The New Yorker Radio Hour - Thomas Mallon on Impeachment, and Philip Pullman on “His Dark Materials”

Episode Date: November 15, 2019

As he opened public impeachment proceedings last week, Representative Adam Schiff invoked Watergate—which, after all, ended well for Democrats. To understand how that history applies, or doesn’t, to the current proceedings, The New Yorker’s Dorothy Wickenden spoke with Thomas Mallon, the author of the deeply researched “Watergate: A Novel,” and of historical fictions about Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. How would Mallon write the story of the Trump impeachment as a novel? “I would go right inside the heads of Lindsey Graham, Ben Sasse, and Mitt Romney,” he tells Wickenden. “A guilty conscience is one of the best springboards for fiction.” Plus, a conversation with Philip Pullman, whose beloved trilogy, “His Dark Materials,” has been adapted for a new HBO series. But he’s already onto a second trilogy about its heroine, Lyra, because he has more to learn about her universe.  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.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. As Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, opened impeachment proceedings last week. He very deliberately invoked the specter of Watergate. These actions will force Congress to consider, as it did with President Nixon, whether Trump's obstruction of the constitutional duties of Congress constitute additional grants. for impeachment. Now, you can see why Schiff would want to remind us of those Nixon years. Nixon had won his second term in a landslide, but over the course of many hearings, and much information that was coming to light, a very different narrative took hold.

Nixon came to be seen as a crook, a man who had put his own interests ahead of the countries, and finally he lost the support of senators, even in his own party. To understand how that president applies or doesn't apply to the Trump hearings, we called on Thomas Mallon. Tom's books include Watergate, a novel, and historical fiction about Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Tom Mallon spoke with the New Yorkers, Dorothy Wickenden. So I thought you could help us see this drama through your eyes,

which is, there are those of a novelist. So Watergate, in so many ways, really was tailor-made for a novelist. What in specific appeal to you as you began that work? I used to call Watergate a claustrophobic epic because you had all of this frantic action in Washington, but it was all happening within the space of a few square miles. It played out over more than two years. And you had a cast of incredibly colorful characters, complicated characters. Everybody from these figures of unexpected nobility like Sam Irvin at the Watergate hearings,

the extraordinary tortured psyche of Nixon, really a tragic figure in my estimation. Somebody with great political gifts, great really governing gifts, who's done in by this terrible sense of defeat and unfairness that he carried around. The comic characters from Martha Mitchell to Tony U. Lasowitz, who was the bag man for some of the money, who tells Richard Nixon's white shoe lawyer, Herbert Kalmack at one point, something's not kosher here, Mr. Cowenbach. And all of these quotes, all of these phrases that entered the language. Remind us of some of those phrases. Erlickman talking about we'll let this person twist slowly, slowly in the wind.

Stonewall really enters the political lexicon at that point. I'm not a crook, Nixon, and my particular favorite, which is the limited modified hangout, which is at what, that was a John Ehrlichman phrase, and this was about how we could, you know, be halfway honest about the cover-up. We could admit some things, but hold back others. But a great deal of the memorabilness of Watergate, the reason it's so memorable is the way I think the story unfolded. and how the public received it. And I think that in many respects, just as the characters are extremely different from the ones involved in the Trump drama, the conveyance of the story was very different. You grew up in a rock-ribbed Republican family and you watched the Watergate

scandal as a college student. Do you remember your immediate reaction in June 1972 when you learned about the break-in at the Watergate Hotel? I don't. And I think in a way that telling because I think very few people would remember it. For months, it was referred to in the news as the Watergate caper. That was the way it was, it was kind of this very entertaining little offshoot of the 72 campaign. And Watergate doesn't really explode until early 1973, by which time Nixon has had an enormous victory over George McGovern carrying 49 states. This candidate who had never felt terribly loved or popular. He had been the vice president for an extremely popular president, Dwight Eisenhower. If you listen to tapes of Nixon receiving congratulations from people

on the phone on election night, 1972, one of the things that most fascinated me from the point of view of a novelist was you can hear that he's depressed and he's depressed by victory. He did not know how to cope with victory. He had grown so used to combat that he really couldn't deal with the fact that this was it. He kept up his high approval ratings until early 73. Then they started to fall. What caused that? Well, I think the Watergate revelations came very gradually, and people began to know that something was really wrong.

