Jonathan Lethem on Novel Writing as a Memory Art

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TRANSCRIPT

SPENCER BAILEY: Hi, Jonathan. Welcome to Time Sensitive.

JONATHAN LETHEM: Thank you for having me. This is long in the making, so lots of anticipation for me.

SB: Yes. And not far from the street you grew up on.

JL: Totally. I just walked from the block I grew up on, on Dean Street, because I had brunch with an old friend there and then took what for me is like a classic walk, along Dean and Pacific, up Clinton, and then Henry. I used to go to the movies on Henry Street. There was a little tiny theater, right near Fascati Pizza.

SB: Yeah, up until maybe a decade ago. And even to the end, they had the little ticket stub, the tear-out ticket stub….

I wanted to begin with a subject that I know is near and dear to your heart, which is book dedications.

JL: Oh, that’s nice.

SB: In an interview last year, you said, “Over the decades the thing that’s surprised me the most is how no one ever asks about a book’s dedication.” So I’d like to start our conversation on the subject of your book dedications and begin by asking you about your new book, Cellophane Bricks, which is dedicated to Bob Newman and the High School of Music and Art. Tell me about the significance of Bob.

JL: I’m so glad you asked me. Finally, it’s happening!

SB: [Laughs]

JL: And that’s a really unusual dedication for me in one specific way, which is that I hadn’t… Sometimes the books have a necessary or obvious longstanding dedicatee. You’ve been pointed to that dedicatee consciously or semi-consciously for years of planning and writing the book, the way Motherless Brooklyn was for my dad and then The Fortress of Solitude was for my sister. And when you’re taking care of basic things like that, you can feel it and you know it. Then others are dedicated to a partner or an old, old friend. I see in your stack The Disappointment Artist, which was dedicated to my dear old friend from Park Slope I grew up with, Maureen Linker. And you feel it coming and it’s very satisfying to finally do it. How do people who only have three or four books handle this? Fortunately, I have a lot of books so I can hit all of these really necessary marks. But I started my dedicating life… Are you ready for a long answer to your question?

SB: Yeah. [Laughs]

JL: I started my dedicating life with maybe a curveball. A lot of people dedicate their first book to their parent or parents. I dedicated my first book to my fourth-grade teacher, Carmen Fariña. She was very important to me. She was the crucial, watershed teacher for me in a lot of ways. But it still was sort of like… In a way, I think of it as an act of arrogance because it stated implicitly, if only to me, that I was going to have a lot of books [laughter], so I could start with my fourth-grade teacher. It was like I was confident that there would be books later to get to my parental dedications and…

SB: And not just any fourth-grade teacher. She became the New York City [Department of Education] Chancellor.

JL: That’s right. She was a legendary teacher, but I had either her first or second year of teaching grade school. So she was a very young woman and not a legend yet, although she was to me. She taught a great fourth grade. And then soon, she was the principal of that school and I was like, “Of course, she became the principal,” and then she rose and rose and rose until she was the chancellor. So it started to look like I was really sucking up with that dedication [laughter], but at the time I made it, it was just to a fourth-grade teacher.

So then I spent many years giving a lot of the big ones out, parents and oldest friends. When I did this book, Cellophane Bricks, which was full of writings about art and also confessions about my own backstory as an art student, of course it put me in mind of high school because I went to Music and Art, which is now LaGuardia, and I was a painter in high school. I was writing about that, and I was writing about the art of some of my friends who stayed with it, who became working artists, like Julia Jacquette. And I wrote about Rosalyn Drexler, who was someone who went to Music and Art many, many years before I did, happily still walking the earth. She’s in her nineties. So Music and Art was in the mix. 

Bob Newman was a teacher I had at Music and Art. Weirdly enough, he was a painter and got hired as a high school English teacher. So he was in this place but not teaching art. But he and I connected, and he was the teacher who assigned me The Great Gatsby—third year of high school maybe—and I was very attached to him. We would talk about art and movies and books. So he was in this interesting space for me of being an artist who was also someone I was talking about writing with since I was about to make that switch over from making art to making writing. But then again, I never really left the art world behind because I wanted to hang out with artists and think about art, and that’s why this book exists. 

Well, I’d forgotten about Bob Newman in some ways, but he came to a reading of Brooklyn Crime Novel in Albany. He presented himself. He was many decades older, and he’d shaved his mustache and he stood at the signing line and said, “Do you remember me?” And I looked up and I was like, “Oh, my God, you’re Bob Newman.” 

SB: [Laughs]

JL: It was about three weeks later that I had to dedicate this book, and I was like, “This is something I’ve never done before. I’m going to do this sudden dedication.” That was so moving and so special to be reconnected with him. I haven’t been imagining for decades that someday I’ll get to Bob Newman. He’s on my list of people to dedicate a book to. I was like, “This book is dedicated to Bob Newman.” It was just perfect. And then I stuck the High School of Music and Art in there to broaden it and incorporate—because I hadn’t seen him since high school.

SB: Yeah, the chasm of time between that, wow.

JL: So that’s the story on that one. Thank you for asking about it!

SB: And Brooklyn Crime Novel, you dedicate to the playwright Lynn Nottage, who was your childhood friend, your friend today—you grew up on the same block as her.

