Speaker I’d always been fascinated in comparative religion, I suppose you’d call it, and examine and Julian the origins of Christianity and the splits within the church.
Speaker And then I became very curious, what did all this come out of? And I was very conscious that there’s nothing very available to American readers. On other countries, histories, religions. Ethical systems. So I suddenly figured out after a great deal of reading that in the fifth century B.C., everything happened. It was a great explosion in the life of the human race. And suddenly you had an accident, you had you had Socrates. And a series of great philosophers, you had Zoroaster in Contemporary and Persia out of Zoroaster comes monotheism, out of which comes Judaism and Christianity and Islam. In India you have the Buddha and Mahavira. I was the head of the Jains. And in China you have my favorite Confucius, who’s an atheist. He’s an ethical teacher, is an educator. Now, these systems in the fifth century B.C. were all simultaneous. So I figured out one man had to live to be 75. Could have met all of them, most likely since people from Greece did not travel often to China, but I invented such character and indeed I make him I think he’s a grandson of Zoroaster, so he’s very interested in creation. He has one question to ask. How did it all start? And each of them gives a characteristic answer or not. And in the course of his life, he ends up in Athens as an ambassador from the great king of Persia. Empirically, this is very much alive and Socrates is around. And so in the course of the book, you get to see. China, as I it, India, Iran, Persia and Greece. And is the sort of book I wish I had had to read when I was a kid, because it really gets you into these systems and I hope rather painlessly. It’s had a curious history, it’s got it’s picked up quite a few devotees over the years, but publisher hated it. All those strange names Americans want books about people called Jim and Lucy. They don’t want to hear about the Iran and the ayatollah. So over the dead bodies of my publishers that came out. And was immediately, to their astonishment, I think it was the number two bestseller on the dreaded New York Times bestseller list, and it’s always had a following. It’s now about to come out again in paperback. But I came to a number of conclusions while writing it, I never start with a theme that I’m going to demonstrate. If I wanted to do that, I would become a very high paid lawyer and take on very expensive cases. That’s what lawyers do. You let your imagination roll, you learn as much as you can about the subject as you learn it, you are in a sense, passing it along to the reader. You come to a number of you find out a number of things. One in the fifth century B.C., there’s a simultaneous explosion in every part of the world that we know about. New religions, new ethical systems. It suddenly occurred to me. And Noam Chomsky had this reaction when he read it, and he doesn’t particularly care for novels, but he did read it and. He liked it very much. And what he like particularly was I was coming to a conclusion which is implicit in the book, that the human race is like a child. It’s a toddler, it goes around on all fours, it stands up and at a certain point mature age reproduces and in time decays and dies.
Speaker Well, suddenly, in the fifth century, it is the human race, having toddled around and made a mess, suddenly pulls itself together and figures out that the earth goes around the sun, figures out all kinds of things that he had no way of doing before, but through the sciences which began to blossom.
Speaker There’s a new view. Of creation, many views of creation. And Chomsky was very drawn to that because that’s very much like his own theory of linguistics, that everybody is born with same potential for language. Some are more advanced than others. But you go through phases until you get to it, you are articulate. Well, then question as I finish the book, where are we? If we are the child who got through the fifth century, a great moment, we’re now in the 21st century. Which looks like it’s going to be a very, very bad moment for the human race. They’re just about to we’re about to go back to nuclear reactors for. Our fuel energy supply in the United States, that is a great step backwards. So. That was one sense, is that we are evolving, we are a species. We will flower reproduce and eventually will die out. What phase are we at now? We have the means of killing ourselves, but that is not in creation. Then to the question of how did it all start, which is the question that my I call him Cyrus Smitham, Cyrus for the Great with a great king of Persia at whose court he was born to, because that is the family name of Zoroaster and he is related to the Holy Family. And so Cyrus, Fatema is wherever he goes, he asked the same question and. Confucius is really the best. Well, he was asked once, what happens to us when we die? Now, everybody in the religion business has an answer for that, you know, to make you feel better. And Confucius said. Why do you ask me about death, about which we know nothing? And you say nothing about life, which we have to know a lot more than we do and we can no. He just left to die. The only so-called religious leader didn’t bother with that. Alexander the Great when he. Swept into India with his Greek army, he immediately summoned a Buddhist priest and he asked the same question, How did the earth begin?
Speaker The human race began and they said, well, it was said was this enormous turtle and it laid an egg and there was another turtle and then I was another egg and another turtle. And Alexander said, stop it. That’s nonsense.
Speaker That’s ridiculous, and the Buddhist priest said, well, ridiculous questions deserve ridiculous answers.
Speaker Or as an old lady who believed in the turtle theory once said, they said, well, what’s that turtle resting on? She said, look, it’s nothing but turtles all the way down.
Speaker I don’t know, because that’s where he first meets the Buddha and finally Confucius makes and you just started talking about Confucius, but if you can talk a bit more about him, particularly with an extraordinary story.
Speaker Well, Confucius was primarily an educator and. He was very interested in education and all of him came the system of educating all the poor kids in China, which was the strength of the Chinese civilization for a couple of thousand years. And if they ever get their act together, it’ll still be Confucius, because he just said, we’re not going to train the aristocrats, we’re going to go from village to village and take every bright boy we can find, not train girls in those days, but we will collect them from everywhere so that we have the best minds at work.
Speaker Although he was an atheist and had no interest in a sky, God, he believed in religious ceremonies of which they had inherited quite a few. And he said the ceremonies must be regularised, they must be perfected because they’re very old, they hold together our race. And they are the balance between the Middle Kingdom, which China regarded itself in heaven. And to maintain a harmonious balance, the ceremonies must be correctly done, and the emperor always stood to the north of the people as required. And there he receives the mandate of heaven, which is the entire focus of the universe, is on him as the father, the leader of his people. And they have some vague creation theories, which Confucius never took very seriously. But he was extremely interested in ethical life as well as education. And one young man asked him, Master Kung Fu was his real name, the master going? If there were one precept, just one by which someone should lead a good and ethical life, what would that that be? And Confucius said five centuries before Christ. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Histeria I got from the Christian right when I wrote that, that he couldn’t have said that. I said, Oh God, thank heavens you’ve told me of it. Don’t read the Analects of Confucius in which all of his sayings are written down or all the ones that were collected then.
Speaker Just a little bit more what was said as an atheist, but what more about his theory of creation and creation?
Speaker There was some there that folk stories and they had they were animists as the entire human race was when it started, meant they worship trees. They worshipped a river. They worship the stars on. Which is called animistic, they would project sort of a human personality upon a special treat, then from that they would evolve into gods and so forth. Confucius, it just kept skipped all that stage, he went straight to what he wanted to do, there were China had broken up into about a half dozen warring states during his time.
