GEORGE SAUNDERS & DICK CAVETT
February 26, 2013
LIVE from the New York Public Library
Celeste Bartos Forum
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Good evening. Good evening. Good evening, my name is Paul Holdengräber, and I’m the Director of Public Programs here at the New York Public Library, known as LIVE from the New York Public Library. My goal here at the Library is simply, as you’ve heard me say so many times, to make the lions roar, to make a heavy institution dance, and if possible to make it levitate.
After the conversation, George Saunders will sign books, and I want to thank again and again and again our independent bookseller, 192 Books. (applause) I would also like to thank, as always, Barbara Fillon from Random House. Barbara, thank you so much. (applause) You have in front of you the program of the spring season. There are a few additions. For instance, next Wednesday, on March 6th, I will be interviewing the artist Ed Ruscha, and on May 21st Matthew Barney. Also André Aciman will be joined by Nicole Krauss on April 22ndand to discuss his new novel Odds Against Tomorrow in an evening entitled Worst Case Scenarios, Nathaniel Rich will be joined by the one and only Slavoj Žižek. And other additions will be added, I’m just unsatiable. (laughter) To find out more, I suggest that you join our e-mail list and why not become a Friend of the New York Public Library?
Months ago, when thanks to Barbara Fillon I had the good fortune of inviting George Saunders, I asked him a simple question:“Who would be your most desired interlocutor, interviewer?” He mentioned a few names, names, I should add, ofvery famous writers and excellent journalists. He wrote, “Maybe we could start with those names. Do you have any ideas that I’m missing here?”And then this line, listen carefully: “My childhood dream was to be interviewed by Dick Cavett,” (laughter/applause) and then he adds, and I have some qualms about that, “or interview him, ha!” (laughter)
In 1889 in a letter to Felice, Freud wrote, “I gave myself a present, Schliemann’sIlios, and greatly enjoyed the account of his childhood. The man was happy when he found Priam’s treasure because happiness comes only from the fulfillment of a childhood wish.”A week after George Saunders expressed his childhood dream to me, I was to write to him thathis childhood dream had become true. In response to this news, Saunders wrote, and I hope he won’t mind my reading this out loud to you,“I’m not sure I know you well enough to say this,”—we didn’t know each other at all—(laughter) he didn’t write that.“I’m not sure I know you well enough to say this, but holy shit!” (laughter) Dream come true, indeed.
In a story that ran this past Sunday in the New York Post, Saunders confirmed that indeed Dick Cavett is his childhood hero. And he added,“I learned how to be a person from him.”
Over the past six or seven years, I’ve asked my guests to provide me with seven words that will define them, a haiku of sorts, or, if you want to be very modern, a tweet. (laughter) George Saunders wrote the following, “Why so hard to get smarter and nicer?” Dick Cavett wrote, “Nebraska, magic, Yale, television, Broadway, movies, writing.”
And one last matter to settle, George Saunders, before I invite you to the LIVE from the New York Public Library stage with Dick Cavett. Your childhood dream may have been to be interviewed by Dick Cavett. And so you will. Dream granted, fulfilled. You added,“or interview him.”Now, we may have to fight over that, George, because as an interviewer, or as I prefer to call myself, an instigator, I may have to interview Dick Cavett myself. To be continued, George. As you added after your “or interview him,” ha! Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome warmly to this stage George Saunders and his childhood hero, Dick Cavett.
(applause)
DICK CAVETT: Well, I have to tell you something that I’ve been—we’ve been around each other for about an hour now and I have not mentioned this. I guess I don’t read e-mails all that well, and I really honest to God thought you were going to do me tonight, (laughter) so go ahead. One other thing. People kept saying to me, “You do know who George Saunders is?” And of course I did. And do. And I just—I don’t believe in fulsome compliments, but you were just great in All About Eve. (laughter) I’m sorry for the young people who don’t get the reference, (laughter) but Google it, we don’t have time for you. Not bad. So at the last minute or hour I realized maybe I am the interlocutor, the host, the Jack Paar, the Johnny Carson—
GEORGE SAUNDERS: The Dick Cavett.
DICK CAVETT: Or the Dick Cavett, (laughter) or David Frost, or the bore. Peter Cook the greatest comedian of my lifetime, next to Groucho, just before he died was asked by the BBC, “Peter, do you regret anything?” And he said, “Yes, I do, in fact. I once saved David Frost from drowning.”(laughter) What that has to do with my new friend here, I don’t know. I had a very—my parents were English teachers,and their friends were teachers. One was a postal clerk that had read everything anyone had ever read. And he used to say,“My sister teaches writing at Washington University.”And he always put “teaches” in quotes. “‘Teaches’ writing.”Was it taught to you in any way?