JL: I grew up like eighteen street numbers down the block from her. And she and I just had brunch on the block on Dean Street at the corner of Dean and Bond. So it was great to see her. It’s always great to see her. Yeah, Lynn, I have photographic evidence that I was at her, I think it would be her fourth birthday party, along with a bunch of other overdressed kids from the block. I’m wearing a weird red sports jacket that they’d stuffed me into. Her parents were proxy parents for me. Like all the parents on that street, they were looking out for all the kids who played out on the sidewalk. So when Lynn and I get together, it’s a deep— It carves very deep into time and memory and consciousness. Really, I knew Lynn before I can remember.

SB: Yeah. I’m sure some people might see that and be like, “Oh, this is a humblebrag-y dedication,” or something, like, this award-winning playwright—

JL: Yeah. She’s stellar, and so it looks very suspicious, right.

SB: But who knew this block would birth these two internationally—

JL: So strange.

SB: —known, renowned authors and artists…

JL: So sweet for us to get to gloat like that. It’s a gloat-y dedication, but I’ll actually suggest something else, which is that if you hold on to people—you can hold on to all sorts of people, and I’ve held on to all sorts of people—some of them are going to become the masters of reality, of some version of reality or another. And I think that one of the things I like about my connection with Lynn—so ancient—you can’t be calculating that this 4-year-old is going to win the Pulitzer Prize. You’re just hanging out. You’re like, “Do you like me? I like you. Do you want to play ball? Let’s play ball. Do you have a ball? I think I might have one.”

But I got implicated in this other thing, which got a lot of attention in the last few years because of a podcast, actually, which is that I was at college with some people at Bennington College, by accident. [Laughs] And I was really there by accident. I mean, in the most profound sense, I didn’t belong there. And we have become accidentally married through time, me and these two other writers, who were undergraduates at Bennington College at the same time. And it’s great. It’s kind of awful. [Laughs] It’s kind of ridiculous. It doesn’t make any sense.

SB: This is Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt.

JL: Yes, yes.

SB: Yes.

JL: It’s exhausting….

SB: We don’t need to dwell on it, though. Let’s—

JL: I love it, I love it, but it’s ridiculous because we just happened to be there. So the me-and-Lynn thing, which really cuts a lot deeper into my sense of self, is I think there may have been a little bit of a slightly bratty pushing back at the whole… “The Bennington Generation.” I’m like, “What about the Dean Street Generation?”

SB: Yeah.

JL: What about the “Dean Street Between Bond and Nevins Generation?”

SB: And then by the late nineties, you’re lumped in with the “Brooklyn Jonathans,” which just became its own—

JL: Oh, yeah. Well, that’s another weird thing, to get stuck to your first name like that, after escaping so many traps. [Laughs] I was a genre escape artist. I kept slipping the bounds of these categories and then I ended up in the dumbest category of all, which is some other guys with your first name who you have really very, very little in common with.

SB: [Laughs] All right. So I think it’s worth noting here that time—and in this podcast, we talk a lot about it—you’ve written a lot about this subject, directly and indirectly and in your fiction and in your nonfiction. And so broadly, I thought we’d start there. Do you have an awareness of this time link, and how do you think about time in the context of your work?

JL: It’s so great to think about it after just taking that walk from Dean Street up to your beautiful quarters here. It’s magical for me. I get inside buildings now that I looked at the outside of for sixty years. [Laughs] I think about the collapsing of time in my memory forge so much when I’m walking these streets because all I can do, helplessly, is tabulate what’s the same and what’s transformed and the irreconcilable, incommensurable mystery of that as you grow older and older. And I’m getting old. Now I’m 60. And I look at these building fronts or the stoops or even just the sidewalks themselves and I am transported to moments that are… They’re dust, they’re memory dust. 

But I can still think about walking with my friend Benjy when we were—not even cutting school—cutting day camp [laughs] in order to just walk around Brooklyn Heights and talk and then circle back to his house after his parents were gone and they wouldn’t know we’d done it to drink soda and listen to Beatles records and play Monopoly because that was better than day camp. And then they were so slack about taking attendance that we got away with this for like a month one summer.

And here I am having this feeling, this experience again. I was blessed with… Genetically, my mother had a famous memory among her friends. She was like a memory artist. She would startle people with reciting whole conversations they’d had and reminding them of things that maybe they didn’t even want to be pinned to. And I grew up with a memory that it’s not good for… I’m not good at the memory tricks that are mathematical, but for conversations and people and feelings and situations, I’m often playing the same role. I remind people of stuff that they did when they were a kid or when we were in our twenties, which is a long time ago.

I’ll be like, “There was this party and this is who you had a crush on and this is who I had a crush on and this is what we did that night.” And they’ll be like, “How the hell are we still there in your head?” And I’m like, “I don’t know, I’m just stuck with it, I’m saddled with this,” which is for a novelist, of course, an enormous gift. And among the many things that this art requires of you, to some extent, it is a memory art, which terrifies me because, unlike my father who’s painting beautiful paintings in his nineties, even though he often doesn’t know exactly what day it is anymore. I mean, he’s doing well for nineties, he’s not only able to paint the way [Willem] de Kooning was. He can also enjoy himself and have a conversation, but he couldn’t write a novel. [Laughs]

And I wonder, when will I stop being able to do this? Because you have to build a world and then remember it—enter into it all these relationships, all these imaginary people and situations, and relate one part of a novel to another. That’s a memory art. So this is a gift for me. Anyway, I do it helplessly, but there are times when it’s also in intimate life or just between me and myself, sometimes my inability to have the blessing of amnesia. I sometimes wonder, might it be okay—or even better than okay—might it be nice to let some of this stuff float away, to not be chewing over it all, like me and Benji walking on that sidewalk [laughs], because some of it’s not benign. Some of what you remember is what keeps you up all night, things you didn’t get right in an encounter when you were in seventh grade or in your relationships in your twenties or something. You’re still working on them.

