The Eric Metaxas Show - Mark Helprin (Encore Continued)

Episode Date: April 6, 2024

Eric continues his conversation with Mark Helprin, author of many works of popular fiction, such as "Ellis Island" and "Winter's Tale."

Folks, welcome to the Eric Mataxis show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m. Investments.com. That's LegacyPMinvestments.com. Welcome to the Eric Mataxis show. Do you like your gravy sick and rich and loaded with creamy mushrooms? If no one was looking, would you chug the whole gravy boat? Chug, chug, chug, chug. Stay tuned. Here comes Mr. Chug-a-lug-lug-lug. himself, Eric Ma, Texas. Hey, folks, in 2019, I interviewed the great Mark Helprin for Socrates in the city. This is a special encore presentation in joy.

In Judaism, there is a, there are many branches, of course. There's the conservative, the reform who are Democrats, and there are conservatives who are Democrats. And they're the Orthodox who are Republicans. And among the Orthodox, they're the Hasidim. And you know those guys with the black hats, the diamond merchants, etc.

They're Tea Party. They're Tea Party. Yeah. They are the spine of Judaism. I serve as a... Also, I protect them in the Shabbat houses.

I'm a consultant to them and I have done protection duty for them because of the massacres in India, etc. But I can't practice it. I don't feel comfortable with that. But I come from my Hasidic background. My ancestors were Hasidic rabbis. And the division between Hasidism and the other Jewish denominations, if you call on that,

is that in Hasidism, you have a direct connection to God. you have to study too you see that I don't know Talmud Torah etc I can read the Bible in Hebrew but not very well certainly not fluently not as I should if I were a real Hasid but the whole point

of Hasidism is that there is a direct connection without the kind of formal remediation that that intermediation excuse me intermediation that you get in in other forms of Judaism but they study hard but you don't

need to study hard, actually. You can experience it right at the well. So that's what I followed. What was the question? Oh, what's right? What's right? Well, I mean, in fact, it's just like religion. You have many ways of approaching it and judging it, and of course we're all fallible, so you can't be too confident in what is

right because you you may be wrong. We've all been wrong and sometimes seriously. God knows I have. But you make it a combination of logic and reason

and experience and drawing upon others considering other opinions and then your gut feeling finally. And that's, you make a combination of that and then when you feel that you've arrived at a certain conclusion you're ready to risk doing what you have

to do in order to protect it. Well, I still think that the reason that it was startling for me to discover that you were rather politically conservative and a fiction writer is because most fiction writers don't have that fierce moral quality in their writing. They're writing typically as, you know, I would say maybe run-of-the-mill utopianists who believe that in fact were not fallen, that we're evolving from something to higher levels and that we can, I guess it was William F. Buckley who talked about it, but he was quoting someone else when you talk about immanentizing the

Eschaton, right? That if we have enough taxes and we have enough government, we can fix everything and we can create utopia, you know, through social engineering or whatever it is. And we know that history, especially recent modern history, is replete with examples of people trying to achieve that. So when you say something like we're fallible or that morality is a struggle or this or that, you realize that you're parting company with most of the people who create art in our time.

Yeah, well, they are afraid of a number of things. First of all, they're afraid to be ambitious. So they sort of imbibed the academic tendency to particularize. The American Academy is divided between the English approach and the German approach. In the 19th century, we had to choose. Harvard chose to lean toward the English approach, which value good writing, graceful exposition and generalization. Johns Hopkins was the big leader

and Columbia followed in valuing the German approach which was to be very particular, strict and limited, rigorous. It's a question of richness versus rigor. And writers today have inherited the rigorous approach,

which means that they limit their ambitions just the way scholars limit their ambitions. You know, the penis denial in Belgian circus stories as a thesis. And the fiction cousins of that

are, you get these novels which are like magazine articles. They deliberately limit them. It's almost like John McPhee, but it's a novel. And the novel might be called the

Estonian rug merchant's baboon. That's perfect. That doesn't really exist? No. That sounds like a novel that the New Yorker would just go crazy. Of course. Because it's got just enough exoticism or just enough but not too much. And it's kind of limited, you know.

