The critic in winter

Did Mailer ever get on you for anything you said about him?

The last time I saw him he was very friendly. We had a sort of physical competition. I used to be fond of Indian arm wrestling and I beat him and he didn't like it. I introduced him to Saul Bellow. They'd never met each other.

Out of that whole group of writers, who do you think will last? Is it too soon to tell?

The one who is clearly going to last is Ralph Ellison. Mailer, I'm not sure about. Bellow will last. I don't know how high he'll be in the pantheon. I used to think Barth and Hawkes had a chance. I'm not so sure now. Barth's most recent book was terrible. And he sorta knows it too, I had a note from him which mentioned the reviews.

What do you think of Grace Paley? I love her stories.

Oh, she's very good. Grace is not in the front of anyone's consciousness, but when you talk she makes everyone's list.

Raymond Carver?

Oh, he's good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.

What do you think about the present university situation in the U.S.? Of the rise of the MFA program?

I don't much like what's happening. This department has gone the way -- not that all colleges have gone, but they talk not any human language. They talk Derrida-style, Lacan or Foucault. Foucault was the one person I met [in France] that I could talk to. He was a mensch. He talks to you, you know whether you agree with him or not because you know what he is saying. He was a great influence on my "Freaks" book, his book on madness.

In that book, you make the point that most "freaks" live the same unhappy or happy lives as the rest of us.

One of the problems I had was the problem of language. Saying "freaks" used to be impossible; this is one of the books that changed that. I love it now that a large minority of people who are "handicapped" prefer to call themselves "crippled." This is all part of the game, [like] queer theory. It's the same game I play with the word "nigger." I've been playing it for a long time.

What is the reaction that you want?

The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans. One of the first times I ever spoke to black Americans, a young kid who was a member of SNCC said Martin Luther King Jr. was an Uncle Tom, and I agreed with him. As far as I'm concerned King was one of the worst human beings I ever met. He would upstage you when you were talking, literally upstage you, shove a hip into you, shove around so he could look at the girls in the first row or so and see which he was going to fuck. I gave him a hard time.

Are you OK with saying this on tape?

Yeah. Absolutely. And when I walked out, I got one of the greatest compliments I ever got in my life: The young kid from SNCC said, "You're a mean motherfucker."

What about Baldwin? You said you wanted to write about him, but never did.

Baldwin, we got to be friends. I like what he did when he started. I like the early fiction and essays. One of the things he wrote frankly about, which I wanted to write about -- I never got around to it -- are the blacks that I think of as "black Jews," whose first work was published by Partisan Review, Commentary, that's just not Jimmy Baldwin, but Ellison.

Among today's critics, whose work do you think is closest to your own?

The person I liked when she began was Camille Paglia. And I liked her even better when I heard her talk. When I celebrated my 80th birthday, they asked me who I wanted to hear talk, and I invited Allen Ginsberg, Camille Paglia and Ishmael Reed. So it was a nice, varied group. I love Allen. He was a great man. We saw each other many times. I knew his father back in Newark. One time when I was doing something at Yale, I saw him out of the corner of my eye with a group of students chanting "Om, Om, Om." As I passed by he went, "Om, Shal-om."

What do you think of him as a poet?

I admire him as a poet, despite the fact that he seems not to know when he is being good and when he is bad. But he will last, or at least those poems will last, the ones in which he finds his real voice. Anybody in the next centuries wanting to know what it was like to be a poet in the middle of the 20th century should read "Kaddish."

What do you think of Paglia now?

I have very complicated feelings about Paglia. In some ways I was delighted when she came here to help celebrate my 80th birthday. What pleased me was to discover that she had a real sense of humor, which enables her sometimes to see what is really funny not only about other people but about herself as well. If I am in any sense disappointed, it is because her most interesting work seems to have been done early and she has got to a point much too soon to start repeating herself.

Do you have any advice for the critics of the future?

It's funny to be a critic, I never met anybody in my life who says, when you say what do you want to be when you grow up, "I want to be a critic." People say I wanna be a fireman, poet, novelist.

Critics? How do they happen? I know how it happened to me. I would send a poem or story to a magazine and they would say this doesn't suit our needs precisely but on the other hand you sound interesting. Would you be interested in doing a review? And then I'd do it and decide that it's easy and you figure you might as well keep your name in front of people and you figure some day they'll run a story. And after a while they did publish some stories, but it's strange ... When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say "critic." I say "writer."

Do you think someone will go on and finish your work?

I have two answers to that: I hope so ... and I hope not. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's somebody doing something because I pushed them in that direction. What I really dream of is that somebody would blow everything I've done out of the water in a beautiful way which would clear the way for something better to come along. My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time.

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