In “Holocaust: A History,” authors Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt recount a 1941 conversation between an Italian journalist named Curzio Malaparte and high-ranking Nazi officials shortly after Malaparte toured the Warsaw ghetto. Malaparte asked the Germans about the massacre earlier that year of 7,000 Jews by Romanian police and soldiers. One Nazi, Gov. Gen. Hans Frank, replied, “I share and I understand your horror at the Jassy massacres. As a man, a German and as Governor-General of Poland I disapprove of pogroms … We Germans are guided by reason and method and not by bestial instincts; we always act scientifically … Have you perchance even seen a massacre of Jews in the streets of a German city? … Yet, within a short time, not a single Jew will be left in Germany.”
As Dwork and van Pelt show, many Nazis, and especially the architect of the Holocaust, Heinrich Himmler, believed themselves to be “decent” and “surgical” murderers, performing a great and laborious sacrifice for the good of Germany. Throughout their absorbing history, Dwork and van Pelt reveal the dark complexities behind the Nazis’ war crimes — the rationalization of mass murder, the emergence of the “final solution,” the small events that drive an ordinary man to commit acts of genocide, the equally small events that turn other ordinary men into heroes. As Dwork explained to Salon in a recent phone interview, the Holocaust was a phenomenon that evolved as the war progressed, rather than something that was meticulously planned. Each decision and act built on the last, and ultimately constructed a catastrophe.
Dwork, a professor of history at Clark University, and van Pelt, a professor of cultural history at the University of Waterloo, are also the authors of “Auschwitz.” In this latest effort, they have plowed through mountains of source material in order to place the Holocaust, often treated as a singular event in human history, within the framework of the history of Western civilization — with surprising and fascinating results.
What’s different about this history of the Holocaust? What were you aiming for when you conceived it?
Debórah Dwork: We were aiming to step back, widen the lens. Often people think about the Holocaust as something that was outside of time, an aberration. If you ask, “When did the Holocaust start?” [most people] don’t know. Our goal was to fit the history of the Holocaust into the context of Western civilization so that people could begin to look at it as part of a larger piece.
So you don’t think that the Holocaust was an aberration?
Dwork: No, I don’t.
Why?
Robert Jan van Pelt: [In our book] we look at the nature of European racism in the 19th century. A combination of racist fury and nationalism had a deep and profound emotional reverberation in the collective imagination of people. Both of those created a very strong sense that there was an in group and an out group. The emancipation of the Jews just happened to happen right at that time. If it had happened a century earlier, maybe it wouldn’t have been the Jews who were selected for the Holocaust.
Second, the First World War was a catastrophic and cataclysmic event which really shook up all the values and certainties in European society. The war introduced the idea of mass death and mass murder — as in the Armenian genocide — as permanent parts of the European imagination, certainly the German imagination. Both of these things created a landscape in which ultimately the Holocaust could be contemplated by someone like Hitler in 1941.
You write that Hitler said, “Whoever thinks about the Armenians anymore?” Do you think that that genocide had a great effect on him?
Dwork: Yes, I do. It was a powerful model for him.
You also argue that the Inquisition and the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution were precedents for the Holocaust. Can you explain?
Van Pelt: The Inquisition and the French Revolution rejected the idea that those who live in a society have a right to live there. What the Inquisition formulates is that there is a group [of people] that stands between us and salvation and that group has to be removed if it cannot be converted. The French Revolution did the same thing. It broke with a traditionalist idea that what is inherited — even things that we can’t really cope with, like, for example, Jews — deserves a place because God wants it to be there. Both the Inquisition and the French Revolution had this revolutionary idea that people can radically change society and that will bring them to the Promised Land. That is something which the Nazis — and for that matter the Communists in the Soviet Union in the 1920s — adopted. Ultimately, it’s going to be the Jews or it’s going to be the Kulaks or any other group that’s perceived to stand in the way. They will become the victim. And it has genocidal implications.
Dwork: Why is it that hundreds of thousands of people are persuaded to get up every morning and go out and kill people? It’s not because they are bloodthirsty creatures. It’s because they believe they have embraced an ideology of salvation. In the case of the Inquisition, it’s a religious salvation: “We can achieve salvation and we have to get rid of the Jews to do it.” In the case of the French Revolution, it’s a secular salvation: “We can create a new society.” The same is true with the Nazi era. The reason why all these Germans were persuaded to act as they did was not because of sadistic delight, or the sexual pleasure of bloodthirstiness. It was built on this ideology of creating the perfect Germany.
So you don’t believe that anti-Semitism is a special type of racism? Some would argue that extreme anti-Semitism has existed for so many centuries and that the Holocaust was in some way inevitable. Or were the Jews just a group that was chosen at that time?
Dwork: Anti-Semitism was a necessary but not sufficient factor. It’s not an either/or but an and/and. Certainly, anti-Semitism played a very important role but we have lots of examples of incredibly anti-Semitic societies that did not murder Jews.
In the book, you write, “Were the Jews a separate people, a nation unto themselves, or could they be integrated into the new state?” How big of a role did nationalism play?
Van Pelt: The problem was: How does the nation define itself? The nation was defined [as some place] where people have done things in the past together. At a certain moment, Jews fit in that picture. If in any country the emancipation of the Jews had the greatest possible chance, it was in France on the basis of this kind of definition: “We’ve done things in the past together and we will do great things in the future together.”
The great problem was that most countries, and especially Germany, [relied on] the idea of racial descent. The idea was: “We descend from an original group, we are the descendents of the original Germans, and we have this original language in common.” Language becomes central in the definition of a nation. The people who speak German are Germans; the people who speak English are the Brits.
Of course, the question is: Is language natural to someone or not? Then, you get this absolutely absurd debate about whether a Jew can ever learn German. Wagner writes whole treatises on the idea that Jews destroy the language the way they pronounce it, and hence they destroy the inner values of the nation. A fantasy emerges of the Jew as a corrupter of the inner values. In most of 19th-century Europe, the idea of a common descent and a common language became the dominant ideological core of nationalism. It was very difficult for Jews to be integrated in that idea.
Why did these ideas appeal to Germany so much? I know that some Holocaust scholars say that it was something exceptional about Germany and their specific strain of eliminationist anti-Semitism. Do you agree that there was something special about Germany?
Dwork: Robert Jan, you take that one. We don’t actually agree on this 100 percent.
Van Pelt: The Romanians and others were quite happy to join. Let’s not only focus on the Germans as the sole perpetrators. We quote Georg Hermann [a German Jewish novelist who fled to the Netherlands when Hitler came to power] who writes in the 1930s about his memories of the First World War. Hermann says that before the First World War, anti-Semitism existed but it wasn’t really a problem: “Antisemitism was present, irritating as a gnat in a summer evening, but one frightened it away and found it quite pleasant out there, mild and warm.” For example, quite a lot of research is being done right now comparing anti-Semitism in 1910 at German universities and at Oxford. The anti-Semitism at Oxford was more pervasive than that at German universities which were the centers of German nationalism. What makes the Germans take the lead in this is very clearly based on the contingency of the First World War — the incredible defeat, what war means to the Germans, and then, the result of defeat.
[Debórah and I] certainly disagree with any person who says that the Germans have made themselves into the kind of perfect genocidal, eliminationist anti-Semites. The First World War and the very tough period after the First World War created the seeds. However, that doesn’t mean that the Holocaust was then unavoidable. German democracy seemed to work in the late 1920s. But then there’s the Depression and everything that follows from there. In our book, we try to reintroduce a sense of the historicity of the various elements that bring us to the Holocaust instead of engaging in the kind of essentialist discourse [that says that] the Germans were born to be genocidal maniacs.
Dwork: If we had to write one big sentence across the whole of our book it would be “Nothing is inevitable.” It’s step-by-step, and it’s a contingency. Many factors come together by accident, fortuitous circumstance, either with positive effect in some cases, or with negative, disastrous, horrific effect in others.
Can you explain why gentiles turned on Jews in Germany? In the 1930s, it happened so quickly — laws were passed banning Jewish business and suddenly little gentile kids were taunting Jewish kids on the playground. What foundations were there and why?
Van Pelt: When Germany found itself in a stalemate after 1915, a number of things happened very quickly. Before 1914, Germany as a nation-state was a very problematic thing. It was actually a collection of independent states like Bavaria and Prussia, etc. When the unified German state went to war, it was obvious that the dynasties could not answer why this war was going to be fought. An ideology was created that there was this other Germany, this inner Germany which was not embodied in the idea of the state. Instead, it was a mystical bond that united Germans of all different ranks and of all the different regions together. Who belongs to this [bond] and who does not starts to acquire very critical importance.
As the Germans were formulating this ideology, they started to exclude the Jews from that definition. That was based on these 19th century ideas of belonging to a nation because of language, etc. So it was only in the First World War that these 19th century ideas started to come to fruition. You get this idea that the Jews don’t share in this mystical union.
One German historian named Oswald Spengler basically says that the Jew can don a German army uniform, the Jew can die in the trenches, he can even earn a medal, but the Jew will never really understand what it means. He will never share with his comrades what it means to die on behalf of this nation. In some way, despite all his sacrifices, he’s not really part of this. Now, if a person who is “sympathetic” says that, think about all the other people who start asking, “Are Jews really fighting on the front? Or are they sitting comfortably in the offices of the army?” Those kind of rumors start to increase. It was that mystical, theological redefinition of the nation that drove the Jews out of the collective, at least in the imagination of the people.
Then, when the Nazis came to power, or when Hitler started disseminating his beliefs, were Germans fearful of him? Or did he make sense to them because of how they’d defined themselves?
