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The New Yorker Radio Hour
Episode 6: Two Writers and a Rock Star Onstage
00:55:10
Two interviews recorded live at the 2015 New Yorker Festival: Patti Smith talks with David Remnick about how her writing and music are intertwined, with a live performance of “Because the Night”; the fiction writers Jonathan Safran Foer and George Saunders interview each other.
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- [00:04]
Patti Smith
Floor 38. It's very exciting to be having a conversation with someone when they have that revelation like the interview.
- [00:14]
David Remnick
Packer seems to be interested that. John McPhee's brought this up from One.
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Patti Smith
World Trade center in Manhattan. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.
- [00:30]
David Remnick
I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us for the New Yorker Radio Hour. For the past 16 years we've been putting on a festival, the New Yorker Festival. A weekend long extravaganza of everything from fiction to politics to science to cartooning. Everything that you might imagine in the magazine comes out in three dimensions. And the person that invented this is the director of the festival, my friend Rhonda Sherman. Tell us what we're going to be hearing today.
- [00:57]
Rhonda Sherman
You're going to be hearing today two events from this year's festival. Two very different events. The first one is an interview with Patti Smith and you.
- [01:06]
David Remnick
I remember that.
- [01:07]
Rhonda Sherman
Yeah, that was a highlight. And we have a conversation between the two fiction writers George Saunders and Jonathan Safran Foer.
- [01:15]
David Remnick
I think maybe I could answer, but I'd love to hear why you thought so. Why did we have Patti Smith?
- [01:19]
Rhonda Sherman
I would book Patti to sit on stage and knit a sweater. Patti Smith is an iconic American artistic figure from the last 50 years. I mean, she is just, I think, a great American artist.
- [01:33]
David Remnick
And I had a blast interviewing her. Although it was interesting. The one thing she did tell me that I didn't expect at all, she says, I'm not a musician. And we'll hear her talk about that. Patricia Lee Smith came downtown and living in conditions meager in comforts but rich in art, began forming the protean artist, songwriter, painter, clarinet virtuoso, stage performer, poet, political activist and memoirist whom we know today. There's little that Patti Smith will not try. Nothing she is afraid to say, and seemingly nothing that she cannot do. The searching spirit that's in Patti Smith is located not only in the music and poems and performances, it's also to be found in two astonishing memoirs. Just Kids which came out five years ago. Is a book of seven self creation and Arrival. A love story that is the stuff of Puccini with the great photographer Robert Mapplethorpe as Patty's co star. Now there's a new book and no less beautiful, it's called M Train. Ladies and gentlemen, the great Patti Smith. I'm so excited.
- [02:58]
Patti Smith
Me too. I just want to say there are a few things I can't do. I don't Know how to swim, nor drive a car or play chess. So there are a few things I can't do.
- [03:07]
David Remnick
There'll be no swimming tonight. Patti. This book is quite different from Just Kids, which by Patti Smith terms is a pretty straight narrative. I can't imagine that it's only subject that brought you to do this book. It's also got to be form and playing around with a new sense of memoir.
- [03:28]
Patti Smith
I think it's a process. Just Kids. I wrote because Robert asked me to write it, literally the day before he died. I had never written nonfiction, some. So in writing it, which took a long time, I had a lot of responsibility, a particular agenda, and it was so grueling and also painful. And then when I was finished, I really wanted to write something that had no agenda, no responsibility. No one knew it was coming. No one asked me to write it. And I just sat and I had this dream that, well, I could write about nothing. Yeah, I could do that. You know, I got nothing to say. I got, you know, whatever. And then I just sat every day, just writing without design. But what I learned in the process was everything has a design. It's like nature, you know. After a while, patterns emerged and Just.
- [04:39]
David Remnick
Kids had to be. Maybe you're working off of letters or diaries or maybe talking to old friends and acquaintances to re. Remember things.
- [04:47]
Patti Smith
No, I only talked to one person. Unfortunately, almost everyone in Just Kids was gone, had passed away. But I have a very good memory. I took minimal drugs in the 70s.
- [05:03]
David Remnick
So what do you consider minimal?
- [05:06]
Patti Smith
Well, in the 60s, I took none. And in the 70s, you know, I smoked a little pot and I. Robert and I took acid twice.
- [05:17]
David Remnick
With what result?
- [05:18]
Patti Smith
Well, I just was. I just complained all night and he said that I can get that at home. No, I mean, I felt. No, I felt like John Brown. I felt angry at the world. And he kept saying, patty, you're supposed to feel universal love, you know. And I was like, on a soapbox about the world and about pollution and about, you know, Jesus. But, yeah, so anyway. But I kept little diaries. My mother, every Christmas would send me one of these, like, little diaries that have, like, you know, what month, you know, your gemstone, your flower. And then little sections for each day. And I wrote these things that are seemingly meaningless, but it would be. Cut Robert's hair like a rockabilly star. Chop up my hair like Keith Richards met Janis Joplin, you know, all these texts, day by day by day, it jogged your memory. Where the moon was, you know, when I was. When Robert and I had an argument or when something sad happened when Jimi Hendrix died. They're all notations. But daily.
- [06:32]
David Remnick
Were they emotional notations or they were just facts?
