Tony Kushner, e Art of eater No.

Interviewed by Catherine Steindler

ISSUE 201, SUMMER 2012

W I T H H I S M OT H E R AT G R A D UAT I O N F R O M C O LU M B I A C O L L E G E I N 1 9 7 8 .

Tony Kushner was born in New York in and raised in Louisiana. He moved
back to Manhattan to attend Columbia College in . He has lived on the Upper
West Side more or less ever since. In the late nineties, discouraged by a series of bad
dates that le him convinced he was “done with men,” he bought a house in the
Hudson Valley. But then he met the writer and editor Mark Harris, a devoted New
Yorker who prefers the beach to the woods. Kushner and Harris, now married, spend a
portion of each summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Our interviews took place during the summer of in a café in Provincetown
and in Kushner’s New York City o ce. is room, which happens also to be a kitchen,
is bedecked with two large canvases painted by his sister, Lesley; stout terra-cotta
angels dressed in papier-mâché robes; and a movie still of Glinda the Good Witch in
an ornate silver frame. Kushner is tall, with a mass of dark curly hair, a so face, and a
gentle, open manner. He delivers erce opinions in genial, unru ed tones at lighting
speed. It is obvious that for Kushner, speaking is an immensely pleasurable activity.
When we met, the Signature eatre Company had just wrapped up its –
season, devoted to Kushner’s plays. For the occasion, Kushner had made large
revisions to his most recent play, e Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and
Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, and to Angels in America, his sprawling, two-part
“Gay Fantasia on National emes.” When Angels was rst produced, in the early
s, it won two Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize, appeared on Harold Bloom’s list
of essential literature in e Western Canon, and placed Kushner in the middle of the
growing debate over gay rights, a place he has occupied ever since. e HBO
movie, directed by Mike Nichols, introduced a mass audience to the qualities that
animate all of Kushner’s plays: an outlandish sense of humor, a dark vein of raw fury,
and a gymnastic compassion that extends in unlikely directions.
His full-length works include A Bright Room Called Day, about the failure of the
German Le in the s; Hydriotaphia, a madcap comedy featuring the seventeenth-
century polymath omas Browne on his deathbed; Slavs!, in which ex-Soviet
apparatchiks confront the wreckage of communism; Caroline, or Change, a musical
written with the composer Jeanine Tesori, about an African American maid in the
civil-rights era; and Homebody/Kabul, about an Englishwoman who abandons her safe
middle-class London life for Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
Apart from these, Kushner has written screenplays for Steven Spielberg,
translations and adaptations of plays by S. Ansky, Corneille, and Brecht, a children’s
opera with Maurice Sendak (on whom he has also written a monograph), and
numerous one acts and essays. At the time of our interviews, Kushner was nishing an
opera about Eugene O’Neill and writing a screenplay about Abraham Lincoln.
Kushner attributed his increasingly pragmatic politics to his admiration for Lincoln,
Obama, and his father, who was ill and much on Kushner’s mind; William Kushner
died on March , .

I N T E RV I EWE R
You’re part New Yorker, part Southerner.

KUS H N E R
Yes. My mother was from New York. Her father, Benny, was a union glazer who went
out on strike and got shut out, and then got sick. He was unemployed a lot a er that,
and they lived on welfare in the Bronx, in real poverty. My grandmother had managed
to nagle free piano lessons for my mother’s sister Martha. My mother, who was
younger, tagged along, and the piano teacher spotted her musical talent. Her other
sister, Lucy, who was a good deal older than my mother, had married a music
contractor. My grandmother wanted her kids to have meaningful occupations, to get
out of poverty but also to achieve impressive things. So she pushed Lucy to push her
husband, Artie, to nd my mother an instrument to play. Artie ruled out traditional
instruments for women, the ute and the harp—too much competition—and chose
an instrument on which she’d really stand out. He didn’t know of any female
bassoonists.
She was a great bassoonist. She might have been a little bit held back by the fact
that her hands weren’t enormous—she was about ve foot two—and there’s a lot of
acreage to cover with bassoon keys. But she had a bassoonist’s soul. She had a very deep
and somewhat tragic sense of life.
She was one of the rst women to hold a principal chair in a major orchestra. She
played with the New York City Opera, recorded with Stravinsky, and toured with
Sadler’s Wells Ballet. At one point she got a job as rst bassoonist for the Orlando
Symphony. My father had just been hired as rst clarinet, so they sat side by side in the
orchestra. ey met and married and then came back to New York.

I N T E RV I EWE R
When you were two, they moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana. Why?
 KUS H N E R
My father was from Lake Charles. His father, and his father, and his father owned a
small lumberyard there. But I think my parents moved partly because of the di culty
of the music business. My mother was not an aggressive person. She had a lot of
ambition, but she was a woman of her generation. When my sister, Lesley, was born
deaf, my parents couldn’t deal with it, especially my mother. ere was something
clearly wrong—Lesley wasn’t learning how to speak. en when I came along, a year
and a half later, I talked a lot very early and it became even clearer that Lesley’s speech
development wasn’t proceeding along normal lines. Still, it took until she was four and
a half before they got her hearing tested. My mother’s brother was a great
psychoanalyst. His work is cited in Brown v. Board of Education. He was an incredible
man, brilliant, I adored him, but he was a product of his time as well—this was the
ies—and he apparently told my mother that he didn’t feel Lesley was really deaf but
that she was refusing to speak because my mother was away, touring.

I N T E RV I EWE R
And she believed him?

KUS H N E R
Some women would have said, Go fuck yourself. My mother didn’t. As a clarinetist in
New York, my father wasn’t making a great deal of money, and if my mother had
stopped working, they wouldn’t have been able to manage. So my paternal grandfather
said, Come down and help me run the lumberyard.
My father was not at all interested in the lumber business. In the late s, he sold
it to a man named Carlbert Berard, his contemporary in the African American family
that had worked as foremen at the lumberyard for three generations. So it became the
Kushner-Berard Lumber Company. But when they rst moved to Lake Charles, both
my parents also taught music at the local college and played in the tiny local orchestra,
the Lake Charles Symphony. en, when I was ten or eleven, my father was hired to be
the conductor of a small symphony orchestra in a nearby town called Alexandria. He
spent the next thirty-seven years conducting there. And when the Lake Charles
Symphony needed a conductor, he was hired there as well. He’s been the musical soul
of his town. I think he has had a really great life.