Dwork: Absolutely. There is evidence of that. But I want to give you the countervailing position [to the notion of a special form of German anti-Semitism]. We know what the end result — the Holocaust — is when we hear the words of Spengler. But a recent historical study shows what was happening in the United States in terms of anti-Semitism and what was happening in Germany. In 1930, anti-Semitism was much more visible and blatant in the United States than in Germany. More hotels, country clubs and restaurants excluded Jews in the United States than in Germany. In 1930, going through upstate New York, it was common to see signs that said “No Jews, no Negroes, no dogs,” whereas in Germany those signs were nowhere to be seen in 1930.
Van Pelt: You asked about the fear of Hitler. In some way, Hitler was very attractive to many people. And that was because he was young. Ten years after the First World War there was a real sense of failure in Germany, a sense that the older generation had failed and that the young would be able to do what the old had failed. A little bit like 1968 in the United States. It’s strange for us to imagine when we look at the pictures, but Hitler and all of his guys were young people. That attractiveness of a fresh new beginning was really there. We forget that compared to all the other politicians and all the other people who were actually running the country, [the Nazi leaders] were half their age.
Dwork: They were exciting after such lackluster politicians before them.
And at the same time, the Germans were desperate.
Dwork: They were desperate. They had ricocheted from one disaster to the next. The Weimar Republic had a shaky start, then gained its stride in the mid-’20s. But it just couldn’t catch a break. The worldwide Depression had a devastating effect. One lackluster German government after the next took power, and achingly rigid and conservative politicians tried to enforce solutions that were not acceptable to the people. When Hitler came on the scene, people turned to him with a sense of relief. They looked to the experience of the Italians under Mussolini. They saw Italy on the rise again since 1922.
In fact, there were liberal-minded Dutch businessmen — the Netherlands wasn’t doing well at that time either — who went over the border into Germany in the mid-1930s to look at the German economy under Hitler. I interviewed one such man and he said, “The racist politics were not something I could accept, but the economic part of it was quite attractive to me at the time.” So it’s not just Germans who thought that this was acceptable. When Hitler came to power in 1933, the Western newspapers reported rather favorably.
Did the Western papers express any outrage to Hitler’s racist politics?
Dwork: Well, remember the United States in 1933 was a profoundly racist society. We had segregation. Racism was not a big shock for Americans. Strict racist policies against Jews as opposed to just exclusionary practices — that was a little surprising. But the United States was a different place then too.
Looking back, people might think: Why couldn’t more Jews and others leave right away? In the early 1930s, did they not think it would get that bad? How much did they feel the threat? Or was it that they simply couldn’t?
Dwork: Jews were desperate to leave in the 1930s. The problem was — who would take them in? The problem was not at all what was wrong with the Jews. What was wrong with the governments of the other countries?
But I’m wondering — did they perceive early that anything really awful was actually going to happen?
Dwork: It depends. Certainly, there were Jews who knew themselves to be at risk, and understood that if the Nazis came to power, then they had to flee. For example, communists of every persuasion, Jewish social democrats, but also other social democrats, people who had been critical of the Nazi regime. This pertained particularly to men. People generally thought that a regime would target men as political enemies, but that a regime would not target women and children. That was something completely new. So the first wave of refugees out were men.
When was this?
Dwork: Immediately, 1933. Some of them took their families with them but it was very complicated because there was a worldwide Depression and borders were closed. It was very difficult to get entry permits for Jewish refugees.
And America made immigration nearly impossible, didn’t it?
Dwork: That is correct. The State Department was profoundly anti-Semitic and wouldn’t even permit the fulfillment of the legal quota, let alone increase the quota to meet this need.
They made it difficult in terms of paperwork too.
Dwork: Absolutely. In the days before computers, fax machines and photocopying, people had to do 6-feet-long documents and 10 copies of it.
So Germans in general — gentiles and Jews — did understand the Nazi party’s threat?
Dwork: When you say “threat,” again, you’re saying that with the benefit of hindsight. The people who knew that they would be at risk — they knew to leave. But Jews, simply because they were Jews, did not understand immediately that they had to leave. They thought that anti-Semitic movements come and go, and that Hitler, now that he was in power, would have to moderate his tone. In 1933, 50 percent of all marriages contracted by Jews were to non-Jewish partners in Germany. Jews felt very comfortable in Germany as Jews.
It really took 1938 with the November pogrom [Kristallnacht -- a massive coordinated attack on German Jews] for all illusion to be shattered. But the illusions disappeared one by one. It wasn’t as if during 1933 to ’38 nothing happened and then in 1938 all illusions shattered. In the meantime, it became increasingly difficult to get out. That’s the point that needs to be made. Day after day, thousands of Jews lined up at consulate offices, at embassies, at shipping agent offices, at the tax offices to make sure their taxes were up-to-date. Even though the Germans wanted Jews to leave, they wanted to squeeze them dry before they left.
It took an enormous effort to clear all of those bureaucratic hurdles, and then the question was: Where to go? The great joke circulating between Jews in Germany at the time was: What language are you learning? The answer is: the wrong one.
Was anyone helpful?
Dwork: The only person who can really claim that is Trujillo in Santo Domingo, who for his own racist reasons was willing to admit Jews. He hoped that these Jewish refugees would intermarry with the native population and lighten up the skin color.
Were the gentiles married to Jews in Germany persecuted as well? Or were they sometimes humiliated but ultimately treated differently because they were gentiles?
Dwork: It depends on what you mean by persecution. It was certainly a policy to get the non-Jewish partner to divorce the Jewish partner. Life was made difficult, but [gentiles married to Jews] were not typically incarcerated in concentration camps. Typically, they were not deported. Certainly, they suffered what we would call persecution now. But not within the context of that time.
Van Pelt: One of the choices they had to face was sterilization. For a state to impose that choice on a couple was absurd and mad and criminal. The idea was, “OK, we’re allowing the Jewish spouse to remain married and we will not persecute them if we can be assured that no children will come out of this marriage.” I would call this persecution even when the life of that person isn’t at stake at that moment. The life of the next generation is extinguished.
You also say that there was a climate at the beginning of the war throughout Europe where everyone was considered dangerous, everyone was a stranger. Did that have a lot to do with why many countries didn’t let Jews in, or was it simply because they were Jews?
Dwork: I would say it was multifactorial.
Van Pelt: A very simple example. In 1939, England declares war on Germany and then starts rounding up German nationals to intern them. Most of the German Jews, at least men, are also interned, often with German Nazis. To the British, everyone who has a German passport is suspicious. It takes the British a year, sometimes even longer, to find out who is an anti-Nazi German, who is a Jewish anti-Nazi German and who is a Nazi German. Internees are ultimately brought to Canada for a year or two before they are released. In 1939 to 1940, the English had very few resources to sift through who is to be trusted and who, from a military point of view, should be considered enemy aliens.
You see this in France too. The French have all of these Spanish, German and Jewish refugees and then they are overrun by the German army. In the general panic, everyone who speaks the wrong language is picked up and held in a camp until they can start sifting through them.
What about Poland? You say that Germany wanted to eradicate Polish culture, and the gentile Poles were suffering, but they became more anti-Semitic as their suffering went on. Is that right?
Dwork: I don’t know whether they became more anti-Semitic as they suffered. Poland has had a long history of anti-Semitism. They had an incredibly anti-Semitic government between 1935 and 1939. In fact, when we’re talking about that refugee situation, the situation of Jews in Poland and Romania was even more desperate than the situation of German Jews in the mid-1930s. Then come the occupation years and a range of occupation regimes. The occupation regime in Poland was extraordinarily harsh. Ten percent of the Catholic Polish population alive in 1939 was dead by 1945. Life was difficult for them — near-starvation to starvation conditions existed, their labor was exploited, children were not going to school. It was a situation in which giving aid to others was almost impossible. Also, the already extant anti-Semitism was inflamed by propaganda. Nevertheless, probably millions of Poles participated in one way or another in attempts to help Jews.
A lot of the questions about the Holocaust have been about ordinary people choosing or not choosing to perpetrate genocide. From your research, why do you think that some people do and some people don’t.
Dwork: I don’t think that people decide that they are going to perpetrate genocide. It’s step by step. One decision changes the situation but also changes the person. And then the next decision is made. Rescuers weren’t born to be rescuers — they came to rescue. You’ve seen the movie “Schindler’s List”? So you know exactly what I’m talking about. [Oscar Schindler, a German Nazi businessman who employed cheap Polish Jewish laborers in his factory to profit from the war, eventually saved 1,100 of them from Auschwitz.] The same thing with perpetrators of genocide.
What we look at too little in the Holocaust is the role of greed. Especially when you’re talking about neighbors. Nazism very effectively destroyed social community. It destroyed neighborliness. It destroyed that social fabric with denunciations, with pitting people against each other, with creating the in group and the out group, with creating an ideology of exclusion and salvation through exclusion. Then, on top of that, those who were in the in group could benefit materially. That’s not trivial.
And what about the S.S.? You call Himmler an “evil genius.” How did he convince S.S. members to kill en masse? How did mass murder and extermination camps become palatable to these men?
Van Pelt: People don’t go out in the morning to perpetrate genocide; they do it within another context. In this case, the context is striving for salvation. What was central to Himmler and the S.S. and the way they enacted the Holocaust was actually this Christian idea that they took the sin upon themselves. That’s the way Himmler talks about it: “We have taken this burden upon ourselves so that the nation will not have to carry this. We are like Jesus Christ committing the crime on behalf of Germany. It needs to be done so that everyone else can live.”
He sees himself as a hero. He sees the S.S. as heroes. He never says it’s not a vile business. He says, “I’ve been there, I’ve seen what it means to kill people and it’s horrible. But somebody has to do it and this is our honor.” He talks about it in this medieval chivalric sense — the knight who has to commit the crime in order to save the situation. That allows him to explain to himself and to others how he can do what he does and somehow remain moral in the act.
If everything happened in stages, then we can see that they went from wanting the Jews to go to Palestine, to then conceiving of Madagascar and ghettos, and then eventually to Auschwitz. How did it go from deportation to mass murder? And so quickly?
