WITH LUCAS WITTMANN
LUCAS WITTMANN
Thank you all for joining us. I am absolutely thrilled to be up here with two writers that I admire, though I can assure you that I’m not as excited as the two of them are to be up here together, as I learned backstage. They’re each other’s greatest fans, I think. So, let’s get right into it. Renata, it must be very exciting to find your books being reissued thirty years later, and to be getting such wonderful praise. Can you tell us a little bit about how it feels?
RENATA ADLER
Well, it’s very peculiar; it’s like being this sort of found fossil. It just feels very strange. Here I am, and they’d been out of print for a very long time, and then David, it’s just … I don’t know if they still have the Hollywood legend of being found at Schwab’s Pharmacy, but here I am, this fossil found at Schwab’s drugstore by David and by other people who said, well, why doesn’t somebody reprint it? And then for the longest time, nobody did. I mean, they said it in 2010. It was this body that said, “We’d like to have this reprinted,” and then nothing happened, and now it’s been reprinted. So it’s very odd. They still look familiar, I must say.
LUCAS WITTMANN
David, you started the call for Renata’s books to be brought back into print, and you’ve read Speedboat two dozen times?
DAVID SHIELDS
I’ve been teaching the book for many, many years over and over again and I just sort of selfishly wanted the book back in print so I didn’t have to surreptitiously teach it. It’s just a real consummation for me to be here, to be with Renata Adler. She really changed my writing life—I would say in many ways really saved my writing life, and she changed the trajectory of my work completely. I was at an impasse with my work and I read and reread her book Speedboat and Pitch Dark over and over again, and I watched the Ross McElwee film Sherman’s March over and over again, and those works completely changed my writing life. So the idea that I had something to do indirectly with the books of Renata’s being reprinted—I could pretty much die and go to heaven. My work has been done.
LUCAS WITTMANN
How did they change your writing?
DAVID SHIELDS
I had written one very traditional novel—my first novel—published almost thirty years ago. I wrote a second novel, a bildungsroman, a growing-up novel, that was somewhat more formally playful, but still relatively hamstrung by narrative, and then I was starting to play around in a third book, novels and stories, called A Handbook for Drowning, that mixed between the essay and story. A little bit of collage, but a lot of relatively formally straitjacketed stories as well. Then I was trying to write what I thought was my fourth book, a book called Remote, trying to write that as a novel. For a number of reasons, I could not get the novelistic machinery to operate with that book. I found myself sort of incapable of developing those things that are apparently quite crucial to novels, like settings and plots and characters. And so I was endlessly reading and rereading Speedboat and Pitch Dark and I absolutely loved those works’ compression, precision, the way they let a thousand discrepancies bloom at once, the way they tell multiple stories simultaneously, and above all the way, as in Proust, narrative is being used as a vector on a larger philosophical grid. Stories aren’t being told just to tell stories but those narrative vectors that Renata unleashed in Pitch Dark and Speedboat are part of a much richer philosophical meditation that is full of enormous questions for me. That thrilled me to my toes, and still thrills me to my toes.