Speaker There was no proper emperor. The mandate of heaven had been withdrawn. Confucius felt that unless he could train, particularly the out of work nights, there were five ranks of nobility and the bottom one was procreating greatly, had no money. And we’re just going around making a lot of trouble. They were becoming thugs and he started to educate them and he said, until we can educate people once again so that they understand the old ceremonies, they understand. The rules by which a good life can be led.
Speaker Until they begin once again, those ceremonies which keep heaven and earth in balance, we will have nothing but chaos and nothing but war. So he founded what was really a kind of political religious party using Welbourn young men who had no money and no occupation.
Speaker And he’s to set up schools and started to train them, and suddenly there was a Confucian generation and in due course I always thought and I got the feeling, writing the book, that Confucius saw himself as the son of heaven at the mandate of heaven had come to him. And if he could simply pull off a sufficient educational system with he’s out of work nights. He would become the emperor. And he would straighten out the state.
Speaker It did not come to pass, he held office once. I think he was chief of police and one of the judges, he never got farther than that. But within a generation or two, there was indeed a very fierce emperor who united all of China, who came from the section called Chin and China, and he turned out to be a total tyrant and murdered everybody in sight.
Speaker So these stories do not always have happy endings, but out of it came the Confucian system of education, which kept China as a high civilization for 2000 years. And the richest nation probably in the world and the most advanced scientifically so advanced in a lot of confusion, wisdom was they invented gunpowder, which allegedly Marco Polo brought back to Italy and to Europe. They used it for firecrackers, which is much more fun. They knew they could blow up cities where they had. But by and large, the Confucians targets, it’s just as well we don’t use these as a weapon. We’ll go back to the bow and arrow. You know, it’s nicer causes less damage. So even their scientific advances where we would use everything immediately to kill people, they said, no, this is not going to be useful to us.
Speaker And.
Speaker I just wanted to talk briefly about.
Speaker Was the question would be who first coined the word universe in my universe?
Speaker Well, it’s a monotheistic concept. It was certainly one of the Greek philosophers. We certainly get it in later in Aristotle, but I think it’s very early. I’m only guessing because if I’ve known, I’ve forgotten, but it seems to me like Parmenides, who came right across the Bay of Bay of Salerno, their. And he lived and died there, Parmenides thought everything was a whole. Everything was connected with everything else. And for him, this totality was creation. And everything was part of the whole forever, which is arguably what Democritus. And the Adama’s, as they call them, also thought we’re all nothing but floating atoms, some of them assembled as a person, some as a tree. But if you broke us all down, we would just be swirling atoms. One pretty much like the other. Which again, gives you the idea of a unit or a universe. So the exact etymology, I don’t know.
Speaker For Cyrus, there was only one subject of honor and that was question.
Speaker Well, if you could figure Cyrus felt that if you could figure out how it began, you might have some idea of what it was and where it was. Ever since I first started to think, the first question I asked myself is, where are we? We call this a universe, but it’s pretty clear to me then there was a lot more that it was it was plural, not singular. That was an awful lot going on out there. What’s it placed and we’re told it’s expanding into what or is it sitting? That’s the question that you can have many sleepless nights over.
Speaker I’m told that there are mathematicians and advanced calculus who can do a series of numbers which which answers it, but. I am innumerate.
Speaker What if Cyrus were to where we have quantum physics and be we’re going for this so-called unified theory? What do you think Cyrus would make of these newest theories of creation?
Speaker Do you think tomorrow he would probably see them all as games that every generation played a different set of games, the games, in some sense, advance. I think would be more of a confusion with applying the sciences 99 percent to warfare and the destruction, I think he would probably say this is counterproductive. What is the point of having mastered the atom? To use it to blow up two Japanese cities that were trying to surrender. A bit of history that we’re not allowed to be taught in the schools, but it appears that the truth of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think he would be. He came to no conclusion in the course of his 75 years. He found Socrates something of a windbag. He admired Confucius because he was practical. He found the Buddha very enticing. And, of course, a paradoxical. One of the beauties of any names is Tathagata. Which means he who was coming and gone and come again. The Buddha is in the Buddha is not just worthy of President Clinton. What it is, is is pure Buddhist lion, you know, are calculated to stop you dead in your tracks. Am I here or am I gone? For the Buddha, who was a good Hindu, he believed in reincarnation. Nirvana, the elephant was when you’ve completed your cycle of reincarnation and you were freed and you ended Sunita, which means shining nothingness and you just became an atom floating around in some shining place without consciousness. You didn’t stress that, but plainly that’s what he meant. So the mood is extremely attractive, but if you’re interested, as I think my sirus was, and certainly as Confucius was in organizing a state and educating people, then to tell everybody, well, you’re not really here anyway.
Speaker Whether you whether you’re married or not doesn’t make much difference. You’re just evolving. And this whole cycle of creation I took this on in the book called Kalki, which I brought up to date. An American guy says I’m Kalki, which is the name the last reincarnation of the Buddha. Actually, vishna, the ninth incarnation was the Buddha, the 10th will be a white man called Kalki, and that’ll be the end of the world, the cycle of creation. And it was a Hindu belief that you went through a cycle thousands of years, you went through all sorts of development and then.
Speaker Kalki on his white horse. Appears as Sheva, which is the structure. And the entire world ends. And it starts over again. There was a certain monotony to the Hindu religion. And to overwhelm overcome that monotony, the Buddha arrives teaching something quite different that you yourself can get yourself out of the cycle. This deadly cycle of birth and rebirth and reincarnation.
Speaker We’ll start with Kalki, you know, to which theory of creation now and square of it all.
Speaker Well, I have my days. I have Buddhist days when I think it probably isn’t here at all. We simply imagined it. Since we know the difference from one mine to another, one temperament to another. And actually, we’re all basically sort of uninteresting and basically very calculable, you can pretty much figure out anybody’s reactions to almost anything. They arguably were interchangeable. I often think of the human race as a form of virus, a bacteria. Which is constantly populating and increasing its numbers. And I think it is easy not to be as it is to be. But then you have to lower your sights, and as long as you are, then you try to do the best you can with what you’re presented with in the way of a society, hence the need for a Confucius or in practical mood and a Confucian. And in fanciful mood, I find the Buddha extremely consoling. To be done with with rebirth and reincarnation. Monotheism, of course, came along to destroy everything in sight. With Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and of course, you have to promise afterlives, you have to make one race superior to another, you have to make hierarchies. It’s the deadliest form of religion. And I would say one thing, except for the possible exception of Zoroaster, you would have found all of the great figures of the fifth century B.C. would detest monotheism, one God. But it’s so clear, everything is God. There’s so much of him. Universe is simply a synonym for God if you want to believe in a deity and if you don’t want to believe in a deity, there’s an awful lot of evidence to support you.
Speaker I’ve read, you know, you see Iris and devouring our house. Is there any hope that we will?
