New York Public Library



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GEORGE SAUNDERS & DICK CAVETT

February 26, 2013

LIVE from the New York Public Library

live

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 22nd and 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, of very 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’s Ilios, 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 that his 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 just was 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 show that my father wouldn’t let anybody talk during in the old days called Information, 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 copy I 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 you recall 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 Tremain with 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 and trying 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, a followed 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 was Tom 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 as intellectual 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.

(laughter)

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Yeah, yeah.

(laughter)

DICK CAVETT: Are we on? (laughter) From somewhere she just knocked my notes on the floor. I tell you what—she, I had her booked on my PBS show, and she sent a form along, not a release form, but fifteen stipulations. Can you guess what the last one was?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: No.

DICK CAVETT: Besides Mr. Cavett not being there. The last one was, “there will not be disagreement with Miss Rand’s ideas.”

(laughter)

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Ewww! Oh, yes, there will.

(laughter)

DICK CAVETT: Well, it didn’t happen, because I wrote back, nor will there be Miss Rand. (laughter) I’m kind of sorry because I think it would have been fun to get the old bag out there.

(laughter)

GEORGE SAUNDERS: But I’ll tell you one thing, I didn’t read between Esther Forbes and Ayn Rand, but and just this is to come right out and kiss up, because I did watch your show obsessively. And that was an incredibly wonderful life—it was on the South Side of Chicago. My parents had given me a television for my room, and I was allowed to watch it as late as I wanted. So every night I’d watch your show and got so many wonderful, beautiful lessons about generosity from you, curiosity, and intensity. And also the fact that there were people out there doing intellectual work, and there was somebody championing them. So I’m sure I’m not alone in wanting to thank you for that. It was an incredible thing.

(applause)

DICK CAVETT: Could I hear that again? (laughter) I feel swell now.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I remember watching the famous Lester Maddox episode.

DICK CAVETT: Ahhh, yes.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: It was late, seemed like it was late in the show, and I jumped out of bed and ran down the hall to try to find somebody I couldn’t believe that could happen.

DICK CAVETT: Verify what was going on. That was something and I saw that thing recently, and I was on the edge of my chair watching. It builds like a drama.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Did you ever speak to him after that? Was there ever any sort of—

DICK CAVETT: Yeah, once by phone.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: By phone.

DICK CAVETT: After the show he got six thousand telegrams congratulating him and I got six thousand suggesting I try swimming in the Yazoo River with an anchor around my neck. That might have been the one that produced my favorite hate mail, from Waco, Texas, you might have guessed that. “Dear Dick Cavett, you little sawed-off faggot Communist shrimp,” (laughter) and I wrote, it had a return address, (laughter) honest to God, and I was able to write back, “I am not sawed-off.” (laughter/applause) I wonder if they got it. But this part about your learning to be a person.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Yeah!

DICK CAVETT: You said you learned from me. What were you before?

(laughter)

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Well, I don’t know. There’s some kind of. My feeling would be there’s something kind of nascent in all of us that wants to be generous and engaged and involved. You see one example of that on the large stage, the screen, and it opens something up in you. I remember after 9/11. Remember there was that period where everybody, well, not everybody, but some people were saying if you said anything that was even slightly anti-administration it was unpatriotic, and you sort of felt like, “well, maybe, I hate to be the one who says the thing that lets the terrorists win,” you know, and the same week Al Gore and Tom Daschle both said, “Bullshit, it’s not true,” and then it was such a feeling of seeing your better self kind of writ large. And I got that feeling all the time from your show, because you didn’t take any shit from anybody, but also you were incredibly generous, and you gave people a chance to recover, you gave people the chance to do their best, and I think even as a kid, I just saw that as a really incredibly positive set of traits.

DICK CAVETT: I can’t help asking, did you think I was a little hard on Norman Mailer with my—

(laughter)

GEORGE SAUNDERS: No, no, I just watched that other night.

DICK CAVETT: Let’s establish now the ultimate line in that, because it’s always misquoted. When he said something about threatening the three of us, and somehow, “I wouldn’t hit anybody here because they’re all smaller than I am.” I had said, “I hope we get through the show without your hitting anybody.” I said, “In what way smaller?” And he said, “Intellectually smaller,” and that was what produced, “Perhaps you’d like another chair to help contain your giant intellect,” which got an inordinate laugh then but not now (laughter) and then it finally got to, “Read the next question off the question sheet,” which to me meant David Frost, and that produced, and this is the correct wording, “Why don’t you fold it five ways and put it where the moon don’t shine?” Now, it is often quoted, and this is tin ear writing—“Why don’t you stick it where the sun doesn’t shine?”

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Not as good.

DICK CAVETT: And it loses it all, (laughter) because that would be vulgar. (laughter) Stick it doesn’t work. Okay. Here’s a question for you. What is the funniest essay ever written and is at the same time a master course in writing?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I think that there’s one and I’ll get the title wrong, but it’s by Jack Handey and it’s something on how to be an artist. And it’s just an unbelievably virtuosic sequence of the descriptions of the paintings that he’s going to someday do, which are all crazier than the one before. What’s a master class in it, is that he—in humor writing I find this very hard to do anything—you have to escalate, you have to escalate, but it’s very difficult, and he does this escalation just with fifteen paintings. There’s no, the sort of setup doesn’t shift. The essay doesn’t go off in some other direction. He just says, “I’m going to list these paintings,” and he does it. And the escalation is in the sequence. I don’t remember a single one of them. But I remember sitting there having to stop reading to get up and walk around so I could continue breathing. So I could back and read it. (laughter) He’s a really funny, brilliant stylist.

DICK CAVETT: Yes, so that would be your candidate?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I think so, yes.

DICK CAVETT: Do you want to know the correct answer?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Yes, I really would.

(laughter)

DICK CAVETT: Just reach over and slap me if you want to. The audience would enjoy it, I think. Here’s the title, I’ll only say it once. “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”—

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Mark Twain.