SB: Cellophane Bricks, to go back to your new book, it’s, in many respects, a book about art as much as it is a book about time. As you put it in the book, “I’m unpacking the time that lurks inside these evidential objects.” [Laughs] I had to pull that line because I feel like when you talk or write about art, you’re also writing about time. I was wondering how you think about this writing about art and writing about time.

JL: Great. Well, you’re making me think of something, and I’m going to just run with it, which is that when I tried to explain, first to myself and then to other people, why I switched from making paintings to wanting to work with narrative… First I wanted to make films or comic books and then I settled on actually prose narratives, just writing stories, and I let go of the visual stuff entirely and I decided to become a novelist. That was a consequential shift for me. There’s a lot of reasons it happened, but I often said that the limit I hit making paintings was that I couldn’t do time. I couldn’t make them tell stories in time.

And so it’s so interesting to hear you isolate that line in Cellophane Bricks where I’m almost confessing that now I can see the time hidden inside paintings. I relate to them that way. And this is a book… Cellophane Bricks, it’s a series of accounts of something that’s deeply mysterious to me, which is my permanently charged relation to having abandoned an art practice and then wanting to collect it around me like a blanket—to hang out with artists, to visit their studios, to think about paintings, to own paintings and stare at them and be with them. And yet I stopped making them, so decisively, and it’s like a death. It’s a kind of an end that I brought on myself.

And that itself, of course, is now a story that I can study. It exists in time and it’s evolving in time. One of the weird things in the book, I confess that out of nowhere, thirty years after the last time, I made a painting. Not a really important one to anyone except me, but there I was and I was like, “Oh, I can still do that.”

SB: A bird.

JL: Yeah. Look at me, painting this bird. And then I stopped again. And now I just stare at that bird and I’m like, What does that mean? That I did it again. After a while, everything—the streets, the paintings, the people around you—you see the time that’s trapped inside the present. When I was writing Brooklyn Crime Novel, people would say to me… Because I bring the neighborhood up to the present—technically. Up to 2019. I didn’t want to deal with quarantine. I was writing it in quarantine and I was like, “Let me just make the present 2019. That’s good enough.” It’s about characters who were embedded in the past and can’t let go of it, like me, but who are still alive and are still thinking with the streets, thinking about the city and with the city as well as they can.

People would ask me to weigh in on the present situation, you know, like, “What’s gentrification now? What’s Boerum Hill now?” And I would be very cautious, I would say, “I actually can’t see the present. My eyes are so embedded in pushing through the layer of the present to unlock these secrets in the past that I don’t know that I could be trusted to report on what’s in front of my eyes right now. You have to ask someone who’s not using these helpless time machine binoculars that I’m stuck with in front of my eyes. That’s all I can look through now.”

SB: I’m so struck here because, when I was preparing for this, I came across a piece you wrote in The Collapsing Frontier, another book that came out earlier this year, and you write about the profound effect of Italo Calvino’s writing and work on your writing and practice—and linking time and trauma, actually. And the quote is, “The lasting relevance of Calvino’s traumas to my own encourages my suspicion that in some way we still live inside 1945, or only a few years after, oozing through a slow-motion version of the Cold War world that followed.” So it’s a sort of stuck-in-time idea and that time has stopped and is almost unable to progress beyond a certain moment. So I guess, could you talk a little bit about that “stop time”? Do you see the link between what you were saying and that?

JL: Sure, that’s great. This thought about the postwar world, we can see it in very cartoonish form when Republicans can still get elected by scaring people about their opponents being Communists. [Laughs] It’s like, that kind of works because there’s a part of everything that’s still lodged in that breakdown, the trauma and reconfiguration where you swerve and the evils of Nazism are instantly supplanted by the Cold War, [Joseph] Stalin, and then it justifies everything, right? It organizes everything. Korea and Vietnam and the Red Scares and the culture wars all seemed to, in a way, have been born in that same instant. I often think about the perversity of how much of our reality is still dictated by J. Edgar Hoover’s closeted sexuality.

The rumor is persuasive that the mafia had the goods on him. They had pictures of him in a pink tutu or whatever. So he took the foot off the gas. The FBI’s original mission was to fight organized crime. And so he had this enormous machine of operatives and he had the authorization of the president to operate this incredible machine, and he pivots and starts pursuing this more, in a way, chimerical thing of the subversives, the Reds, in every organization because then, they won’t publish the photo of him in a pink tutu. [Laughs]

I’ve oversimplified things probably a little bit in that story, but we’re stuck in these incredibly rudimentary forms of panic and reaction and fear that are still these… It’s like an ur-text moving inside and underneath so many of the things that we think of as the contemporary twenty-first-century paranoid, internet, unreality that it must all originate with the internet. Well, I think maybe there are some problems with the way internet life reorganizes our neurology and our reactivity and plays with it, diddles it, basically twenty-four/seven. But the themes, the forms of anxiety and panic and amplified fear and rage seem to me much, much deeper, and you can trace a lot of them. I mean, modernity is the story of the two World Wars.