Speaker Well, look, this is a very, very. Minor planet and slightly second rate sun. Which is aging. And the survival of bacteria that we call the human race, which is eating up the planet, destroying the planet, for us, it’s not we’re wonderful for cockroaches. Apparently they’re going to go on forever thanks to our efforts, but we won’t. So we probably will will end in time and incalculable time. And there are plenty more where we came from. I’m sure that duplicates of us everywhere. I like the idea of parallel universes in the Smithsonian Institution. I have a couple of going. And even worked out a way how you would get from one end to the other, somebody experimented with it and almost went back in time. Eventually convinced himself he had, he hadn’t, but he made the first step toward it.
Speaker So I have in there a scene in which it’s very important to stop the Second World War, which can only be done by stopping the First World War. And that can only be done by making sure Woodrow Wilson does not become president. So the boy who was the hero of the book and a lady friend go back into time. 1939 and just before Woodrow Wilson is about to be governor of New Jersey and he’s about to be picked for the Democratic candidate for president. And they go back and they find him in on a vacation in New Jersey. And he’s got a mistress in Bermuda. So true. And they blackmail him and he doesn’t run and there’s no First World War, it’s a German French war as usual, but we’re not in it. That’s done by going into an alternate alternative universe. Since I don’t think time travel as such would ever work, but you might find the universe sufficiently similar that if you affected events there, it could indeed have a leak over into the universe in which you are stuck.
Speaker I always seem to have known about Julian, the apostate, as he was called, meaning somebody who had started his life as a Christian and gave it up and went back to actually he wasn’t a pagan, properly speaking, he was a neo Platonists. But what had happened was he’s the founder of his dynasty, Constantine the Great. Family came from what is now Serbia, it was called Illyria in those days. And there was Constantine, who was succeeded by as. Who in turn was succeeded by Julian? A lot of fighting going on inside anyway, Constantine became a Christian. And forced the religion on the entire Western world. Constantine reunited the empire, which had been broken in half by a collision. So he put the two halves together, set himself up as sole emperor. He had no organization. Christians don’t like to hear this, but the reason that Europe became the West became Christian. Was for administrative purposes, the Roman Empire had broken down roads and broken down communications. The only organized group anywhere in the Empire was the church, and the church was divided between Athanasius and Arius, between Roman right and Greek right. But it’s still a formidable organization. And roads and records and filing cabinets. Constantine saw that he had to govern this repaired empire with something and he made a deal with the church. I will make you church universal. Everyone must be Christian or else. Meanwhile, you will help me because you’ve organized the empire into so many dioceses and you have all these travelers and means of communication.
Speaker I’m going to take over your apparatus. So that was the that was the trade off. Then comes he succeeded by Konstanty as Constantine becoming a great theologian. You can’t keep away from religious conferences. The Trinity was sheer ecstasy for him to try and figure out what on earth that meant. One bishop at the synod where they thought up the Trinity, somebody said, I don’t understand a word of it. Other bishops said there are some mysteries too great for us even to think about.
Speaker Julian did think about it. He was a younger son in the family. His father was put to death by Constantine. His constant air became his enemy, constant his. Julian Rebels, Julian has made SESAR and Ghazi’s Gustus is the number one title and Caesars the number two title. So he’s he he lives in Paris, in fact, which is rather nice note, in a way, he goes into rebellion against Constancia who dies in the middle of the campaign. Julian becomes emperor. What he does.
Speaker He doesn’t go after the Christians the way the Christians were going after everybody else, Christians were killing everybody in sight, including each other. Those who are on the Greek side of Christianity were murdering those on the Roman side and vice versa. Julian was in favor of toleration, something unknown.
Speaker In monotheism, which is, of course, is absolute, so for your own good, we have to burn you alive. And Julian put an end to that, he said every religion will have its opportunity to develop as it wants to. There will be no state religion. So in other words, he thought of the First Amendment, the American constitution, long before there was a United States. This creates such rage in the Christian establishment, both Greek and Roman. They were out to get him. He had also turned into a very great general and he’d had one of the greatest victories since Julius Caesar and God, and he saved the West for the empire. Goes back home, back to their hometowns in area in Serbia, in the Balkans, Constantine dies, he goes to the new city of Constantinople, the city of Constantine, and has three years as emperor in which he is the first philosopher king.
Speaker And he allows anybody to insult him and anybody to argue with him, if they’re intelligent, he will he will defend his positions, but his tolerance was intolerable to monotheists. So he went to war with Persia, which was part the which was a constant enemy, and on campaign, he was doing pretty well against the Parthians. But he was murdered by a Christian. In the battle.
Speaker And then another emperor was chosen on the battlefield and got back to Constantinople and the world once more was dominated by absolute Christianity, and if you disobeyed, if you were not a Christian or anti Christian or a pagan, pagan comes from the Greek word for countryfolk. And the country folk didn’t take well to Christianity. They like the old gods. So it took a long, long time to deep organize countryfolk and make them into Christians. The last tribe of which much has been made to be Christianised in Europe were the Germans, the students, and I think it was very late 3rd or fourth century when they finally baptized them, they put them all, dunked them in a river and the last of the tribes to hold out.
Speaker The legend goes that they were sworn they would never kill anybody. That was part of being a Christian. Of course, they killed whomever they chose, but in theory, they had to take sort of an oath at baptism that they would have shalt not kill.
Speaker So every last one of them held up his sword arm from the river so the river water wouldn’t touch it, his arm would not be baptized, hence the Nazi salute.
Speaker Julian, like Constantine, admitted that he had trouble walking his.
Speaker I had forgotten that.
Speaker It is reported that I wrote that Julian had a similar difficulty looking into people’s eyes that Constantine had had. Whether this is true, I’ve long since forgotten, I’m miles from my research, but there’s one interesting thing anthropologically when I came to write Burm. The first thing that you learn about Thomas Jefferson is he was the shiftiness eyed man anybody had ever met. Jefferson could never meet another person’s gaze. And generally people think, well, he’s being evasive. He thinks, you know, he doesn’t dare look somebody in the eye. Later on, anthropologists have determined. That the predator never looks his victim in the eye. And he said even with dogs and cats, if one is about to attack, you will first look away. Then he’ll attack. The one who’s going to be the victim is just staring straight ahead at his killer. But the true predator looks away and Thomas Jefferson was certainly a predator, and Constantine and I suspect Julian were also fairly predatory.
Speaker Absolutely, Julian, have a tragic flaw.
Speaker He thought that he could civilize the Christians. I think that is as deep a flaw as you could have, in other words, that you could allow them to go on with this injunction from St. Paul to proselytize everyone on Earth. And if they wouldn’t convert, you kill them if you had the power to kill them. He thought that they would behave like civilized people if they were left alone to. Preached to people and convince people he didn’t mind. He didn’t know that they felt they had a mandate to kill. Anyone who disagreed with them. And they would do it by force. That was an underestimation of the Christian message.
Speaker There’s a passage which, you know, they have they want to read when we do the readings, but it’s about the tyrant.
