Mark Helprin: His Life and Work

[Music] welcome I am so excited to to be here tonight and it's gonna this is gonna freak me out because I haven't been out here before now as I'm looking out in the audience I'm seeing people that I know some dear dear old friends and a number of former friends that I don't want to be here thank you for coming I there there are a number of special guests in the audience this is kind of funny I was told my friend Martha Linder is here from Lakeland Florida and she told me that Colonel sussing him is going to be there and I thought who the heck's colonel sussing him and then Mark Halperin introduced me to him he was a test pilot for the f-16s is that right the the chief test pilot for the f-16s defining the envelope not like those other test pilots they hang way way back he actually was pushing the envelope of what it could do so a real a real test pilot but he dropped the first smart bomb the first JDAM and I thought that is so cool and I wanted to call him out and embarrass him in front of the group so please applaud this man if you get a chance if not now if you get a chance later on you can applaud him and then also um you know since I'm I'm calling out people who have done great things in the in the air um some of you remember eight or ten months ago a Southwest plane lost an engine a person was killed and a heroic woman landed that plane her name is Tammy Joe Schultz and she's with us in the room where are you Tammy Joe don't be embarrassed where'd she go where is she she's right here she's right here look she's all embarrassed I love that I love embarrassing people they can't squirm away they have to take the applause it's wonderful it's wonderful and Tammy Joe was was the was one of the first women fighter pilots ever okay she pushed a different kind of envelope so you just you just watch it there pal but it's incredible any any other era notic people in the room here anybody who's really done anything spectacular you know at above say 30,000 feet I'm just curious anybody I didn't I didn't think so well this brings me to the subject of the evening there are very few people in in whose presence I am genuinely humbled and awed and that that's true I first encountered the fiction of Mark Halperin Lowe these 35 years ago I was an undergraduate at Yale and we had a writing course and somebody handed out you know mini a graft or stapled short stories that we had to read and the first one was called the sroi tersh pizza I thought it was destroyed our pizza but it's the SROI Gersh pizza and it's a story unlike any I had ever read it's the sort of thing that if you are a fiction writer or a writer as I am who values great writing and poetry and true literature when you read most of what Mark Helprin is read you you understand you're in the presence of a rare genius that's a simple fact I don't he preys on people lightly because there are a lot of wonderful writers of fiction but there are very few that are genuinely great artistic talents and geniuses and there are so many sentences in his writing and so many sentences in that short story alone that make you understand you're dealing with a maniac a person who does not think the way you do and either he's crazy or he's a genius or he's a crazy genius and I think that genius and insanity are closely linked but I really mean that that when you read his stuff you understand that this is somebody who he's in the in the highest-ranked of writers in our time and I want to give you some basics of who he is just so that can relieve the tension here he was born in 1947 but oddly enough is only 62 years old now I don't know how the heck you do that that's wild that's why I'll ask you about that now whenever you if you know anything about mark helping you read these BIOS they all say the same thing they say Mark Helprin was raised on the Hudson and in the British West Indies which is nothing if not at least pretentious who are we kidding it says after receiving degrees from Harvard College and Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences he did postgraduate work at the University of Oxford comma Princeton comma and Columbia I like the Oxford comma thank you he has served in the British Merchant Navy the Israeli infantry and the Israeli Air Force now his stories were published in The New Yorker for a long time almost about 25 years and as I said earlier they are widely recognized as some of the best short stories ever written in the English language now I hate to say that with him in the room because it's embarrassing but I'm just telling you straight up it's a fact he's right up there with the best of the best and if you've ever read for example a collection of Faulkner short stories he pretty much stinks at reading short stories and novels if you really want to take the time to talk about it with me a lot of the people that have been lauded as the greats are not really that great at least they're not consistently great maybe Updike in Cheever leap into my head as people who have written great fiction in our time and of course they're both gone so it's just important that I say those things it wasn't until 1986 that I got to see a Mark Helprin in person I was at Yaddo which is a writer's colony in Saratoga Springs and somebody said oh Mark Helprin speaking at Albany someplace so we went and heard mark there and he was like a stand-up comedian it was sheer lunacy which is why he's not giving a speech tonight I'm gonna interview him because we need to tamp it down we need we need to get somewhere in the conversation but extremely funny and a joy to listen to sometime in the early 90s I was in Nantucket and I was bored and I walked into a bookstore I picked up the Paris review which they've had those interviews stretching back to you know Hemingway in in the 50s and it was an interview with Mark Halperin whose fiction I had loved and I started reading it and what struck me about the interview mostly was that I had by that time swung politically conservative I guess and had become very serious about my Christian faith and as I read the interview with Mark Halperin it stunned me that he seemed to take the concept of God seriously and seem to be politically conservative and if you know anything about the world of Arts and Letters in America at this point you realize that those two things really never go together that that the world of of literature if you hang out with writers they tend to be rather monolithically extremely politically liberal there's nothing wrong with that but but if you're not of that ilk it becomes uncomfortable so I was kind of stunned really to read this about Mark Helprin and I thought how has he survived in that world and the answer is he's a hermit he never talks to those people but I was just impressed then and so it it it renewed afresh my interest in reading him and I remember reading Winter's Tale and a soldier of a great war around that time and these are again these are works of fiction of the absolute highest order he has routinely he's crack jokes about it been compared to you know tol story well where do you go from there Socrates in the city obviously so it really is a very very great honor for me to have