George Pettigrew explains how a deep dive into his family’s untold history changed his life. Then we’re doing something a little different this week: sharing a conversation from 2016 that helped inspire 70 Over 70. Max interviewed the writer Renata Adler for the Longform Podcast and they talked about how her relationship to her work has changed over time, why she continues to write, and what she still hopes to accomplish.
Know someone who should be on 70 Over 70? We’re looking for all types of stories and people to feature at the top of the show. To nominate yourself or someone else, email 70over70@pineapple.fm or call 302-659-7070 and tell us your name, age, where you’re from and what you want to talk about.
transcription
[PRE-ROLL]
[OPENING MONTAGE]
Madeleine Albright: I know this program is 70 Over 70, but I really wish I were younger. I wish I was 70…but, I am ready
[THEME MUSIC STARTS]
William: I’m 72 years old.
Paula: I’m 75, miraculously enough.
Sandy: I am 83 years old.
Betty: I am 88 years old.
James: You know, I’m here at 92.
Lucia: I’ll be 94 in May.
Donalda: I’m 101 years old.
George Pettigrew: My name is George Pettigrew, I'm 71 years old, and I live in Kansas City, Missouri.
[THEME MUSIC FADES OUT]
George: I grew up in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and that was segregated Jim Crow South. You know, growing up, school system wasn't supplying the black schools with positive images of themselves. In elementary school there were only two books on all the shelves that had any reference to Black. One was Little Black Sambo and the next one was Black Beauty. One a fiction and the other one a black horse.
[MUSIC FADES IN]
George: And everything else was about white people. And then I found out about the stories about the Buffalo Soldiers.
[MUSIC CONTINUES]
George: The Buffalo Soldiers were African-Americans that were enlisted in the United States Army during peacetime in 1866 for the first time in the nation's history. And my becoming familiar with the Buffalo Soldiers was due to my mother. She constantly talked about a buffalo soldier by the name of Isaac Johson. Now, Isaac Johnson is my great grandfather. I never met him, but he was a Buffalo soldier meaning he actually was in the setting of all these cowboy movies I had been seeing all my life! But I never saw myself in it. I never saw anyone else in it that was like me. Then it was just like the light came on. So this gave me an awareness that, wait a minute, Black people are not what popular opinion may want to prescribe for them. It gave me a real sense of where we had been and not that we were hidden or-or invisible but that we were there.
Now at my age of 71, I’m an oral historical storyteller and when I am presenting in front of an audience of young people I come into the room and I'm fully dressed as a Buffalo soldier.
The boots come all the way up to my long knees. There's a sky blue set of woolen trousers and underneath there's a dark blue blouse. There are two chevrons on my arms, and they’re both in gold braid. There's about a 10 inch blade knife on my left hip and on my right hip is a 45 Colt six shot. And in that uniform, I at that moment, become someone else. I become...really a Buffalo soldier by the name of Isaac Johnson. I keep him in my head.
[MUSIC ENDS]
George: You know, I realized my mission is to leave that audience, those listeners, with an understanding of the contribution to America that everyone has made, using the Buffalo Soldiers as an example of the undertold story. What's missing is the oral history being handed down. But that’s what I want to do. I want to break that, uh, cycle of not knowing who you are in this land. And when you have that then you stand -- you stand with a different understanding, you're more sure of yourself. If I could encourage anyone to do anything, your mission should be to tell the stories, engage your family, engage the youngsters…
[THEME MUSIC FADES IN]
George: And let them know just how things were, how you get to here, and where you may even expect to go.
Max Linsky: That was George Pettigrew, and from Pineapple Street Studios, this is 70 Over 70, a show about making the most of the time we have left. I'm Max Linsky.
[THEME MUSIC CONTINUES]
Max: So we’re doing something a little different this week. This episode is sort of a time capsule.
The interview you’re about to hear, with the writer Renata Adler, was recorded exactly 6 years ago for the Longform Podcast, a show I co-host with two friends of mine, where we talk to journalists.
Renata had just released a new collection of her non-fiction when we talked. A New Yorker staff writer for 40 years starting in 1962, she’s covered everything from the Vietnam War to the march from Selma to Montgomery to Nixon's impeachment hearings. She was also, for just over a year, the film critic at the New York Times.
