2Lucy Sante

EO

What is your relationship to beauty?

LS

Oh, not starting out simply! [Laughs.] No, I like beauty. I know beauty likes me. We get along. I would say the pursuit of beauty has been a major factor in my life throughout. And that's really too vague of a question for me to go beyond that.

EO

Well, what does beauty mean to you? And how do you identify it?

LS

I guess for most of my life, I've found beauty among ugliness. It was part of the lure of New York City back when it was New York City—it was a nasty, dirty, dangerous place, but with all kinds of beauty contained within it, you know? I think I like the idea of beauty coming in a difficult package. It doesn't change that aspect of beauty, but it makes it a little less accessible.

EO

Does that idea make it your own?

LS

Yeah, of course. That's part of the idea. Make it your own and defend it from the wolves out there. A good example is my book Evidence, which is a collection of police evidence—photographs from 1914 to 1980—mostly murders. I remember when I was working on the book, I had photocopies of all the pages in a hallway in my apartment, and I was messing with them. And people would come over and say, “I can't look at that.” But, you know, to me, they actually possess beauty. Not the kind of beauty you might want to share a room with—you know, not the kind of beauty you might want to sit across from at breakfast. But beauty.

And what does this beauty consist of? Well, partly, it's the beauty of the lighting and partly it's the beauty of the time. And partly it's the beauty of the process, certainly a photographic process, but also that weird privilege of seeing a body after death and before decay. So, that's an example of that kind of beauty.

LO-B

This reminds me—in my interview with Mimi Thi Nguyen for November, she referenced a line from John Waters’s Female Trouble: “Crime is beauty,” which seems related to Evidence.

EO

What about desire?

LO-B

Yes, when we last spoke, we talked about desire a bit, in terms of when you knew you wanted to be a writer.

LS

Probably when I was about ten.

LO-B

But when you became a writer—you were talking about how in the mid-1970s you were writing things that you didn't love.

LS

That was the 1980s, actually.

LO-B

Right, but what you said was that you didn't want to write anything that was an adjunct to publicity, and that you desired a kind of writing that existed as writing. Can you talk about that a little bit?

LS

Yes. I meant something that is not a blueprint for something else. Something that could only exist as writing, not that could eventually be a movie, for example. I mean, that’s great if it becomes a movie, but then what you're responding to is just the ideas. I was talking about the combination of ideas and language that's irreducible—that could not ever become a movie. You know, this kind of writing is not going to make anyone rich. Ever. Story of my life. But, you know, I like a kind of writing that's irreducible—just itself and nothing else.

LO-B

I'm sure you are asked for advice from young writers all the time—do you tell them to keep a low overhead? Like, this isn't going to be a huge salary.

LS

Well, I tell them not to . . . I mean, today's world, really, it's crazy. I became a writer because I grew up in a different world.

EO

But did you choose writing or did writing choose you?

LS

Beats the hell out of me. I mean, I'm always wondering, given the timing of my first desire to become a writer, it strongly suggests that it's completely linked together with my learning English as a second language, and then my particular relationship to the English language. Since I learned English as a kid, already knowing one language and being thrown into another one—you know, I got thrown into school without knowing any English—so as a consequence, every English word, at least basic English, comes with a pedigree. It comes with, like, “I first saw this word on the side of a truck in Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1963.” This kind of thing. So, writing becomes, among other things, a complex conversation I'm having with the entry of English into my life. My native language is French, I write stuff in it, but I've never tried literary writing in French, ever. Partly because that is much more of an emotional language for me. I don't have that distance. It's the distance that's really a plus for me.

LO-B

More emotional too, because it's your mother tongue.

LS

Well, yeah, because I learned it in the womb. I'm really vulnerable in that language. And I'm not so vulnerable in English. I’m more defended in English.

EO

Do you feel like you are dropping yourself in a specific context and that you're writing against certain constraints? Or creating constraints for yourself within the context?

LS

Well, I create the constant constraints for myself, of course. I mean, every project has constraints. There are natural constraints and artificial constraints, you know, Oulipo kind of stuff, which I do every once in a while, when I'm bored, but the general constraints arrive as part of a project.

EO

Right, but there's the way in which you become a writer, right? There are so many different paths to becoming a writer . . .

LO-B

Is there a particular education involved with becoming a writer? Is it like reading? Is it traveling? Is it taking philosophy classes? How does one become a writer in your opinion?

