It’s like those racing greyhounds and the mechanical rabbit—one can never catch it. It makes for the worst and best in life. I remember a friend at Robert Kennedy’s funeral, someone very close to him, and she said: “It was such a hot day. Sweltering. And there was the grave waiting in the grass under this great cool green tree. And suddenly I envied him. Envied him all that green peacefulness. I thought, Bless you, Bobby, you don’t have to fight anymore. You’re safe.”
Answered Prayers is complicated technically and much the longest work I’ve done—indeed, triple the length of all my other books combined. During the past year or so I’ve been under great pressure to finish it; but literature has its own life, and insists on dancing to its own measure. Answered Prayers is like a wheel with a dozen spokes; the fuel that spins the wheel is an extraordinary young woman who has had fifty affairs, could have married virtually anyone, but for twelve years has loved an “older” man who can’t marry because he is married, and won’t divorce because he expects, with reasonable cause, to be the next President of the United States.
Q: If you hadn’t decided on writing, a creative life, what would you have done?
A: Become a lawyer. I often considered it, and many lawyers, including one attorney general and a Supreme Court justice, have told me I would have made a first-class trial lawyer, though my voice, often described as “high and childish” (among other things), might have been a detriment.
Also, I wouldn’t have minded being kept, but no one has ever wanted to keep me—not more than a week or so.
Q: Do you take any form of exercise?
A: Yes. Massage.
Q: Can you cook?
A: Not for company. For myself, I always dish up the same cuisine. Crackers and cream of tomato soup. Or a baked potato stuffed with fresh caviar.
Q: If Reader’s Digest ever commissioned from you an “Unforgettable Character” article, whom would you write about?
A: God forbid that such a degrading assignment should ever come my way. But if it did—ahem, let’s see. Robert Frost, America’s Poet Laureate, was fairly memorable. An old bastard, if ever there was one. I met him when I was eighteen; apparently he didn’t consider me a sufficiently humble worshiper at the altar of his ego. Anyway, by writing a scurrilous letter to Harold Ross, the late editor of The New Yorker, where I was then employed, he got me fired from my first and last time-clock job. Perhaps he did me a favor; because then I sat down and wrote my first book, Other Voices, Other Rooms.
As a child, I lived until I was ten or so with an elderly spinster relative in a rural, remote part of Alabama. Miss Sook Faulk. She herself was not more than twelve years old mentally, which is what accounted for her purity, timidity, her strange, unexpected wisdom. I have written two stories about her, “A Christmas Memory” and “The Thanksgiving Visitor”—both of which were filmed for television with Geraldine Page portraying Miss Faulk with an uncanny beauty and accuracy.
Miss Page is rather unforgettable, come to consider: a Jekyll and Hyde; Dr. Jekyll on stage, Mr. Hyde off. It is purely a matter of appearance; she has better legs than Dietrich and as an actress can project an illusion of infinite allure—but in private she insists, Lord knows why, in disguising herself under witchlike wigs and costumes of consummate eccentricity.
Of course, I don’t care much for actresses or actors. A friend, I can’t remember just now who, said, “All actresses are more than women, and all actors are less than men.” A half-true observation; still, true enough to be, in my opinion, the root cause of the prevailing theatrical neurosis. But the trouble with most actors (and actresses) is that they are dumb. And, in many instances, the dumbest are the most gifted. Sir John Gielgud, the kindest man alive, an incomparable technician, brilliant voice; but, alas, all his brains are in his voice. Marlon Brando. No actor of my generation possesses greater natural gifts; but none other has transported intellectual falsity to higher levels of hilarious pretension. Except, perhaps, Bob Dylan: a sophisticated musical (?) con man pretending to be a simple-hearted (?) revolutionary but sentimental hillbilly.
But enough of this question. It was stupid to start with.
Q: What is the most hopeful word in any language?
A: Love.
Q: And the most dangerous?
A: Love.
Q: Have you ever wanted to kill anybody?
