Literature professor and book critic DG Myers is dying of cancer, but that doesn’t mean he’s planning to go gentle into that good night. In a wide-ranging conversation, we talk about why he believes university English departments will barely outlast him, how he made the move from Southern Baptist to Orthodox Judaism (getting recircumcised a few times along the way), what he’d like to be remembered for, why the idea of The Western Canon is a canard, which books and authors he's trying to get to before he dies, who he regrets not reading before now, the identity of the one author he’d like to hear from, and a WHOLE lot more.
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 4, Episode 13 - Reading Maketh a Full Man
[music] Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host Gil Roth and you're listening to a weekly podcast about books and death, not necessarily in that order. Wait, did I say books and death? Isn't this supposed to be a podcast about books and life? Well, this one's a very special episode, as you'll find out shortly. You can subscribe to The Virtual Memories Show on iTunes, and you can find past episodes, get on our email list, and make a donation to the show at our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm. You can also find us on Twitter at vmspod@facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow, and virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. Now, a week ago, I sat down to record a conversation with David Gersham Myers, an associate professor of literature at Ohio State University. Now, there are different ways I can tell you who he is, lists of facts that I can provide you, but I'm not sure how useful they are. Here's a bunch. Professor Myers is 62 years old, and he's been a professor since 1989. He was recently denied tenure at OSU, an experience he wrote about in a piece called "Acadim Quits Me." He's the author of "The Elephants Teach," a work of historical scholarship on the teaching of creative writing. He's a father of four young children and his wife's a pediatric cardiologist. He named one of his children after Saul Bello. His daughter has the same name as my mom. He's an Orthodox Jew and politically conservative. He's been writing literary essays and posts at a commonplace blog at dgmyers.blogspot.com for the past six years. He got his BA at UC Santa Cruz and his masters at Washington U. and St. Louis, where he studied under and wrote a thesis about Stanley Elkin. Like me, he worked at trade magazines for a while. Unlike me, he went back into academia where he got his PhD at Northwestern. His reviews and articles have appeared in Jewish Ideas Daily, the New York Times Book Review, the Weekly Standard, Philosophy and Literature, the Suwani Review, First Things, the Daily Beast, the Barnes and Noble Review, the Journal of the History of Ideas, American Literary History, and other journals. He was fired from a book review and gig at commentary in 2012 after writing a blog post in favor of gay marriage. He has lively Twitter conversations about literature and criticism at dg_myers. He'll be dead from prostate cancer within the next two years. Should I mention that last one first? I mean, it's the most important thing, right? Or at least it creates a context for everything else. And if you're me, it's also a reason to politely ask Professor Myers if he'll have the time and energy between chemo sessions to record a podcast. I mean, two of my first guests on the show were a cancer survivor and a guy who died for 10 minutes but got resuscitated, so it's not like I'm a stranger to talking with people about their mortality and sharing it on the show. Still, I was nervous about taking a few hours from someone who knows he's got limited time remaining. I mean, we all got limited time remaining, we just don't know the limit. But Professor Myers was up for it, so I booked a two-day trip to Columbus, Ohio in March. Now we never spoken before and I had no idea what to expect either from his health or just his demeanor. I mean, it was a realization I had on the flight out there that the vast majority of guests I've had in the last few months or people had literally never exchanged a word with before we sat down to talk. And in this case, I was worried that he'd have to defer after the rough chemo session that he'd had the week before or that he might be, well, I don't know, obviously bitter or drained or whatever it is we are when we know we only have a few years left. But as it turned out, he was really gregarious and welcoming with enough energy to keep talking for quite a while after we turned off the mic, so though I'm afraid I kept the conversation going in a little bit too long. But just listening to our respective energy levels in this conversation actually, you might be more inclined to think that I'm the one on his way out. But anyway, before we record it, I got to meet his kids and play with his daughter for a few minutes until their nanny took him out to go see Mr. Peabody and Sherman. That quickly put me at ease about our whole project that afternoon. That is, I came to realize just in the initial interactions with Myers and his family and then with me that it was always a lot like me. I mean, no, I'm not an Orthodox Jew and no, I'm not a family man or have any interesting kids, but we both think conversation is life and he's glad to make time for it, even if it's with some schlub from New Jersey. So I guess this episode really isn't about books and death, it's about books and life. And now the virtual memories show conversation with David Gershaw Myers. As long as we're going to be straightforward about it, the article you wrote about not getting tenure and leaving OSU or helping him quits me. Yeah. Would you have written that if the circumstances of it had happened, but if you weren't dying, yes. Okay. And in fact, the irony there is that I probably would have retired after this semester anyway. It is becoming increasingly difficult for me to carry this, to drag this heavy bear that goes with me, you know, the Schwartz poem, the heavy bear that goes with me across campus. So it's just increasingly difficult to keep most in your health? Yeah. It's just my mobility has gotten very compromised. And so I probably would have quit after this semester anyway, or at most, and this is the other irony. They didn't want to rehire me because on another three year contract, because then they would have had to tenure me. And I won't live through another three year contract. Yes, it doesn't explicitly come up in the essay, which is why I was a bit at the point of the essay. It shouldn't matter. And I'm trying to suggest that my case is not unrepresentative. Now, how was the piece received by your peers? It is amazing, though I think characteristic of my standing at Ohio State University, that no one at OSU said a word to me about it. Positive or negative? Not a word. It went, even though it was in the department newsletter, it was immaculately ignored. But I only received by email positive and enthusiastic responses. Of course, if you read the comments, both on my blog and inside higher ed, and at American Conservative, where I can't remember if it was my schematics, I think, linked to it, there were a lot of negative comments about your, you know, and making fun of me and suggesting that I should have been fired anyway, and that, well, it's about time that an academical face the real world, so, but those who wrote to me were supportive. So where do you see humanity's gone wrong? You know, I know I sound like an old foggy when I talk about this, but I seem to have been at the very end of the last wave, where the expectation was that you graduated with a Ph.D., and at a minimum, you knew Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. When I joined the faculty at Texas A&M in 1989, the chairman, the then chairman, the late Hamlin Hill asked me, because they're never quite ready for you when you arrive, what can you teach? And I said anything but Chaucer. And only because I can't recite Middle English, I can read it, but I can't recite it. I think it's a Jewish thing. I think so too, although I would love to teach the Miller's Tale, but that, I don't know whether to call it an expectation or an ideology, disappeared shortly after I got my Ph.D. At Texas A&M, the Ph.D. requirement is one course before 1900. So Ph.D.'s can graduate, and of course they all take a course in the Victorian novel. And I guess then literature begins around 1830. Surprise. And I would take an evil delight in asking my younger colleagues what they were reading, and watch the look of panic on their face, because everyone reads scholarship now, and very few primary materials, mainly because our academic specialties are an inch wide and a mile deep. So the kind of thing you had at St. John's, which is- Which is the opposite of my undergraduate education, which was spent at Hampshire College. Wow. Yeah. See, I was the person who wrote to you about being able to Shakespeare a course, right? You couldn't take Shakespeare, but you could take Shakespeare's treatment of women. I had to go to UMass to take a Shakespeare class, despite the fact that we all understood that we were being impressed by Shakespeare. We didn't actually know the text of what was there. It's just astonishing to me. This is around the same time, actually, 1989. Right. And that's about when it started, right? Yeah, the peak of the culture war's wave. Right, and by the early '90s, theory loosely understood. It's not really theory. It's a party, the party pre in the name of theory, had taken over English departments and replaced the ideal of wide reading. Wide reading, make it the full man, Ben Johnson, full- I'm sorry, full reading, make it a full man, Ben Johnson from discoveries. That