Both as a critic and as a journalist, Renata is fearless and exacting and clear on what she thinks. And I expected her to be the same way in this interview. But instead, she was willing to think out loud with me — about her work, her career, and most importantly, this time in her life and how her relationship to the writing in her collection had changed over the years.
[MUSIC FADES IN]
Max: It's one of my favorite conversations I've ever had, with or without microphones. And I want to share it with you because it’s a big part of the reason 70 Over 70 exists. This talk with Renata made me want to hear from so many more people her age not just about their past but about their lives right now.
When we talked, Renata Adler was 77 years old.
Today’s she’s 83.
INTERVIEW
Max: Renata Adler. It's a pleasure to have you here.
Renata: Well, it's great to be here.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Max: It's early in the day. It's-it's 11-ish. And you told me that you do much better early in the day.
Renata: Yeah, it's not that early, Max. It-it's OK, but I don't know why I said that, because I it was true for years, but right now it doesn't seem to be so true.
Max:Really?
Renata: It seems to me maybe I do better late in the day [both laugh]
Max: Do you want to put this off again?
Renata: No, this let's not put it off again [Max laughs]. Here we are.
Max: Do you write normally in the morning?
Renata: Yeah, if-if I write, it's normally only in the morning. And it's funny because that changes from when you're young. I mean, all--everything changes from when you're young. No, not everything. But that, for example, being a night person.
Max: You were a night person as a young person?
Renata: I think I was a night person, or at least it was perfectly normal to write at night or write when you got home or something. Now, what started to happen is I would think, “Oh, my God, it's 7 o'clock in the morning. The day is already gone. [Max laughs] How can I possibly work, the day is already over.” And that started to move back. So I thought, “Oh, well, you know, it's 6 o'clock in the morning. And already in Europe its..,” I mean, it just-it just went on and on.
Max: We're done for.
Renata: We're done for. So it got earlier and earlier and then it became this imaginary thing of being able to work only in the morning because you can't really say at 4 o'clock in the morning, oh my God, it's 4 o'clock in the morning.
Max: The day's gone.
Renata: Yes. No point in starting.
Max: Might as well just go to bed now.
Renata: That's--yeah. Well, it was turning into that a little bit [both laugh]. Yeah.
Max: Let's talk about, uh, night owl Renata. Younger, writing-at-night Renata.
Renata: If I remember her. There was a radio program and it was just for night people. I forget what it was called, but it was for people who worked at night and also for insomniacs. And so, um, this guy began to refer to them, I think, as the night people. He became very possessive about the night people and they about him. And he said, what I want you all to do tomorrow, what all the night people will do tomorrow is go to their local bookstore and say that you are looking for a book called I Libertine. So many people went. First, people in bookshops would say we can't find it, there's no such book. And then there started to be such a demand that they'd say, well, we have it on order. And then somebody actually wrote a book called I Libertine. They just wanted it to be an exercise of power by the people who are up at night. And it worked.
Max: Did you go?
Renata: No, no.
Max: Huh. Here's the probably ridiculous leap I'm taking, which is that I went back and read all of these pieces from The New Yorker that you did in the 60s and marching from Selma to Montgomery and Sunset Strip in, uh, Nigeria...that period you were going all over the country looking for-- I don't know, I'm interested in how you describe it. But I was struck by how present you seem to be in these places, but not a part of these different historical things.
Renata: You know, in the book, it looks as though I was much more prolific than I was. So years would pass.
Max: You're talking about your collection. The one that’s just been--
Renata: Yeah. So years I mean, I would go to Selma and then I would do nothing for or maybe I would do something or they'd be spells of doing something. But so it wasn't sort of jetting around the world.
Max: I'll-I’ll grant you that maybe you weren't always in, like, the thick of history for 10 years and maybe there were some, some-
Renata: No, but I did try. I mean, I did sort of happened upon it here and there. Yeah.
Max: Are you being self-deprecating by saying you happened upon it or-or does that is that really how it feels to you? I mean, like what was drawing you to those places?
Renata: OK, well, it's-it's slightly inaccurate. That is with Selma. I really want to go.
Max: How old were you when you went to Selma?
Renata: I don't know. When was Selma? Was it 1963?
Max: Yeah.
Renata: Probably 26, right?
Max: OK.
