The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 6: Two Writers and a Rock Star Onstage

Episode Date: November 27, 2015

Two interviews recorded live at the 2015 New Yorker Festival: Patti Smith talks with David Remnick about how her writing and music are intertwined, with a live performance of “Because the Night”; the fiction writers Jonathan Safran Foer and George Saunders interview each other.   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

in a conversation with someone when they have that revelation. The first is making sure. The Packer seems to be interested in that. John McPheets brought this up. From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. I'm David Remnick.

Thanks for joining us for the New Yorker Radio Hour. For the past 16 years, we've been putting on a festival, the New Yorker Festival, a weekend-long extravaganza, I have everything from fiction to politics to science to cartooning, everything that you might imagine in the magazine comes out in three dimensions. And the person that invented this is the director of the festival, my friend Ronda Sherman.

Tell us what we're going to be hearing today. You're going to be hearing today two events from this year's festival, two very different events. The first one is an interview with Patty Smith and you. I remember that. Yeah, that was a highlight. and we have a conversation between the two fiction writers, George Saunders, and Jonathan Saffron, 4. I think maybe I could answer, but I'd love to hear why you thought. So why did we have Patty Smith?

I would book Patty to sit on stage and knit a sweater. Patty Smith is an iconic American artistic figure from the last 50 years. I mean, she is just, I think, a great American artist. And I had a blast interviewing her. Although it was interesting. The one thing she did tell me that I didn't expect. at all. She says, I'm not a musician. And we'll hear her talk about that. Patricia Lee Smith came downtown, and living in conditions meager in comforts but rich in art,

began forming the Protean artist, songwriter, painter, clarinet virtuoso, stage performer, poet, political activist, and memoirist whom we know today. There's little that Patty Smith will not try, nothing she is afraid to say, and seemingly nothing that she cannot do. The searching spirit that's in Patty Smith is located not only in the music and poems and performances, it's also to be found in two astonishing memoirs. Just Kids, which came out five years ago, is a book of self-creation and arrival, a love story that is the stuff of Puccini, with the great photographer Robert Maple Thorpe as Patty's co-star. Now there's a new book, and no less beautiful.

It's called M-Train. Ladies and gentlemen, the great Patty Smith. I'm so excited. Me too. I just want to say there are a few things I can't do. I don't know how to swim nor drive a car or play chess.

So there are a few things I can't do. There'll be no swimming tonight. Patty, this book is quite different from just kids, which by Patty Smith terms is a pretty straight narrative. I can't imagine that it's only subject that brought you to do this book. it's also got to be form and playing around with a new sense of memoir.

I think it's a process. Just kids I wrote because Robert asked me to write it literally the day before he died. I had never written nonfiction. So in writing it, which took a long time, I had a lot of responsibility, a particular agenda. and it was so grueling and also painful. And then when I was finished, I really wanted to write something that had no agenda, no responsibility.

You know, no one knew it was coming. No one asked me to write it. And I just sat and I had this dream that, well, I could write about nothing. Yeah, I could do that. You know, I got nothing. to say, I got, you know, whatever. And then I just sat every day

just writing without design. But what I learned in the process was everything has a design. It's like nature. You know, after a while, patterns emerged. And just kids had to be, maybe you're working off of letters or diaries or maybe talking to old friends and acquaintances

to re-remember things, no? What's old? I only talked to one person. Unfortunately, almost everyone in just kids had passed away. But I have a very good memory. I took minimal drugs in the 70s. What do you consider minimal? Well, in the 60s, I took none.

And in the 70s, you know, I smoked a little pot. And I, Robert and I took acid twice. With what results? Well, I just was, I just complained all night and he said that, I can get that at home. No, I mean, I felt, no, I felt like John Brown. I felt angry at the world and he kept saying, Patty, you're supposed to feel universal love. You know, and I was like going to soapbox about the world and about pollution and about, you know. Jesus.

But, yeah, so anyway. But I kept little diet. My mother every Christmas would send me one of these little diaries that have like, you know, what month, you know, your gemstone, your flower, and then little sections for each day. And I wrote these things that are seemingly meaningless, but it would be cut Robert's hair like a rockabilly star, chop up my hair like Keith Richards, met Janus Joplin, you know, all these day by day, They jogged your memory away. Where the moon was, you know, when I was, when Robert and I had an argument or when something sad happened, when Jimmy Hendricks died, they're all notations, but daily. Were they emotional notations or they were just facts? They were just little facts.

