by Tom Piazza
A month later I received an answer—brief, but not too brief, and full of characteristic flourishes. He told me he had “of course” enjoyed reading my letter, and that he appreciated the fact that I hadn’t interrupted him, that he probably was in fact in the middle of a thought. He wrote that answering mail was a periodic “comedy,” that it all went into a bag to be answered at regular intervals. He said that he would look forward to reading my article and would write to me about it then. No piece of mail, before or since, has ever made me as happy.
Over that summer I finished writing the article about the jazz festival in Senegal, and William Shawn himself bought it for The New Yorker in October of that year, paying what I thought was an astonishing sum, and then never published it, and that is a story for some other occasion. In any case, I sent the manuscript to Norman, reminding him of our exchange of letters earlier in the year. I never heard back from him.
Winter came, and went, and in the spring of 1981, as luck would have it, I met Peter Alson, Norman’s nephew, at a party. I had started work on a novel and was planning to use my New Yorker money to move to New Orleans and write the book. Peter was writing his first novel, too, and we became instant best friends. After we had known each other for a few weeks, he invited me to the house of his mother, Barbara Wasserman, on West Eleventh Street for a family gathering. Norman was there, and when Peter introduced us, Norman’s face opened up and his eyes focused in, simultaneously.
“Oh . . . Tom, hey . . .” he said, slapping himself lightly on his stomach and then chopping the air with his hand. “Listen, I haven’t had a chance to read your piece yet.” Crinkles formed around the sides of his eyes as he looked up at me with a seriocomic, faintly appraising look. “But my assistant has. And she liked it. And her pride would be that she doesn’t suffer fools gladly.” On that last sentence he kind of arched his eyebrows, holding my gaze and nodding slightly and deliberately toward me to let me know this was no small compliment. Later, when I met Judith McNally, I knew it was not. But at the time I wondered how in the world he had remembered that envelope that he got in the mail nearly six months earlier. Yet another smoke signal from yet another Young Writer In The Wilderness, among all the similar letters and manuscripts he received . . . But there it was. Norman took it all seriously, and the list of writers who can report similar experiences is long.
That afternoon he invited me to join him and Peter and José Torres and the rest of the gang at the Gramercy Gym the next Saturday morning for their boxing club, which I did, and which I kept doing for three years. And if I were to start telling the stories, detailing the kindnesses, the laughs, the visits to Maine and P-town, the insights and, later, the help I received from Norman, there would be room for nothing else in this issue of The Mailer Review. I will say that because of that meeting I did not move to New Orleans as planned. I stayed in NYC for another ten years, until I left town in 1991 for the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (with a recommendation from Norman). In 1994 I finally did move to New Orleans.
Norman was a profoundly generous friend. He read my early stories and articles and discussed them with me seriously. He wrote letters of recommendation, to Iowa and to arts colonies. Eventually he wrote a beautiful and heartfelt cover quote for my first book of fiction. He counseled me about literary agents and editors and reviewers, and once—most wisely and comfortingly—about a lost love that was tearing my life up two decades ago. He took me out for a drink in the late afternoon, and he listened to me talk about it, and he didn’t give me direction or advice, merely let me know, by an anecdote here, a metaphor there, that he had been through it too, and had (obviously) survived, and that one’s work was, ultimately, what got one through.
After I moved out of New York I saw him less frequently, but we would usually manage to have lunch at the Chinese restaurant by the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn Heights on my visits back from Iowa or New Orleans. After my novel My Cold War was published, in 2003, Norman invited me to visit in Provincetown. There were some things he wanted to say to me about being a novelist. Of course I went, and in January 2004 we spent three days talking, talking, talking, once well past midnight—about novels, about the war in Iraq, about the nature of God and whether He existed, about Tolstoy and Chekhov, but mainly about what it means to be a novelist and what one should strive for. It was a gift beyond measure, really. I visited Norman and Norris again in P-town several times, and it always counted. Even when he must have known there wasn’t a lot of road left, Norman was brilliant, funny, cranky, unself-pitying, generous, and utterly committed to the craft at which he had spent his life.
When Norman was in the hospital for the last time, I was at the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, trying feverishly to finish the first draft of my novel City of Refuge. My editor at HarperCollins was audibly drumming his fingers on his desk, and I was riding the novel through the chutes and rapids of its final playing-out. I wrestled with the question of whether to drive down from MacDowell and visit him in the hospital. If I had been able to ask him directly, my guess was that he would have told me to stay where I was and finish my fucking book. I was hearing guarded optimism from some family members, even the possibility that he might be discharged, and I let myself believe it. I sketched out a day-to-day schedule of work for two weeks, ending on November 10, the date on which I would write the book’s final scene. Then I would go wherever Norman was and visit him.