Renata: But I had just been doing unsigned reviews at The New Yorker and maybe by then assigned reviews or so of books and maybe a little bit of talk reporting. But I had never done any real reporting and I so admired real reporters, I just thought to read. So I asked Mr. Shawn whether I could go to Selma and he said, yeah. And-and a march, as it turned out, is something that is easier for me as a reporter to cover, because the structure is given that, as you say, on Monday morning, then on Monday at noon on the Monday afternoon, the Monday night. So you didn't have to….there's nothing abstract about it.
Max: There's a lot of striking things in that story, particularly for someone my age to read about Martin Luther King as a living person joking around.
Renata: Oh, well, sure.
Max: I mean, that's not a side of him that I've seen very much of. But there's this moment, I think, on the first night where everyone's asleep and you at 2:00 in the morning, went and talked the people who are standing watch. For some reason that made me realize that you were a 26 year old who had somehow talked her way into covering this march for The New Yorker. And you were it was 2:00 in the morning. And you're out in the field in the middle of Alabama and you're completely in the background in that moment. It's just a quote unquote, reporter talking to this nightwatchman.
Renata: It's funny who's interesting even if you're not reporting, but just in the course of the day who is interesting and says interesting things. And there are so-- I mean, there are such a lot really. There's such a lot. But being a security guard. They are--yeah.
Max: I'm sort of in a way, not surprised to hear you say that, because all those pieces sort of include these long descriptions of it's not banal, but it-it's common experience.
Renata: It's common experience.
Max: It's people sitting around bored.
Renata: Yeah, it-it’s was astonishing to me that people were sitting around bored.
Max: So, I mean, like you were maybe sitting around a little bored in New York, then going to these places all over the world where it felt like the entire attention was focused on action. And you get there and it would be like still kind of a little bit boring.
Renata: I never thought of it. I never thought of it. But that's right. I mean, time doesn't pass any differently or anything like that, although, I mean, I must say, those poor Biafras, right, because for them, I mean, they were practically exterminated. That's what it was about. And that's what people were doing. I just didn't happen at any particular moment to be in a place where something was blowing up.
Max: I'm interested in when you-when you were in places like Biafra that didn't have the kind of built in narrative that someone in Montgomery has.
Renata: Yeah.
Max: How you knew you had the story? Like, how you knew you were done, how you knew you were ready to go home.
Renata: That's so interesting because, of course, nothing happened that would explain that. I mean, there was not a storyline. You know, nothing was true of the situation when I left it that had not been true of the situation when I went there. So what did I know? I have no idea, because, of course, it couldn't have been scheduling because you couldn't fly in or out of it. Or maybe there weren't that many opportunities to leave because the--I remember this very clearly. I was taking the plane and to my surprise, what was leaving on the plane with me, for some reason, was going to the Ivory Coast. But it was out, right. It was getting out. And the plane was full of refrigerators [laughs]. So, I mean being I mean, used refrigerators being exported from Biafra and I didn't inquire about the refrigerator. I wouldn't even know what to ask [Max laughs]. I mean, what could you possibly--
Max: Just-- wait. So, just so I’m clear this, uh, is just the plane?
Renata: It was just a flight out of Biafra.
Max: It was you and a bunch of used refrigerators on this flight out of Biafra.
Renata: Yes, that's it. That's it.
Max: You were like, oh, yeah, I've got it. I've got the story.
Renata: I've got the story. But I thought, I don't understand these refrigerators [Max laughs] and then I thought my mother will be very relieved that I'm still alive. I mean, that was a-- so I...
Max: That must have been a pretty consistent thought.
Renata: Yeah, she--looking back on it, she was pretty good about this stuff. She was really...
Max: Yeah! My mom would not have been very happy if in my 20s I was running around the world to war zones.
Renata: No, and, of course, it didn't seem like that. But still it must have been on her mind. I wouldn't like it so much if my son suddenly said, I'm leaving for Biafra and, you know, I might have a remark or two to make.
Max: I almost hesitate to ask this question because I think it might reflect poorly on me. But I'm going to I ask you anyway.
Renata: Go ahead.
Max: You describe yourself at that age doing this reporting. Naive is not the word that I want to-I want to use. I want to... but I don't know a better one. Reading those stories, they're so confident. Like the work that came out of those experiences is so sure of itself, that feels like a little bit of a gap to me. Does it feel that way to you or no?
Renata: When you mention it, it does, but that confidence wasn't there at all. And I don't think I have it in situations usually anyway. I mean, I have it much more than I used to when I was...shy.
Max: You were shy when-when you were in your 20s doing those stories?