Also, the trauma of, the shock of World War I originates so much of modernism and the disappointment in the new global technological possibilities that they were all shackled to the purposes of trench warfare and the nightmare of World War I. Have we even finished reacting to that, the crushing, maddening realization that we weren’t in control of these forces, that they were going to be in control of us? That’s where you get the modernists and you get the Dada movement and, out of them, you get hard-boiled detective fiction, which comes from [Ernest] Hemingway and Hemingway comes from Gertrude Stein, and Gertrude Stein is essentially a Dadaist writing about how nothing makes sense. And the hard-boiled detective is wearing a trench coat.

Well, what’s that a reference to? They’re all traumatized World War I veterans. It’s trench warfare. None of his stuff is that esoteric, but we forget that we’re still in these reactions to the traumas. I wrote a novel called Dissident Gardens. And a lot of that book was about trying to relate my own life politically to my grandmother’s experiences as a disappointed, betrayed, paranoid Marxist. She was of the generation that idealized the Soviet Union and it’s tormenting to consider the fate of that kind of idealism faced with the realities of the twentieth century—the pact with Hitler and then the Khrushchev revelations. 

Then my parents were from the postwar era. They were essentially boomer, anti-Vietnam idealists, and civil rights idealists. And I was raised in this atmosphere of the new left and how change could really be affected, and yet there was some way in which I was wary or anxious on their behalf. I felt Reaganism coming. I could see the shrinking circle in the seventies of my parents’ idealistic hopes and how they were… And I identified with my grandmother’s skepticism about that and I was like, “What is this skipping-a-generation traumatic thing?” 

And then this study was circulating that caught people’s imagination that asserted that trauma skipped a generation and that people actually, for whatever reason, tend to be processing their grandparents’ form of trauma. Well, I don’t know. That may have been debunked or qualified to some extent. It seems a little… I mean, it seems metaphorical, but as a metaphor, wow. It really landed for me because I was like, “Why do I feel more like my grandmother than like my mother about my relation to history? Why do I feel morbid and disappointed when my parents are all Age of Aquarius about everything? And how did that get into my DNA, my psyche?” So I tried to write about this identification with the… I was born a pre-demoralized leftist.

[Laughter]

SB: I love that that brought us back to Brooklyn, more or less. And somehow your answer captured almost an entire century there. 

Going back to Cellophane Bricks, and just sticking on art and time for a little bit, there’s so much I appreciated in that book about how you were exploring time, whether it was in the case of John von Bergen’s drawings—you likened them to “time taffy.” Or in one of the essays in the book about the artist Nan Goldin’s work, there’s this beautiful passage about time. You write, “A human life becomes a bridge in time. Abide long enough, you’ll detect the weight of it, the presence of a continent of lost things extending behind you.” More or less, what you just talked about, a line that feels actually quite Fitzgeraldian somehow.

JL: Yeah, you’re right. That sounds like the ending of…

SB: Of The Great Gatsby.

JL: …Gatsby. Yeah.

SB: Yeah.

JL: Yeah.

SB: Maybe elaborate on this idea a little bit of life as a bridge in time.

JL: Well, I think this does come out of my last remarks about my grandmother. Of course, now I’m old enough that I notice the incredible coherence and articulation of utterly different views of reality in my students, in my own children, in people I want to identify with and am eager to talk with and be persuaded by—and am persuaded by. And then I have to try to conjugate it against these sensations that are locked inside my body. It’s like somatic time, where I’m like, “Yes, yes, you’re right. That’s true. It’s not okay. That’s not okay. We can’t have that anymore.” 

And I’m like, “But should I say that I remember when we felt differently?” And everyone knew why things were like that. And even if they’re unjustifiable in present terms, I’m a witness. I’m a living bridge in time to when reality was configured otherwise and how to bring that knowledge into meaningful present use, to not become this curmudgeon or reactionary, but instead to just accept that you know how it was otherwise, even as you see it changing is… I guess it’s the art of acceptance, but also, it demands that you testify very precisely so as to offer yourself up as a warning and an example that things may not always seem as simple as they do, as they seemed to me when I was organizing my certainties, the lion’s share of which are in tatters now. [Laughter]

I have to be glad that I had them and that I can still identify them, but also, I only want the very few and best of them to be carried forward. I don’t want my useless certainties. There’s a line that I reused in that essay, “The Ecstasy of Influence,” but it comes from Lawrence Lessig where he said, “The nature of a time can be grasped in what doesn’t need saying, what is taken entirely for granted.” And I think it’s bottomlessly profound. It’s the things that no one thinks we need to even articulate that are defining this present moment. And later, they might look like a thing that really needs to be discussed and described quite a bit. [Laughs]

SB: There’s actually a line I pulled from “Ecstasy of Influence,” in which you write, “A time is marked not so much by ideas that are argued about as by ideas that are taken for granted.”

JL: Yeah, there I am restating Lessig again or maybe quoting him, exactly. That might be his words.

SB: “The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense.”

JL: There it is. Those are his lines. Thank you. Yeah. Well, that’s him, not me. But I organized myself in that essay around my fascination with that because that essay was written in spirit of what seemed like an immediate political urgency, which was the copyleft movement. I was really into this notion that we needed to talk about intellectual property because it had been abused and was being abused more and more by corporate expansions of the term of copyright, things that are very wonky and lawyer-ish that I’m not usually interested in, but I was like, “Oh, wait, this is bad.” 

