The Press Box - Remembering Larry McMurtry and Chatting With Author Alexander Wolff

Episode Date: March 29, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker remember the great novelist Larry McMurtry. They reflect on his novels and films such as ‘Lonesome Dove’ and ‘Terms of Endearment,’ and talk about the impact McMurtry had on the state of Texas (3:05). Then, author Alexander Wolff stops by to discuss his recent trip to Germany, his relationship with his father, and what it was like revisiting the past in the process of writing his new book, ‘Endpapers: A Family Story of Books, War, Escape, and Home’ (30:05). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Alexander Wolff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Head into the Ringerverse to stay up to date with all things superheroes and nerd culture entertainment. Hosted by a rotating lineup of superfans at The Ringer, including Mallory Rubin and Van Lathen, shows will provide instant reactions to blockbuster releases, insightful backstories on canon, and mind-bending theories, as well as fresh takes on the latest news and rumors. Check out the Ringerverse on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. David, Ben Mullen of the Wall Street Journal reports that Axiose and the athletic are in merger talks.

Oh, no. What I want to know is, what do you expect from the Axios athletic expanded universe? Um, oh man, I have nothing. I don't even know where to go with this.

Um, so the idea is that they're trying to, they're going to merge and, and go public at some point. Hold on. Let me see where I, the tweet that I saw about this.

This has Ben Mullen said, the plan is to build a portfolio company that consolidates high-quality publishers. Okay. What don't we even say about this? That's your take. Long pause. I mean, okay.

Oh, man. I mean, it just, I don't know. It just, it feels wrong. Maybe it's not wrong. Maybe it's not my place to say. If this, if people, you know, I just feel like when these, when we, when, when, when, when, when, journalistic outlets or outfits are trying to go public and make a bunch more money.

I don't know. It feels like we're just getting, we're like stumbling into trunk territory here. Can we get like a great odd couple podcast? See, that would be fun. What if we got Jonathan Swan and Ken Rosenthal? How about Jonathan Swan and Bruce Feldman? Put them together. What could possibly go wrong?

I would listen to that. yeah that sure but i mean i i bet there's you know a lot of people at axios that have some hot sports takes they've been they've been forced to hold in for all these years oh wait they're talking about sports is that what we're doing here just polite conversations between people and on different beats i just call it the water cooler two best tweets i read why i joined the athletic by mike allen that's from adam ren and mark de stephano tweeted we're putting the newspaper back together. See?

Get your politics and sports in the same place. Coming up on today's show, David and I remember Larry McMurtry, the author of Lonesome Dove and the co-writer of the screenplay for Brokeback Mountain. Plus author Alexander Wolfe goes to Germany to reckon with the lives of his father and grandfather. All that more in the press box. A part of the Ringer podcast network. Hello media consumers.

Brian Curtis and David Schumaker here. David, we're in full cowboy funeral mode today. because we lost Larry McMurtry. Great novelist, great Texan, great used book dealer. Let's hit those in order. Where do we start with Larry McMurtry

as a literary figure? Wow. He's sort of, I don't know that it's possible to really separate him out from the other pieces of him. And I just say that because there is a sort of,

he's an institution in a way that very few writers are anymore, right? And part of that is that he was sort of, I don't know, I think his sort of work in the mythological sort of helped mythologize himself. And I also think that he's, you know, I mean, the fact that by the time that you or I probably read Lonesome Dove, well, I mean, I can't speak for you. A lot of kids are reading it pretty young in Texas, But by the time I read it, he was just a name in the bookstore.

And I mean that as a compliment, right? I mean, he was just like a gigantic name on the cover of a book. And you knew it because of Lonesome Dove. And as an adult, you realize that he wrote like every movie that our parents liked in the 80s. You know, I mean, he was just, he was such a cultural institution in so many ways. So all of that, I guess, is to say his status of a, as a writer is not, something that I really thought deeply about for most of my the time that I read him, right? I mean, there was just sort of an assumption of his greatness. I think that, um,

when I, when I've read him over the past decade or so, I think that's pretty much borne out. I mean, he is a, I think that the, the main thing to say about him as a writer is that calling somebody plain spoken is a compliment in the state of Texas. And I think that's about as far as I should. I mean, that's about all needs to be said in a certain way. He was a literary volume shooter. 30 plus books according to the obits and the same number of screenplays. And I was thinking, what are the comps there?

Is it like John Updike? Yeah. Paul Theroux, maybe. People that just always have a new book out in bookstores every time you go. John Updike for a portion of my childhood, a significant portion, was probably the terror of my dad's reading life because he had these beautiful copies of the Rabbit Trilogy and is on his shelf. And so every new updike book became a Christmas present for him, which was every single year, you know. It's like a tie. I'm going to give you the new uptick. I'm sure Larry McMurtry held that status for a lot of people, right? I mean, he was, he published, like you said, he was. a volume shooter. He published a lot. And, you know, but that, that was sort of his style. You know, you don't publish, you don't, you know, writing Lonesome Dove, the novel would be almost an impossible

task for anybody that was not a volume shooter. Oh, absolutely. 800 plus pages. Yeah. And so, I mean, in that book, despite his expansiveness, read Lone's some dove, read some of the nonfiction essays that sort of, they came out around the time when he was clearly gearing up to write it. I mean, that book could have been five times as long. Yeah, there was a really good Grantland piece by Michael Hoinski caught him sort of in the last decade of his life. And Merchery had just published a book that was 196 pages long, but was divided Hoinsky writes into 58 chapters. And through the profile, which is really good,

