Lloyd Schwartz Discusses His Latest Volume of Poetry.

DATE November 20, 2000 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Professor Robert Pastor talks about US and foreign
election processes and gives his recommendations on how to reform
the US electoral system
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

The confusion, accusations, suits and countersuits surrounding the Florida
recount has a lot of Americans wondering if it's time to reform the election
system. My guest, Robert Pastor, has witnessed elections around the world.
He established the election monitoring system for the Carter Center and, for
13 years, worked with monitoring teams in Latin America, the Caribbean, the
Middle East and China. During the Carter administration, he served on the
National Security Council. Pastor is a professor of political science at
Emory University in Atlanta. I spoke with him early this morning.

How worried are you by what you're seeing. You've seen people try to steal
elections around the world and you've tried to prevent that from happening.
Do you think that we're in a crisis point in how this recount is being handled
in the United States. Are you concerned that part of our democracy is
breaking down?

Prof. ROBERT PASTOR (Emory University): No, it--I'm not concerned at all. In
fact, I think, in some ways, this is the finest moment for America. We have
discovered that in a very close election, we have a system of procedures; we
have people who are actively engaged; who are volunteering their work; who are
working very hard to make sure this process comes to completion. We have an
independent judiciary, which we all respect. So I'm not concerned about it
for the United States.

I think, in other countries that I've observed, this is a moment in which
riots often break out. I was in one country in which the election commission
was almost burned down during the count. I don't think we have any reason to
be concerned about that in the United States. I think in--on the contrary, I
think this should be an opportunity not only to be patient and watch the
process work, but I also hope that it's an opportunity for Americans to think
hard about ways that we can improve this system so that we can avoid these
particular problems, as well as other problems that have emerged during this
very long and expensive campaign. And we can think hard about what kinds of
reforms we need to prevent these kinds of problems from occurring again.

GROSS: You have seen warring parties be very suspicious of each other in
foreign countries where you've monitored elections. How do you think the
Democrats and the Republicans have been handling themselves in this really
close election, as they watch each other during the recount in Florida; as
they watch each other during all the suits and the countersuits?

Prof. PASTOR: Elections are a process by which competing parties and
candidates struggle for power. And once you keep that in mind, you
understand why the heat between the parties is likely to be very intense
during every phase of the process, particularly during the counting phase.
So I'm not at all surprised by the partisanship between the two leading
parties. You--one would expect that.

The critical question is whether you can insulate that partisanship from the
counting process and the judicial process. And I believe that our system
permits that and does have certain walls that will separate the partisan
debate from the actual resolution of these particular disputes.

GROSS: One of the questions about partisanship revolves around Katherine
Harris, the secretary of State in Florida, who co-chaired George W. Bush's
election campaign in that state. Is it typical in states, do you think, for
somebody who is clearly that partisan to be in the secretary of State-type of
position where you're supervising part of the election and deciding
whether--when the count is ready to be certified?

Prof. PASTOR: It is typical that secretaries of State in most states are
aspiring politicians. It's unfortunate, however, that that particular job
and the kind of people that are encouraged to run for that office is viewed
as partisan. I believe this is still one more of the problems that we ought
to resolve in the future. The person in each state who should be charged
with the conduct of elections should be a person that's seen as above
politics, not as an aspiring politician.

GROSS: How do you think they should be chosen? I mean...

Prof. PASTOR: Well...

GROSS: ...people in politics tend to chose people who share their political
point of view.

Prof. PASTOR: I think we ought to re-evaluate the way we look at the
electoral process. We've taken the entire process for granted for far too
long. But now we understand that the conduct of elections is at least as
important as the regulation of our money or the resolution of disputes. And
therefore, we should think about choosing our senior election officials much
as we chose our judges or we chose the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank.
These individuals are seen as above politics and they're above politics, in
part, because of the process by which they're selected, which is, usually,
that they're nominated by one side or the other. But they need to be
approved and confirmed by both parties. And the only way that occurs is if
everybody sees them as above politics.

Secondly, their term of office should exceed that of the political mandate.
In the states, for example, they should exceed the term of the governor so
that their time horizon is much broader and they think of the broader state
and national interest, as opposed to the interest of the party in power.