This is privatization. This is the commons being taken away from the human brain in a way. The idea of who owns thinking or speech is being handed over to corporations. But at the same time, I felt like, “Well, this is a really ancient issue.” First of all, the idea of the commons in its privatization is a medieval term. And so I was like, “This isn’t just a sudden internet issue.” What happened to Hank Shocklee from Public Enemy, where he suddenly couldn’t sample records anymore, isn’t really only an issue that emerges with digital sampling. It’s something much bigger.

And if we want to talk about it in terms of art practice, it really transcends digital means of copying and sampling and reproduction. It’s like the conversation that’s happening around A.I. right now. You’ve got to historicize it and look at analogous transformations to get any handle at all.

SB: As if it’s not obvious, I did quite a deep-time reading of your work. [Laughs]

JL: Thank you.

SB: And by that, I mean I was fascinated to just see, “Oh, there’s Jonathan on time again. There’s Jonathan on time again.” And in another essay, where you were writing about New York City subway stations, particularly the Hoyt-Schermerhorn Station here in Brooklyn, you wrote this line that will make me never think of a subway station the same way again, which is that a subway station is “a sinkhole of destroyed and thwarted time.” [Laughs]

I’m pretty sure I’m going to just think that every time I go into a subway now. And I was struck also because yesterday, I listened to this episode that was on The New York Times’s Daily podcast, an interview with Robert Caro talking about The Power Broker, which is fifty this year. And he’s talking about his time stuck on the Long Island Expressway and how he was basically… He didn’t call it “thwarted time,” but I was thinking of your sentence when he was describing the thousands of hours that so many commuters—

JL: It’s another sinkhole, yeah.

SB: —yeah, have been stuck because of the decisions of one man. 

[Laughter]

JL: Yeah. Well, the subway is another, for me, deep contemplation because, of course, as I say in that essay, I remember it from before I remember anything. And a kid in New York grows up riding those trains and being fascinated with them, and then they become banal, frightening, or irritating, or just places you need to pass through, kill time, absent yourself. This is before cell phones. I read so many books on the subways because I rode for an hour from Brooklyn to Harlem every day to high school, and then back another hour. But when you forget your book and you have to really stop and look at the tracks or look at the tiles, look at the people, endure the waiting, and of course, there’s the late night, the train that never comes, the station is this place that human mind is trying to look away from, endlessly trying to replace. [Laughs] And yet human attention, human distraction, human experience is accumulating there, stacking up, piling up in a useless compilation of years.

There are pieces of graffiti that are still there that I laid eyes on, something scratched into a metal column, and there’s seventeen layers of paint over it, but you can still see it. That essay is one of the things that I worked the hardest on. I worked on it like I worked on a whole book. Before I even knew how to operate archives, I wasn’t good at this, I got myself into the M.T.A. archives, which are not easy to penetrate, and looked at photographs of the construction of the Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway station, things that didn’t even get into the essay, but I was living inside the mind of that station for months as I wrote that piece. And it also has Lynn in it.

SB: It does.

JL: Yeah.

SB: And The Warriors, this great film.

JL: That’s right. Well, I was on the set of The Warriors. It’s one of those phenomenal things. Much better than I was at Bennington was that I was on the set of The Warriors. More formative still. [Laughs]

SB: Well, just sticking on time a bit longer, you wrote these great profiles of James Brown and Bob Dylan, and I wanted to bring those up. They were published in Rolling Stone in 2005 and 2006, respectively, and they hit on some, what I would call “time truths,” at least as they pertain to these two artists. And the James Brown one I wanted to quote. It’s really good. “James Brown is like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, a man unstuck in time. He’s a time traveler, but unlike the H.G. Wellsian variety, he lacks any control over his migrations in time, which also seem to be circumscribed to the period of his own allotted life space. Indeed, it may be the case that James Brown is often confused as to what moment in time he occupies at any given moment.” Could you speak about these experiences—

JL: Yeah. Thank you.

SB: —with Brown and Dylan? How remarkable that you got to profile them, spend time with them.

JL: Totally. Insane that I was in those spaces and it seems like a dream I had now because I haven’t gone on interviewing the world’s most legendary musicians. But anyway, how many are there at that level? So it’s like I went straight to the summit and then I just lived in the flatlands for the rest of my life and I just look up at the mountain every once in a while. I’m like, “I was up there once.”

They are two really different experiences, first of all, to characterize because the Dylan time, which I cherish, was three hours in a hotel suite, specifically at Shutters in Santa Monica, and super professional in every respect. He was there to do a piece of work. It was affectionate. He’d read Motherless Brooklyn and liked it and flattered me by talking about that. He’d handpicked me from a very short list of writers to talk to. But he knew that he’d agreed to do this in exchange for the cover of Rolling Stone to promote his new record. At that point, I don’t know if this is still true, he basically made that deal with either Rolling Stone or Time or Newsweek for each record and he would give one big interview and get the job done. So he was there to take care of business, and we had a great conversation, but it was in and out and the publicists were in control.

James Brown was a whole other trip because he had never consented to let a writer into the recording studio before. And he had a very at-odds relationship with Rolling Stone and the idea of being covered by them, so I had to win the trust first of his organizational people. Then they said, “Well, it’s still up to him. He’s going to meet you and he’ll like you or he won’t. And he decides at the drop of a hat and we can’t control that.” Every part of it was this weird— It was getting into a citadel. And then once I was inside, the citadel turned out to be this absolutely anarchic scene where the lunatics were running the asylum. 