I N T E RV I EWE R
And how about your mother?

KUS H N E R
She was the rst bassoon in the Lake Charles Symphony, and she became an actress in
community theater because she no longer had enough of an outlet as a bassoonist to
express herself. My mother was always tortured a bit by her sense of having given up a
successful career as a bassoonist. at might be a partial explanation for why her
daughter became a wonderful painter, her eldest son became a playwright, and her
youngest son is rst horn of the Wiener Symphoniker.
On the wall over here, I have a signed print of a poem by Robert Duncan, “My
Mother Would Be a Falconress.” It was the urtext of my psychoanalysis. Duncan
imagines himself as a falcon and his mother as a huntress. He goes and fetches little
birds out of the sky for her, but he doesn’t eat them, he brings them to her. He’s
constantly tempted to break the bond and y o , become a wild thing. At the end of
the poem he does, and it sort of kills his mother.

I N T E RV I EWE R
You’ve said that your mother’s spirit haunts Homebody/Kabul.

KUS H N E R
A er my mother died, in , I felt a kind of ba ement. ere is simply no way to
comprehend the vanishing of this person. e rst night a er the funeral, I had a
dream—it was raining outside and she was sitting on her grave in her nightgown, just
getting soaked to the skin, and I had to go and nd the cemetery. I think that’s how I
came up with the idea of the homebody disappearing.
My mother was a really great bassoonist and a wonderful actress, but she had a very
odd relationship to her accomplishments. I’m interested in narcissism in women—not
pathological narcissism, but healthy narcissism—the way women had such a di cult
time, certainly in my mother’s generation, in feeling pride and assertive self-possession
and self-identity. She was supposed to, in a certain sense, not be a person. Pride in
accomplishment is so essential, and with my mother it tended to manifest itself
furtively. ere was a lot of hiding and exposing and hiding again. at’s certainly
what makes that character in Homebody work. She reveals herself, then conceals
herself, over and over again. She has these dazzling displays of erudition and
vocabulary followed by self-abasement. It’s what makes her mysterious and alluring, I
think. My mother was a mysterious person. You had to work really hard to gure out
what was going on with her. And you rarely succeeded completely.
All About Eve is one of my favorite lms, but recently Mark and I watched this
Sidney Lumet lm called Stage Struck, which is also about an actress. e di erence
between the two lms is amazing. In All About Eve, Bette Davis has that horrible
speech about how if you’re a woman with a career, you wind up with nothing but a
suite of French provincial furniture. So she’s going to become a wife. Eve Harrington is
going to become a monster. At the end of Lumet’s lm, the actress says, Fuck you, I
don’t want to have kids. I want to be a great, famous actress. And she walks out, and
she isn’t beaten up for it or condemned. It was made about eight years a er All About
Eve. Well, there it is.
It’s still very hard for women. I see it in my work with Jeanine Tesori. She’s one of
the great theater composers, and I’m amazed at how tight some people—mostly men
—are with praise for her. ey’re just not quite comfortable with it. It’s not happy-
making to them that this extraordinary composer is a woman. It would just be better
for them if she were a guy.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Was your mother’s acting your rst exposure to theater?

KUS H N E R
Pretty much. When I was a little kid, my aunt Martha would take me to children’s
plays, and I remember those very vividly, mostly because I adored her, so going out
with her was the best thing in the world.
But I think what made me go into theater was seeing my mother onstage. e rst
thing she did was Mrs. Frank in e Diary of Anne Frank. e second thing she did
was a play about Freud called e Far Country. She played a paralyzed woman in
Vienna who goes to see Freud. I remember her in this wonderful nineteenth-century
gown being carried by her husband and laid on Freud’s couch. I think I was four or ve
years old.
Right a er she was in that play, my sister had her rst tting for hearing aids in
New York, so my mother and sister went up there on a bus and I stayed at my paternal
grandmother’s house in Lake Charles. My kindergarten class went to a barnyard to pet
animals and I got some allergy to something. e next day I woke up and couldn’t
move. For two or three days I was paralyzed. A cousin of mine, who was my father’s
age and was a doctor in Lake Charles, came and carried me into the living room. I still
remember having dreams about him carrying me around. It was very sexual and great.
When I was seven, I saw my mother do Death of a Salesman. It had caused a split in
the little local theater, the decision to produce Salesman, because it was a dirty play
about an adulterer—and, I’m sure, because Miller had refused to testify and was
married to Marilyn Monroe and was a liberal. e splinter group that produced the
play staged it in the round, which also was a big scandal. e regional-theater
movement was just starting, and theater-in-the-round was a new thing. e reason it
was important to me was that I watched my mother acting and looked across the stage
and saw all these adults, who were her friends, weeping. Especially at the end. It was
the sixties, so women wore mascara, and I remember seeing all these raccoon eyes. I
remember thinking, Something’s going on here. I don’t quite understand the play, but
my mother is making all these people cry. I’ve always thought that made me want to be
a playwright.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Did you ever want to be an actor yourself ?

KUS H N E R
When I’m writing a new play, there’s a period where I know I shouldn’t be out in
public much. I imagine most people who create go through something like this. You
willfully loosen some of the inner straps that hold your core together. You become
more porous and multivalent and multivocal, so that the multitudes you have inside
yourself can start to get up and walk around and emerge. en, hopefully, you put
them back into the cave. But to really play Linda Loman, you have to go there every
night. So you live in a state, I would imagine, of permanent looseness in the core,
which I nd frankly terrifying.
I’ve become close friends with very few actors. ey are of course dazzling people
and I need them to do my work. When I meet a new actor with whom I want to work,
it’s like discovering a new color. But I’ve always had an instinct of maintaining a
certain distance from actors, because I nd them uncanny and unnerving.
Sometimes a phony-baloney actor will hoodwink the public for decades, but the
actors we really revere aren’t kidding around when they act. ey su er. Part of what
we are paying to see when we go to the theater is su ering. We want to see actual
su ering. ere’s a certain Christ-like thing going on—the actors are su ering so we
don’t have to.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you think that as a playwright you torture actors, like the magician tortures the
amanuensis in your adaptation of Corneille’s L’Illusion Comique?
 KUS H N E R
As a playwright, you are a torturer of actors and of the audience as well. You in ict
things on people. But most audiences come to the theater eager to have experiences, so
they’re open to having things in icted on them. I run into people who tell me, I lost a
partner to aids and Angels was incredibly hard for me, or, My mother committed
suicide, and that scene in act of Intelligent Homosexual is unbearable. ere’s some
part of me that says, Good, that’s what this is about. at’s what this is for. I believe in
the power of theater to teach and to heal through compassion, through shared agony.
And it also o ers a way of developing critical consciousness. It teaches how to look at
the world, to see it with double vision.