lived long enough to get to a point where I get to to talk to mark just like he's a regular person believe me he's not but as you'll soon see but it really is a great joy and so it's my honor to welcome you Mark Helprin to Socrates in the city please join me on the stage well that was my own yes your Iran sir that was absolutely spectacular thank you and I just want to say that how many people come up here and make a joke about Socrates drinking hemlock how many crack jokes about how I actually I'm not gonna do that but what I'm gonna say is that Macaulay you know who Macaulay was the 19th century the historians historian he was the Chuck Schumer of his day he every word that came out of his mouth was a was a lie and including beauty and and buff a buck yeah you know what Bob means maybe if and and bah but he said the more I read Socrates and this is even say it that way but I'm sure that there's nobody living can imitate Macaulay but go ahead he said the more I read Socrates the more I understand why he was poisoned and of course no one ever read Socrates because we know him only through Plato so Macaulay it was just a terrible fraud and by the way if there are any relatives of Chuck Schumer in the audience yeah get out well mark the point of Socrates in the city is not merely to interview interesting people it's typically to dig deeper about the big the big questions now I don't normally push that but when I have someone like you who has written as well and as very very thoughtfully as you've done over the course of your life it's very tempting to me to ask you the question which is the question of all questions which I've never asked that Socrates in the city but I think I'll ask it now and we can move on from here but my first question to you is what is the meaning of life are you serious fortunately very serious you see this tie yeah this see how long it is yeah I I did an interview in Chicago and I looked at the at the the television recording of it and it was even longer I mean look how long it is and I just don't understand that I'm not that short but they it comes way down I have to stop but there might in the and the length of the tie really aren't necessarily related well I don't know but I'm gonna stop buying my ties at the giraffe tie shop uh-huh alright but what is the meaning of life are you I don't know I know you don't know but it strikes me that you've thought about it very very much over the course of your life and I'm wondering what you think it might be because your fiction is not devoid of these kinds of ruminations so I I don't think I don't ask this of most people at Socrates and city but you strike me as somebody whom I might ask that question by the way I just did it's a very challenging question obviously it's the kind that you see in the New Yorker cartoon with the guy and sitting on a mountaintop and people come with knapsacks and ice axes and they they ask him what the meaning of life is and he usually cracks a joke but and I've never been asked that kind of question I'm not surprised but let me let me struggle I let me start by saying that I knew ray Carver otherwise known to people as Raymond Carver one of the founders of the minimalists and I didn't like ray Carver for various reasons he's dead now so I don't like to speak ill of the dead but I didn't like what he did to his family I was around when that happened and you know I just hated his writing yeah I had his writing to accept that I chose one of his stories which was actually a very beautiful story for the best American short stories of the 1988 because I was the first one to ask for them to be submitted to me blind not even with the typeface of The New Yorker it's so that there would be no back scratching and no favors and I just read it I didn't know who wrote it and it was a beautiful story about check off and it was written with Rea knowing about his own death so that was anyway one good thing that he wrote but he was ill at the time he was ill at the time he had cancer but to paraphrase him he said I would say what we talk about when we talk about dying well is living well because you can't you can't do anything when you're dead so what you have to do in order to die well is to live well and one should be able to die well I've thought about that ever since I was a small child because it will come faster than you can possibly imagine when it does happen you look back and it's as if life passed that fast so given that there will be eternity on that side and we have come from eternity on this side Winston Churchill said it's like coming up from the ocean onto a raft for a few moments and then going back into the ocean what you want to do really I would I would like to do is to live so that you do justice to the short time you have and so that you are comfortable returning to that eternity to do so and in my opinion you have to have some knowledge of the Eternity on either side when I was an infant I felt that I did I felt that I had existed before not in another life but in another form somehow in a in you know bodyless form of let's say just an independent soul that Dante an idea that you are that you were with God you had that sense as an infant infant in the crib I knew I came from someplace you remember that yes I remember that and I and I loved that place and I felt very comforted by it the place from which you'd come not the crib place from which I had come not the crib there I had a very uncomfortable crib it had spice yeah but so here listen to this when I was born at the beginning of the seventh month in 1947 and not expected to survive the hospital told my parents kids gonna die he's gonna die and my parents were so upset that they left for two weeks I'm not kidding wait a minute yeah they did hold on yeah you were in the hospital yep and your parents left for two weeks yes they went to the long I went to East Hampton but wet which hospital doctors Hospital which has since been torn down they found out that I was born there and they toured that location use the Manhattan used to overlook Gracie Mansion yeah okay so you were there yeah for two weeks and your parents left and they left because they well I was born by accident evidently my my godfather was Robert Capa the photographer my mother always said that I was his son but I know that I'm not his son and my father son because I look like my father and my many traits of my father there's no question and I was my father son but she evidently was having an affair with him and my parents were about to break up that it's a very sad story and then she was in a taxi accident which is one reason why I was born so prematurely but anyway I was not wanted and they left and then when I came home I was sick for a year really really sick I had born with spina bifida and also with no cilia on my bronchial so that fans that phlegm up so so I in my childhood I had pneumonia 12 times and many of the times I was put in ice baths and everything and they thought that I've been Catholic they would have called a priest they thought I was a goner I was very very close to death and it never bothered me because each time I really I told where's the father Darius hi each time I felt