GROSS: Let's look at the butterfly ballot, the controversial ballot that was
used in Palm Beach County in which some of the names were to--some of the
punches were to the left of the name and others were to the right of the name,
in the opposing column. And a lot of people say that they meant to vote for
Gore-Lieberman and, inadvertently, because the ballot was confusing, voted for
Patrick Buchanan. Any opinion of the design, having worked with elections
and ballots around the world?

Prof. PASTOR: The design makes a big difference. I have to say that I don't
recall an instance in which a national election was designed by a local
official. I think this is a case of--where our system is so excessively
decentralized that a particular county can make such a decision. And that
decision could affect the entire country. It would seem to me that, at the
minimum, a national commission should design the ballot for the presidency.
Obviously, the ballots for local and state officials need to be designed at
different levels, but at least at the national level, there should be one,
single design.

GROSS: You said that the absentee ballots system is the part of the electoral
system that has the biggest problems with fraud. Why is that so?

Prof. PASTOR: That's because, I think, the political parties can play a major
role in both getting the absentee ballots and having voters vote for them.
There are cases, of course, in which the parties themselves or certain
individuals were able to fill out the absentee ballots themselves. And, of
course, that is blatant fraud. The biggest problem, of course, is that the
essence of a free election is a secure and secret vote. And that's not
possible with an absentee ballot or, to put it differently, I think an
absentee ballot is not quite so secure. A person might very well vote in the
presence of others. Somebody might vote for that person. So there are many
different areas in which the absentee ballot could be misused.

And, in part, because of the history of absentee-ballot fraud in Florida, the
Florida State Legislature, within the last few years, have passed a law which
sets a whole set of--which sets a large number of requirements that must be
met before the ballot could be considered valid. And many of these
requirements, such as witnessing of the vote by a separate individual; the use
of the voter registration number; the specific signature must match the
signature that's on hand at the registration office. There are a whole set of
regulations which, if they are not precisely implemented, would lead to the
declaration of the ballot as being invalid.

And so you have two different sets of problems. One is the traditional use
of the absentee ballot in the case of, possibly, use of fraud. And the other
is whether it stands up to all of the additional requirements that are--that
have been put in place.

GROSS: If you were given the job of reforming the American election system,
where would you start?

Prof. PASTOR: Well, there are many different places in which the American
electoral system needs to be reformed, from the nature of the machines that we
use to the design of the ballot to the excessive decentralization in which
individual counties can make decisions that affect people's right to vote for
a president. There is partisanship at different moments in the electoral
process where there should not be. Our campaigns go on for far too long.
They're far too expensive, making it too open for special interest to control
the process. Our Federal Election Commission does not function very
effectively. Our Electoral College, right now, is an obsolete, archaic
system in which people do not have the opportunity to directly elect their
president. There are so many different things that need to be corrected that
one hopes that this latest case of what's going on in Florida will move our
country and move all the people in our country to demand some significant
reforms in the electoral process to permit greater democracy to function as
our Founding Fathers had intended it to function in our country.

GROSS: Do you think this election makes the case against the Electoral
College?

Prof. PASTOR: Well, I believe that the case against the Electoral College
has been made many times in the past very effectively, too. I think the
basic argument in the--against the Electoral College is a very simple one.
And that is that if you believe that in one person--every person should have
an equal vote in the president and that that vote should translate and be
aggregated to decide on the president, then you don't want to have an
indirect system in which electors can make up their own mind independently of
the people's vote and that that outcome could be different from the popular
vote. I'm--that's the argument in favor of reforming the Electoral College.
Of course, our Constitution makes it very difficult for us to reform that
particular provision of the Constitution because small states might feel that
they will have less power in the decision of the president and, therefore,
they're unlikely to approve of such a reform.

GROSS: My guest is Robert Pastor. He established the election monitoring
system for the Carter Center and has monitored elections around the world.
We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Robert Pastor is my guest. He's a professor of political science at
Emory University and he established the election monitoring system for the
Carter Center and worked with the Carter Center for 13 years.

What are some of the lessons about elections that you've learned from
supervising elections in other countries?

Prof. PASTOR: Well, the first and most important lesson is that for an
election to work, the administrators must be seen as non-partisan and
impartial. Secondly, the process needs to be completely transparent, which
is another way of saying that all of the key political parties should have an
opportunity to observe the full range of electoral processes, especially
during the count. If you have impartial administration and you have a
transparent election in which the observers of the parties can watch
everything, I think this--these are two very critical ingredients.

