A conversation with Brad Leithauser
Talk about a charmed life: Brad Leithauser goes to Harvard, then Harvard Law, wins a Guggenheim and a MacArthur “genius grant,” marries a terrific fellow-poet in Mary Jo Salter, publishes regularly in The New Yorker, and is even honored by the President of Iceland for “contributions to Nordic literature,” for goodness’ sake. What does this guy know about troubles?
Plenty, apparently. We talked with him about wartime, Detroit, and deep shame, which all figure in his latest novel, The Art Student’s War (Knopf).
By the way, what is a guy from Harvard Law doing writing poetry?
Yeah, you do wonder. Everyone assumes, and quite naturally, that I must have disliked law school, and I didn’t. I really enjoyed being a student. Unfortunately I can’t make a living being a student, and I can being a teacher, but I do prefer being a student to being a teacher. That feeling of coming in with your notebook and pen and staring expectantly at the professor and saying, “Teach me something, tell me something I don’t know,” it’s a very happy role for me. My dad practiced law, but as far as I know, this is my only trip around the planet, so I wanted to do what I love best, and that’s writing.
It seems that this book draws a lot on your family. Has this been a more personal project?
Everything, if you take it seriously enough and work hard enough on it, certainly becomes personal. But in terms of enlisting others, I had my mother go through it, my stepfather, my daughters, my wife, all looking for different things. I taped a lot of people. It was a broad, collaborative project.
The Art Student’s War opens in a Detroit that hasn’t fallen apart yet. Whites and blacks, Turks and Poles, Catholics and Dutch Reformed are all living closely together. But then the riot of 1943 lets us know that all is not okay in this multi-ethnic city. Did the riots of 1967 make an impact on you?
Yeah, I think hugely. In the indirect sense that they had such a big effect on the city, and this was my city. Those riots in the Sixties are still kind of raw, whereas the riots of the Forties seem to have vanished out of people’s memories. The city has failed to get fully back up on its feet. It’s painful for me, because both my parents were Detroiters. I’d like to think that the book is an act of loyalty to them.
You came of age during the Vietnam War, and this has been written during another long war. Did you intend for readers to draw comparisons?
Oh, very much so! What’s striking to me about Iraq and Afghanistan is how few sacrifices we, as a country, have been asked to take on. Nobody has been asked to do anything. The more you immerse yourself in the Forties, you’re seeing that everybody pitched in, even the arthritic old woman who had trouble walking, but her hands were okay, and she knitted sweaters! And the little kids were out collecting bacon grease! I went through every copy of the Detroit newspapers during the war, and there was not an issue that did not embody this notion that we were in this together. Say you were to read a Detroit paper now. Days can go by and there’s hardly a mention of the war! And we can still do everything, we can have tax cuts, we can have this, we can have that. This does not seem to me a viable model on which to proceed as a democracy.
And I’m just horrified at how, whatever side you’re on, such terrible things get said. We need a degree of civility. Part of the pleasure of the book was feeling that while the Forties were difficult, scary times for people – and at the outset of the war, all the news was bad – there was a healthier temperament about what we had to do.
That decency really comes through. And yet there are all these delicious episodes of social unease. A birthday party that’s an utter disaster; awkward luncheons; stilted conversations. Do you love writing those uncomfortable scenes?
(laughs delightedly) Really, I do. I’m the parent of two children. On a figurative level, I’m the parent of all the characters in my books, In both cases, there’s a natural impulse to protect your children from embarrassment, trauma; I think that’s a good, healthy, sane impulse with one’s real, flesh-and-blood children. If you can protect them from the moment where they’re mortified, shamed, you do so. With your characters, you have to overcome that impulse. The more embarrassment, shame, social difficulties you can subject them to, the more vivid they become. You don’t remember the characters where things basically go well. You might like them, but…what you tend to remember in fiction is those squirming moments of “Oh, no, please don’t say that!” or “Please don’t go off with that person!”
There’s a lot in the book about the power of physical beauty: beautiful women, attractive men, and Bea as an artist restoring the good looks of wounded soldiers. Could you say a little bit about your fascination with physical beauty?
You’re absolutely right, and I don’t think that’s been the case with other things I’ve written. This book probably describes color – red, gold, blue – more than any of my other books, because I was seeing things through the eyes of an aspiring painter. And also I wanted somebody who had this heightened awareness of the looks of things, and the looks of people. My Bea has a healthy touch of narcissism; she likes being pretty. She suddenly becomes drawn to this character who is clearly much less good-looking, who draws her in on another level.
Both you and your wife are practicing poets. How has that been for your relationship?
It’s been good. You know, there are levels within levels in any complicated relationship. I don’t think we’re competitive with each other. And if we were, I don’t know how we could make it work. We’ve both come to accept as poets that nobody gets much acclaim. Your books don’t sell many copies. For the first fourteen years that we were married, we lived overseas, so we depended on each other.
So now you’re living in Baltimore. Are you going to poach on Anne Tyler’s turf?
Baltimore is doing better than Detroit in a lot of ways. There’s more life in this city. I would be surprised, though, if I ever set fiction here. I feel less connected to it than I do to Detroit.
I’m working on a novel now, and it’s got another Michigan character. He’s born in Detroit and is teaching at a terrible imaginary college in Ann Arbor that everybody keeps confusing with the University of Michigan, and he always has to explain that he’s not teaching at the University of Michigan, he’s teaching at this place called Ann Arbor College that’s, you know, that has no money.
There are religious dimensions to your novels. Where are you coming from spiritually?
Well, my mother was a deacon of the Presbyterian Church, and my father wasn’t religious at all. They were civil with each other, respected each other. She just loved my father dearly, so she was not going to drag that man to church. He would go once a year, maybe. She was there every week, and I was there, too. I keep writing about religious characters, and I spend a lot of time listening to religious music, but I don’t go regularly to church. I think in a funny way I’m an embodiment of my two kinds of upbringing. I went to church camp and recall those terrible threats being thrown at you. My parents were very liberal, and they decided to move to a Jewish neighborhood for the schools. Which I’ve been very grateful for. In my childhood, I thought that Christians were a minority. At high holy days, the only two kids who came to class were me and my cousin.
In Detroit, there used to be these discrete neighborhoods. Corktown was Irish; Hamtramck was Polish. If you stepped into the wrong church, you felt like you had trespassed. Now things are more blurred. It’s very rich novelistic territory.