And Brown was very old. It turned out to be the last recording sessions of his life. But he was incredibly energetic and unpredictable, scary at times, a fascinating, boundlessly energetic human being to be around who wasn’t interested in giving me an intimate time the way Dylan at least wanted the impression of intimacy. Brown wanted to impress me and freak me out and teach me things. And he wanted to indoctrinate me into the cult of being in his presence, which is what his musicians and hangers-on were in. And he was like, “All right, you’re going to ride with the group.”

So I was with the musicians and I was experiencing all this crazy stuff, and it was four days, but it became more because I traveled to England and rejoined the entourage for a while. That was a real episode in my life experience. I identified with the band because I was with them a lot more than I was with Brown himself. And they told me crazy stories, so many more than I could put into the piece. But I do believe that he is in this unstuck relationship to time. 

And I started to see that as the fundamental thing I needed to explain about James Brown, that he wasn’t living in one moment; he was living in many moments simultaneously, which is why he was a musical visionary and why it was like meeting someone who, in a way, was still a jailbird in the fifties who was angry and wanted to bust out and create himself. He was all of those things simultaneously. He was still on the set of The Blues Brothers, reliving those moments. He would talk about things as if they were happening in front of him.

So in a way, what is that? It’s a model of consciousness, right? When I say that I’m stuck with my memories, I can’t walk down the street without living in the past. Well, I felt that he exemplified the problem of consciousness, which is that it’s moving in time. It’s in anticipations and memories and fantasies, parallel realities, as much as it’s right here.

SB: Well, I would love to go back to Brooklyn here, and I’ll do so through your fiction, specifically The Fortress of Solitude. There’s this great moment in that book where the narrator speaks about time in the mind of the book’s protagonist, Dylan Ebdus. The narrator says, “Time, he’d been told, would speed up. Days would fly. They didn’t fly there, on the floor of his father’s studio, but they would. They’d fly, the film would speed up and run together so fast it would appear to move, summer would end, he’d be in school, he was growing up so fast, that was the consensus he alone couldn’t consent to, mired as he felt himself to be utterly drowning in time there on the studio floor…” I know you’re not Dylan Ebdus. 

JL: [Laughs]

SB: I do know the book is semi-autobiographical.

JL: Oh, yeah.

SB: I wanted to ask, is this how you viewed your experience in time as a youth, sort of mired there?

JL: First of all, that’s a string of sentences I haven’t reencountered since I wrote them. So I’m really interested in them and I like them. Thank you for reading them to me. Yeah. What strikes me right now, because, of course, I have two teenage boys. So twenty years later, when I wrote Brooklyn Crime Novel, I had the benefit of being a parent of teenagers while I was writing about growing up. When I wrote Fortress of Solitude, the only subject I had was myself. The parts of my brain that were still a teenager’s brain, I had to go back and reanimate them. And those sentences are me reanimating that paradox of how everyone is warning you of how quickly you’ll grow up and not to grow up too quickly and to cherish your childhood and how rapidly everything will pass and, “Oh, my God, how big you’ve gotten,” and how you’re like, “It’s total molasses. These days are killing me. They won’t end. And when will sixth grade be over?”

It was an eternity of time. And yet, probably I could index it already, other parts of life. I remember childhood, being a toddler. I had pretty good memories of preschool and first and second grade, and those things had begun to seem far away, so I could kind of identify with the adults who were giving me this information. I was like, “Well, yeah, I can make a model of what you’re talking about, but it’s not what I’m experiencing today. It’s not how it feels.” So I was two things at once. I was the grown-up who would agree to this notion that time was slipping away and moving up and speeding up. And I was like, “Get me out of here. Show me the way out of sixth grade.”

SB: [Laughs] And yet, you grew up in this condition, I think, where art was so central. And art, of course, is something where you can really lose yourself to time, whether it’s making a painting or going to The Met or the Whitney and looking at art. Your brother and his friends were cartoonists and graffiti artists and, as you’ve noted, you grew up “an art son and an art student, in an art city.” Could you talk about that, the art element of your upbringing, and how you viewed that art time? Because I imagine that was where you probably maybe didn’t feel the molasses as much.

JL: Yeah, that’s really interesting to think about its opposition. There’s a fundamental thought at the heart of that, which is actually a Dylan thought. I think he’s expressed this as concisely as anyone else, which is like “art is for stopping time,” when you make it work. And he says this about some song he’s written. He’s like, “I know it’s good when it stops time.” “Mr. Tambourine Man” or “Visions of Johanna” or whatever it might be, “Desolation Row.” And you can feel in the greatest of his songs that idea that, even though they’re moving through time, even though they have a duration, time is stopped by them.

Of course, that’s true of a novel when it’s working for the writer or the reader. Time disappears in a way that’s different from that it either speeds up or slows down. It actually disappears. It goes away. I boasted about my memory earlier. I think about the days of the writing of my books when I was in the grip, say, of a long novel, like writing Chronic City. I try to think about the days and where I actually can remember myself writing the book. What I remember is everything except the writing. I remember the surround, the context, the getting to the studio, the exit from the studio, the moment when I stopped to count the words or pages and was like, “Wow, I just did eighty pages in a month. I’ve never done that before.” But the actual moments of writing vanish—they don’t exist.