- [06:35]
Patti Smith
They're just little facts. But then I was always keeping journals. And Robert, we wrote letters back then, and Robert wrote me quite a bit of letters. And so I was able to take a lot. They were primary resources.
- [06:51]
David Remnick
And for this book, did you have primary resources or resources of any kind?
- [06:55]
Patti Smith
No, just me. It's all my memory. Occasionally, I'll ask my sister Linda, who's a year younger than me, if I'm worried that I didn't remember something right about our childhood. But she always reaffirms that things.
- [07:12]
David Remnick
And you see it the same way.
- [07:13]
Patti Smith
Yeah, sometimes she'll remind me of something or I'll remind her. But yeah, we were very, very close, my siblings.
- [07:21]
David Remnick
It's interesting because most people, when they talk about memory and when you read discussions of memory, they talk about the unreliability of memory, that no two or three people who had experienced the same thing at the same time ever come to the same conclusion. And yet you think this was.
- [07:37]
Patti Smith
Well, with my brother, sister and I, my parents. My mother was a waitress. My father worked in a factory. We were born right after World War II, just about a year apart. But I was so much taller and a little more. I don't know why, a little more advanced. And I was the one who watched my siblings. And, you know, I designed our plays. You know, I was always writing plays or figuring out scenarios that we would act out and we would talk about them. We loved our childhood. You know, I know it was stressful for my parents because they had no money sometimes it was very difficult. I was sick a lot. But it was happy because I was so loved by my brother and sister. You know, they really admired me, and I felt like I was really somebody. And we have a good collective. My brother passed away, but the three of us used to have such a great collective memory. And when my brother passed away, my sister and I really even magnified our collective memory because it's up to us.
- [08:55]
David Remnick
In Just Kids, there's an act of Magic memorialization about a period of time and a deep friend and lover. In this book, you're going back to something extremely painful, the memory of which is both joyful and painful, which is your marriage to Fred Sonic Smith. And he was very young when he died. And the romance and the love described is beyond intense in this book. What's the process of writing this?
- [09:25]
Patti Smith
Well, I never planned to write about Fred, he just popped up. My sister and I have a theory that he was getting a little annoyed at all the attention Robert was getting. And he wanted to, you know, but we just joke about that. But, you know, he's been gone, like 20 years, and there's certain periods where I. He's there, but sort of somewhere back here. And sometimes he's right in the forefront. And I think, when does that happen? It was very intense when I was writing this book. And I don't know why, but September is his birthday. November, he passed away. He passed away on Robert Mapplethorpe's birthday. So it was. It's a doubly difficult date for me. But sometimes it's just my children, because my daughter reminds me so much of him in certain ways. She'll have a gesture or all of a sudden, the other day, she had a shorter skirt on, and I noticed a birthmark on her leg that I hadn't really noticed that it was exactly like his. You know, it's things like that. Or my son will call me up and when he's a little sleepy and his voice sounds so much like Fred's, and I'm.
- [10:51]
David Remnick
How old's your son?
- [10:52]
Patti Smith
33. And so I think that my children sometimes magnify memories of him.
- [11:03]
David Remnick
One of the memories that's really important to you and important in this book is the memory of reading.
- [11:08]
Patti Smith
Yeah. Neither one of my parents finished high school, but they were both avid readers. My mother liked more. You know, she'd read things like Mandingo and stuff like that. She liked romance novels and poetry. My dad read everything. Aristotle, Plato, Carl Jung, Huxley. And he was always, my poor mother. My mom would be, you know, making a meatloaf or something. He said, beverly, listen to what Aristotle says. And she said, I don't want to hear what Aristotle says.
- [11:45]
George Saunders
I don't.
- [11:50]
Patti Smith
But he also. He was such an interesting man because he was.
- [11:53]
David Remnick
It's never happened in my house once, not one time did that happen.
- [11:57]
Patti Smith
But he read the Bible all the time. He was very inquisitive. He read science fiction.
- [12:04]
David Remnick
And it was a religion, too. Religious house as well.
- [12:08]
Patti Smith
Well, I mean, the Bible and prayer was really important in our house. My mother was a Jehovah Witness, but she couldn't practice because she couldn't give up smoking. So, I mean, it's. I mean, but this is how awesome my mother was. She. She could not give up smoking. She was a real Bette Davis with the cigarette and a chain smoker, and she loved her religion, but she couldn't Live up to it. But she still read all the material, studied. And I was taught to be a Jehovah Witness. I was Brother Witness.
- [12:46]
David Remnick
Well, sort of relationship to the Bible. The first words I ever heard come out of the mouth of Patti Smith when I first put on a record was, Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine. And that was your announcement to the world, covering a song by Van Morrison and them. So what was your relationship to all this and when did you balance it?