McMurtry's kind of making this joke like, hey, you know, I need money, right? I got to write a book. What else am I going to do? You know, he's just joking. Like, he makes the joke, got to wonder where my next million dollars is going to come from. But he had,

and certain people that generation had it, like Dan Jenkins had it to name another Texan. I just can't stop writing. Like, I got to do, I got to be doing something. I believe McMurtry's thing was 10 pages a day. No matter what happens, I am writing something.

thing and this writing is going to be a book and it's going to come out. Yeah. His R was certainly enhanced by the movies you mentioned. Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, HUD, Lonesome Dove, pretty frequently through his career later co-writes a screenplay to Brokeback Mountain, which also brings in movies where he wrote a lot about the fact that his work was made to movies. Also, I landed on this when we talk about him as a literary figure from the Washington post obit. Janet Maslin,

a book and movie critic at the New York Times, dubbed Mr. Murtree a father of chick lit on the strength of his character Aurora Greenway, the grand dom of terms of endearment. So he's very versatile. He could write male characters

like those cowboys and lonesome dove. And he could also write female characters and made it a point to write boat. Yeah, I mean, he said as much throughout his career, but I'll just say it here. it's the creation of characters of likable or of otherwise appealing

you know characters with a significant gravity as far I mean and I mean then in the terms of like planetational were his or what made him famous I mean that's what people kept coming back for whether it was

any of those movies that we talked about the books they were based on books completely separate he could he could create a character that people just wanted to be with that wanted to, you know, go on the adventure with, wanted to watch or read or whatever else. The, you know, I kind of think that, um, him being so Texan was what was, was an interesting,

like, counterweight to that. And of course, they, you know, played together really directly in term, in Lonesome Dove and a lot of his, uh, Houston novels and everything else. But there's also, but it's, it's sort of like those two things were almost enough. And then there's, is this just like just the the wit, the brilliance, the, the, I don't know, the ability to make every conversation interesting and significant. I mean, that, that was, that was, that was, that was, that was, that was, that was, that was, that, that, those are the big building blocks. And he, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the subject matter, you know, Texas, I mean, if you can kind of set aside the Texasness of the whole thing, the specific, that's, that's, the

specific subject matter hardly. I mean, it was not a big, didn't matter as much as his ability to create these characters. Totally. He could do it in rural Texas and he could do it in city Texas. And the character's what pulls you through in both cases. I saw at one point he, and I think it was in the Grantland piece or the, maybe it was just in the Times O bit, I forget, but, but he referred to, he referred frequently, I think throughout his life is to Houston as his Paris, right? Because he, and he usually did it as a means of dismissing Dallas. But, you know, he went to Rice University. And from, you know, for a kid from Archer City, Houston must have seemed like the biggest, the biggest city in the world, you know, and it certainly was more metropolitan than just about anywhere in the state at

the time. But yeah, I mean, there's, there's a lot of different, a lot of different kinds of Texas. And he mined them all. Let's spend a moment on his Texanist. The historian Douglas Brinkley had a great line I saw quoted this week, that there are three essential books. in Texas, the Bible, the Warren Commission report, and lonesome dove. By the way, sitting here in Fort Worth talking to you, I can confirm that that is correct. Yeah. That's all you need. You're good.

Maybe semi-tuff. You know, maybe now there's a Lawrence Wright volume or two, but really those three will get you through the day here. His one thing about his Texanist that always amazed me was that he was a great critic of the Texas establishment, a great critic of Texas mythos as it had been created over the years. And then because McMurtry was so good and so productive, he became the Texas establishment. His novels became the Texas mythos. Yeah. Lonesome Dove most prominently, right?

I saw lots of places this week. It was an anti-Western, quote, unquote, an anti-Western. Let me tell you, dude, you go to my University of Texas message boards where they are seemingly always talking about Lonesome Dove. Nobody's going, man, this is a very clever anti-Western. They're like, this is the best cowboy book ever written.

It's a bigger deal now that Western movies have kind of receded into the past than any cowboy movie other than maybe the movie of Lonesome Dove. So here's a guy who was taking something apart and then he just became that thing.

It's a really, really interesting process. Or he brought the mass to him. I mean, I don't know that he became, I mean, he, he didn't compromise as a writer so much as the world came to agree on his definition, you know, in the original New York Times Review of Lonesome Dove, Nicholas Lemon contrasted, it said it wasn't anti-Western, at least it started as one and sort of ended as one, but contrasted it with the sort of cowboy, he called it the cowboyana movement of that, you know, of sort of, you know, Hollywood and pop storytelling. in the previous decades. It's sort of the glorification and mythology of the cattle drive, you know, and even though that was such a small period,

a small slice of American history, it occupies this great space in our mind. And kind of what Lemon comes around to is that in so many words, McMurtry tried to show you that these were not gods on the trail. These were real men, but just kind of by the power of his writing,