used to be the ideal, certainly the ideal in which I sought a PhD, that had disappeared and the new ideal, as enunciated by my PhD advisor, Gerald Graf, was theoretical sophistication. The emphasis was on finding something new and daring to say. And I just read an article this morning in The Globe and Mail about porn studies. And it was done. Don't knock it, okay. It's sex with somebody I love. Sorry, go on. Well, that's a deeper guide. But the columnist for The Globe and Mail pointed out that almost all of the articles, the academic articles she read, felt that it was deeper goor to cite Derrida and Foucault. And that, I think, is what should we call it, the new canon of English studies. It's amazing to me because Derrida and Foucault, in intellectual terms, are anachronistic by now. They're passé. But not too young academics who still cite Derrida and Foucault without a probative testing of their assumptions or propositions. But cite Derrida and Foucault as though their scripture. Before you got the diagnosis, you were working on a sequel to your first book, The Elephant's Teach, that was going to be about the invasion of theory. It's called Battle Cry of Theory. Indeed. Did you have essentially loose conclusions at that point? This would have been around 2008 or so that you would have given up on the project, I think. Would theory have eaten its own tail at this point? What's your... I see it as wave after wave of new theory because those who were truly cutting edge succeeded Derrida and Foucault with Butler and Zizek and other newer theorists, including names that I have not committed to memory because I, as I said in my blog piece on giving up on that book that with limited time left me, I didn't want to spend it reading such stuff. So at this point, the humanistic tradition in English is dead, not to be recovered. There are a few young scholars who are trained in it, but they are self-selecting. And even with them, the expectation is one of theoretical sophistication. The way you stand out is by the theorist that you cite. Do you see a terminus or endpoint for this? Yes, but I see a political one. That is, I think, state legislatures will put in anti-English departments or universities will. I think the English departments will start being closed down. Now when I was at Northwestern, the university shut down the geography department just closed it down. And the geographer said, "But we have tenure." And the university said, "Well, you still have tenure? Just no job." "You don't have a salary and you don't have an office, but we didn't take away your tenure." The political means are there and I try to imagine parents talking to kids who come home and tell them what they're studying. And parents asking themselves, "I'm spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for this." To be fair, again, I went to Hampshire. My senior, well, we don't call them senior because, of course, it's part of the patriarchy. My Division III project was a novella about Henry Miller and George Orwell, which my father managed to construe as. I was studying marine biology because he hadn't gone to university and the title that was inside the whale. That was enough for him to draw his own conclusions. That and he hadn't seen anything like a Hampshire graduation since his last Fellini movie. What sort of timeline do you think English as we know it has? I think within a generation, within a decade. One of the reasons I believe this skill is because of the response to my blog, there is, in this country, a deep hunger for literature and for discussion of literature. This has always been my experience as a teacher. My teaching, I think, is a lot like what you experience at St. John's. It's a bunch of an old fart and eighteen largely white kids sitting around yanking a better book. But I'm just enough of a leave of sight actually to introduce the word "life" into our literary discussions and discuss the relationship of books to life and to moral issues that the students might gasp actually wrestle with in their own lives. There are a lot of students who hate my guts, but most students, even those who don't get good grades, at least enjoy the experience of studying literature with me and in this old humanistic way of doing so. But as I say, and I hear from readers all the time thanking me for recommending books and suggesting a different way of looking at it, these aren't academics. These people who could have been academics, they're smart enough, but who were turned off by the academic round and just love to read. So English departments have done a horrible disservice to a ready and eager population of readers. Within your first book, within the Elephants Teach, you discuss creative writing programs in terms of essentially being made to create more creative writing teachers. That was the end point that wasn't the origination point. No, no, but ultimately it reaches a strange where it becomes institutionalized, becomes a factory for creating more creative writing teachers. Do you see the same teleology for English at this point that people are only qualified to teach essentially bullshit theory? Exactly. Despite all the claims about creating critical thinking skills, I've seen evidence of it. I'm not sure that a Doritian analysis of a shopping center or a Bodreardian analysis of a freeway system in a city is interesting even to English majors who have graduated. It's only good for writing look at me articles. Now after writing the Elephants Teach have come to call creative writing, and I think I do it in the afterward to the second edition, a bureaucracy. And I think that's when English departments have become too. There are bureaucracy in the sense that they're insulated from markets and concerned only with perpetuating their own interests. Which you believe outside forces? They'll eventually say are not worth state support. Right. What do you think academia has to learn from your writing, both the book and between the blog and your Twitter presence? Do you think there's any effect you can have at this point? No, my experience of writing, Accademe Quits me, suggests and 24 years in the profession of writing this kind of stuff. Now my career in many ways is very much like Michael Berubez, but he was a success and I quite frankly was a failure because I was a political conservative in a field that assumes that political conservatives are either A stupid or B fascist and therefore politically illegitimate. So early in my career for instance I wrote a piece showing the self-contradiction in the thinking about the canon and how the idea of the canon as I put it in my article was a bogey. It didn't really exist. Didn't matter. It just disappeared without a trace. When I began at Hampshire a professor had been let go essentially for not being Latin American enough. I was teaching a magic realist course and insisted on teaching Faulkner as part of it and apparently this caused consternation to the point at which he had to sue to get reinstated at the place. There was a second professor that's happened with in a different context who's now I think Dean, which is why I'm afraid to go back to find out how the 20 year progression led to him taking over the English group. Well see I can trace a similar story in my experience at Texas A&M when I was hired there as a theorist and eventually through an interesting institutional maneuvering the course was taken away from me but I taught it as a course in the theory that is truly presuppositionless examination of literature and like the undergrads at Texas A&M the graduate students were largely traditional, if not politically conservative traditional. By the end the last time I taught a doctoral seminar and made the decision never to do so again I taught a course on evil in the American novel. This is right after 9/11 and I can remember aside from the outburst of a student who said we're talking about God too much in this course. Evil being evil. Well and even though I kept saying we require a theological language to discuss evil though using a theological language implies nothing about belief in God. I don't know how many times I repeated that and apparently it wasn't processed. But the same student at one point got very angry and classed and said where's the lesbian on this reading list. Now I had a more traditional student who said well Truman Capote is on the list. We're reading in cold blood but that sort of and you know I continue I had this public fight with the British novelist Linda Grant about when I put out my list of the greatest fiction of the 60s and Grant's reaction was where are the women. Not writing great fiction of the 60s. Well I threw a back at her and said who have I left off of course. She didn't know. She had no names to suggest. It was an abstract expectation as it was with the student in my seminar. So over the 20 years I taught at Texas A&M I saw the emergence of this sort of student whose thought was kind of an autopilot. Again I hate to just be so unsympathy given that there's an audience also listening but everything is just harking me back to 1993 in western Massachusetts where it was just understood that we had to get the lesbian Latina presence of you know X, Y, and Z in order to have a legitimate take on this stuff. And I don't know. It should beat your head against the wall for a very long time. I did but because I can talk about the economic side of my career if you want but the teaching side and the publishing side was always rewarding. That is I had students who followed me from class to class. Even though I was the second hardest grader in the department my class has always filled up the first day they opened. I loved teaching and editors have always liked me because I don't take much editing. So I never had any