- [13:08]
Patti Smith
Well, I mean, I had a really good biblical education. Between my father's constant searching and very inquisitive and, you know, playing the devil's advocate about certain passages. I went to Bible school and the Jehovah Witness religion is very scripture based. And so I had a really good biblical education, but I had different interpretations of some of the scriptures and I just was not the kind of person that could stay in an organized religion. And that line I wrote When I was 20 years old, I recorded it when I was 27, but I wrote it in a poem when I was 20. And it was really not so much against. It wasn't opposed to Jesus. It was opposed to organized religion. And it was also, I was young. I wanted to take responsibility for all of my own wrongdoings. I wanted to be, you know, free of guilt that, you know, Jesus had to die for me every time I did something wrong. I just thought he'd be free of me. I just wanted to, like, make my own mistakes. And it was really funny when the record came out. I mean, people were picketing me and sending me death threats or praying for me and saying, you know, you don't believe in Jesus. And I said, I believe in him so much. He's the first word on my record, you know. You know, I didn't say Jesus doesn't exist. But, you know, and also, as I evolved, you know, I appreciated Jesus more as an individual, as a revolutionary. And, you know, I have a high regard for him.
- [15:04]
David Remnick
What flipped the switch for you as a girl or a young woman that famously, whenever one reads about you, it's reading Rimbaud. And it's kind of an amazing thought that some kid at age 15, 15, somehow in South Jersey stumbles upon illuminations or whatever was the book and something lights up. Is that really the story?
- [15:30]
Patti Smith
Well, I mean, one of the things that really, you know, lit up for me was seeing Picassos for the first time. I was like 12. I had never been to an art museum. My father one time took us all to an art museum in Philadelphia. It Was like free day at the art museum. And I saw Picassos for the first time. My father didn't like them. My father liked Salvador Dali because he had better draftsmanship. But I totally. That was the first time my father and I locked horns. And I started realizing that I had certain things spoke to me. And as far as Arthur Rimbaud goes, truthfully, I saw a copy of Illuminations at a bus station in Philadelphia in front of one of those dirty bookstores they had outside a bookcase. And all the books were 99 cents. And it was sitting there and I looked at it and I just fell in love with him. It was more like a boyfriend, you know, it was just like.
- [16:40]
David Remnick
You mean that famous.
- [16:42]
Patti Smith
His face? Yeah, that picture. He looks like a young Bob Dylan, you know? And I just fell in love with him. And it was pre Bob Dylan. I hadn't fallen. I think I sort of traded Rimbaud for Bob Dylan for a while. But at first it was just. I was captivated by his face. But when I opened it and was reading it, I didn't understand all of it, but the language was so beautiful. It was transporting. Like, it was prose poems, but they were. It was transporting, like poetry. And in. I just. I don't know, I fell in love with it.
- [17:24]
David Remnick
And where did it lead you to?
- [17:26]
Patti Smith
Well, led me into trouble at the factory when I was 16. That's what piss Factory is really about. My first job was a baby buggy bumper beeper inspector.
- [17:39]
David Remnick
That's not true.
- [17:40]
Patti Smith
Yeah, it's true. And I stood there and I had to, like. And I was moving to. I didn't. I was born, you know, I just wanted things to move along. And these women, I mean, God bless them, they worked in this factory their whole life. And they knew how to keep things moving slow for certain reasons, survival reasons. And I was sort of screwing up the quota, as they say in Piss Factory. But I was carrying Illuminations. And I remember the supervisor, and she had, like, maybe one tooth. And she looks at. She says, what you reading? You know, you're not supposed to be reading. And I don't think half of them read, but she was looking and she said. You know, she looks. And it was bilingual. And she said, what language is this? And I said, it's French, you know. And she was. You know, they decided it was a communist book because it's like, South Jerry. Fern. It's a Fern language. It's a Fern language. And they decided it was communist. And they told me I wasn't allowed to read the book there. So of course I brought the book the next day. So they took me into the john and gave me a lesson. And that's why it's called Piss Factory, because I got dunked in a little yellow water.
- [19:08]
David Remnick
So you paid for your Rambo?
- [19:10]
Patti Smith
Well, yeah, I paid for arrogance, really.
- [19:13]
David Remnick
You regret how you behaved?
- [19:16]
Patti Smith
Yes. It was only a few years ago that I realized I was like reading the poem and it has a lot of hubris and I'm not recanting it because it was a terrible place and they treated me terribly. But now I understand that these women were working there since they were 15 years old. They were in their 40s. They were never going to get. Things were never going to get better. I was making a dollar and a quarter an hour, so they were probably. What were they making? $2.
- [19:52]
David Remnick
But you knew you were leaving?
- [19:54]
Patti Smith
I knew I was leaving and I just came in disrupted things, didn't show the hierarchy their proper respect. But I didn't know. I was just a kid, you know.
- [20:09]
Rhonda Sherman
That's Patti Smith talking with David Remnick on stage at the New Yorker Festival. They'll talk more in a moment and they'll play one of Patty's biggest hits together. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. Hi, I'm Rhonda Sherman, director of the New Yorker Festival. A little later on the New Yorker Radio Hour, we've got a conversation between the writers George Saunders and Jonathan Safran Foer. And now back to Patti Smith, the writer and performer, interviewed by the magazine's editor, David Remnick.
- [20:49]
David Remnick
When you were very young, you came to New York. Did you know that you could put it over? Were you, in other words, was there a sense that you were in your mind in the beginning pretending to be an artist and did you think it would really happen?