I mean, if you're talking only about a baboon that belonged to an Estonian rug merchant, you're defining it closely down. But that's as far into transnational. ascendance as like New Yorker type fiction wants to go. That's exactly right. Like the rug merchant alone the idea of a rug merchant

he's sort of you know close to the world somehow he's a he's a rug merchant but that's as far also in the poetry that's published in the New Yorker. It's interesting because it's just part of the zeitgeist and you're I mean you're explicating it but they're afraid

they're afraid to take a chance they're afraid to put them put a marker down and say this is what I stand for this is what I love. This is what I would die for. Some things are good. Some things are not. Some things are beautiful.

Some things are not. They're terribly frightened. They're cowards. I mean, I can't generalize and say everyone, but so many. And that is the zeitgeist in modernly. I have been criticized so often these days, they say, he uses such big words, you know. And I don't.

I mainly keep to Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Saxon. vocabulary, but they say, the sentences are too long, the descriptions are too, there's too much description. People have been trained to inhale nihilism. There's a form of nihilism. Like the minimalist. Like the what? The minimalist. Like Grey Carver. They don't like richness of language. They don't like metaphor. They don't like occult meter.

But there's a reason for that, right? In other words, when you talk about minimalist and nihilism, they are in some ways at war with a past, right? In other words, when you think of a past where all the typefaces had seraphs and all the buildings had moldings and whatever, they hate that because it somehow bespeaks a patriarchal Christian, Western order that inescapably

points to God and they are trying to carve their own minimalist path out of that. So any hint toward morality or good or evil it's disturbing and that's why I'm you know you must be a great writer just to have

snuck so much of this past these watchful dragons. Well it's quite easy to fool a publisher at lunch. Because they drink so much. And also, it is, it does pay to have a business sense. You know, a publisher is very slow to pick up on things, and they're not always the brightest

bulbs. Why don't we just say that they're stupid? They're stupid, yeah. In the interest of time. You're not going to be a lawyer. You're not going to be a doctor. you're not going to be a physicist, you're not going to be an engineer, you're not going to be a businessman where you have to take risks and actually see what's going to happen in the future and do all kinds of finance stuff.

And so what do you do? You go into publishing. That used to be... I'm horrified. Many publishing friends are here. Don't leave, friends. Don't leave. I'll defend you in five minutes. Remember as a kid, your parents and grandparents making you try all the vegetables on your plate or when they coax you to eat fruit instead of sweets? That's because they knew what was good for you, and it's true today than ever before. You need to eat your fruits and veggies. There's no substitute for a healthy diet, but there is balance of nature. Their products are gluten-free and non-GMO, and they contain no added sugars or synthetics. If you're looking for something to make you feel better naturally, you should definitely try balance of nature today.

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Portions of the Eric Metaxe show are brought to you in part by Jeff Hayes Films and the real RFK Jr. movie. To be clear, the website is rfkmovie.com, RFKmovie.com. This is a special Socrates in the city presentation with the great Mark Helprin. But this is, you're being serious, right? you're saying that you were aware of this going into writing fiction, that you're bringing something into it that you have to disguise? Well, no, I wasn't aware in the beginning because I'm old enough

so that I started when the terms were different. I started in 1964. I went to Harper and Row and met a woman there named Joan Kahn, who was a great fiction editor, and started to submit to her, and they would get back to me. You were what, 17? Yeah.

Okay, why? Well, I'll tell you, because my parents didn't read to me. That's why I said earlier that I hadn't read Charlotte's Web, I hadn't read many children's books. Charlotte's Web? Yeah. And I was completely, I had a room on Central Park West that had a black linoleum floor.

There were no toys in it, and no books. And that's where I stayed most of the time. Sounds like a Skinner box. Well, it was solitary confinement. Because they were gone. My father lived in England for six months of the year. My mother was an actress.

She was always on the road. And I was kept in that room, and that's where I learned to be, for instance, when I go to Europe, I can sit and watch a fountain for eight hours. 17 hours. I can do that. I don't mind. I like it. But anyway, I was, oh, yes.

When I got to first grade, and it was at the Birch-Wathen School, which in those days was on the west side, I was the only kid who didn't know how to read. They all had been pushed by their parents who were all Jews in the movie business. And it's like the kids now who were tutored to get into fancy kindergartens so they can go to Harvard eventually. And they were pushed by their parents. And they came in limousines, et cetera.