LUCAS WITTMANN
Renata, we know how David arrived at his books by reading yours, but when you read his books did you find yourself—the shock of recognition, that here was someone who understood—
RENATA ADLER
Well, that’s the funny thing, it only occurred to me recently. Here we are, we think all of the time, we have our consciousness, the stuff we pay attention to, don’t pay attention to, things change. Just the last few days, I thought of something. I don’t know how many of you write, and I don’t know how this is for David, but I think this is true. When I was writing, it turns out—what was I doing? I was addressing a situation. When you write, you address a situation. You don’t realize that. You realize it in nonfiction, because you’re addressed or reporting something. You try to report it as accurately as you can, that’s nonfiction. If you’re writing an essay, you are addressing a situation because you maybe want to persuade people. It may just be that you feel you must write, that nature intended you to be a writer, or you think you can make money at it, or anything. You want to be famous, whatever sorts of reasons people write for. But the situation is interior. It’s not wanting someone to realize that something is a complete fraud. So starting out writing nonfiction, but then thinking all writers write fiction, and when I was thinking about it I realized the only work that mattered to me was fiction. When you’re addressing plot, which preoccupies both of us in much the same way, it occurred to me it’s sort of a mixed thing about real life. People saying, is this autobiographical, is this fiction, is it real. I think that’s just in a way a crazy question because what you’re doing the minute you say, “This is fiction,” is you’ve changed the game completely. I realized from your book that that’s had more of an impact on me than real life, and so this division is in a way fake because I care more—I mean, I wish that Juliet would not commit suicide, and I wish it every time that I’m reading about a plot, and I care more, in a way …
Okay, let me go back in this crazy way to something else. There was a time in Hollywood when the story became no longer the story on the screen, of the plot on the screen, but the actors. There was this time when the actors became the plot. Everyone was making up fantasy lives for these actors, and there were magazines like Modern Screen, and there was suddenly an offscreen plot, which were the lives of these actors. Then there came the moment, which was a wonderful moment, of the auteur theory. So, the director became a character for everybody. And then a truly horrible moment when the critique—when suddenly on billboards you saw what some damn critique had to say, as if that mattered in the slightest. But, okay, so who is in the plot?
So then there’s the plot in one’s own life, where one wishes certain things to happen. And the people that one loves, one wishes certain things to happen for them. There are these wishes that one has of how it’s going to go, and that’s sort of indispensable in plot, one would think. But, well, first of all I thought, what does one wish in Hamlet? One doesn’t wish—well, I wish you’d go off and kill your father. Or I wish you’d be nicer to Ophelia. I mean, we have no position in this, but with a thriller it’s just very this kind of body-wish that one has, one wants to go this way and not that way, and yet reading the same thing knowing it’s going to end badly, and yet still wishing it would go another way. Why can’t we do that in fiction? And I think we can, actually, but the rule has changed in a funny way. What you don’t especially want is the reader on the writer’s side to such an extent, or even aware of the writer to such an extent, that the whole experience of reading fiction is gone. You want the reader not to worry about this performance. So there’s a kind of criticism that says—look, I know just what she’s up to. You don’t want that. What you don’t want is for someone to say, oh, look, there’s a very interesting technique, and identify with the writer, because that’s not the experience of reading fiction. But somehow the writer became the main character in the fiction, and that’s the predicament we’re stuck in and try to address as narrators. Does that not … ?
DAVID SHIELDS
No, that rings true. I have all kinds of things I can say, but Lucas, did you want to jump in?
RENATA ADLER
I didn’t mean to go on for so long.
DAVID SHIELDS
I think that was such a Renata moment for me, where there were ninety-seven digressions that ended with this absolutely crucial epiphany, which is the fourth law of thermodynamics: the perceiver by his very presence alters what he perceives—it is the key postmodern philosophical moment, and I think a lot of Renata’s work, and I hope in a different key my own work, proceeds from that realization. I also admire in Renata’s work, in Speedboat and Pitch Dark in particular, the way in which the private and the public come together, the ways in which fiction and nonfiction are conflated, stand-up comedy and political polemics stand side by side. I think a lot of what Renata was talking about has to do with, to my ear, a weariness with the authoritarian narrator. So much of what is astonishing about Pitch Dark and Speedboat has to do with the ways in which Renata Adler got to, for an American audience, earlier than most American writers, these sort of poststructuralist ideas about the ways in which language and communication change everything. Virtually everything about the book, say, Speedboat, has to do with the warping nature of communication. The epigraph, if you remember—we were talking about it backstage and Renata said, “I just sort of threw in the epigraph at the end, I’m not sure why,” and I hope that was false humility, because the entire book builds off the epigraph, where it reads, “‘What war?’ said the Prime Minister sharply. ‘No one has said anything to me about a war. I really think I should have been told.’ And presently, like a circling typhoon the sounds of the battle begin to return.” This is from Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. To me so much of the book is in that epigraph. The ways in which language doesn’t just register life, it absolutely creates it and prophesies it, and specifically the ways in which language creates in its miscommunication psychic and cultural and even political violence. Human beings can never totally understand one another, and out of that frustration comes cultural cataclysm, and so much of that, to me, is encrypted to me in that epigraph. It’s so much of what Speedboat is about.