The third one is an independent judiciary or an electoral court. A lot of
countries have not only independent election commissions--national election
commissions, they also have national electoral courts. These are judges with
great wisdom, non-partisanship and professionalism in the judging of electoral
law. Again, we don't have anything like that in the United States, but this
might be one reform that we might want to consider in the future.

GROSS: Is there an election system that you helped create in another country
that you're particularly proud of; that you think functions really well?

Prof. PASTOR: No, I have not created an election system in any other
country. I don't know of any foreigner that has. But there are a wide range
of election systems that have been created by their own people that should
gain our attention during this critical moment. We only have to look towards
our neighbor elections, Canada. They are conducting an election right now,
which--in which the campaign has been condensed to just 36 days, not four
years; in which the amount of money that's contributed to the parties is
somewhere between $15 and $50 million, as opposed to $3 billion, as we've just
seen in the presidential cycle. We can look to Costa Rica that has an
independent electoral court which is widely admired by all of the candidates
and parties and by most of Latin America as well. And, also, its election
commission is viewed as a fourth branch of government equal to the other three
branches, the judicial, the legislative and the executive branches of
government. So there's much that we can learn from other countries in the
world.

GROSS: You've brought people from other parts of the world to the United
States to see how elections here operate. What are some of the things that
the people you've brought here have admired and have been, really, kind of
surprised at and disappointed in?

Prof. PASTOR: In 1992, we brought a group of Mexican officials representing
the political parties to the United States. Our ulterior purpose was to
encourage the Mexican government to invite foreigners to look at their
election in 1994. And, in fact, that did work. But the more interesting
thing that came out of their observation was that they were very surprised
that there were so few party monitors; that the regulations were, actually, so
thin; that the process was so open that, at one point, one of them said, `This
should be a very easy system to manipulate.' And I asked him, `Well, why do
you think most Americans have confidence in the electoral process here and so
few Mexicans have?'

And that began a very interesting discussion in which we all concluded, at the
end, that it was because electoral disputes and problems, which emerge in both
sets of countries, were perceived to be resolved fairly in the United States.
And that was not the case in Mexico at that time. They did not have, at that
time, an independent election commission. They did not have an independent
judiciary. They now have an independent election commission. They still have
problems with their judiciary. So the comparison, both for the Mexicans and
the Americans, was very interesting. And I think we came to appreciate both
the differences and the special advantages that accrue as a result of an
independent judiciary in the United States.

GROSS: Tell the story of what happened when you took Chinese election
officials to Atlanta to watch you vote.

Prof. PASTOR: Yes. Actually, in two of the last four elections in which
observers have been watching me vote, I've run into particular problems. In
the time with the Chinese, there was a run-off of a primary. They were just
arriving at that particular time. And the election officials wouldn't permit
me to vote for that run-off because they said that I had voted for the other
party's primary. That was not the case, and I protested and--in order
for there to be both an opportunity for me to vote, but also a learning
experience for our Chinese visitors. And sure enough, the polling officials
handled it very well. They made a phone call to Fulton County Courthouse and
were able to ascertain exactly for which party I had voted in the original
primary; establish that they had made a mistake and, therefore, permitted me
to vote. So the lesson for the Chinese was every election in every country
often has irregularities and problems. The critical issue is whether there
is a process for resolving those problems expeditiously and fairly so that
people can, in fact, exercise their right to vote.

GROSS: And what happened more recently?

Prof. PASTOR: In this last election, I went and I was told that I had
already received an absentee ballot and, therefore, would not be permitted to
vote. I said, `Well, that was not the case.' My son, who has a similar
name, had received an absentee ballot, but I had not. The registration list
indicated clearly, however, that I had received one. I protested, and the
chief election official came over to me with an affidavit, asking me to sign
it, that--in which he co-signed, which indicated, clearly, that if this
represented a second vote on my part, that would be felony, a crime. Since I
was confident that I had not voted as an--in absentee, that was certainly
satisfactory to me and it permitted me to vote.

Once again, this was a good example. I brought my students to this
election--a good example of--that problems do emerge, and we, in fact,
witness a great deal of irregularities on Election Day. The critical issue,
once again, is whether or not there is a process for resolving this problem
expeditiously and permitting a person to exercise their franchise. And in
this case, it occurred.

GROSS: But, you know, you're a special person. You not only know your way
around the election system, you have people with you, you know, from other
countries observing American elections. So you're going to be taken care of
in a very punctual way. Other people might not have it so easy when a
mistake is made.