DICK CAVETT: By Mark Twain. And I read it every year and it gets better each time. It’s just a masterpiece, and there’s one full page single space of this is what brought it up, Fenimore Cooper’s genius for getting just the wrong word. Female for woman, this for that, this for that, and you might agree that the trick of writing an essay is, “how do I close it,” like a comedy sketch. And that one ends illustrating Cooper’s violated all the rules of writing, he got the wrong word for this, the characters are not real, the logic flies into the air, the something doesn’t follow, the people don’t resemble anyone—and then he ends it with, “But what is left is art. (laughter) I think we must all admit that.” Great essay.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: That’s the essay where he does this great analysis of how it would be impossible for the canoe—the canoe would have to be three miles long to pass under the tree.

DICK CAVETT: Cooper’s Indians . . . yes. If you were smart, you will go home now. (laughter) It was online, I turned someone onto it. Fenimore Cooper’s literary offenses. It’s not in that that he has a line that always gives me gooseflesh about writing. And I know you know it.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Don’t bet on it.

DICK CAVETT: “The difference between the almost-right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” I just gave myself a chill, did anyone else get one? (laughter) People with a tin ear, including one fine comedy writer always argued with me said, “it’s just as funny the other way around, lightning and the lightning bug.” I said, “No, it’s not.” The last word lightning is majestic. It’s poetry. The other one’s a gag. Do you go back and change wording?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Oh yeah, I’m a big reviser. I have one story in this new book I started in ’98 and just finished it last spring, so it’s kind of the inner nun theory, (laughter) which is “What are you trying to pull?” That kind of idea I found, too, so much in that revision process, if you’re leaning into the language and trying to make it a little edgier, you tend to—it becomes truer, more detailed, more specific and somehow more true. And I can’t—the first time I do it it tends to be a little caricaturish, and a little bit harsh, sometimes a little cruel, but then after many many passes, you start to see the different exit ramps where you’ve left maybe kindness or close observation and gone off on some kind of projective ledge. And then with successive revisions you can pull it back, and over the course of these years, the piece actually moves, it becomes truer, and maybe becomes—I don’t know if kinder, but it becomes a little more honest in the things that it’s pillorying or criticizing, so for me I wish I was somebody who could just do it right the first time, but for me it’s about many, many revisions, and saying, “oh, there’s a little bit of bullshit, let’s fix that.” That’s good enough for today, and then come back the next day, and over many, many weeks, it starts to kind of, like a big ship it starts to move in a better direction.

DICK CAVETT: Does it happen in any instance in something that you have published—and you think, how did I miss . . .

GEORGE SAUNDERS: There are sometimes where I see a little bit of a cheap joke, or a quick joke, where now I would go, “if I just had stood by that one a little bit longer, I might have gotten something a little more, a little nicer,” and then also I think with stories, by the time I’m done with them and send them to the New Yorker usually I would fight for every comma, I’m sure of every comma, I’m sure of every coffee stain, everything’s perfect, and then even a few months later, that conceit kind of falls apart, and then you read it out loud and you’re like, “Yeah, that’s all right, It’s good enough, but I don’t know why I did that and not that.” It’s mysterious.

DICK CAVETT: Is there anything you’ve ever decided not to publish at all?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: There’s nothing I decided not to publish.

(laughter)

DICK CAVETT: You’ve got people who do that for you.

(laughter)

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I wrote, actually, when my wife and I were first married, we—I was working at a pharmaceutical company, writing up animal reports, and so I think we both were like, “We didn’t expect this. We wanted something better.” So I went to a wedding in Mexico. A friend’s wedding. It was very glamorous. Great novelistic stuff. There was a radical priest who did the service. There was a guy who’d just gotten out of prison. There was a male model/surfer in attendance. This was really great, it was like Malcolm Lowry territory I came back and I said, “Honey, don’t worry, I got this.” So we had I think one of our daughters then, so I would stay up late, drink coffee, get up at six in the morning or seven and go to work and finally after maybe a year I had this seven-hundred-page novel, and then I thought, “No, I’m a minimalist. I’ll cut it back.” So I cut it back to three-eighty or something. Just to give you some idea of how good this book was it was called “La Bota de Eduardo,” (laughter) which I think means “Ed’s Wedding,” (laughter) so then I gave it to my wife to read and I thought, “I think we’ve really got something here.” So I said, “It’s long, so just take your time and I’ll check back in a week or so.” And then like any real writer, you go around the corner and peek back, and she maybe was on page two and she just had her head in her hands like this. (laughter) So that one I didn’t even send it out.

DICK CAVETT: You married that woman?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Oh, yeah.

DICK CAVETT: Before or after that incident?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Way before. She saved me. She saved me. So that one never even went out.

DICK CAVETT: Who used the phrase, “Murder your darlings,” about going over your own writing?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Faulkner.

DICK CAVETT: Was it Faulkner?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Jodi Faulkner.

(laughter)

DICK CAVETT: I thought it was “murder your grandmother.” Who gets credit for saying one of the secrets of writing is to back over it, when you feel you’ve finished, read it through one last time, and any passages that strike you as particularly fine, strike out.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I don’t know who said it, but it’s true.

DICK CAVETT: Somebody said it. Good.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Luckily I never have those parts that seem fine.

DICK CAVETT: There are a lot of good quotes about writing, and some of them are by people who can’t write themselves. By the way, if you do a talk show and we find ourselves reversed and you finally own up to the fact that you were supposed to interview me tonight, here’s a warning that I found the hard way—my friend Chris Porterfield finally pointed out to me, that it’s about time we admitted to ourselves that some of the very finest writers, who write the most mellifluous prose, can’t talk. And it’s such—you’re too modest—it’s such a shock when it happens. You think—it’s as if John Cheever came in and said, “Yeah, right.” (laughter) Which he didn’t. Did you ever see a show I did with Cheever and Updike?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I didn’t see that one.

DICK CAVETT: I’ll get it for you, and anyone else who wants it. (laughter) I got to see it because I wrote a blog about that show and those two. But what was fun about it was watching John Updike glow when Cheever praised his writing. It was just the sweetest thing, and luckily the director cut to it in time.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I saw on YouTube there’s an incredible clip of Hemingway talking to a reporter at La Finca La Vigia, and it’s the strangest—I still don’t know quite what’s going on, because he’s very stiff and he’s “Welcoming you,” (laughter) and it looks like he’s being prompted by somebody and he goes, “to the Finca La Vigia,” and then the broadcaster is equally strange in that late fifties way. “Mr. Hemingway . . .” (laughter) We’ve come a long way.