problem publishing and I was out publishing all my colleagues. So when I described what an English professor was to my friends and my family I would always say a teacher and writer. And so as a teacher and writer I considered myself a success. One of my secret successes was when I wrote a refutation of Foucault and showed how Foucault did not himself write by his own beliefs and mentioned it to Roger Kimball, the editor of The New Criterion. I was writing for The New Criterion in those days and Roger stole it and published under his own input. And when Joseph Epstein wrote a piece for commentary on creative writing he too stole one of my arguments. To me that was this kind of delicious kind of under the table success that is I was spreading my ideas. Yeah. Virely. Right. Exactly. It's not under my own name. Now how drastically did students change and how much is it accelerated in the last few years? Undergrad students haven't. There's a minority who expect the party line. But last semester I taught a course on Gatsby and The Art of Criticism. It was a great course and my best student was an African American, a young poet. Isaiah was his name. God, I loved him. He lives right by and we've sort of become friends. He actually comes now into my Bible course this semester. And so Isaiah is his black poet, right? And who is he reading? A.E. Jackson, Robert Frost, because he recognizes what he needs to become a better poet. And he came to me and said, "Who do you recommend?" And I said, "Start with Wyatt." And the next day I saw him he had Wyatt's complete poems with him. He didn't say to me at any point, "Where's the black man on this list?" He didn't regats me and say, "Where's the race in this book?" So what Isaiah was about, Isaiah was about becoming the best poet he could be. And he saw Fitzgerald and these white male poets as enabling him to be a better poet. He was a black poet. He is a black poet. There's no doubt that he is writing out of the black experience and he riffs on rap. And maybe because he is black and he has no doubts that he's black, he doesn't feel like he needs this sort of external confirmation all the time that he's black. Which frankly is sort of the way I feel about being Jewish. You know, it's like, I can't imagine looking for the Jews on a reading list. Well, my last guest, Tova Mervis, her first, I interviewed her about her most recent novel, Visible City. And her first two novels are very explicitly Orthodox. Yeah. This one isn't, but as she put it, you know, it's about a therapist and his wife, an academic, and a lawyer on the Upper West Side. It should be relatively obvious, even if we're not saying it, you know, what it is. And Tova comes out, I shouldn't call her Tova. It's fine. Ms. Mervis comes out of the Orthodox world. She's one of those who, she can't help being Jewish. Yeah. I mean, she just is. So she doesn't have to worry about proof, she doesn't have to be like Michael Shabon. And try to prove that he's something he's not and get it wrong in doing so. I don't recall your take on, on Cavalier and Clay, although the Holocaust theme strikes me as, as air sets. I couldn't keep going for some reason. I dropped it numerous times, flinging across the room in the first place. Have you tried telegraph, haven't you? No, I haven't. My take was, if you're writing a novel about Jews from Eastern Europe, golems, escape artists, and comic books, and you lose me, you messed up at some point seriously down the road. That's it. Well, again, because Shabon inherits the popular, the vulgar understanding of a golem and doesn't look any further. So it was early in the 20th century that a rabbi named- Good stuff, May rink, no, no, it's a rabbi named Eudel Rosenberg, who creates the idea that the golem is a champion of the Jews against anti-Semites. That's a very, very modernist conception of the golem, and Shabon being a stranger to Jewish tradition didn't capture that. But he's a great writer. And telegraph avenue where he finally gave up on that, as if he didn't have to prove anything, though there are those who disagree with me. I found that novel wonderful. Which is part of what I figure will come out of this with a whole bunch of recommendations. I do have to say, under normal circumstances, I bring a book as a gift of some kind for a guest touching on the subject that I find loathe to deal with because I'm mortal like everybody else. You know you're going to die within a year and a half. You're also an academic. So I figure you've got tons of books, but also saddling you with, here's one thing you should read before you- Well, I think I've sat on Twitter. My bucket list is books I have yet to read. Which gets me to the big question of what do you regret not having read before now? And what are you trying to get to? Well, Anna Karenina. Yeah. I have never read Anna Karenina. So I got the new translation of it, and I'm looking forward to it. And I just- She dies at the end. I shouldn't give that away. Shit. Oh, okay. But yes, she dies at the end. I haven't read Tom Jones. Tom Jones is over there on the shelf, I'm reading Tom Jones. I never- I can't believe that I'm a Ph.D. English and never read Tom Jones. DeQuincy. I just finished Confessions of an English Opium Eater. I'd never read DeQuincy. Do you feel that imperative? No, I just- it's not an imperative. Again, my Ph.D. What we do is read. My Ph.D. Advisor Jerry Graf talks about the fallacy of what he calls the coverage principle. And I think Jerry is on to something, although I'll talk in a minute about my idea of saturating an expanse of learning. But in that sense, I'm with Graf. I've given up any coverage principle. Now I'm just reading. Yeah. And the other day I reread Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop, simply because Fitzgerald makes me feel good. I have to say, about, I guess, two and a half years ago, I was 40-41, I'd read The Leopard for the first time by line Padusa. Wonderful. It had been sitting on my shelf for ten years, and I didn't get to it until Willard Spiegelman had written a piece in The Wall Street Journal about it, which is how we began our correspondence. And I finished that book, and that was the first time in my life I had a moment where I thought, "Thank God I got to read this before I die." And that's essentially been the realization to thank God I have a life where I can feel that way about books, but also that brought in the hint of mortality that I really didn't want to deal with. Well, believe me, it's not that hard, and there are very few books I have that regret about. And I believe it's the only one. I mean, even if I croaked before finishing Tom Jones, I won't be saying that other day. But Lamppaduse's novel reminds me that one of the writers I need to get to is Pavese, who I've been intending to read all my life. Never touched it. And Pavese is loved by so many novelists I respect and admire that he's just somebody I've got to get to. And do you find it? Well, I mean, it's that age we live in now where we have those threads that keep growing further and further. Like you say, instead of coverage, it just becomes, for me, part of it is I'm reading books because of guests, like reading the elephant's teach in the span of a week, which may not be the way it should have been read, but that's what I did and finish it on the flight in yesterday. But when I look at the books that I read for guests and the books that I'm reading on my own, there's just that thread of, "Well, this person turned me on to that book and it starts to grow further and further and further." Right. Now you didn't take up "Dance of the Music of Time" ever, have you? No, I read "Dance of the Music of Time" or read, I would say, about two thirds of it. I'm not sure I made it all the way to the end. Years ago, right after I graduated from Santa Cruz, and he died. No, I know polls writing somewhat well. I used to have that two volume, hardback edition, that at some point, you lose books the way you lose girlfriends. Randall Jarrell used to say that when he loved a book, like Christina Steds, and the man who loved children, he always had two copies, at least two copies, one that he would loan out and one that he wouldn't, because he'd never get them when he loaned it out back. So I find it easier to just not have friends. That's an advantage, too. And death works that way. Because once I'm dead I no longer have to worry about not getting my books back. Have you, um, have you willed your library? No, and that's, that's something I'm, I'm trying to figure out. I think that I'm going, I have a very good Holocaust collection, and I'll probably give it to the, the Melton Center for Jewish Studies Library here at OSU. But the rest of it, I don't know. My sons are not yet big readers to my, to my great disappointment. So I haven't yet decided what to do with it. It's a puzzle. I think, actually think about it, but I don't know. And my wife will have something to say about this. I'm sure. Get all these books out of here. Right. It is, I don't know if you've seen my library. No, no. I was going to take a look afterwards. It dominates the house, and we, when we lived in Houston, we had a built-in library that was, that was gorgeous, and we lived in the house for five years, thank goodness. But when we left, we realized that we would have a hard time selling this house because who wants a built-in library for 2,000 books? Listen, but I spent 2013 having a library built into the house, and we converted the rec room and downstairs guest bedroom and just tore down the wall, put up shelves everywhere. And same realization, no one, especially in suburban New Jersey, no one is, I got a library in the basement. Perfect. Right. They're going to say, how do we pull this down and put up giant TVs and