RENATA ADLER
Well, I didn’t mean, David, that it was by accident. It’s just that I so loved it I wanted it in there somewhere. I just loved it. Vile Bodies is so wonderful and so good. Well, I’m from Newtown, Connecticut, right, that’s where I live. So I thought, do I write about this or not, and I thought probably not because it’s sort of exploiting what’s there, but I probably will. But a funny, strange thing happened to me about literature and its impact on one’s life. This business of communication and what we have in common, how many generations of it and in what form, and how much of it is literature and how much of it comes from memory, and so, okay. A great gap here, but we use educational law. You’re an educator, you use the education you have, you have the memory of your own life in real life, and you have the memory that is imparted to you when you learn. So I thought learning is joining a sort of public memory in a way. Because we’re all going to die, and what will be left joins us all as a tribe, or as a species. It’s these memories and these languages and these communications that we have in common, including especially literature.
So, here goes. There I am in Newtown. I was reading a lot of classics because I had back trouble. So I was reading Richard III, and he’s just murdered the children because he wants to be king and he is in fact king. And he says to the mother, “Say they were not slain. Say I slew them not!” And she says, “You slew them not, yet …” Now I’ve forgotten! “Say you slew them not? Then say they are not dead. And dead they are.” And that’s really powerful when I’m not screwing it up.
Then came the Nuremberg trials, and whoever it was speaking at the Nuremberg trials, speaking of these mass murders. He said toward the end of the trials about these war criminals, “Say you slew them not? Then say they are not dead, but dead they are.” He took it and suddenly applied it to six million people. Then in the Neshoba trials, remember three people dead in the Mississippi dam, and John Doar was prosecuting. It was impossible in the South. You could not get a Mississippi jury to convict. And then he said, “Say you slew them not? Then say they are not dead. And dead they are.” And there were these three boys dead in the dam. It’s a beautiful recurrence, is it not? To me, it’s beautiful.
But then, Newtown, and I thought, what do we say? I don’t know how you feel about this, but I was going to say these lunatics from the National Rifle Association, and I thought, they say they slew them not—then say they are not slain. Yet dead they are. And there they are, twenty kids in Newtown, and there they are.
Then came this new thing. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but in the news the last few days they found the bones of Richard III. In a parking lot, right. And before that, this wonderful writer of thrillers, Jospehine Tey, had written a thriller in which she discovered that Richard III did not murder those children, and it’s a bum rap through and through. Richard III was perfectly okay. And I thought, gee, reality is as tangled as that. Isn’t that pretty tangled? But you couldn’t use it in plot, you couldn’t use it in an essay, I couldn’t even use it tonight. Just for some reason it’s on my mind.
[laughter]
DAVID SHIELDS
And yet you did.
RENATA ADLER
And yet I did. Yet dead they are.
LUCAS WITTMANN
I wondered, thinking about Newtown, I wonder if we’ve lost a bit of that cultural and shared culture. I wonder if you were to say that today, though you did tonight, if one were to say it publicly its resonance would be lost.
RENATA ADLER
That’s it. And how much resonance would be lost. And I was wondering about that about memories. At one point I tried to figure out how much, if we didn’t remember the worst commercials, the worst songs that everyone knew for no reasons, everything that everyone learned at school, the Mother Goose rhymes, everyone knew these things and in one generation people knew certain things that another generation didn’t. I don’t know how many of you remember that commercial with a ring around the collar, and it was just for a detergent. Everyone knew that. You can’t get rid of it. We’ve got it, we’re stuck with it. But all of those memories we have in common I think will now go. And certain feelings. For example, I was thinking, how much literature will we lose with modern technology? Just take contraception, we wouldn’t have Tess of the D’Urbervilles, there are all of these predicaments that no longer exist. We just don’t have them. One of them—the feeling—you miss somebody and you can’t communicate with them because they live two thousand miles away, or they live thirty miles away. There’s a feeling for another person that you could have when you couldn’t just pick up your cell phone and reach whatever them you’re reaching. So there’s a whole realm of feeling that is going to be very hard to reach, for any of us.