DICK CAVETT: It never occurred to me that you could find or Google or whatever Hemingway talking.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: You can actually find Tolstoy talking. Not a video but he records portions of “What Is Art?” or something in French, German, and English. You can hear Leo in English.

DICK CAVETT: You can hear Tennyson reading “The Charge of the Light Brigade” on the British Museum recording.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: And it’s weird because Tennyson uses the word “dude” a lot. Which we, you wouldn’t think that—

DICK CAVETT: Dude?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: “Dude,” yeah.

(laughter)

DICK CAVETT: Well, that is interesting, boys and girls, let’s all make a note of that. Was there a Lord Balfour in England’s history? The great Peter Ustinov said he heard a recording of Lord Balfour making his first recording ever, and it ended something like, “And thus we go forth onto the widening vista of history, and on to triumph. Was that all right?” (laughter)

You know, Twain was recorded by Edison and it burned up in a fire Edison had. We could have heard once and for all if Hal Holbrook was right. (laughter)

Should we lighten the atmosphere a little bit and talk about death?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Yeah, I think we should.

DICK CAVETT: Because you’ve written and been quoted eloquently, and I’m not sure I can cite the places, but how many of you can identify, how does it go? “I work all day and get half-drunk at night. Waking to soundless dark I stare. Soon the window edges will grow light, and then I see what’s really always there, unresting death, a whole day nearer now.” Phil Larkin. It’s a great poem, it’s his masterpiece, I think it’s generally agreed. It has a line in it about the things that don’t make death, or try to make death seem palatable, or ease from the fear, and he says, I hope I get it right. “Religion tried. That vast moth-eaten musical brocade created to pretend we never die.” It got to somebody. (laughter) It is the poem “Aubade.” It is online. Aubade is a prayer to the morning or a poem written in the morning. Fabulous poem, but you—about death—are you against it?

(laughter)

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I haven’t really thought it out beyond me, but I’m against it for me. For sure.

DICK CAVETT: That poem has it—the “fear of when and how and where myself shall die.” Where did I read you on the subject of death and saying that it made you think of wasting time when the clock is ticking, but you put it better.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I think—what is that Woody Allen line, I’m not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

DICK CAVETT: That was Groucho Marx’s favorite Woody Allen line. I don’t want to be around—

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I’ve had just a couple of things in my life where it was here. I thought, boy, that two or three days after that are really strange turf. You know, when you’ve had a close call, you’re almost a different species, in that mode, and you—it seems like the good things in life come to you differently, the bad things in life come to you differently, and I don’t know if it would be possible to sustain that kind of awareness, but those days are very interesting when—

DICK CAVETT: That was it. Yeah. That was what was so good about it. You talk about the intense, sharpened perception. That was close.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: And the courage. You know, because I’m kind of naturally, a little bit of a getalong person, I don’t like trouble, and I don’t like to be rude, and in those days I just didn’t care, you know, not that I wanted to be rude, but the truth was closer, and it seemed much more idiotic to resist a truth that was right in your face, so you would see a problem and you’ve give an opinion, or you’d take an action, whereas maybe before these things happened, you’d try to be a little more ceremonious, a little more polite, and it seemed in almost every case when I would be bold like that, I was actually a better person and kind of nicer, really. It was like that feeling that if this was your last day, you wouldn’t be pussyfooting around quite as much, for better or worse. And you’d kind of go at the kernel of corn a little more directly.

DICK CAVETT: I wonder if I could find it, or if I even typed it out here, but I was not going to do all of “Aubade” for you, but there’s a line it about it about those regrets that you subject yourself to. Would you sing something while I look for it here? (laughter) Oh, here’s a note we can get to. I wondered, George, what you and I have in common. Have you ever been sued by Lillian Hellman?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: No, not that I know.

(laughter)

DICK CAVETT: Okay. Forget that. Let’s see.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: We’ve got the Midwest upbringing. That was good.

DICK CAVETT: “Making all thought impossible but how and where and when I shall myself die. Arid interrogation, yet the dread of dying and being dead flashes afresh to hold and horrify. The mind blanks at the glare.” That wasn’t the passage I was thinking of, but he goes on to think of three things. “Love unexpressed,” something else, and “time torn off unused.”

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Beautiful.

DICK CAVETT: Good line for the writer or for anybody.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I was on a plane that had an issue—“an issue”—and there was a very short time—it was such an issue that all the help had vanished and there was an electrical fire up the middle it did like that and there was black smoke coming out of those deals and what was interesting was for some amount of time, there was—thought disappeared, nothing, and I think if you’d asked me my name, I couldn’t have come up with it, and gradually some words came, which were, “no, no, no, no, no, no,” and then I became aware of this airplane seat in front of me and the first coherent thought was, “It’s time to get out of this body and that’s what’s going to do it.”

DICK CAVETT: That seat in your face.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Yeah, and I thought, “Oh, that’s not going to be enjoyable at all,” (laughter) and so then we were, about seven or eight minutes before they told us what was happening, but at this time the plane was dropping pretty fast, the black smoke was coming out, and people were really hysterical and only after about six or seven minutes I—there’s a fourteen-year-old boy sitting next to me and I had not even seen anything except the back of that seat and he said very sweetly, “Sir, is this supposed to be happening?” (laughter) And that kind of roused me a little bit. And I thought, okay—

DICK CAVETT: That was a bright kid.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: That was a bright kid, yeah. (laughter) Slowly, as time went by, I started to maybe think a little bit about what would be left behind, but even that was so terrifying your mind couldn’t really go there.

DICK CAVETT: I realized while you were talking. That’s the thing I read somewhere. Where did I read that?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: New York Times Magazine.