LS

I'm reading, reading, reading—and imitating, which is basically the thing I have tried to drill into my students for years, because that's how I learned writing. I studied with Kenneth Koch, who had us do imitations all the time. Later, when I became a professional writer, I started at the New York Review of Books. So, I was reading all the essays in that and absorbing that particular voice until I got it down. And then I could break away from it.

EO

What are your thoughts about writers who are first starting out, and often the editors take the reins of the material? Isn’t that alienating when you're new to writing? When did you know you had to trust what you felt? And when did you decide to fight for what you thought on the page?

LS

Pretty much as soon as I started publishing, because I think about every word and none of it is automatic. I think about every comma, every period—so I'm prepared to fight for all of it, because I can explain all of it. But by and large, it varies a whole lot. You might think that since I've been publishing for over forty years that maybe editors would leave me alone, but they don't. I've noticed that the leading culprits actually are the younger editors who feel that they have to change things. Older editors tend to leave things alone much more. This just happened to me—I will not name the publication, but I just had to make the editors go back to my phrasings to avoid a bunch of cliches and received ideas. They want those cliches and received ideas! Because that's style, I guess.

Style, by the way, is a very difficult conversation, and I’m speaking as someone who has taught writing to undergraduates for twenty-three years. How many people are even aware that they have a style? Style is not something you seek out; style is something you bring to writing. The more relaxed and at home you feel with writing, the more you'll have a style. It may not even look like a style. It may be a style that is only really visible to you. But, if you care about it, it's there.

EO

I’m curious about what it’s like for you writing against a deadline, and when you’re not? How do you write? Do you write in your head? When you sit down, are you writing as you move through the world in your head?

LS

Yeah, if I'm in the middle of something, I will rewrite my sentences all night long and dream about them sometimes. The writing I do in my head is really rewriting. I really have to be at my desk to write.

LO-B

You need your books.

LS

I have thousands of my books behind me. I ordered my library in chronological order—not precisely, but more like a general sweep—and that helps me situate things. What happened in 1979? I kind of look over in one spot, you know. It just helps order my mind. And it's been that way for a long time. It's kind of like a timeline of human history. I'm completely allergic to numbers. I can't do math for shit. But I remember dates. It's how I organize my knowledge of the world to a certain degree.

LO-B

I want to get back to editors. Were there any editors who are, or were, helpful critically? Who was the most instrumental editor you’ve worked with?

LS

The editor in my life was Barbara Epstein, to whom I was an assistant in the early ’80s. She was co-editor of the New York Review Books and died in 2006. She was my teacher, editor, boss, and surrogate mother. I think about her every day. She helped my writing, not by changing it, but by helping it better, or really be, itself. A lot of this was imparted through watching her editorial process—how she treated the works of other writers, including various celebrities, Oxford dons, whoever. She could cut through the crap. If it was dead prose, she'd cut it. If it was a bad word choice, she changed it. I got to see exactly what her thinking was in every instance. She still lives in my head.

W.H. Auden, in The Dyer's Hand, which is one of the great books about writing, says something like all the writing manuals will tell you to free yourself from sensors and go for liberation. But, actually, every writer should have a whole board of sensors in their head—by which he means critics. There should be a bully, a bored only-child, etc. That advice has worked very well for me. I mean, there's been all these characters in my life who live in my head to critique my writing, which include people I haven't seen since high school and people who are barely literate. But Barbara is the most authoritative voice there.

EO

What about using the “I” in writing? Some writers have made rules against that. Did you ever create your own sort of style guide with rules?

LS

I didn't use “I” for the first ten years of my writing, because I was impersonating somebody more worldly and sophisticated than I was. So, I couldn't let on about my grubby life.

EO

Did you keep a journal? I was reading “The Art of Dying” by Peter Schjeldahl, who passed away last Friday, and he writes, “I’ve never kept a diary or a journal, because I get spooked by addressing no one. When I write, it’s to connect.”

LS

I grew up with a mother who read every scrap of paper in my room all the time. So I could not commit anything to paper. And that prohibition is still very strong in my head. I keep a bunch of notebooks around for various, specific things. I can tell you that the prohibition is still so strong. I won't write down anything unless I'm willing to see it.