tremendous comfort as if an angel had come down and and protected me and I was not disturbed by the idea of dying and I came very very close and once when I was on Mount Rainier I climbed Mount Rainier and on the way back I was running across an ice field and it was a it was all kind of flat and ice and I was jumping over crevasses and so I jumped over a crevasse onto what was just a piece of white it looked like solid ground but it was crust over a crevasse and I fell on the crevasse and I put out my head I had ski poles at that point I put out the ski poles and the the the snow went up in the air and I saw it absorbing it was sparkling in the sunlight I felt the greatest kind of joy so I've never been afraid of of dying and I've always felt that when I do I will be going back to the place that I feel that I knew when I was an infant okay so what do you do with the time in between when you're conscious and you are active and you can do what you can do I think the best thing you can do is to is to embody the virtues the classical virtues in other words if you if you are honorable if you have courage if you if you love if you treat people correctly and you and you and you also seek God in in whatever way you can whether it be in art particularly music because in my book Paris in the present tense which is not here but I say there's jewel jewel decor who was a Maitre at the Sorbonne says to his students look I know I'm paraphrasing I could never remember what I wrote he says look I know that in a university this is really a very dangerous thing to say and you probably will disagree with me etc I don't I don't care but what I'm what I have to tell you is that music is the voice of God so if you seek God while you are alive and you become give thought to what came before and what will come after and you behave correctly and and you are charitable and brave etc etc then then you are that's that's the meaning as far as I can tell but let me just add something here I was in Massachusetts doing it an another event and as part of it I was explaining he was purely literary was supposed to be purely literary and yes I don't like this time as part of it I was explaining that yeah that the what I called my conditions precedent for then saying what the book which is Paris in the present tense was about and one of them was the resurrection of virtue which is not popular because people mock virtue as if you're if you talked about virtue you're just an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy etc it said it but of course that's absolutely garbage and we need it to survive both as a country and as individuals etc and I and I said look you know heroism these days has been devalued along with so much else and courage a heroine you supposed to be a hero if you bring cupcakes to school and I gave various levels of what I think heroism is I said first it's doing something is this noble and just of course you have to define noble too but that as we carry on that you'll sort of see the second level in the in the escalation on the escalation ladder is something which is Noble and just and contrary to your immediate interests the third level is doing something Noble and just and contrary to your immediate interest which leads to your death then you have a real hero and I would ask the audience I always do that's not the top what's the top anyone no that's not the highest level of heroism the highest level is doing something which is noble and just contrary to your media interests which leads to your own death and nobody knows which is another interpretation of the what you see on the tombs of the Unknown Soldier throughout the world known but to God that's what real heroism is now I have to tell you that afterwards I was signing books and a guy came up to me this last night this last night yeah and this was Massachusetts keep that in mind he comes up to me and he says do you think that the people who tried to kill Hitler were heroes and I said yes and he said would you think I was a hero if I tried to kill our Hitler what is Angela Merkel have to do with any of this it was Massachusetts so I knew what he meant and I that that's something which you know if you think about it we have lost Lincoln Garfield McKinley and Kennedy and there have been attempts in modern times just in modern times on Roosevelt Truman Ford and Reagan and this is serious topic and people to talk about that I remember when Reagan was elected I lived in New York at that time in 1980 and I saw in all these buildings kill Reagan kill Reagan's with graffiti all over the place and then of course that nut who now lives in Virginia and walks around shot where do you go from there well I'll tell you it's very tempting to do an impression of William F Buckley sitting up here sat like this you know yeah yes tell me more question what is the the know he was it the question becomes what what I want to ask you is that you're you're making a number of assumptions you talk about God you talk about morality mom your fiction and the reason I've asked you this question is because your fiction is filled with muscular virtue morality it's all there your heroes are real heroes there's a sense of justice injustice in most of what you write it's very strong so I guess first I really want to ask you where does that come from because it's one thing to say I believe we should be virtuous I agree but but how do you come to that were you raised in a home where those things were stressed were you raised in a home where God was was part of your upbringing how did you come to think that way I think two ways one my father was the most extraordinary man he was a well it's a long story but I'll try to compress it he was a student in Colombia first in his class and his father had a food processing business if I had the dairy part and they combined with a cousin and they had a meat processing - my father was sent to North Africa to buy sheep innards for sausage casings this was in the 20s and I have a picture of him in patties going throughout North Africa it's he bargained with the tribes and he went through North Africa up through the Levant Turkey into Soviet Central Asia and bargaining with these nomads and they would send caravans with sheep innards to ports and then it would be shipped back to the United States and it took a very long time and when he got back he was debriefed by the Army Intelligence and that started a relationship with intelligence that he carried on for most of the rest of his life his lawyer in business was built Wild Bill Donovan who founded the OSS and CIA so my father went to camp X during the war and was trained at Camp axe in Canada by the SAS the the his final exercise was to be dropped and blindfolded as a plane took off in a an SS uniform dropped by parachute into the woods of Ontario and they said you have to be in New York within two weeks and if you're caught we don't know you two weeks later said in an SS uniform yeah this was during the war during the war yeah 50% of the people at Camp X died during the war they were there they were in cells they couldn't talk to one another they were taught all the weapons my father had a photographic memory so he would