But then I was always keeping journals. And Robert, we wrote letters back then, and Robert wrote me quite a bit of letters. and so I was able to take a lot of that they were primary resources. And for this book, did you have primary resources or resources of any kind? No, just me. It's all, you know, my memory. Occasionally I'll ask my sister Linda, who's a year younger than me, if I'm worried that I didn't remember something right about our childhood,

but she always reaffirms things. And you see it the same way? Yeah. sometimes she'll remind me of something or I'll remind her but we were very very close my siblings it's interesting because most people when they talk about memory and when you read discussions of memory

they talk about the unreliability of memory that no two or three people who had experienced the same thing at the same time ever come to the same conclusion and yet you think well with my brother's sister and I my parents my mother was a waitress my father worked in a factory we were born right after World War II

just about a year apart but I was so much taller and a little more I don't know why a little more advanced and I was the one who watched my siblings and you know I designed our plays I was always writing plays

or figuring out scenarios that we would act out and we would talk about them we loved our childhood You know, it was, I know it was stressful for my parents because they had no money. Sometimes it was very difficult. I was sick a lot. But it was happy because I was so loved by my brother and sister. You know, they really admired me and I felt, you know, like I was really somebody.

And we have a good collective. My brother passed away. but the three of us used to have such a great collective memory. And when my brother passed away, my sister and I really even magnified our collective memory because it's up to us. In just kids, there's an act of memorialization about a period of time and a deep friend and lover. In this book, you're going back to something extremely painful, with a memory of which is both joyful and painful,

which is your marriage to Fred Sonic Smith. And he was very young when he died. And the romance and the love described is beyond intense in this book. What's the process of writing this? Well, I never planned to write about Fred. He just popped up. My sister and I have a theory

that he was getting a little annoyed at all the attention Robert was getting. and he wanted to, you know, but we just joke about that. But, you know, he's been gone like 20 years. And there's certain periods where he's there, but sort of somewhere back here, and sometimes he's right in the forefront. And I think...

When does that happen? It was very intense when I was writing this book, and I don't know why. but September is his birthday, November he passed away. He passed away on Robert Mapplethorpe's birthday, so it's a doubly difficult date for me. But sometimes it's just my children because my daughter reminds me so much of him in certain ways.

She'll have a gesture or all of a sudden. The other day she had a shorter skirt. on and I noticed a birth mark on her leg that I hadn't really noticed that it was exactly like his. You know, it's things like that, or my son will call me up and when he's a little sleepy and his voice sounds so much like Fred's. How old's your son? 33.

And so I think that my children sometimes magnify memories of him. One of the memories that's really important to you and important in this book is the memory of reading. Yeah, neither one of my parents finished high school, but they were both avid readers. My mother liked more, you know, she'd read things like mandingo and stuff like that. She liked romance novels and poetry. My dad read everything, Aristotle, Plato, Carl Young, Huxley. And he was always, my poor mother, my mom would be, you know, making a meatloaf or something. He's like, Beverly, listen to what Aristotle says.

And she said, I don't want to hear what Aristotle says. I don't, you know. But he also, he was such an interesting man because he also. That never happened in my house once. Not one time did that happen. But he read the Bible all the time. He was very inquisitive. He read science fiction.

And it was a religious house too. A religious house as well. Well, I mean, the Bible and prayer was really important in our house. My mother was a Jehovah Witness, but she couldn't practice because she couldn't give up smoking. So, I mean, but this is how awesome my mother was. She could not give up smoking. She was a real bet, David. with the cigarette and a chain smoker.

And she loved her religion, but she couldn't live up to it. But she still read all the material study. And I was taught to be a Jehovah Witness. What was your relationship to the Bible? The first words I ever heard come out of the mouth of Patty Smith when I first put on a record was, Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine. And that was your announcement to the world.