everything. We did, when we built it, here was, my stepfather is a carpenter and a cabinet maker, and we built them so that they can be taken out and moved. So that, if Naomi decides after I kick the bucket, that she doesn't want the books around as a reminder of how I cluttered her life, she can revert to that as a cleaner study. Yeah, it's a good one. She's a book woman too. She, she's a mystery buff, but her biggest complaint is that we have all these bookshelves in no room for her books. Amy and I made space for her stuff, and we just put shelves upstairs so she can put all the cookbooks and things like that, so she still got space for her fiction, but she likes to play up the fact that I keep them away from my books because I'm racist, and somehow, you know, I have to segregate your stuff that, you know, Naomi says the same thing. My books aren't good enough to be on David's shelves. Those are mass market paperback. I can't possibly put those next to my trade. Exactly. That's one of the things that I have been doing since the diagnosis. This makes absolutely no sense, makes no sense because I'm not going to live, but this is what I'm doing. I am weeding out my mass market paperback and replacing them. In fact, the only version of Stoner I had was a mass market paperback, and Williams's Augustus, his historical novel about the Roman Emperor. Does Stoner have like a great macho cover to it or something in the horrible 1960s? No, it's a guy who looks very much like a geek. Okay, so it's like the Eakins picture on the New York Review books. I only read it last year for the first time as in these last five or six years people, waves of discovering Stoner, which actually raises a question I have for you. Do you have a particular affinity to university novels? No, no. In fact, I don't like many of them. I just wonder, because you mentioned the human stain once or twice also, which I don't consider a university novel because it's funny. I just had a friend who went through a bad academic misconduct problem. He was innocent and found guilty, nevertheless, and I recommended the human stain for him because academics react exactly the way they reacted to Coleman Silk. You know, I recommended the other day DJ and writes academic year to someone, and Lucky Jim, of course, is wonderful. I am not a huge fan of David Lodge's stuff though. I find it's too close to a Romano clay for my tastes. RV Castle has a largely unknown novel about a university president called The President that's not bad. His Clem Anderson, in many ways, is a university novel. It's about a writer. It's early days of creative writing. But if I were a novelist and I don't have a narrative streak, I would disguise my professor as something else. Understood. Which I think is something that Stanley Elkin says somewhere, that Elkin spent his entire life in the university, and as far as I can recollect, never wrote about a professor. And he does say somewhere that he would take the university and pretend it was something else, or disguised to make it look like something else, so that he could make use of his understanding of the personnel dynamics, but then translate them into something that people were actually interested in. It's funny because I think most people in academia think that academia is such a unique beast and can't possibly have anything comparable in the real world that-- Right, and that's total hogwash. Elkin, the only thing I've read as a living end didn't like it outside of the first part with the Jewish liquor store on it, which is wonderful, and which I assume is more indicative of the rest of his work. Do you have a direction you'd point out? Well, I think the best way to start is the Dick Edson Show, 1971, and then his next novel, The Franscheiser. I don't like the later ones as much. The stories are wonderful. Elkin, who I earned my masters under at Washington University, was an incredible character. I went to WU to study under Elkin because I admired the energy of his prose style so much, and he and I became, as often happens with me in an older man, a kind of father and son or uncle and nephew team. I think one of the great crimes is that he's being forgotten. I hope the Library of America will rescue him and put some of his books in a volume or two. We met anecdote by my brother's mother-in-law, who had to conduct Elkin at some reading. She lives in St. Louis. That's my brother. It moved out there. It essentially involves Elkin not realizing that the reading was going to take place at, I think, a girl's school or something like that and had a pretty eyeballed past. That is Stanley. Stanley, I'm sure, was faking the reluctance to go on. I mean, the apocryphal story at WU was that he had a southern girl by the name of Miss D.U. in one of his creative writing classes, and she turned into a story. This is early in his diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, and Stanley is reputed to have said, "Miss D.U., I sure hope you can fuck, because you sure can't write." Which is sort of an odd way of getting to my me-no question about creative writing from someone who's written about it and someone who's been in academia all these years. Can writing be taught? No. No. It can be learned. Okay. But it can't be taught. It can be edited, but it can't be guided. The best creative writing teachers are two things. They're guides to a student's reading. The great writing teachers ought to be alive to what a young writer needs to read. Again, this sounds like brag, but with my student, Isaiah. And it struck me that what he needed was more discipline in his lines. That's why I returned him to Renaissance Poetry, so that I want him to learn meter. Maybe so that he can dispense with it, but I want him to learn it. And that, it seems to me, is the first duty of a creative writing teacher. Different writers need a different literary education. And creative writing has become a substitute for literary education. Creative writers read one another, but they don't read the dead. It is for them, the literature of the past is a museum that they need never wander. And they read one another out of professional responsibility. Oh, workshop, right thing. With no real sense of excitement or discovery. So that's the first thing. And the second thing is that a creative writing teacher needs to be a great editor. And would they likely have made it somewhere else as an editor? Well, editors have a really great profession. No, I just think that great writers are great editors of their own stuff. So, RV Castle coined the term that was later used by Francine Prose in her book on creative writing. Were you actually mentioned Blue Angel? No, no, for actual text, reading as, reading like a writer. And it was Castled in his book writing fiction who coined that term. Creative writing could teach that, could teach how to read with a writer's eye. And a good creative writing teacher knowing how to do that should be able to enter into the mind of his writing student and see where the writer is trying to go and why he's not getting there or where she went wrong. That's why I think that a good creative writing teacher should be a great editor. Not because she's worked as an editor professionally, but because she one, knows how to edit her own stuff and two, knows how to read like a writer. I don't know if you've had a chance to listen to it. I had the Bruce J. Friedman interview I did a few weeks ago where, in my introduction, I mentioned that Bruce read a short story that I'd sent him the only one I finished since 1995 or so, but gave me just this little note about it in addition to saying he liked it and keep going. But just the note he gave me was so absolutely perfect, a small technical thing, but just nailed it and I thought, yeah, not only was it proof that, you know, I had a pretty decent story, but it was proof that he read it and had the eye to figure out what didn't work or what this one little technical thing was. Yes, the teacher who was best for me at that was J.V. Cunningham, who would rarely say more than a sentence or two, but it was exactly right. And it wasn't just poems, though I sent him a few poems, but more of my scholarly writing. So writing is writing. There's still the ability to convey things fluidly, even if you're going to use deliberately poetic language. Yes. Absolutely. Well, good prose is good prose. No, that's a much better way of putting it, see? It's good prose, you know. How did you get started? Where did you decide this was? Well, I wrote my first novel in the sixth grade. I did a two and I ended up running Trade Magazine for 20 years. I worked in Trade Journalism, too, before I went back to graduate school. I wrote the Adventures of Casper Konstantino when I was in the sixth grade. And I can remember my mother, bless her heart, used to take my brother and me to the Marcy Branch Library in Riverside, California, where I grew up. And you know, I was a precocious little snot. So I would go to the adult section, and they were called, it was called in the adult section, much the way that younger men, or of a younger generation, would go into adult bookstores, which didn't exist when I was a kid. That's why I would go into the adult section. I can remember reading Moby Dick when I was in the sixth grade. So I got a very early start on unserious reading. And from the time, probably, if you ask my mother that I've been in the womb, was in the womb, I've been a contrarian. So my teacher would say, read the Scarlet Letter, and I'd say, no, I'm reading the House of Seven Gables. And that contrarianism sharpened my literary judgment, because I had to defend it. I had a lot of teachers who just punished me for it, but was lucky to have a lot of teachers who rewarded me and sent me on my way. Was there the sense