his job would have been and it was he was set to do this to be parachuted into Germany and be captured near where Heydrich was deliberately to be imprisoned and then with his photographic memory to remember the the you know count the steps know where the doors are to read upside down and backwards the German on people's desks and and on bulletin boards whatever then to escape then to recount that to get intelligence about Heydrich but I think the Czechs beat us to it but anyway in killing Heydrich yeah in killing Heydrich but he so he two weeks later he he can't he with a shave and a haircut in a Savile Row suit he walked into the place where he was supposed to after having eaten at the oyster bar I don't know how he did it but he could also smoke even when he was very old he would be smoking a cigar and stand on the diving board and then jump into the pool swim underwater the length of the pool come out and the scar would be still lit because he could turn it upside down back hold it in his mouth and his teeth and do that he was quite miraculous but anyway when when I was little the there were a lot of bullies of course boys are bullied and now I suppose I would you know accuse people bullying me and try to keep them off the Supreme Court but but they did beat the crap out of me and so my father said well I'll teach you how to defend yourself and I said but I can't because there's so much bigger you know that's what a bully is they're really much much bigger they're three or four grades higher and they he said no no no let me show you how to do it and he did and there were a bunch of bullies who would frequently bully me and I just I just practically killed them and that brought up in me the desire always to be able to fight and that in turn made me not afraid of being bully so for the rest of my life I figured why not do what I think is right no matter what the consequences and that has led me to all kinds of armed roles in various armies police forces intelligence places etc which just to be clear you're packing now they think I'm joking no no no no anybody laughs he'll take you out yeah ii know but you you are you take that Susie I don't want I don't want to go there yet because there's so many rabbits but you just just to make sure that you know we're in the princess was under federal privilege and legally totally legal yeah that goes without saying yeah what are we gonna do now I was on Obama's protection to tell three times I have to decide whether take a bullet for him and I decided that I would which is a lot different from the guy who came up to me in the in the yes last night and was talking about assassinating the president I I did not think to put it mildly that Obama was the kind of person that I would want to protect but he was the President of the United States it's the office etc um and by the way in Massachusetts that guy is considered a moderate that's quite true that's quite true anything he's not kidding really I lived in Massachusetts for ten years yeah and it almost killed me well you you still haven't really given me an understanding of how you come to the or maybe you you haven't thought so much about it because you know it's right but when you talk about I mean anyone who has read your fiction and I'm sure most of these people have it's why they're here there's a fierce moral quality to it and I guess so I want to ask you this kind of silly question how do you know what's right is right how do you know what's good is good you mentioned God in certain ways in your fiction you you have these moments of transcendence was there any I know that your ethnic Li Jewish were you raised with any faith as a kid or was it mostly that kind of stuff you were not no I was not I came to it on my own when I suppose well I mean I came to a recognition and a an experience of the divine presence when I was from the beginning so from when you were an infant when I was an infant and I then in terms of really I don't really practice Judaism it's not I don't see it as a something so good you don't you don't need to practice well Oh in in wait a minute wait a minute hold it in in Judaism there is a the many branches of course there's the conservative the the reformed who are Democrats and there are conservatives who are Democrats and there the Orthodox who are Republicans and among the Orthodox they're the Hussey Dean and you know those guys with the black hats the diamond merchants etc a party there keep that they are the spine of Judaism I serve as a also I protect them in in the Habad houses I'm a consultant to them and I have done protection duty for them because of the massacres in India etcetera but I can't practice it I've just not I don't feel comfortable with that but I come from a Hasidic background my my ancestors were acidic Ravi's and the the division between ha seed ISM and the other other Jewish denominations if you call them that is that in ha seed ISM you have a direct connection to God you have to study to see that I will do I don't know Talmud Torah etc I can read the Bible in Hebrew but not very well certainly not fluently not as I should if I were a real faucet but the whole point of caution ISM is that there is a direct connection without the kind of formal remediation that that intermediation excuse me intermediation that you get in in in other forms of Judaism but they study hard but you don't need to study hard actually you can experience it right at the well so that's that's the what what would I followed and and what was the question oh what's right okay right that's right well I mean it's just it's just like religion you you you have many ways of approaching it and judging it and it's and you of course we're all fallible so it can't be too confident in what is right because you you may be wrong we've all been wrong and sometimes seriously God knows I have but you make it a combination of the logic and reason and experience and drawing upon others considering other opinions and then your gut feeling finally and that's you make a combination of that and then when you feel that you've arrived at a certain conclusion you're what ready to risk doing what you have to do in order to protect it well I still think that you know the the reason that it was startling for me to discover that you were rather politically conservative and a fiction writers because most fiction writers don't have that fierce moral quality in their writing there they're writing typically as you know I would say maybe run-of-the-mill utopianist hsihu believed that in fact were not fallen that we're evolving from something to higher levels and that we can I guess it was William F Buckley who talked about it but he was quoting someone else when you talk about eminent izing the eschaton right that if we have enough taxes and we have enough government we can fix everything and we can create utopia you know through social engineering or whatever it is and we know that history especially recent modern history is replete with examples of people trying to achieve that so when you say something like we're fallible or you know that morality is a struggle or this or that you you realize that your parting company with most of the people