Renata: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know shy is the right word.
Max: How did that manifest itself?
Renata: For one thing, I didn't talk so much and-and I had this sort of fear of meeting people and then I had this tremor anyway, which I've always had. So the question of getting a spoon, if you really got the shakes say, and you're not I mean, at an age where people just assume it's Parkinson's and you can't get a spoonful of soup to mouth because you're shaking, it was a form of nervousness, maybe more than shyness. I don't remember. I mean, I'm too different from what I was then to-to know it. But your question about the naiveté and the confidence in the writing...yeah. Here's the thing. It's a different person who writes. I guess it becomes a different person, because if you-if you're just going to be totally tentative and you say, “well, you know, something seems to be going on in Biafra and there are people, you know, and I don't want to take sides or anything, but,”... that would be very weird.
Max: That would read weird. Yeah.
Renata: Unless you're going to be fairly definite, what's the point of writing? I mean, I don't think I write into situations in-in which I don't feel some confidence that what I'm writing is likely true.
Max: Yeah, OK, so you-you had confidence that it was right. But I want to go back to something you just said, which is that the writer and the reporter I guess...
Renata: Yeah.
Max: For our purposes here are different people.
Renata: Yes, I think that's right. There is a difference.
Max: Does one of them feel more like you?
Renata: Yeah, the non writer one. The non writer one. So it's well, I should think about that a little bit more, but it's an awfully good question because don't you sometimes feel that you are really several people? I mean, there's one who does this and there's the one who does that, although I feel more confident about the confident person than I do about the other person. I don't know how I separate them. I may not. I've never separated them in this way in my mind. I've more separated them, oddly, into the writer of fiction and the writer of nonfiction.
Max: Uh huh. Well, what's that what-what does that difference look like?
Renata: Oh, I mean, that's just- it's just a coincidence. It's just a coincidence that they're both the same person [Max laughs]. It's just-it's just one of those things that happens. You know, they just--I wonder if that's true. I don't mean that to be quite so frivolous, but it's really very different.
Max: Tell me about that. How do you think about yourself as a novelist versus yourself as a nonfiction writer?
Renata: It's very interesting because sometimes in the fiction there is stuff that's more literally true than what I could do in reporting about the same situation. So it's reporting but the minute you say it's fiction, it becomes fiction. Context is different. The meaning is different. The meaning to me is different the--
Max: What are you thinking of when you say that?
Renata: I'm thinking...it happened to me again and again in writing fiction that I would be telling a story and suddenly I would think, look, this has to be cut off here. This is before the whole point because it looks too like satire that's gone too far. Actually, that quite often happens. That happens, too. I mean, you just can't.
Max: Too far because it's too real?
Renata: No because.
Max: Too far because it's too harsh?
Renata: No. Too far because reality is so much more extreme sometimes than what one can actually write without putting people completely off. But it's a different problem because there are a lot of literally true stories in my fiction. But there's no way I can do them completely in fiction either, because it looks...wild. It just looks wildly, so wildly improbable. And not that I better just cut it.
Max: It's too crazy to even be in a novel.
Renata: That's right.
Max: So you didn't feel like your-your novels were kind of in conversation with your journalism at all?
Renata: Never thought about it till this minute. Yes, in another way, sure, yeah. In another way, yeah.
Max: How so?
Renata: I thought that, you know, having been a critic for so long, having done the whole thing backwards, right. Actually what I think the proper order is maybe you write fiction, maybe you get a job at a newspaper, then you write reporting pieces and then you write criticism. I mean, criticism is for old people. I mean, I don't mean for old people, but it's for--it's the end of the line, it's not the beginning of the line. So to start out as a critic with all these opinions about everything, you know, and these views and these interpretations and then get to be a reporter, which is certainly at least that should be step one if step one one is not.--and then but then I thought real writing, real writers write. I mean, so having been a critic and been criticized, a lot of fiction after all, and movies and stuff.
[MUSIC FADES IN]
Renata: I thought, well, then you have to have tried it. You have to have done it.
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
[[ MIDROLL ]]
[MUSIC FADES IN]
Max: Can we talk about your time as a critic for a second?
[MUSIC FADES OUT]
Renata: Sure.
Max: Spent 14 months as the movie critic for The New York Times.
Renata: Yep.
Max: You were hired, I-I believe, at 29.
Renata: Yeah. Didn't start, though, till 30.