A: Haven’t you? No? Cross your heart? Well, I still don’t believe you. Everybody at one time or another has wanted to kill someone. The true reason why many people commit suicide is because they are cowards who prefer to murder themselves rather than murder their tormentor. As for me, if desire had ever been transferred into action, I’d be right up there with Jack the Ripper. Anyway, it’s amusing to think about: the plotting, the planning, the surprise and regret imprinting the face of the villain-turned-victim. Very relaxing. Better than counting sheep.
Not long ago my doctor suggested that I adopt some healthier hobby other than wine-tasting and fornication. He asked if I could think of anything. I said, “Yes, murder.” He laughed, we both did, except I wasn’t laughing. Poor man, little did he know what a painful and perfect demise I’d planned for him when, after eight days abed with something closely resembling black cholera, he still refused to pay me a house call.
Q: What are your political interests?
A: I’ve known a few politicians whom I liked, and a more surrealist montage could not be imagined. Adlai Stevenson was a friend, and always a generous one; we were staying as guests in the same house when he died, and I remember watching a manservant pack his belongings, and then, when the suitcases were so pathetically filled, but still unclosed, I walked in and helped myself to one of his ties—a sort of sentimental theft, because the night before I’d complimented him on the tie and he’d promised to give it to me. On the other hand, I like Ronald Reagan, too. Many of my friends think I’m teasing them when I say that. I’m not. Though Governor Stevenson and Governor Reagan are quite different spirits, the latter shares with the former a modesty, an “I’m looking you in the eye and I mean what I say” directness that is rare enough among us folk, not to mention politicians.
I suppose New York’s Senator Jacob Javits and Governor Reagan, for purely reflex reasons, feel antipathetical toward each other. Actually, I think they would get along fine, and would make an interesting political combination. (Of course, the real reason I always speak well of Governor Reagan and Senator Javits is that I like both their wives, though they are even less alike than their husbands, Mrs. Javits being a lacquered but still untamed city urchin, a smoochy-voiced and sexy-eyed child-woman with a vocabulary as fresh and salty and Brooklyn-bred as the waves that spank the beaches at Coney Island. As for Mrs. Reagan—I don’t know, there is about her something so small-town American and nostalgia-making: the homecoming queen riding past on a throne of roses.)
The two politicians I’ve known best were President Kennedy and his brother Robert. They, too, were quite unalike, and not as close as generally believed; at any rate, the younger brother was very much afraid of the elder—
Q: Do we really have to hear any more about any Kennedy? Moreover, you’re sidestepping the question, which wasn’t about politicians but your own interest in politics.
A: I have none. I’ve never voted. Though, if invited, I suppose I might join almost anyone’s protest parade: Antiwar, Free Angela, Gay Liberation, Ladies’ Lib, etc.
Q: If you could be anything, what would you most like to be?
A: Invisible. To be visible or invisible at will. I mean, think of the possibilities: the power, the riches, the constant erotic amusement.
Q: What are your chief vices? And virtues?
A: I have no vices. The concept doesn’t exist in my vocabulary. My chief virtue is gratitude. So far as I know, I’ve never betrayed anyone who was kind to me. But as art is life’s compensation for the flawed delights of living, I reserve my greatest gratitude for those poets, painters, composers who have compensated me most. A work of art is the one mystery, the one extreme magic; everything else is either arithmetic or biology. I think I understand a considerable lot about writing; nevertheless, when I read something good, in fact, a work of art, my senses sail away into a universe of wonder: How did he do it? How is it possible?
Q: Looking back, it would seem as though some of your answers are rather inconsistent. Deliberate cruelty, you say, is the one unforgivable sin. Then you confess to occasional verbal cruelty, and later on admit that you have contemplated prepared murder.
A: Anyone consistently consistent has a head made of biscuit. My head, the interior, may be made of something odd, but it isn’t biscuit.
Q: Suppose you were drowning. What images, in the classic tradition, do you envision rolling across your mind?
A: A hot Alabama day in, oh, 1932, so I must be eight, and I am in a vegetable garden humming with bees and heat waves, and I am picking and putting into a basket turnips and slushy scarlet tomatoes. Then I am running through a pine and honeysuckle woods toward a deep cool creek, where I bathe and wash the turnips,