covering a song by Van Morrison and NEM. So what was your relationship to all this? And when did you bounce? Well, I mean, I had a really good biblical education between my father's constant searching and very inquisitive and, you know, playing the devil's advocate about certain passages. I went to Bible school

and the Jehovah Witness religion is very scripture-based. And so I had a really good, biblical education, but I had different interpretations of some of the scriptures, and I just was not the kind of person that could stay in an organized religion. And that line I wrote when I was 20 years old. I recorded it when I was 27, but I wrote it in a poem when I was 20, and it was really not so much again it wasn't opposed to jesus it was opposed to organize religion and it was also i was young i wanted to take responsibility for all of my own uh wrongdoings i wanted to be you know free of guilt that you know jesus had to die from me every time i did something wrong

i just thought he'd be free of me i just wanted to like make my own mistakes. And it was really funny. When the record came out, I mean, people were picketing me and sending me death threats or praying for me and saying, you know, you don't believe in Jesus. And I said, I believe in him so much. He's the first word on my record, you know. I didn't say, Jesus doesn't exist. But, you know, and also as I evolved, you know, I appreciate. Jesus more as an individual, as a revolutionary. And, you know, I have a high regard for him. What flipped the switch for you as a girl or a young woman?

Famously, whenever one reads about you, it's reading Rambo. And it's kind of an amazing thought that some, a kid at age 15, 15, somehow in South Jersey, stumbles upon illuminations or whatever was the book. and something lights up. Is that really the story? Well, I mean, one of the things that really lit up for me was seeing Picasso's for the first time. I was like 12.

I had never been to an art museum. My father one time took us all to an art museum in Philadelphia. It was like a free day at the art museum. And I saw Picasso's for the first time. My father didn't like him. My father liked Salvador Dali because he had better draftsmanship. But I totally, that was the first time my father and I locked horns. And I started, you know, realizing that I had, you know, certain things spoke to me.

And as far as Arthur Rimbaud goes, truthfully, I saw a copy of illuminations at a bus station in Philadelphia, you, you know, like in front of one of those dirty bookstores, they had, you know, outside like a bookcase and all the books were 99 cents. And it was sitting there, and I looked at it, and I just fell in love with him. It was more like a boyfriend, you know. It was just like...

I mean, that famous... His face, yeah, that picture. He looks like a young Bob Dylan, you know. And I just fell in love with him. And it was pre-Bob Dylan. I hadn't fallen in it. I mean, I think. I sort of traded Rumbaugh for Bob Dylan for a while.

But at first it was just, I was captivated by his face. But when I opened it and was reading it, I didn't understand all of it, but the language was so beautiful. It was transporting, like it was prose poems, but it was transporting like poetry. And then I just, I don't know. I fell in love with it. And where did it lead you to?

Well, it led me into trouble at the factory when I was 16. That's what Piss Factory is really about. My first job was a baby buggy bumper beeper inspector. That's not true. Yeah, it's true. And I stood there and I had to like, and I was moving to, I didn't, I was bored, you know, I just wanted things to move along.

And these women, I mean, God bless them, they worked in this factory their whole life, and they knew how to keep things moving slow for certain reasons. Survival reasons. And I was sort of screwing up the quota, as I say in Piss Factory. But I was carrying illuminations,

and I remember the supervisor, and she had like maybe one tooth. And she looks at it. She says, what you read? You know, you're not supposed to be reading, and I don't think half of them read, but she was looking, and she said, you know, she looks and it was bilingual. And she said, what language is this? And I said, it's French, you know, and she was, you know, they decided it was a communist book. Because it's like South Jersey, Fern. It's a Fern language. It's a Fern language. It's a Fern language, and they decided it was communist. And they told me I wasn't allowed to read the book there. So, of course, I brought the book the next day.

So they took me into the John and gave me a lesson. And that's why it's called Piss Factory, because I got dunked in a little yellow water. So you paid for your Rambo? Well, yeah, I paid for arrogance, really. You regret how you behaved? Yes. Yeah. It was only a few years ago that I realized, you know, I was like,

reading the poem and, you know, it has a lot of hubris. And I don't, I'm not recanting it because it was a terrible place and they treated me terribly. But now I understand that these women were working there since they were 15 years old. They were in their 40s. They were never going to get, things were never going to get better. I was making a dollar in a quarter an hour. So they were probably, what were they making, $2? knew you were leaving. I knew I was leaving and I just came in, disrupted things, didn't show the hierarchy, their proper respect. But I didn't know. I was just a kid, you know. That's Patty Smith talking with David Remnick on stage at the New Yorker Festival. They'll talk more in a moment

and they'll play one of Patty's biggest hits together. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. Hi, I'm Rhonda Sherman, director of the New Yorker Festival. A little later on the New Yorker radio hour, we've got a conversation between the writers George Saunders and Jonathan Saffron 4. And now, back to Patty Smith, the writer and performer, interviewed by the magazine's editor, David Remnick. When you were very young, you came to New York, did you know that you could put it over? In other words, was there a sense that you were, in your mind in the beginning, pretending to be an artist? and did you think it would really happen? Well, I wasn't pretending to be anything.