Max: And you were the lead movie critic of The New York Times.
Renata: Right.
Max: 30 years old.
Renata: Yeah.
Max: Had not reviewed movies before?
Renata: Once in one of those summer substitute capacities for a month in the summer at The New Yorker and once for Life magazine, maybe twice for Life magazine, I realized I'd forgotten that till this.
Max: But like you were, sort of, given a brand new job.
Renata: Yes.
Max: You've written about it quite a bit, but-but maybe our listeners don't know how it went. So how would you describe your 14 months?
Renata: The way it began was that I was offered one of the book critic's jobs. You remember there were two book critics.
Max: Uh huh.
Renata: I said, no, I can't do that.
Max: How come?
Renata: And they said, how come? And I said, well, because a book review takes so much time, you have to keep going over it and over and over it. And I have found, even as a reporter, that I need something that goes on in time because I was so hopeless at any reporting piece that didn't go and then, and then, and then. But it wasn’t my dream to be a movie-- it hadn’t crossed my mind. Then I guess Bosley Crowther embarrassed them because he was panning constantly. He was panning--
Max: Right, he'd been the chief critic for 27 years.
Renata: For 27 years. So then-then they wanted to make it clear that Bosley Crowther was no longer the film critic at the time. So they, more or less, eliminated the second string. They said, you review everything that comes out, which was a lot of writing.
Max: Did you feel like you were on like a much bigger stage?
Renata: Well, I felt I was on a much bigger stage in that some people who had never heard of me would say, I know I've seen your name somewhere.
Max: Mm hmm.
Renata: And that was the Daily Times or the Sunday Times.
Max: Right.
Renata: Still happens to me. They say, oh, you're the movie critic.
Max: Were you in a position where you could make or break a film?
Renata: I don't think I could break a film and I wouldn't have wanted to. And as for making them, sometimes I tried and sometimes it works. Sometimes it didn't work, but it wasn't--the power was gone. The minute I had the job, the power was gone.
Max: You really think that's true?
Renata: Well. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it wasn't the institution anymore speaking. And I think they welcomed that. I don't think they want I mean, the Times could still perhaps to this day open and close plays.
Max: Yes.
Renata: And they can certainly do it with books, almost.
Max: Restaurants too.
Renata: Restaurants too. Now, that's a terrible power. And there were more papers then, fortunately. So there were other critics you could read. So the power more or less went. So it either--people started to have views about whether I was good at it or-or terrible at it.
Max: Well, I think part of the reason I was asking that question was the studios took out an ad.
Renata: Yes.
Max: In the paper.
Renata: Right.
Max: Full page ad.
Renata: Yes.
Max: About how you were panning all these movies.
Renata: Yes. No, you're right. You're absolutely right. It was, in fact, many. Yes. Some of which I had not panned.
Max: Well, yeah, it was like The Graduate.
Renata: Yes, that's right.
Max: You weren't into The Graduate.
Renata: Yeah, I wasn't. This and then I did then, “and she also dislikes our picture.”
Max: Right.
Renata: Isn't what a recommendation. That's right. That was the punch line. What a recommendation.
Max: That feels almost unprecedented to me. I-I don't I can't think of any other moment like that where the companies would take out an ad in the same paper as the critic to punch back.
Renata: Yeah and I hadn't--I think it was just so odd to have me doing this. I think everybody had an opinion about movies,so there was no danger in it. But this I sort of thought I could do and I thought, well, I'm doing it. And-and the same embarrassment that I had before about pieces thinking, oh, you know, how can this piece, when it comes out with it and so on... it changed completely my attitude toward writing, because the way to get over the embarrassment of a piece--well if it appears if you have a piece in New Yorker every few months or every few years, it seems as though your whole life turns on what you write in that piece, because that's going to be the last anybody hears from you for a long time. But so at the Times, the only way out of the embarrassment of yesterday's piece was to write about...
Max: At least everybody forgot about it.
Renata: Yeah.
Max: Except for those people who took out the ad, they didn't forget.
Renata: They didn't forget, but also there were a lot of people who just hated those reviews they were a lot of movie buffs. And-and Variety. I started seeing in my-in my spare time there wasn't really any spare time, but I started to go to the Museum of Modern Art and they had a collection of movies. And I would see classic movies that I hadn't seen before. And Variety ran a completely mocking piece and then another one. She's so stupid and uneducated about movies. She's actually watching movies in the Museum of Modern Art. So I had to stop.
