can write a sentence. Do you still do the vomit on the computer and then go back now? You just do your...

Yeah, but it took me a long time to transfer from... From typewriter to computer? Yeah. It's a different... Yes, your mind thinks in a different way. And for a while, not so much for casuals. I used to be able to write them on the computer, but for a while, not so much for casuals. I used to be able to write them on the computer, but for a while

on reporting pieces, I used the computer as a fast typewriter. I actually printed out and then did a new draft. I think the yellow draft, I sort of missed doing the yellow draft, but

in a way, I'm doing that all the time now because you sort of change things as you go. But it was important for me to get started. Bernard Taper, who was a good reporter and a nice guy, he told me once that he doesn't go on to the next paragraph until he has the first paragraph. Absolutely, the way he handed in. I said, if I did that, I would still be working on the first paragraph. Exactly. I have no idea how I would do that.

No, me neither. God did not mean for people to make a living as writers. No, he didn't. That was not in his plan. So, whatever you can do to edge by on something like that.

What are your thoughts on the world, on your life these days? Fortunately, the girls have sort of taken over this operation here. So I think of myself as like the crazy old coot who lives in the attic, brought down for earrings occasionally, and pays $82 a month for a World War II rent control

situation. A border they can't get rid of, I suppose. That's right. That's right. I was talking about that yesterday or today, and I said, I love that, because now I don't do what we call around my house ACC, which is administrative caca. That's good. Remember I said to you when I first heard it, because I lived with my dad for 10 10 years and I had done this piece on the value of old age sort of philosophical and what does old age mean to society but this gerontologist from the states and a thinker and writer

she said the number one thing you need to have a good old age is a daughter and you have two I have two that are well they were well brought up not not by me, by their mother. Can I ask you, Bud, and we're just talking about various things, can I ask you, I mean, your family, it's disconnected in some ways from Ukraine,

and life for Jewish people in Ukraine wasn't very good. No. To say the least. But do you feel a certain connection to it because of your family connection to Ukraine and what's going on there? No, I don't really. I mean, as I've said, they never talked about it. And as you just said, their life probably wasn't so jolly in Ukraine or they wouldn't have left because think of leaving your country and you don't know the language and i mean and you don't i mean it just it sounds really scary and did you ever go no i've never been to the ukraine i've never been

to russia uh or ukraine where's your mother's family from oh that's what i'm writing about my my my my grandfather pop we called him a sweet man with a little grocery store. He was from one of those places that changed countries every two or three weeks. So I don't know where he was from. But also, the story I've always heard is that he came to New York as a teenager. His brother or half-brother was supposed to meet him at the boat, and he wasn't there, and he never found him. So he didn't have any family at all.

My mother's family, her maternal side, and they were from Lithuania, meaning they were Litvaks, and my father thought Litvaks were funny. Were funny? I think my father thought, in the way that some comedians used to think that K words were funny, words beginning with K were inherently funny,

my father thought Litvox were funny. And I didn't exactly know what the stereotypes were of Litvox, but apparently the Jews in Lithuania were more intellectual and less warm than the Jews who were Galicianers, who were in the other part of Eastern Europe. Mordecai was the same way. Mordecai was the same way. Mordecai Richler, there's a scene in one of his earlier books, Son of a Smaller Hero or something like that,

where these Jewish guys, teenagers or in their 20s, see this beach in Quebec somewhere. It has a sign on it that says, this beach is restricted to Gentiles. And they sneak back at night and change it to, This speech is restricted to Litvaks. Not to Jews, to Litvaks. So you're writing about? I'm writing sort of about Yiddish.

I don't know, somehow I was inspired, if that's the word, by years ago. I came across this guy who specialized in dictionaries. And I had two Yiddish-English dictionaries. Both of them are sort of odd to be here. One of them is called Dictionary Schmictionary. And it has, among other things, a line drawing of a naked man and an arrow pointing to various parts of his body, and there's one word for head and eight words for penis. But anyway, it started because I came across, I looked at this dictionary, came across the word meese.

Meeese, even I knew. I was raised in this immigrant situation where if the parents want something hidden from the child, they speak to each other in Yiddish, but otherwise you speak in English. So mis is the root word for miskite, meaning unattractive person. And there's a cabaret song, a song in Cabaret the Musical. Miskite, miskite, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Me skite, me skite, once upon a time there was a me skite, me skite. Looking in the mirror he would say, what an awful shock. I've got a face that could stop a clock. And so the definition was, the first definition was ugly. Second definition was beautiful. And I thought, what a great language. What do you mean the second definition was beautiful? There's a little preface, so as to fool the evil eye.

The scene I imagined in the piece is some of my great aunts sitting around, and they look at this toddler and they say, what a miskai. Because if they said how beautiful he was, the next time he was in the kitchen and there was boiling water around, that would be it. Wow, it was a veiled way to ward off the evil eye. Wow, that's beautiful. I think all cultures have something like that. Yes. So I'm sort of writing about Yiddish, and it's a weird piece. I don't know what's going to happen.

I've been picking at it for a long time. Is it going to be an essay, or is it going to be a book? No, it's an essay. It's about 1,800 words, something like that. It's quite beautiful, that idea of hiding the beauty behind the ugly. Oh, yeah. And my mother often says something like,

kid has a good appetite, kenahora. And kenahora means sort of, God, don't pay attention to what I said. It's sort of a... Don't tempt fate. Don't tempt fate, exactly. And yeah, a lot of... I'm not an anthropologist, obviously,

but I suspect that most cultures have something like that. Yeah. It's a protection. Yeah, because it's scary. It is scary. Yeah. But it's kind of nice to think

that under the ugly is beauty. Yeah, that's right. So when will you come back to Nova Scotia you're leaving tomorrow for New York when do you come back next July I hope it's so lovely to meet you well it's nice to meet you and as I said before when I first met you

I remember reading the essay on Alice when it came out in The New Yorker. And your essays over the years have been funny and deeply moving. Oh, thank you. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. You were listening to Calvin Trillin, a warm weather Nova Scotian. The longtime New Yorker writer and author was in conversation with Ideas producer Mary Link at his summer home in Port Medway, Nova Scotia.

You can go to our website, cbc.ca slash ideas, to see additional material and photos. Technical production, Danielle Duval and Pat Martin. Web producer, Lisa Ayuso. Our senior producer is Nikola Lukšić. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.