Jonathan Lethem: The McSweeney’s Interview — in its Entirety Thus Far

This interview began a few days ago, and very well might conclude today. If you have read portions of it, you may skip to the parts you have not yet read. If you have not read any of it, you may skip to the parts that seem easiest to read.

Mr. Lethem has made many books, including Gun with Occasional Music, a scathing renunciation of Neo-Orthodox Catholicism, and Girl in Landscape, a reevaluation of British foreign policy after the Opium War. His new book is Motherless Brooklyn, a detective story wherein the protagonist suffers from Tourette’s, and goes on to marry the young Ladybird Johnson. It is due in stores any minute now, and it is by most accounts Lethem’s best work yet.

Lethem was born in he United States sometime after WWII. He has brown hair and does not wear hats. He is known for his quick wit and even quicker temper. We are proud to have Jonathan Lethem as the first subject of these, the McSweeney’s Interviews.

McSwys:
Many years ago, when she was alive, Gertrude Stein famously said something derogatory about Oakland which is often quoted, because it is a famous quotatation, which she said at one time. My question therefore is a two parter: 1) How do you account for the disproportionately large Hungarian population in Bridgeport, Connecticut and 2) How do answer critics who deride you for not dealing more directly with subjects such as Oakland, Hungary, and Bridgeport, Connecticut in your work, insofar as it is purportedly the work of someone who claims to be an American?

Lethem:
The Americanist impulse… oh, hell, I’m going to fumble this one, I can tell. See I’m from Brooklyn — I thought I’d made that clear at last. For years I tried to fudge the fact, setting my books “no” “where” “in” “particular” (and then frequently trying to make the fact of their blandly virtual settings a sort of meta-subject of the narrative, probably a cake-and-eat-it-too mistake) while setting my own actual life story in Gertrude Stein’s famous Oakland. (If you look at a map I can point out where I actually lived: in the exact center of the “O,” which served simultaneously in the words “Oakland,” “Nowhere” and “Roger O. Thornhill.”)

It didn’t work. I understand that now. So I’m back in Brooklyn. The point being, even the most Hungarian of Bridgeportians, with his candles and his beret and plateful of blinis (are candles, berets and blinis characteristic of Hungarians? I’m sure your fact-checker can handle this for me) knows more about being an American than I.

McSwys:
Hmmm. It seems obvious you1re determined to make this difficult. Very well. My next question is sure to test the limits of your compliance. Is it again a two-parter: 1) Has the buzz surrounding Antonio Banderas’s imminent directorial debut (“Crazy in Alabama,” Paramount Pictures, November 1999) gotten to you, too? and 2) How many times a day do you fall in love with strangers wearing large shoes (and why?)?

Lethem:
1) There’s some sort of assonance — to put it more or less politely — between Hungarians in Bridgeport and Banderas in Alabama. You’re driving at something, but I certainly don’t know what it is. I don’t think I’m the person to say.

2) When I get off the train and start walking, that’s when I feel that I’ve got the very world for my old friend. When summer comes undone. In the summertime, when you were with me. Lazing on a sunny afternoon. With the radio on. Tuning in to the wavelength. Little story about Jack and Diane. Shoes? Shoes hardly ever come into it.

2a) I have fallen in love with several Philip Guston paintings wearing large shoes, however.

McSyws: Sigh. I don’t see why you can’t just cooperate. Whatever. Moving on: Rei publicae Christianopolitanae descriptio, J. Valentin Andreae describes a man who, while in search of the “Land of Peace,” becomes shipwrecked on Caphar Salama, an island above which floats the utopian city of Christianopolis. In Christianopolis, life and education are shaped according to Rosicrucian ideals, attempting to reach a balance between Christian tradition and universal knowledge. Now, assuming you’re aware of Andreae’s work, how do you account for the feeling, when embracing a friend of many years, that by holding this friend longer than seems normal and longer than they feel is comfortable, that you are staving off death?

Lethem:
There’s nothing in Andreae to contradict the notion that you are staving off death by the embrace of your friend: his name is Vic, he drank heavily for years, he’s become a reasonably successful graphic designer on the ? you guessed it — internet. I don’t know, actually, how Vic staves off death. Here in the millenium’s shadow we’re staving it off as best we can. In my case, bootleg Dylan cds, e-mail at three in the morning, the blackcurrant soda at the overpriced-but-undeniably-delicious new cafe on Smith Street, VICTORY. As I said, I don’t know how Vic manages it, but I’m glad he’s still with us. Vic lives in L.A., but were he here I’d probably segue from the awkward silence after our protracted embrace by taking him down the street to VICTORY and buying him one of those blackcurrant sodas.