who create art in our time so yeah well they they they are afraid of a number of things first of all they're afraid to be ambitious so they they they sort of imbibed the academic tendency to particularize the American Academy is divided between the English approach and the German approach in the 19th century we had to choose Harvard chose to lean toward the the English approach which is which value good writing graceful exposition and generalization Johns Hopkins was the big leader and Columbia followed in in valuing the German approach which was to be very particular strict and and limited rigorous say it's a question of richness versus rigor and writers today have inherited the the rigorous approach which means that they limit their ambitions just the way scholars limit their ambitions you know the penis denial in Belgian circus stories as a thesis and that the the fiction cousins of that are you get these these novels which are like magazine articles they deliberately limit them it's almost like John McPhee but it's a novel you know the and and the novel might be called the Estonian drug merchants baboon perfect that's perfect yeah that doesn't really exist no that sounds like a like a novel that the New Yorker would just go crazy of course and then of course just enough exotic system or just enough but not too much and it's kind of limited you know I mean if you're talking only about a baboon that belonged to his Estonian rug merchant right you're you're defining it closely but that's as far into transcendence as it's like New York or type fiction wants to go that's exactly what merchants alone the idea of a rug merchant he's sort of you know close to the world somehow ez-zor he's a rug merchant death but that's as far also in the poetry that's published in The New Yorker it's interesting because it's just part of the zeitgeist then you're I mean you're explicate it but they're afraid they're afraid to take a chance they're afraid to put them to put a marker down and say this is what I stand for this is what I love this is what I would die for the some things are good some things are not some things are beautiful some things are not they're terribly frightened they're cowards I mean I can't generalize and say everyone but so many that is the zeitgeist in in in moderately I have been criticized so often these days they say he uses such big words you know and and I don't I mainly keep to anglo-saxon an anglo-saxon vocabulary but they say the the sentences are too long the descriptions are too there's too much description people have been trained to to in inhale nihilism there's a form form of nihilism like the minimalist like the what the minimalist gray carver they Harbor yeah they they they don't like riches of language they don't like metaphor they don't like a cult metre but there's a there's a reason for that right in other words when you talk about minimalist sand kneel ISM they are in some ways at war with a past right in other words when you think of a past where all the typefaces had serifs and all the buildings had moldings and whatever they hate that because it somehow bespeaks a patriarchal Christian Western order that inescapably points to God and they they are trying to carve their own minimalist path out of that so any hint toward morality or good or evil it no it's disturbing and that's why I'm you know you you must be a great writer just to have snuck so much of this past these watchful dragons well it's it's quite easy to fool a publisher at lunch because they drink so yeah and and also it is it does pay to have a business sense you know publisher is very slow to to to pick up on things and they're not always the brightest bulbs why don't you say that there's they're stupid they're stupid yeah I mean if you're not gonna be a lawyer you're not gonna be a doctor you're not gonna be a physicist you're not gonna be an engineer you're not gonna be a businessman where you have to take risks and and and actually see what's gonna happen in the future and do all kinds of finance and so what do you do you go into publishing they used to I'm horrified many publishing friends are here don't leave friends don't leave is it I'll defend you in five minutes as soon as we um but but this is this is you're being serious right now as you're saying that you you were aware of this going into writing fiction that you're bringing something into it that you have to disguise well no I wasn't aware in the beginning because I'm old enough so that I started when the terms were different I started in 1964 I went to Harper & row and met a woman there named Joan Cohn who was a great fiction editor and started to submit to her and they they were you know they would get back to me you you were what 17 yeah okay why well tell you because I in my parents didn't read to me that's why I said earlier that I hadn't read Charlotte's Web I hadn't read many children's books Charlotte's Web yeah yeah and I was completely I was I had a room on Central Park West that had a black linoleum floor there were no toys in it and no books and that's where I stayed most of the time I get like a skinner box well it was solitary confinement and because they were gone my father lived in England for six months of the year my mother was an actress she was always on the road and I was kept in that room and that's where I learned to be - for instance when I go to Europe I can sit and watch a fountain for eight hours 17 hours I can do that I don't mind I like it but anyway I was i yes I when I got to first grade and it was at the birch Wathan school which in those days was on the west side I was the only kid who didn't know how to read they all had been pushed by their parents who were all Jews in the movie business and they wanted the it's like the kids now who were tutored to get into fancy kindergartens so they can go to Harvard eventually and they were pushed by their parents and they came in limousines etc and I didn't know the alphabet so I remember it walked in mrs. Smith was my teacher and she said go to the desk with your name on it and I said I can't read and she said okay well what is your name I told her and she said find the M and I said what's an M and all the kids laughed at me aha right so I was really pissed but you made a monkey out of those kids that's exactly I was really pissed and by second grade I was reading beyond 12th grade level and and by the sheer spite out of sheer spite and in third grade I began dictating stories to my third grade teacher who would write them in longhand and then Simon and Schuster offered me a two book contract in third grade to write a biography of Abraham Lincoln and the children you love to know what a third graders biography maybe I'd pay for that yeah well they thought it was gonna be in golden books and and a children's story about a mouse which would have been essentially copped from Stewart little but right right my father said no because my mother had been a child star and he said look what it did to her so I'm not gonna let you do this what it did to her yeah oh it did to her but believe me but so so I what was the question with capital of North Dakota Bismarck okay all right well that is it I'm