Dwork: We all know the term “final solution” to the Jewish problem, and we think, usually without thinking, that the final solution was there from the beginning. If you look closely at the history of Nazi policy and practice with regard to the Jews, one sees that the Nazis developed their solutions until ultimately they came to the final solution — the annihilation of all the Jews in Nazi-occupied regions. The Nazis never wanted the Jews; they always wanted to get rid of the Jews. The question is: What does “get rid of” mean?
Initially, it meant sending them off, enforced emigration. Then, when the Germans conquered larger and larger tracts of Europe, millions more Jews came under their control. The original solution was no longer working. So they devised other solutions that took care of larger numbers of people and that are workable during wartime. The next solution is some kind of reservation. Such a reservation was created in the Lublin district [in Poland]. Then the Germans got this idea that they would send the Jews off to Madagascar. They really believed that might happen; it was on the drawing board.
And that was a reservation that they would control because they didn’t believe in a Jewish state, right?
Dwork: They hadn’t worked that out in such detail. But going back to your question about support for Zionism — that support was rooted in two ideas. One was: Send the Jews out of Germany. The second was that Jews are not really Germans, Jews are not really Europeans, so if they believe in nationalism then logically the Jews deserve their own state in Palestine and that’s where they can go.
The Nisko reservation in the Lublin district was a disaster; even the Nazis recognized that. The Madagascar option never materialized because Britain did not fall so the Germans never controlled Madagascar. They turned to other solutions. But the practice of killing Jews came before the policy decision to murder the Jews of Europe.
Meaning they were already killing them — they were already being shot randomly, they were already dying in ghettos.
Dwork: Yes, so practice came before policy.
Van Pelt: The ghetto situation by 1941 — many people were dying and German public health officials were talking about how to deal with that. They started to say, “Maybe we should kill all of them because that’s going to be more humane. They’re not going to survive the next winter.” In the situation of mass death in the ghettos, you don’t need a policy to kill all of them to be confronted with the fact that people are dying en masse.
Then, in June 1941, you get the attack on the Soviet Union and as a result of the incredible violence of the war you get massive killings in Romania, for example. That is why the Romanian story is so important because the Germans see what Romanians are doing. I don’t want to say that they get inspired, but in some way it brings mass extermination by Einsatzgruppen [Germany's mobile units created to kill Jews] on the table. The Germans have Einsatzgruppen, but they have not been given the order to kill all Jews as of 1941. But when the Romanians start killing all the Jews — starting with the Jassy massacre — it introduces this new possibility. By August 1941, the Einsatzgruppen are killing women, children, as well as men.
In a situation of war, things become possible that were unimaginable maybe two, three months earlier. Practice does not necessarily imply a policy but then the policy follows very quickly. By late 1941, German administrators in Russia are still asking, “What are my instructions? I can’t find them in the Brown Portfolio.” [The Brown Portfolio contained the official guidelines for treatment of the Jews. At that time, it did not mention genocide.] While people are killing and deporting, the individual initiatives are being taken without there being a clear policy. Ultimately, the politicians catch up by December.
Did they get the idea of concentration camps from the Romanians — a place of mass extermination?
Van Pelt: The Romanians were massacring Jews the old way in 1941. The Einsatzgruppen followed suit in late summer 1941. Then it becomes clear that what may work in Russia doesn’t work in central Europe and the West. So the first extermination camps are devised because it’s very difficult to continue killing people. The German soldiers can’t take it, the S.S. can’t take it. It’s too bloody, people start drinking, they collapse as a result of the strain. At a certain moment Himmler says, “OK, we better start cleaning this operation up.” That’s when the camps are created where they can be killed in a clinical way that will not burden the executioners with their own deeds.
And the Allies knew that this was going on.
Van Pelt: From late 1942 onward. By then, some of them were in operation for a year.
How did they not know before that?
Van Pelt: How would you know? They hardly knew what was happening in Europe. It’s a situation of war. There’s an incredible amount of information going to the Allies by radio interception, and of course, the first thing they’re looking for is information of military value to them. What’s happening to Jews is of very little military significance. In 1942, you cannot fault the average intelligence officer for not paying attention to that kind of information.
I’ve gone through tons of these transcripts about Auschwitz. The information that’s relevant is buried among other things. Now we are looking for it. At that time, no one was looking for it. The aerial photos of Auschwitz and Birkenau in 1944 — the only reason they were taken was because Auschwitz was close by an important industrial target. But when the camera started rolling and started photographing Birkenau in the beginning of a bombing run on that industrial target, Birkenau was the unimportant part of the film. Now it is the only important part of the film.
After 1942, when they knew about the camps, the Allies believed that they needed to win the war first and that would save the Jews.
Van Pelt: Insofar that the Jews come into the policy at all. They didn’t want to fight a war for Jews because it’s not going to be a popular war. But, yes, the argument is victory at all costs and no negotiations. This was a policy set by Churchill in 1940: “We will not negotiate, this is a war between good and evil and only total victory is acceptable to us.” Of course, this is to the detriment of the Jews because when no one wants to negotiate with the Germans on any issue, they also don’t want to negotiate on behalf of the Jews. That very firm policy — and the correct policy in the sense that it led to the ultimate destruction of the Third Reich — was, of course, very bad for the Jews. Any opening that existed in 1944 for negotiations was effectively ignored by the Allies.
Did you want to write this book in terms of Western civilization because of the more recent acts of genocide. Did you want to put it in a context of genocide?
Van Pelt: Our approach is very clearly a criticism of the idea of the Holocaust as unique, or something that stands by itself or this otherworldly event. [That idea exists] especially among many survivors, and legitimately so because that’s how they experienced it.
And also because so quickly after the war everyone tried to forget the Holocaust, or ignored the magnitude of it.
Van Pelt: Yes. We also feel that historians in general have not been able to place this event in the reading of history as such. In some way they are afraid of this topic. When you go to universities, Holocaust history is quite often banned to Jewish studies departments. It’s not taught in the history or the philosophy or the sociology department.
Do you expect many historians to reject your book?
Van Pelt: Historians by nature want to integrate things, and others have tried it in different ways. It will be more difficult for Holocaust theologians. But we didn’t want to create a controversy with this book. We wanted to approach this event with the same kind of historical tools and questions as we would approach another event and not put it in a historical ghetto of our imagination. Somehow bring it back to earth.
Over three decades, Alison Bechdel’s comics have grown increasingly intimate. Her alt-weekly strip, “Dykes to Watch Out For,” was as emotionally true as it was funny and shrewd, but as with other great political cartoons of the era, like “Bloom County” and “Doonesbury,” the travails of its cast — a gay-community ensemble whose lives Bechdel chronicled from the Reagan era through the first anxious decade of a new century — only hinted at the life of the artist herself.
Her own personality burst out more explicitly in 2006 with the appearance of “Fun Home,” a masterful graphic memoir about her relationship with her clever, exacting and very closeted father, who taught school and ran a funeral home simultaneously, and whose death under mysterious circumstances raised the possibility of suicide. Critics justly heaped acclaim on “Fun Home,” praising its intricate narrative architecture and honest, despairing voice. In reconstructing her path from girlhood to womanhood, from nervous young diarist to nervous young artist, Bechdel overturned many of her family’s myths, and a host of broader cultural ones.
Her new book, “Are You My Mother?,” is even more personal, restless and reflective, a wry, self-interrogating look at her relationship with her mother, and the ways that relationship has fed — and obstructed — Bechdel’s own work. Like Roland Barthes’ “Mourning Diary,” it’s a gorgeous meditation on the lack of a mother’s love, one that keeps shuddering over a catastrophe that has already occurred; but whereas Barthes’ notes came into being in the months following his mother’s funeral, Bechdel wrote and is publishing her book while her mother is still alive. “The secret subversive goal of my work,” she has said, “is to show that women, not just lesbians, are regular human beings.” I spoke with the author by phone earlier this month about that project, and about her book and the fraught relationship it documents. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.
The Barnes & Noble Review: You wrote ”Fun Home” looking back on your relationship with your dad, but you were constantly talking to your mom while you wrote this book. And she was a somewhat grudging subject. Was this one harder?
Alison Bechdel: Yes, as I learned during the research for ”Are You My Mother?,” and also instinctively from my experience being a human, mothers are just more difficult than fathers. It’s a much more fraught and complex relationship for everyone whether you’re male or female because this is someone who you’re physically a part of. And so it became very confounding for me, trying to sort that out. The psychoanalyst who I write a lot about in the book, Winnicott, wrote that the mother must be dismantled whereas the father can be murdered. And I feel like somehow I murdered my dad, and that was really a walk in the park. That was so much easier than dismantling my mother.
BNR: You were talking to her all the time, transcribing your conversations with her, and you had all these letters and diaries, and really precise memories, and then all of your reading, of Winnicott and Virginia Woolf and ”The Drama of the Gifted Child.” It must have been a lot to wrangle.
AB: It was, especially the Winnicott stuff. I kind of had to give myself a tutorial on psychoanalysis, which really took me a couple of years — you know, learning that language and getting a handle on it, just a slim grasp of the body of Winnicott’s ideas. That was a big project, but a kind of enjoyable procrastination too, because I couldn’t quite face what I was going to have to do.
BNR: But Winnicott ends up being, in a way, a character in the book.
AB: That was a real breakthrough for me, the moment that happened. When I began, I guess I realized it could be possible to introduce Winnicott as a character but I felt very firmly that I wasn’t going to do that, that somehow it was not in the scope of what I was doing. But then he somehow sort of insisted. That was soon after I ruled out the first name of the book and started over. Virginia Woolf and Donald Winnicott appeared in my mind crossing paths one day in London and that started me out in a new direction.