- [21:06]
Patti Smith
Well, I wasn't pretending to be anything. I came to New York City in 1967 looking for a job because the New York shipyard closed in Camden, New Jersey, and 30,000 jobs were taken away. And there wasn't a single single job in South Jersey or Philadelphia, not even in a factory for a girl, you know, 20 year old girl who had a couple years of college. And so I came to New York City really looking for a job and there was tons of bookstores and all kinds of places. And so my first desire was to simply get a job. And my hope was, you know, to evolve as an artist and as a writer, as a painter. And I also dreamed of meeting somebody, you know, because I didn't have a boyfriend. Then meeting somebody like me with a like mind.
- [22:10]
David Remnick
At what point did you think I could. This could happen?
- [22:15]
Patti Smith
I didn't think like that, you know, because I wasn't in a hurry. I was ready, you know, like in all the biographies I had read of, you know, all the artists or all the painters and poets, they all suffered, they all starved, they were all unappreciated. And I was ready for that.
- [22:34]
David Remnick
That part you could do.
- [22:35]
Patti Smith
Yeah, I had no problem with that. I knew I wasn't ready. I knew I had something and. But Robert and I were quite different. I was ready to suffer and take a while. Robert didn't want to suffer. He knew who he was. He knew what he had and he wanted, you know, he wanted that to be known.
- [23:00]
David Remnick
He had an ambition.
- [23:02]
Patti Smith
He had ambition. I had ambition. But my ambition was more conceited than Robert's. I wanted to like, write great books and win a Nobel Prize or something like that, or, you know, mine were like far reaching. I figured, well, Herman Hesse wrote Glass Bead Game when he was 65 or something. You know, I wasn't in a hurry, but I did want to do something great. But Robert and I also didn't have the confidence that I had, you know, I was still, you know, I still had to prove my worth to myself before I could prove it to the world. But Robert believed in himself and really, really tried to inspire more self confidence in me.
- [23:49]
David Remnick
How did the direction turn so intensely to music? And how did you figure out what you were going to be musically? What was around in the air?
- [23:58]
Patti Smith
Music had nothing to do with it. I mean, I feel embarrassed when people call me a musician. I can play a few chords, sing.
- [24:07]
David Remnick
You write music.
- [24:08]
Patti Smith
Well, I'm a performer. I feel proud to say that I'm a performer. And I think of myself as a performer in the best sense. But I didn't have any musical aspirations. I was writing poetry and I would read it to Robert and Robert would say, really wanted me to read it in front of people because he thought I was really good or entertaining or whatever. And he really pushed me. Robert got me my first poetry reading, but I found myself much too agitated and naturally speedy to just stand up and read poems. I was like bored by it.
- [24:51]
David Remnick
Just the whole act of the poetry reading.
- [24:52]
Patti Smith
Yeah, it was just like. I go to poetry readings and they're like Snoresville and you know, it's just. But I mean, I like. Ginsburg was a great reader and I love seeing William Burrs and Jim Carroll. There was a few really Good poets. But on the whole, I read somewhere.
- [25:11]
David Remnick
That you used to go to poetry readings with Gregory Corso and hate the stuff.
- [25:16]
Patti Smith
Well, yeah, but Gregory hated it more than me. Gregory was the biggest heckler I ever saw.
- [25:22]
David Remnick
He heckled the poets.
- [25:23]
Patti Smith
Oh, he would get, say, get a blood transfusion. He was like, always. I was. I was like. So when I was doing my first poetry reading, I didn't want to be born because I thought, if Gregory's going to be in the audience, I better deliver. And I decided that I wanted to have some sound behind a couple of my poems. And I was trying to figure out how to do it. And Sam Shepard said, why don't you get, like, somebody to play guitar behind you?
- [25:56]
David Remnick
And Ginsburg was doing that at that.
- [25:58]
Patti Smith
Time, too, and not in St. Mark's Church. Nobody had brought a guitar in 1971 in St. Mark's Church yet. So I asked Lenny Kaye. I had met him in a record store, and he played a little guitar. So he came and he played guitar behind me. And I did that poem, Jesus Died For Somebody's Sins. It was a poem. Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine Melting in a pot of thieves Wild card up my sleeve Thick heart of stone My sins, my own. And people were quite upset that we had electric guitar in the church. And that was encouraging. And I don't know. It's the. It just evolved, you know, I didn't have any game planned. It was. First it was just to make poetry a little more visceral, that's all.
- [26:56]
David Remnick
By the mid-70s, peaking maybe at around 1978, you were a rock and roll star.
- [27:02]
Patti Smith
Yeah, I was for a while.
- [27:05]
David Remnick
Yeah, you were. For a while.
- [27:06]
Patti Smith
You said, I'll tell you how I knew I was a rock and roll star. Because we had a job in Italy, and it was actually right before I quit, and I was just walking down the streets of Florence, and there were thousands of kids everywhere. I mean, they were, like, camped and sleeping on the streets. And so I went into a record store and I said, what's going on here? You know? And the guy said, patty, it is you.
- [27:39]
David Remnick
You hadn't noticed until then.
- [27:41]
Patti Smith
Well, I did. I knew we had a job, but I didn't know it was in a stadium for like, 80,000 people. And I also didn't know that they, you know, they didn't have rock and roll in Italy for decades, you know.
- [27:56]
David Remnick
Yeah.