Prof. PASTOR: You're absolutely correct. In the course of our election
observation, we asked some waitresses at a diner which we stopped to eat
whether they'd had a chance to vote. These were poor, African-American
women. And they said that they had tried, but they were not able to. And we
asked what had happened. And they said they went to their polling site and
they showed us their election credential, which was very good. And they said
their name was not on the list and they were told to call a phone number,
which they called all day long, but it was busy. And as a result, they were
not able to vote and a lot of their friends were not able to vote. But they
also did not know how to work the process, as I did.

So you're absolutely correct. I think this is one of these big problems.
There are a lot of people out there. Usually, they're poor, and they,
therefore, don't know how to pursue their interests, or they're in poor
communities and it's very difficult to do so, that may have not been
enfranchised, but should have been. They have a very low level of
administrative development and a lower capacity to problem solve; that is to
say, poorer communities do. And when that occurs, people are disenfranchised.
And we need to correct that problem. My guess is that it occurs throughout
the United States. And this is one of the many different issues which we
really need to take a close look at.

GROSS: Well, I want to thank you very much for talking with us.

Prof. PASTOR: Thank you, Terry.

GROSS: Robert Pastor established the election monitoring system for the
Carter Center. He's a professor of political science at Emory University.
Our interview was recorded this morning. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH
AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Credits)

GROSS: Coming up, our classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz talks with us
about the other side of his writing life: poetry. And he reads from his new
collection, "Cairo Traffic." And Maureen Corrigan reviews posthumously
published books by Jack Kerouac and Iris Murdoch.

(Soundbite of music)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Interview: Lloyd Schwartz, "Cairo Traffic," discusses his poetry
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Our classical music critic, Lloyd Schwartz, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994
for his music criticism. Music criticism is just one part of his writing
life. Lloyd's third book of poetry has just been published. It's called
"Cairo Traffic." Lloyd also directs the creative writing program at the
University of Massachusetts, Boston and co-edited the book "Elizabeth Bishop
and Her Art." We invited him for a reading and conversation. Let's start
with the poem that opens his new book. It's called "A True Poem."

LLOYD SCHWARTZ ("Cairo Traffic"): "A True Poem." `I'm working on a poem
that's so true I can't show it to anyone. I could never show it to anyone
because it says exactly what I think and what I think scares me. Sometimes it
pleases me. Usually it brings misery. And this poem says exactly what I
think--what I think of myself, what I think of my friends, what I think about
my lover. Exactly. Parts of it might please them. Some of it might scare
them. Some of it might bring misery, and I don't want to hurt them. I don't
want to hurt them. I don't want to hurt anybody. I want everyone to love me.
Still, I keep working on it. Why? Why do I keep working on it? Nobody will
ever see it. Nobody will ever see it. I keep working on it, even though I
can never show it to anybody. I keep working on it, even though someone might
get hurt.'

GROSS: That's Lloyd Schwartz reading from his new collection of poems, "Cairo
Traffic." So, Lloyd, do you have such a poem that's too honest for anyone to
read?

SCHWARTZ: I wish I did. I was actually working on something that I couldn't
show anyone--I didn't think I could show anyone. And I was stumped by it
also, and I think that the channel got switched to actually thinking about
writing that poem and that's where this poem came from.

GROSS: You know, your poem, "A True Poem," which you read, is about some of
the problems that one faces when they write about their honest perceptions of
other people. You've written a series of poems about your mother, and in
these poems it isn't an issue of what your mother will think because your
mother has Alzheimer's disease and is beyond kind of comprehending the poems
or even recognizing you as her son. How did you start writing poems about her
and her condition?

SCHWARTZ: I almost have no control over the subject matter of my own poems.
And if I'm feeling something deeply enough, I may not even want to write about
it, as was the case with the beginning stages of my mother's illness. And
then I couldn't think about anything else. And the subject just took hold,
and I had to write about it. Everything else had to be shoved aside. And I
was also so moved by the things that she said and my mother was never a
writer. I wish she had been. I think in some way the extraordinary things
that she was saying to me I wanted to commemorate. I wanted to capture her
mind and her thoughts and her words which she herself would never have written
down. And that just took over, became a passion.

GROSS: Let me ask you to read a few lines of your poem, "The Dream During My
Mother's Recuperation," and this is a collection of--at least I assume it's
a collection of some of the things that she said with memory loss.