GEORGE SAUNDERS: It was. I was a grad student with Tobias Wolff in Syracuse. I think by that time I was pretty good, but what you learned there was the discipline, that there were other people doing it, that it wasn’t just you in Amarillo, Texas, and so that was good, to see that, you know, you’d go to a party and everyone would leave early and be home writing.
And I think also with Wolff there was—what you learned was the writing was something that was happening apart from everything else. He wasn’t a wild, crazy, guy, he wasn’t outwardly rebellious, he didn’t talk a lot of crap about writing, or art, you know, he justwas a real well-read gentle guy. So you knew that all that magic he was making was taking place four hours in the morning in his house and it had nothing to do with anything going on outside. So that was kind of a nice—I think as a young person I held out the hope that you could do it by being flamboyant or traveling a lot or having something really freaky happen to you—only you—and then you could write about it, but then you saw that he just vanished in the morning and did something intense and then these beautiful stories came out.
DICK CAVETT: Were you ever taught such things as the mechanical art of plotting—
GEORGE SAUNDERS:No.
DICK CAVETT: Or some of the old-fashioned ways they used to allegedly teach writing? How to devise a climax for your story.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: No, no. I got a lot of just the nuts and bolts from the nuns in Chicago and that was really useful, the guilt, extreme guilt, that was a good trail for writers, never good enough.
DICK CAVETT: Don’t anybody be embarrassed that I can’t find my glasses and therefore can’t see my notes. Dick van Dyke always said, “I only need them for the phone book and for finding it.” (laughter) Oh! Here’s a name that some folks here I gather are closer to my age than say Margaret O’Brien’s when she was making movies. Clifton Fadiman.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Who?
DICK CAVETT: Does that mean anything to you? Clifton Fadiman.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Yeah, I know the name.
DICK CAVETT: He hosted the radio showthat my father wouldn’t let anybody talk during in the old days calledInformation, Please, and all the literary greats appeared on that show, hard to do it today, perhaps. I’m not sure why I brought him up. I just read, I found a copyI got for fifty cents of his essays and one of the best ones is about reading as a kid. One assumes you read as a kid, though not everybody does. Can you recall—I don’t think I’ve ever asked anybody this—can yourecall learning to read at all?
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Yes.
DICK CAVETT: You can!
GEORGE SAUNDERS: I can.
DICK CAVETT: I haven’t a scintilla of memory of learning to read.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: I remember first again. Always it’s a nun, the first time a sentence popped off and became a meaning. I can remember that. But I was taught to read in a deeper way by reading the book Esther Forbes, or Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes, and that was given to me by a nun in third grade.And it was a nun I was a little bit in love with, she was one of those hot nuns. (laughter) But she said to me, she pulled me aside, and you know, that’s pretty good, (laughter) and she said, “I have something that I think you’ll like,” and then she handed over this edition of Johnny Tremainwith the Caldecott Prize and a big gold sticker.
DICK CAVETT: Caldecott. Right. They had an award.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: That’s right. And it was a beautiful gold sticker. And she said, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I think you can handle this.” Which was like catnip, so I took it home. And that book was the first time I’d ever seen style—style—you know, it was a—You could see she’d made some very strange decisions, comma omissions and strange compound words and that really kind of nailed me, I’d never seen that done before. So I remember going out into the—we had, for some reason our playground was a parking lot in Chicago, nothing on it but just lines, (laughter)and I remember going out and thinking in that Esther Forbes diction, you know, looking andtrying to describe the nuns, you know, “three black shapes looking stern,” you know, with no comma, that kind of—so the language had kind of gotten into my head in a way that had never happened to me before.
DICK CAVETT: But can you actually remember learning, “Oh, yes, afollowed by n is what again? An?”
GEORGE SAUNDERS: I don’t think I remember that, no.
DICK CAVETT: I apparently—by the way when I do an event like this, I’m always criticized for talking about myself, so just shut me up.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Oh, no.
DICK CAVETT: I have no memory of that, but I’m told that I read at two and a half, picked up a book called Max and Moritz, a comic German book—in English, I wasn’t that smart. (laughter) So I have no memory, but here’s a terrible confession, and if you promise you’ll make an embarrassing confession about yourself, I’ll tell you this. I was reminded by an old teacher—they all seemed that when you were a kid—that in second grade, when the other kids read, as you read around the room, badly, I held my ears.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Oooooh.
(laughter)
DICK CAVETT: Isn’t that awful? And that was the beginning of the report cards, they said, “Dick must learn to be more considerate of others.”
GEORGE SAUNDERS: If in the middle of this you put your hands up, I’ll take the hint.
DICK CAVETT: I doubt that I’ll have to do that. What about the standard Rover Boys of the old days and stuff, was that still read when you were a kid—
GEORGE SAUNDERS: No, it wasTom Swift.Tom Swift was read.