Max: [laughs] Well, that's just to get back to that thing we were talking about before, like the-the person on the page and the person off the page.
Renata: Yeah.
Max: I have an impression of how the person on the page would respond to that.
Renata: How?
Max: Which is basically fuck off.
Renata: Well, it is sort of it's a form of fuck off, isn't it.
Max: Well, like that-that-that kind of confidence. Right? That kind of like declarative, definitive writing. So this is what I think. You can not like it if you know what to, but I've thought about it and this is where I've arrived, a shy, slightly less comfortable person off the page.
Renata: Yeah.
Max: I would imagine that getting an ad taken out in your newspaper would be pretty uncomfortable.
Renata: There is this thing, and I'm sure you have a too about trying to give value, some kind of value--what's the point of writing a piece of any kind unless you think there's something in there? It's very hard to write if there's nothing in there. Or But-but I think a lot of people do. They just sort of say, well, I have to write this piece and I write this piece and I think this is what I think. And they say it very definitively. But I worked pretty hard in that one sense of saying, well, what's here? I mean, why should why on earth should anybody read this piece? And quite often it's hard to find an answer, particularly if you're reviewing movies every day. But often enough, I thought, oh, wait, this is really what I'm doing.
Max: Mm hmm.
Renata: And so if people don't like it, I can't help it. But this is what I do. And I, I just want it to be fairly confident that there was something in the writing. And I guess I never I don't write unless I have that.
Max: How come you left that job?
Renata: Oh, well, um, my oldest brother said, are you going to do this for the rest of your life? And-and then I thought, you know, enough. It's been you know, as it was it was more than a year. Right. So it wasn't that I thought, but--there was always a question. When you stop this, you know, when are you going? Because it's. It's just I thought it was just crazy to be a critic, a movie critic, particularly every day of your life, with an opinion about every movie by everybody, and that's too many opinions for one thing.
Max: You put out a collection of your-of your criticism. And in the introduction, you had this line that, uh, that really stuck with me. I've been thinking about, which is basically like having too many opinions on too many things is a sign of-of hucksterism.
Renata: Well, I think it may be true. And reporting does make sense. Reporting every day does make sense because you're telling a story which is true every day that you think there's some reason that people should know.
Max: Right. Yeah. I mean, the idea was this difference between going out every day and reporting things and learning things and formulating an opinion on everything that comes across.
Renata: Yes yes yes yes yes. This is a bad sign if you find if you find...
Max: It sounded right to me.
Renata: Yeah. Well.
Max: It was also validating because I don't have an opinion on a lot of stuff.
Renata: No, no. And perhaps one really shouldn't.
Max: I want to, uh, talk about this a little bit more because you've written critically about the Times. The New Yorker was your home for a long time. You wrote a book that had a lot of critical stuff about it. You’ve written critically about people you work with.
Renata: Oh, see, that's a very important issue for me, Max, because--
Max: Correct the record.
Renata: Here's the record. Oddly enough, I mean, even people who've liked my work have said, you know, she has the courage to bite the hand that feeds or whatever it is. Nothing like that happened. I was such a defender of The New Yorker that I was doing it even in my reviews at the Times. I was saying this writer somewhat. I mean, and I was almost-almost a hired gun for The New Yorker because The New Yorker did not engage politically with anybody. But oddly enough, if somebody was attacking The New Yorker, I don't know how to put this, they might have me to reckon with.
Max: OK.
Renata: OK. I mean, it's not what we did, but it's how it came out.
Max: I understand.
Renata: And I was completely loyal to it and I loved it. I mean, in that way that people do, then it changed.
Max: The magazine changed.
Renata: The magazine changed. And I you know, with the way my book came out, I didn't mean to write a book about The New Yorker. I just noticed that people that I liked and I thought liked me really did not and never had. And I think it was partly to do with when I went to the Times and did the movie reviews because it had to do with the notion of fame and I mean, who knows what--and they hated my fiction. I mean, there were people who hated me there, which I for some reason did not know. Right. I thought these are, you know, perfectly nice people and their friends. I didn't know it. And then I started being attacked in book after book. For instance, one book said, The beginning of the end of The New Yorker was the pieces by Renata Adler about the Westmoreland and Sharon trials, which she bulled through. First of all, you couldn't bull anything through at the New Yorker. But secondly, it's not what I do. I mean, it was really--it was an attack everywhere. And so I thought, gee, you know, I don't think The New Yorker--I think I better have my own protection. That is, I'm going to write my own New Yorker memoir and it's just out there. So by then it was so completely defensive, I'd been virtually fired by The New Yorker. I mean, I'd had a very troubling time with The New Yorker. That is when they changed management. I mean, what everyone thinks of David Remnick, he was not a fan. For example, I greeted him very warmly. You know, I'm normally quite friendly. But then there came a moment when I said, look, um, the, um, special counsel for the impeachment of Clinton is about to put out his report. The House committee is putting it out. And I just have quite a lot of experience of impeachment inquiries because Nixon inquiry.