he almost accidentally lifted these irregular guys up to God-like status. right and and and that's a huge compliment to McMurtry but you know I mean it did sort of overtake the genre I mean the the previous anything else almost anything else that falls into the rubric of Cowboyana is it kind of pales in comparison right I mean it's almost like this is this is not an exact example at all but there's a sense in which lonesome dove is sort of like the Game of Thrones of the Western because Game of Thrones like began as a deconstruction of Tolkien of like all these like you know of all of the fantasy

books that came before it but if you ask anybody right now to define fantasy they would point a game of Thrones yes right yes and and that's sort of what happened to lonesome dove it became it was such a phenomenon it was such an incredible work of literature and of film and everything else that it just sort of it it it absorbed the the definition or the you know it took over the definition I think that's a terrific analogy and that's exactly what I'm saying. It's not intellectual inconsistency at all. It's just supreme skill and supreme imagination and also, by the way, supreme ambition that anti-Western can effectively become the Western. It can occupy the same place in everybody's mind, the same yearnings that a different

generation had for John Wayne and the searchers and everything else becomes this generation's yearning for lonesome dove. Totally. Totally. And you know, Larry McMurtry was such a self-conscious Texan. Yeah. That I wonder if that's what he set out to do. You know, I read some quotes from him. He once told Texas Monthly, all I wanted to do was write a novel that demythologized the West,

instead it became the chief source of Western mythology. I totally take him at his word. But he was very self-conscious about Texas and Texas literature. And I just wonder if that did not please him to great extent, that he had both been the guy to take it apart. Yeah. And been the guy to repart. place to be that he would he would have of course never admitted it right i mean he had part of part of

what made larry mcmurtry who he was was the sort of gruff uh kind of unforgiving exterior and who knows that could have been a lot of his interior too but it always he he he definitely felt like a the writer as character you know through at least in in in so much as the way he was you know he portrayed himself in public um you know the thing i kept coming back to is i was like flipping back through lonesome dove uh over the weekend was thinking about cowboyana, that sort of concept of everything else. And most of the TV shows and movies of that period have sort of faded, you know, faded from the popular imagination.

But weirdly one, and this is, I say this is a father of a young child. One of the things, one of the ways that they've persisted is the songs, right? Like the, like the, like the, the, the, you know, all those sort of like trail songs that you kind of pop up around the campfire or just randomly. like, you know, like children's TV shows and stuff like that and you find yourself like whistling one or singing one to your kid or whatever else. And McMurtry, Larry McMurtry, whose son probably not coincidentally is a singer-songwriter of note, James McMurtry. There's something sort of about the way that Larry McMurtry wrote and sort of the plainness of his writing, but the sort of whatever the literary version of catchyness of it is, right? Just the seductiveness of it is, you know, that sort of he felt sort of like a, like an epic poet, right? This is the sort of like Gilgamesh or Evangeline or something.

He was like he was writing stories that you would retell. And that was like, that's, that, it speaks to the simplicity and the, and the, like I said, the catchiness, but also just like the deep, deep literary value. No, absolutely. And again, I keep coming back to ambition. The ambition to be that guy, you know, whether you, whether you, whether you, whether you, whether you, truly were thought that you would succeed on those terms, the ambition to write the 800 page anti-Western saga. It's pretty amazing.

He did this other thing in terms of his Texanists that was so interesting. Back in the 60s, there were three writers in Texas. I'm not even going to name them because they're almost, they're incredibly obscure today, but they were kind of the granddaddies of Texas literature. Because David, you know as well as I do at Texas. Hey, we got the best barbecue. We got the best Mexican.

food. We got the best power grid and we have the, we have the best writers over here. We don't need any help over here. He wrote this essay, which he put in his book in a narrow grave, which are a bunch of essays about Texas, and just took these three guys apart. This is in 1968 when these guys were very, very much still had names. Just took them apart. And it's not even like it's a blunt force hit piece. He read all their books. His criticism was incredibly. scalpel-like and his point was, folks, Texas doesn't have a literature. It doesn't. We want to think it does.

It would be nice to think that these guys were great writers. They were just okay. We don't have a literature here. But then to come around to the point we were making a minute ago, he did it. He supplied the state with a literature with this gigantic body of work that you could not argue wasn't literature. That no smart-ass critic, you know, Latter-day McMurtry could come along. and poke holes in. And again, that's an amazing called shot.

At that point, he'd written three novels, I think, when he wrote that essay, including the last picture show. But then he wrote so many more and became the guy that he out loud said that the state lacked to that point. Can we say a few words about Larry as a bookseller? Sure. Because it's not nuts, is it, to say that Larryman Merchery was one of the greatest used book dealers in a market.

