Jim Lehrer

This evening, we're going to have a conversation about Jim Lehrer's 16th novel, as Barbara said. The Phony Marine. It's a very provocative title, and it's a concept I imagined that's somewhat disturbing for Jim. As he served as a Marine. And I just recently, just about an hour ago, actually, saw the address that Barbara referred to at the National Museum of the Marine Corps. And I would add that the intimacy of that address was, to say the very least, poignant. Perhaps it's best to give just enough summary here to entice but not give too much away. So I quote: Hugo Martyr is about as unremarkable as they come. On the floor of the Washington, D.C. branch of Nash Brothers, one of the country's most respected men's stores, Hugo is a wise and reserved salesman. At home he is a solitary divorced 50 year old with a few friends and an eBay addiction. But he has always wanted to make more of his life, dreaming of becoming an artist, a cartoonist, and when he was younger, a marine. Then late one night Huge stumbles upon an online auction for a silver star. The medal awarded for bravery in battle. He bids and wins. But it is only after he places the lapel pin on his jacket that he realizes the enormity of his actions. And thus this story is set in motion about a small thing leading to big damages, but also it has an ancient motif about a sort of magical object, a talisman, which has both revelatory and pernicious effects on whomever possesses it. This little pin. As for our format of course, I'd be a fool to attempt to formally interview a master interviewer. So, and I probably am one anyway, but we intend a more informal discussion. And with audience questions afterwards. If you will, about Jim Lehrer as novelist. The writing life, and this new novel in particular. So I'm going to begin with a comment and a question. First, Jim, thanks for allowing me to share this evening with you. In equal measure, The Phony Marine is part morality play, part character study of what Chekhov called "a tentative human being." And part cautionary tale. But in my reading throughout this book, the novel is a kind of painfully ironic disquisition on heroism. Both of the cinematic and the day to day sort. Let alone heroism in the military. This protagonist of yours, Hugo Martyr, he's really complicated. He's a really complicated guy. On the one hand, he's quite sympathetic and almost hapless, and on the other hand, there's at least at first something a little unhinged about him. And it could be argued that before he ends up saving someone's life in this book, one worries that his actions are born of a kind of pathology, certainly a self delusion. As far as imaginative fiction is concerned, however, it's of far less interest to me whether or not Hugo is even partially based on a real person, than the fact that you are an impressive student of people. And wanted this specific character of Hugo to be in the civilian population in Washington D.C., where the book is set. So my extended question is, what haunted you about this fellow's contradictions? What was provocative about Hugo's existential or certainly his psychological condition, to sustain you for the length of this novel? And how did this fellow stay with you so vividly, because he certainly stays with the reader very vividly. Well thank you, Howard. Thanks to all of you for coming tonight. In a nutshell, I became Marine Corps, all that, is the manifestation of it. But I'm a big believer in what expectations to do human behavior. Somebody expects you to be smart, you tend to be smart, they expect you to be a jerk, you tend to be a jerk. I know, it all goes back to childhood. Teacher expects you to do well, you tend to do better. Teacher expects you to be a poor student, sometimes you turn out to be. You know, in other words, some people rebel against that, but expectation is a huge motivator, and what got me on this, on Hugo, was that he, without thinking, thinking it through, by just putting this lapel pin in his coat, raised the expectations among anybody who saw him, and saw the lapel pin and knew what it means, that he was heroic. So that's really what drove me through that, was that okay, Hugo, you're a hero. Yeah, you won this metal. So you get into a situation where a hero is required, you damn well better act like a hero. And what fascinated me about this was the specifics of it and all of that, was that that's possible for any of us. In other words, the character of Hugo, I really believe, is, there's the hero, there's a possibility, a potential for heroism in all of us. What might keep us from being heroes is that a situation never arose where we were called upon to test our ability to be heroes or test what we might do or whatever. This guy inadvertently asked for it. He said, I mean it isn't like most heroes in combat don't set out to be heroes. All they do is set out to stay alive. And the training in a marine corps, most, a lot of people, do heroic acts instinctively, out of training, rather than "Oh my God, I've got to do something heroic, I've got to save somebody's life" or something. There's a hand grenade starts rolling your way, and there's five other marines there. And