Old White Man Writing
An Interview with the Author
1. How did you come to write this particular book, and why did you feel the need to write it?
I’d been submitting essays to literary journals for years, and getting most of them rejected. I’d noticed that many of the essays that were getting published were by writers of color; and of those, many were young women – or people of non-binary gender identity. As a political liberal, I didn’t particularly like the fact that I noticed this; and even less did I like the feeling of resentment that went along with it. What did this feeling say about me? Was I kind of a racist and sexist? Didn’t I believe it was a good thing, and in accord with my own values, to work to right the literary balance of power, as the editors of these journals were evidently trying to do? And was I not just getting a taste – a just and proper and overdue taste – of what it felt like to be marginalized on account of one’s race and gender? This was the way of historical change, as seen through the lens of contemporary literary culture. Those of my ilk – old white men – had been culturally (and politically, and socially) dominant for many centuries; it was past time for a change. Socially and politically I was a fellow-traveler, wasn’t I? So what was this resentment? It was the resentment of the excluded – the same feeling of being shut out that those against whom my resentment was directed had been feeling for so long. The shoe was now on the other foot, and it chafed. That chafing, though, was what historical change felt like on the personal level. The irritation would produce a blister. My job was to understand the source of the irritation, and say what the blister felt like, without letting it become a callus, impervious to feeling.
But this is to give a rather figurative account of the book’s genesis. A more literal description would just be to say that I recognized that my job was to tell the story of one old, privileged white man – a writer – and his sense of his place in a changing America. It might be a story whose time had passed, in a number of ways; but it was still a story, and – depending on how well (which is to say how honestly, and thoughtfully, and discerningly) I told it – it deserved to be heard.
2. Is your book more of a polemic or more of a memoir? Does it have a point to make, an axe to grind?
It is definitely more of a memoir. It does have a point to make, but it is not a polemical one. I suppose if I were to explain the point in one sentence, it would be that I am taking some of the stuff of my life that has been swept under the rug and sweeping it back out again.
3. But isn’t that what all memoirists do?
Yes, that’s true; but I think I do it more, and differently, than many other memoirists. The stuff I sweep back out from under the rug is stuff that even I don’t want to look at! Some of my friends who’ve read my work say that I tend to beat myself up. I can see why they say that, but I see it as just telling the truth. One friend said my book was “memoir as blood sport.” I didn’t particularly like hearing that, but I think he was right. In my own defense, though, it’s only my own blood that is getting spilled.
4. Your book has a protagonist whose name is the same as yours, but with German spelling. How did that come about?
Yes, that’s right. Except that Joßche is more than a protagonist; he’s the second narrator of the story. The book started as an essay – or maybe it was a short story; I’m not sure what to call it – where I, Josh Gidding, was talking about a spiteful, jealous alter-ego named Joßche who didn’t want me to get married again. He wanted me to remain a widower. (My first wife died 20 years ago.) He sent me black tulips for my wedding, but I threw them out. Julie, my second wife, liked this piece and thought I should expand on it and “let it rip.” I did that for 100 pages, and then hit a roadblock. So I went back to an old novel I’d been trying to get right for 20 years, but I hit another roadblock there, too. Then I got an idea of how to rework the “Joßche” story, using old essays I’d written that had never been published (though not for lack of trying!), as well as other old (and much new) material, and the result was this book.
5. What does it mean to you to have written a literary memoir?
It means that I brought a literary sensibility to what I was writing, which I guess is no different than what I usually do when I write. What is a literary sensibility? I think it is really nothing but the desire for every sentence to be true. This is hardly an original idea. I had a friend, Katie – now deceased – who took a writing class with William Zinsser at Yale. Zinsser told the class that all problems in writing boil down to the problem of writing things that aren’t true. I never forgot that. I certainly haven’t solved this problem in connection with my own writing, but I am seriously working on it.
6. What would you be happiest talking about?
I think what I’d most like to talk about is my idea of “biographization,” which I spend some time on in the book. My friend Howard, who is a writer and director I greatly respect, found these parts of the book really boring. I hope he is wrong, but he may well be right. I’ll let the reader decide. In any case, I find the idea rather intriguing. There are two senses in which I use the term “biographization.” The first sense is when you imagine your life as though it were an ongoing biography, or novel, or film. I think many of us tend to do this. It’s a form of self-romanticizing, or self-mythologizing. The second sense of “biographization” involves what is perhaps an even more fanciful notion, though it is also basically just a variation on two familiar old saws: everybody has a story to tell, and everybody has a book in them. This sense of the term “biographization” basically means that everybody deserves a biography, which if done seriously, attentively, and lovingly enough, could not fail to be interesting. Now when I say “biography,” I don’t just mean a journalistic biographical article or profile, but a fully-fledged book, complete with footnotes and primary sources. As scholarly as you could make it. I know this sounds like a crackpot idea, and calling it a fanciful notion might even be an understatement. Maybe it’s just another one of those things that should be swept under the rug. But you know what happens when I do that!