And the other thing is that the scandal spread. Things kept turning up. The Watergate investigations turned up the things that the White House plumbers had done as far back as 1971. What John Mitchell, the Attorney General himself privately referred to as the White House horrors. And it kept unfolding. And people knew there was going to be more and more. And there was this tremendous buildup waiting for the testimony of John Dean. Now, I guess you're fully aware, Mr. Dean, of the gravity of the state. charges you have made under oath against the highest official of our land, the President of the United States?

Yes, I am. And being so aware, do you still stand on your statement? Yes, I do. Mr. Chairman, I have no further questions. I might add this, Mr. Dash. I realize it's almost an impossible task if it's one man against the other that I'm up against, and it's not a very pleasant situation, but I can. only speak what I know to be the facts, and that's what I'm providing this committee.

And those hearings were watched by 85% of American household. So we know about Dean, and there was this great character in Senator Sam Irvin, who was the chair of the Watergate Committee. Yes, I mean, he quoted the Bible, he quoted Shakespeare. His eyebrows went up and down. He had these enormous bushy eyebrows, and they were almost like a second set of hands. and he would get very excited. He was extremely astute about what was going on, and he was a very good judge of character, and he had these snappish exchanges sometimes.

The foreign intelligence activities had nothing to do with the opinion of the Ellsberg's psychiatrist about his intellectual or emotional or psychological state. How do you know that, Mr. Chairman? Because I can understand English languages, my mother tongue. there really was a kind of cinematic quality to the Irvin hearings. But one of the things that was essential about Irvin, aside from the fact that he was

this fantastic sort of personality, just as Trump would say, right out of central casting for an interesting southern senator, he did not come from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. He came from the conservative southern segregationist wing. and it was enormously effective to have somebody who was not one of Nixon's typical tormentors. It gave the hearings a certain kind of credibility, whereas I think a lot of the public, when they look at Adam Schiff, they just see a kind of, you know, Nancy Pelosi-style California liberal. And, well, you know, these people are always out to get Trump. They were out to get him from day one. And, of course, you have to remember that the urban hearings were a full year before the Judiciary Committee here. hearings. Impeachment was really not in the air until later.

And so this is something else Schiff has going against him. He has an incredibly compressed time frame here, given the coming elections in the fall of 2020, and they have to kind of race through this as quickly as possible. Yes. The timeline was really quite elongated, and that in itself, I think, allowed things to sink in with the public and to build up. My friend and mentor, Mary McCarthy, wrote a little book about the Watergate hearings called The Mask of State. And Mary wrote, the high points of Watergate were the hearings of the Watergate Committee, summer 1973, and the hearings of the House Judiciary Committee, summer 1974. They made up a gripping serial story that by some freakish chance was seasonal and like a nature myth turned on the phenomenon of rebirth on the flowering of national institutions that seemed to have died down. but now we're coming back every summer,

not only in the Capitol, but on TV as a delighted public tuned in. The characters in that drama in installments were mostly unfamiliar except for the villain, whom we had been watching on the box for 20 years. But we came to know them like members of the family or old soap opera pals. These days, the days of Twitter and Fox News and everything else, is it possible that we could even, if we had all of the great characters, that the public would tune in to these hearings the way they did then? My answer would be no, because what you're really lacking above all in this,

aside from all the colorful players, the bit players, the heavies, what you're lacking is a protagonist. Nixon was endlessly fascinating, tragic, gifted, conflicted, mean-spirited, generous. there was something to grab hold of there. I can't imagine writing a novel with Trump as a point of view character, just to be rattling around in that great weightless, gaseous psyche of his. It just doesn't hold a reader.