And at its best, of course, the experience of reading a novel that you’re in awe of and in the total—it commands your consciousness—is the same kind of experience. It’s certainly what you’re hoping to induce in a reader, dearly hoping it’s the precious thing you have to impart beyond any idea or sensation or thought or joke. You want to substitute a world for actuality and insist it upon the reader’s experience in that way that stops time. Well, did I know that that was the counterpoint to reality when I was a kid? 

I’ll say this. I think the place I tasted it best, apart from reading—certainly, I buried myself in books to change my reality, to transport myself from where I was and who I was, to become other than myself. But the place I tasted it best was not in museums or in studios or looking at my dad’s pictures or looking at other paintings but was in movie theaters—in the dark dream space of a movie theater. And I used to do things, crazy things like go to The Thalia alone. I would take the subway up to, what was that, 96th Street? I don’t remember. Somebody will correct me. One of your listeners will know. [Editor’s note: The Thalia, now Leonard Nimoy Thalia at Symphony Space, is located at the corner of West 95th Street and Broadway]. And go and buy a ticket to The Thalia alone on an afternoon when they were showing something. And there would be in the repertory houses in the city on a weekday in the summer. There would be three people in the theater.

And I would sit there and I would watch a movie three or four times over because they wouldn’t kick you out because what was their motivation for kicking you out? I once watched 2001[: A Space Odyssey] three times in a row in The Thalia. That’s making time disappear. [Laughter] That’s a three-hour film. And I was… Obviously, films are a very unique form of describing time, but also, when they work, they discharge time, they make it other than itself. And I was very interested in that sensation, for all kinds of reasons.

SB: I know you’ve written about the summer of Star Wars, too, that being a very impactful moment in your life. Returning to your youth, in your teens, your mom gave you this incredible gift on your 14th birthday, which was a typewriter, and this was just months before she passed away, at 36. She had fallen ill, suffered seizures, and then it was discovered that it was symptoms of a brain tumor. Could you talk about this harrowing period, this moment, and the gift of the typewriter, what that did for you, time-wise?

JL: Yeah. Right. So she lived just long enough to validate and/or predict or incept my change in focus from making paintings and drawings to what I’ve spent my whole life doing: Just adding words to this blank page or blank screen. It’s a strange way to spend decades. Sometimes I notice how strange an occupation it is. I don’t even mean as a profession, I mean as a devotion of my attention and energy and life force. Well, she was a great reader—I’ve talked about her memory powers—and she was also a great raconteur, a great talker. She had marvelous bookshelves that I…. I’ll tell you, now, we started with dedications. I just dedicated another book and I dedicated it to her memory, which I’ve never done before.

And I almost added… In the same way that I added, “and the High School of Music and Art” to Bob Newman, I almost added “to the memory of Judith Lethem and her bookshelves” because I had them after I had her and I was still with her when I was with them. What she wasn’t, in fact, was a writer. But her friends often said that they thought she would be a writer or she was meant to be a writer. And this was a mysterious area for me that after she died, people would say, “I always expected Judith to be a writer.” And what they meant was her passion for reading, combined with her memory powers and her talk, her verbal dexterity, and the flow of her words and stories and jokes. But I don’t know that she was meant to be a writer. And I think she didn’t ever claim it or declare it.

In fact, I think she may have said, “No, it’s not who I am.” And I think it was self-aware because she was much too social. She was much too involved in the world of people. It’s from my father, the painter, who retreats to a studio with such extraordinary regularity—to that isolated space to practice this strange inwardness—from whom I get that capacity. But I think she recognized in me that when I said, “I might want to write or I think I’m interested in writing” she said, “Well, you got to learn to type, kid.” [Laughter] And she didn’t only give me the typewriter. She put my hands on the keys in the right place. And she said, “If you just put them on the right keys to begin and you use all eight fingers, you’ll learn to type. You don’t need anyone to show you anything more.” And she was right. That’s all you need to learn. So I taught myself to try to write and to type the summer after she died. I wasn’t a writer yet and I hadn’t even stopped painting or declared really to myself totally that I was going to be a writer, but I learned to type and I was beginning what I would do. And, yeah, it’s an interesting juncture.

SB: You’ve previously said, “I find myself speaking about my mother’s death everywhere I go in this world.” 

JL: [Laughs] Today is no exception.

SB: So, would you say then that, on some level, your work is about processing or contending with, dealing with this loss? I know it’s a heavy, big question, but I think it’s not such a coincidence that your breakthrough novel from 1999 is called Motherless Brooklyn.

JL: Sure, of course.

SB: It’s right there.

JL: Yeah. Well, you know where that title comes from… I mentioned my friend Maureen Linker, who’s a philosopher and a teacher, professor, but grew up with me in the neighborhood. And she and I and our friend, Diane… I guess my mother died first and then Diane’s mother died when she was quite young. We were still at home. And then Maureen’s mother died prematurely. And Maureen joked with me. She said, “We’ve got to form a band called Motherless Brooklyn.” And that’s where the phrase comes from. I mean, of course… And it’s not a heavy question for me. It’s mysterious, it’s bottomless, but it’s animated in the sense that I wrote about Calvino’s essay “Lightness,” by my understanding that in our inmost selves, we have to animate around the darkness and the trauma or the loss.