America. If you want to talk about, I said before about this, how we just sort of became, he built his own mythology or this whole mythology kind of sprung up around Larry McMurtry. His mythology as a bookseller was kind of second to none, right? I mean, he was sort of like the John Henry of like bookselling as, you know, Amazon and whatever, the internet kind of overtook our world. Yeah. I mean, I'm in Fort Worth right now and it's still. a long way to Larry McMurtry's bookstore. Yeah. It was just, it's out

there in Archer City. His first one opened up in Georgetown in Washington, D.C. in 1971, also called Booked Up, the Archer City version, which he intended as the Hay on Y of Texas according to the O-Bits opened up in 1988. Dwight Garner in New York

Times said, at its height it was six buildings and 400,000 books. I made two trips there. And one striking thing was, well, I got two striking things. One was Larry McMurtry himself was in there just wearing an undershirt and marking up books with a pencil. And if I could remember what books I bought there, I'm pretty sure I could see his actual chicken scratch in the front page with $5 or $8, whatever was. It was incredibly cheap, by the way. And number two, I remember that there

were like buildings you would walk into down the street. It was pretty much all of downtown Archer city such as it is. And you would walk into a building and grab the books you wanted, but there was no cashier in there. And just on the honor system, you had to walk back to the main building where there was a cashier who could check you out. So it was like in a small town and had small town values from like, I don't know, the 1940s or something. No. You would have had to drive, like you said, a long, long way out of your way to, you know, steal 40 bucks worth of books. So I guess the honor system probably worked out most of the time. Calvin Trillard once wrote a New Yorker profile.

He said, Larry knows which shade of blue cover on a copy of Native Sun indicates the first printing and which one doesn't. He knows the precise value of poetry books by Robert Lowell that Robert Lowell may now have forgotten writing. And Larry himself once said, the bookshops are a form of ranching. Instead of herding cattle, I heard books.

I love that quote. Well, that was, I mean, I was going to say, that the beginning of that quote or that that passage about him knowing that you know the color of blue on the cover of the book was mcmurtry comparing himself to his father and he said and mary said he was a lousy cowboy but his dad could see a herd of cattle and say i want that one and then leave and come back the next day and see once again the herd of 200 cattle and go directly to the one he wanted right i mean and that it's that kind of just weird gift that mental precision about one very specific thing that McMurtry

carried over to his love of books. I mean, that's a pretty cool way to dress up bibliomania, but yeah, yes, absolutely. I would love for a cowboy metaphor for you or I to dress up the fact that we have way too many freaking books.

Put a button on this segment. Pete Crowato says, with the death of McMurtry, this feels like an ideal time to get each of your Texas literary Mount Rushmore's. Can I hit you with mine, David? Oh, my God. Yes, please. Texas literary Mount Rushmore.

Larry McMurtry, Dan Jenkins, Mary Carr, and Jonathan Charks. That's my four. I'm going to battle. Oh, man,

I was not prepared for this. You could just, we could just leave it at my comedy version if you want. You and I might need some time to think. Yeah, we can leave it at that.

I'm trying to think. I like Joe Or Lansdale a lot. There's some weird ones, right? Like Donald Barthel, right is from Texas. Oh, yeah. Does that count?

He was in the University of Houston forever. And Rick Bartholme, his brother is I love, love, love. You get into this weird definitional argument about who is a Texas novelist and who's not a Texas novelist and who's a Texas writer. But yes, I think suffice it to say Larry McMurtry has one of those four spots. Absolutely true. Absolutely true. I'll try to come back with a more with a precise list.

I don't know if I can. You're right. Texas is a very weird place. That's sort of what makes it Texas. I will say as we walk away from this thing, that everyone's going to be talking about lonesome dove, and rightfully so. But the fact that he was so prolific

should not diminish any of the books on his bibliography. And particularly the Last Picture Show, which is obviously well regarded, is one of the great sort of coming-of-age novels. And I don't, you know, those sort of coming-of-age novels, I think everybody gets to have

like one or two on their list, you know, and that's, but there's probably, there's probably a ceiling to how many of them you're going to read and really be moved by, but that one is just profound. And, his,

his Houston novels have pieces that just, and which are a series of books set in Houston, in terms of endearment was one of them, but it's sort of, this sort of circle of characters that dip in and out of each other's lives and whatever else. It's a loose series, but all my friends are going to be strangers.

The second one, moving on was the first one, I guess. And those books just, occupy a large, I mean, such large places in my memory when I just think of Larry McMurtry. And I mean, they all, any of them, anything you can get your hands on in the used, and in whatever used bookstore is closest to you. Just grab it and read it. He was, he was a fantastic writer. All right, let's do the Overward Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious

that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received. David, the cargo ship ever given, which had blocked the Suez Canal for nearly a week, is free as of today. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write. The ship is blocking so much important and useful stuff they've decided to rename it, Mitch McConnell.

This one was a little more high tone. If you're in line at the Suez Canal, stay in line. Remember those election day tweets? Yes. And finally, I wanted to make a joke about the boat, but it looks like that ship has sailed. Thanks to Joe Schmidt, Michael J. Anders, and Jesse McIntosh, and Alex Ungerman for those.

This week, David, Montana Senator Steve Danes tried to make a point about meth at the border. And this is how American pride breaks bad. 20 years ago in Montana, meth was homemade. It was homegrown. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write, My dad was a meth farmer and his dad was a meth farmer. And thanks to cheap imports last year, they had to declare bankruptcy and sell the meth farm.

Weird item, David, from Fox 8, New Orleans. A tax preparer allegedly pulls gun on clients who had complaints about filings. Tax preparer allegedly pulls gun on clients. It was an upward Twitter joke to call this H&R Glock. Thanks to Devin Peterson. And finally, David, in a very questionable decision, I got on Twitter Thursday and posted our senior yearbook photos from high school. I'm very aware. We appeared to be wearing tuxedos, which really threw a lot of people.