LUCAS WITTMANN
And yet, speaking of that technological realm—David, you quote from Vonnegut, I think, about how for a modern novelist not to deal with technology is like a Victorian novelist not to deal with sex, or something. But most fiction has missed this changing world of ours, this new technology, this communication.
DAVID SHIELDS
I think a lot of the things I admire about Renata’s Speedboat and Pitch Dark has to do with the ways in which she is fully aware of that, and the ways in which technology plays a major role. In Speedboat, for instance, that book, it’s called Speedboat, after all, and in a lot of ways it’s about the ways in which the faster we move, the more violent our emotions become, and the more warped our language becomes, which creates a more thwarted human relationship, which leads to a kind of cyclical violence, so that book is constantly—the emblematic episode of it is of course a moment when a speedboat is going terribly fast on these rocky waves and someone’s back breaks, or doesn’t quite break.
RENATA ADLER
She keeps bouncing, exuberantly.
DAVID SHIELDS
And there’s a conflation in that scene between sexuality and movement and wealth and language and communication, and you realize reading that book over and over again that Adler is trying to teach you what things to look for in a particular scene once you learn what to read for, the book has taught you what it’s about. I’m delighted to see Speedboat and Pitch Dark reissued, and the books are being talked about very positively, as well they should. But there’s also a sense that Pitch Dark is somehow “about” the quality of being a woman, or Speedboat is “about” the 1970s, and I don’t read those books as in any way being that journalistic or that topical. I think that Pitch Dark, for instance, which has gotten definitely talked about in the reissue, but it’s taken me a long time to realize how amazing Pitch Dark is. In many ways, Speedboat is this unbelievably magical verbal machine, and Pitch Dark is this incredible structural machine which is divided into three sections. The first section is to a large degree about the pitch-darkness of a particular relationship—how a couple completely misunderstands each other. The middle section is about a quasi-crime and the misunderstandings between a couple of drivers, and in the third section there’s a sense in which the pitch-dark moves from a couple to a crime to society writ large, so as you pull back as though from a painting, the design becomes clear. Renata Adler is trying to show you in Pitch Dark how on the micro-level of a relationship, at the middle level of a quasi-public crime, and on a huge cultural level that we are in pitch-dark—that we misunderstand each other in virtually every exchange. I’d love to see that book talked about in this kind of high philosophical level.
And obviously Speedboat, too, is drenched in the 1970s, but it also is, as I’ve tried to push, a very deep meditation on the nature of human communication. Anyway, I’m responding a little bit to Lucas’s question about technology. To me Renata Adler was there very early, especially in Speedboat. That book is obsessed with velocity, technology. There’s an incredible moment with a party line, and the communicatives on the party line think a couple is going to get married, and when the couple realizes that everyone on the party line thinks they’re going to get married—they were going to break up—but they get married regardless because everyone on the party line thought they were going to be married. That’s this major Adler moment for me. Language creates an event. Language doesn’t register events; the language creates the events.
RENATA ADLER
Well, here’s something I want to say about David. You take on the whole thing. I mean, you take on simultaneously the questions of the highest abstraction, questions of what is art, and then a manifesto. Always a manifesto. But it struck me that there are these moments when you know exactly what someone is talking about, in real life or in reading. It sounds like a digression, but it’s dead-center for me. People said to me, “You have to read One Hundred Years of Solitude,” and I tried various times. I tried, and I got to page fifty one time, and I got to page one hundred fifty another time, and I thought everyone has the same name and I don’t know what this is about, and then one time it just hit. I understood it. I don’t know what you think, but I think it’s just the most incredible masterpiece. I thought: I get it, where was I before? There’s no plot, but the richness of invention. It is so good, and if you haven’t read it or failed to read it, try again. When you know what you’re talking about, and when other people know what you’re talking about, and when I read David I know what he’s talking about. A lot of times it happens to me because we only have so much time, and the thing about our lives is really that we die, and that really is so. There are these come-off moments, some of us have them, where all the role-playing that we do just comes off and we really talk about what we mean at that moment. That’s a good thing to do. But the final, bottom-line come-off moment is that we’ll die, perhaps painfully if no one is watching out for us. And another is quite funny. There are just some people who occasionally say something and they may be ruined, and perhaps unjustly, they don’t know what they’re talking about, and I won’t hear more of that. That’s someone I shouldn’t be reading, or perhaps I should be more tolerant. No, there are some people who are quite harmful!