I N T E RV I EWE R
What do you mean by “double vision”?

KUS H N E R
e essential thing in theater is that what happens onstage very obviously both is and
isn’t at the same time. e play demands that the audience extend its empathic
imagination. But simultaneously, the audience—both the individual audience member
and the collective animal—is skeptical. It says, But that man isn’t dead. He’s still
breathing. And, at isn’t an angel crashing through the ceiling. It’s got these big wires
hooking it up. It’s just a woman in a dress and cardboard wings. at disbelief is
engaged in a dialectic with the surrender of skepticism. e theater requires an
essential gullibility that you can’t get through life without having. If all you can feel is
skepticism—well, you meet people like this. Run away from them. ey’re not good
people.
When I was a sophomore at Columbia, I simultaneously discovered Marx, Brecht,
and Shakespeare, and I realized they’re all playing with the same thing—the way
things both are and are not what they seem. All three ask us to see the surface, but also
what’s beneath the surface, what shapes the surface. ey ask us to think about
intended e ects and about what’s being concealed within the e ect.
Capitalism has done exactly what Marx said it does—it gives the inorganic
machine the qualities of the living beings who created it and makes it seem like a living
thing itself, not a dead thing created by human labor. We’re trained through market
research and the dark genius of advertising to develop increasingly erotically charged
relationships with the inorganic. You develop the feeling that you can’t live without
your iPhone and your iPad because they’re sold to you as having souls, as magical
manna from heaven, instead of what they actually are, which is just stu that people
put together. We feel the object has a soul because human energy went into making it.
at’s its truest value, that it’s human made. But to disguise its origins, to hide the fact
that your stu is made by powerless and exploited human beings, it’s packaged and
sold as being actually human, organic, erotic. e labor, the human energy that went
into making the lifeless commodity, is concealed within, covered over by an e ective
illusion of life. e Nike sneaker or the iPad seem alive, and we have to learn how to
look beneath their surface e ects to locate and understand the sources of their
uncanny, cyborg power.
Brecht says the point of theater is, among other things, to make you conscious of
this disappearing trick. at’s why he used a half-curtain in his productions, with the
audience watching one scene being played out in front of the curtain and, behind it,
the next scene being prepared. As he wrote in one of his theater poems, let people “see
that this is not magic, but work, my friends.” His most famous, and most
misunderstood, idea about staging is what he calls the distanciation e ect—he wants
theater to enable you to see the familiar as strange and the strange as familiar, so that
you greet reality with an appetite to interpret it.
You nd the same dialectic between illusion and reality in Shakespeare. A
Midsummer Night’s Dream is kind of Shakespeare’s aesthetic manifesto. In act , scene
, when Hippolyta and eseus nd the lovers asleep—I could talk about this
endlessly—she says, “ ’Tis strange my eseus, that these lovers speak of.” And eseus
says,

More strange than true. I never may believe

He says that you can’t believe this stu —that, like poets or lunatics, lovers make up
shit that’s not real. ey “give to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.” And
then Hippolyta has the great answer. She says,

But all the story of the night told over,

“All the story of the night told over” is the play. “All their minds trans gur’d so
together” is the audience. “More witnesseth than fancy’s images”—they’re seeing
something that’s more than just fantasy. “And grows to something of great
constancy”—it’s real at the same time, however strange, however freakish and unusual
and admirable this reality is. at’s theater.

I N T E RV I EWE R
You’ve played with illusion and reality quite a bit in your plays.

KUS H N E R
Whatever else is going on onstage and whatever else people are learning and
experiencing in the course of a play, they’re always being taught critical consciousness
by the inadequate illusion. at’s why I wanted to go back to the theater of illusion
with Angels and have magical things happen. When we did it at the National, Richard
Eyre was concerned that the angel wasn’t own in on thin, nearly invisible wires but
that instead she came swinging in on this big obvious rope. But I loved that. I thought,
Exactly. at’s the idea.
In Angels, if you do what Oskar Eustis and I worked out in the stage directions for
the rst arrival of the angel, if you follow the directions exactly—now the lights icker,
now the bed moves—it works on a whole other level than if you just say, Nobody’s
going to believe it’s an angel. Just make some noise and some crashing and have the
ceiling split when she comes in. e closer you bring the audience to believing, the
more powerful the equal and opposite reaction is—the disbelief. When they see that
the stu falling from the ceiling is Styrofoam—because of Equity you can’t drop real
plaster on an actor, alas—and that the crack in the ceiling is precut and the angel’s on
visible wires, they’re right on the edge of belief and disbelief.
 Watching theater, you learn that existence is legible but that you have to have a
critical mind if you’re going to read it.

I N T E RV I EWE R
You sound like Gus in Intelligent Homosexual.

KUS H N E R
at’s exactly what Gus is talking about. Marxism-Leninism has made the world
become transparent and legible to him. at’s what metatheories are meant to do—
not necessarily to explain everything, but to command a magisterial enough vista, to
have a deep enough coherence that they become for their adherents a way of
understanding the world, at least of beginning an understanding. We’re now in the
twenty- rst century and have seen so many metatheories fail that we’re very skeptical,
appropriately skeptical, of all of them. But I think we’re still in search of them and
always will be, because we apprehend that there is coherence in the universe. We
understand that what appears chaotic is merely the result of a limited point of view. If
you can view chaos itself from God’s eye, you can see great patterns. Everybody from
Aristotle and Plato to Wallace Stevens has written about this.
e point is to pierce the veil of illusion and see underneath to the skeleton, to the
infrastructure, to the plumbing, and see how this stu is actually made and how the
magic e ect is produced. You can’t live as anything other than history’s fool if you
don’t make an e ort to do that. I mean, you will always wind up being history’s fool—
it’s not like you’re going to get out of it—but the only hope we have is for people not
to be literal readers, not to be fundamentalist readers, and to understand that, from
the Holy Scriptures on, the whole point is to interpret and to understand. I think
theater forces you to do that.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Is theater unique in that respect?