DICK CAVETT: It’s in the Times. By the way, I should add, Woody Allen has a well-known obsession with death and when his first book of New Yorker pieces out, he wasn’t aware until someone pointed out that fourteen out of the twenty had to do about death in one way or another. And so naturally I did him the favor of giving him Philip Larkin’s “Aubade.” Ran into him a week later and I said, “I hope I didn’t ruin your day.” And he said, “Not my day.” (laughter)

What’s the line? You made me think about it. I think it’s in “The Death of Ivan Illych,” the one by Tolstoy with that title and the man is dying and he says, “I can’t be dying,” and I’m murdering it, but, “as a child I had a little red and white leather ball.” At first that seems to be a non sequitur. And then you realize that’s probably where the mind would go.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: It goes from broader to to he says, I had a home, I had a mother, and it ends in that little red ball.

DICK CAVETT: Is that what it is? So the old bag Lillian Hellman didn’t sue you, either?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Not yet. There’s still time.

(laughter)

DICK CAVETT: I didn’t realize writers could get you in trouble the way—not only alluding but referring to the Mary McCarthy/Lillian Hellman incident that happened on my show.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I do want to ask you one question.

DICK CAVETT: Yeah, it’s your turn now.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Here’s something that I said a lot and I don’t know that it’s true. But I thought that your show was so original and so strange in the way that anything could happen on the show. So, question: what kind of a prep would a guest undergo before he or she came onto your show?

DICK CAVETT: Well, I think it was tradition, it goes back to the tradition established for how to run that kind of show by Jack Paar. And it involved what were called talent coordinators and then they lobbied and got themselves called segment producers. And they would usually call Peter Ustinov at the St. Regis, and say, “You’re on tonight. Jack would like to know a few things you’d like to talk about.” The notes would be usually maybe four little paragraphs numbered on two or three pages. “He has a funny story about coming through customs, he would like to talk about the current prime minister, he wants to do his imitation,” and those could be elaborate, and eight or ten pages, or zero, which is what happened to me by accident with Katharine Hepburn, when she came in to study the studio—no one ever did that—see where it was, where she could put her foot, how she could sit, and then said, humorously, I hoped at first, “Well, why don’t we just do it now?”

(laughter)

GEORGE SAUNDERS: At that point did you have her notes prepared?

DICK CAVETT: I put some papers on the desk so it would look like the show would look so she wouldn’t be surprised by anything. But my only great idea, and you can find this on YouTube, I just learned, I said, “She probably isn’t going to do the show, she’s still deciding, let’s tape her visit to the studio, she won’t know, she’s never done television,” and we did, and it made a great opening for the show, including the moment where she said to the stagehand, “Let’s move this fence,” or whatever. “Well, we’d have to unscrew the whole thing.” “Don’t tell me what’s wrong, just fix it.” (laughter) Will you promise to watch that?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I think I’ve seen it.

DICK CAVETT: I think it’s on YouTube as Katharine Hepburn rearranges the furniture on the Cavett show. But then after doing it and waiting for her verdict, I had to tell her and I thought, “I’ll either get, ‘Well, good-bye then, Mr. Cavett,’” and she said, “I’ll send somebody to look at it.” And a lady at ABC said, “We’d set the room up and a woman came up wearing slacks and sandals and a khaki shirt and a babushka that only showed this much of her face and a very familiar voice.”

(laughter)

GEORGE SAUNDERS: So she sat and talked for the full hour—

DICK CAVETT: Hours.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: But she didn’t think it was being taped.

DICK CAVETT: The talk, she knew was being taped, after she said, “Let’s do it now.” I don’t want to give the impression I fooled her for hours. Although that’s kind of a better idea you have.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: At some point the audience started drifting in

DICK CAVETT: Yeah, it was so long because I had real shows to do that night, and she was supposed to come in two days later for the show. The band came in and were stunned to see who was sitting there. The musicians and some other people and I think a few people called friends. They’re all on that my DVD called Hollywood Greats, you can hear an audience that wasn’t there at the beginning. Especially when I told her I’d been in The Merchant of Venice with her in Stratford. “Really?” (laughter) I said, “I wasn’t onstage with you, but I had a line.” “What was it?” “Gentlemen, my master Antonio is at his house and desires to speak with you both.” “Is that the way you said it?” (laughter) Then she went, “I’m sorry.” Boy, was she good. She was nervous, Katharine Hepburn at the beginning was nervous. And that totally relaxed me. You’ll find this when you do your talk show, because I thought, “She needs me. I need to help this pitiful little woman.”

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Do you have thoughts on—because now they’re, the shows are they’re more prep heavy it seems, they don’t want a lot of accidents, they want kind of—do you feel that something is lost in that?

DICK CAVETT: I think so. I did a show recently and I like the guy and I said to him and he took it as a compliment, “How do you read the entire show off Teleprompter?” I never heard of this. Introductions, you know, you want to get their movie name right and stuff, but he’s mastered doing almost all, and he ad libs, of course, you have to because you don’t know what’s going to come up. Jack learned his monologue, Johnny, as you could always tell by his eye dropping, there were the cue cards were glued along here, it didn’t matter, because he was a master at it, but Jack wrote it out in longhand, and that committed it to memory for him somehow. That was amazing. I never saw anybody do that before. And when a great star does your line the first time, they can shoot you then, you’re happy. And if it’s Groucho Marx, twice.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Yeah, yeah. It seemed like some of the spontaneity of your show would take—would go some really interesting places and you could really get the measure of a person, you could really feel the way that two or three great minds might work together, but it seems like now that there’s so much pre-shaping with a desired end that in a certain way the show resembles itself repetitively, but in the long run it feels like somehow, the sense that I had as a kid of going, “Oh, this is how cultured people interact,” “this is a way a conversation sometimes goes,” “this is the way that someone bristles,” “this is the way that somebody blunders into something they didn’t mean to say”—that seems to have kind of receded a little bit.

DICK CAVETT: I don’t know what the cause of that is. It’s easy to see what the cause, the brainless starlet, there’s an old terms out who comes out and uses the word “excited” five times—she’s excited about her movie and excited by her director and excited by her costume and this perpetual state of excitement making you wonder why her eyelids are at half-mast. And then show a meaningless clip from the show. I just stopped doing that. I love when Dave Letterman gets that, because it’s funny with it and sometimes at the ladies’ expense and well deserved.