You can see I ramble. It’s what I do.
DAVID SHIELDS
I wanted to respond. Lucas asked me earlier what have I learned from Renata Adler. A lot of things. The only rule is never be boring. The main thing I learned, among so many things—I can’t imagine my writing life without Renata Adler, to be honest—but the main thing I’ve learned, that I was so envious of for so long, is just how manifestly, blisteringly intelligent she is line by line, page by page, paragraph by paragraph. There’s no room to hide. She is just absolutely manifestly intelligent on the page. That’s what I realized I wanted to do. I’m smart, too, I want to think. I can be smart on the page. Someone like, say, Raymond Carver. I admire what he does, but it has nothing to do with what I’m interested in. This is our chance. They tell me the thing about life is that one day you’ll be dead, and I’m very aware that in fifty years I’ll be dead. This is the entire secular ride. And this is our chance to articulate fully the human predicament at this moment. I think a lot of this line of David Foster Wallace, who was asked, “What’s so great about writing?” and he said we’re existentially alone on the planet. You can’t know what I’m thinking and feeling and I can’t know what you’re thinking and feeling, and writing at its best is a bridge constructed across the abyss of human loneliness. The writing I love, the writing I try to write, the writing I read, the writing I teach, foregrounds strongly the question of how the writer solved the problem of being alive. Samuel Johnson said a book should teach us how to escape existence or to endure existence, and so much of what I love about Renata’s work, as well as other people’s work that shares those qualities, is that it is manifestly, melodramatically, existentially wrestling with the essential human questions.
RENATA ADLER
Now I remember what my point was about the manifesto. It’s this. There is this solitude that we all have. One reads alone and writes alone. At the same time, the world is going on the way it’s going. There’s a lot of writing about bullying, a lot of gangs out there. Without being paranoid, in a certain way the world falls apart, and in another really just gangs up. What you need is something that brings together people who know what each other are talking about. That’s when the boldness of having a manifesto is almost incredible. It’s Luther, or it’s Marx, except that we’re all shy, but there it is, you’re starting over. I guess in my way I thought I was starting over, but I didn’t mean to. I just wanted to write the kind of novels I like to read. And because I edit a lot I just kept editing, and then I thought where was the part I meant to do, which might have been a thriller or something, and then I thought when I was editing along sooner or later, and then it didn’t occur.
LUCAS WITTMANN
Can you explain that a little more? Do you mean that when you were writing it you thought you were writing a thriller?
RENATA ADLER
Yeah, I mean I thought I writing a normal novel. But there came a point where somebody said to me, “You must read Henry James, The Princess Casamassima.” It’s very thick, but I thought, all right, I might read Princess Casamassima. And then I got into it. It’s brilliant beyond belief. Who has a male hero called Hyacinth? And it’s a political novel, it’s prescient about radicalism, and it’s long. It’s a Henry James novel. He must have worked over every word, but he did it in a way I can’t do. I just can’t do what he does. Those novels seem a kind of miracle to me.
DAVID SHIELDS
Can you talk some more about your composition process? I mean, how did those hundred and seventy pages come together? I’m just kind of selfishly wanting to know.
LUCAS WITTMANN
Especially because everything is so precisely and deliberately, at least it appears to be to the reader, chosen and written.