one guy just falls on it, blows himself up, saves the lives of the others. I mean, that's not something that has anything to do with other than you know it just happened. So that's how most heroism happens. And it just choo! before you know it, it happens. And Hugo is different, and that's what interests me. He's really an amazing character, um, he gets in over his head, I mean that's what I love, he finds himself in over his head. You know, the trajectory is he starts, or orders in a sense his heroism on eBay, but he doesn't quite know it yet, you know, he doesn't quite know it yet. Yeah...he buys heroism. And he's been thinking about this selling clothes...I mean this has been building up in a kind of meditative way, it's really funny and tragic at the same time. One of the things in this novel, throughout the novel, almost from start to finish: movies, especially the battlefield dramas starring John Wayne and Van Hefflin are not only frequently referred to, but movies in this novel serve as a kind of intensifying element to the plot, because at a certain point, Hugo actually sort of studies these movies to try to gain knowledge of how a marine might, how a marine should comport himself. It's part of his, he's an auto didect in a way, he privately does this. Sends himself to his own boot camp. He sends himself to his own boot camp. He does, not quite as rigorous physically as it you know as it would be but...but by doing this he adds a kind of verisimilitude to his fraudulence. Because he's a fraud on a certain level. And in this regard it struck me that this novel speaks to, in a sense, to the rather uncanny effects of celebrity. Because in a way, Hugo, in his own way, is an actor. At least his-- the pin sort of requires of him to play a role. And his role is as a wounded veteran of the Vietnam war. And this role actually for awhile, before shame and revelation catch up with him, rewards him with a kind of ego fulfillment, it rewards him with pride and admiration and erotic charge and so forth. And I bring all this up because in The Phony Marine, you have a very unusual and eclectic narrative strategy. I'd even call it cinematic, but I don't mean that in just in the sense of visuals. Be-- While your descriptions are very visual, I'm thinking more of the cutting between comic tableaus and menacing things that happen, real violence. There's a dream sequence, for instance, which I consider absolutely vital to this book, which comes fairly close to the beginning, and in that dream as a matter of fact, movie marines show up in the dream. There's scenes that have a sort of slapstick choreography such as in the restaurant, which end up to be very violent, or potentially very violent. And your dialogue is definitely a form of action, it keeps the pace up. And lest you think that I'm being judgmental on a literary level by calling something cinematic, let me say that none other than Graham Greene admitted that he, and this is a quote, "Cinema moods and cinematic techniques are my greatest influence as a novel." That's from Graham Greene. Sometimes a novelist discovers his strategy after the fact. When writing The Phony Marine, were you conscious of how much cinematic compression there was to your chapters, and does film, as it did for Graham Greene, have an influence at all on your composition, or how you see these very very clearly visual scenes that you write? Well, I think Howard put, rather than, I think the way I would state it is that the influence, the main influence has to do with more with scenes than from film scenes. In other words, I had a, I had written some plays, and I became a much better novelist as a result of writing plays. I didn't know that. Yeah. Not very good plays. But that's neither here nor there. No, but it, it means you had-- You think in terms of scenes. And the restaurant scene you mentioned, there's a scene at the D.C. courthouse, these are all, these things could have been on a stage, even though I didn't think in those terms, but I think when I wrote them I thought in those terms, in other words-- You did. When people come to hear the things it's like on a stage, and so I always, it is just part and parcel how I do it now, I don't think, I guess I'm thinking of the story and all the other things you're supposed to think of, the character development and all that, but I'm also moving back and forth and around small scenes, big scenes, scenes that seem to be irrelevant in one moment that hopefully will seem relevant later, but I think many many beginnings, middles and ends. And that's what gets me to the big beginning and the big middle and the big end. Yeah, I mean the restaurant scene, which I don't want to give it away, in a way, but you take sort of a familiar places and then they suddenly turn un-familiar, because what you see on the surface is not what's really going on. The same in the courtroom, where the, where Hugo's heroism really, you know, is tested. And so that's what I mean more by cinematic. Well, you're absolutely right, I mean that's, it is, the movie thing specifically, marine movies that Hugo gets to look at, and he doesn't know, he's never met a marine, he's never been around