KUS H N E R
No, lm demands interpretation, of course, and there are great directors who
emphasize the arti ciality of lm, its theatricality. But in lm, the possibility exists of
creating overwhelmingly convincing, nearly inescapable illusion, and that doesn’t exist
as a possible choice onstage. You just can’t manage it. In a lm like Avatar the illusion
is almost inescapable, almost all encompassing, and it’s certain that, as we proceed into
the future, cinematic illusion is becoming even more so. e at projection screen is
already a kind of archaic convention. It’s just an imitation of the proscenium arch,
really. In the future we’re going to take drugs and the screen will be all around us and
we’ll have sensory experiences with it and I’m sure it’ll be great, but people will still be
going to the theater to watch Hamlet and Laertes ght. e great thing about having
somebody die at the end of a sword ght is that it takes a lot of physical energy to do a
sword ght. So they’re dead, but their ribcages are heaving up and down. e
incomplete, imperfect illusion will never be unnecessary for human beings, and its
home will always be in the theater, where everything, including death, is
simultaneously thoroughly and yet not entirely convincing.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Is it true that you wrote the rst dra of Perestroika in eight days?

KUS H N E R
It was ten days, but it had an outline already. It was the year my mother died, and I
hadn’t been writing very much. I went by myself to this shack that had been lent to me
on the Russian River in California and started writing and just . . . I don’t know what
happened. It was kind of magical. I wrote seven hundred pages. e rst dra was this
massive stack of legal paper. I literally couldn’t stop. I couldn’t sleep. I would go to
sleep for ve minutes and dream. I actually dreamed, word for word, a whole scene.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Which scene?

KUS H N E R
When Joe nds Harper on the Promenade in act and she’s standing in the rain, she’s
thrown her shoes in the river, and she says jazzy stu like, “Nothing like storm clouds
over Manhattan to get you in the mood for Judgment Day.”

I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you tend to write very quickly and then revise, and revise, and revise?

KUS H N E R
I tend to delay as long as I possibly can and get into a lot of trouble and get everyone
upset. And then it comes out. I always write under panic. I seem to need that.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Does the panic enliven your plays, or is it just a horrible necessity you have to endure?

KUS H N E R
It’s de nitely horrible and I don’t want to believe it’s a necessity, but it seems to be. I
don’t want to valorize it in myself, because it has made it hard for me and very hard for
the people who work with me. It’s been particularly tough on Jeanine. It’s caused
problems for many theaters I’ve worked with, for Mike Nichols and for Steven
Spielberg. It’s never been a good thing. It’s something I have struggled with and
su ered from all of my life.
I nd writing very di cult. It’s hard and it hurts sometimes, and it’s scary because
of the fear of failure and the very unpleasant feeling that you may have reached the
limit of your abilities. You’re smart enough to see that there’s something that lies
beyond what you’ve been able to do, but you don’t know how to get there, how to
make it happen in the medium in which you’ve decided to work. I can be very
masochistic, but that kind of anxiety is something I tend to want to avoid.
I’ve been in therapy and psychoanalysis since I was seventeen, so I certainly know a
lot about why I procrastinate. But the need to do it is still very powerful. e smartest
shrinks I’ve had don’t think there’s a clean separation between the salutary and the
unsalutary parts of it. And they tell me I’m probably not going to be able to change it.
Like sexual taste, your work ethic is formed deep within, and it’s comprised by all sorts
of impulses. Why do any of us bother to put on clothes in the rst place and accept
toilet training and learn how to read and write and count? It’s enormously peculiar,
the process of becoming civilized and developing things like a work ethic and a sexual
ethic.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Have you developed techniques for dealing with procrastination?

KUS H N E R
e lesson I learn over and over again—and then forget over and over again—is that
writing won’t be so bad once you get into it. One’s reluctance is immensely powerful.
It’s like what Proust says about habit—it seems tiny in the grand arc of a person’s life
narrative, but it’s the most insidious, powerful thing. Reluctance is like that.
When you feel most terri ed—I think this is true of most writers—it’s because the
thing isn’t there in your head. I’ve found it to be the case that you’ve got to start
writing, and writing almost anything. Because writing is not simply an intellectual act.
It doesn’t happen exclusively in your head. It’s a combination of idea and action, what
Marx and Freud called praxis, a combining of the material and the immaterial. e
action, the physical act of putting things down on paper, changes and produces a
writer’s ideas.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you feel that psychoanalysis is necessary for a writer?

KUS H N E R
I don’t want to say that everyone should be in psychoanalysis, but I certainly think
Freud is valuable, even essential. Learning to read the text of human behavior and the
immensely complex way that language constitutes meaning is important. Being an
analysand also teaches a kind of ethics, a kind of scrupulousness about behavior. You
learn that you’re going to do things you didn’t consciously intend, things that you
intend only on a very deep level. You learn that it’s better, when those things happen,
to acknowledge that they happened. You lose your innocence and that’s painful and it
makes you a pain in the ass. If you read e Psychopathology of Everyday Life or the
theory of the unconscious or Interpretation of Dreams, you start listening to people in
an intrusive, slightly domineering, slightly paranoiac way. You start to suspect every
motive you have and every motive that everyone else has, but I think what you get in
return for that is a degree of consciousness about how we act and interact.

I N T E RV I EWE R
In constructing characters and scenes, do you use psychoanalytic theory as a tool?

KUS H N E R
Not consciously, but I think that because of many years of therapy I tend to ask, Why
does this person say this? Why do they keep using this word? I tend to really get
interested in parapraxes, in strange, remarkable things that you hear when you listen to
people talking. And I think it helps with rewriting, because a big part of writing is
reading. You put it down on paper and then, if you’re a good, observant reader, you
start to parse through what your unconscious has been up to, what it’s trying to nudge
you toward. You say, Oh, see how many times I’ve used this word in this scene. Why?
 So when I’m writing an exchange and have a fairly strong impulse as a character to
say something, I almost always let it happen and see what it leads to. When you’re just
starting to write a play, you don’t know who these people are, so you just have to listen.
ey’re singing a song through you, and if you can hear their melodies, then you have
something to start to work with.

I N T E RV I EWE R
When you talk about doing things that are motivated on an unconscious level and
trying to read people, I think about rehearsals. I know you had a tough time in
Intelligent Homosexual rehearsals.