- [27:56]
Patti Smith
I had no idea. I wasn't just, you know, because I was.
- [27:59]
David Remnick
You had had album after album you were on as they Say, the COVID of the Rolling Stone.
- [28:04]
Patti Smith
Yeah, but we weren't rich or anything. We were still just building and. I don't know, I'm just myself.
- [28:11]
David Remnick
Did you enjoy it?
- [28:13]
Patti Smith
I enjoyed working with my band. I loved the camaraderie. I liked connecting with the people, but I didn't. There was so much stress and so much pressure, like, to do peripheral things. Going to see radio stations, you know, doing interviews, getting your picture. Took all this stuff, which at first was sort of fun. But then I realized I wasn't growing as an artist. I wasn't, like, evolving. I wasn't doing any work. And I was also starting to act, you know.
- [28:51]
David Remnick
What?
- [28:52]
Patti Smith
Well, not like I was raised, you know, like, if there wasn't a car for me, I'd get pissed off or, you know, things like that. Or if some piece of equipment didn't work, you know, I put my foot through an amplifier or something, you know, I was developing, sort of.
- [29:07]
David Remnick
Did you throw any TV sets in swimming pools?
- [29:09]
Patti Smith
Oh, no, I don't mean that kind of thing. I just mean agitation.
- [29:13]
David Remnick
Right. You know, because of the pressure. Yeah, just because you could.
- [29:17]
Patti Smith
Stress and just adrenaline. It's just high adrenaline.
- [29:22]
David Remnick
And then at a certain point, you step back and you move to Detroit and away from. Away from a lot, by the way.
- [29:29]
Patti Smith
I didn't. I didn't do anything I was ashamed of. I'm just saying that no one noticed. I noticed that I was like, there's nothing wrong with being arrogant and having a certain amount of hubris. You sort of have to. But when you start acting like you're hot or something, it's time to step back and say, you know.
- [29:47]
David Remnick
And was that part of the reason for stepping back?
- [29:50]
Patti Smith
Yeah. I didn't. I didn't like how. I wasn't used to being pampered. I wasn't used to having cars I wasn't used to. And at first it was kind of cool because, you know, I had dark glasses on. I could pretend I was in, Don't Look Back, you know. But then it just seemed like. I don't know. But, you know, I enjoyed it for a while. You know, I had my fun.
- [30:13]
David Remnick
And now that you're back and you spend a lot of time on the road, particularly in Europe, what's it like? Do you enjoy it more than you enjoyed it when you were 30 or whatever it was? You do? Because.
- [30:24]
Patti Smith
Well, one is, I'm a lot healthier. Because back then, all the halls, whether there were thousands of people or small, were filled with thick smoke. Cigarette smoke, pot Smoke. And I was always getting bronchitis and now there's no smoke. Smoke. And so I'm able to do. I just did almost 50 concerts this summer and in like a heat wave.
- [30:53]
David Remnick
Some of them in front of gigantic crowds. Some in front of a few thousand, some in front of 100,000 at Glastonbury.
- [30:59]
Patti Smith
Yeah. But the thing is, I did all of those in the middle of the heat wave. I'm 68 years old. I didn't have any trouble because I wasn't cutting through clouds of smoke. Smoke. But also I like it because there's so many young people come to our concerts. Our band is really lucky because we attract young people. And I think it's because of the book, because it's really funny. In the old days there would be people come in with your record and then it was a cd. And now I look in the front row and everybody's got.
- [31:33]
David Remnick
Just kids.
- [31:34]
Patti Smith
Just kids.
- [31:35]
David Remnick
Wow.
- [31:35]
Patti Smith
And it's, it's kind of nice, but we're an old fashioned band. We don't have any cues, we don't have a lighting guy, we don't have tapes. We're just a rock and roll band. We're pretty raw. If we mess up, we just laugh or I'll talk to people.
- [31:52]
David Remnick
I'm so glad to hear that.
- [31:56]
Patti Smith
But also young kids, I mean, sometimes they'll yell out stuff that they're concerned about or that they feel frightened about.
- [32:04]
David Remnick
What will they do?
- [32:05]
Patti Smith
It might be just like, you know, that they, you know, nobody cares about them or what shall they do if they don't have any money or because they feel you.
- [32:15]
David Remnick
They know you in a way that they don't know, you know.
- [32:18]
Patti Smith
Well, they know I don't know about that, but they know I'm going to talk directly to them and they know that I'm not going to, you know, I don't pamper them.
- [32:29]
David Remnick
Meaning what?
- [32:29]
Patti Smith
Well, I mean, they. People say I don't have any money to put out my cd. And I said, well, get a job, you know, and get a job and.
- [32:37]
David Remnick
Because that's tough love.
- [32:39]
Patti Smith
That's what, you know. Well, that's what we did, you know, when we, when we did Horses, I was working at the Strand and Lenny was still working in a record store. We all had jobs, you know. And I thought when we finished Horses, then we go back to our job, you know, I took a little hiatus and they said, no, you tour. And it was like, tour where? And they said, finland. Going to Finland? I was ready.
- [33:06]
Jonathan Safran Foer
Yeah.
- [33:07]
David Remnick
Seeing Finland. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Now, this may be the worst decision of my life, although I somehow doubt it. You want to talk about the song?