You used a key word, before I did the first show, Jack Paar called, I was still in awe of Jack right up to the end of working for him, and after, and he said, “Kid, when you do the show,” my stutter’s coming back—Jack stuttered—“don’t do interviews,” and I thought, well, sing, or read to the audience? He said, “No, no, no, no, that’s interviews—that’s what your favorite this and David Frost and clipboards and what’s your favorite color, and let me ask you this. Make it a conversation.” And what an insight. It’s the whole secret. It’s what Jack did. And you could feel it, when you went out there prepared sometimes, a little stiff and a little afraid of the guest, and then James Mason, my first week, got so damned interesting that I forgot my notes, I forgot I was on the air, and we talked until there was frantic signaling, “You’ve got a commercial!” Sometimes you think, when you have your talk show the first week, “Oh my God, the guest’s lips have stopped moving and I don’t have any idea what he or she said,” and I only found out too late to have a general question ready—something that applies to everybody.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: “Have your lips stopped moving?” That would be a good question. “Have your lips stopped moving?”

(laughter)

DICK CAVETT: We’re both alive up here. I made an X on a couple things here that I wanted to get to with you. Did we do death yet?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: We did it. So easy.

DICK CAVETT: Somewhere maybe in that piece, you said something in an originalish way about—

(laughter)

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I remember that one, I was really on that day.

DICK CAVETT: It was right on page two, I think, right near the bottom of page two.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: That’s when I tend to say them.

DICK CAVETT: The thing that you said in an unclichéd way had to do with the fact that it’s something we’ll all have, it’ll happen to all of us. Except Dick Cheney, apparently. (laughter) Say something.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I don’t know. I think that for a fiction writer, about a death a story is pretty good, you know, there’s nothing as interesting. Whether actually you’re dying or trying to avert it, it turns the heat up in the room a little bit when there’s death on the horizon.

DICK CAVETT: Are there people who can actually put it out of mind utterly? I wonder—

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Who can what?

DICK CAVETT: Who can put it out of mind?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I don’t think you’d want to be that person.

DICK CAVETT: Big surprise.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Big surprise. I think to put it in mind is probably better.

DICK CAVETT: Let me see what I put my X on here in the remaining hour that we have. (laughter) Let’s see, earliest writings. A page here with a bunch of Xs. Talk to each other. (laughter) This is kind of funny. You have to sign a release form, we both did, they sent me mine. My assistant said, “Print it, and bring it in,” and I did, something might be wrong with me or my printer, but here it is.

(laughter)

GEORGE SAUNDERS: You’re going to need a very small pen.

DICK CAVETT: Can you read that?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I wouldn’t sign it. That’s how they get you.

(laughter)

DICK CAVETT: Even if I sign it, how will they know? Oh, yeah, I made a big note here about your becoming a person thanks to me, and I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering if I did it to anybody else.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I bet you did.

DICK CAVETT: Writers who can’t talk, there’s another problem with some writer guests, I found. Some of them had unusual voices. You know the writers of that time, even though you were too young to be hobnobbing with Cheever and Updike and Saul Bellow and all these folks, I had one writer come on, and I had to brace myself when I would introduce him and it would sound something like this, “So you’ve been photographed a lot lately with Lee Radziwill, why is that?” “She’s very interesting, very beautiful, very nice.” (laughter) And I would brace myself because the audience always did that when poor Truman began speaking. Anyone know which Truman I mean?

(laughter)

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I actually remember seeing him on your show and I didn’t know who he was, and I thought, “That’s amazing talking. How does he do that? Where did he learn that? I want to talk like that.” (laughter) There was actually—in our grade school there was a little epidemic of people who didn’t know who he was but they’d seen him on the show, and they’d imitate him. Him and Nixon, were the big imitations. We didn’t know he was a writer, he was the guy from New York, that’s all we know.

(laughter)

DICK CAVETT: Typical New Yorker. When you—and bogus as other people were in many ways—but gee, he was entertaining to talk to. He always had a story that he claimed happened to him and sometimes you know it was from Colette or something, but he was a lot of fun.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: In those days were writers—were they reticent to come on TV? Were there any of them who said, was there anyone who said, “I’m a writer, I wouldn’t dream of going on TV,” or were they happy to do it.

DICK CAVETT: Chris Porterfield is in the audience, he could yell out one or two. I think E. B. White wrote a lovely note, that I’m afraid I’ve lost, as I have many things, saying he appreciated the invitation but “I think maybe it’s a little late for me to start a new medium,” “to learn a new medium.” Saul Bellow was there. Just about. Never Philip Roth, I’m sorry to say.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Was he invited?

DICK CAVETT: He was, yeah. That is one way to get a guest. (laughter) And what’s funny is when you learn that somebody wanted to come on the show. Does anyone know the name Fred Astaire? He admitted that he had hoped he could come on nobody had asked him for quite a while and then he did. Anyone remember, I loved Fred Astaire, and I did two ninety-minute shows with him. I don’t need to take your time with this, but—Paul Lynde, how hilarious Paul Lynde was. He had a special writer, he himself was not witty, so he could never come on my show because he said, “They’ll think I’m funny.” He said a writer made him that way. What was the host’s name on that show. Peter something—

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Peter Marshall?

DICK CAVETT: Peter Marshall, yeah. Mr. Astaire had retired, so it went like this. “This gentleman has said he will never do this thing again. This gentleman’s name is Fred Astaire, and he will never do this thing again.” Paul Lynde: “order hair by mail?” (laughter) I can see someone reviewing us tomorrow saying—

GEORGE SAUNDERS: “He did a great Paul Lynde.”

(laughter)

DICK CAVETT: It’s easy for me.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Astaire, on the DVD, there was some thought that he had never used a stand-up microphone before or something, you said. He went to do that wonderful medley and he seemed kind of —

DICK CAVETT: He did a twenty-minute medley of Gershwin and then the next time he came on he did a twenty-minute medley of Cole Porter. Did he say he’d never used it—

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Or maybe it was an overhead mike, but he was sort of unfamiliar with the technology.