Yeah. That was sort of the normal thing, right? That was like, I don't think we, I don't think I had an option except to wear the tuxedo in that photo. Well, it was just the top of a tuxedo. We should make clear. we were not wearing we were handed a thing right weren't it like the million dollar man used to wear the ring where it was just the tie and part of the shirt it was not a tuxedo dicky or anything you just like there was nothing tear away there's no tearaway component to it but yeah it was like

it was like if you had a senior picture taken in a graduation you know in your in your robe and hat or whatever that was probably it wasn't the one you actually wore a graduation it was the one at the photo studio nine months prior yes i think some people thought we were at some real fancy school or something like that. In case you haven't judged the quality of this podcast, David and I are public school graduates. I just want to make that very, very clear. Would you like to hear

jokes about long-haired David and helmet-haired Brian? Please, please. First off, did you guys go to a high school for magicians? Are these the Columbine guys? How did two people immediately go there? That was bad. About

David, I have very strong opinions about Prague Rock. and about Brian I call my favorite teacher by his first name that's good you did you were basically that guy

no I was that guy but I didn't actually do that people had some press box references to the composition notebook dump or the strained cumberbund of the week this one's for wrestling fans

so Shoemaker went through a few gimmick changes and Curtis is pretty much Sina and that. And finally this, some friendships last forever. Most hairlines don't. Thanks to Jason Gay, Tim Masterson, Lincoln, Truly, young, Long John Silver, Nathan, and Brandon Boyd. If you dragged us, we deserved it. And congrats, you made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. In the notebook, David, we have Alexander Wolfe, who is one of my favorite sports writers, period.

Longtime Sports Illustrated writer's superb basketball guy, yeah, yeah, yeah. But Wolf is also one of those people in the sports writing business who use sports as a window for, or you might say an excuse to explore the rest of the world. And speaking of the world, Wolf recently went to Germany to explore what his father and grandfather who were born there did during World War II. He's come back with a great new book called N-Papers that reckons with what he found out about both of them. Here's Alexander Wolfe. All right, Alex, how long was the idea for N-papers kicking around in your head? Oh, probably in the non-frontal lobe of my brain for 20, 25 years. But there's just something about the metabolism of covering sports for a weekly magazine

that keeps it in the back of your brain. And I suppose I was the embodiment of what so many generations of Germans were. And I suppose a lot of Americans, too. We just these unpleasant historical things we suppress. And 2016, the Rio Olympics, that was the end of the ride for me at SI. And suddenly I had the time. And I felt it was unfinished business. So turn to it.

Unfinished business in terms of like filial record keeping. We are the people who preserve our parent stories or unfinished business like, uh-oh, I might find something bad in the past. And if I do, I need to reckon with it. Well, okay, I need to fess up here. You know, in our business, if there's a good story out there, an instinct tells us that there is. And I felt there was a story to tell, and that's what I do vocationally. So I knew that between the letters my dad had sent home from mostly the Eastern Front, the Russian Front, for those of us who can remember Hogan's heroes, between those and then diary entries and, you know, my ancestors.

were literary people. They wrote letters. They kept diaries. Between all that, I knew that there was a record. There was something to rummage through. And that got me excited enough. And I figured, okay, if I could familiarize myself with the history, maybe add a layer of context of what's going on in the world today, there might actually be something that

could be pulled together in multiple threads. You mentioned taking a buyout from SI in 2016. You literally take this money and wire it. to a German bank and then move with your family to Berlin to start this project. Here's a really practical research question. How's your German? Well, okay, so after my sophomore year in college, way back in the late 70s, I stopped out of college and played one season of third division basketball in Switzerland. I didn't know a word of German then.

And unfortunately, in Switzerland, they speak this god-awful dialect. So I didn't pick up as much as I would have liked, but I didn't. did teach myself the rudiments of the language. And when I came back to college, took a couple semesters. Now, for 40 years, it's, it lay dormant. And I was lucky. I live a couple miles from Middlebury College, which has a world-class language school, and they have a German school every summer. And because I, you know, visit the grocery store with the people who run it, they're my neighbors and friends. They let me go in for three weeks to scrape the rust off. And I tell people I had just enough German that I could walk into an archive and recognize that there was something I wanted

to drill down deep into, you know, just enough to get in trouble, as it were. And, you know, I had a lot of people who helped me. I found a wonderful ABD, Alba dissertation, American expat in Berlin, who taught English, but was also almost a PhD in history. And she would workshop passages that were a little bit beyond my Ken with me. So that helped a lot. And then, you know, I've thrown myself on the mercy. My editor at Grove Atlantic, Peter Blackstock, fluent in German, so he saved my butt a few times too. In Papers is mostly about two people, your father and your grandfather. Let's start with the latter, your grandfather. What made Kurt Wolfe a notable figure in Germany? So he inherited a lot of money in the late 19th century, early 20th. His mother died. And her

family were very prosperous, Jews converted and baptized mostly through that 19th century, but made a lot of money he inherited it and he loved books. So by the early 1900s, he was collecting them. And then around 1910, 11, he became a silent partner with a book publisher. And then went out on his own. And among the first writers, he signs up is Franz Kafka. So he has two or three really successful years publishing the Kurt Wolf Ferlag. And then World War I hits. And the publishing house is really well through the war, but then when the war is over, Germany is totally changed. And people like Kafka, there's no interest in a guy like that. So he goes into a funk, my grandfather, eventually in 33, flees Germany right after the Reichstag

