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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Lethem: My parents, who are about 10 years older than you, Phillip, had the same instinct, but perhaps it had just then become obsolete. Certainly the blacks in the neighborhood we moved into didn't honor it.
Lopate: I don't think the blacks honored it in my neighborhood, either. As Baldwin says in his essay about uptown, "Blacks see the Jews as a frontline of bill collectors." But culturally, we felt a warmth. It didn't last forever, but it was part of the scene.
Conley: Mine are about five years older than Phillip. And I think that in some ways, they probably had some of the same attitudes, but didn't know at the time what they were getting themselves into, moving into a project. In fact, my father was horrified by moving into a cookie-cutter apartment. He thought it was the urban equivalent of tract housing. It wasn't bohemian enough. But how could they know the overblown cultural symbolism the word "project" would take on over the course of the next generation? Now, partly because of the success of rap music, it's become a certain badge of honor.
Lethem: Another generational difference is the enormous advance in Jewish assimilation in the years between Phillip's childhood years and ours.
Conley: I totally agree. I didn't even think about being Jewish until I went to California and I realized that I was in a stigmatized group. And then I reread my past. I literally read my high school yearbook and realized, "My god! All these people are Jewish!" Andy Epstein, who was tall and blond and blue-eyed and good looking -- I would have never guessed that [he was] Jewish. I didn't even think, "Epstein, of course he's Jewish."
That's something new to our generation. The other kids, they probably thought I wasn't Jewish. And the kids that I thought weren't Jewish because they also had Irish names, they were Jewish too.
Lopate: You know, I want to talk about the issues of writing about this stuff, because I think we can only go so far with sociology, even though we have a sociologist here. I think that it's still something that takes a certain courage to write about. It feels like a minefield. It feels dangerous. At least it did to me when I wrote "The Countess's Tutor." I felt like, "I'm going to get in trouble, but I'm just going to put this stuff out."
I think one reason Dalton's book is a triumph is that he does so well with the Dalton character. But every once in a while I would feel like you were trying too hard to understand. That is, I would feel that you were trying to explain that whites still had the power, so there were very good reasons for blacks to be responding in this way. Sometimes I would be grateful for those passages; I would think, "Well, he's trying to get at a larger understanding." And sometimes I would be not grateful for them and think, "Well, this is mucking up the prose."
Conley: You've put your finger on one of the most difficult parts of writing a thematic memoir, which is not, like "The Liars' Club," so individualized. I'm trying to speak to larger issues. And it was a tightrope to walk. I can't tell you how many more explanations I crossed out at the last minute. Now sometimes there are a couple of things I wish I did say, because it's such a sensitive issue, and almost presumptuous for me to write, as a white guy. In some instances I violated the cardinal rule of "show, don't tell." Sometimes I put a sentence here or there that would nudge the reader in the right direction. But I hope those were far and few between.
Lopate: They were. It's a near-perfect book. Really. But there's a kind of cover-your-ass statement that we all know about, you know, like "Oh my god, I don't want them to think that I'm a racist because this black kid beat the shit out of me." But, you know, maybe at that moment you were a racist. And I felt like there was possibly even a certain anger that you weren't putting in.
I feel that in nonfiction we have to tell as well as show. But it's a question really of the kind of telling, and how to get a perspective which doesn't feel like damage control.