I came to New York City in 1967 looking for a job. Right. Because the New York shipyard closed in Camden, New Jersey, and 30,000 jobs were taken away, and there wasn't a single job in South Jersey or Philadelphia, not even in a factory for a girl, you know, 20-year-old. old girl who had a couple years of college. And so I came to New York City really looking for a job. And there was tons of bookstores and all kinds of places. And so my first desire was to simply

get a job. And my hope was, you know, to evolve as an artist and as a writer, as a painter. and I also dreamed of meeting somebody, you know, because I didn't have a boyfriend then, meeting somebody like me with a like mind. At what point did you think I could, this could happen? I didn't think like that, you know, because I wasn't in a hurry. I was ready, you know, like in all the biographies I had read of, you know, all the artists or all the painters and poets,

they all suffered, they all starved, they were all unappreciated. And I was ready for that. That part you could do. Yeah, I had no problem with that. I knew I wasn't ready. I knew I had something. But Robert and I were quite different. I was ready to suffer and take a while.

Robert didn't want to suffer. He knew who he was. He knew what he had. And he wanted, you know, he wanted, that to be known. He had ambition. He had ambition. I had ambition, but my ambition was more conceded than Roberts.

I wanted to write great books and win a Nobel Prize or something like that. Mine were like far-reaching. I figured, well, Herman Hesse wrote Glass Bead game when he was 65 or something. You know, I wasn't in a hurry, but I did want to do something great. but Robert and I also didn't have the confidence that I had you know I was still

you know I was I still had to prove my worth to myself before I could prove it to the world but Robert Robert believed in himself and really really tried to inspire more self-confidence in me and how did the direction turn

so intensely to music and how did that how did you figure out out what you were going to be musically? What was around in the air? Music had nothing to do with it. I mean, I'm not, I feel embarrassed when people call me a musician. I can play a few chords, but... Sing. You write music. Well, I'm a performer. I feel proud to say that I'm a performer. And I think of myself as a performer in the best sense. But I didn't have any musical aspirations. I was writing poetry

and I would read it to Robert and Robert would say really wanted me to read it in front of people because he thought I was really good or entertaining or whatever and he really pushed me. Robert got me my first poetry reading but I found myself much too agitated

and naturally speedy to just stand up and read poems. I was like bored by it. Just the whole act of the poetry reading. Yeah, it was just like I go to poetry readings and they, like, Snoresville and, you know, it's just, but I mean, I like Ginsburg was a great reader and I love seeing William Burrs and Jim Carroll. There was a few really good poets, but on the whole. I read somewhere that you used to go to poetry readings with Gregory Corsoe and hate the stuff. Well, yeah, but Gregory hated it more than me. Gregory was the biggest heckler I ever saw. He heckled the poets.

Oh, he would get, say, get a blood transfusion. He was like always, I was like, aye, yeah, yeah. So when I was doing my first poetry reading, I didn't want to be born because I thought, if Gregory's going to be in the audience, I better deliver. Right. And I decided that I wanted to have some sound behind a couple of my poems. And I was trying to figure out how to do it. And Sam Shepard said, why don't you get, like, somebody to play guitar behind you?

Ginsburg was doing that at that time, too. And not in St. Mark's Church. Nobody had brought a guitar in 1971 in St. Mark's Church yet. And so I asked Lenny Kay, I had met him in a record store, and he played a little guitar. So he came, and he played guitar behind me, and I did that poem. Jesus died for somebody's sins. It was a poem. Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine.

Milton in a pot of thieves, wild cart up my sleeve. The cart of stone my sins, my own. And people were quite upset that we had electric guitar in the church. And that was encouraging. And I don't know. It just involved. You know, I didn't have any game planned. It was first.

It was just to make poetry a little more visceral, that's all. By the mid-70s, peaking maybe at around 1978, you were a rock and roll star. Yeah. I was for a while. Yeah. You were for a while, you said. I'll tell you how I knew I was a rock and roll star

because we had a job in Italy, and it was actually the last, right before I quit. And I was just walking down the street. of Florence and there were thousands of kids everywhere. I mean, they were like camped and sleeping on the streets. And so I went into a record store and I said, what's going on here? And the guy said, Patty, it is you.