DICK CAVETT: I should watch some of my shows.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: You should because that’s actually an amazing moment because as an interview he didn’t really want to say much. You say, “How did you get interested in dancing?” And he said, “Well, I went to a dance class, and it was very interesting.”

DICK CAVETT: He was not the easiest person to talk to, and yet he loved being on. And he broke his rule and danced, and my hair stood up and so did the audience’s.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: As soon as he did that he came alive.

DICK CAVETT: You’re right. I found an old answering machine tape and it was “Dick, this is Fred, I think that you, you know, you get to the place, and they’ve sent me these notes, and just—Ginger would always, anyway, they’re just not my bag.” (laughter) Yes, sir. Would you be surprised to learn that his only stipulation in the guest notes was that we not talk about his origins in Omaha?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Really?

DICK CAVETT: Who would be the last person to come from Omaha in the world?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: He was ashamed of them?

DICK CAVETT: Fred Austerlitz, the Austerlitz brewery, and Jewish, partially. A grandfather or great-grandfather, isn’t that wonderful, all those anti-Semitic country clubs he belonged to with his friend the Duke of Windsor and other wretches. (laughter) Did you know Chris Hitchens at all?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: No. I saw him at a couple of events. We never ended up—Wonderful writer.

DICK CAVETT: Do you find writers more fun to hang out with than other people?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: No, no. (laughter) I think writers are more fun to e-mail with than other people. (laughter) No, I mean, I always felt like, you know, when you’re writing you have time to go back and refine yourself, and be more truthful, be funnier, be more direct, whatever personality defects you have, you can look at them, go, “yep, there you are again, old friend,” and work with it, and then so in the end, the thing that comes out is more interesting and smarter and more accessible and funnier. So I think when I first was really interested in writing it was this sense that I didn’t have enough. I liked the world and I loved people and I wanted to be in there somewhere, but when I would show up in person, I was, “Oooh, I am so disappointing to myself,” I wanted to be more, and when I sat down to write something the thing that got produced eventually had more of me in it than I did. So I felt like if you could send that ahead of yourself (laughter) and then show up, not say much, not let anybody down.

DICK CAVETT: Have you found it true, as I did, the hard way that you invite a writer on and he can’t talk too good?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I can’t, I mean, I’m from the south side of Chicago and one of the things I do in all my books is make these inarticulate characters, it’s pretty easy. (laughter) So my working theory is whatever mode of discourse you can occupy enthusiastically, you should do so, and then trusting that if you work with it, and exaggerate that mode, it becomes poetic, so in Chicago, a lot of the older guys in the neighborhood were not particularly articulate in the traditional way, and they would say if they wanted to express affection for you, they might say, “You. You jackoff. You fucking, you know, you know,” but we knew the language, “Oh, he loves me!” (laughter)

So one of the—As a kind of a writer from that background, for a long time I just tried to be Nabokov and failed, I tried to be Hemingway and failed, and then for me a big turning point was when I went, “You know, maybe if I just take that mode and all the other strange American street modes that I know, let them into the table, and just sort of put some adrenaline in them, kind of get them to step up and be dictional systems, then that might be poetry, too.” And in fact that’s the kind of what I’ve been doing. So when I talk, I always feel inarticulate, but I think, “Well, if I could write it I could refine it, and maybe I could even make it less articulate but more meaningful.”

DICK CAVETT: In an interesting way.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Yeah, yeah.

DICK CAVETT: Does it embarrass you to talk about your style? They always write about that “His style is this and that, and obviously obsessed with words,” they say to you and that kind of thing. Should a writer think about a style?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I think so. All the time. Yeah, I do. But sometimes what I found is style is actually you regarded with generosity. So, in other words, all of, you know, your natural attributes and tendencies and tics even your habits. As a young writer you’re trying to put up a screen, “you have to stay out, only Old English is spoken here.” And at some point, style means, let the fence down, let all those idiots in, let them gather around and then see what they really want to say.

So for me, for example, when we were younger I worked for engineering companies, and I have a degree in engineering, so technical language is really natural to me, and so for many years I thought, “Well, that’s too bad because that isn’t literature,” then if you say, “Well, maybe it is,” and you start letting it in, your style becomes that which is readily available to you. Style, maybe I tell my students, sometimes style is the voice that you can do very easily, your mother’s voice or your father’s voice or your siblings’ voice, or it might even be your voice, the part of it that you’re secretly ashamed of, might actually be the key to your originality.

You know, you have this, I think when writers are young we have this idea that, you know, you fall in love with Hemingway and there’s Hemingway Mountain and it’s so beautiful, (laughter) there’s a cloud at the top and a bunch of manly men standing around. (laughter) You think, “I’ll do that,” and you strike up the hill, and it’s hard work but you’re going to be Hem someday, or you’ll be in the Hem lineage, you’ll be the recipient of the Hemingway Prize and then you get up there and you get close to the top you see that all you’re ever going to be is Hemingway Lite, you know, a Hemingway imitator and you think, “That’s ridiculous,” then you come down and it’s discouraging and then you look over and thank goodness, Kerouac Mountain is nearby, (laughter)

So I think you do a lot of that, and finally for me after we’d had our daughters and I was working at an engineering company, I took one more shot at James Joyce Mountain, which is this wedding novel that I tried, and I just thought, “Aaaah! I can’t do it anymore.” So luckily we had a—here’s a sentence you won’t often hear, “Luckily we had a conference call scheduled,” (laughter) and so I was taking notes in the conference call and got really bored and started writing these little poems, these kind of Dr. Seussian sort of rhyming, kind of nasty, kind of funny things, and every time I’d finish I’d flip it over so they couldn’t see it and I’d make an illustration and flip it over. So this wasn’t too long after that Mexican novel fiasco, and I brought it home and sort of threw it on the table and my wife read this and I heard for the first time in about seven years of writing really sincere laughter, you know, like, pleasure. “Ah! That’s what I should—”

So at that point I started being funny. I started allowing myself to be funny, to be a little bit working class in the thing so I had a great week and wrote this story that was later published but that was a bit like looking over and you get Saunders molehill, (laughter) just, like a little pile of crap with my name on it (laughter) because the story wasn’t anything like I wanted my stories to be, they weren’t like Carver, they weren’t like Hemingway, they was just that, and it felt original, but it felt a little sad too to have down off all these high peaks and, you know, go down there, but it was better to be there by myself than to be with those others—

DICK CAVETT: Is there a writer in the past that you fantasize having met?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Hemingway. I’d still like to meet that guy, yeah, for sure. You know, I’d actually who I’d love to meet is Nikolai Gogol, the Russian writer. Because apparently he was a completely dysfunctional guy. He taught university, and he was fired for falling asleep during his own lecture, (laughter) which that’s a—and also had—he apparently had a huge beak nose, and one his accomplishments he could actually touch the top of his nose with his tongue and come over the top.