And I didn't know the alphabet. So I remember I walked in, Mrs. Smith was my teacher, and she said, go to the desk with your name on it. And I said, I can't read. And she said, okay, well, what is your name? I told her, she said, find the M. And I said, what's an M? And all the kids laughed at me. Ha, ha, right?

So I was really pissed by that. You made a monkey out of those kids, huh? That's exactly. I was really pissed. And by second grade, I was reading beyond 12th grade level. Out of sheer spite. Out of sheer spite. And in third grade, I began dictating stories to my third grade teacher who would write them in the longhand.

And then Simon & Schuster offered me a two-book contract in third grade to write a biography of Abraham Lincoln. And a children's... Wouldn't you love to know what a third-grader's biography of Abraham? I'd pay for that. Yeah, well, they thought it was going to be in golden books. Oh. And a children's story about a mouse, which would have been essentially copped from Stuart Little. Right, right.

My father said no, because my mother had been a child star, and he said, look what it did to her. So I'm not going to let you do this. Look what it did to her. Yeah. Oh, it did to her, believe me. But so I, what was the question? What's capital of North Dakota? Bismar.

Okay. All right. Well, that entails it. Pierre, but wait a minute. So you were, you're leading up, actually, to a question I want to ask, but you were talking about how you were raised in a room with black linoleum and how you really were not, you were left to yourself effectively. And do you now, you seem very cheerful.

It doesn't strike me that you're thinking of this as neglect or something that you, or maybe it was neglect, but you simply aren't bitter about it. But it sounds like neglect, no? No, it wasn't neglect. What was it? It was neglect. Yeah. In the best sense of neglect.

But my parents, I love my parents. And in fact, I was crazy because I spent most of my life while my father was alive, I can see why they did this because they probably knew what was coming. I spent most of my life telling my father asking him questions about his life. So I feel, and really I do, as if I were born in 194, because I have spent tens of thousands of hours listening to every detail of his life. And he had a photographic memory. He was famous for it.

Someone could say to him, for example, when was the last time you were on 26th Street between 3rd and 4th Avenue? And he would say it was in, this would be 1915. 50s, he would say it was December 17th, 1936. And they would say, describe it. And he could tell you everything that was in the store windows, the cracks in the site, everything. He had a complete photographic memory.

So I trailed him, beginning when I was very little, asking him questions about starting from his earliest memories. And he lived a very adventurous, interesting life. So essentially that's why probably they put me in the room with the linoleum because they knew that I'd be pestering them. Right.

And you needed to catch a break and that was the only way you could get away from you. Well, it's interesting. This brings up another quality in your fiction. It does seem to be of another time. You don't write, thank the Lord, like most contemporary writers.

And I think it's why reading you, it's like reading someone from a different generation than you are and so now at least we have some explanation of where that came from. Yeah, and in the Soldier of the Great War, which is about a 74-year-old man, strangely enough so is Paris. He's also 74. I wrote a Soldier of the Great War beginning in 1980

when I was, let's see, a 33. and I've always felt like an much older person because I've sort of absorbed my father's age and I also oh I know what this is about originally I started in a different time and I'm a throwback to a different time

and I never succumbed to the pressure to conform to this time simply because it's not worth it And you shouldn't ever do anything that you would lose sleepover or that you'd feel bad about. Well, let me ask you, you know, when you obviously came of age in the 60s. Yeah. You graduated Harvard in 69? 69.

Okay. Well, it graduated me. Who cares? The, from Harvard. The question is, you know, you ought to be. you're the classic boomer. You're supposed to fit into that mold, and you obviously don't.

You don't strike people as somebody who would have been a hippie at that time or that kind of a person, and not only that, but then you joined the Israeli... Is it Air Force? Army infantry and then Air Force, I was seconded to the Air Force as an infantryman. it's secunded how they say it in the West Indies? No, so they say it.

Yeah, I guess so. Okay. Well, so my question is, why did you do that? Because that seems like exactly the kind of thing, pot smoke and draft Dodgers of your generation would not do, right? It's really very countercultural and strikingly. Well, I was swimming in the Harvard Sea, which, and by the way, when I was 17, I was going through Greece

and I met a guy whose name was Alpert who was a assistant maybe he was a graduate student then but I think he was an assistant professor the lowest rank of a professor and he and I walked across the Peloponnesus

and we slept in barns and we ate in people's houses goats milk and that kind of stuff How old were you? 17 and he turned out to be Robert Alpert, otherwise known as

Baba Ram Dass, Ram Dass, or Ram Dass, as I call it. Okay, for those who don't know who that is, this is one of the leading gurus of the New Age movement, practically invented New Age in America. And when he was an associate of Timothy Leary, and they developed LSD.