fire, not because of his Jewish ancestry so much as because he's this publisher of these degenerate writers and an enemy of the Nazis for that reason. And is in exile, pretty much throughout the continent of Europe during the 30s and right up to the early 40s. He's a big enough literary figure that he publishes Kafka, and he also declines to publish James Joyce. Well, to his credit, he never wrote his memoirs, but he did do a series of radio essays in the early 60s in German or German broadcasters where he tells these great stories. And one of them is he gets this letter from this guy he describes as a crazy professor who's

writing me from Triesta in bad German, who clearly wants him to publish something. And he thinks it was probably portrait of the artist as a young man. But as Kurt says, ruefully, that if I'd published that, I surely would have gotten the greatest work ever to be published in the English language, Ulysses, which was just then coming down the pike. A near miss, as it turned out. But he published a lot of good stuff anyway. He did. And every publisher has those myth stories. And that's I suppose the mark of somebody who's in the arena, you know, if you haven't played in the bigs, you know, you're not going to strike out with a basis loaded. Kurt had a very high-minded ideal about publishing.

You talk about his fortunes went up and down. Occasionally he was reaching for bestsellers, but he mostly was looking for challenging books that he thought were important. He has this wonderful quote where he says, I for my part, consider a publisher to be, how shall I put it a kind of seismographer whose task is to keep an accurate record of earthquakes. I love that. He was reaching for the stars and seeing what that profession could do. He was. And to be fair, today, Kafka looks like this great coup. In fact, he never went back to press with a single piece of work that Kafka wrote for him because there was just no demand.

I mean, Kafka was somebody that, to his credit, knew that the world would be ready for someday, but not at that very moment. And that's probably. for all the wisdom supposedly in that seismographer quote, I think sometimes he wasn't reading the Times quite right, that he was kind of taking out these little annuities that were going to come do 10, 15, 20 years down the road. But yeah, that was the world in which he ran. And he loved art, Das Noia, which is German for the New.

That was kind of the thing. And later on he was a little embarrassed at some of the expressionist writers he published. But for the most part, And certainly once he came to the U.S., the writers became a little more mainstream, and he had a little more commercial success. Healer comes to power, and how does your grandfather escape Europe? So he happens to be in Berlin, although he was born in the Rhineland and had been based in Munich.

He happened to be in Berlin with my step-grandmother when the Reichstag burned, which was, of course, that moment where people knew that Hitler and the Nazis were going to seize power. and he barks at my step-grandmother. These are madmen pack. So within 48 hours, they're in London. They get married. They hadn't been married at that point. And they embark on this seven or eight-year odyssey where they're hiding out in Italy and in France and getting tips that they need to move because the Gestapo is about to swoop down. And they eventually, in 1941, make it out of Vichy occupied France through Lisbon to New York. And within any of year after landing in New York, they found Pantheon books where, you know, they're two penniless refugees. They had to find people who would be willing to invest in it, but they did. I mean, it's kind of the American dream on steroids. They're escaped from Europe. I mean, it's not just like Casablanca. It kind of is Casablanca, with the letters of transit and borders being crossed and trying to get on the list to get out of the country. It's just an amazing story.

Yeah, and they had angels who were looking out for them. There was someone, history has done a fairly good job of recording the exploits of a guy named Varian Fry, an American who went over and had a little stash of money to help people like Kurt and Helen. And a lot of artists and writers and philosophers like Hanna Arendt get them out. So they weren't doing it entirely on their own. But they did have a son, my half-uncle, Christian. they'd stashed in a convent on the Atlantic coast of France because they had to go flee Paris after the Nazis invaded and they didn't want to have to bring her child along. So he was stashed with a bunch of nuns. And meanwhile, of course, my dad from Kurt's first marriage is an

entirely different set of circumstances. He's back in Germany as a consequence of this escape. Nico Wolf. What happens to him? So because of a divorce in the early 30s, my dad and his sister are with their mother, Kurt's first wife, in Munich. She's not at all Jewish. She's actually from a very prosperous pharmaceutical and chemical family, the Merks. And as a result, my dad goes to boarding school. He winds up getting conscripted into the labor service, which is his paramilitary organization, the Nazi set up. And then with the invasion of the Soviet Union, he's driving a Jeep with reconnaissance photos and maps to help a fighter squadron find its target. So he's there for about a year and a half in the Ukraine. But for the grace of a study leave that brings him back to Munich for four or five months,

he would have been right in the teeth of that Soviet onslaught. So he's in fact on the Western front and gets captured by the Americans after the Battle of the Bulge. You mentioned going through all the letters he wrote from Ukraine. What was that like? Was that exhilarating? Was that terrifying about, you know, in terms of what you might find in those letters? Well, a lot of the things in the letters were very familiar to me in the way that you know your dad and you can see and feel and hear who he really was. The endearments, the expressions of concern for people, all that is universal. But the most disturbing thing I think that I uncovered in working on the book, I don't know about you, Brian. I was a history

major in college. And I thought I knew the basics of European history. And I had never heard of what the Nazis called the hunger plan. So we think of the Holocaust as death camps in the woods in Poland. And I always had. And it turns out from reading this book, Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder, that I learned that the Nazis basically decided when they invaded in the East that they were going to starve Slavs and Jews. They were going to send food back. to the Reich to keep civilians happy, and the soldiers would just live off the land, and that eventually German farmers would come and repopulate this. What we later would know is the breadbasket of the Soviet Union.