And as a result, I think it's unlikely in a way to hold the public. The public will say, we never had any illusions about Trump. We always knew he was a bad guy. We always knew he was thuggish. That's why we voted for him. We liked him. That's what his base would say. So you always look for point of view characters. And if you were writing the story of the Trump impeachment, who would that be? Oh, I think I would go right to the people who have not kept us from getting to where we are right now. I would go right inside the heads of Lindsay Graham and Ben Saz and Mitt Romney, the Republicans who know better. because they cannot be feeling good about themselves. Yeah, you can see the torment with Lindsay Graham written all over his face. No, and that's absolute catnip to a novelist.

A guilty conscience is one of the absolute best springboards for fiction that exist. Watergate almost has a kind of rhetorical subtlety to it and dramatic subtlety to it that this doesn't have. This is just a comic book in some ways. So do you think Democrats made the right decision or the wrong decision to focus solely on Ukraine? I mean, there's so much information in the Mueller report that is sort of trying to guide them toward possible obstruction of justice on any number of fronts? It's a hard call. With Nixon, as I said, there was a lot of stuff. It was a variety of stuff.

But they did try to load up the impeachment articles with things like that. the bombing of Cambodia, and that kind of thing left Republicans cold. So I think there's a good case to be made for narrowing things to the most egregious and the most understandable. But I don't think it's going to be enough. And I do think after that, consider how this is going to play out. I mean, my friend Brenda Wineapple's recent book about the Johnson impeachment. That's Andrew Johnson. Yeah, back in the 1860s. talks about how when Johnson was acquitted by the Senate, by one vote, by a single vote,

he basically spun it as a great vindication. And to some extent, history bought into that. Imagine, given everything we know about Trump as showman, bloviator, liar, imagine if he's acquitted in the Senate how he is going to present that, how he's going to talk about it. You know, you can just just hear him now. It's the greatest political victory ever seen in the United States. You know, it's not going to be a matter of escaping justice. It's going to be this kind of gladiatorial triumph. Thank you so much, Tom. Thank you. You can find Thomas Mellon's writing for us at New Yorker.com. He's the author of many books, most recently, Landfall. Dorothy Wickendon is executive editor at the magazine, and she hosts our podcast, Politics and More, every week.

Stick around because Philip Pullman, the author of His Dark Materials, joins us in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. For eight years, Game of Thrones was a critical darling and a huge ratings bonanza for HBO, and by the time it ended, in May, it was the most talked-about show on television, or it certainly seemed that way. Not even six months later, HBO has just launched a new show based on a series of beloved fantasy novels, but this one, it's got a lot less nudity and not quite as much beheading. The show is called His Dark Materials, and it's based on a trilogy of books,

Young Adult Novels, by the writer Philip Pullman. What's in the world? This is Lara and Pantiline. As we are hereby invoke the privilege of scholastic sanctuary. And among the many fans of those books is the New Yorker's Katie Waldman. His Dark Materials was first published in the mid-90s, and that leads to an easy comparison with J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books. But Philip Pullman's concerns are very different from hers. His Dark Materials is set in a world parallel to ours and actually occasionally blends into our own world.

It stars a sprightly, spunky heroine named Lyra. She has mysterious and unknowable parents. The universe is sort of a patchwork of different fantastical locations in sorts of. settings. There's kind of a northern sublime world that is populated by armored bears. There are witches. There's a steampunk team of scientists. It's really wonderful. So while HBO is releasing this series based on his dark materials, Philip Pullman has just put out a new book set in Lyra's World, and that's called The Secret Commonwealth. So this is the second book of his second trilogy. So if you're counting, that's five books set in this universe as of now.

Katie Waldman spoke recently with Philip Pullman, who was at home in Oxford. So to start off, the HBO BBC adaptation of His Dark Materials just started airing. You're an executive producer on that show. And back in 2007, there was a film adaptation of the same book of The Golden Compass, the first book of his Dark Materials. I wonder whether you think that there are any aspects of your work that TV is a medium is particularly well suited to capture. Well, I think the human drama is going to come out well, partly because of the quality of the actors who are going to have to present it. TV works a little better in close-up, I think, than the big movie screen does. So it's the human drama that works very well.