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Nutrametics.com use the code Eric for 15% off. Hey, folks, in 2019, I interviewed the great Mark Helprin for Socrates, in the city. This is a special encore presentation in joy. So when I was a freshman, I was put in a place called Penny Packer, which was a sort of a modern building. It wasn't in the yard. It was sort of exiled. That was the worst possible place you could be. And Alpert lived on Harvard Street, which is where Penny Packer was, just a couple blocks up. So I ran into him, and I went to see him as a department, and he said, you want to smoke a joint. I didn't know what it was. I mean, I've never tasted coffee in my life.

I don't like things like that. And I said, no, what is it? He said, oh, it's great. No, I don't want it. He said, you want some LSD? And I said, what is LSD? And he said, well, it's this new thing. You put it on the sugarcube.

We invented it, whatever, whatever. And I hated the idea of drugs. And so I, so I, from that, even then, even as a freshman, I was different. But I did swim in the political sea and it was very much against the Vietnam War. I gave a speech at West Point to the Corps of cadets apologizing for not taking my place because although I was against the war, I don't think that I was my own legislature and I should have fulfilled my duties as a citizen. And so that speech is in the congressional record.

It's been printed all over the place. The reason that happened was I was sitting on the grave of William and Henry James in the Mount Auburn Cemetery. It faces south so that it's sheltered from the northern wind and also the sun shines in the south. I was writing the first story that I published in New Yorker, actually the first one that was actually published was called because of the waters of the flood,

but the first story that I wrote that they bought was called Leaving the Church. church. Henry James is there. William James was there. I was sitting on Henry's grave, leaning against the family bedstead grave marker.

And a funeral in Cambridge Cemetery, which adjoins Mount Auburn, which is where Mary Baker Eddy is buried in a lot of famous people. But the Cambridge Cemetery is for the proletarians. And a funeral came and they buried somebody. And then they left.

And I went to see who was buried. and it was a boy my age who had been killed in Vietnam. And that really, really struck me. And from that point on, I decided that I wanted to do something of that nature. I had already been 4F, but it was fake. When I took an EEG, I can make electrical pulses in my body that make the needles go, whack, whack, whack, whack, whack. You can do that?

I can do that. Can you teach others how to do that? Maybe, but you don't have to worry. You're too old for the draft. And I can also, now my wife will have to verify this because no one will believe it. Say what I do about horses. Okay, so that's what she says. She's crazy.

So anyway, I had made myself 4F, and I felt very bad about that. So then I went to Israel and joined the army. We were fighting Russians, and we were fighting my cousin. Wait, why did you do that? In other words, you're obviously ethnically Jewish, but you were not raised in a home that was religiously Jewish. What prompted you at that time to go to Israel and fight? Two words, never again.

The Holocaust. In 1967, which is when I went first, the state was threatened with annihilation. And I just didn't want that to happen, so I wanted to do my peace. and I did. But anyway, I tried to join the Marines too, but I already had been 4F.

They wouldn't let me do it. Gosh, I want to ask you about, do you think there's something inherent in Jewishness? And that's, gosh, it's so sloppy even to talk that way. But I guess the moral quality of your fiction even before I knew that you'd fought in the Israeli army, struck me as coming out of being a Jew, because being a Jew obviously comes with certain experiences,

and you often have characters who are, I guess they remind me, I'm always sure that they're autobiographical. And they're very romantic. There's a lot of love, it's beautiful love, it's not sexual. That itself is rare. But it struck me that somehow it feels to me like something that I've noticed in other Jewish stories, usually movies.

Woody Allen in some of his best films has this. It's interesting. He doesn't come out where you do. But it's interesting to me that you're very much of a romantic. Has that been something that you've thought, thought much about is who you are as a Jew. I mean, you just said never again. So this was something that meant a lot to you.