BNR: I love the way their experiences live alongside and reflect yours — your relationship with your mom, your romantic relationships, your psychoanalysis.
AB: I don’t know how this book is going to go over. I don’t know how many people are interested in psychoanalysis. I feel like most people are impatient with it.
BNR: Did you happen to see Maria Bustillos’ piece for “The Awl” about going to David Foster Wallace’s archives at the Ransom Center and looking through his self-help books?
AB: Oh God, no. I’m looking it up now. The first page I Googled has an image of ”The Drama of the Gifted Child” on it.
BNR: He wrote notes in it about his relationship with his mom, and that piece cycled around and around the Internet. ”The Drama of the Gifted Child” has a huge readership among people who are interested in literature and ideas.
AB: The interesting thing about that book is, it’s really intended for other analysts. It’s not meant for a lay audience, really. I mean it wasn’t directed toward that audience, though that’s the audience it found. But I just want to say, I’m relieved I didn’t see that. I feel like it would’ve distracted me from what I was doing.
BNR: One thing you highlight beautifully in ”Are You My Mother?” is that writers have the same problem analysts do: They compulsively analyze people. Would you say that your mom shares that tendency?
AB: Yeah, I would say she has a really keen kind of psychological insight into other people and their motivations.
BNR: Is it hard to talk about this, knowing that she might read the interviews?
AB: You know, I can’t even think about that. Whenever I do interviews I just have to assume that she’s not going to see them. She really is not interested to that extent, and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t seek stuff out online. So I think I’m just going to tell myself that she’s not going to see this interview.
BNR: OK, then, gloves off! One thing that makes her such a fascinating character is that you can’t tell — I can’t tell — whether she’s being intentionally undermining or just applying the same critical lens to your work that she uses to judge the rest of the world.
AB: I think it’s the latter, but I always have to deal with the former. You know, when she makes these comments about other writers or other cartoonists and seems to be comparing me to them, my first feeling is always that I’m coming up short and she’s criticizing me, trying to humiliate me. But I don’t think she’s really trying to do that.
BNR: That tension absolutely comes across. You transmit it so well, I found myself squirming. But I came to like her more and more as the book went along. Especially when you ask her to tell you the first thing she can think of that she learned from her mother, and she says she learned that boys are more important than girls.
AB: That was a really pivotal moment. My first therapist told me to do that, thinking it would yield some useful information, and it did. That was like the key to my childhood. I also want to say, I genuinely like my mother in a way that I don’t think a lot of my friends do. They love their mothers, they’re close to their mothers, but I don’t know if they genuinely enjoy their mothers’ company in the way that I do. Sometimes she drives me crazy, but she can also seem completely delightful. I can have serious conversations about writing with my mother, which I think is kind of amazing. I’m also still scared of her, so that was the biggest thing I had to grapple with in the book and don’t know if I succeeded. I don’t know if I really took her on in a way that if I were completely honest I would have. Because I’m still afraid of her.
BNR: She is formidable. But then at times she would play with you and make stories with you.
AB: One of my earliest, most powerful memories of my mother is playing this game where I would be a crippled child like the kids I would see at the orthopedic wing of the hospital when I would go to get my fallen arches checked up on. I was just fascinated with these children, with their external signs of disability, their crutches and braces and big shoes. There was something about that that I needed to reenact, and my mother entered into that imaginary space so willingly with me and in such an encouraging way. Even though I knew there was something weird about having this fantasy about disabled children, she didn’t censor it. She encouraged me to go with it, and I feel like she probably did that with me in lots of imaginary games as a kid but for some reason this is the one that I remember the most vividly. And I speculate in the book that it’s because it was a fantasy that she shared to a certain extent as well.
BNR: And when your OCD was making it really difficult to keep the diary, your mom would write down your entries. I remember that from ”Fun Home,” too, and both times it gave me chills. The devotion implicit in it.
AB: Oh my God, that was another pivotal moment. She would sit there and write down everything I said. It was amazing. It also becomes weirdly this template for my relationship later with therapists, other women who would sit there and take down notes on what I was saying.
BNR: Yes! What’s it like to go back and look at those journals now? Those diaries where she wrote the entries for you?
AB: It’s really powerful. I’m at the University of Chicago right now, teaching a class. I moved out here for a couple months, and part of what I’m doing is putting up an exhibit of my work in a space on campus. One of the things that I wanted to show was the way I used all these different archival references in my work.
And so I took a section from ”Fun Home,” a section where my mother starts writing in my diary near the end of Chapter 5. There’s this accident and these people are killed, one of them’s a young boy, and they’re all at our family funeral home, all the bodies. On the wall, along with the printed pages from the book, I show the topographical map of my hometown, the big coloring book page from the ”Wind in the Willows” coloring book when I was a kid. And also I scanned my childhood diary, first the spread of the week before this terrible accident when my OCD was reaching a crescendo and there’s just this childish handwriting with these big squiggles and blocks all over it, and the following week — the next thread — is my mother’s tidy handwriting. It’s still my language but her writing. I think it’s such a visual and striking image of this moment of transmission or connection with her. It’s still, you know, really arm’s length. It’s this intellectual exercise. That’s as much as I got, and that’s what I will take.
BNR: She was giving the gift she knew how to give you. It’s a striking counterpoint to her early days as a mother when she’s trying to breastfeed you and can’t, and the doctor tells her she’s not a good cow, which is (laughing) just awful.
AB (laughing): I know, he really said that.
BNR: But then the journals, the storytelling, was just something she could so naturally share with you.
AB: But what she did is a double-edged sword. Yes, she was teaching me to write, but this cathexis, for lack of a better word, around the diary entries, I feel like that’s what made me want to write memoir. That’s what makes nonfiction so vital for me. That she taught me to write about my particular life, but she doesn’t like that I do that. She really wishes that I were a fiction writer.
BNR: Right, which is…
AB: Like you.
BNR: Well, I’ve written plenty of nonfiction stuff about my mother. A lot of it seems, now that I’m older, not very generous. I was filled with rage toward her when I was younger, and now I feel much more love and empathy. Your work is vastly more mature and more nuanced.
AB: I wonder how much the empathy you’re feeling now is a result of the fact that you wrote about her, you know? Would you be able to feel that if you hadn’t done that writing?
BNR: That’s a good question. Do you think writing ”Fun Home ”and ”Are You My Mother? ”helped you move beyond and change some of your own feelings?
AB: I totally do. That’s why I do it, and it feels so fraught to talk about this because writing is not supposed to be therapeutic. A sort of analogy has occurred to me. People ask me, was writing “Fun Home” therapeutic? And I feel like, yes it was, but that’s kind of like asking somebody if swimming the English Channel was a good workout for them. That’s not why they did it — “of course “it was a good workout. Both of these books have entailed transformative processes. You can’t engineer or will yourself to undergo a transformation, but that’s what both of these books have involved. I kind of set out on a journey, and I know that that’s what I have to do, and it’s sort of a high-wire act in that respect. Especially with this book about my mother, when I had a book deal for it, I couldn’t really promise that I was going to figure this out in three years or whatever my initial contract was for. And in fact I didn’t; it took me a lot longer.
BNR: How long did it take?
AB: Six years, almost as long as ”Fun Home.” “Fun Home” was a seven-year project, but I was also writing my comic strip for that time, and with ”Are You My Mother?,” for two years of that I was writing the comic strip, and then for the next four years all I was doing was writing this book. It’s kind of crazy.
BNR: But the work shows. And your process is so painstaking. You’ll take photographs of yourself in various positions and then translate them into drawings.
AB: Yeah. That’s really crazy, I do that for every figure in the book.
BNR: One of your therapists advanced this theory, and it dovetails with some of Winnicott’s ideas and ”The Drama of the Gifted Child,” that in encouraging your diary to the extent she did, your mother was teaching you to be the repository of all of the emotions that your family couldn’t process. And so in addition to predisposing you to the memoir form by helping you write your diary, your mom was also — if that’s true — making it fraught for you.
AB: Yes. Very much. Interestingly, my father too, I feel, was complicit in the diary thing, because he’s the one who physically started me off writing in a diary. My very first entry, he wrote the first sentence or began the first sentence, “Dad is reading ‘The Trumpet of the Swan.’” Both of my parents sort of ceremonially made me the, I don’t know, repository for all of this emotional anguish.
BNR: They really liked the idea of their daughter taking on that role. I guess it’s typical to give a girl a diary — to hope that she’ll write secrets in it and use the little key that comes with it.
AB: You know, that’s so interesting. I didn’t address at all the archetypically feminine role that the diaries have, but that’s so much a part of the story too. Why is that? We don’t give boys diaries.
BNR: I laughed out loud when your mom says, after reading an early draft of the book, “You must have a pretty good memory.”
AB: Yeah, I don’t quite know how to take that.
BNR: But then she also seems pleased. She says that it coheres and there are clear themes, and it’s a meta book, which goes back to what you were saying about being able to talk with your mother about stories and about literature at a really high level.
AB: I feel like she’s at a higher level than I am. She thought of it as a meta book; I hadn’t even been thinking of it in that way. So you know, she’s actually much more well-read than I am, much more up on what’s happening in literature at this moment.
BNR: Well, as someone who spends a lot of time reading opinions about books online, I’m not really sure for a writer that that’s a good thing.
AB: In my mother’s case I wonder too if she’s so — she’s following the state of criticism so closely that she can’t write because she feels so scrutinized.
BNR: To have the level of critical acumen that she has and to have the very precise ideas that she seems to have about what stories should be and the best way to tell them — for many people, that’s death to more creative kinds of writing.
AB: As I worked on this project about her, my image of who she could have been or what she could have been kept morphing. At first I thought, oh, my mother was a frustrated poet. Then I saw more of her frustrated actress part, and in the end I feel like it’s really her frustrated critic part that is maybe the most… maybe that’s who she really would have been. Like when she says she wishes she could’ve been Helen Vendler.