Max: Right, you were the speechwriter for the impeachment.
Renata: Yeah, but it got to be more than that. And so I said, could I when that comes out, that report, I mean, nothing is more boring than a report, House report, committee report. I said, could I review it? And David Remnick said to me, “Frankly, Renata, I, I've just had too many Monica Lewinsky pieces.” And I thought, look, there are a lot of things you can say, a lot of things you can say if you're letting a writer down easy. But I don't write Monica Lewinsky pieces. And so I thought, you know, I just don't have a future here. It was about as hostile a thing this is possible to say.
Max: Was that the last time you pitched Remnick? Was the last time you tried to write something for The New Yorker?
Renata: Or there was no question of ever writing anything for New Yorker. And in fact, he wrote me a note or the department wrote me a note saying, you know, there's no point in renewing your contract or the contracts were meaningless, didn't make any difference. But what it did is it took away health insurance. And I'd been there for 40 years and I had a child. So then I went off and taught. But so that wasn't me attacking the hand the fed me. That was me trying to defend myself.
Max: So your- so your understanding your assumption is that the problems with you and The New Yorker from The New Yorker side was with your work?
Renata: And possibly with this public persona that there began to be. Because it didn't-because there was a secret longing within The New Yorker always, I think, to be famous.
Max: So you think perhaps as you started to accumulate some fame.
Renata:Yeah.
Max: Which was related to taking that critic's job at the time.
Renata: It was probably completely dependent on it. There was no other-there was no other. And that's not what we did, but then also the fiction department rejected every piece of fiction I ever wrote.
Max: Did you like being famous?
Renata: See, I wasn't famous. I wasn't famous. I was only famous within that New Yorker sense.
Max: OK, well, did you like being famous within that New Yorker sense.
Renata: Yeah. Yeah.
Max: Do you feel a part of that world now?
Renata: Which?
Max: That world in which you were famous?
Renata: No, it doesn't exist anymore. It's a different world anyhow, a lot of it's remnants of it still exist. So this is-this is different. And this is--it's an interesting question. You know, it's funny. People just they don't like me. There was no threat about me. I mean, there isn't in my presence. Is there much of a sense of threat?
Max: No.
Renata: Are you just saying that because I'm hoping you won't say yes. But I mean, I don't think.
Max: No. I mean, to be honest, that was part of what I was once we started talking on the phone trying to set this up, that was part of what I was so interested in was on the page, you were very threatening.
Renata: Yes, I can see-I can see that in a way. But why is that threatening? I mean, that's you know, that's--
Max: Because of that the thing I'm trying to ask you about, which is that you're willing to say things that other people aren't willing to say. They're willing to talk about over drink.
Renata: Yes.
Max: But they're not willing to put it in a book or or whatever. Like, you were willing to say things that other people weren't willing to say.
Renata: Which is bizarre.
Max: Why? Why would you say things that other people wouldn't say?
Renata: Well, for one thing, because you just as soon say something new if you're writing. You'd rather say something different from what's already been said, because otherwise, why say it? It's not very inspiring or it just why...why would you? But I realize that sounds very superficial and I don't quite get it myself, and it was a pretty long exile, assuming that it's ended now, which it hasn't perhaps done.
Max: You don't feel like you're-you're back in the fold. Everyone that I have told that I was going to get the opportunity to talk to you pretty excited.
Renata: That's awfully nice. It has been--I mean, I've met some of the nicest, brightest, I mean, most wonderful people I've ever met have been through these reprints. And that's-that's just that's just so lucky because all of that is such a raffle anyway. But something that I can't help noticing is I can't get a job.
Max: You trying?