So reading that history and then reading my dad's letters home in which he's talking about incredibly well-fed they are. I mean, Portuguese sardines and oil. and fried potatoes with pork. And I mean, it was excruciating to read those two things in parallel. And I think the whole experience for me had the greatest impact when I had a sense of chronologies that I could lay with letters here alongside history here. For instance, realizing that the very time my step-grandmother is saying to my aunt,

you know, we're hoping for the victory of the allies now that they've joined the war. after Pearl Harbor. Precisely at that time, my dad is on the Russian front. And his sister is in Freiburg about to be bombed out of her apartment. So the sense of these parallel tracks that these different parts of my family took was driven home to me in the most obvious possible way. And when your dad was alive, he told you he'd spent one night passing through Auschwitz, essentially. What did he understand or know was going on there when he passed through? You know, he was a grunt in the Luftwaffe at that time, moving from posting to posting, and overnighted there. And I asked him, probably the longest session we had where we talked about the war, what he knew.

And he said he didn't know what was going on there. He did see trucks with forced laborers being driven around the grounds. And Auschwitz-Burkenau was this great complex. in addition to the death camp, there were also forced labor compounds. And he said he wasn't aware of it. And I would like to believe that because he told me that, and everybody wants to believe their parents tell them things that are true. You know, so many German civilians, in fact, did know what was going on

or were let in on enough that they surely had to be willfully in denial not to know what was going on. And I suppose the most generous possible way of reading it is that my dad was, you know, he was in a theater of war and there's that fog people talk of that comes with being in the midst of a war. And no, he didn't know. But it still was a heartstabbing moment to see a letter he had sent home that had a stamp of Hitler in profile with a postmark of Auschwitz on it in his handwriting to his mother, my grandmother. So these are things that sort of hit me as gut punches, one after the other, as I worked on this book. One theme that you bring up throughout the book is that you guys didn't talk about this all that much during his life. Why not?

Well, I didn't grill him on it. I totally understand why he wouldn't bring it up. I mean, he emigrated in 48 because his father, Kurt, had made it as a publisher by then, and had become a U.S. citizen, was able to bring him over to study. he could make a new life for himself. He graduates with a PhD in chemistry in 1952, meets my mom, who's American as she could possibly be, starts a family, gets these jobs in industry.

He thinks he's won the lottery. And I completely understand why he wouldn't want to revisit this stuff. Now, why didn't I grill him on it? Well, I did, to some extent, in the mid-90s, when we were both kind of coming to terms with mortality and all. But no, I didn't grill him on it. And there was just such a, I think he felt his big gift to me and to my sisters was this kind of fresh start, this unblemished Americanism that he had totally bought into. But at the same time, I don't want to sell him short here.

When I would ask him, as I did on that Danube cruise, when I would ask him about a specific thing or another, he didn't flinch. he would respond. And, you know, there's so many things, of course, now that I've been through the archives and read the letters carefully that I wish I could ask him about. So this book is kind of adjudicating between those two polls. Yeah, you have a good line in there where you talk about you were afraid that he might tell you a painful truth if you asked, and you were maybe also afraid that he wouldn't tell you the truth if you asked.

And both those are very, produced very complicated emotions. Yeah, and I end the book on the note of it's a strange place to be between wanting to know and not wanting to know. But that's kind of where I landed. And I think if Americans are reading this book, I hope that they sense to some extent what was going on in Germany after the war. So you have kind of my generation of Germans, my cousins, born in the late 50s, who every day were kind of negotiating this between how they wanted to discover what really happened. And then their elders, entire generation that just did not want to talk about it. And I feel lucky that America and that interceded in a way in my relationship with my dad where he could kind of. make it as an immigrant, and I could make it as an immigrant son. And then in the mid-90s,

we did finally broach this stuff to some extent. And then he died in 2007, so it took me another what dozen years to really tuck into the material and try to pull the story together. I loved reading about how his German heritage figured into your childhood in New England, the lit candles on the Christmas tree, the idea that he forbade you from going into the Boy Scouts because the uniforms and the oaths were a little too close to home. You know, like, I don't know about that. Let's avoid and do another after-school activity. Yeah, and here again, I need to tip my hat to my dad because he was really good about finding

teachable moments. He knew how close it had been. I mean, half of all German males born in that little window that he was born in ended up dead. And how lucky was he that because his dad had been in exile? that he was able to get to the states in 48. There wasn't even a federal republic that issued passports in 1948. So he hit the lottery eventually.

But when I was a kid in New Jersey growing up and would play Army with other kids in the neighborhood, he would quietly pull me aside at the end of the day and explain that you don't play Army. It's not something to play. And he was a vociferous, pacifist. He was a very engaged citizen. Late in his life, he became a.

involved in a group that was dedicated to U.S.-S.-Soviet relations at a time when real tensions. And now, after going through the history, I know why he did it. This was a way to kind of to maybe put a circuit breaker in place so this doesn't happen again, you know. And so I really do admire how he made himself an American and to watch some of the things that were happening in the States from the perspective of Berlin during that year I was over there. You know, Charlottesville happens four days after I arrived. arrive in Berlin, was it forced me to think, what would my dad be saying when he watched what was happening in the U.S. after he had fled Nazi, well, Germany, he didn't flee Nazi Germany.