BNR: And how your dad had her read books for him and help him write his papers.
AB: She should’ve been an academic, I think. She did teach high school English, but I think she could’ve gotten a PhD and been a really kick-ass poetry professor.
BNR: You write early in ”Are You My Mother?”: ”My foremost difficulty is the extent to which I have internalized my mother’s critical faculties.” Apart from all your second-guessing of your writing itself, I’ve noticed that you’re really hard on yourself for using a font based on your handwriting to letter your frames.
AB: I do feel guilty about it, like it’s somehow cheating to use a digital font, and to not actually hand-letter my work. But at the same time, I have these lengthy passages of quotations from Winnicott or from Virginia Woolf that I have obsessively hand-lettered.
BNR: So interesting: the parts that aren’t your language.
AB: Yeah. In fact those things are treated as drawings in the book, even though they’re text. I frame them as a drawing and often overlay them with my digital narration. It’s almost like I’m giving those words more attention than my own words, but not really.
BNR: I’m so interested in — and ignorant of — the mechanics of putting together graphic novels. Were all of the quotes from other writers treated as drawings, or the longer ones?
AB: Pretty much all of them. I mean, there are very short things that are just half a sentence that I might have quoted in my own narration, but most of them are actually copied from the original text where I read them. Part of it was trying to replicate my own experience as a reader. Well, not replicate but transmit. To get people to read kind of through my eyes. In my early drafts the quotations went on a lot longer. My editor really pushed me to cut them down.
BNR: How was that, working with an editor and showing her the book in stages?
AB: I had an amazing connection with my editor about this book. She’s the same editor I had for ”Fun Home,” which seems like a great gift in this era, to have that kind of continuity with a publisher. Let’s go back to the question of how I actually do the book. I do write first, but my writing is very drawing-based. I actually write in a drawing application, in Adobe Illustrator. So I’m not just writing in a word processing program, I’m creating these panels on the page and I create little text boxes for the narration or dialogue and I’m able to move that stuff all around. I’m thinking about the page as a two-dimensional field as I write, which feels to me like a kind of drawing even though I’m not drawing with a pencil or not drawing much. I will do occasional sketches. So that takes a really, really long time and that’s how I get the whole story mapped out. If you saw the pages at that point, it would be just blank boxes with the text and the dialogue, with the narration and the dialogue and maybe a few images dragged in here and there.
BNR: Is that what your mom had seen when she said that she couldn’t imagine how you were going to draw it all?
AB: Yeah. It was hard for her to read that, and it’s hard for anyone to. It doesn’t make sense unless you’re really comics literate, and my editor is somehow able to see how that stuff is working without the pictures, and then proceed to edit me the way she would edit any book. I’ve never really talked with other cartoonists about how they work with their editors. It’s hard for me to imagine Chris Ware or Joe Sacco being edited at all. I feel like drawing is more primary in their work somehow. Maybe not. I don’t know if they work with editors, but I just somehow imagine that they don’t, but who knows.
BNR: Your work feels more literary to me than a lot of graphic novelists’.
AB: Well, you know… I’m sorry to use this word in this way, but I think I probably do privilege the writing more than the drawing. I mean the drawing I do work very hard at, but it’s a little more in service of the writing than vice versa, and I think that mix varies a lot for different cartoonists.
BNR: Your visuals are wonderful, but I always feel very connected to the internality of your characters.
AB: You know what, Maud? I feel like cartooning for me has been like a way to be a crypto-writer. I couldn’t ever say I wanted to be a writer because my mother was a writer, and even now I’ve had to find this alternative way of expressing myself as a writer. I don’t want to diminish the drawing. I think it’s integral to what I do. But I’m kind of a secret writer.
BNR: Not so secret really, I hate to tell you. I was reading another interview in which you said that each of your parents had carved out and claimed huge portions of the artistic sphere. Your dad was so visual arts driven, and your mom was a writer and an actor, so you felt like cartooning was this little sliver of creative self-expression that neither of them had claimed.
AB: Yeah.
BNR: When I read about your font, I had the image of you sitting there trying to decide which –
AB: Actually, I basically did that. This guy had me write five or six versions of each letter, and then he kind of averaged them out.
BNR: Does it help with the niggly copyediting problems — “its/it’s” and whatnot — that pedants like me notice in a lot of graphic novels?
AB: Yeah, it enables me to make corrections of typos or to make last-minute editing changes in a way that would be just way too onerous to do by hand. You’d have to go in and manually erase and re-draw the “it’s” and take the apostrophe out and move the space. It would take you forever; it’s insane. So I feel like I’m able to write more carefully because I’m using a digital font. A lot of cartoonists, their stuff is filled with typos. It’s part of the charm, but I feel like my kind of writing I can’t do that. I can’t live with that.
BNR: Your work is so precise and well-considered that I would imagine you’re constantly revising. Do you ever find yourself having to choose a word that will fit in the spot?
AB: Oh yeah, very much. I’m very wordy for a cartoonist. I’m always struggling against that, because the more space your words take up the less room you have for pictures. So it’s always this precarious balancing act. I will often use a word that’s shorter than the word I really want just so I can fit it into three lines instead of going to four. I can’t give you an example right now, but I do that constantly. Editing decisions based on that really minute kind of space.
BNR: So as you’re creating the panels, as you’re drawing, do you ever find yourself shortening things so that you’ll have more room to include some other object in the panel?
AB: Well, just as a general principle, I try to keep the words at an absolute minimum. What’s interesting, as I continue with the drawing process, is that I often find spots where the words become kind of vestigial because I’m conveying something in the picture that makes them redundant. I can delete the words and get these powerful moments in the story that way. There was that one section, when I’m talking about my parents and their courtship and how my mother would like go to my father’s grad school classes with him occasionally. I had a line there saying explicitly “I think my mother should have gone to grad school” or something like that. And it became very clear as I was illustrating this that that my opinion was much more powerful as an implied thing, and so I took that line out and then it came to life. Sometimes the words overdetermine it and kill the energy of the writing. I guess that’s true of any type of writing, you hope to get to the phase when you can just delete stuff and get rid of all that baggage. But in my case, a lot of the time, it’s things I’ve already done in the drawing that enable me to get rid of words.
BNR: Your mom wished you’d written ”Fun Home” as fiction, but in the end she capitulated. She read the draft and said some perceptive things about it –
AB: I feel like she hasn’t really capitulated. She has this really amazingly schizoid response to what I’m doing. On the one hand, she’s very excited about the book actually coming out. She’s sort of anxious that it do well as a book, but just like with ”Fun Home” she doesn’t want to talk about the content of the book. And she’s really — beyond those few things that you just said, like that she observed that it coheres and it’s a meta book, she really hasn’t said much to me about the substance of the book. Has said nothing to me.
BNR: Were you conscious when writing of trying to communicate something to her about your relationship, or did you try to put her reaction out of your mind?
AB: I feel like this book is at its core just a simple and quite pathetic effort to get my mother to hear me tell her that I love her. I could not possibly do that in person, I mean I’ve tried that. I’ve done that. It goes OK, but it’s never what I want. And even having done this, I don’t… you know, I’m still waiting for some kind of response from her that I’m sure I will never get. She really feels like the book is — she sees the hostility; she doesn’t see the love. And that is distressing to me.
BNR: It’s so clearly drenched in love and in longing for that kind of response from her. But part of the tragedy of the book is that she doesn’t feel like — well, like the kind of character who’s going to be able to give that sort of response.
AB: Something that really captures her sort of split response to the book is that I got a pre-pub review that talked about my “substantive yet essentially distant” relationship with my mother, and I showed her that review and she was really psyched about it. She thought it was good. It was a starred review, and she was happy about that. She did not seem the least bit fazed to hear our relationship described as “substantive yet essentially distant.” I think she would agree that’s accurate.
BNR: Have you ever heard your mother describe your relationship?
AB: No. No, I haven’t. I have no idea what she would say. I know that she talks about me to other people, like in this kind of bragging way. I know that she’s proud of me and takes some vicarious pleasure in my successes, but she doesn’t say that to me. I only gather that she says that to other people.
BNR: So other people will tell you, “Your mom is so proud of you. She told me that your new book got a starred review in Kirkus?
AB: No, actually, I feel like I overhear her at her house. If I’m visiting, I can hear her saying to her best friend on the phone or to someone else on the phone. That’s how I know she does that. It’s like she doesn’t care if I’m overhearing her or not, I’m not really part of the – she’s not factoring me in, I don’t think.
In essay collections like “The Disappointment Artist” and last year’s acclaimed “The Ecstasy of Influence,” best-selling novelist Jonathan Lethem brought his sharp critical lens and personal passion to bear on Marvel Comics, Roberto Bolaño, Bob Dylan and the John Carpenter movie “They Live.” Add to that diverse list of cultural artifacts the Talking Heads album “Fear of Music,” the subject of Lethem’s latest book, and published as part of Continuum’s 33 1/3 series of music writing.
The collision of Lethem and Talking Heads makes perfect sense. Both can’t escape being identified with New York – or, in Lethem’s case, Brooklyn – and despite working in disparate modes, each brings the formalism and precision of the high arts to popular forms. Lethem fans already know of his love of the band – composed of David Byrne (vocals and guitar), Tina Weymouth (bass), Chris Frantz (drums) and Jerry Harrison (keyboards, guitar) – from his essay “The Beards.” There, he connected his love of “Fear of Music” to the aftermath of his mother’s death from a brain tumor. “I have an obvious predisposition to handling the material of 1978 and ’79 with an exaggerated, personal intensity,” he told me. We spoke via Skype, Lethem from his office at Pomona College where he is the Roy E. Disney Professor in Creative Writing.
What drew you to Talking Heads’ music as a youth?