DICK CAVETT: Can’t everybody?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: And then he apparently also his mother used to claim that he had invented the locomotive and didn’t—he apparently didn’t contradict her. (laughter) But he’s a guy who took this incredible kind of crazy provincial background and he came to Saint Petersburg and kind of saw that he couldn’t do the Pushkin—couldn’t do Pushkin, so he started being himself so the books are unbelievably brilliant and insightful, but apparently as a person he was a train wreck.

DICK CAVETT: Wouldn’t you be dysfunctional if your name was Gogol?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: And he had that nose.

DICK CAVETT: Was it possibly Gogol, so it has a little more something to it?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: And the thing about him that he had a phobia of anything small and sort of wormy—wormish, and also he had this obsession with his nose so when he was dying his doctor prescribed leeches on his nose. So that was his last—

DICK CAVETT: Wow.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Is that a downer at all?

(laughter)

DICK CAVETT: Boy, I won’t eat again for weeks. Well, here’s something you’ve been dreading, who’s your favorite blogger for the New York Times online? (laughter) Surely you can think of a name.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: It’s you. It’s always been you. Is that fun to do?

DICK CAVETT: I still run into people who say, “You know, I look on every goddamn page of the paper and I never find your column.” I say, “We live in an age when there’s something called online.” Here’s a writer cringe-making story. By the way, was it Kingsley Amis who referred to Mary McCarthy as a real cock-crinkler?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I don’t know, I wasn’t there.

(laughter)

DICK CAVETT: You can admit it. I just thought I’d throw that in for the young people. (laughter) In one of her essays talking about the place she taught that she hated, wrote a funny novel about, one of her actual students, said, “Miss McCarthy, I have to leave now, I have to go meet Professor James, because we’re working on my short story and he’s going to help me put in the symbols.”

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Ouch.

DICK CAVETT: Did that go right to your—I love to make writers retch telling that story.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Speaking of long words with the word “cock” in them, there was a—I got an e-mail from somebody a few years ago that said, “I saw something you did online. It’s disgusting, you’re a terrible writer. If you’re saying what I think you’re saying, I haven’t read the piece, but if you’re saying what I think you’re saying, you’re,” and then he said, “I find that completely cocksuckworthian.”

(laughter)

DICK CAVETT: Would you repeat that for those who missed it?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I don’t understand that.

DICK CAVETT: Don’t look at me! I can’t arbitrate that. I wonder if they’re getting the hook in the wings to get us off of here, because I just want to see if there’s any one thing that would delight everyone so greatly. A writer story, you’ve got to let me tell this.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I will.

DICK CAVETT: Updike and Cheever I had on, I referred to that. Often I had two writers, Mailer and Vidal, and the great Janet Flanner. This night I had two authors, W. H. Auden—W. H. Auden and Chad Everett. (laughter) I forget which series Chad was on.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: He was on Marcus Welby, I think.

DICK CAVETT: Was he? Maybe. He was a nice guy.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Medical Center!

DICK CAVETT: Yes, that was it. He was a nice guy; he had what the great S. J. Perelman once said about the heads of studios, “a forehead by dint of electrolysis,”—two three four. (laughter) I just think that’s such a great line. But he was a sweet guy, he’s dead now, and I have constantly been told that you can’t make jokes or say anything bad about the dead and I say, “Goebbels, Hitler, can I say something bad about?” I will just deliver for you a quote that you will treasure from Chad Everett to W. H. Auden. Suppose you were assigned to write a line.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: That’s a lot of pressure.

DICK CAVETT: He turned to Mr. Auden, who later that night said, “I will never appear on television again,” (laughter) and said, will you be Auden?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I will.

DICK CAVETT: He was right here. “Do you work from life or what?” (laughter) Why that isn’t in Bartlett’s Quotations I have no idea.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Did he have an answer? Did Auden have an answer?

DICK CAVETT: I can’t remember, I think Auden slipped farther down there or into his shirt collar or something. Not quite as good was—because Chad had had two poems printed in Pageant magazine so he—he saw them as equals.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: They were peers.

DICK CAVETT: In fact Chad said to me at one point, “You don’t understand we poets.”

(laughter)

GEORGE SAUNDERS: He didn’t.

DICK CAVETT: Am I being cruel? Gee, this has really been a good—I’ve had a good time here, has anyone else? I can’t come up with anything as good as, “Do you work from life or what?” There ought to be a special award for a writer who wrote that. You know, it’s funny we talked earlier about going back and rewording things and one of the first things I learned, slowly, unfortunately, as a gag writer—what Woody Allen began as, when he was seventeen and then for Sid Caesar not gags, but in a joke writing topical lines, your first wording is always the right one, and I’m not sure I can explain why that is, but you will write a gag, let’s say, and the punch line is, “that was no lady, that was my wife,” and that’s a perfectly worded punch line, and then you think, maybe we it should, “That was no lady, that was the woman I’m married to,” “That was no real lady,” and then you realize you have—There was a guy on the staff who came on for thirteen weeks, lets his name was Dave Jones, and he established the phrase “Dave Jonesing a line.” He asked me for help and I would say, “How did you first write that line? Go back to that.” It hits you right. Something in there writes it correctly for you.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Isaak Babel said, sometimes you turn the wheel slowly, and at the exact moment you pull the lever and that’s the line.