that, for God's sake, the kid is reading? This is what I got largely, you know, growing up, again, a generation plus later. Actually, no. You're about 20 years older than me, how old are you? I am 62. OK, 43. So yeah, there was a reached a point where in my junior year of high school, the Honors English teachers, the whole list of books to pick from for a term paper, I picked something. And no, no, Gil, I think you want to read "Catcher in the Rye." I said, no, Mr. Grittale, I was going to go with this Somerset, no, no, Gil, you want to read J.D. Salinger. And now I was like, OK, I'll do that. And lucky for me, that works. And I didn't end up building John Lennon or anything. No, I think there was something similar to that. I didn't realize this until I became a teacher myself. And that is that you can recognize those who are born writers, and they are so rare among undergraduates. I've probably had three writers in 24 years of teaching. So I think the other thing that probably happened to both of us is that our teachers recognize they can write. We're writing novels at the age of 12. Honestly, it was even-- I mean, yes, there's that sense within academia. Even in the professional world, when I was in grad school at St. John's, I needed at a part-time job, a placement agency, put me in at the Annapolis Mall, working in the marketing department, wrote my first memo for the guy running the place. And he-- oh, let me call the agency and tell them you're staying on here full-time. No, because he realized, oh my god, this kid can actually convey things in the English language and get things across. And you don't quite realize, in my experience, I'm sure you've got it differently now, it didn't quite realize for years that's not something normal people. No, it's a minority skill. And I think that it makes you stand out for teachers. You know, I was never a classical good student, but I had this literary rage from an early age. By the time I got into high school, I had two kinds of teachers. One who did nothing but praise me and encouraged me and, like your teacher, suggest, no, you need to be reading this. My best high school teacher was a woman named Mrs. Bakewell. I can remember writing an essay on Transcendentalism for her as a junior in high school because I fell in love with Thoreau. And she went and got me Perry Miller's anthology, The Transcendentalist, and gave it to me as a gift. I mean, I don't think you could get away with that as a teacher now. You'd be seen as sexual harassment or something. But she single-handedly got me to study the Transcendentalists as a movement. And then there was my AP English teacher, Ms. Gobrecht, who used to tell us stories about watching the soldiers come home from World War II and thinking, "Somewhere out there is the man who was meant to be my husband," and she was very weird. And she would single-handedly as responsible for my distaste for the romantics. So we read a lot of Keats and Shelley, and I gagged, and we were supposed to memorize a poem and read it to the class. So I memorized as much as I could manage Ginsburg's howl, and got up and started. And at some point, with a red face, she got up and demanded that I stop. You didn't get arrested, so that's a plus. And my very first book review was a review of Portnoy's Complaint, which I wrote. She was, of course, the advisor of a literary magazine, and I wrote it for the literary magazine, and it was very rivaled. As it would have to be, exactly, between the book and your age at the time. Exactly. I both quoted it, but also imitated it, and she rejected it with anger. And then I took the AP exam. And to this day, I can remember writing about Herzog, Pinchons V, and Kessler's Darkness at Nune, which I know the examiner said, "I know where Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Milled." But I ended up at the highest possible grade of five. And in those days, your teacher was supposed to be the one who would call you. And apprise you of your score. And I'll never forget that Miss Gogrecht kept saying, "I can't believe you got a five." I can't believe you hear it. Well, I don't know it all. It's unprofessional, and I wanted to say, "See? Which of us is really the critic here?" Then did you keep up with Pinchons? I was just trading tweets with my friend, Ran Carriaga, who went to Santa Cruz with me, and Ran was the one I remember bubbling with enthusiasm over gravity's rainbow, which I was unable to finish. Especially if it was a mass-market paperback, which is what I had. We're too old for that now. You need that big-trade paperback version. That's right, which I didn't want to spend the money on. My tastes were going in a different direction by that point. It's funny. So much of those books, for me, came out of comic books, reading Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, writers like that. Going on to Pinchon, DeQuincy, things of that, I also had a couple of good teachers who pushed me along. I'm rereading for the millionth time in Visible Cities right now by Calvino, which was my gift book from a teacher back in my senior year of high school. Oh, that's nice. He gave me. I can't find that copy anywhere. I convinced I would not have lent that one out, because I know he inscribed it, but, yeah, can't find it. Calvino's wonderful. The Cloven Viscount. Anyway. Now, who are you rereading? Who do you find yourself, again, harkening back to? Well, Penelope Fitzgerald recently, I've been rereading. Roth, I am constantly reading. Let me ask a Philip Roth question. My brother, who's a teacher in high school in St. Louis, wants to know in limited time left, or limited time available, what Roth he should read. Well, I told him, "Portnoy, Sabbath Theater, you can kind of get by." No, I think more than that, I think you should start with it by Columbus because it's short, and it's as I've written is, in many ways, a prelude to what Roth will always be interested in. Of course, the next two, "Letting Go" and "When She Was Good," need to be ignored. I have a buddy at Shul, who came up to me and said, "I read Letting Go," because I know you love Philip Roth. Yeah, I know, I said, "Why didn't you ask?" Well, Dan. Dan Portnoy. I mentioned those books to Thane Rosenbaum last September, and, "No, no, no, you have to start with a ghostwriter." And I would say then the ghostwriter, Portnoy, then the ghostwriter, Sabbath Theater, American Pastoral. Do you read "Everyman" often? Yeah, well, I've read everything. I mean, I go back to "Everyman" every year or two, largely to prepare myself for you. I'm not a big fan of "Everyman." Okay. I asked one... As an old Jew who's dying, you would know better than I did. Well, the cancer, you know, the interesting thing is that Nathan Zuckerman has the same kind of cancer. True. He has prostate cancer, and he had an operation to remove his prostate. I didn't have that. And he is impotent and incontinent as a result. Not my experience with prostate cancer, I know, I know. But nevertheless, I feel like this kind of, as if Nathan Zuckerman and I belong to the same social club. I need to try... I need to try exit ghost again because I had a horrible, horrible time reading it. Right. But the human stain is also wonderful. And as you suggested, I don't think there's a better book about academic politics. I also think it's set at Hampshire. You may be right. The geography of it. And he's in Western Massachusetts. Well, it could be Bennington. I went to Bennington for the first time just a year or so ago. So I didn't have that framework, but reading it back in 2000. 'Cause remember E.I. Lonoff teaches at Bennington, and Lonoff is based on Malamud. So it could be... No, I think Athena College is probably a composite. A little bit of Bennington, a little bit of Hampshire. I don't know that Roth taught at any of that. No, no. But living in the Berkshires, he is the Western Massachusetts. Right. Well, then he would know Williams, too. So I'm sure it's a combination of all of those. Yeah. Yeah, we just see ourselves in the horrible, politically correct... But it's, you know, it's no different than anywhere. Liberal arts colleges are not any different from state universities. It's just funny to me having such extreme polls of Hampshire and St. John's is my way of seeing things where I realize the middle ground isn't much, much better. No. And, you know, the thing that people do not understand about academia is that it's a national institution, at least for professors. There is no local identification. Professors identify with their discipline, not with their institution. So the culturally Texas A&M and Ohio State universities could not be more different. The culture of the English departments are remarkably similar. I was going to ask, was there any significant change? What brought you here? My wife, Naomi, who is a pediatric cardiologist, received and offered to become chief of electrophysiology at Nationwide Children's Hospital here in Columbus. And so dragged me along with her. What did they call me, a trailing spouse? Nice. Did you stay behind at all? No. Did you have much overlap? No. No. Gotcha. Because we had four children, and we were living in Houston an hour and a half away from College Station. So, and because of my position in the department, I wasn't eager to spend a lot of time around my colleagues anyway. I would have colleagues. I would be with a group of students. You know, we'd come back from class and they'd be wanting to talk and we'd be going to my office. And I'd pass a colleague in the hallway and I'd say, "Hey, Don!" And my colleague in front of students would give me the cut direct. Just academics are small people, small people. That's why the human stand I think gets them exactly right. I can't be with you on this Coleman. Yeah. I'll