In 1978 I launched myself out of a very difficult Brooklyn public school and got into the High School of Music and Art, in Manhattan. It was like crossing the threshold. Suddenly I was hanging out in Harlem, trying to figure out who the cool kids were and how I could become one of them, or whether I somehow already qualified. Everyone had their band; it was pretty much like a menu: You could be into the Ramones or Cheap Trick or the Dictators. U.K. punk was this attractive signal coming in, but we had a special affinity for the New York bands. I had a friend that semester who was into Television — he was a little hipper than I was.
I was just at the right conjugation of nerdy, alienated and hyper-alert that I identified instantly with Talking Heads. They sang songs about books! I got it immediately.
In the book you call “Fear of Music” a paranoid album, and other works of art you’ve written about – some Stanley Kubrick films, and Philip K. Dick’s novels, for instance – have this bent as well. Are you a paranoid person?
Paranoia is closely related to a subject that’s right at the heart of the album: fear. Paranoia is an intellectual shading on a somatic experience, a physical reality that is fear. I experienced a lot of fear — not only my mother’s death, but I lived through a rather desperate chapter of New York’s urban history —and it shaped me. Paranoia is a kind of utilization of fear, like “Let’s pick this fear up and shine it around like a flashlight and see what I can see with it.” As it invests itself in certain kinds of artworks, like in Philip K. Dick’s novels, paranoia tends to be a mode of inquiry and exploration — a philosophical mode, really. In that sense, it was attractive to me, because it was a lot less passive than just lying there and trembling.
But I try to disentwine my inclination for conspiracy and paranoia in artwork from its general lack of not only usefulness but interest in everyday life, where it’s actually a way of shutting possibilities down.
Do you have a favorite song on “Fear of Music”? From your description of “Heaven” – “If heaven’s impossible to know, ‘Heaven’s’ hard to recollect” – that seems to be your least favorite.
I received, in a very specific way, skepticism about “Heaven.” I have a friend, John Hilgart, who was a sounding board while I worked on this book. Hilgart said, quite passingly, “I always felt on Side 2, after ‘Air,’ there’s a three-song lull. I like ‘Heaven’ in principle, but to listen to it is kind of boring.” And then he felt, and I think this would be a much more common remark, that “Animals” and “Electric Guitar” are buried on Side 2 because they’re less inspired melodically or fully realized, and bear less relistening.
I had always held the whole album on this pedestal, where, in a way, it was all exactly as good as itself. I saw it as fractal, “This album is perfect, therefore everything on it is perfect.” Besides, I had always taken “Heaven” as a sacred object — everyone knows this is one of the masterpiece songs. But when Hilgart said that it was like – click! – “Heaven” is one of those things that I listen to and tell myself I’m loving it, but it’s actually boring. I started focusing on the idea of tedium, because the song’s self-referential; it wants to be boring.
In fact, I like “Heaven” a lot. The only song I’m uncomfortable with is “Electric Guitar.” The song is crippled by its disorganized quality, and it doesn’t seem as pure conceptually, because how do you put an electric guitar up there with air, heaven, animals, mind? It doesn’t belong on that stage. Also, it’s been played live barely ever. It’s a sitting duck if you need there to be a worst song on the album, though, really, I don’t know if “Fear of Music” needs to have one.
I do know that my favorites are the two side closers. I wouldn’t want to have to choose between “Drugs” and “Memories Can’t Wait.” Those became the most rewarding songs to write about; they just got richer and richer for me. I actually made myself like them even more, which I didn’t think was possible. Of course, “Life During Wartime” is pretty good too. [laughs]
Did you find yourself liking the album more in general as a result of writing about it?
It was like having any subject before you when you’re writing a book — your own characters, your childhood, some stupid idea you made up about Tourette’s syndrome, whatever it might be that you’ve committed years of your life to — you love it and hate it a lot along the way. There were days when I felt utterly under its hobnailed boot, and there were days when I did not want to listen to “Fear of Music” again. I wrote through those feelings, of course, as you do with your contempt for all the different assignments life has given you, and I was enraptured by the end.
What’s weird is that I put it on for pleasure now. Your iTunes counts listenings, and my entire top 25 most-listened-to tracks on iTunes is all “Fear of Music” and different live versions of the songs. It was ceaseless, to the point where my wife would force me to switch to the headphones.
How did you start?
I rarely delay — and certainly proportionate to how many pages the piece was, I don’t think I’ve ever delayed starting a project as long. There are novels that I had in mind for three or four years, or even more than that before I began writing them, but those were very long novels. I took three years circling around this.
I kick-started myself in a really specific way. I accepted an invitation to the Experience Music Project Conference to be on a panel about urbanism. I said I would talk about Talking Heads’ relationship to urbanism and the evolution of their vanity as urban dwellers, starting with the “More Songs About Buildings and Food” song “Big Country,” which goes “I wouldn’t live there if you paid me,” to “Fear of Music’s” “Cities,” “I’m finding a city I’m going to check out,” and ending with “True Stories’” “People Like Us,” where they’re pretending to be hicks from Texas. I saw this as a topic I could make an interesting presentation on, but of course I was thinking, I’ll start writing about “Cities” and then I’ll have myself on the page about “Fear of Music.”
There are small traces of that presentation in the chapter on “Cities” in the book. A lot of it had to get thrown out, but at least it got me thinking about how to make something actually occur. I knew that I would write about each song directly and that I wanted to intersperse those chapters with provocative side questions about the album as a whole — I had that structure sitting there. I wrote about the commercial, the radio spot advertising “Fear of Music,” and then I wrote about the album jacket, and then I started writing about “I Zimbra.” Except that I had this weird chunk of thinking about “Cities,” which I incorporated, I wrote the book straight through as it reads.
Were there critical works or other texts that influenced your approach?
I was very conscious of the 33 1/3 books. I’ve been an eager customer, so I was thinking of some of the ones I loved best, like Franklin Bruno’s “Armed Forces,” Douglas Wolk’s James Brown book, “Live at the Apollo,” and Carl Wilson’s book on Celine Dion, “Let’s Talk About Love.” Not that I was going to ape their approaches, which are quite divergent anyway, but I write to enter into a conversation that books on shelves are having. I wanted to be a really exciting member of the 33 1/3 team, I wanted to come in with something that only I could do, but that also was recognizably a contribution to this recent but very interesting tradition.
In terms of critical writing, I followed less a specific example and more the general idea of close reading. I had written a book on the John Carpenter movie “They Live,” where I had just stared at the movie and free-associated. I wanted to do that but more so. “They Live” had a relatively high number of outside comparative texts brought in — other films, artworks and some theoretical things. With “Fear of Music” I thought, let me bring in fewer, and let me sometimes bring in none at all, let me just be with the sound of the songs and say what I’m hearing.
You write that it’s never unimportant asking what was going on in the artist’s life at the moment of creation. Let me turn that on you. Why write this book now?
How can I reconstruct or account for such a sprawling intention? I began fantasizing that I might do a 33 1/3 book before I had even agreed to do one, and “Fear of Music” was always the record that I knew I would write about. Then three years elapsed between agreeing to do it and actually starting.
I have been amazed to find myself doing so much critical and cultural writing, a lot of it being a weird mix of criticism and memoir, or covert memoir pieces pretending to be critical pieces. There’s a long evolution for me, thinking I would write fiction that was all going to be invented, and that I like to read criticism but I would never want to write it, then having it invest in the fiction itself. “Fortress of Solitude” is where that really starts, but “Chronic City” extends it. I incorporated a lot of critical impulses, cultural commentary — even things like liner notes crept into the voice of the book.
Having come into this hyper-developed critical voice without ever meaning to, I wanted to both do it service and quarantine it by writing this book. Like, you go over here and write a whole book about “Fear of Music,” then shut up. This and the “They Live” book would be both a summit and a farewell, which has to do with an intention for what I want to have happen in my fiction next, which is that I want to stop incorporating the critical voice into it in the same way.
Simultaneously, I think I’m also done with the tokens of my 14- or 15-year-old self. I can’t really imagine anything after this climax of “Fear of Music.” It’s like I finally came out of hiding, like once you show yourself you can slam the door, because the internal paparazzi are satisfied, they got their shot.
In the liner notes of “Sand in the Vaseline,” Jerry Harrison said, “There is a shared sensibility [with Talking Heads fans] that would make friendships immediate.” What’s that sensibility?
They’re pretty bookish. One of the things I thought interesting was how underwritten the songs are. They’re not wordy, really, but the sensibility is so fundamentally literary. Usually people think about Leonard Cohen or Bob Dylan or somebody recent like Craig Finn, who have these cascades of descriptions and evocations. Byrne never did that and it doesn’t seem like there was ever a phase in his songwriting career where he was even thinking to do it. But in another way I think Talking Heads are a very literary band in their fundamental stance, their ambivalence and sense of inquiry. I think even when he’s switched to nonsense lyrics there’s a spirit of inquiry that pervades all of Byrne’s best work, and “Fear of Music” is dominated by it.
Kelle Hampton, the author of the eye-opening new memoir “Bloom: Finding Beauty in the Unexpected,” left for the hospital to give birth to her second child with “everything just — perfect,” packing not only the birth music, the blankets she’d made herself, the baby’s coming-home outfit, a special nightgown and a crown for the baby’s big sister, but also hand-designed, beribboned favors to pass out to visitors. Yet the moment her newborn daughter, Nella, was placed in her arms, Hampton’s concept of perfection altered in an instant: Though ultrasounds had signaled nothing unusual, Nella was born with Down syndrome.
Hampton writes with bracing, brave honesty about her initial response to Nella’s condition — “I think I cried for seven hours straight. It was gut-wrenching pain” — and her struggle to find hope, joy and an expanse of possibilities in what first seemed to bring only sadness. As on her blog, Enjoying the Small Things, the journey Hampton records in “Bloom” becomes a call — and not only to parents — to rethink our concepts of perfection, discover our capacities for resilience, appreciate the family and friends on whom we depend and, yes, find beauty where we may not have noticed it.