Speaker He left Michael truly in life to write to him as well. And I was alarmed in just this way.
Speaker Monsters or kawan not set about I don’t know when he’s taking a bath and he splashes this sort of or a basis or about stuff, you know, and then he apologizes.
Speaker And I guess the question that would be hard is how corrupt and how does Julian resist this.
Speaker Well, Julian was born knowing about power since he was a member of the Imperial Family. And the imperial family was this busy killing each other off as it was killing its enemies. So he knew right off that he was living a dangerous life, precarious life, and that he was about to be murdered at any time.
Speaker And he was perfectly prepared to take care of his enemies, but he didn’t go looking for trouble. And he was surprisingly and paranoid as Empress go. Konstanty, yes, his predecessor was just terrified of his own shadow. And I think Jordan being a reflective man when he knew history, he’d read about the Twelve Caesars, am I going to be just like them or not? Am I going to be like them or not? That’s a question he must have put himself.
Speaker Also, the scene where where where Julian has this transformative experience, not unified with the sun, could you describe that?
Speaker No, I don’t know. Is that Lefsetz?
Speaker We went to the sun. Yeah, that’s. Julian used he dealt Symbol’s everybody interested in religion. Works with symbols, consciously or unconsciously. And for him, early on in my narrative. Is his affinity for Helios, which is the Greek for some. And he saw that as his as the center of his being from which his strength came. And the Sun Course is represented by Apollo in the Greek pantheon. But it wasn’t really a follow that he directed his attention to, but it was there, the blazing disc, which was the source of life. And he was in a great tradition which goes back to, if not in Egypt and continues here and there today.
Speaker I just want to go back to power.
Speaker I think it’s Julia Roberts is the prerequisite of power to invent its own past.
Speaker No, that’s very nice and. Uh.
Speaker Well, you have the advantage of me because I’ve forgotten all this. Julian would certainly have discovered what any thoughtful emperor would and even some unthoughtful ones. That history is yours to do with as you please. Once you have absolute power. You can change anything to anything. Look at Julius Caesar fixing his genealogical tree to prove that he’s a descendant of the goddess Venus. Or other Romans making they were descended from the Trojans. I mean, they were constantly coming up with fake genealogies to show how far back they go. So he would see immediately the value of even a false geneology if he felt it was symbolically correct. That he was heir to the son, heir to Apollo, heir to the source of all life. Yes, he would he would play those games, but. I think it is nature was, as I get it, was not all that mystical. He was a neo Platonist, which was really Gaga philosophy that was a spin off of Plato himself. And there are a number of really extremely boring philosophers it produced like Yamli Cross and Theo Pompous, and he was just absorbed by them. He wasted so much time on them. And for those who really liked good literature, they rather deplored his taste in metaphysics, but that was his hobby.
Speaker Julian writes this, This is something you also talk about in houses, but they say that to no one’s is to know that they’re all there is human.
Speaker But of course, no one can ever know himself. Nothing human is finally valuable, even to ourselves. So strange.
Speaker No, the Greeks. Had an injunction which was carved in the place of honor. On the temple of Apollo at Delphi, know thyself. Any time the Greeks put up anything in marble, you know, they were in doubt about it.
Speaker It’s the things that people don’t say about themselves that are true. Know thyself is a wonderful injunction’s, just simply meant we none of us knows himself. And this is a good thing sort of to aim at and to realize that one person is probably more or less like another person. And the better we know about ourselves, the wiser we will be. But it’s more of.
Speaker It’s more of a cry than a declaration. Know thyself. However, out of it has come the great line in Western literature, best exemplified by Montane. Who really did nothing but write and write and write about the classics and as always, you know, that’s how he would have kidney stones.
Speaker And before, you know, he’d gone off into a study of the infinite study religion study of Cicero, and then he’d get back to what medicine he was taking to dissolve the kidney stones. Well, that’s know thyself. And I know that kidney stones know that this is zero. It was trying to pull it all together in order to get a purchase on knowledge and reality.
Speaker Rome never tried to impose. This is a quote, Rome never tried to impose any sort of wish upon the countries that conquered and civilized. In fact, quite the contrary. Rome was eclectic. As a result, we have 100, 100 important gods and a dozen mysteries.
Speaker If they had impose their religion on the countries they conquered, would they have survived?
Speaker Well, I think the success of the Roman Empire was they accepted whatever deities and also whatever royal family is, unless they were subversive, that came their way.
Speaker What they did impose was the legal system and the legal system involved instead of, as in the United States, deeply religious country dedicated to the Bible. He will swear an oath on the Bible that you will tell the whole truth, nothing but the truth, so help you God. The Romans imposed on every country over which they held sway. In the courtrooms, there will be an image of the emperor. And you would have to swear. On the ditty of the emperor that what you about say the whole truth forth, so on. But the Romans were very relaxed about it. The Jews said we can’t have swear on a graven image is all right, don’t do it. They were very relaxed about these things. They didn’t force anything on anybody in the way of belief.
Speaker They forced you to obey their laws and pay their taxes and do all the practical things that you do when you run an empire. They never thought that there was one God and it was their duty to impose them on everybody, no matter how much people hated him. That was very unnerving and that’s why they lasted 500 years. The British Empire barely made it 150 years, and I think our days are numbered as well.
Speaker Which is just how is the book received and now being criticized for being anti Antichrist?
Speaker Well, Julianne, when it came out, it was after my 10 year hiatus, which I couldn’t publish novels because I wasn’t going to be reviewed in the Daily New York Times. I was their policy. They will try and deny it now. But it just take a look.
Speaker You’ll see they were not reviewed seven books and I was blacked out. Luckily, I had England where I was quite well received and a lot of Europe, but I took 10 years off to do plays and movies and so on. Then I came back with Julian and.
Speaker The reviews in America were pretty, pretty dull and mystified. Why is an American not writing about an American subject, which is marriage and divorce and one’s self? Who’s interested in this, we’ve never heard it again, it’s the syndrome, if we don’t already know it, it isn’t worth knowing because we know everything. There was a bit of that.
Speaker Curiously enough, the church, to the extent that they checked in at that time, since they’ve done quite a bit on a book, but Jesuits loved it and it was required reading among Jesuits. And I got some very interesting reviews from them.
Speaker Then, to the amazement of the publishers that advised against who on Earth wants a novel about a fourth century emperor, it became number one bestseller in the United States. And I saw to it that people would know that by printing the bestseller list with it, as no one in my memoirs. Did you say that? And people say it’s not true. The New York Times are not listed as that. The Herald Tribune, which was the good newspaper that did indeed note that it was number one.
Speaker So it had a great audience from the beginning or as great an audience as a novel could have in 1964.
Speaker And I was back.
Speaker The vegetation in the.
Speaker In the first paragraph of society, he talks about memory and.
Speaker I think we are all, I think, betrayed by those lines of memory. How are we?