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I mean, my father's family came from a little village near Minsk called Koednev. And when we lived in upstate New York, we had a farm in Kinderhook, New York, a huge farm. and it was 32 on September 1st when we took the kids to school for the first time there was snow on the ground September 1st and that winter it was 32 below

the pool fence was covered by the early October and we didn't see it again until May I mean it was a hell of a winter but anyway at the edge of our farm far away was a auto repair shop and in the auto repair shop which was

really miserable, freezing cold and dirty with oil, et cetera, et cetera. They had people working on cars, but it was sort of like a very primitive type thing. And I went down there once to talk about our car, and I was wearing boots and gray pants and a gray 60-40, and I had a gray Stetson, and I had my pistol on, and I had a giant dog, who was a Bernie's Mountain dog, named Constance. And I walked into this place and one of the mechanics reared back and almost threw himself against the wall

because he was terrified because he thought I was a state cop and he was frightened of cops. Why, he was a Russian. He didn't have teeth. And his name was Igor. And it turns out he was a Jew from the area. And I said to him,

my family came from Korynev. Do you know it? He said, oh, he said, it's just a stone. I said, the stone. He meant like a gravestone. And it turns out that the Einzats grew up in the special group, the Germans, they would get trucks, put people in the trucks,

and then put the exhaust back into the trucks, drive to a pit where they would just throw all the dead people. And they killed every single person in the village. And these were all my relatives. We were lucky. My family escaped. We came here in 1870. And that doesn't leave you.

In the Second World War, we had 32 people who served, one of whom my cousin Robert died in his fighter plane. And my father volunteered at age. He went into the OSS stuff when he was 36. He was past draft age. And so I felt the same way. And I feel the same way about America, too. I mean, if America were threatened now, I would volunteer. Oh, 71, they're not going to take me.

But I do serve actually now in an armed capacity. I'll be retiring in two years. Time flies when you're having fun, so we don't have a lot of time left. I wanted to ask you to tell the story of meeting, hanging out with John Cheever as a kid. You have such a storied life that it makes a story. makes your fiction seem almost dull. And your fiction is not even close to dull. But you really do have, and you're aware of that,

having an outrageously storied life, and having met the kind of people when you were already a kid that most people don't get to meet in their lifetimes. Winston Churchill. You met Churchill? Yeah, when I was very little at Lake Anisee in, I think it was 1951 or whatever.

My father, who had worked for him in the war, was we were in anisee too and my father was taking something to him from Alexander Corta with my father's business partner and I wrote on my father's leg and we waited in an ante room with a stone floor with a lot of other men

most of whom were British in suits and then the doors opened and Winston Churchill came out and I was still riding in my father's standing on his shoes and holding onto his leg but one about Cheever I can tell you about Cheever

yeah quickly because I want to ask you about Winter's Tale. This is ridiculous. Go ahead. Actually, it turns out that Theodore Roosevelt invented this thing called straight lining. At Sagamore Hill, he would have his kids

go in a straight line no matter what, you know, climb over a wall, crawl through a swamp or whatever. I didn't know this, but I invented it for myself when I lived in Eagle Bay, which was in Austinine. We had about 1,000, 2,000 acres of more or less forest.

and I had the idea just independently that I would go in a straight line. So one day... You know you're nuts, right? Yeah, yeah. I was walking to school. I used to walk five miles to school and five miles back. And later...

Isn't that weird? That it was five miles there and five miles back? What are the odds of that? It's amazing. Sometimes it wasn't. Okay, all right. Because I would take a different route. Okay.

Yeah. But what I meant was that I would not only walk to school but also back. Right. And one day I was running a little late, and John Cheever came by in his Nash Rambler, the color of Pepto-Bismol. And he opened the door and said, Marco, because my name was Marco then. He said, what are you doing? And I said, well, I'm walking to school. He said, well, you'll be late. And he said, would you like a ride?

So I said, okay. So I got in the car and we rode to school. because he had lived in the garage above the garage on the school grounds with his family. Now, did you know at the time that he was a famous writer? Yeah, we all knew. His kids went to the same school, and people knew he was deathly poor at the time. And my parents knew. They were friends with him.

So I got in the car, and he said, why do you walk? And I was telling him, and I told him about straight lining. The next thing I know, there was this story called The Swimmer about Bert Lancaster who did a straight line. But that's okay. I mean, people borrow. So in all seriousness, your conversation with Cheever influenced him to write The Swimmer. Yes, for sure.