We asked Hampton, via email, about “Bloom” and the experiences and impulses that inspired it. It may be typical of the author that she immediately turned the task of tackling our questions into an event worthy of celebration, writing, “I’ll put some good music on tonight, light a candle, grab a beer, and completely enjoy the process.”
The Barnes & Noble Review: One remarkable aspect of your writing is your knack for tapping into emotions, both your own and your readers’. Has motherhood — and particularly Nella’s birth — made you more connected to your emotions?
Kelle Hampton: I feel emotions very intensely. Expressing them is another story. I think we’re all conditioned to mask certain emotions because we think they won’t be accepted or they’re “too much.” Motherhood definitely compelled me to express emotions more freely. The depth of love, the fear of losing, the need to protect, the unearthly joy — it was too much for me to contain. That’s why I started writing more. And writing something I was thinking seemed more acceptable than saying it out loud. Then with Nella’s birth, there were these contrasting emotions that were so difficult to deal with — grief, fear, sadness, shame. But once I expressed them through writing and realized other women related to them, it gave me the freedom to express myself in a way I had never done before.
BNR: ”Bloom,” like your blog, uses photos and text to tell your story. Why did you choose to combine both elements?
KH: The book is a testament to my journey that first year, and writing and photography played equal parts in my healing and perspective shift. Because the book deals with Down syndrome, a condition that has many negative stereotypes, the photos are a powerful way to showcase the beauty of these children and the beauty Nella brought to our family.
BNR: Early in “Bloom” you mention a book you read shortly before Nella’s birth, Donald Miller’s “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years,” which spoke to you of “the power of challenges — how living a life of comfort does nothing to make us grow, and how hard times shape us.” But you also say you couldn’t fully grasp Miller’s message until you went through your own challenges. Can we learn life lessons from books or only from our own experiences?
KH: I’ve thought about this question a lot, especially from a parent’s perspective, because we make efforts to keep our children from pain and to give them happiness. No one wishes heartache for their child, and yet I know a lot of my happiness and contentment today comes from challenging experiences and sadness in my past. I think we can learn a lot from others’ experiences, and books give us an opportunity to do that. But life without any pain is unrealistic, and the great thing about reading books and learning from others is that when we do go through hard things, we’re more equipped to handle them and don’t feel quite so alone.
BNR: I initially assumed that, before Nella’s birth, you’d led a life without much difficulty. But then you discussed challenges you faced during childhood, in particular the breakup of your parents’ marriage when your father, a preacher, came out as gay. Did those childhood challenges help prepare you for those you’ve faced as a mother?
KH: My siblings and I talk about this a lot — the fact that we are so grateful for our past, even though it has a lot of pain, because it made us tough and definitely more compassionate. Once I started writing those chapters from my past, it really hit me how much those painful memories created a foundation for later challenges in my life. Does that mean someone who had a dreamy, heartache-free childhood is at a disadvantage for handling hard times as an adult? Not necessarily.
It’s important to me, as a mother, not to shield my children from life’s more disheartening realities but to bring awareness to them in a way that gives my children both a sense of gratitude for what they have and the motivation to bring positive change to their world. I want my girls to know that life isn’t going to be without pain, but I also want to equip them with love and confidence and a perspective that allows them to face these challenges when they come.
BNR: You learned fairly early in life to embrace difference. But still you struggled at first to embrace the ways Nella was different from the daughter you had envisioned. How has your sense of “perfection” changed since you had Nella?
KH: I’ve definitely shifted my views of perfection away from image and more to inner happiness, and that shift has taken away so much pressure and allowed me the freedom to really be myself. That, in itself, is happiness.
BNR: After Nella’s birth, your close circle of girlfriends — your “Net,” as you call them — stayed with you, giving you incredible support. What do you think is the secret to having such close female friends?
KH: I think women’s friendships get a bad rap in the media. They’re portrayed as catty, jealous and unsupportive. That saddens me because I know how amazing it is to be part of a group of women where you find love and support. I think women have high expectations for each other, and sometimes we are inclined to run or drop a friendship at the first sign of drama. I embrace my friendships with the understanding that because we are all women with fiery personalities, big dreams, and a hell of a lot of passion, some drama is inevitable.
You have to approach it with compassion and forgive mistakes, because we all make them. Of course, yes, you also need to make choices to surround yourself with people who bring out the best in you, who challenge you, who bring good energy. Those who don’t aren’t worth exhausting efforts.
Secondly, if you want close relationships with friends, you have to be vulnerable. I know how much it means to me when a friend admires me enough to call, crying, asking for help or trusting me with an intimate conversation. Likewise, I want to do the same and reach out to my friends, revealing my own vulnerabilities. My friends are great for shopping, laughing, or going out for drinks, but the best, most beautiful moments I’ve experienced with them are far more serious. And when you experience heartache with a friend at your side, it is bonding in a way that can’t be forgotten.
BNR: Do you think women can support each other in ways that men (even husbands) cannot in tough times, and particularly those involving parenting?
KH: As much I support equal rights for men and women, there are certain gifts women possess that men don’t naturally have and vice versa. Even though Nella is [Hampton's husband] Brett’s child and he, of course, was the only one who could sympathize with that personal parental loss of receiving her diagnosis, there was something so comforting that came from my friends — women who understood, in a way Brett couldn’t, the emotional aspect of the end of a pregnancy, a mother’s expectations, the ideal birth experience.
BNR: You write that you knew immediately, before anyone told you, that Nella had Down syndrome and worry that you didn’t show her enough love at that moment. We all sometimes feel a disconnect between the mother we want to be and the mother we fear we are in a particular moment. Should we even have a concept of what makes the “perfect” mother? Does that give us something to strive for, or give us only impossible standards we’ll never measure up to?
KH: I think we all have this imaginary version of the perfect mother we want to be. There is a quote I love about the fact that there is no way to be a perfect mother, but there are a million ways to be a good one. I try to focus on that, to know that when I try my best, acknowledge mistakes, follow my instincts, and remind myself of what’s most important, that is perfect parenting.
BNR: I wonder, too, about the dangers of our expectations for our kids. If we have a preconceived notion of who they should be, we may fail to appreciate them as they are. That’s a lesson you say you’ve learned. Is it something you feel is important for all mothers to learn?
KH: Yes! I’m learning it with Lainey [Hampton's elder daughter] just as much as with Nella. I’ve been challenging myself not to push Lainey to be a leader all the time. I have a preconceived notion that kids need to be leaders, not followers, and my husband recently reminded me that we do not need to tell our children to be leaders; we need to tell them to be themselves. It makes us all happier — to sit back, to lead by example, to accept what we are given, and to love our children no matter what path they choose to take in life.
BNR: Motherhood can be a touchy topic. Some of the emotions and responses you talk about in the book are bound to incite strong responses — mostly positive, but perhaps also negative. Were you afraid, writing about such personal topics, that you might be misunderstood and attacked?
KH: When I first published Nella’s birth story [on her blog], I discovered right away that being honest about touchy things is not always well received. It was good for me to read responses, even those “Oh my God, what kind of mother would say they want to run away!?” remarks. It initiated a personal process for me of challenging myself to write what’s true — in a respectful way, of course — and not to change my writing to cater to other people.
BNR: Did you ever find yourself pulling back? Or did you just write through those concerns?
KH: There were parts that I went to write and stopped to ponder the effects first. And, most always, I proceeded, hoping that people will understand this is my journey. Memoirs are personal, and not everyone is going to shake their head “yes” to every line, and that’s OK. The other side is that it has been incredibly fulfilling to read e-mails from women who have said, “Thank you for saying that. I felt it too, but didn’t want to say it, and you make me feel normal for admitting it.”
BNR: Do you worry about how your kids will respond to what you write when they’re old enough to read and understand it?
KH: What I wouldn’t do to have my own mother’s thoughts and photos and words and things that inspired her preserved from when we were little. I hope my children, through reading everything I’ve written — the good, the bad, the beautiful — will always read between the lines and be inspired by the constant truth of “Wow, she loved us. She celebrated life.”
BNR: One of the things you consider is how much you let your sense of how society perceives you shape how you feel about yourself. Was writing this book a way of shaping your own identity — and taking charge of your own narrative?
KH: I can’t begin to explain what writing this book has personally done for me. I owned every word I wrote, and as I typed it, I believed it even more. Empowerment — that’s what it is. I realize how much stronger I am, how much more effective I am in living purposefully, when I take control of how I feel about myself, my family and raising my kids, write it down, and put it out there for the world to see.
BNR: It sounds like writing is deeply therapeutic for you.
KH: There’s something mysterious and enlightening about the space I give myself when I write. It’s when I take all those loose philosophical/emotional thoughts I’ve had throughout the week and weave them together. I learn a lot about myself. I face my pain and struggles head-on, and I overcome them through the process of expressing myself. And, for me, when I write I’m going to do something? It’s even more powerful than saying it. When I write, “I’m going to rock this out,” it’s almost as if I hear the band in the background with each letter I type. I feel motivated, eager, excited. I’m inspired in a way I can’t explain. Writing is powerful — and it doesn’t cost near as much as therapy does.
BNR: Is it the same with photography?
KH: After taking pictures for a while, you begin to look at life a little differently, continually scanning landscapes, people, situations for that “framable” shot. In those first days, taking photos of Nella brought light to her beauty and made me recognize how perfect she was — the new, wrinkled skin on her fingers, those sparse rows of tiny eyelashes, her soft cowlick of silky hair. And it went beyond Nella as well. When I thought my world was this depressing reality, I’d pick up my camera and see the opposite — oh look, a sunset. Vivid blue skies. My child holding an ice cream cone with rainbow sprinkles. A dimpled smile. My husband rocking his new girl to sleep. I never stopped taking pictures of these things, and it sinks in after a while: Look for the good, and you will find it.