As for a style guide—I believe you're really your own style guide. By this time, as you know, I've been doing this for so long that a lot of these things which could have been conscious processes have become just, you know, absorbed and unconscious. But certainly, I'm aware that one of the central features of the English language is its Latin Germanic duality. That's what makes it such a brilliant language. You've got these opposing forces, brought together in one language. And I always know my writing is shit when it's like leaning too far in one direction or the other. It's got to be sitting right in the middle of those. If you use too many Latinate words, and not enough Anglo Saxon, it is going to be pretentious and deadly. And if you use too many Anglo-Saxon words around Latin, it's going to sound illiterate.

EO

Do you ever get annoyed by the presence of others who use language performatively? Or, how do you embody thought?

LS

What do you mean?

EO

Because everyone does this differently—some people do express themselves in the way they write and others don’t. For me, I feel like I've had to catch up in writing with how I think. My writing has been a way to express what I’m thinking but it’s like I have to catch up to my mind.

LS

Well for me, it’s more of a process. I go into writing more or less knowing what I want to say, very loosely. And then I work it out on the page. Writing tells me what I think. I'm not relying on, you know, logic. I'm not relying on argument. I'm relying on my subconscious mind to be doing the bulk of the driving. And that way, I find myself writing things that I had no idea that I thought, and that surprises me and makes it all worthwhile.

LO-B

I have some final, lightning round questions for you: First off, do you read your work out loud while you’re writing it, you know that old trick?

LS

I don't literally read out loud. But yes I read, and reread, over and over and over.

LO-B

Do you read the reviews of your work?

LS

Yeah, yeah. They always get something wrong. [Laughs.]

EO

What do you want them to get right?

LS

Everything. Come on! [Laughs.]

LO-B

Well, I think John Ashbery probably got it right. He says you're “a superb writer who can give astonishing form to floating moods and thoughts that no one has noticed before.”

LS

Thank you, John.

LO-B

Do you think about your audience when you're writing?

LS

I honestly have no idea who my audience is. You know, my audience is whoever wants to read it.

LO-B

[Laughs.] Okay, do you think your audience has changed?

LS

When I was writing a lot for magazines, in the 1980s and ’90s, I would often think of the readership. I would write differently for the New York Review of Books and The Village Voice because they were for completely different people, that maybe have a thin intersection. For the Voice, it was kind of necessary to come in with an attitude. So, you know, I did that.

But nowadays, you know, the identities of publications are so blurred. I never leave my house, of course, so I never know what's going on in the outside world. I don't even write for magazines very much anymore. It’s mostly books or things like museum catalogs. So, I'm just going to write for somebody kind of like me, maybe.

LO-B

I think that’s very good advice! Have you ever gone back and read something you wish that you could change?

LS

I mean, it’s always too late to change it of course, but there's a lot of my early published work that I'm really glad is not online! I kind of wish I could get rid of everything from before 1990, for example. [Laughs.]

EO

Are there any questions for Lucy?

Aria Dean

Do you have a favorite book of yours?

LS

It's usually the last one. Although right now, it’s the one before the last one (points to a copy of Maybe the People Would be the Times) because my last book, Nineteen Reservoirs, I don't think of as a real book because it was actually a magazine series. I'm proud of it.

EO

Is there any form of writing that you want to do, or that you haven't done yet, or that you haven't been given the opportunity to do?

LS

I've never lived for opportunities. I can say that I haven't written a lot of fiction because my problem is that I don't really have a sense of story. I can tell an anecdote—my books are stuffed with, even brimming with them. But a story, especially one carried out over a long arc? I’m just not capable of that. It’s kind of like the way I watch movies: I come out of a movie, and twenty minutes later, I cannot tell you how it ended. I also tend to remember movies with sequences of images, and the vibe, rather than the story.

LO-B

How do visual images relate to your process?

LS

I use writing as my practice, but I don't think in words, I think in images. I mean, they're very important to me. But it's a big swirling goulash of stuff that feeds the writing—and don’t forget music! [Laughs.]

EO

Are there things that you've kept only for yourself? In terms of your process, any secrets?

LS

No, not really. Well, you know, I mean, I recently let go of a secret that I’d been sitting on for almost sixty years. So that's, you know, that’s a kind of loaded word for me right now. But do I have a secret formula? Or some secret sauce? No, I don't.

Audience

Just going back to the beginning of the talk, and how you were talking about the ways in which New York has changed, and your relationship to beauty. Do you still find any beauty in New York?

LS

The oldest and crummiest stuff in the city is where it feels like home. The new modern, slick contrivances just don't move me.