Speaker Well, I did it I did the same number even more explicitly at the beginning of Palimpsest, that memory is not only self-serving, but memory is.
Speaker Subject to attrition. Subject to time, subject to forgetfulness, palimpsest, where I picked it as a title for a memoir, is it’s one bit of writing, it’s a block of printers block. And they write on it and then they write again on and they do impressions and they write over it again. They write over it.
Speaker And so you have 20 or 30 messages, one on top of the other, and they’re hard to decipher and some of them contradict others. And that to me is the way memory works. You can’t really rely on it, but that’s the best you can do if you break your leg the age of 10 and you want to think about it the age of 40, you’re not going to think. It isn’t like pushing a button, getting an old old tape. You push the button.
Speaker But what you get is not the actual moment of breaking your leg when you were 10. What you get is the last time you remembered breaking your leg when you were 10, but you may have thought about it 500 times since you were 10 years old. Each time you think about it, you alter it. And each time you press the button to recall the breaking of the leg, you’ve lost more of it and you gained stuff that just wasn’t there at all to begin with. That is the nature of memory. So Eugene Luther and Messiah is trying to recall a religion which became a world religion with himself as the sort of Judas the outcast, and it’s a death cult that takes over the world and he’s writing in the near future. Looking back over the origins of this cult, which started in America and turned into a death cult, a lot of it was stolen in a movie called Stolen Green, particularly the things where people go to commit suicide. And you go to these very nice places and you lie down and see beautiful pictures and newsreels and music, and you leave this world happily and presumably.
Speaker And it was a quarry for other people’s work, but it did. It was a cult book at the time and much read. It was the last of my first. Seven or eight books when I had to, it was 1954 and I had to quit, as I have described for 10 years, writing novels. So for Masire and this man is remembering how this thing started and the gas leak out basically took the world by storm as the death cult, I was reading an interesting piece about it by some professor not long ago saying that what gave it its its strength was that it is a subtle parody of Christianity, which, of course, is a death cult writ large. What’s the resurrection? But. Emphasizing the nature of death and maybe it can be overcome and maybe it cannot be. And so 10 years passed and then with Judy and I seem to have picked up where I left off, but go further back in time.
Speaker We just talk about some of the real life parallels to caves where caves, where know there are plenty of them.
Speaker John Kerry, who is the. He comes from the state of Washington. His message, wherever this was written back in the early 50s, his message is that death is no thing.
Speaker And nothing. Is neither bad nor good, but nothing.
Speaker And this is to remove people’s fear of death when he he’s a hypnotic TV performer and I was the first one to invent that somebody could turn himself into a messiah through using television. And he has a sort of hypnotic effect on audiences and he gets more and more worshipers.
Speaker And then the plot requires at one point that he killed himself to prove that death is no thing and he doesn’t want to kill himself. So they have to shoot him offstage, as it were, to prove that he had taken what he called caves away. And so he is dead and he is now celebrated as the person who has become nothing, and now it’s all right for everybody to have a lot of people start doing it. The world is overcrowded. Not a pleasant place to live in. And many people go to these things. They were beautifully done in the movie Soldier and Green. I thought Edward G. Robinson goes into this wonderful place and lives on a stretcher and have broad screen of birds singing and all sorts of things that you can’t see in the late modern world that he inhabits. And the story is told by the one man who was part of founding it and then realizes that it is a death cult.
Speaker And it is a. life and that it is bad. But he goes he vanishes into Egypt, which is what Islamic world is the last to be converted. And he’s still safe. And then suddenly a couple of strangers arrive in Luxor, where he’s living. And they want to find Eugene Luther. He’s terrified that they’ve come to kill him because he’s the last person who knows what the real story was. So he gets to talk to this one man. Find out what has been happening and they gradually figures out that the guy isn’t really interested in him. And then they have a sort of testament to the testament of John Cave. And he asked to look at it. He looks it up.
Speaker And his name is not in it, he has been a racist. And then at the very end, he says that now his life is over. And now that he’s been erased from a religion that he’d helped create. He said it is only now that I realized that I was he whom the world awaited. And did not act.
Speaker Well, this was pretty advanced in the early 50s to say that you could set up a religion on television and we saw what the Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell and Oral Roberts could do and Dr. Sun Moon and the Scientologists, suddenly their religions all over the place. Now, thanks to the ubiquitousness of television.
Speaker And what does that mean, Luther, consider to be the one monster that the human race will never conquer?
Speaker I don’t know what was bought, and I thought that was great.
Speaker Oh.
Speaker I don’t know, apropos of what I’d have to know, how how he comes into that and at what stage. That sounds like Eugene Loser at an early stage. As anxieties hovers over the last half of his life.
Speaker But.
Speaker He does have one insight, because at first he does approve of the death cult of caves where John Cave. And he felt that one of the triggers. Would be. Something that the human race, in his view, could never overcome. And that is boredom. There isn’t enough for most people to do in the course of a life. And for many people, there isn’t anything to do except the most boring, repetitive acts. And he felt. He he was not as mystical as John came about, no thing cannot be bad, but he felt that boredom would lead many people to get out of a world in which there really was nothing much for them to do. And if they weren’t afraid of what happens after your dad. It’s, you know, good riddance, you know, go away. You don’t like it here, you won’t be missed. Right after Duluth was published. I was staying near Windsor was Princess Margaret and a small House party. For four or five days and. She likes to sit up all night and we were sitting up all night, about four or five of us still left and she started to read aloud. From Duluth. And she and I were both paralyzed with laughter, and I’m afraid that’s very correct, Brit. No one on earth we were laughing about. And at the end of it, she said, you know, I don’t know what there is. Solo and violin me that loves this book.
Speaker Etc., because it’s funny that.
Speaker This is just a fun thing, but what do you think would happen in Darwin, x, x, x, x, X, Y or Z cocktail party?
Speaker I don’t know if Darlene X were to meet or to meet Myra Breckinridge. Well, it would be two great forces of. Creation, I think it would be a rather similar to whatever it was that meant the earth that created the moon, some big chunk of something would fly off. I’m sure of that, darling, of course, is more of a pussycat, but equally strong willed.
Speaker And Myra.
Speaker I think might be pretty hostile. Because, darling, I never make it very clear, but although. Her uniform as a member of the Duluth Police Department, homicide. Is made by Mambo Shey, or Main Bottcher, as he used to be called, and it’s theoretically chic, Darlene is not well groomed now. Myra is. It’s her one severity. You must be extremely well groomed at all times. And she would probably want to remake Darlene and to possibly Betty Grable, who is the obsession of Cloris Craig, another figure in Duluth. In fact, Clarice Craig is writing The Life of Betty Grable. And she’s got onto a fact that nobody knows that Betty Grable was murdered because of her affair. But Darlene can’t remember. Of course Craig cannot remember. Whether she was having an affair with J. Edgar Hoover or Herbert Hoover, and until she untangles this, she’s just hung up. I don’t think I would be sympathetic to this.