You hadn't noticed until then? Well, I knew we had a job, but I didn't know it was in a stadium for like 80,000 people. And I also didn't know that they, you know, they didn't have rock and roll in Italy for decades, you know. Yeah. I had no idea. I was just, you know, because I was...

But you had album after album. You were on, as they say, the cover of the Rolling Stone. Yeah, but we weren't rich or anything. We were still just building. And I don't know. I'm just myself. Did you enjoy it? I enjoyed working with my band.

I loved the camarader. I liked connecting with the people, but I didn't, there was so much stress and so much pressure, like, to do peripheral things, going to see radio stations, you know, doing interviews, getting your picture took, all this stuff, which at first was sort of fun, but then I realized I wasn't growing as an artist.

I wasn't, like, evolving. I wasn't doing any work, and I was also starting to act, you know. What? Well, not like I was raised, you know. Like if there wasn't a car for me, I'd get pissed off or, you know, things like that, or if some piece of equipment didn't work, you know, I'd put my foot through an amplifier or something. You know, I was developing sort of a...

Did you throw any TV sets and swimming pools? Oh, no, I don't mean that kind of thing. I just mean agitation. Right. You know. Because of the pressure. Yeah. Because you could.

Stress and just adrenaline. It's just high adrenaline. And then at a certain point you step back and you moved to Detroit and away from a lot. By the way, I didn't do anything I was ashamed of. I'm just saying that I noticed that I was like, there's nothing wrong with being arrogant and having a certain amount of hubris. You sort of have to. But when you start acting like your hot shit or something,

It's time to step back and say, you know. And was that part of the reason for stepping back? Yeah, I didn't like how... I wasn't used to being pampered. I wasn't used to having cars. I wasn't used to... And at first it was kind of cool because, you know, I had dark glasses on.

I could pretend I was in Don't Look Back, you know. But then it just seemed like, I don't know. But, you know, I enjoyed it for a while. You know, I had my fun. And now that you're back and you spend a lot, of time on the road, particularly in Europe, what's it like? Do you enjoy it more than you enjoyed it when you were 30 or whatever it was? You do. Because? Well, one is, I'm a lot healthier because back then, all the halls, whether there were thousands of people or small, were filled

with thick smoke, cigarette smoke, pot smoke. And I was always getting bronchitis. And now there's no smoke. And so I'm able to do, I just did almost 50 concerts this summer and in like a heat wave. And some of them in front of gigantic crowds, some in front of a few thousand, some in front of a hundred thousand at Glastonbury? But the thing is, I did all of those in the middle of the heat wave. I'm 68 years old and I didn't have any trouble because I wasn't cutting through clouds of smoke. But also, I like it because there's so many young people come to our concerts.

Our band is really lucky because we attract young people. And I think it's because of the book, because it's really funny. In the old days, there would be people come in with your record, and then it was a CD. And now I look in the front row, and everybody's got... Just kids.

Wow. And it's kind of nice. But we're an old-fashioned band. We don't have any cues. We don't have a lighting guy. We don't have tapes. We're just a rock and roll band. We're pretty raw. If we mess up, we just laugh or I'll talk to people. I'm so glad to hear that. But also young kids, I mean, sometimes they'll yell out stuff that they're concerned about or that they feel frightened about. What will they do? It might be just like, you know, that they, you know, nobody cares about.

about them or what shall they do if they don't have any money or... Because they feel you, they know you, in a way that they don't know, you know, X, Rose or... Well, they know I don't know about that, but they know I'm going to talk directly to them and they know that I'm not going to, you know, I don't pamper them. Meaning what? Well, I mean, people say, I don't have any money to put out my CD and I said, well, get a job, you know, and get a job and... Because that's...

Tough love. That's what, you know, well. well, that's what we did. When we did horses, I was working at the Strand, and Lenny was still working in a record store. We all had jobs. And I thought when we finished horses, then we'd go back to our job.