a marine, the only marines he knows are the ones that are in the movies, so he goes back and refreshes his memory. John Wayne, Van Hefflin, and some others... He gets his posture from it. Yeah, he gets his posture. And he eventually because he's gone, as you say, gets carried away, in addition to just having a silver star he decides he's going to be a marine. So he gets his head shaved, and... He gets buff. He gets in shape, right. Learns how to really cuss really well. And does all the other, starts learning the jargon and history and creates his own personal story that he took right off of eBay, with the metal that he bought for $85, and eventually as you say, we don't want to give away too much, but we do want to say one thing Howard, pick up on a thing, a point you made earlier about how it transforms him and what it did to his ego gratification and all that. One of the germs that led to this book was, I was introduced by a guy at a speaking engagement here in Washington, and he was a Vietnam veteran, and he had picked me up. I was going to his place, the place where I was going to make the speech was close to my house. He picked me up and he said, he was in the army in Vietnam, and he said, "I was just reading your bio, Jim, I never realized you were a marine." And I said yeah, and he said..., I said, "Well the Korean war was on," I told him, and I only got about two thirds through the story when we arrived at the location of the speech. So then he gets up, and I'm sitting down, just like you did or Barbara did, introduced me, and he says to the crowd, there were about 200 people there, they all worked at the National Parks Service. And he says, "You know about Jimmy Charles wah wah here, he's this and this," he said, "One thing you don't know is that he was"...listen to this... "He was a combat infantry officer of the United States marine corps in the Korean War." Wrong. I looked out on the faces of those people and I have never felt a wave of admiration... And the point is, I didn't want to correct him. I was 50% there. I had been an infantry officer in the Marine Corps, but I was never in combat, it was between the Korean War and Vietnam. I didn't want to correct him, Howard. That's what Faulkner, Faulkner says we write fiction in order to remember the truth more accurately. That's probably what you did. That's what you did. So that moment, I mean... I didn't want to, I did, but I didn't want to. I wanted that wave, and Hugo-- That's a great anecdote. Put the finger on it, I mean that's what. Hugo, when he got, when people first started, my God it's a terrific thing. Actually I don't think that would work, would have worked as graphically or as powerfully had he not had the profession he had. Now I run the risk here of disparaging something, I don't mean to, but the sort of tranquility of his profession, of serving other people in that regard and dressing in a certain way, a certain predictability and rote quality to that life, as contrasted by his dreams of heroism, his literal dreams of heroism, but also his actions finally...I don't think it would have worked as well had you not begun with that kind of thing. It was beautifully done. Um, we do understand, you mentioned childhood before, something comes from childhood. You do mention in the novel, some of Hugo's background. And you have Hugo Martyr attend Michigan Western State College, in Kalamazoo, Michigan. And in that turbulent period, and I find this kind of emblematic of Hugo's ambivalence toward life in general, Hugo didn't really care either way, one way or the other, about the war. The Vietnam war. He didn't care enough to protest it, nor to advocate it on patriotic grounds or for any other reason. Now, Jim, you are a marine. And I don't want our friendship to end right here. But I need to tell you that I graduated...just when I'd graduated from Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo I attended the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, which was sponsored by Iris-- I've been set up obviously. Which was sponsored by Iris Handpearl, and who studied with Gandhi and Joan Baez, and I traveled for weeks, actually, with Joan Baez and her husband David Harris, who famously went to prison for resisting the draft. I was, believe it or not, their staff photographer, although I was only capable with a Bownie Instamatic. And when my birthday came up third on the draft line, I layed down in front of a draft board and was thrown into a paddy wagon and hauled off to Fort Wayne in Detroit, at which point I opened up my shirt and revealed a t shirt with a picture of Gandhi on it, and I was summarily dismissed. And I, like many people of my generation and my inclinations, really hated that war. And I bring this up because nothing's simple. And there's nothing simple really in your book. Because there's three names from my high school on the Vietnam Memorial, and my closest friend at the time came back wounded, a very badly wounded, veteran, and spoke out against the war. And when he did I felt that his credibility meant something truly profound. And I felt that his anguish spoke volumes. And that in effect, he became, along with others like