- [33:26]
Patti Smith
Yeah, I can talk about the song. The song's a collaboration with Bruce Springsteen. Bruce was working on this song when I was recording Easter. And he was having difficulty with the lyrics, and unlike Bruce, but he was. And he had a great chorus and a very anthemic piece of music in my key. And he gave it to me. And at the time I had met my future husband, I had met Fred. We had a long distance relationship, and Fred was living in Detroit and I was living in New York. And, you know, we didn't have cell phones or nothing back then, and we didn't have much money. So long distance calls cost a lot of money. And so we only got to talk to each other once a week. So one night I was waiting for him and Fred was supposed to call me, like at 7:30. And then 8:30 came and then 9:30. And I know some girls would have been cool and just left, but I'm not that kind of girl. I'll just walk. Wait and wait and wait. So I didn't know what to do with myself. So I picked up this cassette that with Bruce's music, and I wrote some lyrics to occupy my time. And so Fred called me about midnight. And by then I had written the lyrics to what would become my most successful song. And that's why in this song it has these words. Have I doubt When I'm alone Love is a ring the telephone. Because I was waiting for a phone call from Fred.
- [35:32]
David Remnick
Ready?
- [35:53]
Singer performing 'Because the Night'
Take me now baby here as I am Pull me close Try and understand Desire is Hunger is the fire I breathe Love is a banquet on which we feed Come on now try and understand the way I feel under your command Take me now as the sun descends they can hurt you now can hurt you now can hurt you now well, well, well because the night belongs to lovers because the night belongs to us because the night belongs to lovers because the night belongs have I dealt When I'm alone Love is a ring the telephone Love is an angel Disguised as last Here in our bed until the morning comes but come on now Try and understand the way I feel under your command Take my hand as the sun descends it can arch it now now can't hurt you now can't hurt you now well, well, well, well, well because the night belongs to lovers because the night belongs to us.
- [37:45]
Patti Smith
Belongs.
- [37:46]
Singer performing 'Because the Night'
To lovers because the night belongs to. Although we're filled with doubt the vicious circle turns and burns without you oh, I cannot live and forgive the earning burning I believe it's time to feel, to heal Touch me now Touch me now Touch me now because the night belongs to lovers Belongs to us Belongs to lovers because the night belongs to us Cause we believe in the night we're lovers. Cause we believe in the night we trust because the night belongs to lovers because the night belongs to love.
- [39:14]
David Remnick
David Remnick, that was the great Patti Smith. I spoke with her in October of this year at the New Yorker Festival. I'm David Remnick. And in a minute, George Saunders interviews Jonathan Safran Foor. Where Jonathan Safran Foor interviews George Saunders. It's kind of hard to tell.
- [39:31]
Patti Smith
Thank you. I had a great time.
- [39:33]
David Remnick
That's just ahead in the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
- [39:55]
Rhonda Sherman
And I'm Rhonda Sherman.
- [39:57]
David Remnick
Rhonda, tell us why you picked George Saunders and Jonathan Safran Foer to do this. You could have gotten, I guess, any number of novelists or short story writers in dialogue.
- [40:06]
Rhonda Sherman
Well, they're friends, for starters, and that means they've already got a dialogue going on between them. And also I thought it might be great to hear what they're working on since they're both just about to finish new novels.
- [40:18]
David Remnick
George is working on his first novel, even though he's in his 50s, so there's a lot to talk about. So here's George Saunders and Jonathan Safran Foer, with Jonathan starting us off.
- [40:29]
George Saunders
So I wanted to begin by asking you something very, very basic, and it comes from something you say in your acknowledgments. In this book, you say, caitlin and Elena. Watching you all these years has taught me that goodness is not only possible, it's our natural state. So I thought, God, I don't know any other writer who would say that goodness is our natural state besides Anne Frank. And I started thinking about goodness and how it feels like your work is constantly engaged with goodness, and yet I don't really know what goodness is. It's not really morality.
- [41:05]
Patti Smith
Right.
- [41:05]
George Saunders
It's not really kindness. And I was hoping you could talk a little bit about that.
- [41:09]
Jonathan Safran Foer
Oh, yeah, sure. Yikes. Well, here's the thing. I never really could write very well until we had our kids. And then suddenly it was like the universe got saturated with kind of moral, ethical stuff that I felt like I could actually use. And then the experience of watching them made me think they really were naturally good. And then about that same time, we became Buddhists. And one of the things in The Buddhist teachings is that. Especially in the Tibetan one, is that there is this thing called Buddha nature. Everybody's got it, you can't earn it or get rid of it. And then what actually happens in our life is that these obscurations get laid in on top of it, partly by the thoughts that we're always having and the habits we acquire. So that. Just because it was exciting to me and it fit with what I was seeing with the kids, you know, that actually, if you start from the assumption that people are basically are all the same, they're just these little drops of nectar put in these decaying containers, you know, then it. I mean, I like it.
- [42:08]
George Saunders
It's a very strange description of.
- [42:10]
Jonathan Safran Foer
Or maybe that's just me.
- [42:12]
George Saunders
Just talk about it with your wife that way.