I'm happy that the story will be told fully in this form, whereas it couldn't have been told fully on the stage or on the, movie screen. Yeah. There actually will be listeners, though, who are not familiar with the universe of the dark materials. And so just to back up a little bit, it's set in a parallel universe to ours. And the biggest difference is that everyone's soul is manifested in an animal that they can talk with and that everyone else can see. And those animals are called demons, right? Is that the correct pronunciation? That's right, yeah. Yes, in Lara's world, Lyra is the main protagonist. She's a girl of about 11 or 12.

In Lyra's world, everybody has a demon, which is their own, part of an aspect of their own self, which is in the form of an animal, and it's outside them, so that their demon can talk to them, can look around corners when they wait in the shadows, that sort of thing. And the relationship between the human and the demon is a very, very close one, and it can't be broken unless by exceptional. force or cruelty or something like that is the whole story, the arc of the whole story, is really, I suppose, in one simple sentence about the change from innocence to experience

or the change from childhood to growing up. And the demon symbolizes this because children's demons can change shape all the time. According to what they're feeling or what the mood is or how excited they are or whatever. Whereas in adolescence, the power to change, great. gradually fades away and they find one fixed form which they have for the rest of the human companion's life. It was a very good idea, probably the best idea I've ever had. Yeah. A person's demon is their opposite gender, right? Well, most of them are. There seem to be a few exceptions,

but there are all sorts of things I haven't yet discovered about demons. I often get asked, for example, I often get asked how demons are born. And my answer is, well, I haven't had to describe a scene in which that happens, so I haven't had to think about it yet. Demon gynecology is a mystery to me. Can you imagine a world of sort of gender fluidity where demons change according to their partners' gender? Yeah, I can imagine it, but I haven't had to yet. Maybe that'll happen in the third book. Maybe you give me an idea on which the whole story will turn.

So Lyra is what in the States we would call a middle school age student. And I think you taught that age group before you became a professional novelist, right? Yeah, it was, I taught for about 12 years and it was children of that age, children between 9 and 13. I taught the sort of 11, 12, 13 year olds. It's a very interesting age because they are just on the cusp of becoming entering their adolescence. And all sorts of things are opening out for. them. And it's wonderful to see that happening to young children. My own grandchildren are going through that stage at the moment. And again, it's very exciting to see. Your father was a

pilot, correct? And he... That's right, yeah. You grew up thinking that he had died in battle. Yeah. When I was about seven years old in 1953 or four, the British, were fighting an insurgency, as they called it in Kenya, the Mao insurgency. And the roots of that lay deep in colonialist history, and it's a thing on which we certainly know in Britain cannot look back with pride. But my father was a pilot, and he was involved in that whole distasteful business, and his plane crashed and he died. I was very young, as at the time I said, I was six or seven, and I, um, I, was either led to believe or came to believe or misunderstood,

but I thought he'd been shot down in battle, you see. And so to me he was a great hero, and it wasn't until much, much later that I realized what he'd really been doing, which was effectively dropping bombs on people who had spears. Well, that complicated the whole thing. And then I discovered other things about his life about his relations with my mother, which I didn't know about. And it caused me to revise my ideas about a lot of things.

Yeah. Would you characterize that as an innocence lost? Innocence, oh, I suppose it was in a sense because, yeah, my eyes were opened. Yes. I mean, the reason I ask, it just seems that Lyra has a similar experience in the books where she starts out entranced by her father and also her mother, even though they've kept their distance from her. And then over the course of the story,

she discovers that there are aspects of them that are less savory and she decides to strike her own path. That's right, yeah. This is a classic trope, if that's the word I want, in literature that children read, because the first thing you have to do if you're writing a story is to get the parents out of the way. There can be no adventure in the story if the parents

are saying, no, come on, dear, it's bedtime. So you have to get rid of the parents pretty quickly. And that's what happens in this one, of course, as in Treasure Island, as in all sorts of classic children's books. Yeah. I'd love to actually turn to the Secret Commonwealth. First of all, what drove you to continue the story? I mean, you actually placed the first volume of the Book of Dust in the past before