Renata: Always! It's the way I can’t get an apartment. I mean, I always used to get apartments. They just sort of befell me. And I used to get jobs, they sort of befell me, but they're very few. But I think it's also something I'm not good at.
Max: Getting jobs?
Renata: Yeah.
Max: Well, what's the job you want now?
Renata: I like to teach, so I'd like a university affiliation. And they, you know, a lot of universities have old people hanging around and they're called other writers in residence or they're called professor this or they're called professor that.
Max: What do you want to be writing?
Renata: Well, writing is another matter. I mean, that is I mostly want to write and I want to be in a place where I can write. And-and so I look at these memoirs like Mr. Biermann, who got me my job and other memoirs. And quite often he goes to somebody's house and he lives there while he's writing, right. And so during the day, you know, the food comes in, everybody takes care of him all day. And all he does is he shows up for supper. And then there are other people. I think Updike used to go to hotels a lot just to write. And that I-I just need a place to write and then I'd like to do it if I can. I mean, there are pieces. There are things I want to do now.
Max: Like what?
Renata: Well, I had finished a novel before this reprint thing happened. I thought I'd finished it. But, you know, when does it end? There's always a question. So now I'd like to do something about that.
Max: When you get on a plane with a bunch of used refrigerators?
Renata: Yeah. When you publish when you know that you have to publish something is that it's fairly urgent, not because of writer's block, because publishers block, you're suddenly in a position of such danger if you don't publish anything.
Max: Did you have writer's block when you're in that exile?
Renata: Well, you know, I-I wrote some things, but I did. Yeah, but--
Max: Some things. But not a lot of things.
Renata: No, but what would happen is people would sort of accept them and then suddenly think, hey, what am I doing and then not publish them.
Max: Oh really?
Renata: Yeah. When another collection of pieces came out called Canaries in the Mine Shaft years ago, the pieces in there were from Harper's, The Atlantic, New Republic, New York Review of Books. Not one place reviewed them.
Max: Huh.
Renata: Which is.. I mean, it's not it's not an enlightening it's not a great insight or anything, but it's a little odd.
Max: So what was it like with this latest collection? Because I feel like most of what I saw was pretty fawning.
Renata: It's been so nice! I have no if I if I'm complaining and whining here...
Max: No, no, no, you're not.
Renata: That's I mean, I've been so lucky. No, no, this is great.
Max: Has it been fun?
Renata: Yeah, this is nice. But I do think, you know, maybe it's time to-to-to write something or teach or do something and not just sort of lie around and just die now. I mean, although, why not.
Max: Come on. Why not?
Renata: Well, I mean.
Max: Don't bring that why not in here.
Renata: No, no, no, no, no.
Max: I don't want to hear why not.
Renata: No, no, no. But what I mean is you can't say, oh, alas I'm now only 97 years old. And already, you know, I find I can't lift the weights I used to. It's just--
Max: So the novel is one thing. But have you thought about what kind of nonfiction you would do?
Renata: Yes. You see, and there was a piece. There was a piece that I worked on for months and months and months that what I was going to include in this collection so that there would be this piece.
Max: Why didn't you?
Renata: Because I kept missing the deadline. And then there was one more deadline. And I thought, you know, maybe it isn't time to write this piece, but I really regret it. I regret it. I wish I had put it in there.
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Renata: Because it-it's something that I'd really like to say.
CREDITS
Max: 70 Over 70 is a production of Pineapple Street Studios and it’s produced by Jess Hackel.
Our associate producer is Janelle Anderson. Our editors are Maddy Sprung-Keyser and Joel Lovell. Research and additional reporting by Charley Locke.
Our mixer is Elliott Adler, and Jenna Weiss-Berman and I are the executive producers.
The theme song is Like a Dream, by Francis and the Lights, and the music you’re listening to now is by Beverly Glenn Copeland who is 77 years old. Original music by Terence Bernardo. additional music by Noble Kids, and music licensing by Dan Knishkowy.
Our cover art is by Maria Kalman, who’s 72 and our episode art is by Lynn Staley, who’s 73, my mom, and feeling better.
Thank you, George Pettigrew and thank you, Renata Adler.
This is actually a condensed version of the interview that ran on The Longform Podcast in 2015. If you’d like to hear that or many more interviews with journalists, please go check out Longform.
Also, the collection that Renata and I were talking about in this interview is called After The Tall Timber. I recommend it.
I'm Max Linsky. Thanks for listening.
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