Hold it right there. That's amazing. That's one of the greatest short stories of the 20th century. and the fact that you may have had something to do with it, apart from writing, is really something. I bet if Susie and Benji knew about this, they would probably attack me and say, oh, it's not true, but it is true.

Well, in the story, and I remember Cheever better than I remember your fiction, he talks about taking a dog leg at some point. Oh, I never read the story. So you're a liar. I've never, I've never read any of them. There's another story about when you talk. He wrote a book about my family called Bullet Park. We lived in Brayton Park.

And when Martin Luther King was killed, there were riots in Ossining, and they were burning down the stores and stuff and attacking people's houses. So my father and I went and we bought ammunition. And then Mary and John Cheever came to brunch. And they said, you know, this was the time when there's riots going on. And we said, yeah, we bought ammunition. And the Cheever said, you were. What? Why? In case people come to try to burn our house down. You would shoot people who were going to kill you? You know? And the answer was, yeah. This is a special Socrates in the city presentation with the great Mark Helprin. But I got to get to the red meat, okay? Uh-huh. And that is that when I published my first book, which is called The Dove of the East, it was published. It was published.

published by Knaf, and I had a lot of stories from the New Yorker in it. I was quite young, and I came home from New York after having an editorial conference with Rachel McKenzie, who was one great New Yorker editor, and I was on the train. I was reading Carlos Baker's biography of Hemingway. I thought that would be my life. See, it wasn't the old days. I thought things were going to be different. And I got home, and I took off my suit. I think it was this one. And I saw John Cheever out by the pool because they didn't have a pool. And this had to be 1978? No, it was 1974.

It was 1974. And he was sitting by the pool. So I figured, well, hey, I have the same publisher. He knows I published it in the New Yorker. If he reviews it, it'll go on the front page of the New York Times book review of my first book. So I went down to him. And I said, hi, John. And I mixed this up with when I went down, and he had written the Faulkner.

Faulkner, which he pronounced as Faulkner. I called it Falconer, being a pro. And he said, hi, Mark. And I said, hi. And he said, right off the bat, he said, you know, Faulkner was so-and-so and so-and-so. saying something good. Won the National Book Award. National Book Award.

No, you told him that Faulkner... No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no. I remember... He said something about it. And then I said, big deal. Faulkner won the Nobel Prize. Oh, that's right.

Yeah, that's right. Because I thought he was saying Faulkner. He's saying Faulkner. We have to slow this down because people may be missing. This is very funny. John Cheever. who spoke with this plummy North Shore, South Shore, Boston accent pronounced his book, Falconer as Faulkner.

Faulkner. So when he said that, you thought he was talking about William Faulkner. And he said, Faulkner was made the, Faulkner won the something special. And you said big deal. He said big deal. the Nobel Prize. It won the Nobel Prize. And he went like this

for a second. You know? It was summer. It was before. It was June. It was before Nobel Prize season. But he still went like that to thinking, oh, it did?

And that was later in the 70s. Yeah, that was, I guess I came out. Right. Yeah, I confused them. But, but, and people, Clayg, Craig, Craig Claiborne said to me once a dinner at his house, he said, Maw. He spoke like this.

He said, Is John Chivo gay? And I said, oh no, no, no, no. He said, because he understands about homosexual love. And I said, well, I've known him since I was a child. He's not gay. See, the show's what I knew. So anyway, I go down to the, in a different time, and I say, you know, I have a book out.

Could you review it for the times, thinking, you know, this is going to be it? And he said, well, Mark, he said, actually Saul and I are coming out with books this fall, and we've pledged not to review any other books. And I felt at that moment both, A, really angry that he wasn't going to do this for me. And I had known him all my life, and I'd given him the idea for the swimmer, which was his big thing. And also ashamed that I wanted to be in that system of backscratching, that I was angry. about. And I decided right then, at that moment, I would never write a blurb for anybody. I would never ask anybody for a blurb. I would never serve on a prize jury. I would never go to Yado or

anything like that. I would never have anything to do with any writers whatsoever. And I've kept that promise. Folks, thank you for listening to our encore presentation of Socrates in the city. Go to Socratesin the City Plus.com for more and see you next time.