KUS H N E R
I wrote iHo in rehearsal at the Guthrie and then for various reasons found it very hard
to get back to before we went into rehearsal again at the Public. Some of the central
cast members had been with the play from the beginning, and they’re all enormously
smart and talented and very powerful actors, and it wasn’t entirely clear by the end of
the rehearsal process at the Public who owned the characters they were playing. It was
clear who was going to own them, because it’s my play. But I felt like I was having to
negotiate with the actors whenever I wanted to make changes, and sometimes I had to
submit to them. A great actor like Linda Emond is not faking it. She’s doing
annihilating work, and if I start monkeying around too much with the words, it’s
terrifying for her, for any actor working at her level. It’s like brain surgery—it makes
her work impossible. A playwright in production is a soul divided. You don’t want to
fuck up the production, and you can easily do that by not respecting what the director
and actors need. But you must also take care of the play. e needs of these two
di erent things—the play and the production—are o en incommensurable.
But production is also the great thing about being a playwright. When your work is
reasonably close to completion, you get to go into a room full of wonderful people
who will then help you continue to write your play. e solitude of novelists and poets
and non ction prose writers is a terribly frightening thing for me to contemplate.
Actors and directors make my life so much easier, and even sometimes happier. e
only problem is that, as my friend George Wolfe always says, a playwright has to be
able to know when it’s time to leave the party. Rehearsal rooms are hotbeds of
su ering and agony and joy and sex, or at least eroticism and excitement, and you can
get very caught up in them. It’s hard to leave and go back and be alone with a blank
page. is is something that every writer, playwright or otherwise, goes through. But
as a playwright I don’t think you quite develop the same talent for solitude that poets
and novelists do.
I wish I were a poet.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Why?

KUS H N E R
Because it’s the most important writing. e greatest writers are the great poets. When
you bury your head in poetry, it has all the mind-exploding power of serious
philosophy, but it’s also music. As a child of musicians, I nd rhythm and melody very
important.
 I N T E RV I EWE R
Melville was a big in uence on you, wasn’t he?

KUS H N E R
Still is.

I N T E RV I EWE R
In what way?

KUS H N E R
Because he’s very, very great, as deep as deep can be, vast, capable of unnerving insight,
so acute an observer that he o en seems clairvoyant. And he gives me permission to
have gross lapses in taste and judgment and sanity. In Billy Budd, Melville says, “In this
matter of writing, resolve as one may to keep to the main road, some by-paths have an
enticement not readily to be withstood. I am going to err into such a by-path. At least
we can promise ourselves that pleasure which is wickedly said to be in sinning, for a
literary sin the divergence will be.” Melville gives you permission to rejoice within the
work of art in the in nite possibilities every work of art opens up to the artist. He
gives you permission to celebrate form and content irresponsibly, to irt with
overdoing it, overreaching, to irt with disaster. He practically insists upon it.
It’s too schematic to break down English-language writers into any two schools,
but I’ll do it anyway. I feel there are Beckettians, writers who shape a language of
selection—the English language responds powerfully to that because of its unruliness
—and then there are writers who are nuts about the language and think, Why use one
word when you can use six, and why use a plain word when something that will send
everyone to the dictionary will do? You see this in omas De uincey’s Confessions of
an English Opium-Eater and in omas Browne’s voluptuous and bejeweled language
in essays like Hydriotaphia and Religio Medici. Melville is of that school. He is pushing
language—sometimes by overclarifying, by overemphasizing, and sometimes by
pulling in obscurities—toward a nonrational or superrational mysticality, toward
music, exploring and playing with the structures of language, stretching and bending
the rules of form, to make a kind of sense that lies beyond ordinary sense, beyond what
cool reason comprehends.
And through all the craziness, this wonderful human being comes through. How
adorable Melville is. Melville was probably a manic depressive and a huge pain in the
ass, but as with Lincoln, as with Shakespeare, you fall in love. Don’t you feel that you
absolutely would have loved George Eliot? I even feel that way about Dostoyevsky. I
mean, I wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time with him, but still.

I N T E RV I EWE R
When did you become a reader?

KUS H N E R
I’ve always been a reader. I grew up in a house that was packed oor to ceiling with
books. My father also grew up surrounded by books, and he read a great deal. He
constantly quotes and recites poetry and the Bible. His parents were big readers. I
found the title for e Intelligent Homosexual in , when my grandmother died
and I went down to Lake Charles to help my father pack up her library. I came across
her copy of Shaw’s e Intelligent Women’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism. I’m still
incredibly moved to think about these Southern Jews, second-generation immigrants,
some of them rst generation, living in a part of the country not especially welcoming
to progressive thought, with their libraries full of Ibsen and Dickens and Shaw.

I N T E RV I EWE R
How do you think growing up Jewish and gay and white in a Southern town a ected
your politics?

KUS H N E R
Being gay gave a particular edge to my politics, a way of taking politics personally. It’s
not always something I entirely trust, but I have a certain kind of rage that fuels my
politics, because I feel that these people on the theocratic, homophobic right are a er
me—me speci cally—and everyone like me. I’m not hallucinating that.
Jews have good reason to feel the same thing—we’ve been persecuted for
millennia. Jews are a very small minority in Lake Charles. My family lived near the
lake in a house in the woods, and the other families who lived in the woods near us
were all right wing—John Birch Society–type right wing, hard right. One of them had
a big poster of a peace sign stamped into sand and it said “Footprint of an American
Chicken.” And this was during the sixties.
We experienced a kind of tepid anti-Semitism, or simple ignorance. I’m sure the
parents of some of my friends were anti-Semites, but not the kind who’d say, You can’t
play with the Kushner kids. Mostly there was a sense of Jews as being strangers, aliens,
not like everyone else. When my mother was dying, in , my sister and I were in
her hospital room taking care of her. She was asleep, and a very nice nurse came in and
very shyly said, “Can I ask you a question? Are you Jews?” We said yes. And this young
woman said, “Can I see your horns?” is was in . I didn’t know what she meant.
I had only a vague sense that there was a myth that Jews had horns.
I think that sense of Otherness is a big part of who I am, of my sense of myself. It
helped that it developed around being Jewish, an identity of which my parents were
proud. It made my sense of pride in being Jewish transfer easily—well, relatively easily
—to a pride in being gay.
And I was raised to believe that a part of being Jewish was to try to be just, fair,
ethical, a good person, a mensch. A week and a half ago, someone who is in a Lake
Charles men’s club with my father wrote to him and asked, “Why is it so many Jews
are Democrats? Republicans are the only ones who seem to care about Israel.” And he
quoted some guy on a hideous right-wing Web site who’d called liberal Jews “plopping
Jews” because they haven’t worked to become Jewish, they just “plopped” out of their
mothers’ wombs. My father wrote back to this guy and said, “I have three things to say
to you. First, there have been incredibly great Jewish writers, from the genius who
wrote the Book of Job to Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. Why, with so many great
Jewish writers, are you reading this idiot on this stupid Web site? Second, my mother’s
womb is none of your goddamn business or this jerk’s goddamn business, so leave my
mother and her womb out of it. e third thing I want to say to you is this—‘What
mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor?’ at’s from
Isaiah, and that’s why I’m a Democrat.”