I took a little hiatus, and they said, no, you tour. And it was like, tour, where? And they said, Finland. Whoa, cool. Going to Finland, I was ready. Yeah. Seeing Finland. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, this may be the worst decision of my life,

although I somehow doubt it. You want to talk about the song? Yeah, I can talk about the song. The song's a collaboration with Bruce Springsteen. Bruce was working on this song when I was recording Easter, and he was having difficulty with the lyrics. and unlike Bruce, but he was. And he had a great chorus and a very anthemic piece of music in my key.

And he gave it to me, and at the time I had met my future husband, I had met Fred. We had a long-distance relationship, and Fred was living in Detroit, and I was living in New York. and, you know, we didn't have cell phones or nothing back then, and we didn't have much money, so long-distance calls cost a lot of money. And so we only got to talk to each other once a week. So one night I was waiting for him, and Fred was supposed to call me, like, at 7.30, and then 8.30 came, and then 9.30. And I know some girls would have been cool and just left, but I'm not that kind of girl.

I'll just wait and wait and wait. So I didn't know what to do with myself, so I picked up this cassette with Bruce's music and I wrote some lyrics to occupy my time. And so Fred called me about midnight, and by then I had written the lyrics to what would become my most successful song. And that's why in this song it has these words,

have I doubt when I'm alone love is a ring the telephone because I was waiting for a phone call from Fred As I am

who's trying understand desire is hunger is the fire I breathe love is a banquet on which we feed Love is a ring

the telephone Love is an angel That was the great Patty Smith. I spoke with her in October of this year at the New Yorker Festival. I'm David Remnick, and in a minute, George Saunders interviews Jonathan Saffron 4. Or Jonathan Saffron 4 interviews George Saunders. It's kind of hard to tell. Thank you.

I had a great time. That's just ahead in the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. And I'm Rhonda Sherman. Rhonda, tell us why you picked George Saunders and Jonathan Saffron Farrin 4 to do this. You could have gotten, I guess, any number of novelists or short story writers in dialogue. Well, they're friends, for starters. And that means they've already got a dialogue going on between them.

And also, I thought it might be great to hear what they're working on since they're both just about to finish new novels. George is working on his first novel, even though he's in his 50s. So there's a lot to talk about. So here's George Saunders and Jonathan Saffron Four with Jonathan starting us all. So I wanted to begin by asking you something very, very basic. And it comes from something you say in your acknowledgments in this book. You say Caitlin and Elena, watching you all these years has taught me that goodness is not only possible, it's our natural state. So I thought, God, I don't know any other writer who would say that goodness is our natural state, besides Anne Frank.

And I started thinking about goodness and how. it feels like your work is constantly engaged with goodness. And yet I don't really know what goodness is. It's not really morality. It's not really kindness. And I was hoping you could talk a little bit about that. Oh, yeah, sure. Yikes.

Well, here's the thing. I never really could write very well until we had our kids. And then suddenly it was like the universe got saturated with kind of moral ethical stuff that I felt like I could actually use. And then the experience of why. watching them made me think they really were naturally good. And then about that same time we became Buddhist. And one of the things in the Buddhist teachings is that, especially in a Tibetan one,

is that there is this thing called Buddha nature. Everybody's got it. You can't earn it or get rid of it. And then what actually happens in our life is that these obscurations get laid in on top of it, partly by the thoughts that we're always having and the habits we require. So that, just because it was exciting to me and it fit with what I was seeing with the kids, you know, that actually, if you start from the assumption that people are basically are all the same, they're just these little drops of nectar put in these decaying containers,

you know, then it, I mean, I like it. It's a very strange description of, or maybe that's just me. I don't know. Just talk about it with your wife that way. But, you know, this idea that you're, if you, you know, any moral view we have is basically a scale model to help us do stuff, you know. So for me to say, if everybody's basically that loomers. thing in a container that sometimes works at cross purposes, that gives me a place to start, you know,

whereas the way I thought when I was younger, which is everybody's f*** up, except me, you know. Then I felt that I couldn't get any traction, you know, and for me it took me back to early Catholic stuff, where that was kind of what the nuns were saying in between wax, you know, was that, yeah. But I mean, for you know, because I actually would say when I read your work, one of the things that always intrigued me about it and made me love it was that there is this questing quality, and I think that that person believes in goodness. So my big question that I wanted to start off with was basically why do we do art? And second question is, is that a question that's actually meaningful to you? I think you sort of have to say yes. It does a lot. It's a sweet drop of nectar in my

desiccated ovaries. I once heard somebody asked if he believed in God. And he said, I'm not only agnostic about the answer, I'm agnostic about the question, like if it could even mean anything, because it's so definitional. When I think about why I sit down in the morning, there's a much of unholy or kind of crass reasons. But the one that really is continuing to feed me as I get older is that in the moment of engagement with a text, you don't really, you sort of have to step away from your ideas about it, at least when I do it. And when you can do that, when you can just respond to your text with the red pen and through many iterations,