- [42:15]
Jonathan Safran Foer
But, you know, this idea that you're. If you. Any moral view we have is basically a scale model to help us do stuff, you know. So for me to say if everybody's basically that luminous thing in a container that sometimes works at cross purposes, that gives me a place to start, you know. Whereas the way I thought when I was younger, which is, everybody's f ed up except me, you know, then I felt I couldn't get any traction, you know. And for me, it took me back to early Catholic stuff, where that was kind of what the nuns were saying in between whacks, you know, was that. But I mean, for you. Because I actually would say, when I read your work, one of the things that always intrigued me about it and made me love it was that there is this questing quality, and I think that that person believes in goodness. So my big question that I wanted to start off with was basically, why do we do art? And second question is, is that a question that's actually meaningful to you? I think you sort of have to say, yes, it does a lot.
- [43:17]
George Saunders
It's a sweet drop of nectar. In my desiccated ovaries. I once heard somebody asked if he believed in God, and he said, I'm not only agnostic about the answer, I'm agnostic about the question, like if it could even mean anything because it's so definitional.
- [43:34]
Jonathan Safran Foer
When I think about why I sit down in the morning, there's a bunch of unholy or kind of crass reasons, but the one that really is continuing to feed me as I get older is that in the moment of engagement with the text, you don't really. You sort of have to step away from your ideas about it, at least when I do it and when you can do that when you can just respond to your text with the red pen and through many iterations. To see that thing get better than I am is really rich. I see a better part of myself starting to come through, and that's really. For me, it's been really addictive, you know, and when I think about why art, that's actually. Apart from the crafting, that's the. The one that I. I'm getting sort of more addicted to as I get older, as opposed to.
- [44:12]
George Saunders
Me, too. I completely agree.
- [44:14]
Jonathan Safran Foer
Yeah.
- [44:15]
George Saunders
When I started writing, I was committed to a desire to be known or understood or to have some sort of communion with an imaginary other or a real other, or just with myself. And that's fallen away, I think, and been replaced more by a commitment to this accident that you're talking about in.
- [44:33]
Jonathan Safran Foer
That thing you're calling the accident. How do you actually go about it? Is it iteration? Is it heavy revising? Is it some moment of insight or what.
- [44:40]
Patti Smith
What's.
- [44:43]
George Saunders
I had some flies enter my house not that long ago.
- [44:46]
Jonathan Safran Foer
That's it.
- [44:48]
George Saunders
And they write my books. No. And they apparently reproduced. And now there's lots of flies. I don't know what to do. And I went to the hardware store, and the guy sold me just this sticky paper, basically strips of paper. And I was like, what's this? He's like, just put them up. And I said, do they smell good? Are the flies gonna want to screw them? Like, what is good about this paper? And he said, they fly around enough that eventually they'll hit that paper. And sure enough, sure enough, they are covered with flies. So writing is like the sticky paper, you know, Like, I face the page, the blank page. I don't really approach it with too many notions, but a kind of openness to where things might. So you have to start somewhere. Nobody starts from nowhere. So you have to make some very basic decisions, even if they feel arbitrary. But then from that, the accidents start to happen. And the kind of uncontrolled growth. But it's also different at different stages in writing a book. I'm getting to the end of something, and I can't. The accidents are much, much harder to come by. And that kind of willful ignorance is disingenuous. I know what I'm doing. I know what I want.
- [46:03]
Jonathan Safran Foer
You threw the bowling pins off, and you can't pretend that you didn't. Yeah. Yeah. But at this stage of your life and your career, is there stuff that scares you in writing? Stuff that you kind of go towards because it's scary? Or lean away from. Because it is.
- [46:18]
George Saunders
I think just trying itself scares me. You know, I said to a friend the other day, we were talking about where I was with my book. I said, look, it's not as good as it could be, but I think it's the best that I can do right now. And she said, that is as good as it could be. What else would it be? Somebody else writing it, like a little better than you did, or you living a parallel life that was different. This is as good as it can be, as good as you can make it. Right now. I think that I'm not afraid of artistic choices at all. I'm afraid of saying this is the best I can do. And so there are a couple of responses to that. One is not to show anybody, and the other is not to try ever. Yeah, And I often just don't try, but it catches up to you. And so that's sort of, I think, been the. What I've been facing down in the last year or so. How about you?
- [47:19]
Jonathan Safran Foer
Well, it's funny because I'm finishing up a book, which is a novel, which is, for me, that's new territory. And what I'm noticing is that. Exactly that, like, it's. I don't know when or how to stop, actually. You know, I think, well, I just keep doing this the rest of my life and, you know, keep tinkering with it. So that's scary. And then the other thing I found as I'm getting older is I took a while to publish my first book. Didn't come out until I was 38, which age 37 or something. So when I finally was able to, I felt like, oh, my God, the grail. You know, I finally figured out what I do and what I don't do. Note to self, keep doing that, you know, and then at some point, that wears out because whatever it was that got you in the door in the first place has to grow and evolve. So what I'm finding now is just that my. I think my work is generally moving towards something that I would say lets in more light, lets in more of the positive valences that I've experienced. But that's a little scary, you know, to sort of give up whatever approach got you to the party is a little bit scary. But otherwise, you're like shark, you know, you go to the bottom of the tank.