RENATA ADLER
Well, the only thing in this world I’m compulsively neat about is typing, so the computer is a nightmare for me. I thought it was going to resolve the problem, but it doesn’t do anything. I used to type with two fingers and I would make a mistake near the end of the page. Then, no white-out, no eraser, it looked too horrible, so then I had to go back to the beginning of the page, while I’m doing that go back to page one. So it meant a lot of typing of stuff and throwing out of stuff and putting in of stuff and cutting off of stories when this was the whole point I was getting to. That was a surprise to me. At the same time, I thought about plot and suspense when I thought about it at all. I thought you can’t do that artificially if I know how this is going to end. So why not do that right at the beginning? Well, you can’t, then you have no plot. It’s like you can’t give the punch line of a joke. Well, I can’t tell jokes, either, I thought it’s so artificial, so then I thought I’ll just see where this goes as a story. Then it turned out for me to be a story about intensity of a certain kind. I don’t know what it’s a story of. It was by correcting and correcting that I found … So now with a computer where you can move everything around at every second and you can have a perfect page, and maybe autocorrect will ruin it for you, but you can have a perfect page, there’s almost nothing for me to do. So it doesn’t work on computer at all.
LUCAS WITTMANN
Do you write by typewriter, not by hand?
RENATA ADLER
No, I write on the computer, but it’s just very confusing. I used to think I wasn’t going to lose any work. I used to lose a lot of work because in throwing those pages on the floor and writing notes on checkbooks and wrapping paper, you lose a lot of work that way. But on the computer I forget what I filed it under. It’s just a continuous struggle to write on that thing. So, there it is. I just finished what I think is another novel, and I hope this one is more what I was hoping to do with the first one. I do appreciate that you care about Pitch Dark, David, because nobody liked it. I mean not nobody, but people certainly didn’t like it. And it mattered more to you in ways that I thought were obvious, but it didn’t.
DAVID SHIELDS
Why is that?
RENATA ADLER
Well, because this question of modernism and feeling. That is, if you’re a certain kind of modernist. Well, let’s go to something else. The performing arts. There’s no reason to think that a violinist today, anybody in the performing arts, is not as skilled as ever. They practice, and if they play Mozart it’s going to affect you in a certain way. Music can affect you. And then there’s ballet. So there are the performing arts.
Then there are these arts that I never could find a name for. I kept asking people and they’d say I meant fine art. But what I meant was art that produces an object. So, if you’re a sculptor, you have a rock. You do something to the rock and there’s something there. You’re not performing it, it doesn’t depend on your lifetime. You’re not doing something that people are meant to watch you doing. You’re doing something that will produce a result that’s there. A book is like a rock in that sense. So is what a composer writes. It’s there, it’s a rock. So is a book. So why have they lost the capacity … I don’t think anybody can do what Dickens could do.
So, I’ll get to the point. Soap operas make me cry. Movies make me cry. All that conventional stuff. You can get to those feelings. Dickens makes me cry. But someone writing now like Dickens would be absurd. It’d be great, but it’s not what a modernist does. So the modernists I know that sat down to write as modernists had a certain contempt for what I call my housemate syndrome, this sentiment and stuff. What they dread most is kitsch. So there are certain effects they can get. Whimsy. Brilliance. You know what I mean? Regret. It’s a certain kind of modernist. I once had a conversation about this. I said, you know, I can’t help it, I really like to be moved by what I read. And he said, I hate that. And I know what he meant. There’s a kind of corruption that comes with feeling. You know what I mean?
DAVID SHIELDS
In many ways I think your work gave me a way out of all of those issues. You talk about it as though you’re kind of exploring it, but Pitch Dark and Speedboat are the exit maps out of that very conundrum for me.
RENATA ADLER
That’s what I want to find for myself!
DAVID SHIELDS
You want to find that sentiment.
RENATA ADLER
Yeah, I want to find my way there, not cheaply.
DAVID SHIELDS
Well, I think those books do. In the prologue to my new book, How Literature Saved my Life, I do a long aria to how great Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station is. I don’t know if you know that book. Do you like it?
RENATA ADLER
Yes, but because of you!