BNR: What are you most hoping readers will take away from “Bloom”?
KH: Life is full of challenges. But life is also as beautiful as you create it to be.
Why did Bob Dylan compose the classic “Like a Rolling Stone” only after he had become so disgusted with his own music that he was planning to quit the business permanently? How did Silicon Valley become a hub of innovation while other genius-packed cities did not? And what does the placement of a company’s bathrooms have to do with the number of innovative products it makes?
These questions –- and many more like them — are at the heart of Jonah Lehrer’s new book “Imagine: How Creativity Works.” The journalist and author of “Proust and the Neuroscientist” and “How We Decide” has taken on one of the most deceptive and beguiling problems in the science of mind, what he calls “our most important talent: the ability to imagine what has never existed.” His investigation into how we invent new things, and why some people and communities are more creative than others, takes the reader on a wide-ranging journey through the work of social scientists and neurological researchers — but also into the lives and insights of inventors and engineers, writers and salespeople, musicians and magicians, teachers and students. The result is a bracing, entertaining and counterintuitive guide to an aspect of ourselves that often seems an unsolvable mystery.
Jonah Lehrer spoke with us via email about his new book, and what he’s learned in the making of it.
The Barnes & Noble Review: One of the things that stands out in “Imagine” is how creativity is frequently misperceived, or partly misperceived, as associated with pure freedom of the mind. But in so many cases you highlight the opposite perspective — the one expressed by Milton Glaser’s words as he describes creativity as “a very time-consuming verb”: You highlight the effectiveness of the harsh group critique to enable ideas to grow, or the centrality of “grit” as a building block for a young artist to cultivate.
Jonah Lehrer: There are all sorts of romantic misconceptions about creativity. We’ve long believed, for instance, that the imagination is hindered by constraints and constructive criticism. But the scientific evidence clearly suggests that the opposite is true. We think of creativity as being an innate trait — you either have it or you don’t — when studies have consistently shown that even seemingly minor factors, such as the color of paint on the wall, can dramatically increase creative output. And then there’s the myth of effort. Because creativity has long been associated with the muses, we’ve assumed that creativity should feel easy and effortless, that if we’re truly inventive then the gods will take care of us. But nothing could be further from the truth. Instead, creativity is like any other human talent – it takes an enormous amount of effort to develop. And then, even after we’ve learned to effectively wield the imagination, we still have to invest the time and energy needed to fine-tune our creations. If it feels easy, then you’re doing it wrong.
BNR: The discussion of brainstorming is particularly counterintuitive; you point to research that indicates how “criticism and debate” — despite the former term’s association with repressive negativity — is a more fruitful model for groups working together. If brainstorming is so unsuccessful a strategy for generating innovation, why has it held on for so long?
JL: I think the allure of brainstorming is inseparable from the fact that it feels good. A group of people are put together in a room and told to free-associate, with no criticism allowed. (The imagination is meek and shy: If it’s worried about being criticized it will clam up.) Before long, the whiteboard is filled with ideas. Everybody has contributed; nobody has been criticized. Alas, the evidence suggests that the overwhelming majority of these free-associations are superficial and that most brainstorming sessions actually inhibit the productivity of the group. We become less than the sum of our parts.
As you note, researchers have shown that group collaborations benefit from debate and dissent; it is the human friction that makes the sparks. Alas, the presence of criticism means that a few people are going to get their feelings hurt. So I think one reason we’ve clung to brainstorming for decades is that it increases employee morale, even if that comes at the cost of creativity. That’s an unfortunate truth, of course, but that doesn’t make it less true. There’s a reason why Steve Jobs always insisted that new ideas required “brutal honesty.”
BNR: Much of your book explores what might be said to be the central paradox of creativity: It seems to require both resolute, disciplined focus and, in Yo-Yo Ma’s phrase, “the abandon of a child.” Is this because when we are talking about the imagination we are really talking about multiple neurological functions? Or is it that creativity is a kind of protean idea itself, that changes with the artist — one might approach everything through “getting in the flow” and another who exists in the world of endless, patient revision?
JL: One of the most dangerous myths of creativity is that it’s a single thing, separate from other kinds of cognition. In reality, however, “creativity” is a catch-all term for a variety of distinct thought processes, each of which is well suited to particular kinds of problems. And this is why different parts of the creative process require different kinds of creative thinking. For instance, a big epiphany relies on a very different set of brain structures than the editing that comes afterward. A pianist in the midst of an improvised solo is thinking very differently from an inventor tweaking a gadget, even though both are in the midst of invention. So whether we should aspire to the abandon of a child or seek out focus depends on the kind of creativity we need at that moment. There is no universal prescription for creative thinking.
This also helps explain why there are as many creative methods as there are creators. Some people smoke joints; others chug coffee. Some go for walks; others stay late at the office. Some need collaborators; others need solitude. Creativity, like most interesting things, resists easy generalizations. I wanted “Imagine” to capture this complexity, not pretend that it doesn’t exist.
BNR: Some of the most thought-provoking insights in “Imagine” describe creative methodologies that seem to aim in one direction, but actually seek to trick (or perhaps hack) the brain’s programming. For example, you describe how students of improvisation at Second City spend a brief session before each class sharing maximally intimate confessions from their lives. The point for the actors isn’t, as it might appear, to get in touch with deep emotions. Rather, it’s to simply shut off the censoring part of the brain, so that in the work that follows, ideas and associations emerge freely. Should more of us be employing these sorts of strategies?
JL: Creativity is so hard that I think we need all the help we can get. Some of the mind hacks I describe in “Imagine” come from watching the time-tested habits of successful creators, such as those comics at Second City. And other hacks come from science, from the controlled conditions of the lab. Did you know, for instance, that people solve 30 percent more insight puzzles when they’re slightly drunk? That’s my kind of empiricism.
BNR: So much of your previous book “How We Decide” described ways in which we have difficulty understanding how our brains are actually working — the “emotional brain” secretly working away inside, with our assumptions about the supremacy of the “rational brain” leading us into constant miscalculation. ”Imagine” has a similar focus on the mysteries of thought, but, perhaps in keeping with the title, the emphasis seems to be more on collaborating with the unknown parts of the self. Did you see it that way? Are your books on a continuum in your own mind?
JL: I think both books revel in the fact that so much of our wisdom — whether it’s those inexplicable hunches that lead to good decisions, or that moment of insight that comes in the shower — emerge from mental places we have no access to. This is strange, no? The mind remains a black box, even when it’s our own mind!
And this is where modern science comes in handy. All these fancy experimental tools help us peer below the surface of consciousness, illuminating those darkened corners that we’re not even aware of. As a result, we’re able to understand ourselves in a new way and hopefully squeeze a few more epiphanies from those three pounds of Jell-O inside the skull.
BNR: Although your book is largely not a prescriptive one, an idea that your last three chapters all strongly support seems to be designing ways for more “creative collisions” to occur in schools, at work and in everyday life. Over the last several years, the focus in many aspects of our culture has been on building a digital “social network.” Can this do the work of physical and conversational interaction? Do we need to spend more resources, as a culture, encouraging the power of the “emergent property of people coming together”?
JL: In the late 1990s, when the dot-com fever was at its peak, many technology enthusiasts predicted that cities and physical offices would soon become obsolete, a relic of the analog age. After all, in an online world of email and video chats, why should we sacrifice our quality of life to live amid strangers? Cheap bandwidth would mean the end of expensive rents: The zeroes and ones hurtling across the fiber optic cables would supply us with all of our human interactions.
Of course, this pessimism has not come to pass. More people than ever before are moving to cities; we still commute to skyscrapers. (One of my favorite factoids is that attendance at business conferences has doubled since the invention of Skype.) And I think the reason Skype has not killed off cities and offices is because something magical happens when we cram ourselves together. It turns out that all those random interactions add up, which is why the most innovative cities and workspaces have a way of hurling people together, forcing them to converse and share knowledge.
I’m reminded here of that great Steve Jobs story about the Pixar headquarters. When he was planning the studio in the late 1990s, he had the building arranged around a central atrium, so that the diverse staff of artists, writers and computer scientists would run into each other. But Jobs soon realized that it wasn’t enough to create an airy atrium; he needed to force people to go there. He began with the mailboxes, which he shifted to the lobby. Then he moved the meeting rooms to the center of the building, followed by the cafeteria, the coffee bar and the gift shop. Finally, he decided that the atrium should contain the only set of bathrooms in the entire building. (He was later forced to compromise and install a second pair of bathrooms.) At first, people hated this design, since it meant they were constantly schlepping to the atrium. But now lots of people have their bathroom breakthrough story, describing how some errant conversation while washing their hands led to an insight.
BNR: Has working on this topic changed the way you think, your approach to “creative” tasks? Do you work differently than you did before you started this book?
JL: It definitely has. I think the single biggest change is how I respond to a creative block. Before, when I was stuck on a piece of writing — and I’m often stuck — I’d chain myself to my desk. I’d drink strong coffee and will myself to focus until I found the answer. I assumed that the answer would only arrive if I searched for it relentlessly.
Of course, I’d often wake up the next day and realize that my “answer” was often an illusion, that I’d stayed up late to get a fix that didn’t really fix anything. And so I’d be forced to begin again.
And here’s where the science comes in handy. Now, when I’m really stuck, I think about all that research on moments of insight, which suggests that insights are far more likely to arrive when we’re relaxed, and better able to eavesdrop on the murmurs of the unconscious. Instead of staying at my desk, I go for a long walk. Einstein once declared that “creativity is the residue of time wasted.” So I guess you could say I’ve gotten much better at wasting time.
Jonathan Lethem 
Sanjay Gupta (Credit: AP/Mark Lennihan) 