give it a reread along with the rest of the pastoral books. I do have the theory that everything after Sabbath's theater comes out of that book, that the threads of-- Out of Sabbath's theater. That's all the novels have--even the polio from the--not the humbling nemesis. Everything has a point. And it's possible-- That's very interesting theory. Yeah. It's--I've reread it last year for the first time since '95 and thought, "Yeah, no, the American pastorals, although the nemesis books, everything has some thread coming out of here." That's very interesting. I much prefer American pastoral, but I have been--and in fact to my buddy at Shul recommended Sabbath's theater, I think it's such an amazing achievement to make Mickey Sabbath this horrible human being, absolutely fascinating and even lovable. It was funny. It was back-to-back interviews. I did last year was David Gates, who's not a very Jewish writer, and Philip Lopate, who's a Jewish writer, both of whom had recently reread Sabbath's theater. The same time I did it, as though there was some sort of, you know, Rothy and Zeiger. So we all needed to--I guess shortly after his announcement of retiring, we all needed to-- Right. And then we jump down to that one. I don't remember it, well, I was a very different man at 24 than at 42, I guess, is the way of looking at it, which is to me one of the great marks of literature all around is how much better the books get as I get older. Right. Exactly. The same experience you'll have with the much shorter ghost writer, which changes every time you read it. I mean, there are--I taught a seminar on Roth here at Ohio State, and I reread it. And there were whole passages that I read and asked myself, "Why did I not underline this?" It's just this amazing stuff in there. Do you mark up your books? Absolutely. Okay. Completely. Although in teaching myself to do that, I have some very embarrassing copies where every word-- See? I'm more afraid of the really banal marginalia, which is why I write nothing. I just put brackets around things and hope that I'll remember why I bracketed it later on. I was going back to my marginalia. My mother, when I was home with the family for Thanksgiving, had found my old copy of the Great Gasp, which of course by that point I was done teaching. And I was very angry, but this is--well, I write it when I was 18. And it's great embarrassing stuff. My crying of lot 49 was going back to that one. Yep. Yeah, I'm not going to write it. And pencil, just so there's a chance it's going to fade over the years. And what's your Jewish experience? What's your history in America, I guess? When did your people--I'm first generation American, which is why my Roth is very different than other people's Roths. What was your-- Well, my experience is unique, and I'm writing a piece for the Image Journal on this. But I converted to Judaism at the age of 17. What was the name, middle name of Grisham? Well, I changed my middle name. Okay, that makes much more sense. But with the name David Myers, which is a very Jewish name. And there is a part of the family that looks as if the first of my family to this country was named Abraham Mayer, which sounds suspiciously Jewish, but by the time my parents came along, they were Southern Baptists. And I've always been very religious and had a wonderful--when I was a young Baptist--a wonderful minister by the name of Owen Miller, who loved my challenging questions. I can remember reading the genealogy at the beginning of the Book of Matthew, which traces Jesus' descent to the house of David through Joseph. He's coming to Reverend Miller and saying, "How can Jesus belong to the house of David if his father did, and he's a virgin birth?" That's a good question, son. Go talk to the rabbi. This is like when I'm 13. And Reverend Miller didn't get angry at me, but then he took a bed or a pulpit, and the new guy came in and was angry when--so the minute I got my driver's license, I was out of First Baptist and beginning to look elsewhere. Free agent. And I went to every possible church, and in the meantime--and this, of course, is just perfect for someone like me--my reading led me to Judaism. That is basically Franz Kafka and Saul Bello. I was assuming Bello was going to fall in there somewhere. But Kafka too, because it was First Kafka and Malamad, but mainly Kafka and Bello, and Bello figures prominently in this story, and I felt a great emotional affinity with Bello and his characters and with Kafka and his tortured sensibility. And so I went one Friday evening to the Reform synagogue in town and immediately felt like I had come home. And I was 17 then, and I was 16 then, because I had just started to drive. And I started studying with the Rabbi, who was a relief Rabbi, and a professor at Hebrew Union College in LA who would drive in every Friday. So it was just serendipity, right? I studied with an intellectual, with a professor, with an academic scholar. And he gave me the standard reform materials, and very quickly we surpassed them, and before long we're reading Gersham Shalom together. And I was home. I was in a tradition in which study was sacred. And since then, it's just been a movement. And argument. And argument. And argument. And arguing with God. But arguing. And that's right. And where contrarianism is valued as, what, after all, a edush, a newness. So my contrarianism was welcomed. And my constant asking, how could this be, was right at home. Because every text in Judaism is the next door to another text. So I was right where I belonged. Say nothing to the girls, who are exactly the girls I had been looking for. Being a Portnoy is complete. Well, I won't go into that now. And then I soon out grew reform, and ended up teaching Hebrew school on Long Island at a reconstruction at synagogue. And from there, went to-- every time, every stop, I've been reconverted. So I've had a reform conversion. A reconstruction is a conversion to conservative conversion and an orthodox conversion. I've been converted four times. Very good. I've been circumcised then at birth, and three-- the conservatives-- so twice more. The conservatives and orthodox both required me to be circumcised again. So I've been circumcised three times and converted four. Symbolically enough, I hope. Yes. And you only have to draw blood. Yeah. Yeah, I heard that about Ethiopian. The Ethiopian Jews coming into Israel also was-- Right. You know, the-- I don't know, I don't identify with the intellectual tradition of Judaism. My wife's people are Polish and Hungarian Jews, both of my in-laws are survivors. So we have an interesting mixture here in the house. How has it all prepared you for the end? Well, my belief in God is unshakeable. And I yet have a close enough relationship to Hashem that I can-- and my wife can-- scream at him a lot. And I don't understand why he wants me to go through this. Sometimes I think it's for my children's sake. And sometimes I know that we will never understand Hashem's plan, because we see such a small little portion of it. Socially speaking, to die as a Jew is a great thing. To die as an orthodox Jew is a great thing, because I'm surrounded by a community that will not let me be alone. I have a friend here in Columbus who comes every Shabbos morning to walk me to Shul. And now I have to go in a wheelchair. He pushes my wheelchair. Every Shabbos, every Shabbos. He has a heart-- we are like a month apart in age. He has a heart condition, but he doesn't let that stop him. I have another friend with whom I'm studying the book of Ezekiel who comes by every Shabbos afternoon, even if it's only for 15 to 20 minutes. We study on Thursdays. He comes by on Shabbos just to check up on me, and makes sure I'm all right. When I was in the hospital a year ago, of course, the community provided every possible meal. If the kids need to be picked up, they're like six people who volunteer. If I need to be taken to chemo, I can call any of six or seven people. The community will not let me die alone. And that's wonderful. My great-- I don't know if you read this, Gil, but one of the things I wrote on my blog was about how to talk to cancer patients. It's something that I think people don't know how to do. Orthodox user constantly saying, "Rifu-ish-lema-to-meem," which basically get well. Yeah, I did that in our first email correspondence and realized, "Whoa, I just screwed up major land." I don't think-- Well, there are two ways of doing it. Again, some Orthodox users are just on autopilot. It's what you say to everyone, and so it makes me angry because it's meaningless. Other Jews, and I think this is more like you, don't know me as well, didn't know exactly the ins and outs of my condition. That was it. Yeah. And want to say something that's appropriate to an Orthodox Jew. But in that piece, I wrote that one of the things that people can say that is, I think, most encouraging someone is dying is that don't worry about your wife and kids. We'll make sure that they're watched over and taken care of. So for instance, the wife of the man who walks me to Shul, every Shabbos, said to me a couple months ago, "Don't worry, I already have somebody picked out for Naomi." And I can't tell you how-- It made me laugh and how wonderful that was, even though it was a joke. I mean, it's also-- I know she's actually thinking that way. Well, did you read Roger Engel in the New Yorker very recently, did a piece on Being 93? Right. Right. I know he did. I didn't read it. And that's where it comes out. Near the end, it's-- his wife died a year or so earlier, the second wife. And you start looking around. And they had talked about it for years leading up to it because the assumption was being a man he was going to die first, but it was that realization, you're 90-something years