I’m sorry — what was the question? Have you actually read my work?

McSwys:
Let’s stay on-subject, shall we? Mr. Lethem, you have long been a vocal critic of the FBI, and many critics have accused As She Crawled Across the Table of being a thinly-veiled attack on the bureau, and Janet Reno in particular. How do you respond to such charges, especially in light of your own experiences working in the intelligence community, and your status as a person, alive so close to the turning of a century? Also: Does rain ever make you feel rat-like? Do find incessant rain, like that which at the moment has us hiding and scurrying, defeating or oddly comforting?

Lethem:
I’d like to answer the first part second, and the second part first. Is that okay? I didn’t sense any particular urgency in the order of the questions — or am I missing something? Well, okay. You refuse to speak. I’ll do as I please. First second, second first, that’s roughly my plan of attack. Speak up if there’s a problem. I’ll wait a moment. Speak. Or forever hold your peace. Ah, then. Well, here goes. The second, the question about the rain, rats, all that. So: the rain. When the rain comes I run and hide my head, I might as well be dead when the rain comes. When the sun shines — now that’s another story altogether. Actually, it’s then that I feel rat-like. A nice plump rat sunning itself on Commons lawn at a pretty little New England college, thinking about bolting and running across the shoe of a kid who’s just now slinking out of the school psychiatrist’s office — the psychiatrist is named Horst and he wears sandals. Though he’s in his forties, Horst drinks the vanilla milkshakes they sell at the little snack bar behind commons, taking them up to his office where he sits and counsels eighteen year-olds against participating in the rampant cocaine use taking place nightly in the college’s dormitories. He ardently sucks the last drops out of the bottom of the wax-paper milkshake containers, never leaving more than a trace, a thin film at the bottom of the cup. Rats notice things like that.

Janet Reno, sir, isn’t in the FBI. She’s the Surgeon General.

McSwys:
Must we quibble?

Lethem:
We must not.

McSwys:
You know, you have wonderful teeth.

Lethem:
Thank you.

McSwys:
It has been said that life is a breeze if you have great teeth.

Lethem:
Actually, the quote is, “Life is nothing without great teeth.”

McSwys:
Ah, yes.

Lethem:
Edmund White, from The Beautiful Room Is Empty.

McSwys:
White? No, it was Wilson, Edmund — Patriotic Gore.

Lethem:
No, I’m pretty sure it was White.

McSwys:
Wilson.

Lethem:
White.

McSwys:
Wilson.

Lethem:
White.

McSwys:
Bacon.

Lethem:
White.

McSwys:
Pound.

Lethem:
White.

McSwys:
Iacocca.

Lethem:
Oh wait, maybe it was Iacocca.

McSwys:
Yes, it was. From I Gotta Tell You: Speeches of Lee Iacocca.

Lethem:
Good book.

McSwys:
Great book.

McSwys:
Tell me, do you have children?

Lethem:
No.

McSwys:
What do you fear most for them?

Lethem:
If you’ve never had children yourself you could never understand my reply.

McSwys:
Is that some kind of riddle? Mr. Lethem, why do you insist on being so meandering and elusive? All we’re trying to do here is conduct a straightforward interview to try to interest people in your FBI-hating work, and you persist in making it difficult. Why is that, Lethem?

Lethem:

Dear Janet McSweeno,

I want to tell you a little story, as you stand there glowering at the my authorial barricades with your barracudas or bazookas or whatever they’re called full of nerve gas and inflammatory interviewing devices. And while I tell you this little story I want you to remember the children who stand in here with me, all the humble innocent little children I’ve created in my various books, children who never did anything to deserve the pain you’re about to inflict on them, whose only crime was that they dared to exist.

The story happened to me today: I was walking down Bergen Street I saw a tiny little old woman, a brown woman, perhaps Domican or Puerto Rican. She pushed a shopping cart ahead of her and the shopping cart was nearly taller than she was. She wore a tee-shirt — perhaps you’re familiar with this trend: tiny old poor people in extremely new T-shirts, often worn over long-sleeve shirts? — and the T-shirt reached almost to the tops of her shoes. I was watching her from the back. And here’s the point: the text on the back of the little old lady’s T-shirt was: BIGGER, LONGER, AND UNCUT.

You, sir, are the vile media. You are that T-shirt. I am that old lady.

This will be our last communication.

McSwys:
But we haven’t done the neat part yet.

Lethem:
Oh, God. The neat part?

McSwys:
Yeah, it’s really neat.

Lethem:
Fine, let’s do the neat part.