Pierre with sofa wait a minute so you were you're leading up actually to a question I want to ask but you were you were talking about how you arrays in a in a room with black linoleum and how you you really were not you you were left to yourself yeah and do you now you seem very cheerful it doesn't strike me that that you're thinking of this as neglect or something that you or maybe it was neglect but you simply aren't bitter about it but it sounds like neglect no no it wasn't neglect what was it it was neglect yeah but in the best sense of yeah well yeah but my my parents I love my parents and in fact I was crazy because you know I spent most of my life my young while my father was alive I can see why they did this because they probably knew what was coming I spent most of my life telling my father asking him questions about his life so I feel and I really I do as if I were born in nineteen four because I have spent tens of thousands of hours listening to every detail of his life and he had a photographic memory he was famous for it he could he could someone could say to him for example when was the last time you were on 26th Street between 3rd and 4th Avenue and and he would say it was in this would be the 1950s he would say it was December 17th 1936 and they would say describe it and he could tell you everything that was in the store windows the the you know the cracks in the site everything he had a complete photographic memory so I trailed him beginning when I was very little asking him questions about starting from his earliest memories and and and and he lived a very adventurous interesting life so so essentially that's why probably they put me in the room with the linoleum because they knew that I'd be pestering them right you need to catch a break and that was the only yeah you could get away from you well um it's interesting that this brings up another quality in your fiction it does seem to be of another time you don't write thank the Lord like most contemporary writers and I think it's why reading you you it's it's like reading someone from a different generation than than you are and so now at least we have some explanation of where that came from yeah and in the soldier of the great war which is about a 74 year old man stranger than us so is Paris he's also setting right for I wrote a soldier of the great war beginning in 1980 when I was let's see a 33 and I've always felt like a much older person because I've sort of absorbed my father's age and and I also oh I know what this is about originally you I started in a different time and I and I'm going to throw back to a different time and I never succumbed to the pressure to conform right to this time simply because it's not worth it and you know and you shouldn't ever do anything that that you would lose sleep over or that you'd feel bad about well let me ask you you know when you you obviously you came of age in the 60s yeah you graduated Harvard in 69 69 okay so it graduated me who cares the from Harvard the question is you know you ought to be you're the classic boomer you're supposed to fit into that mold and you obviously don't you you you don't strike people as somebody who would have been a hippie at that time or or that kind of a person and not only that but then you joined the Israeli is it Air Force Army infantry and then Air Force I was seconded to the seconded to the Air Force as an infantryman it's the Condit how they say in the West Indies know that so they say yeah I guess so okay well so my question is why did you do that because that seems like exactly the kind of thing pot-smoking draft dodgers of your generation would not would not do right it's it's really yeah I count the cultural and strikingly well I I was swimming in the Harvard sea which and by the way when I was 17 I was going through Greece and I met a guy whose name was Albert who was a hard assistant maybe as a graduate student then but I think he was an assistant professor the lowest rank of a professor and he and I walked across the Peloponnesus and we slept in barns and we ate in people's houses in goats milk and that kind of how old were you 17 and he turned out to be Robert Alpert otherwise known as Baba Ram Dass ROM Das or Ram Dass as I call okay for those who don't know who that is this is one of the leading gurus of the New Age movements he actively invented new age in America and when he was an associate of Timothy Leary and they they developed LSD so when I was a freshman I was put in a place called Pennypacker which was a sort of a modern building it wasn't in the yard and it was a sort of exiled that was the worst possible place you can be and Alpert lived on Harvard Street which is where Pennypacker was just a couple blocks up so I ran into him and I then I went to see him as an apartment and he said you want to smoke a joint I didn't know what it was I mean I've never tasted coffee in my life I don't like things like that and I said no and what we know what is it he said oh it's great it's no I don't want it he said you want some LSD and I said what is LSD and he said what's this new thing you put it on the sugar cubes we invented it whatever whatever and I hated the idea of drugs and so I so I from even even then even as a freshman I was different but I did swim in the political sea it was very much against the Vietnam War I gave a speech at West Point to the Corps of Cadets apologizing for not taking my place because although I was against the war I don't think that I was my own legislature and I should have fulfilled my duties as a citizen so that that speech in the congressional record it's been printed all over the place and the reason that happened was I was sitting on the grave of William and Henry James and the Mount Auburn cemetery it faces south so that it's shelter from the northern wind and also the Sun shines in the south I was writing the first story that I published in New Yorker called leaving it well actually the first one that's actually published was called because of the waters of the flood but the first story that I wrote that they bought was called leaving the church and Henry James was there William James was there I was sitting on Henry's grave leaning against the family bedstead grave marker and at funeral in Cambridge Cemetery which adjoins Mount Auburn which is where Mary Baker Eddy is buried and a lot of famous people but the Cambridge Cemetery is for the for the proletarians and a funeral came and they buried somebody and then they left and I went to see who was buried and it was a boy my age who had been killed in Vietnam and that really really struck me and from that point on I I decided that I wanted to do something of that nature I had already been 4f but it was fake I can when I took an EEG I can make electrical pulses in my body that make the needles go what you thought you can do that I can do that can you teach others how to do that maybe but you don't have to worry you're too old for the draft and I can also now my wife will have to verify this because no one will believe it to say what I do about horses okay so that's what she says she's crazy but so so anyway I was I had made myself 4f and I felt very bad about that so