Speaker There’s just a few things, you know, that I wanted to cover briefly. One was to talk a little bit about the 10 years which you were writing for television and for the screen.
Speaker Well, in 54, my last novel of the first period of my life, which was, I think the seventh. I felt that. Unreviewed, and I noticed it had its admirers and did very well in England. But by then, I had to make a living and I had this house of the Hudson. Was expensive to run.
Speaker And. Television had just happened, television drama. So I had a wonderful agent called Franklin. And at the Whigham, Marsabit.
Speaker And I said, I think I want to write for television, I’ve never written a play, really. I said, just give me a couple of scripts, so he got me two scripts and I. Borrowed a television set and watched TV live play, and then I sat down and I wrote one. About a woman who is two people in cold, dark possession. And I gave it to Harold Franklin, who sold it to Studio one at CBS. The producer was Felix Jackson, who was married to a movie star called Deanna Durbin. And it was a wonderful woman called Florence Britton, who had been an actress, who was the script editor. And they liked it and I was paid seven hundred and fifty dollars for an hour drama. Starring Geraldine Fitzgerald, Leslie Nielsen. It was a young man man from Canada. And it well, you never know with television. He did well in the. People seem to like it and the ratings are good. So I was off and running and I wrote another one, another one, another one. And within a year. I had got an offer from MGM to be what turned out to be the last contract rider. Well, by then I was doing so well with television, I didn’t I didn’t take that job for money. I took it. I went to see a great studio because we all knew the studios were coming to an end. And I wanted to be at MGM, which was the the studio. So there I was. And you you had if you were a contract writer, you worked generally with the same producer. And I was lucky in having Sam Zimbalist, who was a wonderful man. And we did the first picture I did with him was the catered affair with Larry David’s second one was there forever. I accuse about the Dreyfus case. And then I really wanted to get I’d seen quite enough of it. I was very fond of him and he asked me about 10 times what I do better. And I said, well, I didn’t like the first movie, I couldn’t I couldn’t really read the book and I said, no, no, no, no. Finally, they were desperate and they said, will you come to Rome for one month’s? Only one month and I’ll rewrite your contract so you don’t owe us five more years of whatever it was. If you just come for the month of May and work on the script, we’ll let you out. So that’s what happened. I came to Rome. And frankly, I brought everything up to the chariot race pretty much. Poor Charlton Heston is busy saying, I didn’t write anything, he’s told so many lies about this. I think he’s a little worried that I might sue him for libel, but currently he is quiet. So that picture was made, Christopher Fry wrote the last half, neither of us got credit. That’s the way the Writer’s Guild works. Officer, officer of the company of the Guild got credit. I didn’t much mind at the time because I didn’t think much of the movie. Then I went back to my sister was doing occasional television and a TV play that I had done in 55 56. I turned into a play for Broadway called Visit to a Small Planet. And that was very successful and became a very bad movie with Jerry Lewis. I had been told it was to be David Niven and found out too late. Been secretly bought for Mr Lewis. I never saw it and I. I have read it. Then I’d also done with Paul Newman on Philco, Goodyear Playhouse, The Death of Billy the Kid and Newman was under contract to Warners and we went into Warners and got them to take it. And that became the left handed gun, which was another miss. Due to the producer changing directors, everything that could go wrong went wrong. Never saw that one either. That was disappointing because that was my first attempt to do my own movie. I wanted to produce them and write them, I didn’t want to be a director. And this was my opportunity and I’ve had several opportunities, but something generally went wrong. Due mainly the management, the more money they pay or the less power you’re going to have, it’s a lot of films. I then went on to another play, The Best Man in 1960. And ran for Congress that year. So I was somewhat returned to politics, my friend Kennedy was running for president. I was happy in my district, upstate New York that I got something like 44 percent of the vote, almost double what the last congressional candidate got. And Jack only got about 35 percent of the vote. Somewhat less than my vote. I was very pleased with that, he was not very pleased with that.
Speaker Then within that 10 years, I had I did several other movies I did suddenly last summer.
Speaker Is Paris burning, I guess that was later. Then by sixty two or three, I decided if I stayed in the house upstate New York, I was going to be a full time politician. And I wanted to go back to novel writing and I wanted to go back to Julian. So I decided to go to Rome to have with him. American Academy Library at my disposal, and that’s what happened to Howard and I moved to Rome and 62, 63 and Julian was published in 64. And from that time on, I was a novelist occasionally going back to do the odd movie, to write the movie, to do three more four more plays on Broadway.
Speaker And mainly, I had returned to the novel and during the 10 years that I was away just to keep my hand in, dramatic writing is not prose. It’s just a total different set of muscles. To keep my hand in Intro’s, I had become an essayist. They didn’t have the time to write a novel, but I had time I could do shorter pieces. So I set myself up as an essayist as well as a dramatist during that decade, so it was a it was a happy decade. I would probably have been happier had I been allowed by the censors of my country to be a novelist.
Speaker Let’s talk a little bit about some friends and some enemies who have been been your closest friends, closest friends.
Speaker I don’t you see most people go through life, so-and-so, my friend, or my enemy, or do I like so-and-so so-and-so like me, my brain has never worked like that. It works like this is so and so’s company, interesting enough for me to be with her or him. And it will be intellectually or sexually or something, but is it sufficiently interesting? I don’t go in the love thing, I don’t go in for a liking, obviously, if I liked someone’s company, I will seek out the company. If I don’t like the company, they can be as noble, noble can be. And I’m not going to be around. Most people suffer from, oh, I’m not love. People don’t love me for myself, they love me for my money or for my fame or this or that. I suffer from none of these things. I don’t care what they think about me. I care what I think about them. I love the company of Christopher Isherwood. He could get on my nerves and there are aspects of him I didn’t like, but then there were aspects of me that he didn’t like. So these things are generally mutual. Tennessee Williams is the person I most like traveling with and most enjoyed his company. And of course, he was a master playwright. And I learned playwriting by watching him write plays. And I’d go out of town things like Summer and Smoke Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I remember I was there the night that Stalin died. And I had been to see the play out of town and then the first thing the headline Stalinists did. I learned a lot by just enjoying his company and picking up theater from. So you can’t say on his knee and had a great influence on me when I was still in the army at 18, 19, 20, 21, it had pretty much faded away. I saw that she was in many ways exactly what I most disliked on Earth, which was. Self-absorption, vanity. And full of. Odd quirks, she believed in astrology, she believed in Reichian analysis. It was. She was kind of. Anthology of what would later be called New Age Cliches, and that was not for me. You know, their friends were just there was a lot of good company around upstate New York, we had F.W. Duppy, the critic and professor at Columbia, who was a great influence on me. Particularly on the essays is in fact, he was the one who asked me on and got me the partisan review.
Speaker And then we were all part of the original New York Review of Books. We were all in the first issue, and that was the beginning of a long career as an essayist.