him, a moral conscience of our nation, because he spoke for the dead. And in regard to your novel, I'm thinking of the actual real life medal winner, Lt. Ronald Cunningham. Whom this character Hugo Martyr kind of channels, in a way, to dubious effect. To my mind, it's one of the most impressive qualities of your novel, how very conspicuous this Lt. Cunningham is by his absence. He's like one of Shakespeare's muted ghosts, because in the more conventional literary sense, you don't substantially develop him as a character, and yet my question is, does it make any sense to you, I mean that this Lt. Cunningham serves as a kind of presiding consciousness over this tale you've told. I mean, I wondered if he served...was, in other words, a real marine kind of looking over your shoulder as you wrote it. That could have been you. I'm speaking about too. He is, he looms very, in the second reading of this book, I felt that this person who's hardly on stage at all loomed very large. I mean, is he being treated well, is he being treated badly, a man who has no control over events. And I just felt that there was a moral or ethical quality to that...you know, I may be oblique about this, but I thought I would risk it, because he... I must say Howard, it's a great complement to me that you've just paid. It is, I didn't consciously think of that as I wrote the book, and for you to say that and to have seen that in there gives me great pleasure. It's all throughout the book. Well, I know, but as you know, novelists think about that sort of stuff too, like writing a novel, and you forget that you're there to tell a story. And once you tell a story about a real character, then these kinds of things can come out of it, and people can read that in there. But I didn't think, I never had a conscious thought, I will explore this in my mind, but you know later, I do not standing here right now remember ever thinking that Cunningham existed as a real character, as an influence on Hugo or to help...to play the role you just outlined. He was somebody who didn't really exist except on the internet, you see. Yeah, an anonymous figure, Hugo takes his story and becomes Ron Cunningham. But you've raised something that I just find delicious. Thank you. Because if I did it, I did it inadvertently, you see what I mean? See, that's what makes you an intuitive writer. No, what it makes is somebody who just tells a story and just hopes there's something there more than the story, and you've just confirmed it and I'm a very happy person. I like Chekhov's thought that one's mind is the worst place to discover one's consciousness. So I think it's like, don't think about it too much. Just go on to write. Um, lastly, I have, in rereading all of your novels in the last couple months, um... I only wrote 16. You're paying for drinks afterwards. Anyway, I heard the rumor that you have a day job, or I guess an afternoon and evening job, more like. And if I remember right, in this compartmentalized, disciplined way that writers have to construct their writing lives, I figure that the phony marine was probably completed a year or so ago...roughly... I think so. Yeah, there are parts I'd been working on off and on for some time. So about a year ago, yeah. About a year and a half ago, I think, yeah. And so given your enviable concentration and prolificness, I think for the audience at least it might be an interesting question to say, what's now, what's next, and if you want to just say "another novel," that's fine, but um... No, the next novel is done, and it's... I knew it! It's actually in copy-edit as we speak. Just up for publication in October 2007. You're really going to get annoyed with me. I know, no, it's terrible to be jealous in front of so many people. It's called Eureka, and it's interesting, it's also about a man of the same age, who's the CEO of a little insurance company in Kansas, has some bad news...some interesting things happen to him, I mean he decides to, he sees an antique toy fire engine at an antique show, one that he wanted as a little boy and couldn't have and he buys it, and then he buys a Daisy Air Rifle, and then he buys a football helmet that he couldn't and then he buys a cushion of a motor scooter, and he runs away from home. Yeah. So you have...you're building up obsessively. You have a guy with a job that's in a sense... Doesn't work. Doesn't work for him. And more importantly, a life that doesn't work for him. And realizes it rather late in life. The insurance guy is about to turn 60, and it's too late to start over, or is it. What do you do about it. You've already accumulated a life and all the accouterments of a life, like a family and a this and a that, responsibilities, what do you do. And assuming that you're not crazy, in other words, it's not a lunatic's reaction, it's a normal person with some questions about his or her life at the moment, and that's, I guess I hadn't thought of it till this very moment, but I guess I'm interested in that, these guys are essentially of my generation. They're younger than I am, but yeah. So yeah, yeah. Terrific. Well um, I'm going to sit down and turn it over to the audience, thank you so much, Jim.