SCHWARTZ: Yes, it is, starting when she was in the hospital for a very
serious operation and her recovery from that operation.

`I feel lost. I'm heading for nowhere. I have to stop somewhere to see where
I'm landing. Whatever is going on will be going on without me. It passes so
fast. That's life. The winter sun is like a stepmother's love.'

GROSS: Did you actually take notes when she was speaking to you?

SCHWARTZ: I actually did. I was visiting her in the hospital. She was not
expected to recover from this surgery that she went through, and she was
saying the most remarkable things. And at some point, I started writing down
the things that she was saying. I just wanted to remember them. My original
intention was not, `Oh, I got to turn this into a poem,' but that I just
wanted to remember some of these things that she was saying. And then really
at some later point, I thought, you know, `This is a poem. She is giving me a
poem.'

GROSS: I want to ask you to read one of your poems about your mother and this
is called "She Forgets." Tell us when you wrote this and what stage of her
illness she was in.

SCHWARTZ: "She Forgets" was in the earlier stages of her memory loss. She
had been hospitalized and she was not permitted to leave the hospital for
home. She had to be put into a nursing home, and she was put into a nursing
home that was really not the right place for her to be. And it took months
and months to get her into a better facility. And this is really a poem about
that first experience in a nursing home and her pain and helplessness about
her, both her physical and her mental situation.

"She Forgets." `The one who told me about the Holocaust, who taught me moral
distinctions, who gave me music and told me jokes is in a nursing home,
lonely, scared, surrounded only by people so much worse off--inarticulate,
incapacitated, drooling. She thinks she's in a crazy house. She's not crazy.
She's there. I put her there because she can't take care of herself, can't
be left alone. She's old. She forgets. She forgets her medicine. She
forgets what she's not supposed to eat. She forgets what day it is. She
remembers who she is and who she was and knows she's not herself. She can't
remember what's wrong with her--"What's wrong with me, honey?"--or why she's
there. But she knows her brain isn't working right.

`Her brain needs air. Oxygen has a hard time squeeze through her hardened
arteries, so her blood congeals. Little clots cause little strokes which
destroy her memory. Aspirin, which thins the blood and helps keep the oxygen
flowing, might help her remember, but she's old. Part of her stomach has
turned upside down. Her food gets stuck in her chest, blocks her breath. She
panics, forces herself to vomit, which makes her bleed, which damages her
heart. A simple operation could fix her stomach, but doctors won't operate on
someone with a damaged heart and aspirin makes her bleed, so she can't take
aspirin. So she forgets.

`I live in another city. Once after I came to visit, she wasn't thinking
about her food. She ate too much or too fast and the food wouldn't go down,
so she panicked, forced herself to vomit and had a heart attack. She was in
the hospital for three weeks which she doesn't remember. So I've had to put
the one who gave me music and told me jokes, who taught me moral distinctions
and warned me never to forget the Holocaust--I've had to put her in a nursing
home, a crazy house, where she's scared and lonely, where she stares out the
window and asks, "What day is today? Why can't I go home? What's wrong with
me, honey? Why am I here?"'

GROSS: Lloyd, that poem was written several years, and I think you must look
back on that period as when she was comparatively healthy.

SCHWARTZ: Yes. Yes. And now she doesn't know who she is anymore and she
doesn't know who I am anymore. And it was hard to think of anything worse at
the time that what was happening that's in "She Forgets" was happening. But
it's worse.

GROSS: How is she now?

SCHWARTZ: She's very weak, very tired, extremely confused. That's how she
is.

GROSS: Do you still remember what your mother was like before was sick or has
she been sick for so long that that's the main image you have of her?

SCHWARTZ: Oh, no, I remember very vividly what she was like. I mean, in many
ways, I mean, she certainly remains one of the closest people in my life, much
closer to me than my father was. There was a kind of war between me and my
father which she mediated, but no, very much. I mean, she was someone I would
go to movies with when I was a child or go to plays. And she was the person
who told me most of the jokes that I knew, and I would even tell her some of
the jokes that I'd heard--sometimes not very polite ones, but she seemed to
get a kick out of them.

And she did love music. She was very involved in--she loved popular music
and Broadway shows. And she went when she was a younger woman and she would
tell me about those experiences. So I remember her very well. She was very
much the center of my extended family.