then I went to Israel and joined the re we were fighting Russians and we were fighting my cousin wait why did you do that in other words you you're you're obviously ethnically Jewish but you were not raised in a home that was religiously Jewish what prompted you at that time to go to Israel and fight two words never again the Holocaust I didn't I in 1967 which is when I went first they the state was threatened with annihilation and I just didn't want that to happen so I wanted to do my my piece and I did but but anyway I tried to join the Marines too but I already been 4f they wouldn't let me do it gosh I want to ask you about do you think there's something inherent in in Jewishness that and that's gosh it's so sloppy even to talk that way but I guess the moral quality of your fiction even before I knew that you'd fought in the Israeli army struck me as coming out of being a Jew because being a Jew obviously comes with certain experiences and you often have characters who are I guess they they remind me I was I'm always sure that I'm that they're autobiographical and it's they're very romantic there's a lot of there's a lot of love it's beautiful of it's not sexual that itself is rare but it struck me that somehow it feels to me like something that I've noticed in in other Jewish stories usually movies Woody Allen in some of his best films has this it's interesting he doesn't come out were you do but it's interesting to me that you're very much of a romantic what has that been something that you've thought much about is who you are as a Jew I mean you just said never again so this was something that meant a lot to you yeah I mean my father's family came from a little village near Mintz called korneyev and when we lived in upstate New York we had a farm in Kinderhook New York a huge farm and it was 32 lived on September 1st when we took the kids to school for the first time there was snow on the ground September 1st and that that winter it was 32 below the pool fence was covered by the early October and we didn't see it again until until May I mean it was a hell of a winter but anyway at the edge of our farm far away was a auto repair shop and in the auto repair shop which was really miserable freezing cold and dirty with oil etc etc they had people working on cars but it was a sort of like a very primitive type thing and I went down there once to talk about our car and I was wearing boots and grey pants and a grey 60-40 and I had a gray Stetson and I had my pistol on and I had a giant dog who was a Bernese Mountain Dog named Constance and I walked into this place and one of the mechanics reared back he almost threw himself against the wall cuz he was terrified because he thought I was a state cop and he was frightened of cops why he was a Russian and he didn't have his teeth and his name his name was Igor and it turns out he was a Jew from the area and I said to him my family came from Gordon F do you know it he said oh he said it's just a stone he said I said the stone and he meant you know like a gravestone and it turns out that the Einsatzgruppen the special group the Germans they were to get trucks put people in the trucks and then put the exhaust back into the trucks drive to a pit where they would just throw all the dead people and they killed every single person in the village and these were all my relatives we were lucky we my family escaped and came here in 1870 and that doesn't leave you you know in the Second World War we had 32 people who served one of whom my cousin Robert died in his fighter plane and my father volunteered at age we went into this the OSS stuff when he was 36 he was passed draft age and so I felt the same way and I feel the same way about America - I mean if America were threatened now I would volunteer Oh 71 they're not going to take me but I do serve actually now in an arm capacity I'll be retiring in two years time flies when you're having fun so we we don't have a lot of time left I wanted to ask you to tell a story of meeting hanging out with John Cheever as a kid you you have such a storied life that it makes your fiction seem almost dull and your fiction is not even close to dull but it but you really do have and you're aware of that having an outrageously storied life and then of having met the kind of people when you were already a kid that most people don't get to meet in their life Winston Churchill you met Churchill yeah when I was very little at Lake Annecy in I think it was 1951 or whatever my father who had worked for him in the war was we were in in Annecy - and my father was taking something to him from Alexander Korda with my father's business partner and I wrote on my father's leg and we waited in an anteroom with a stone floor with a lot of other men most of them were British in suits and then the doors open and Winston Churchill came out and I was still writing my father's know standing on his shoes holding onto his leg but one about Cheever I can tell you about Cheever I ya quickly because I want to ask you about Winter's Tale this is ridiculous go ahead I actually it turns out that Theodore Roosevelt invented this thing called straight lining at Sagamore Hill he would have his kids go in a straight line no matter what you know climbed over a wall crawl through a swamp or whatever I didn't know this but I invented it from myself when I lived in Eagle Bay which is an austin-healey about a thousand two thousand acres of more or less forest and I had the idea just independently that I would go in a straight line so one day you know you're nuts right yeah I I was walking to school I used to walk five miles to school in five miles back and late I had actually that weird that it was five miles there the funny thing the ads of that it's amazing sometimes it wasn't okay so I would take a different route yeah but what I meant was that I would not only walk to school but also that right and one day I was running a little late and John Cheever came by in his Nash Rambler the color of pepto-bismol and he opened the door and said Marco because my name is Marco then he said what are you doing and I said well I'm walking to school he said we'll you'll be late I see would you like a ride so I said okay so I got in the car and we rode to school because he lived in the garage above the above the garage in the in on the school grounds with his family now did you know at the time that he was a famous writer yeah we all knew his kids went to the same school and people people knew he was deathly poor at the time and my parents still they were friends with him so so I got in the car and he said why do you walk and it was telling and I told him about straight lining the next thing I know there was this movie this story called the swimmer about Burt Lancaster who did a straight line but that's okay I mean people borrow and though in all seriousness your conversation with Cheever influenced him to write the swimmer yes for sure and so then hold hold it right there yeah that's amazing yeah I built the greatest short stories of the 20th century and the fact that you may have had something to do with it apart from writing is is really something I bet if Suzy and Benjy knew about this they