I worked like a demon in those weeks, and I thought about Norman every day, about the terrible deadline pressure under which he so often wrote, about many of the things I had learned from him about work, about what was necessary when you were up against the wall and needed to call on your reserves. I worked harder than I had ever worked in my life. The two weeks went by and I was all but done. The morning of November 10 arrived, and I went to my studio to write the final scene of the book. By this time I knew essentially how this scene was going to go, and I was ready. I got to the desk around seven a.m., and for some reason I checked my e-mail before starting work, which is something I never do, and there, in my in-box, was the short e-mail from Norris, telling me that Norman had died and that she thought I’d want to hear it from her before I heard it on the news.
I left the studio and walked around the beautiful grounds of MacDowell, trying to digest this indigestible fact, and realizing that it would be a long time, if ever, before I could. I thought about whether I should have gone to see him instead of pushing to finish the novel. And maybe I should have. But what would I have said? “Good-bye?” That would have been intolerable. “Thank you?” Norman had once told me, “Friends don’t say thanks.” I didn’t agree with him then, and I think I told him so, but anyway I’d already said “thank you” in a lot of ways, and he knew what I thought. I knew he was surrounded toward the end by a lot of love from family and friends, and he hated overly dramatic or demonstrative scenes. I walked around MacDowell for an hour or so, then went back to my studio and finished my novel.
I did go to see him, several days later, in Provincetown. Along with Larry Schiller, Dick and Doris Kearns Goodwin, Peter Alson, Mike Lennon, Doug Brinkley, and several of Norman’s children, I was honored to speak at the small graveside ceremony; I read a brief passage from The Armies of the Night, the extraordinary description of his night journey on a bus through the Virginia countryside en route to his brief jail stay after the 1967 March on the Pentagon. The passage is so full of his sense of mystery, his love for the poetry of the landscape of the United States, his tenderness. He was off, now, on a journey about which he had been very curious, where awaited, perhaps, some answers to the questions he lived with, about God and karma and the afterlife. Or maybe, knowing Norman, not answers but more extraordinary questions.
I miss him, badly, and I miss him every day.
From The Mailer Review, Volume 2, Fall 2008
Sometime in 2010 I was asked to contribute something of my own devising to an anthology titled The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books. After
the gracious invitation I took a couple of running jumps at the topic, but everything I wrote felt very talky and stale and I got busy with other things. Then, months later, with the deadline approaching, a call from editor Jeff Martin reminded me that I had promised a piece. I took one more shot at a conventional essay, scrapped it, and then found myself engaged in this little dramatic scenario, which pretty much accurately reflects how I was feeling at the time. Not that I mess around with guns or anything like that, y’unnerstand . . .
An Interview with Tom Piazza on the Future of the Book
T he Questioner arrives at room 204 of the London Lodge, on the outskirts of New Orleans, the motel room where he is scheduled to meet with Tom Piazza, author of the novels City of Refuge and My Cold War and the nonfiction collection Devil Sent the Rain, and a writer for the HBO series Treme, to discuss the future of the book. Knocking once, twice, he receives no answer. The Questioner tries the door and finds it unlocked. Walking into the room he finds Piazza asleep in his street clothes on an unmade bed, with books stacked on the floor, on the couch, on the coffee table, and a small child’s record player emitting a ticking sound as the needle goes around the inner spiral of a long-finished LP. The Questioner replaces the record player’s tone arm on its perch and shuts the machine off. Pulling the desk chair up to the side of the bed, the Questioner tentatively reaches out to shake the sleeping figure by the shoulder.
Tom Piazza: [still asleep; shifting slightly in bed] Three bucks’s too much . . .
Questioner: Mr. Piazza . . .
TP: [shifts more, frowns, groans]
Q: We’re here to talk about the future of the book.
TP: [waking up] . . . huh?
Q: The future of the book . . . your thoughts . . . ?
TP: What the fuck are you talking about?
Q: Uh . . . we discussed this . . . ? You were going to . . .
TP: What do you mean by “book”? Where are my glasses . . . ?
Q: We can come back some other time, if this . . .
TP: Here they are. How did my glasses get on the floor? [picks up an envelope from the nightstand, shakes it slightly, plucks out two small pieces of what appears to be rock candy, and places them under his tongue] Okay—which book are you talking about, now?
Q: You were going to give us a few words about the future of the book. For a . . . book.
TP: Right, right. [sits up; opens nightstand drawer; pulls out a .38 pistol] I assume I can define the word “book” any way I want to, since you won’t define it for me?
Q: [alarmed, staring at gun] Yes, certainly . . .
TP: Okay. [significantly more alert] I’ll skip all the usual drainage about electronic books and the death of publishing and how many cookbooks get published and how hard it is to sell midlist fiction. And how important literature is, and how we tell ourselves stories to make sense of our lives, or how in the future we’ll all be able to write our own endings to books, as if we can’t do that already, or whether backlit screens will replace regular LCDs on the new Zorro e-reader . . . You don’t need me for that crap. I really don’t care anyway. I’m old-school.
Q: [still staring at the .38] Meaning . . . ?