I N T E RV I EWE R
So the gi for argument runs in your family.
 KUS H N E R
Yeah, sort of. My mother was emotional and loved to argue volubly, as long as it didn’t
get personal—though she took politics personally. I’m a lot like her that way. She’d
o en end up getting too upset and angry to continue. She made me unafraid to ght,
verbally at least. My father really doesn’t like to argue, but when he has to, he’s rational,
considered, forcefully quiet. He says his piece and then he’s done. I was a high school
debater and very good at it. I was channeling my mother—I became very verbally
aggressive through debate. at was probably the worst time between my father and
me. He hated my belligerence. I think he found my style of argument too much like
my mother’s, too expressive. Probably he found it shrill. is was while it was
becoming clearer to him that I wasn’t heterosexual, which he felt was a rejection of
him, which is ironic, strange, sad. But he was right in some ways about my bellicosity
—I was a passionate arguer, but I wasn’t thoughtful. It took me years to unlearn what I
learned in high school debate, which was predicated on a kind of strategic rather than
substantive or ethical approach to argument. ough I’m grateful for debate—it was
probably useful training for a being playwright. And my partner and I won a lot of
tournaments, and that got me accepted to Columbia. Otherwise, public high school in
Louisiana wasn’t o ering a whole lot, academically.

I N T E RV I EWE R
What was high school like for you?

KUS H N E R
Lake Charles High, which is where my sister and brother and I went—where my
father had gone—was integrated by federal mandate when I was a freshman. It was an
all-white school the year I started, in . ere was an all-black high school a few
blocks away. e courts ordered busing, and Lake Charles High became half-white,
half-black, as I recall, within the year. I got to see rsthand that social engineering
works. I saw the place transform from a very good white high school into a very good
integrated high school. At rst there were fears of gang warfare, and there were a
couple incidents of white kids and black kids getting into st ghts, but by the end of
the year this white boy on the debate squad who I had a terrible crush on—I was
madly in love with him—took an African American girl, who was also on the debate
squad, as his date to the prom. ey were homecoming king and queen.
en of course a bunch of white parents got busy working on a bond issue, and
they built a huge new school so far away from the black community that busing laws
couldn’t cover it. Lake Charles High School, where I went, eventually became an all-
black high school and this other school became an all-white high school, and it got all
the funding, and Lake Charles High got less and less funding the more it became
African American, so the experiment in social engineering was undone. But before it
got sabotaged, it worked, and that was an indelible lesson. I think anyone who lived in
the South and kept their eyes open at that point saw the importance of the role of the
federal government in protecting and advancing minority rights against majoritarian
tyranny.

I N T E RV I EWE R
e play of yours that deals most intimately with race, Caroline, has a lot of
autobiographical elements.
 KUS H N E R
Yes, Caroline grew out of an autobiographical piece, something I’d written in a journal
a hundred million years ago. When I was a freshman at Columbia, I thought, I wonder
if I could be a playwright. And I said to myself that if I could come up with twelve
ideas for plays in the next hour, then I could be a playwright. And I wanted to become
a playwright, so I wrote down twelve ideas. I don’t remember what any of them were,
except one—an African American woman who works for a Jewish family in the Deep
South and is, in some ways, also president of the United States. at’s all I wrote, but
the seed stayed with me. Writing it as lyrics to be set to music is what made it possible
for me to write Caroline.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Why?

KUS H N E R
I grew up in a house lled with music—my parents and brother practicing, and music
on the phonograph. Writing this story as a musical gave me access to memories, and to
a means of evoking my particular childhood. Music also gave me permission to invent,
it freed me from claims of verisimilitude. When people are singing instead of talking,
there’s an automatic arti ciality—the audience has to watch with a degree of
sophistication. at helped me get over the ick factor of writing something based on
actual living people.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Caroline is based on a woman who worked for your family when you were growing up.
Were there particular challenges imagining yourself so deep into the mental life of
someone you knew, who was also an African American woman?

KUS H N E R
e character is very loosely based on her. Her name is Maudie Lee Davis, and the play
is dedicated to her. A lot of the white kids I grew up with found doing minstrelsy really
funny. My parents would have killed us if we had done it, and so we didn’t. Learning
not to imitate black speech helped us de ne ourselves, but then, there I was, writing
Caroline, trying to remember what black people had sounded like to me when I was a
child, and trying to write lyrics that approximated what I remembered.
But again, one of the nice things about being a playwright is that the process
doesn’t stop when you send your work o to a publisher. When I wrote Caroline, I’d
already talked to George Wolfe about directing it, and the part of Caroline and the
other African American characters were played by African American actors. So as I
worked on the piece, I had African American collaborators helping me nd things,
understand things, and telling me when I had screwed up. Part of playwriting is
communal, collaborative—at least, it is if you allow it.
For Homebody/Kabul, when we were casting it in the summer of , it was very
hard to nd actual Afghan actors, but we managed to nd actors who had at least
some direct, lived experience of Islam in non-American cultures. e Afghan
characters speak Pashto or Dari, so I found a guy in ueens who’d grown up in Kabul
to translate, and while he was translating, he told me all sorts of things. He was
incredibly helpful, sometimes with information, sometimes just in reminding me in
vivid ways how large a cultural divide I was straddling. In one scene, I wanted a
Taliban soldier at the Khyber Pass to insult a British character by calling him “fag” in
Pashto. And Mr. Zuri, my translator, said, “I don’t know what that word means.” And I
said, “Well, it’s a perjorative term for a homosexual.” And he said, “I’m not sure what
that is.” And I said, “A man who has sex with other men.” And he said, “ ere’s no
word for that in Pashto.” And I said, “Really? at’s not possible.” And he said, “No,
there isn’t. ere are no such men in Afghanistan.”