For him, the sensations associated with the Fascist period in Italy and his suffering during the war, he connects that to his fanciful writings and he’s writing in that essay about how strange it is to him that he connects the two things so inextricably, the darkest things he’s handled as a person and the effervescence in his writing. And he compares this to Perseus, who defeats the Medusa by being lighter than air and using the reflecting powers of his shield to look at the darkness only indirectly, not to face the Medusa head-on, but to flip the darkness outward as an image to play with it and enchant it and transform it and mediate it, reflect it.

So my mother’s death is the worst thing that ever happened to me, and it’s been the most extraordinary enabling gift of a mystery that I recontextualize and reexperience in my art over and over and over again. I just wrote a long, short story this summer that uncovered ways of speaking directly about my mother’s death that I had never—I’m 60 and I had never quite gotten to before. I went back to that source and to do so may strike others as dark or it may make them feel sad for me. If I evoke sadness in my art, that’s meaningful, but I’m not suffering when I engage with my own deepest sense of self and experience—I’m being.

SB: Yeah. I normally don’t bring myself into an interview. But actually, my mother died when she was 36 also.

JL: Oh my goodness.

SB: And when I was researching for this, I was so struck by our coincidence and was thinking about how… I don’t have an answer to this, and I’d be curious to hear your thoughts, but there’s something about the motherless condition or being motherless that forces you to somehow process time differently. At least that’s how I’ve experienced it, but I don’t even have the words really—

JL: Of course.

SB: —to put toward that.

JL: See, I’m going to cry… As I did cry just now for myself, but I was grinning at you through the whole last answer. Now I’m going to weep copiously for you as I try to tell you what I think you mean.

SB: Yeah.

JL: You have the longest conversation, the forever conversation, with a parent.

SB: Yeah.

JL: But yours is with this woman trapped in time, who’s stuck where you lost her, and yet you still keep the conversation going forever. You say to yourself, “Oh, here, I’m showing you this now. Here’s who I’ve become. Here’s what I have to tell you about. Here’s what I think you would be interested in about the way the world is now.” I have that conversation with my mother every day. [Laughs] So, of course, there’s the James Brown thing again, you become unstuck in time that way because one never stops conversing with a parent.

SB: Mmm. Thank you. [Laughs] That was maybe a selfish question, but again—

JL: No, thank you. Thank you.

SB: —the coincidence. And I thought we would end our conversation on this quote of yours, and I’ve quoted a lot, but of everything you’ve written about time that I came across, there was this essay you wrote in 2008, “Things to Remember,” that I felt like really spoke a lot about not just memory or things to remember but about time. You’ve touched quite a bit on this human consciousness idea today. So I wanted to just read this quote quickly and then hearing these lines read aloud, get any parting thoughts you might have. You write, “Human consciousness may be time’s attempt to remember itself. It is possible we are only things to remember…. We’re here as much to forget as to remember, that’s what it means to punch the clock. To forget on time’s behalf. How could time hope to be forgotten without us?”

JL: [Laughs] Thank you. I haven’t looked at that in a very long time. I do see my work, increasingly, like a forensic reconstruction of moments’ lost things. The most I can do is remember myself anew and differently and remember the world anew and differently each time I make contact with language. So this conversation feels like writing now to me because we’re so in the grip of that mystery, but we keep using the word consciousness or I’ve brought it in even before you read that piece.

The mystery of interiority at all, on a scientific or philosophical level, is one you can get so totally lost in. I’ve almost been terrified of addressing it too directly. I have a tiny underdeveloped philosophical muscle. I mean, every now and then, I read just enough that I realize, Oh, I could have spent my entire life thinking about that. But in some way, I’ve flinched from that abyss, the abstraction because I think my instinct is that it’s enough for me to taste it in a glance or obliquely by reading a story by [Jorge Luis] Borges or Calvino. There are other writers who help me to notice that beautiful abyss of trying to understand what consciousness is, to begin with. But I think I’ve also… I just spoke of my mother’s leaning outward, away from the studio, away from the silence, the contemplation, the solitude into the space of others. And I think I’m made of both of my parents.

And so another reason that I’ve… Along with maybe that I’m just not cut out, I don’t have the cognitive hard edge that it takes to be a philosopher and to really stare into that abyss, I think I also have been equally compelled by where we are, this conversation, the intersubjective, the things that spark in the space where consciousness throws itself out of itself into the mixture with other minds. And that’s why I’m a novelist and that’s why I also do a lot of things that take me out of the beautiful but terrifying solitude of the studio or the blank page. I collaborate with musicians. I go to artists’ studios and I talk with them about their paintings. 

I’m trying to throw myself out of that solipsistic abyss of thinking about consciousness into the other magical mystery of another brain, another self, or a whole web of brains, a family, or a rock band, or a classroom. The seductions of the intersubjective space, the collective, the gestalt. That’s also something you could study forever. You and I together talking, and you ambushing me so brilliantly with your mother’s death. Now I’m having an experience that’s not about myself, that’s in the space between us. This is also so compelling that I would never substitute entirely one for the other. I want them both.

SB: Jonathan, thank you so much for coming in today.

JL: It’s been marvelous.

This interview was recorded in The Slowdown’s New York City studio on September 23, 2024. The transcript has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity. The transcript has been slightly condensed and edited for clarity. The episode was produced by Ramon Broza, Emily Jiang, Mimi Hannon, Emma Leigh Macdonald, and Johnny Simon. Illustration by Diego Mallo based on a photograph by Torkil Stavdal.