McSwys:
Great, great. Okay, this is how it works: I give you choices between two things, and you —

Lethem:
Choose.

McSwys:
Right, right. Ready?

Lethem:
I am.

McSwys:
Here we go.

Lethem:
Please do.

McSwys:
Here they come.

Lethem:
Yes.

McSwys:
Down the pipe.

Lethem:
Yes.

McSwys:
Or is it “down the pike”?

Lethem:
Please hurry. I have an AOL chat in ten minutes.

McSwys:
Okay. Johnny Bench or Mickey Cochrane?

Lethem:
Is this supposed to make me think of Johnny Cochrane? It does.

McSwys:
Clyde Drexler or Terry Porter?

Lethem:
Here I’m tempted to say Clyde Porter, but there is no Clyde Porter.

McSwys:
Gas or electric?

Lethem:
Yogi Berra in his prime was better than either of them. He’s perenially underestimated because of his public life after retirement — Ralph Kiner has the same problem.

McSwys:
Slow death or sudden?

Lethem:
Sudden.

McSwys:
White or off-white?

Lethem:
White ceiling, off-white walls.

McSwys:
J.R.R. Tolkien or Frank Herbert?

Lethem:
Mervyn Peake, truly and forever. Make mine Mervyn. I’m not kidding about this. Love the guy.

McSwys:
“I want to die” or “I want to kill you”?

Lethem:
“I’m sorry, I can’t hear you.”
“I want to mmmhhhhnnngg.”
“I’m sorry, I just can’t make out what you’re saying.”

McSwys:
Men dressing as women, or women as men?

Lethem:
Indeed, on many a moonless night.

McSwys:
Men on Mars, or colonies on the moon?

Lethem:
Men dressing as women. Mars dressing in verdant green. The moon going home alone.

McSwys:
John Adams or John Quincy Adams?

Lethem:
It seems to me John Quincy Adams gives you everything John Adams gives you plus a little something extra in the way of Quincy.

McSwys:
Jerry Brown or Jacques Barzaghi?

Lethem:
That’s apples and oranges. Like ’em both. Apples and oranges I mean.

McSwys:
Crunchy cookies, or soft?

Lethem:
Crunchy.

McSwys:
Panda or red panda?

Lethem:
This is torture.

McSwys:
Cameos by Elvis Costello, or cameos by Jonathan Richman?

Lethem:
Why can’t Jonathan Richman star in a movie? I see him as the manager of a Negro League baseball team. Or captain of a small ship which runs aground on a Caribbean Island. Or kindly warden of a droll prison. He definitely ought to be surrounded by dark faces. Is this a racist comment? (Have your fact checker look into this, please.)

McSwys:
Oppenheimer or Sakharov?

Lethem:
As well ask: Enrico Fermi or Yvgeny Zamyatin?

McSwys:
Duty or obligation?

Lethem:
I’ve always held that these were redundant, and ought to be conflated: dublgation, or obty, something like that.

Lethem:
I’ve made a poem out of the next five questions. It’s called The Flow of Blood.

The Flow Of Blood

The flow of blood, over pictures of dead relatives
near walls made of stone, where water flows over smooth rocks. Black actors playing gang members, women playing prostitutes:
neither of these concerns David Ogden Steirs, who has gonorrhea.
He sees
A light at the end of the pier.

(I couldn’t find a place for the phrase “hacking cough”. But every great poem has a flaw in it — I just read about this in Harper’s.)

McSwys:
Wallace Shawn or William?

Lethem:
James Thurber.

McSwys:
Shawn Cassidy or Butch?

Lethem:
James Thurber, James Thurber. Sounds so nice they had to name him twice, James Thurber.

McSwys:
Butch Reynolds or Michael Johnson?

Lethem:
Rickey Henderson.

McSwys:
Cleese or Palin?

Lethem:
Palin.

McSwys:
Idle or Jones?

Lethem:
Idle.

McSwys:
And Chapman? Dead or alive?

Lethem:
Let me ask you this: has anyone — Elvis, Jim Morrison, Jim Carrey, Graham Chapman, that lady flier whose name I can’t remember — anyone at all — every successfully faked their death? And come back? Ever?

Only Batman. Batman has done this. And that is why he is my hero.

THE END.

[Jonathan Lethem’s new book, Motherless Brooklyn, has just been made available to buyers of books nationwide. He will be reading from the selfsame text Friday, Sept 17 at the Barnes & Noble at Astor Place in New York City. Rumor has it that Keith Richards and Jon Doe ? and not Chrissie Hynde and Stevie Nicks, as previously intimated — will be sitting in on a few numbers, so please don’t miss it.]

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