DAVID SHIELDS
I think what Renata’s work represented to me and what Lerner’s work represents in a different way is that you have to break out of the sugar factory. There’s a men’s-commercial, middlebrow, middle-class, bourgeois pressure to pretend that it’s not really hard to feel things now. I’m really quite convinced of that. There’s a pretense of let’s just produce an ordinary narrative, that we feel now the way we used to feel during Balzac’s time. It’s simply not the case, and if we’re honest about it we’ll work really hard to create anti-narrative narratives, Adler-like hieroglyphs that move around to create what really it feels like to be alive at ground level now. And that actually moves me immensely. What doesn’t move me is false emotion. And Lerner talks about this at length in Leaving the Atocha Station, about how what he is moved by is how he goes to a museum and can’t be moved by a particular painting. That moves him. That might sound a little too easy or a little too post- post- post-, but that is the condition we’re in, I think. I just know it. I know it on my nerve endings. And so do all of you! And the work that really kills, the work that really matters, the work that is doing serious emotional, psychological, philosophical work that is wrestling with that, and for me Renata Adler did that work in a really key way a long time ago. There are plenty of wonderful writers now doing that, whether it’s Simon Gray’s The Smoking Diaries—
RENATA ADLER
He married the sister of an old friend of mine.
DAVID SHIELDS
Really?
RENATA ADLER
That’s such a wonderful book.
DAVID SHIELDS
This is the call to arms. Indirectly, I’ve been pushing Vintage to reissue The Smoking Diaries. It’s only available in the UK. It is the great book, in my opinion, of the last fifteen years.
LUCAS WITTMANN
I think we have some copies downstairs. I bought some here.
DAVID SHIELDS
It’s an incredibly beautiful four-volume book and they published it as a cigarette pack. It’s just beautifully done. Incredible book. I swear to god it’s a late twentieth century version of Proust or Rembrandt’s late self-portraits. There’s a whole galaxy of contemporary writers who are following in Renata Adler’s footsteps. Leonard Michaels, Simon Gray—
RENATA ADLER
Yeah, but they were all on their way on their own.
DAVID SHIELDS
Of course. But I really like what Renata said about feeling and kitsch and Dickens and soaps. That’s the issue for me. The work I really value and that I try to produce is work that tries not to lie about that. That’s the work that I find an actual contribution.
LUCAS WITTMANN
Do you go back to Henry James or Dickens, or they don’t speak to you anymore? Because, Renata, you still go back?
RENATA ADLER
Not this minute. I did go back to a lot of classics, but not those. So I had this back trouble and I was lying down and I was reading a lot of classical stuff. There was this really amazing thing that happened to me, which is that I realized I hadn’t understood, or I’d misremembered some stuff. But that’s irrelevant. A lot of stuff where I can’t even remember who wrote it. There’s this series and someone is the sheriff and I can’t remember what they’re called, it’s not very important, but if there’s another one, then I’ll read it right away. I’m really anxious to know what happens next. But it’s not the same. We are presumably the last of the readers, but it turns out there are more of us than we thought. Isn’t that true?
DAVID SHIELDS
I think probably every generation has thought of itself as the last of the readers.
LUCAS WITTMANN
I’m also skeptical of the fact that reading has changed all that much, in a way. I mean, of course there’s Twitter and Facebook, but I sometimes think that because it’s more transparent, in a way, because there’s Kindle and iPad and electronics, that we know more about how people have always been reading. How many times have people tossed aside Dickens or that long piece in a magazine, and we know that now.
RENATA ADLER
I think that’s true. Except I remember years ago, Bowden Broadwater, who was married to Mary McCarthy and was a wonderful writer in his own right, and whose secret was what a nice guy he was. He was teaching at St. Barnard’s and he said, “No more book reports.” And he said, no, you have to stop it, because reading is a pleasure. It’s a physical pleasure, and there’s something about the motion of the eye and the interaction of everything, and if you have these boys reading with a book report in mind you’re already … And I thought that’s so prescient, because reading on my Kindle, even on my iPad, I just don’t know that it’s the same reading. I don’t know that it’s the same act. This happens in every generation. But I do wonder about that blinding computer. I do read on the computer all of the time, but not literature.
LUCAS WITTMANN
I wonder if it’s also something to do with memory. It all seems uniform. It’s the same white page. Whereas if you have books on the bookshelf it’s a different—
RENATA ADLER
It’s just the light. The light. Why should there be a source of light in what you’re reading? It doesn’t seem natural to me. And I just think technology has advanced so much it’s doing us physical harm.