the events. of his dark materials, but the second one is after. What drew you back to the world? Well, I hadn't said enough, at least I hadn't discovered enough in his dark materials, about dust, dust with a capital D, this mysterious substance, essence, whatever it is, that seems to pervade the universe, and which in the story, in our universe, is called dark matter. dark matter is a phrase that fits very well with the line I took from Paradise Lost that gave me his dark materials dark matter is this invisible intangible something that holds the universe from together stops it from

flying apart its mass is such that gravity can't doesn't let us escape from it but we don't know what it is when I was writing his dark materials oh, 25 years ago or more, they hadn't yet, scientists hadn't yet discovered what dark matter was, and I kept my fingers crossed that they wouldn't before I finished the book. Fortunately, they still haven't. So the universe is still a very mysterious place. Yeah, and there's also a kind of maturation of the themes of the earlier trilogy. So Lyra and her demon Pan actually part ways, and Pan appears to be searching for Lyra's lost imagination.

Is that right? Yeah, that's right. She's 20. She's an undergraduate. She's a reader. And she's read some books which have influenced her a great deal, but books by two prominent intellectuals of her time and her world. One of them is a fierce rationalist who denies the existence of anything remotely irrational. And the other is a kind of postmodernist who believes that there's no such thing as truth anyway. And it's all whatever. we care to believe. And these people have seriously undermined her security, her intellectual security. And Pan thinks it's because they've stolen her imagination. And he goes off to look for it. I have so many questions about this. The first is the idea that the demons are merely psychological projections of what is happening internally. This is what one of the philosophers says. It does bear a certain resemblance to cultural analysis that has.

has been generated around your own work. And I wonder if this is you trying to engage those arguments within the world of the book itself. I suppose it is, yeah. I suppose it is. These two different philosophers or intellectuals, they represent strands of thought that are current in the world at the moment, with which I profoundly disagree.

The first one, the guy, a German called Gottfried Brander, is this fierce rationalist who believes that the only kind of evidence that's worth having his scientific evidence. Nothing else is of any use at all, and he regards the imagination, the world of art, poetry, etc., with a fierce contempt. I presented this as being a very persuasive argument,

which has influenced a lot of young people in Lara's world, including her. Yeah, in the first trilogy, you described Lyra as a wonderful liar with a poor imagination. Do you see a sort of tension there? Yeah. Now, I didn't know why I said that at the time. I'm beginning to see it now. Her imagination is all in Pan, of course. It's all in her demon. And it's this lack of connection which sets the story going, I think, in the secret commonwealth. I mean, it's lovely that the conceit of the demon allows you to posit sort of a vision of selfhood as a dialogue between different parts of the self, you know, that the, the, the,

there's always multiplicity. Yeah, that too. I mean, to be more accurate, I suppose I should have about 10,000 demons for each human being because we don't consist of just two parts, but two is quite enough to manage in the story. Yeah. I'd love to go back for a second to Lyra and Pans, so to speak, conscious uncoupling. Gwyneth Paltrow and Pannas, whatever her husband's name was. Oh, goodness.

That's very funny. Conscious and deeply. Were you consciously sort of framing a metaphor for our adult struggles to use our imaginations? Yeah. But mainly I was concerned to see what had caused it and what was going to happen as a result and how they were going to find each other again. You don't realize all the metaphorical or implications of what you're writing or telling when you're telling a story. It's sometimes best if you don't spell them out and for readers to pick them up for themselves. And sometimes they have a better explanation than you do. And of course, if they come up with an explanation that is creditable, I'm happy to claim responsibility for it. No, we don't always know what we're doing.

doing when we're telling a story. The novelist Philip Pullman. He spoke with the New Yorker's Katie Waldman. The adaptation of his dark materials has just come out on HBO, and Pullman's new book is called The Secret Commonwealth. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for this week, and I hope you'll join us next time. We've got an extraordinary story.

It's about a young woman who went into the darkest reaches of the white supremacist movement and came back out again. That story from the New Yorker's Andrew Moranz. See you then. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tuneiards, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.