DICK CAVETT: Tom Swift, yeah.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: And there were a series of books called Great Something of World War II, so great fighter pilots, great rescues of, great invasions. They were really just like duck poop, they just go right through you. Very light. (laughter) I wanted to see how it all turned out.
DICK CAVETT: How it turned out, that was a key thing.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: And it was always the same, we always won.
(laughter)
DICK CAVETT: Funny, the odds never tipped, did they? What about what’s often mistaken as a children’s book, Tom Sawyer?
GEORGE SAUNDERS: I never read it until maybe college. I just didn’t find those kind of books and I didn’t have a lot of the kind of standard kids’ books that you would read to your kids. I do remember in sixth grade reading The Exorcist.
(laughter)
DICK CAVETT: Sixth grade?
GEORGE SAUNDERS: My father had gone to the movie, and “Aw, this is incredible, but you can’t see it,” so I thought, “Well, I’ll read the damn book.” So I got The Exorcist and read it—I read the whole thing in a day and finished it about four in the morning, just trembling with fear, and my father and my uncle, apparently they knew that I had done that, so the next morning I woke up flying upwards out of, you remember that scene where she’s flying up out of her bed and I’m hearing these snarling noises, and I think, “I did it to myself, I shouldn’t have read that,” and my father and my uncle were down at the end of the bed. (laughter) Does that count as the embarrassing revelation?
DICK CAVETT: That will be a good scene in the movie of your life.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Yeah.
DICK CAVETT: Oh God, another awful confession. I interviewed for Jack Paar before he made me a writer, guests, and I interviewed a man named Peter Blatty, and my report was “This guy has written a book he thinks is going to be great.” It was The Exorcist of course.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Aw, ouch.
DICK CAVETT: Oh, lord, I hope he doesn’t ever.If he’s here tonight, I’m very sorry about that. So as time went by did you graduate to the Faulkners and the—there’s only one Faulkner, why do we say that?
(laughter)
GEORGE SAUNDERS: There’s Jodi. Jodi Faulkner.
DICK CAVETT: She could really get the words down on paper.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Yeah, yeah.
DICK CAVETT: I shall allow you to answer that, but I’ll forget if I don’t say this. He was asked once—and I hope this isn’t mythical—by a high school interviewer girl with a clipboard that would pronounce interesting “inneresting,” from the Midwest, “It’s interesting, Mr. Faulkner, that you made this remark that you would kill your grandmother to get a good jolt into your writing if you needed to.” Can you guess his answer, does anyone know? He said, “Oh, hell, yes, (laughter) a good short story’s worth any number of old ladies.” (laughter) That would have appealed to W. C. Fields and a few others. What question are you tired of? Have you had to do the book tour thing frequently?
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Yeah, I’m right in the middle of it.
DICK CAVETT: One of them is, “Why did you write this book?”
GEORGE SAUNDERS: I got it one time at a college and the young woman asked it a little different, which was “Why did you write this book?” (laughter) Which is a slightly nice variation.
DICK CAVETT: Stress is everything in a sentence. People ask you your—what’s your very favorite something as if you could, for example, say which movie is the best of the year. “Who has been your most interesting guest?” is one I get.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Who was your most interesting guest?
(laughter)
DICK CAVETT: Now, that I did not hear. That idea that a book or a guest wins, there’s a top place and then two, three, four, five. It just seems absurd to me.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: It kind of runs against a truth which is that several things, many things come together, and they kind of maybe six or seven get in your head and the question of “best” isn’t there, just that they were there at the right time and even sometimes. One of my big influences was Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged.
DICK CAVETT: What’s you say, Ayn Rand?
GEORGE SAUNDERS: Or Ayn. Or [unintelligible]
DICK CAVETT: I say Ayn Rand, but I’m really affected.
GEORGE SAUNDERS: But that’s a terrible book, (laughter) but it came along—this is my opinion—but it came along when I was in high school and just trying to figure out what I was doing and at that time I had a—I played the guitar. I had a friend who had a friend who had a friend who knew somebody in the Eagles, (laughter) the band, and we thought, that would probably work, we could do that, and so we were going to try to somehow get on tour with them, (laughter) but just at that time somebody gave me Atlas Shrugged, and I hadn’t read a novel probably since Johnny Tremain, a real, and I read it and it just you know, it was very moving—it wasn’t moving, it was just these people and places and words and at one point I had this very strong sense of that there were such things asintellectual communities and I thought that Ayn Rand might have been in one somewhere. And it struck me that I could be—I had this vision of myself in a college sweater walking with some friends, discussing the ideas of Ayn Rand.
(laughter)
DICK CAVETT: When you’re at a young age her novels have all that power, it’s very appealing, and then later you find out what a crock of shit she was.