old, and it's still, you know, the companionship idea, and it's not betrayal. And it's one of those things we all get freaked out because it's an old, old, old person. Right. But yeah. Well, I do have a lot of resentment of such people as Roger Engel, who's getting three more decades. Yeah. And it's still writing for the New Yorker. My oncologist-- you know, I'm writing a book about cancer, life on planet cancer, and my oncologist told me about another one of his patients who just finished his cancer memoir and then died. And I said, well, how old was he? And he said, 82. And he told you to discount death of cancer at 80-- sometimes I feel guilty for being 62. I mean, when I-- but my brother-in-law died of multiple myeloma in his early 40s and left two children and a widow. My wife and her sister, I'm sure, look at each other and say, what the hell did we do wrong? Both of our husbands. That could be radioactive. Thanks. I think it is. But being Jewish, but also being literary, are two of the great solaces in this adventure. That's what I wonder. Just this morning, I was reading an essay by Jeff Dyer who had a stroke very recently. He mentioned a passage from Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. We never know when we're going to die, and because of that, we are, at any given moment, immortal. That's nice. Yeah, except when you actually know that, you know, there is a time frame, I think. No, that's not. It's exactly the opposite. Really? chemo makes me feel like crap, but I'm a very huggy, touchy father. And my kids love to sit on my lap. And they don't care that I'm feeling like crap from chemo. And that is a wonderful feeling. And I just reread Penelope Fitzgerald's The Bookshop. It doesn't matter that I feel like crap, I got that chance. There are always those, and I'm trying not to make this sound sentimental. There's a passage in Mark Harris' Bang the Drum slowly, which is one of the great novels about cancer, in which Henry Wigan realizes that there actually are good things that come out of a diagnosis. And one of the things is that your sense of what there is to value suddenly takes on a different color. And so much of the crap of life no longer matters, and I've become apolitical. I don't care anymore. It's just, it's not worth my time. Outrage is not in your agenda anymore? Not anymore. And I used to be very political. I was a commentary writer. You know, I got fired over a political piece, but I just, I don't care anymore. I can't share the outrage. I don't have the time for it. And every Shabbos, I thank Hashem for my cancer, because it has focused me on what's good and enabled me to ignore what's not. And beside the Mark Harris book, have other books or poems? Well, Peter Gries' Blood of the Lamb is, of course, another one. I actually love Christopher Hitchens' mortality. It's one of the great tragedies that Hitchens got so little time after his diagnosis. Oh, people have asked, you know, who would be your dream list of guests, people you'd want to get, and my wife had said, "Would you have loved to have gotten Hitchens?" I would have been terrified, because the slightest verbal mistake I would have been torn to pieces over her. Maybe I should do that to you. And I made plenty, don't get me wrong. No, and that's a wonderful little book. It's too bad that the editor bulked it out with fragments of unfinished essays. Shanda, that he would do that. Hannah Tolbrouyard died of prostate cancer, 18 months after being diagnosed with it. And his wife collected his cancer writings in a book called Intoxicated by My Illness, and that is helpful. It's amazing the number of men who died of prostate cancer never said a word about it. Walker Percy died of prostate. Walker Percy was castrated, which used to be the treatment for prostate cancer. And I can understand not writing about it, but God, I would kill to have read Walker Percy's reflections on dying of prostate cancer. Now, again, he died relatively at relatively advanced age. I think he was in his 80s or late 70s. But even so, a doctor to suffer that. But there are good and bad cancer books. I think I have mentioned one of the things that makes me so angry is that so many books about cancer are written by survivors. And so there's a triumphalist tone to them. And one of the reasons I feel such an obligation to finish life on planet cancer is that I can only think of two other books, Hitchens and Jillian Rose's Love's Work, written by terminal cancer patients. Most of us who are dying don't take the time to do it. And aren't you innervated from treatment? I think it's that and have a bucket list. Or I don't know what. Because frankly, the level of productivity Hitchens still had while he was undergoing. See, you'd read these reviews in Vanity Fair, Beyond the Essays. And it was just, how are you finding the energy to read and write these things? I don't. Because I don't have it. Yeah. I'm wondering if that's particularly, you know. Hitchens was. It was made of words. No, I was going to say he was a saint, but of course he would kick me for calling him that. And the obituary I wrote for him, I finished by saying, "To honor him, I will not pray for him," which is, I think, exactly right. But whatever the atheistic equivalent of a saint was, Hitchens was it. As much as I disagreed with him. Yeah. How do you want to be remembered? That'll-- No, trust me, my next question's even worse. But go on. Well, this book, I think, The Elephant's Teach has been in print now continuously for 17 years, I am proud to have written a solid work of scholarship that has lasted far longer than most of my better-paid colleagues were. One of the great pleasures of writing that book was to go back and read works of scholarship by completely forgotten scholars, a name that I remember for no particular reasons. Lois Whitney, who was an early 20th century philologist, I can't even remember now what she wrote. I'll have to look it up in the video. Your book turned me on to my new nom de plume, Basil Gildersleeve. I read that one in the first chapter, "Oh my God, I've been using the wrong name all these years." Gildersleeve, of course, is remembered. But there are all these wonderful scholars who have been forgotten and I found them because they live in their writing. And I'm still trying to publish a collection of my essays and reviews. John Wilson has kindly offered to pitch it to a publisher for me. And I would like to see that in print before I die just so I can hold it. But as much as anything, I'd like to, and of course, remembered for my children. Yeah, that was the next question. But in my work, I don't mind just as I told you about Roger Kimball and Joseph Epstein stealing from me. And that is a kind of immortality. I don't care if my name is remembered. I hope that some of the things I've said and some of the books I recommend remain alive. The University of Chicago Press is reprinting "The Tunnel of Love" with a preface by me. I can't tell you how wonderful that makes me feel. Don't know the book. It's Peter DeVries' first real novel. And to know that people will be picking up Peter DeVries after my death, partly because I have been advocating that people read him. Not wholly, the University of Chicago Press has already been dedicated to reprinting DeVries, so it's not that I influence them over much, but I had a small share in it. And that makes me feel good, that I contributed to the Renaissance of Stoner, makes me feel good, that I am identified with the celebration of Kris Bihaz, whatever happened, what happened to Sophie Wilder, makes me happy. I hope that people remember that even though I trashed Michael Shabon in the Swanney review that I recommend to Telegraph Avenue and turn to that book and find that it's worth reading. If I can do that, and if people can continue to read every now and then, my recommendations and pick up a book that kills the time softly for them, I've contributed something to literature. And that's enough. And that's enough. Have you made arrangements to keep the blog live after you go? That'll be my wife's responsibility, and there's no reason it shouldn't be. Yeah. I just mean in terms of paying domain fees, and making sure it's all over. There isn't no money. It's done through blogspot, but maybe I should migrate it to a paid site, so that, but yes, I expect. But some of the blog I want to re-print in a book, and we'll see. Besides seeing your children grow up, what do you wish you had time for? Go to Israel. I was going to ask, have you ever been? No. No. I've never been to Israel. I have never been to Israel, and I will never now get the chance. I will never finish my Roth book, and I would have liked to, especially after I read Claudia Roth, Pierpont's intellectual biography of Roth and was so, so disappointed in it. You know, I pitched that idea to University of Chicago Press four years ago now, and nobody seems interested in that book, I don't know why Pierpont, I think because she had an in with Roth, but that's a regret. He is, in fact, on my dream list, although no one. As high as I've gotten with my interviews, no one has an in on that one. That's, although I do have a story, I'll tell you once the mics are off while my only chance. And I pitched the book to next book, the Jewish series at Shoken, and Jonathan Rosen, the editor, said I want you to go interview him, and I explicitly said I don't want to do that. I mean, that's the kind of thing you do, but I wanted it to be a literary biography, and I didn't want to be influenced, and I have no desire to meet him. I don't, there's a great passage in "Ketcher and the Rye" when Holden reads "The Return to the Native" and dreams about calling Thomas Hardy on the phone. I've never had that. You know, I've known great writers. I studied