Speaker It’s people like that I don’t. I can’t think of anything of a romantic or very interesting nature. And why are they interested in me? It was largely because they were very intelligent.
Speaker So can you tell me when you and Howard met?
Speaker It was we met in 1950, just before my 25th birthday. And a party was given at Cafe Nicholson and he went to the party. And that is, what, fifty one years ago.
Speaker I first met Howard Austen in 1950, 52 years ago.
Speaker And I remember shortly before my 25th birthday, and he’s about four years younger than I am. And here we are and Ravello for that, we were in New York and upstate New York at Edgewater.
Speaker You must find him, you know, when you talk about friendship, the important element being someone who interests you and whose company pursues that, would you think keeps you together?
Speaker I suppose.
Speaker I wanted to just go back and empowerment, as you wrote about your new book, as being your soul mate in the platonic sense, could you could you tell me about that?
Speaker I didn’t. I know you talked a little bit the other day about what one had to you know, the different making, if you could just.
Speaker Well, I was seeing him do it really was the other self and. What he was I was not what I was, he was not, so we complemented each other.
Speaker And.
Speaker That’s the platonic essence aspect of it. The relationship was not, strictly speaking, platonic. That’s another thing. And that is sort of what happens at the beginning of life. Your first attachment of any great strength. Leaves a mark, leaves a profound impression. Which time he raises.
Speaker And it might never have come back to me as vividly if I hadn’t.
Speaker Written Palimpsest and was forced myself to relive those days. It was not a childhood that I particularly wanted to recall. Or youth in the. It wasn’t until I was about 25 that I got free of all sorts of complications in my life, family and.
Speaker Other natures.
Speaker So my first 25 years, I would probably probably have forgotten by now. But recollecting Jimmy and that reminded me of a great many things that I was very happy to remember.
Speaker And began to weigh it and began to see it in a new light. Hence, a palimpsest emerged with a message quite different from what I thought was their.
Speaker Can you tell me about the choosing the spot at Rock Creek, where you want to be buried and halfway between the general and the what’s become of now?
Speaker Well, we were looking about. For places to be planted after death. And I thought I’d always like Rock Creek Cemetery is one of the most beautiful places in Washington. And it’s where all my family and friends ended up. Quite a number of them. And so I went there to see what they had in the way of plots and. Figure it out, and a perfectly modest plot with a slab of marble with my name and dates and Howard’s name and dates and. There will only be ashes under it. And then I noted that it’s on a sort of hill. And I was drawn to the show because it’s where Henry Adams and presumably Clover, his wife, who killed her, so they won’t tell you where they buried. But there’s somewhere on this hill and Henry Adams. Put up this beautiful marble bench, semicircle. With a statue which is generally called the Statue of Grief.
Speaker You can’t tell whether it’s a young man or a young woman because he or she is wearing a kind of call over the head like a shawl. Although Henry Adams irritably said when Theodore Roosevelt asked him, was this man or woman and he said, of course, it’s a young man.
Speaker And. Sculptor, friend of his Idun. Anyway, it’s the most beautiful section of Rock Creek. You sit there and surrounded by flowering trees, and Eleanor Roosevelt told me that I never thought things were really going bad for her. She would drive out to Rock Creek and sit in that bench and contemplate. The image of grief. And I thought, well, this fits in with my life work and the people that I have known from Eleanor Roosevelt to and then of course, I realized Jimmy Dreamboat was their. And almost your race is very hard to find in St.. Maybe easier now, his mother has since died. And I’m told people come there, they put the stone down now, they should have done I should have waited so we were dead. But I guess Rock Creek Cemetery was perhaps advertising, so there it is.
Speaker And George McGovern was up there burying his daughter and he and Eleanor, Mrs. McGovern are going to be buried there, too. He said, well, I went over to see your attraction and there you are. The people were coming to look at your grave. And I said, the fake. We’re not in it yet, but.
Speaker It’s a very bizarre.
Speaker You also wrote about living in Ravello and you said that you first of all, if you don’t want very much anymore and that you live in the present and that you like letting go, could you tell me about that?
Speaker Well, I have no particular ambitions anymore, I need to be accomplish what I feel need to be accomplished. I read, I write, and which is all that I’ve ever done anyway, except occasionally I’ve been active politically. So Ravello is a perfect place in which to both read and write, and that is what I do.
Speaker And I have no great demands on the world, I trust the world has no great demands upon me. So it is a serene, serene place to. To survey the past one zone and that of one’s country. And the Italians are. These are the ones around here are very good at leaving you alone.
Speaker And. It’s very.
Speaker It’s what it’s the new cliche word for what we’re all looking for, the human race is looking for community. And of course, all the people thinking about who talk so bravely about community are all trying to get into the Trump Tower in New York and go to parties. Well, I don’t want to go to parties and I don’t want to be in the Trump Tower. And I have achieved community here. It is not necessarily the community of Issue and Williams FWB, but.
Speaker As I once wrote to the horror of millions of people, if you you’ve known one person, you’ve known them all.
Speaker But very briefly, could you tell me about your 1968 encounter with Buckley, the time of the Chicago convention in Chicago?
Speaker No, there’s nothing much to tell. ABC wanted something different. And they decided to speak for the liberals and be me and speak for the conservatives, there would be Buckley.
Speaker I had got him on to television by making the mistake of referring to him on the Jack Paar Show. He had written that Pope John Two-Thirds message to the world was an essay in triviality. I said, you know, even I said the right wing in America doesn’t even understand what conservatism is for force, I use his name. He rang up immediately and got himself on the Jack Paar Show. And that’s the beginning of Buckley on television. So no bad deed goes unpunished to. And then we were sort of officially the the left wing and the right wing, which is a total misnomer. I don’t identify myself with the left wing and he is no conservative. He’s a radical. But I debated when they asked, would we do? I think six or eight shows together. First batch of the Republican convention in Miami Beach and the second one in Chicago. The Democratic convention and I saw the danger, I will look like the same sort of nut on the left that he is a nut on the right. And, you know, I find him grotesque and I think many people do. Well, once you’re paired with somebody like that, you become the grotesquerie rubs off. And I was dubious about it, but finally I was talked into it as if I didn’t do it, somebody else would and maybe I would do it better than some alternative. So we did it and we seldom spoke to each other. And after the blow up in Chicago, we never spoke again. And I don’t regret it at all. I think it was. It’s the first time ABC ever got to be number one in primetime, and we did it, we were on 15 minutes live and we wouldn’t know until a few minutes before we went on air what we’re going to talk about. And Howard K. Smith, who was our interlocutor, very Buckley, may I say. I would say, all right, boys, we’re going to talk about the vice president, Mr. Dowd, you go first and you just start talking.
Speaker And it was quite paralyzing, if you thought about it, that 20 million people are watching you live and you’re quite unprepared. What you can just wing.