TP: Meaning first of all that I like books that I can hold in my hand. Made of paper. I don’t need to plug them in, and I don’t have to buy batteries for them. They look different from each other, and I like that. I like looking at Bleak House and being able to tell that it embodies a different sense of life than Jesus’ Son does. I like carrying the fuckers around with me. One weighs more than the other. If you like to read your books on an Etch A Sketch, that’s fine with me. Especially if you’re reading my books. But it’s like looking at a book of paintings where Guernica is the same size as a Holbein portrait. You get no sense of the scale of things, of the nature of the artist’s ambition.
Q: Isn’t ambition a little . . . corny?
TP: [raises .38; cocks hammer] I’m sorry; would you care to repeat that?
Q: I said, “Ambition makes me horny.”
TP: [lowering .38] Yeah, me too. Listen, I want to talk about novels right now, because that’s what I write.
Q: You’re also writing for TV, aren’t you?
TP: [angrily; defensively] Yeah—so what? Besides—it’s not TV; it’s HBO . . .
Q: [holding up hands] Nothing wrong with that. Just checking.
TP: Computers and e-books and smartphones all basically look alike. They are strictly vehicles; you pick them up to step through them into some consensus reality; you’re wired in. Everything is leveled out. When everything has equal weight, everything is weightless. The world they offer is one of infinitely diverse information with a common denominator—the screen. The computer is neutral in that it gives you access to limitless amounts of information, but the one requirement is that you have to get it on the computer. The information has no smell, no weight, no texture. Nothing that seriously impinges on your reality. People think it represents some kind of democratizing of information because everything’s the same size. But democracy is when things of different sizes get a chance to mix it up and work it out, measure themselves in their respective strengths. If everything is the same size, there’s no perspective. Perspective, as in, you know, painting. Everything becomes two-dimensional, flat . . .
Q: Isn’t perspective an illusion? A person’s face looming close to the viewer might appear larger than a skyscraper in the distance . . .
TP: Exactly. But that tells you something about reality. Whereas if you had a little chart where you could see everything rendered in exact relative scale but boiled down to a fifteen-inch frame, it might tell you something factual, but you wouldn’t have an experience. You wouldn’t learn something about the reality that something small near at hand can have a much larger impact than something large far away . . .
Q: Well . . . whatever . . . So what about the novel?
TP: I’m coming to that. A novel makes a world from one writer’s perspective. It offers point of view, in the specialized literary sense, which is to say that it places point of view in a contrasting context. The writer makes the point of view, maybe multiple points of view, and also makes the context for those points of view. You make a world. A computer is a competing kind of world; it’s an anti-world. The computer’s ambition is to transcend point of view entirely.
Q: [gaining confidence] But what about all the chat rooms and discussion boards and social networking sites? There are a lot of points of view offered there.
TP: There are a lot of points of view being offered right now down in a dozen bars outside on Airline Highway, but very little perspective. Their dynamic is about letting off steam. If you want to cook something you have to keep the oven closed for a while, otherwise it will be half-baked. Nobody really works anything out at the corner bar. They just confirm their own assumptions. They think they have a point of view because they’re arguing with somebody. But perspective means arguing with yourself. Two eyes, set in different locations on your face, make 3-D. Thelonious Monk used to say, “Two is one.” That’s what he meant.
Q: I’m having trouble following you.
TP: Yeah . . . right . . . well . . . I guess it boils down to some people like books and some people don’t.
Q: But you’re making a case for one over the other.
TP: I’m not, really. I’m just saying they’re different.
Q: I mean, why is that important? Why is it important whether you get your information from a computer of some sort or from a physical book?
TP: [regarding the questioner appraisingly] The information is qualitatively different, isn’t it? Isn’t there some sort of meta-information in the weight of a book, in the effort and time it takes to produce it, as opposed to just hitting a button and sending your latest notion off into the Internet? There’s a resonance. Somebody else might have held the book, and valued it. Maybe they made notes in the margin, and kept it and handed it down to their children . . . I mean, you can give somebody a book; it has
weight, it’s a gesture of faith in the future. The message of the Internet is that the moment is what matters; the closer you can get to that virtual moment, the closer you are to reality. But a novel offers perspective; it says time curves and things change, and what looks big now might really be small, and vice-versa, and here’s a model of how that works . . . I mean, if there’s no future for books, there’s no future. People who are interested in time, and have a taste for the individual consciousness up against mass consensus, will always have a taste for books.
Q: So that’s your prediction about the future of books?
TP: [annoyed] Look, I don’t know about the fucking future. Nobody knows what’s going to happen in ten seconds.
Q: [exasperated] Oh, that is ridiculous; everybody is obsessed with it. There are tens of thousands of websites dedicated to making guesses about the future . . . [gasping] Dear God . . . what are you doing?
TP: [points the .38 at the questioner and tightens his index finger on the trigger] I’ve just about had it with this conversation.
Q: Please . . . Don’t shoot . . .
TP: [pulls trigger; flame sprouts from the tip of the gun. It is a gag-store cigarette lighter]
Q: [shaking, wiping forehead with a kerchief] Jesus . . . What is wrong with you?
TP: Oh, come on . . . You saw that coming, didn’t you?
From The Late American Novel: Writers on the
Future of Books, Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee, editors