To see that thing get better than I am is really rich. I see a better part of myself starting to come through. And that's really, for me, it's been really addictive, you know. And when I think about why art, that's actually, apart from the craft things, that's the one that I'm getting sort of more addicted to as I get older as opposed to that. Me too. I completely agree. When I started writing, I was committed to a desire to be known or understood

or to have some sort of communion with an imaginary other or a real other. or just with myself. And that's fallen away, I think, and been replaced more by a commitment to this accident that you're talking about. In that thing you're calling the accident, how do you actually go about it? Is it iteration?

Is it heavy revising? Is it some moment of insight? Or what's, you know? I had some flies enter my house not that long ago. That's it. And they write my books. No.

And they stay apparently reproduced. And now there's like lots of flies. I don't know what to do. And I went to the hardware store, and the guy sold me just this, like, sticky paper, basically, strips of paper. And I was this? He's like, just put them up. And I said, did they smell good?

Like, are the flies going to want to sq them? Like, what is good about this paper? And he said, they fly around enough that eventually they'll hit that paper. And sure enough, sure enough, they are covered with flies. So writing is like the sticky paper. You know, like, I face the page, the blank page. I don't really approach it with too many notions, but a kind of openness to where things might go. So you have to start somewhere.

Nobody starts from nowhere. So you have to make some very basic decisions, even if they feel arbitrary. But then from that, the accidents start to happen and the kind of uncontrolled growth. But it's also different at different stages in writing a book. I'm getting to the end of something, and I can't, the accidents are much, much harder to come by and that kind of willful ignorance is disingenuous. Right. Like I know what I'm doing.

I know what I want. You threw the bowling pins up and you can't pretend that you didn't. Yeah. Yeah. But at this stage of your life and your career, is there stuff that scares you in writing? Stuff that you kind of go towards because it's scary or lean away from because it is? I think just trying itself scares me. You know, I said to a friend the other day, we were talking about where I was in my book.

I said, look, it's not as good as it could be, but I think it's the best that I can do right now. And she said, that is as good as it could be. Like, what else would it be? Somebody else writing it, like, a little better than you did? Or you living a parallel life that was different? Like, this is as good as it can be, as good as you can make it right now. I think that I'm not afraid of artistic choice. at all. I'm afraid of saying this is the best I can do. And so there are a couple of responses

to that. One is not to show anybody and the other is not to try. Ever. Yeah. And I often just don't try. But it catches up to you. And so that that's sort of, I think, been the, what I've been facing down in the last year or so. How about you? Well, it's funny because I'm finishing up a book, which is a novel, which is for me, that's new territory. And what I'm noticing is that exactly that, like, it's, I don't know when or how to stop, actually. I think, well, I just keep doing this the rest of my life and, you know, keep tinkering with it. So that's scary. And then the other thing I found as I'm getting older is I took a while to publish.

My first book didn't come out until it was 38, which 37 or something. So when I finally was able to, I felt like, oh, my God, the grail. You know, I finally figured out what I do and what I don't do. Note to self, keep doing that. And then at some point, that wears out because whatever it was that got you in the door in the first place has to grow and evolve. So what I'm finding now is just that I think my work

is generally moving towards something that I would say let's in more light, let's in more of the positive valences that I've experienced. But that's a little scary, you know, to sort of give up whatever approach got you to the party is a little bit scary. But otherwise, you're like the shark, you know,

you go to the bottom. of the tank. I find that description really strange that you said you let in more light. And I've read before that you feel like your work is inclined toward a kind of cruelness. And when I read that, I didn't get it at all. It's just so absolutely not how I feel. I feel much closer to something else that you said, which was that you're engaged with this act of kind of redeeming the holiness of daily activities.