Speaker But we got through it. Well, 1968 was a crucial year politically, and everybody knew there was going to be a lot of fireworks. At the Republican convention and at the Democratic convention, at the Republican Convention. I think I was the first person to predict that not only was Richard Nixon coming back, but he was going to be nominated and he was going to win. The Democrats were in a great mess. Bobby Kennedy had been killed. I think Martin Luther King had been killed. Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson wasn’t running as vice president, Hubert Humphrey was to be his heir, but we had all supported Eugene McCarthy, who had been against the Vietnam War. So it was a poisonous atmosphere. And into this game, the Vidal Buckley debates, which were relatively poisonous to and got more so in Chicago when the Chicago police rioted and they turned on the delegates, turned on the press, I got tear gassed in Grant Park. You really saw how easily the country could come unstuck. It was a great moment, I remember I was down on the floor of the convention and they’re standing on a chair, it was Mayor Daley and a Ribicoff, the senator from Connecticut, that got up and proposed to the convention because of the police riots.
Speaker That the convention dissolve itself and go to another city and there is Mayor Daley screaming, Sini, go home, Sini, go home.
Speaker It was that sort of convention.
Speaker You just very you said that you wouldn’t consider yourself, you know, by that tag as a leftist. How would you describe.
Speaker Well, I’m not in the business of self-description. And you’ll find out where I stand on things. I’m anti imperial and most of the country is pro imperial. I believe that the seven trillion dollars that we spent since 1950 on the Empire would have been better spent. Educating the people and giving them a health service, if that’s left wing, then I’m left wing, is that as intelligent as I think it is? I that intelligent? And to spend it on war when we have no enemy except what we create from time to time, that’s stupid. And if it’s stupid not to be stupid.
Speaker You said that you you spent you did a lot of live television talk shows, and why did you do? Why did you do that?
Speaker I did a lot of live TV shows, first of all, I was. Running for Congress as a 59. And I was the leader of the five Democratic leader of the five counties upstate mid Hudson Valley. So. I wasn’t going to run with a lot of money, so I had to make myself known to the district, which I did on national television, and I was constantly on Jack Paar and later Johnny Carson and Merv Griffin and so on.
Speaker And David Seska and I used to do at least once a year State of the Union. And I would get up as a as the shadow president and I would take up the subjects of the president was actually talking about. And then I would give another interpretation, often opposite to what he was saying. And this proved to be a popular feature for a dozen years.
Speaker I did television in order to get my views across to the public. The New York Times is not going to print them. Time magazine isn’t going to print them. You’re blacked out if you say anything that goes against what they believe and what they want people to think. However, in those days, there was so much live television and it was quite free, and if you could hold an audience. And people would listen, you were in great demand. I was told once by The Tonight Show, they said, you know, I said what’s how does this thing work? At times I want to go on. You say, no, no, we can’t book you at times. I don’t want to go on. I say, for God’s sake, you’ve got to be here Monday night.
Speaker And so I said, how does it work? He said, well, don’t tell anybody, but when you are on, our ratings go up in every city in the United States. We lose the entire south. And except for Chicago, most of the Midwest now, if our ratings have been good in the cities, we don’t need you. But if there’s sinking a bit in the cities, we do need you and we don’t care that much about, that’s more important to us than the South and the parts of the Midwest. That’s how it works now. It’s still true, but they won’t have me on at all. They would rather lose money than hear a voice say things that they don’t want to hurt. They are true believers now. It’s like a religion and they’re peddling a religion on television and only if certain things are true and everything else is untrue and anyone who says to the contrary must not be allowed on. That, I fear, is what it’s come to.
Speaker After World War two, you wrote your first book wasn’t your first novel, but the first. One that was. Published and widely recognized.
Speaker And you and there were other writers like Norman Mailer and Post, and you described it as a kind of golden age or what you thought was going to be a golden age in literature. Could you just describe that time? And who were your compatriot writers?
Speaker Well, I’ve often said that the the post-war period, we had five years, 45 to 50. Which was the only five years that we were not at war with somebody hot, cold tempered. In those five years, there was an explosion in all of the arts. We became number one in ballet, of all things, something nobody had known about before the war.
Speaker Suddenly, this ballet theatre and Tudor, Jerry Robbins and music, Lenny Bernstein, Copeland. We were taking off in all the arts in the novel, there was Maila and Carpati, Paul Bowles. McCullers myself, there were at least 20 very interesting writers in that five year period who just just emerged from nowhere and wonderful poets at the beginning of Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop.
Speaker The theater one night, she went to see A Streetcar Named Desire, the next night you got to see Death of a Salesman. All of the arts, there was just a burst of energy because we had been at war and before that depression. For the better part of a generation. But our rulers did not want us to be at peace. And Harry Truman in 1950 militarise the American economy. He brought the draft back in peacetime, something that never happened in America before, we had no enemy. We pretended the Russians were coming where they weren’t going anywhere. And we know that. He installed loyalty oaths for everybody working in government and everybody in universities, everybody teachers. It was like the Soviet Union and we were imitating the Soviet Union. The CIA was an imitation of the KGB. Suddenly, and the loyalty oaths led immediately to Senator McCarthy. It was Truman that started that scare, not Joe McCarthy. He just exploited it.
Speaker So when watched with horror from 50 to the court through the Korean War. To the United States, becoming a garrison state, constantly armed with no interest in the arts, nothing but terror propaganda, schoolteachers denied their jobs. William Buckley and family rushing around say the teachers are communist. That’s teacher communist. They must be fired. They must be fired. They’re teaching communism. It was a reign of terror we all know about. The blacklisted writers are ho, ho, ho.
Speaker Who cares about screenwriters are not important. Well, they lost their livelihoods and we lost a lot of good movies. It was a reign of terror and it went on and on and on. And ever since 1950, we have been at war with somebody somewhere, the enemy of the month club. If it is a Noriega, it’s Gadhafi is not Gadhafi. It’s Saddam Hussein. If it’s not that, it’s North Korea. If it’s not that terrorism now terrorism. That poor man who went to Harvard, Harvard is now blowing up Afghanistan or something. We are constantly lied to, constantly propagandized and alternative voices are not allowed on the media where they can be effective. Yes, you can write a piece in the nation with 100000 circulation, but The New York Times will not notice it. I don’t think I’ve seen Noam Chomsky even mentioned in that paper outside of linguistics and is is a great voice for truth.
Speaker And what there was a point at which.
Speaker Your relationship with Norman Mailer, which had been pretty affable. Became.
Speaker Unrestrained laughter.
Speaker He attacked the feminists and.
Speaker Can you just well, Miller and I have always had perfectly friendly relations, nothing more. And he wrote an attack on the prisoner because the prisoner of sex, an attack on the feminists, I responded. I thought it was all wrong and he got very upset. And it was a lot of fuss in the press, and that was that there’s nothing more to it. An interesting story, in my view.