GROSS: My guest is our classical music critic, Lloyd Schwartz, who's also a
poet. His new collection of poems is called "Cairo Traffic." We'll talk more
after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Lloyd Schwartz. You probably recognize him as FRESH AIR's
classical music critic. Lloyd is also a poet and has a new collection called
"Cairo Traffic."

Your new collection of poems, "Cairo Traffic," is named after the final poem
in the book. And the final poem is really, in a way, a collection of poems
and short prose pieces about your trip to Egypt. And the poem is really in
part about art and religion, death and the desire for immortality, a lot of
the things that seeing what you saw in Egypt got you thinking about--I'm going
to ask you to read the end of "Cairo Traffic."

SCHWARTZ: OK.

`No, I haven't converted, though, in fact, I find I have a lot of sympathy
with elements of what I understand to be the religion of ancient Egypt. Life
and death, order and chaos seem to have been worshipped equally. And I, who
believe there's a reason for everything, that everything makes sense if one
tries hard enough--I believe with equal conviction that reason is an illusion,
that nothing ever makes sense. I'm afraid I'll lose the past, so I don't
throw anything away. So I live in chaos.

`A visitor once asked if I was planning to take everything with me to the next
world. My real conversion took place when I was 13. I lost confidence in
religion. I still believed in morality. Later, I believed in art. In
Israel, at the Western Wall, I found a surprising residue of feeling for
everything I'd been taught to worship as a child, but in Egypt, something
else, something about the relation between how massive these monuments are,
how heroic and how old, older than almost anything else we call art and
fragile. They've been on Earth so long they seem tired of it, tired of time.'

GROSS: Thanks for reading that, Lloyd, and that's from the title poem "Cairo
Traffic" from Lloyd's new book.

Tell me more about how, you know, visiting the Middle East which is lands that
we identify with ancient religions. Did it make you rethink religion at all
or was it more about art for you?

SCHWARTZ: Well, it certainly--I mean, it was very much about art, but it also
was a very powerful image both--as I say, even in Israel at the Wailing Wall
to actually be there triggered, you know, these sort of recessed memories from
my childhood. And I really did feel here was a kind of heroic, physical
manifestation of the power of religion. And it was an extraordinary
experience and it did make me go back to--it certainly tapped feelings, you
know, that I hadn't really had in many decades.

GROSS: Do you think of yourself as a prolific poet?

SCHWARTZ: Oh, no, just the opposite. I mean, this very narrow little book is
10 years of work, and I've published a book every decade, so no. And these
books contain almost every poem that I've written, you know, in that 10-year
period.

GROSS: When you're not writing a poem, do you think that you're still a poet
or do you think you're someone who used to be a poet?

SCHWARTZ: Sometimes I think I'm still a poet. I certainly hope I'm still a
poet. I'm afraid I used to be a poet. There's a kind of network of anxieties
and satisfactions and fears that are kind of inextricable.

GROSS: How do you know when you want to write a poem about something? I
mean, do you ever try to force it and figure out what's not happening, or is
pretty clear when a perception or an experience is leading to a poem?

SCHWARTZ: I'm not a great role model for my students because I tell my
students...

GROSS: Yeah.

SCHWARTZ: ...that, you know, they need to work at it and they need to keep,
you know, writing all the time. And, of course, I am writing all the time.
I'm writing music reviews all the time, but I tend to resist writing poems. I
mean, I want to write poems, but usually when something comes to me, you know,
that makes me want to write, my first response is, `Oh, you know, I'd love to
write a poem but I'm way too busy. You know, I just have much too much to do
to stop everything and write a poem.' And then I have to write it, and
everything else has to be put aside. So that doesn't happen with
extraordinary frequency, but when it happens, it's overwhelming and there's
nothing else I could do. I have no choice. And I don't sleep much and, you
know, there are always deadlines that I have to meet, but the poem has to get
written.

GROSS: Well, Lloyd, thank you so much for reading some of your poems to us.
A pleasure to talk with you.

SCHWARTZ: Thank you, Terry. It's always a pleasure to talk to you, too.

GROSS: Lloyd Schwartz is our classical music critic. His new collection of
poems is called "Cairo Traffic."