would probably attack me and say oh it's not true but it is true well in the story and I remember Cheever better than I remember your fiction he talks about taking a dogleg at some point oh I never read the story so so you're you're alive never know but it's I've never read there's another story about what they wrote it he wrote a book about my family called bullit park we lived in Brighton Park and when Martin Luther King was killed there were riots in Ossining and they were burning down the the stores and stuff and people attacking people's houses so my father and I went and we bought ammunition and then Mary and John Cheever and Howard with the guy who played the Benjamin Franklin in 1776 Howard the Silva came to brunch and they said you know this was the time when the riots going on and we said yeah we we bought ammunition and and an achiever said you what and we said we bought ammunition this why in case people come to try to burn our house down you would shoot people who were gonna really kill you you know and the answer was yeah and and at that and Howard the silver who was an old communist my mother was a communist in the 30s too so she knew a lot of Communists that's why he was there he was just horrified that we would defend ourselves so so we're that sort of achievers but I got to get to the to the red meat okay uh-huh and that is that when I publish my my first book which is called a dove the East it was published by Knopf and a lot of stories from The New Yorker in it I was quite young and I came home from New York after having an editorial conference with Rachel McKenzie who was a New Yorker one great New Yorker editor and I was on the trends reading a Carlos Baker's biography of Hemingway I thought that would be my life you know that see like it was in the old days I thought things were gonna be different and I got home and I took off my my suit I think it was this one and I saw John Cheever out by the pool because he they didn't have a pool and they it had to be 1978 no it was 1975 74 it was 1974 and he he was sitting by the pool so I figured well hey I have the same publisher he knows I published in The New Yorker if he reviews it and it'll go in the front page of the New York Times Book Review of my first book so I so I went down to him and I said I said hi John and I can I mix this up with when I went down and he had written the Faulkner Faulkner yeah which he pronounces Faulkner I called it falconer being right you know appro appro and and he said hi mark and I said hi and he's and he said right off the bat he said you know Faulkner was so and so and so and so saying something that won the National Book Award national know you told him that Faulkner no no no no no no no no no I remember he said something about it and then I said big deal Faulkner won the Nobel Prize oh that's right yeah that's right because I thought he was saying Faulkner he's dead you have to slow this down because you know maybe missing this is very funny John Cheever who spoke with this plummy North Shore South Shore sorry South Shore Boston accent pronounced his book falconer as so when he said that when he said you the one isn't talking about William Faulkner and he said the Faulkner was you know made the the Faulkner someone the sigh big deal big deal and no Buckner won the Nobel Prize and he went like this for a second you know it was summer it was before it was June it was before Nobel Prize season but he still went like that to thinking oh it did you know and that was later in the 70s yeah that was I guess I could name outright yeah I confused them but but and people have clang clang Craig Claiborne said to me once a dinner at his house he said mall he spoke like he said you the O is John Chivo gay and I said oh no no no he said because he understand about almost sexual love and I said well I I've known him since I was a child he's not gay see this shows what I knew I didn't even know what gay was until I was in after college but so anyway I go down to the to the in a different time and I say you know I have a book out could you review it for the times thinking you know this is going to be it and he said well mark he said actually Seoul and I are coming out with books this fall and we've pledged not to review any other books and I felt at that moment both a really angry that he wasn't gonna do this for me and I had known him all my life and I gave I'd given him the idea for the swimmer which was his big thing and also ashamed that I wanted to be in that system of back-scratching that I was angry about and I decided right then at that moment I would never write a blurb for anybody I would never ask anybody for a blurb I would never serve on a prize jury I would never go to yato or anything like that I would never have anything to do with any writers whatsoever that is for fiction I do sometimes review the nonfiction books but for fiction which is what I do and I've kept that promise you'll never see a blurb from me here out of sheer spite I know out of shame for for wanting to be in that unfair system where you know somebody or whatever and by the way I was writing in the elevator at Knopf when Toni Morrison got in the elevator with the director of publicity and this is what before Song of Solomon came out and I had refiners fire coming out in the same list and the director of publicity didn't know me from anything you know nothing didn't recognize me and she said to to Toni Morrison who was an editor at Random House at the time she said I want you to know I want you to know that we just had the editorial meeting in Bob meaning Bob Gottlieb has decided that we're gonna concentrate everything on your book your book is gonna be so I'm sitting there my book is gonna be in the same list and I said okay all right that's that's that's life yeah and once we had dinner in Japanese restaurant in Nyack and we were sitting next to Taunton near Toni Morrison and she didn't recognize me just like it's in the elevator I knew who she was and she was just bitching bitching vicious she has about 300 honorary degrees Nobel Prize cetera et cetera and I was saying she doesn't have much to complain about well I always know I didn't like Bob Gottlieb so thank you for giving me evidence I didn't like Bob Gottlieb either I wanted to what to end on a sour note and I think we've achieved that mark really it's so much fun to talk to you I knew that it would be an outrage to have to limit it to an hour so we're gonna find a way to haul you back up here maybe next time you won't have to drive but there's so much more I want to talk to you about and maybe we can do it another time but it has been a magnificent joy and honor for me to do this so Socrates in the City crowd maybe once again you can thank our special guest our culprit [Applause] you

Channel: socratesinthecity

Views: 16,338

Rating: 4.8801498 out of 5

Keywords: EricMetaxasSocrates, Mark Helprin, Eric Metaxas, Helprin, Metaxas, Socrates in the City, Fiction, WInter's Tale, Ellis Island and Other Stories, Paris in the Present Tense, Meaning of Life, John Cheever, Writing, New York City

Id: -IDXyd5RA1A

Length: 71min 44sec (4304 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 08 2019