7. Given that at least two people of color in your book were servants of your family, do you feel you have any basis for writing about them? In other words, do you have any business talking about your Black servants?
I would say “Ouch!” to this question, except that it’s a question I often asked myself when I was writing the book. It is a question steeped in guilt, shame, and no inconsiderable degree of self-hatred. Which means that it is right up my alley. The first answer that occurs to me is that maybe my writing about my family’s Black servants, in the admittedly rather superficial and inadequate way that I do, is my attempt at offering them up as possible subjects of biographization. I should point out here that biographization only applies to people who are not famous, distinguished, or otherwise worthy of note. Indeed, these people are deemed to be biographically “invalid” – which is precisely what makes them valid and appropriate subjects for biographization. Now you may well ask, Do you actually propose to write a biography of Aline Jackson (our housekeeper) or Willie Dillard (our gardener)? No, I don’t. So then isn’t it rather hypocritical of you to put forth the idea of doing something that you have no intention of doing yourself? Yes, it is. My own hypocrisy in this matter is another thing I am sweeping back out from under the rug.
But that is not really a serious answer, I realize. A more serious answer would be that the idea of “biographization” is not a practicable but a merely notional idea – an idea that might have an effect on the way we see people and their lives: the structure, value, and meaning of their lives. I should also say that the idea of “biographization” was heavily influenced by the description of “the cigar shop on the corner,” as put forth by Wallace Shawn in the movie My Dinner with André, which is my all-time favorite movie. (I must have seen it at least a half-dozen times.) Wally tells André that it’s not necessary to travel to the ends of the earth to have meaningful experiences; if you knew the full truth of what actually happens in the cigar shop on the corner, it would blow your mind.
8. Can you explain why anyone should care about an old white man’s conscience about racial or other matters in his past?
This was another question I thought about a lot as I wrote the book. In a way, the book was written around that question, and the social and cultural moment we are in that gives rise to it. I sometimes wonder (and I put this question in the book) whether an old white man in our present culture has reason to live. I do not put this question entirely ironically or theatrically. Oldness, whiteness, and maleness seem to be questionable categories right now. Oldness because America is such a youth culture, and whiteness and maleness because these categories have been, as the current terminology has it, hegemonic in Western culture for so long that they have come to seem suspect. And with good reason. But this book isn’t about categories; it’s about people I have known and loved and behaved badly towards, and others I haven’t known and have also behaved badly towards. And the thing is – to directly answer your question about why people should care about the state of my conscience – that I am really no different from anyone else. Certainly not from many other liberal old white men who know their day is over, and understand why, and are trying to come to grips with it in a way that their social conscience can live with. Another answer is that everyone has a story to tell, and whether or not it’s a worthwhile one, worthy of other people’s attention, depends on how that story is told. I use humor and honesty and self-reflection to try to make my story relatable, and let the reader be the judge.
9. What would you hope for someone to take away from your book? Alternatively, why should anyone read this book?
You’re probably familiar with the idea of achieving the universal through the particular – which I guess, if it works, is the main justification for telling one’s own individual story: the hope that the individual story will apply and speak to other individuals who read it. As far as a specific takeaway from the book – as I say, it’s not a polemic, or an argument to a thesis, so there is not one specific takeaway that is intended. But I would hope that some of the themes mentioned on the back cover – privilege, entitlement, racism, exceptionalism, bereavement, and even “biographization” – will also speak to readers, and perhaps echo some of their own thoughts and feelings.
10. You have written a book with a provocative title. Was that intentional?
Yes. Though the final version was not as provocative as the title I originally had, which was Old White Man Writing: A Racial Confession. But my wife talked me out of this subtitle, because she said it was misleading – and she was right. Because the book isn’t only about race – my racial sins and uneasiness. It’s about other things, too – those themes I mentioned in the previous question (privilege, entitlement, exceptionalism, etc.). And I finally decided that it was much more important to be accurate than to be provocative. The simpler title is also more suggestive, I think: the racial theme is implied in the word “white,” rather than spelled out, and the other adjective and noun – “old” and “man” – are given equal importance, which is a more accurate indication of the contents. And as long as I’m mentioning grammatical terms, I might as well also say that the last word, “writing,” is grammatically ambiguous – it could function either as an adjective (the participle “writing,” as in “an old white man who is writing”) or as a noun (the gerund “writing” – as in, “this is writing of the ‘old white man’ type”). But the grammatical ambiguity isn’t nearly as important as the open suggestiveness of the title, which implies much more than it explicitly states. And that semantic openness is another aspect of the literary content I am after here.
ISBN: 979-8-89138-091-2