The example you gave was a dog looking. it's a . Actually. I always do that one. So those are two extremely different models. You could say it's through cruelty

that you redeem things. But it's actually hard for me to imagine what you even mean when you say letting a light in that wasn't there before. Yeah, I mean,

I, well, I had a, you know Michael Silverblatt? He's a great interviewer. And he always, we have good interviews, but he always nails me in the hallway. Like he'll give me like

teary or something. But one time he said to me, he said, I know it's a lot, lot of young writers are trying to, are sort of imitating you, but what they lack is cruelty. I'm like, Michael. You know, I'm not, and he said, no, he said, no, I think actually the power of your work is proportional to the cruelty that you show towards your characters. And I, in the midst of denying it, some kind of tears came up like, oh, shit, that must

be true, you know. So there's something about that, and I'm not, I'm never really, I can't really articulate it, but my point is just that it's kind of thrilling to get to this stage of life and say, oh yeah, the finish line is not yet, and what's frightening to you is probably a pretty decent direction to go in, you know. So that's why I'm becoming a ballet dancer. I wanted to announce that here at the festival. I should be here. I wanted to ask you something, because I hadn't read eating animals before the last couple weeks, and I just loved that book so much. And one of the things I loved about it was the tone, which to me, the word I kept thinking of was,

courteous. Like, it's a really hot-button topic, and yet throughout that book you're doing this beautiful kind of running around to the other side of the table, anticipating the reader's questions, coming back around. And I find it so convincing in the subject matter, but also as kind of a model for why rhetoric is good, you know. So I was wondering if you could talk about how you settled on that tone or stumbled on it, whether it was something you did through craft, or maybe your previous life had trained you in it. So, you know, when I write fiction, I know that I want to move somebody. I just don't know how, you know, like in what direction, with what kind of experience.

I just know that I want to create something that is transporting. With eating animals, I knew how I wanted to move people. You know, there was, I had an old teacher in college sculpture, and his definition of art is it's the thing that is perfectly useless. And when something begins to take on a use, it can't be art anymore because it's going to be compromising. It can never be made for its own sake. Art is the only thing in the world that's made for its own sake. So eating animals was definitely not a work of art because it had a real use, a utility that I intended,

which is not to make people vegetarians, although it makes me happy when somebody says, that book made me a vegetarian. The function was really to expand a conversation that feels repressed. I think if I said to you, you should really drink a different kind of bottled water. You might think I was a little annoying, a little obnoxious, a little presumptuous, but you wouldn't freak out, probably. But when you say to somebody, you should think about eating less meat. A lot of people freak out.

And I think, you know, part of that might be because there's a culture of kind of aggressive vegetarians or annoying vegetarians. But I think, I think, like a more powerful explanation is that, Everybody agrees that it matters. It just matters a lot. Life and death matter. And choosing death or in the case of factory farming, which is to say really all meat in America,

choosing cruelty, choosing environmental destruction for culinary pleasure, is it's an awkward thing. It's a difficult thing to approach. And you said I would move back and forth across the table. It's because I move back and forth across the table. I don't think these. These things are simple. Do you have a sense of your political relation to the larger country at this point in your life?

How do you like America? That's my question. Yes, do you like America? Yeah, yeah. And if so, why? I think I could really say I'm agnostic about the answer, and agnostic about the question. You know, what America?

Like, small town America, urban America, political America, cultural America. there are a lot of different Americas. And to say, I like this or I don't like that, it doesn't make any sense. See, that's what Middle Ages. It does make sense to me. Yeah. I know. There are certainly moments.

You know, I took my kids to this just corny, like, low-budget amusement park in Connecticut, not that long ago. And we were standing in line for one of these trampoline things where they hook you up to harness. And in front of us was like, somebody wearing a turban. somebody wearing a keypot, a black person, white family. And I said to them, you know, there's nowhere else on earth where you would be standing in a line like this and be happy to and everybody's watching the person in front

and cheering for them. So that's an oversimplification of America. But I don't think that, you know, despite the endemic problems, I still think no one has succeeded as well we have in creating situations like that. Yeah, yeah. Thank you very much.

Novelist Jonathan Safran 4, talking with George Saunders, author of some of the best short stories of our time, from the 2015 New Yorker Festival. Next week, a political campaign story unlike any you've ever heard before. C to the A to the R-O-Y, vote Carly, hereina, I'll tell you why.

She's not going to fail our nation with any more problems. Unlike her opponent, she can actually solve them. The presidential primaries reimagined by high school kids. That's next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for joining us today. I hope you had a fantastic holiday. See you next week.