I N T E RV I EWE R
Speaking of translation, what did you hope to accomplish by doing a new adaptation
of Mother Courage?

KUS H N E R
Brecht wrote Courage in a kind of slangy, ersatz medieval German, and it’s hard to
know what to translate that into. Most translations opt for something clean and spare,
sort of sidestepping the question of an American-English equivalent for Brecht’s
made-up dialect. ere’s a translation by Ralph Manheim and John Willett that’s o en
used, but it seems to be set in Yorkshire, which is not helpful for American
productions. I wanted to try to do a version that had something of Brecht’s jumpy,
modern and medieval, political and theological blending. Also, Mother Courage is a
musical, and I didn’t think anyone had been especially successful in translating the
lyrics. And I wanted Meryl Streep to play Courage. I felt she had to—it’s one of the
greatest stage roles for women, and she is, without any question, one of the two or
three greatest actors, maybe the greatest actor, in the English-speaking world. At the
rst read-through of the script for Mike Nichols’s movie of Angels, I went up to Meryl
and said, “Since we just met, it’s obnoxious of me to say this, but you have to play
Mother Courage. I would love to do a translation for you.”
When you really love a text, translating it is an act of incredible intimacy. You never
learn as much by reading as you do when you translate. Sometimes I gave myself
permission to add in little bits, not because of any de ciency in Brecht, but because I
wanted to emphasize, ever so slightly, that his characters have inner lives, that they’re
not at mouthpieces for some simplistic political program. Actors tend to make this
weird assumption when they do Mother Courage that they’re not playing people. ey
don’t think about backstory. ey don’t think about subtext in the dialogue. ey play
cartoons. It doesn’t help that Brecht names his characters things like “ e General.”
When you read Mother Courage, you think to yourself—I mean I certainly thought
this the rst time I read it—Oh, this guy the General has the hots for Eilif, Courage’s
violent, crazy, sexy son. And then you think, Not Brecht, Brecht’s not interested in sex,
he’s political! So you turn the General and Eilif and the play into one-dimensional
cartoons. But then I read Brecht’s rehearsal notes, and that’s exactly what he had in
mind—the General never says it, but he wants to fuck Eilif. Who wouldn’t?
With any play, if the play’s worth doing, you have to start by asking questions. Why
is this person doing this? What does this person want? What is this person a er?
Somebody comes in and says, I want your apple. e other person says, But I want the
apple. And they argue about who should get the apple. What is really going to be
interesting is not the apple at all, but that one of them wants to have sex with the
other, or one of them wants to kill the other. Exploring that is the joy of doing a play in
the rst place. It’s a great problem—not just in the American theater, but in theater in
general—that people don’t explore enough. I’m o en frustrated by how
underexplored things feel in productions of my own work. Especially if I’m not
around to pester everyone.
 I N T E RV I EWE R
Why do you think that happens?

KUS H N E R
One of the reasons is that my characters talk about all sorts of things other than what’s
at the heart of the scene. at will eventually emerge, but it may take a long time. It’s
possible for directors to just think, Oh, this is interesting talk, let’s have them sit there
and talk. But that’s not drama—at least as I understand it. In drama, there’s got to be
something at stake and someone’s going to win and someone’s going to lose. A scene is
an embodied dialectic.
Also, almost all productions are given a ridiculously inadequate amount of
rehearsal time. If a play is two hours long, it should be rehearsed for two or three
months, and we rehearse it for three or four weeks at the most.

I N T E RV I EWE R
You went to graduate school for directing. Do you think your work as a director
shaped you as a writer?

KUS H N E R
I studied with Carl Weber, who worked with Brecht, and he taught directing with the
same tools that Brecht used for writing plays. He asked us to try to construct what
Brecht called a play’s “fable,” a kind of outline of the key events the director knows the
audience must follow. And “key events,” we were given to understand, includes both
narrative incident and the way the narrative expressively carries the Inhalt, the deep
content, the ideological, emotional, symbolic, political content of the play—what
Walter Benjamin identi ed in Brecht’s plays as the Plumpes Denken Geschichtslinie,
“crude-thinking story lines.” My graduate training in directing taught me what a
supple and complicated thing an outline can be.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you outline?

KUS H N E R
I always outline. Sometimes I even storyboard on little index cards. en the
characters take over and make a mess of things. But they only come to life because I’ve
outlined.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you have a format you subscribe to for your manuscripts?

KUS H N E R
e choice of the formatting is important. Writing a play is like writing a poem—it
matters where the line breaks happen. A great critic of poetry like Helen Vendler reads
not just the words but the spaces in a poem. Punctuation marks in a play are as
powerful as they are in poems. When she’d send things to editors, Muriel Rukeyser
would put in a note that read, “Please believe the punctuation.” I always tell my
playwriting students that these choices are critically important. Even tiny choices. Is it
“James, colon, line of dialogue, Mary, colon, line of dialogue,” or is the character name
centered above the line? Is the character name underlined? Not underlined?
Capitalized? Is the script single spaced? ese decisions will have an impact on the way
a play is read and on the way it’s performed.
When I read scripts that are single spaced, it feels to me like the writer isn’t
thinking enough about what will happen in the rehearsal room, or has some
ambivalence about handing the script over, because it’s going to be hard for an actor to
act o a script that’s single spaced—they’ll be trapped, glued to the page like readers.
When a play is double spaced and there’s almost nothing on each page, it feels to me a
little bit too friendly, drawn out, airheaded. I do one and a half lines because that
leaves enough breathing room to take notes in. I couldn’t write a play any other way. It
wouldn’t feel like a play to me. Each playwright has his or her own way of doing things,
but the choices matter. A play is both a score for a kinetic event and it’s literature. e
audience should be able to hear that what they’re hearing is written down on paper
somewhere, it isn’t spontaneous, and then also they should sometimes lose track of
that almost completely. And when you read a play, you should always feel aware of its
incompleteness, no matter how good it is as reading material. You should feel a
tension, which is the play waiting to be staged.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you ever write by hand?

KUS H N E R
I always write my plays by hand, with a fountain pen. Not my screenplays. I write those
on a laptop.

I N T E RV I EWE R
You write rst dra s of plays with a fountain pen?

