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Garry Wills talks about the wit of St. Augustine, the necessity for gun control and the arrogant ignorance of the New York Times

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By David Bowman

July 29, 1999 | Garry Wills is the closest thing the world of contemporary American letters has to a Renaissance man. A Pulitzer Prize winner (for his book "Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America"), he's written over 20 books, from "Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man" to "John Wayne's America" to his latest, "St. Augustine." His erudite but never starchy essays for the New York Review of Books tackle such subjects as classical Greek arts and literature, Jesse Ventura, the city of Chicago, the Vatican, the 16th century Venetian painter Tintoretto, the Clinton scandals, Muhammad Ali and film reviews ranging from the silent pictures to "Bulworth." The seemingly inexhaustible Wills also has a new book -- an attack on Second Amendment-based arguments against gun control -- coming out in the fall.

I was going to interview Wills last May when "St. Augustine" was published. Most of what I knew about Augustine was from the Bob Dylan song "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" from the album "John Wesley Harding," but I'm a quick study. I skimmed Wills' book and was ready to phone when I read Dinitia Smith's May 15 interview with Wills in the New York Times. She portrayed the author as a crabby Midwesterner who "seems impatient with people who are not as well read as he is." She describes "annoyance coloring his voice" and notes his often "expressionless" face, which is only occasionally touched by "a thin smile." When Smith asked Wills how many books he had written, she reports that he snapped, "Go look it up in 'Who's Who.'"

I postponed the interview. I knew he'd eat me like candy. I spent a month boning up on St. Augustine. Then I called ...

Buy St. Augustine by Garry Wills

I live in New York City, so the New York Times is more important to me than it is to you, but I'm intimidated as hell to interview you after reading Dinitia Smith's piece.

Well, you shouldn't be.

Did you two just not get along?

She spent six hours getting everything wrong.

So you're not like St. Jerome [a particularly unforgiving saint]?

[Pause] I hope not. She came out here and spent three hours with me last October. Then when I gave a talk in New York, she came to that. Then we were on the phone endlessly because she was reading back to me things that she claimed that I had said that I didn't say. She didn't tape me. She took very casual notes. And there were incredible things that she was ascribing to me.

Like what?

She said that I was drawn to Augustine because he was such a brilliant English prose stylist. [Augustine wrote in Latin.] Because I got impatient with that, she called a friend of mine in Evanston and just kept trying to get him to say over and over again that I'm impatient with people. She tried to do the same with Studs Terkel.

So when she asked you how many books you have written, did you "curtly" reply, 'Go look it up in 'Who's Who.'"?

She said, "How many books have you written?" I said, "I don't know." She said, "How would I find out?" I said, "Probably in 'Who's Who.'"

Well, whew! So you're not going to chew my head off ...

I get impatient not with people, as she puts it, "who aren't well read." The people who make me impatient are ones who combine ignorance with arrogance.

Next page | The deluded American cult of gun worship