DICK CAVETT: Mmm-hmm. A good image, and yet there is such a thing as rewriting. Once I said the line to Groucho and he substituted—he was on The Tonight Show for two weeks before Johnny came on, and I read the line, and he said that’s a very good line but it needs a certainly. I said, I’m sorry. It needs a certainly, Groucho’s pronunciation of certainly. Instead of “you could have fooled me,” it should be “well, you certainly could have fooled me,” and that made the line work.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I read that they used to take—they had been in vaudeville so they would do slight variations every night and at one point they would say this is the wording that really nails it and use that in the future. Kind of rewriting on the fly, I guess.

DICK CAVETT: Another thing he talks about is the fact that Thalberg had do their next movie on the stage up and down the West Coast, like the cabin scene, and find where the laughs were, to hold. This explains why I was mystified when I went to a Marx Brothers movie one rainy afternoon, having roared at it the night before with a full crowd, and their performance was off, they held too long, because they knew for an audience that was the right timing. I never heard any other example of that. What’s at your bedside, what’s on your coffee table now to read when you’re not working and slaving?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I’ve been reading this guy Horacio Moya, he’s a Salvadoran writer who’s living in Pittsburgh now, I think. He writes these crazy 120-, 130-page novels, they’re like slapstick

DICK CAVETT: Say his name again?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Horacio Moya.

DICK CAVETT: Moya.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Yeah. I think he’s been—He’s got six or seven books, But I’ve been trying to think how I might go from a short story to a longer form, and these are really good examples, because they’re fast and they don’t worry much about theme or meaning but they’re just like rapid-fire kind of jokes and action and violence and there’s really like a lot of energy in that.

DICK CAVETT: Did Ambrose Bierce mean anything to you?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Oh, yeah, sure. “Incident at Owl Creek Bridge.” He’s got some amazing Civil War reporting because he was at all the battles. Scary, scary stuff.

DICK CAVETT: And they never found a trace of him. How many of us can say that? Does anyone have one great question from the audience to close with? It cannot be who’s been your interesting guest. And for him it cannot be tell you like—who’s yours?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Who’s been your most interesting guest?

DICK CAVETT: Did I see a lady attempting to speak, oh, the hell with you. (laughter) Suppose they’ve been listening all this time? I’m looking around for a signal that we have worn out our welcome. Anyone?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Stay forever.

DICK CAVETT: Stay forever. Okay, you asked for it. Say again? Okay. Shall we ask them some questions? I can’t see it—there, yeah!

Q: (Inaudible)

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I really—The best answer is this Flannery O’Connor thing she said: “you can choose what you write but you can’t choose what you make live,” so for me if you give me ten pages and ask me to cut it to six, I get really happy about that, but if you give me six and told me to make it to ten, I would sort of get nervous, so I think it’s kind of, it might be something like in sports where there’s fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscles, and I think for me I just, I know how to cut, I know how to make things, quick, short. And I think it’s sometimes my stories are like those little toys, you sort of wind them up and put them on the ground and they go under the couch and you’re happy. (laughter) You know, but as soon as I start thinking about oh, the backstory or something, I just get kind of depressed, so I think it’s probably just inclination.

DICK CAVETT: Does it annoy a high-quality writer like yourself, I won’t look you in the eye because you might blush, when people without much talent have great success in writing?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I don’t think that ever happens, Dick.

(laughter)

DICK CAVETT: All right, what about Rod McKuen? Oh, God, I just remembered. He was a nice guy, too, so you know I’m going to say something awful. He came on the show at the peak of his success and I introduced him as “America’s most understood poet.” (laughter) Is that bad? Oh, God, it’s coming back, not only that, I said, “As sure as June doth rhyme with moon here in the flesh is Rod McKuen.” (laughter) This is a side of me you might not have ever seen.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I’m expanding my definition of how to be a person.

(laughter)

DICK CAVETT: You’re going to take it back, I know, I know. Where do you describe a boy as having “unfortunate Prince Valiant bangs”?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: That’s in the title story of this new book, Tenth of December. Based on a real-life model.

DICK CAVETT: He brought to mind the kid we used to pick on in school.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: That was him.

DICK CAVETT: See, I could have gotten there first. You were about to sign some books, I do believe. How long have we been on, just for fun? How many people have—did someone have an urgent hand up, or is that a camera or a pistol?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Over here.

DICK CAVETT: Someone respectable. Could we have some impersonal questions?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Here’s somebody right here on the right.

Q: (Inaudible)

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I don’t really honestly know. Because I think that the way I think about style is a sentence is only good in the matrix that, in other words, a sentence is kind of a linear, temporal thing that’s going on and your feet are going down as you read and you need just that sentence, so I don’t really have any that I like, in fact most of them I kind of hate at this point, I kind of—you know, you do it and you feel okay about it and then the hope is the next thing will be better. So, nothing really that comes to mind. It’s a boring answer, but I can’t—

DICK CAVETT: How good is your memory of what you’ve read that you can quote a line?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: Terrible. Terrible. When I was younger it was a little bit better, but now it’s terrible.

DICK CAVETT: It’s a gift that is distributed in various ways.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I think so, yeah.

DICK CAVETT: I think I have it. My friend Porterfield is getting an awful lot of publicity here tonight but always expresses wonder that I know I think all the Shakespeare soliloquies, and I never memorized them, and yet I don’t have a photographic memory, I have an auditory memory, and if I was in a play with someone who did Richard II, I hear him doing it, and that prompts me. But once in a while with Mark Twain—Would you rather I said Samuel Clemens?

GEORGE SAUNDERS: No, no.

DICK CAVETT: There’s a line I read it and I know that I’ve got it. This one—somebody should do a book of all Mark Twain’s writings of his hatred of the French. Maybe I will. In this particular line in the middle of an essay he’s describing a shine on something. He said, “It shone with the rare combination of lust and envy that burns in a Frenchman’s eyes when it falls upon another man’s centime,” Centime, anybody? Now, you wouldn’t want to say “another man’s coin” because that kills it. Isn’t that a withering line? Do you want to hear it again. (laughter) I’ve run out of my Twain lines.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: I just wanted to really thank you for doing this, this was so much fun.

DICK CAVETT: I hope I haven’t destroyed your image.

GEORGE SAUNDERS: No, not at all.

(applause)

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