KUS H N E R
For plays, always, always. On yellow legal paper, which has a practical purpose. A single
sheet of / " x " legal paper, with my size handwriting, types up to about a single
page of typed script. So I can count the legal pages to know how much trouble I’m
getting myself into. If I have a play that’s six hundred pages long, I’ve got a problem.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you think di erently when you have a pen in your hand than you do on the
computer?

KUS H N E R
I do. It’s a more muscular activity. I love to draw. at’s why I love fountain pens so
much. You can see in motion the feeling of the line. When I look at a page of
manuscript, it looks like me. I have really weird cursive handwriting. It’s straight up
and down. If I’ve written a sentence really quickly, it’s a scrawl. When I’m reading it
again, I read it with a certain kind of energy. If it’s written fairly neatly and carefully, I
can see that I was thinking carefully. e other thing is, if your handwriting’s as bad as
mine—and most people’s handwriting isn’t very good—when you handwrite a script,
it’s completely privately yours. at’s important, I think. If you’re having trouble
writing, it’s important to know that whatever you write you can throw away. No one
ever needs to know. But when you write on a computer, at least for me, it feels like
your words are immediately public and permanent.
And on a computer, you erase something and it’s gone. It’s sometimes useful to see
what you scratched out and hacked through.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you feel the Internet has changed the way you think and write? Do you think of it
primarily as a help or as this enemy that you have to battle?

KUS H N E R
In some ways it’s de nitely an enemy. is morning I was going to work on a Lincoln
rewrite before I came to meet you. A couple of days ago I biked all over Provincetown
looking for a needle threader—you know, one of those old-fashioned little tin discs
with a cameo on it and a thin wire loop sticking out. I found one and bought it. I’m
trying to teach myself how to needlepoint. I even considered bringing my
needlepointing here, needlepointing during the interview, but then what would you
think? Anyway, I bought this needle threader, but it was crap—two uses into it, the
thing broke. So, this morning before working on Lincoln, I decided I would go online
and nd a really good needle threader. And who knew that on Amazon alone, there
are dozens of needle threaders? So I started thinking, Why does this needle threader
have ve stars and this one four and a half ? And this one only has two, isn’t that
interesting? Can you imagine who got this needle threader and was really
disappointed? And then, it’s like, Oh my God, it’s ten o’clock! I didn’t do any work.
You can’t do that with a pen. You can draw pictures with a fountain pen. You ll it
with ink, which takes time, and then you make a mess and spill the ink, and you have
to clean up your hands. So there’s stu to potschke around with with a fountain pen,
but it’s mostly of limited interest. Unless you decide that you have to go shopping for
fountain pens, which is just like, forget it.

I N T E RV I EWE R
I read that you trained as a visual artist for a little bit.

KUS H N E R
I wanted to be an illustrator or a cartoonist. I took painting classes at Columbia.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Does visual art inform your writing process? Do you visualize as you write?

KUS H N E R
I try not to. I nd myself visualizing much more when I’m working on lm. You can
tell when a play has been written around a design element. I think that that’s not a
good idea. Sometimes I have fairly strong visual images—like the angel crashing
through the bedroom ceiling in Angels. Sometimes images appear in my work. But I
think that part of my brain is mostly shut o when I write plays.
 I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you think that thinking visually leads playwrights astray?

KUS H N E R
ere are no rules in playwriting, really. I think that’s one of the reasons it’s kind of an
unteachable skill. It’s not like writing poetry. I could understand why someone would
want to get a master’s in poetry, because there’s a lot of technical complexity to master.
Playwriting is di erent. I taught graduate-level playwriting for several years at NYU,
and I began to feel that the students, although some of them were immensely gi ed
writers, were making a mistake being there, and that they would have been doing
themselves a favor by becoming assistant stage managers and just hanging out in
rehearsal rooms and then writing. Or getting a master’s in directing. Playwrights need
to know what happens in a rehearsal room.
For narrative realist drama—which is the only kind of playwriting I know much
about—I’m suspicious of the visual image supplanting the actual engine of the play, a
static image supplanting the dialectic, which is the dynamic motor of drama.
e older I get and the more experience I have, the more I realize that the basic
things you have to learn if you’re an actor, director, or playwright are, What’s the stage
action? What’s the objective? What’s the con ict? How is it resolved? What happens
to the people and to the ideas that the people incarnate? It’s not an allegory, but
people are embodied ideas onstage in narrative realist dramas. So if a moment in a play
is really reliant on stage e ect, the question becomes, What is in fact at stake? Has a
gadget or an image supplanted people—or rather, the people playwrights and actors
make up out of words?
Beckett’s plays are about as static as you can get and still call something dramatic,
and they frequently seem to center around an indelible image, but the image always
changes. And the changes, not the image, are what the play’s about. Shakespeare used
all sorts of extraordinary e ects in his plays, but he isn’t a painter, he’s a playwright.
e plays are so fantastically stageworthy because they’re so astonishingly active and
alive.

I N T E RV I EWE R
You have said that theater people—actors and directors—tend to be more interested
in emotions than in ideas. Do you feel alone in your e ort to put philosophical and
political ideas into the center of the play and into the center of our concept of what
matters in relationships? Do you feel the theater has turned away from ideas?

KUS H N E R
Did I really say that? I wish I hadn’t said that. I think most people, actors and directors
and playwrights and audience members, are afraid of ideas and afraid of emotions as
well. And we should be. Ideas and emotions are dangerous. ey threaten stability,
stasis, habit, our comfort in the world. But there’s no such thing as a theater void of
ideas or emotions.
I feel anything but alone. ere are so many people writing for the stage today
whose work I admire and envy and emulate, and like me they’re trying to understand,
to get at the truth—at least on our best days that’s what we’re doing, or trying to do.
Di erent writers put di erent epistemological framing devices at the forefront—
politics, theology, philosophy, psychology. Each writer has his or her own predilection
for how to describe the ways that emotions intersect with ideas, emotion corrupting
and transforming and destroying and exalting thought, and vice versa, ceaselessly. And
of course, ultimately, the distinction between idea and emotion is completely arti cial,
as are the distinctions between politics, theology, philosophy, and psychology. But all
that matters is that you spare yourself nothing and wear yourself out and risk
everything to nd something that seems true. And if you fail to do these things, you
torture yourself about your failures. And then get back to work.
I found a line in Glenway Wescott’s journals that’s become my mantra—“A day’s
work every day now. Now, now, now!”