- [48:23]
George Saunders
I find that description really strange that you say you let in more light. And I've read before that, you know, you feel like your work is inclined toward a kind of cruelness. That. And when I read that, I didn't get it at all. It's just so. Absolutely not how I feel. I feel much closer to something else that you said, which was that you're engaged with this act of kind of redeeming the holiness of daily activities. The example you gave was a dog licking Its. Actually, yeah, we do that one. So those are two extremely different models. You could say it's through cruelty that you redeem things and. But it's actually hard for me to imagine what you even mean when you say letting a light in that wasn't there before.
- [49:08]
Jonathan Safran Foer
Yeah, I mean, I. Well, I had, you know, Michael Silverblatt. You interviewed him. He's a great interviewer, and he always. We have good interviews, but he always nails me in the hallway. Like, he'll get me, like, teary or something. But one time he said to me, he said, I notice a lot of young writers are trying to sort of imitating you, but what they lack is cruelty. I'm like, michael, you know, I'm not. And he said, no. He said, no. I think actually the power of your work is proportional to the cruelty that you show towards your characters. And I, in the midst of denying it, some kind of tears came up, like, oh, shit, that must be true. You know, so there's something about that. And I'm not. I'm never really. I can't really articulate it. But my point is just that it's kind of thrilling to get to this stage of life and say, oh, yeah, the finish line is not yet, and what's frightening to you is probably a pretty decent direction to go in, you know, so that's why I'm becoming a ballet dancer. I wanted to announce that here at the festival. I wanted to ask you something because I hadn't read Eating Animals before the last couple weeks, and I just loved that book so much. And one of the things I loved about it was the tone, which, to me, the word I kept thinking of was courteous. Like, it's a really hot button topic. And yet throughout that book, you're doing this beautiful. Kind of running around to the other side of the table, anticipating the reader's questions coming back around. And I found it so convincing in the subject matter, but also as kind of a model for why rhetoric is good, you know? So I was wondering if you could talk about how you settled on that tone or stumbled on it, whether it was something you did through craft or maybe your previous life had trained you in it, or.
- [50:51]
George Saunders
So, you know, when I write fiction. I know that I want to move somebody. I just don't know how, you know, like in what direction, with what kind of experience. I just know that I want to create something that is transporting. With eating animals, I knew how I wanted to move people. You know, there was. I had an old teacher in college sculpture, and his definition of art is it's the thing that is perfectly useless. And when something begins to take on a use, it can't be art anymore because it's going to be compromising. It can never be made for its own sake. Art is the only thing in the world that's made for its own sake. So eating animals was definitely not a work of art because it had a real use, a utility that I intended, which is not to make people vegetarians. Although it makes me happy when somebody says, that book made me a vegetarian. The function was really to expand a conversation that feels repressed. Like if I said to you, you should really drink a different kind of bottled water, you might think I was a little annoying, a little obnoxious, a little presumptuous, but you wouldn't freak out. Probably. But when you say to somebody, you should think about eating less meat, a lot of people freak out. And I think part of that might be because there's a culture of kind of aggressive vegetarians or annoying vegetarians. But I think a more powerful explanation is that everybody agrees that it matters. It just matters a lot. Life and death matter. And choosing death, or in the case of factory farming, which is to say really all meat in America, choosing cruelty, choosing environmental destruction for culinary pleasure is. It's an awkward thing. It's a difficult thing to approach. And you know, you said I would move back and forth across the table. It's because I move back and forth across the table. I don't think these things are simple.
- [52:52]
Jonathan Safran Foer
Do you have a sense of your political relation to the larger country at this point in your life? How do you like America? That's my question. Yes. Do you like America? Yeah. Yeah. And if so, why?
- [53:09]
George Saunders
I think I could really say I'm agnostic about the answer and agnostic about the question. You know, what America like, small town America, urban America, political America, cultural America. There are a lot of different Americas. And say, I like this or I don't like that. It doesn't make any sense.
- [53:29]
Jonathan Safran Foer
See, that's what middle age is. It does make sense to me.
- [53:33]
George Saunders
There are certainly moments I took my kids to this just corny, low budget amusement park in Connecticut not that long ago, and we were standing in line for one of these trampoline things where they hook you up to a harness. And in front of us was like somebody wearing a turban, somebody wearing a kippah, a black person, white family. And I said to them, you know, there's nowhere else on earth where you would be standing, standing in a line like this and be happy to. And everybody's watching the person in front and cheering for them. So that's an oversimplification of America. But I don't think that, you know, despite the endemic problems, I still think no one has succeeded as well as we have in creating situations like that.
- [54:25]
Jonathan Safran Foer
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you very much.
- [54:31]
David Remnick
Novelist Jonathan Safran Foer talking with George Saunders, author of some of the best short stories of our time from the 2015 New Yorker Festival. Next week, a political campaign story unlike any you've ever heard before.
- [54:46]
Patti Smith
C to the A to the Rly Vote, Carly Fiorina. I'll tell you why. She's not gonna fill our nation with any more problems. Unlike her opponents, she can actually solve them.
- [54:55]
David Remnick
The presidential primaries reimagined by high school kids. That's next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for joining us today. I hope you had a fantastic holiday. See you next week.