“MY ONLY ADVANTAGE as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. There is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.” Every time I have been interviewed I have thought about that quotation from Joan Didion. I did not always think of it immediately and several times I didn’t think of it in time to save myself from being misquoted and misunderstood but always in the end I remembered it and drew back from the spin and prevarication that constitutes public discourse in this era of our discontent.
You can’t tell reporters anything because they will pick out part of it and use it to tell the story they have decided to tell. They are always looking for their story.
In the 1980s I became quasi-famous in the United States and it was the strangest and most annoying thing that has ever happened to me in my life. I had set out to be a poet; my ambition was to write one poem that would stay in the canon for a hundred years and give hope and joy to people when I was dead. Then I started writing fiction and people started paying me for doing it and then I made the mistake of agreeing to be on National Public Radio once a week and bare my soul to the left wing of the American public. This was strange enough since I have always been a conservative, except for the times when I knew a candidate well and worked for him because I wanted to say I knew a governor or a senator or the president of the United States. My main thought after those campaigns were over was that I wished I had my money back.
But I was going to tell you about how I sold out in New York City and agreed to let Newsweek and People magazine interview me. I had won the National Book Award for Fiction the week before and was going around telling myself I was exceptional and trying to pretend to be an award-winning author. I wasn’t sure whether to call myself an author or a writer. I had set out to call myself a poet and didn’t know what to do with my new calling and status.
I was living in New York City for the winter, in an overstuffed apartment I had sublet from a wealthy, aging couple from Mississippi I had been introduced to by an actress from Jackson, Mississippi. The apartment was on Second Street between Madison and Park avenues and had a doorman, so I felt like I could sleep safely, but it was filled to the brink with antique furniture and silver and china and old, dusty paintings. It was cleaned twice a week by an aging Scot who had been using the same pile of dust cloths for at least ten years and whose idea of mopping the floors was to add some oil to the dust mop and shine them up.
I fired her after the second visit and moved half of the furniture into the spare bedroom and tried to clear a place where I could work. I got out the ancient vacuum sweeper and used it for several hours until it broke. I hauled it down the street and left it to be repaired at a shop whose name I found on a list in an address book. Then I bought a new vacuum sweeper, hauled it into the apartment and began to clean. I took down the old dusty paintings and put them in the room with the furniture. I stuck posters from the Van Gogh exhibition on the walls with pushpins and decided I could live until spring if only I could get rid of the closet full of dust cloths and oily floor mops. I can’t remember whether I threw them away and replaced them with new ones or not. I know when the owners returned they complained that some of their things were missing, and since, besides the vacuum sweeper, I didn’t get rid of anything else I suppose I did throw them away.
A month after I fired the maid the owners called and said she needed money so I sent her several hundred dollars in the mail. I was embarrassed that I had forgotten to do it when I fired her but I was so bombarded by the strangeness of living in New York City and having to bring food and firewood into the house via a doorman and an aging elevator that I wasn’t working at the top of my form.
This was my state of mind when my editor called and asked me to come to Little, Brown and talk to the “gang” and go to lunch with him at Le Périgord, which is my favorite restaurant in New York City.
When I got to the Little, Brown offices everyone cheered my book award and treated me like royalty and then Roger took me into his office and told me that People magazine and Newsweek wanted to interview me as soon as possible.
“Of course not,” I answered. “I don’t like either of those magazines. I might do Newsweek if the reporter is someone I respect but I definitely won’t be in People. It’s trash. No self-respecting author would agree to that.”
“Oh, you have to do it,” he begged. “It’s publicity. You can’t turn down that kind of thing. They aren’t going to write anything bad about you. People just want to know who you are.”
“They can read my books,” I answered. “I write the books for them. They can have the books. They can’t have me. I’m not for everybody.”
Roger begged in the taxicab to Le Périgord and he looked sad and agreed to tell them no for me and then he looked even sadder and I remembered he had gone to Andover on a scholarship because his father was poor, so I relented and said I would try to talk to the reporter from People magazine but I wasn’t sure how much I would tell her about myself.
The next morning she called and asked in a whiny, sad little voice when we could meet. “This afternoon,” I suggested. “Come over and see this crazy Victorian apartment I have rented. It’s so full of furniture you will think it is a store.”
At two that afternoon she showed up at the door. She was a mousy little woman with stringy hair and no makeup and she was clutching a large notebook with pens clipped to the edges of the cover. “I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests ….” How had I forgotten that?
We began to talk. She asked if she could use a tape recorder and I agreed and helped her set it up on a table. Such things were more unwieldy and difficult to operate than they are now.
She wanted to know about my childhood. I told her about my powerful, funny, loving father and my wonderful, beautiful mother and my wild, good-looking brothers. I told her about the Mississippi Delta and our plantation, which had been built by the descendants of Yankee soldiers after the Civil War. I told her about my cousins and my friends in Jackson and New Orleans. I told her about New Stage Theatre and Jane Petty and Ivan Rider and Patti Black.
She listened. Then she began to cry. “My mother was a painter,” she said. “She was too busy with her work to be interested in me. I never got to go to the country and be on a farm. I never had a happy life.” And so on for a long time.
I went over to her and put my arm around her shoulders. I tried to cheer her up but she could not be cheered. She had gone into a decline. After a few minutes of her crying I made tea for her and gave her some of my homemade chocolate chip cookies. Then, in a burst of inspiration, I had an idea. “The Royal Shakespeare Company is playing tonight at Lincoln Center,” I said. “They are doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I am going to take you to see it. That will cheer you up.” I got on the phone and called Little, Brown and told my editor what was going on. “You got me into this,” I told him. “So get us some tickets. I was going tomorrow night anyway. Call me back.”
In fifteen minutes he called back and said the tickets would be waiting at the box office at seven that night.
I fed cookies to the poor girl from People magazine, then she went home and changed and returned later and I took her to dinner and then to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company. I could hardly enjoy the play for her being sad in the seat beside me but at least she had stopped crying.
The next week People magazine sent a splendid photographer named Thomas Victor to spend ten days following me around and taking wonderful photographs of me all over New York City. He returned on Christmas morning and photographed my entire family who had come to visit me. He gave me dozens of fabulous prints of these gorgeous photographs and my family cherishes them. Until his death ten years later, he was one of my favorite people in New York and photographed me many more times, always at someone else’s expense.
In late January of 1985 the article came out in People magazine. It was all right, but smart-alecky. It tried to make light of my achievements as a writer and was smug and mean-spirited about the South. “See,” I told my editor when I had the magazine in my hand. “I told you it was a mistake to talk to this lady.”
“Publicity is publicity,” he answered. “I think it’s very flattering actually.”
“Look at the photograph they used,” I replied, pointing to a silly, staged photograph of me standing on a bench in Central Park. “Why didn’t she use some of the ones that make me look beautiful?”
“That’s not how they do it in magazines,” he answered. “You should read some of them sometime so you’d know.”
“Not in this life,” I answered. “I read poetry. I read books.”
WINTER 2000