His father did, but after leaving, being very consciously leaving Germany and saying, this is a damaged country, too much baggage, I want to start anew. And he lived that life as an American citizen. When we talk about your later career in sports writing, I always think it's interesting how we almost separate sports writers into two categories. Some inherited their love of sports directly from their parents, and some got a love of sports in spite of their parents. I think you and I are in the latter camp, at least as it relates to your father specifically. Why didn't he embrace sports? Well, I knew that he was clumsy as a kid. When he went to boarding school, he liked to tell the story about every time he played field hockey, he wound up breaking his nose. And,

And field hockey was sort of a right of passage for young men in Germany as not the way we experienced field hockey in the States. And so he was very open about that. But then in working on the book, I learned how much sports was kind of turned into this rah-rah thing in Germany. The Nazis, obviously, with the 36 Olympics in Berlin and then the Max Schmelling Joe Lewis fight. There was these things that my dad never mentioned to me as part of his memories growing up. And it really, sports really was this source of kind of nationalism run amok in the Third Reich and probably stirred up in my dad all the wrong memories. I know my grandfather, Kurt, was appalled to learn that my half-uncle was playing intramural basketball at his Quaker secondary school in Greenwich Village back in the 40s and 50s, which seems to me today to be a total overreaction. But I do think that I was trying to identify in some way as an American.

I would look at my dad and he still had a trace of an accent and he was into chamber music and it just wasn't working with me or my friend group and just threw myself into sports as a result. You think your experiences with him growing up directed you to become a certain kind of sports writer? Well, I've always been, you know, having always had German cousins and, been aware of history and loved history. And, you know, I was sort of forced under penalty of death to study the cello as a kid. And my mom had gone to music school and all that stuff. So I was always, I was kind of raised to know there was more in the world than just what was in the sports page.

But I guess kind of coming to terms with both, the world outside that spills outside of sports and sports itself. And I will say this, that my mom and dad kind of thought. their noses at what I did for a living for the first 10 or 12 years at ASI. I mean, they wanted to see me, they would have been happy to see me in journalism, but it was National Geographic or Time or the New York Times or NPR, which they listened to 24-7, you know, it's that kind of thing. But then the last 10, 12 years at ASI, I started doing more international travel, historical pieces, and I would get these kind of grudging admissions from both my parents that they'd actually read what I wrote And, you know, I never held it against them that they weren't reading my latest dispatch from Ann Arbor about, you know, the Michigan-Mishican state game.

But that was, I felt that I'd gotten through to them on some level. And there was a point during that Danube Cruz where I was furiously taking notes while talking to my dad where he actually pulled his head up and he said, maybe you'll write about this someday. So he says that. And he's just divulged these very intensely personal, painful things about the war. And for him to say that, to me, I held tightly to that while I was working on the book. It seemed like permission. Maybe not encouragement exactly because I don't think he would have wanted anyone to revisit that, but certainly permission. Alexander Wolf's new book is end papers, a family story of books, war, escape, and home.

It's a wonderful memoir. Hope everybody checks it out. Alex, thanks so much for coming on the press box. Thanks for having me, Brian. All right, it's time for David Chewmaker. guess is the strained pun headline. Yeah. David's not so excited today.

Thursday's headline about a Battle of Cousins who controlled key medical supplies was Swab Story. We got a lot of votes for family swabble as well. Today's headline comes from deep sleut dog. It's from The Guardian. I'll read you the lead of this article, David,

with a dateline from Dijon, France. A French monastery in Burgundy. has launched an emergency online sale to get rid of thousands of its artisanal cheeses, which are languishing in its cellars as COVID-19 keeps buyers away. One brother Jean-Claude from the monastery says, we tried explaining to our 75 cows that we needed to produce less milk, but they don't seem to have understood. Okay.

So we have monks who make cheese and they need to get rid of it. What was the Guardian's strain pun headline? Monk. So the French part doesn't matter. It does not matter. Too much cheese. The Greek cheese. Brother.

This is going to be somewhat biblical in nature. Oh, no. Now you really put me on the spot here. Biblical. What if I told you Bible verse? Well known. What if I told you something from the book of Matthew, perhaps? Matthew...

Matthew 5.9, perhaps. I have no idea. I'm going to get excommunicated for this. Hmm. So the people who make cheese are called what? Cheese mongers? Well, Blessed or the cheese mongers?

Blessed or the, is that keep going? You're so close. Blessed are the cheese? The cheesemakers. Blessed are the cheesemakers. All right. That's great.

He is David Chewaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes with an assist from Isaiah Blakely. announcement time, David, we've got a special episode of the pod coming on Wednesday. You probably know the announcer Al Michaels mostly for calling football games, but Al just won the Ford Frick Broadcasting Award. Shorthand, his name goes into the baseball Hall of Fame. For the 20-plus years, he was a baseball announcer.

So Al's here Wednesday, the day before opening day with a pod-length interview about the art of calling baseball. I think you'll love it. Plus, we got more lukewarm takes about the media. See you then, David. See you later, Brian.