Coming up, Maureen Corrigan reviews posthumously published books by Jack
Kerouac and Iris Murdoch. This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Analysis: Iris Murdoch's "Something Special" and Jack Kerouac's
"Orpheus Emerged"
TERRY GROSS, host:

Perishing doesn't necessarily put an end to publishing as two new books by
Jack Kerouac and Iris Murdoch demonstrate. Book critic Maureen Corrigan has a
review.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN:

As a breed, writers are pack rats, and so when they die, they usually leave
behind lots of paper--manuscripts, letters, diaries, juvenilia. Sometimes
their surviving relatives houseclean to the detriment of posterity, like Jane
Austen's sister Cassandra, who destroyed most of her letters. These days,
however, famous writers' heirs often succumb to the lore of easy money and
allow lots of literary junk to be published that should have been tossed into
the paper recycling bin. There was that dreadful lost novel by Hemingway that
resurfaced two summers ago, the recently published, embarrassing love letters
of J.D. Salinger to Joyce Maynard. I know, Salinger isn't dead yet; he just
acts like he is. And with almost annual regularity, volumes of letters,
doodlings and drafts by the Beat angel Jack Kerouac.

The latest Kerouac book from the beyond is a novella called "Orpheus Emerged"
that Kerouac wrote in 1945 when he was 23. It's pretty bad, but in an
over-the-top, morbidly interesting kind of way. The story concerns a pilgrim
soul named Paul who immerses himself in Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and cheap wine.
Paul falls in with a pre-hipster student crowd around an unnamed university.
The young men are all gloomy. They write poetry, argue about hypno-analysis
and harbor unspoken homo-erotic feelings for each other. The young women,
referred to as the mistresses, wear tight pants and cook up plates of food
that they place like silent offerings on the men's writing desks.

Kerouac supposedly wrote "Orpheus Emerged" soon after meeting Allen Ginsberg,
William Burroughs and the rest of that infamous Columbia gang. So the
novella has some roman a clef appeal. The tortured arguments about art
that compose much of its dialogue are also rather charming; grant it not so
charming that I want to read page after page of characters saying things
like, `Pain is the law of the artist's life.' But "Orpheus Emerged" did
remind me of the earnestness of the Beats, and in this age of irony, I feel
sentimental about their esthetic sincerity. Probably the most intriguing
aspect of "Orpheus Emerged" is the way it's being published, as an e-book,
tricked out with interactive hypertext, audio and video accompaniments, an
introduction by Robert Creeley and still more never-before published shreds
of Kerouac's journals.

Fans of e-publishing argue that it's more democratic because manuscripts don't
have to be vetted by gatekeepers of literary culture like agents and editors.
Skeptics like me suspect that most e-books will read more like spam mail than
literature. Gatekeepers may not be perfect, but they do help stave off the
avalanche of words, words, empty words. "Orpheus Emerged" will probably slink
back into the darkness after its debut, so it's fitting that it's being
published in a comparatively ephemeral form.

Not so Iris Murdoch's recently rediscovered short story, "Something Special."
Its mode of publication virtually shouts out, `This is great art.' "Something
Special," a title which Murdoch surely intended to be ironic and which her
publishers seem to have taken straight, is being printed in hardback on fine
paper, complete with wood-cut illustrations, all this for a short story that
was published only once before in the 1950s in Japanese.

A lot of people, myself included, felt simultaneously queazy and grateful that
Murdoch's husband, John Bayley, wrote that moving and humiliating memoir of
her descent into Alzheimer's disease called "Elegy for Iris." I'm doubly
grateful that Bailey violated Murdoch's privacy after reading "Something
Special," which probably wouldn't have been published like this were it not
for the renewed attention that the memoir drew to Murdoch. "Something
Special" is a devastating short story about limited options and the pitfalls
of romanticism. It takes place during one night in Dublin in the 1950s. A
24-year-old spinster named Yvonne is being pressured by her mother and uncle
to marry her suitor, a moon-faced Jewish tailor named Sam. At first, Yvonne
evokes sympathy. She's a dreamy bookworm who protests her mother's
interference by saying, `Can't I live my life as I please, since it's the only
thing I have?' But as Yvonne and Sam proceed with their evening date, she's
obviously so hard to please and whingy that sympathy dries up. And then it
floods back during the very last page of this dark and emotionally complex
story.

Literary grave robbing is largely an unsavory and unrewarding job, but every
once in a while the shovel strike a part of a corpus that's still kicking.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She
reviewed "Something Special" by Iris Murdoch and "Orpheus Emerged" by Jack
Kerouac.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.

(Credits)

GROSS: This is NPR, National Public Radio.
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