under Raymond Carver, and I studied under Stanley Elkin, and I studied under J.V. Cunningham. And the only one I ever went back to see was Cunningham. I, there's no one like that I want to meet. Well, maybe Ryan Sandberg, but no, I think my deepest regret is that I will not be able to grow old with my wife, and not be able to support her and her career, and make dinner for her every night. I do the cooking in the family, and she works twelve hours a day and comes home and eats my cooking and praises me for it, and I regret that I'm not going to get that. Other than that, I don't conceive of this in terms of regrets, or unfinished business, except for raising the kids. My boys are going to have to go through dating without advice from their dad, or my daughter is. I'm not going to be able to help them with their college applications and say, "No, you don't want to go there." But that's not how I'm conceiving it. For me, the problem, and the problem isn't death, the problem is dying, and getting through these last months without hurting anybody. On Twitter, you recently, you brought up books you once over praise, but are now embarrassed by. Now, one of the ongoing threads for me is actually the opposite. Books are authors you once upon a time hated, but learned to come around on and now adore. Do you think of anybody you've reevaluated positively? That's a great question. Everybody thinks it's great and nobody has a good answer for me. James Baldwin is someone who I was not impressed by, and very similarly, Susan Sontag, whose essays now I deeply respect her fiction, I revile. Novelists are harder. Most writers and critics I know just tend not to go back to something they once hated. Right. I mean, because I've written, he doesn't belong in the Library of America, somebody like Kurt Vonnegut, I can't go back to him, I've never, never had much admiration for John Steinbeck. I guess Updike has grown in my estimation, as I've gotten older. I still, in the Roth versus Updike sweepstakes, think it's not a contest. But we're biased. Right. Exactly. But no, it's mainly essayists. Irving Howe is someone who for years, I used to scoff at, and now I read with great pleasure and instruction. But those are the ones that occur to me, almost no academic writers. I mean, I was right about that. Tony Morrison, I still cannot read, and still believe is overrated for political reasons. So it's too short of a list, I'm sorry. But it's one of those things that occurred to me at the beginning of this podcast. I thought, that would be a great question to put to people, and everyone thinks it's a great question. Honestly, you've answered it better than almost anybody else has so far, except for the very first one I did, a woman who detested Marilyn Robinson's housekeeping when she first read it, taught it a few years later and realized, no, that was me, not Marilyn Robinson. Daddy is good. She came around on that one. I've loved Robinson from the beginning, trying to think of someone who's even, you know, Jane Smiley, I started with the Greenlanders, which I loved, and have never been able to get back to an appreciation for anything she's written. So for years I avoided Francine prose, and as you know, it's one of the things that I'll probably play for a while be remembered as Francine prose's first great public champion. I can remember scoffing at her name and the sort of sense that, because she was very prolific and started young, and I don't know why I felt those were sins, but I felt some of those were sins against literature. But I never read prose, and then did, and was blown away. So I don't know if she counts. I was going to go read Blue Angel after reading the afterword for the Elephant's Teach. So again, this whole thread of yours of starting people on, consider yourself blessed. You're keeping this going. That is, I guess one interesting regret that I have, I have never heard from her. I've, you know, I have heard from almost, Michael Shabon wrote me the nicest note after I reviewed Telegraph Avenue, and it was really, it was, it also was biographically interesting because he was tangling publicly with John Padorets at the time, and John's wife was going through breast cancer, and so I told Michael you have to lay off John, and then a couple months later John fires me, and I was like, no good deed goes unbunished, but I love that note that Michael Shabon sent me, and of course I'd become friends with Billy Teraldi and Chris B. Ha because of my positive reviews of their books, but, but I, you know, what I did for Francine Prose, nobody had ever done, and it's just kind of amazing to me that she's never, she was even asked about my praise of Blue Angel in this, in an interview she did with AWP, and she, it didn't know what to say. She sort of said, thanks, I guess. Writers, and I've known, you know, a bunch over the years in addition to cartoonists, there's a Asperger's level of inability to function in a regular society, so yeah. That's true, but she didn't seem like that kind of person, oh, and I just recently got a wonderful note from Dana Spiata, who I've created a friendship with the author of Stone Arabia, whose father is also dying of cancer, so we made that, that connection, and I had said that that when, when Spiata's Stone Arabia was republished in paperback, she blurbed my commentary review and didn't do it under my name, and she wrote and said, no, I did, I insisted on it, because I loved your review so much, and so we've become friends. So, and, and, and politically, Dana Spiata and I wouldn't agree on anything, but we find this common ground of literature, and it's same, of course, with Francine Prose. Francine Prose would hate me as a political conservative, but... The art is... Yeah, so I, that is the, the one, I guess the one person I would like to hear from before I die is Francine Prose. I'll talk to her, what we'll see, you know. You know, I want, I want to get a note that said, somebody mentioned to me that you're dying of cancer, and it, and it struck me with chagrin that it blah, blah, blah, blah. Not that you want to guilt anybody. No, no, no. Francine, if you're listening. As an adopted Jew, still, or converseo, you, you still, you know. That's right. Final question, what should writers and readers do to save the humanities? Right well, it's good enough for me. My book of essays is called The Obligation to Right Well. It's a phrase that both Billy Giraldi and I have used independently of each other, and I think that's what it takes. Davey Cunningham said to me, when I was, I, I wrote scholarship for him, and he loved my writing, though it's very different from his. And we talked about the importance of writing well, and he said, about scholarship, this is important to do right too. And that's true about criticism, it's true about poetry, it's true about fiction, it's true about tweets, we have to be writing at our best in every sentence, and if something's not going on in every sentence, then we're betraying the humanities. And I think that's what my generation of scholars did. They gave up on writing well. The earlier generation of new critics, Wesley Trimpe, a student of Ivor Winters, the former husband of the poet Helen Pinkerton just died. Patrick Kerp obited him, is that a word, an obit to where I'm on, anecdotal evidence. I had got him to break his teeth on Trimpe's long theoretical work muses of one mind. It's a very difficult book, and it's extremely well written, because Trimpe was dedicated to being a writer as much as a scholar. The only way to save the humanities is to write well and to move that obligation back to the center of the humanities. David Grisham Myers, thank you so much for coming on The Virtual Memory Show. Thank you, Gil. Thank you. And that was my conversation with Dee G. Myers. You can find his writing through a commonplace blog, which is at dgmyers.blogspot.com. That's D-G-M-Y-E-R-S. His book, The Elephant's Teach, was reissued by University of Chicago Press in 2006. It's a scholarly history of creative writing programs in America, beginning around 1880. But Professor Myers has some great character sketches within it, really teases out the tensions and meanings of how creative writing has been understood and taught over the last century plus. Really, if you care about books in life, and I figure you do, because why else did you be listening to this, you should read his work. And while he's still here, Adam on Twitter, at dg_mires, although some of those conversations can get a little contentious, I'm happy that he made the time to meet me and I hope we can do this again before his death. If you're interested, I put up a list of all the books we talked about on a separate page on my blog. You can find it through the blog post for this episode, as well as at chimeraobscura.com/vm/myers-books, and that's M-Y-E-R-S-B-O-K-S. And that's it for this week's virtual memories show. Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back next week with a conversation with Daniel Levine, author of Hide, a revisionist take on the Jekyll and Hyde story. Until then, do me a favor and go to our iTunes page and post a review of the show. You can subscribe to the virtual memory show through iTunes so you never miss an episode. Also, please visit our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm. You can sign up for our email list and make a donation to this ad-free podcast through the site. And if you've got ideas for guests, drop me a line at Groth, G-R-O-T-H, at chimeraobscura.com, or at V-M-S-Pod on Twitter, or at our Facebook page, facebook.com/virtualmemories-show. Until next time, I'm Gil Roth, and you are awesome. Keep it that way. Then we take the burn-in, then we take the burn-in. 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