INTERVIEWER: My castaway this week is a writer. A clever boy originally from the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he graduated from Allegheny College swiftly into the pages of Playboy, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review, where his short stories about postwar working-class Americans earned him a reputation as a fiercely candid and unconventional talent. By the time he was twenty-nine, he had published his first novel, Nine Mile Run, which won him the first of three National Book Awards; since then he’s published twenty more books, and received dozens more awards, including the Pen/Faulkner Award, a Gold Medal in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two Pulitzer Prizes, the National Medal of Arts, and, just this past December—“for his exuberant ingenuity and exquisite powers of ventriloquism, which with irony and compassion evince the extraordinary heterogeneity of modern American life”—literature’s most coveted honor: the Nobel Prize. Widely admired in the States as well as here in the UK and abroad, he’s been translated into more than thirty languages—and yet, off the page, he remains a recluse, preferring the sanctity of his longtime residence on the eastern end of Long Island to what he calls the “fatal froth and frenzy” of Manhattan literary life. “Be audacious in your writing,” he says, “and conservative in your days.” He is Ezra Blazer.
Are we to take it from that, Ezra Blazer, that the decidedly unconventional protagonists in your novels are entirely the products of a wild imagination?
EZRA BLAZER: [Laughs.] If only my imagination were so wild. No. Certainly not. And yet it would be equally wrong to call them autobiographical, or to become caught up in that inane exercise of trying to separate “truth” from “fiction,” as if those boxes weren’t kicked aside by the novelist for good reason to begin with.
INTERVIEWER: And what reason is that?
EZRA BLAZER: Our memories are no more reliable than our imaginations, after all. But I’m the first to admit it can be irresistible, contemplating what’s “real” versus “imagined” in a novel. Checking for seams, trying to figure out how it’s been done. It’s as old as time, this practice of dishing out advice you don’t always follow yourself. “Be audacious in your hieroglyphs, conservative in your hunting and gathering.”
INTERVIEWER: Critics have not always been kind to you. Do you mind?
EZRA BLAZER: I try as best I can not to have any contact with what’s written about my work. I don’t find it does me any good and if it’s laudatory or negative I have to conclude it’s all the same thing. I know my work better than anybody. I know my shortcomings. I know what I can’t do. By this point I certainly know what I can do. In the beginning, of course, I read every word I could find about myself. But what did I get from that? Sure, there are intelligent people who have written about my writing, but I’d rather read these intelligent people on writers other than myself. Maybe praise does something for your confidence, but your confidence has to be able to exist without it. The review of your last book doesn’t help you eighteen months into the new book that’s driving you crazy. Book reviews are for readers, not writers.
INTERVIEWER: Tell me about your childhood.
EZRA BLAZER: I think everyone’s heard enough about my childhood.
INTERVIEWER: You were the youngest of three children—
EZRA BLAZER: Really, I’d rather talk about how music came into my life. I never heard classical music growing up. In fact I had a kind of ignorant boy’s disdain for it. I thought it was all phony, and especially opera. But my father liked to listen to opera, strangely, although he wasn’t educated—
INTERVIEWER: He was a steelworker.
EZRA BLAZER: He was an accountant for Edgewater Steel. But on weekends he’d listen to opera, on the radio, I think it was on Saturday afternoons, and . . . Milton Cross, that was the name of the announcer. He had a deep, mellifluous voice, and the opera was broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera House, and there’d be my father, on the sofa, with his dog-eared copy of The Story of a Hundred Operas, listening to La Traviata or Der Rosenkavalier on the radio. And, well, I found it all a little strange. We had no phonograph, and no books, so the center of our entertainment was the radio, and on Saturday afternoons my father monopolized it for hours.
INTERVIEWER: Was he himself a musical man?
EZRA BLAZER: Sometimes he would sing in the shower, arias, little passages of the arias, and my mother would come out of the kitchen with a dreamy smile on her face and say, “Your father has a beautiful voice.” Unlike my protagonists I’m from a happy family.
INTERVIEWER: Did he have a beautiful voice?
EZRA BLAZER: He didn’t have a bad voice. But I was in the thrall of the popular music. I was eight when the war began, in 1941, so I heard all the songs from the war years, and then when I got to be an adolescent it was all that romantic stuff—
INTERVIEWER: For example?
EZRA BLAZER: [Pauses, then sings:] “A small café, Mam’selle. A rendezvous, Mam’selle. La-da-da-da-da-da-da—” Or: “How are things in Glocca M-o-o-o-r-r-r-a-a-a-a?” And that song I remember because it was popular just before my older brother went into the army. At dinnertime we were always listening to the radio and whenever “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” came on, my brother would sing along in a not-bad Irish accent that just thrilled me. And then he left for the service and whenever that song was played my mother cried. She’d start to cry and I’d stand up from the table and say, Come on, Ma, let’s dance.
INTERVIEWER: How old were you?
EZRA BLAZER: In 1947? Thirteen, fourteen. So that’s my first record. “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?,” sung by Ella Logan, the Irish Ethel Merman.
INTERVIEWER: She’s Scottish, actually.
EZRA BLAZER: Really? Does everyone know that?
INTERVIEWER: I think so.
EZRA BLAZER: Ella Logan is Scottish?
INTERVIEWER: She is.
INTERVIEWER: That was “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?,” from the musical Finian’s Rainbow, performed by Ella Logan. But tell me, Ezra Blazer, surely you didn’t dance only with your mother. What were the origins of your romantic life?
EZRA BLAZER: Well, as you imply, I soon began dancing with girls. At the prom. At parties. One of my friends had a finished basement, for parties. The rest of us didn’t have much money and lived in flats, but his parents had a one-family house and a finished basement and we had our parties there. And the singer who drove us wild at those parties was Billy Eckstine. He had a rich baritone voice, and his blackness, which enchanted us. He wasn’t a jazz singer, though he did sing some jazz songs. [Sings:] “I left my HAT in HAI-ti! In some forgot—” But no. That’s not the one I want. The ones we loved most were the ones we could dance to, very slowly, with the girls, holding them as close to us as we could, because that was the only thing approaching sex that we had, there on the basement dance floor. The girls were virgins and they would remain virginal right through college. But on the dance floor you could press your groin against your girlfriend and if she loved you she would press back, and if she was suspicious of you she would dance with her ass backing away.
INTERVIEWER: This is a family program.
EZRA BLAZER: I beg your pardon. With her tuchis backing away.
INTERVIEWER: And Eckstine?
EZRA BLAZER: Eckstine used to wear suits called the “one-button roll”: the lapels were long and narrow and held together below the waist with a single button. He wore his tie in a wide Windsor knot and there was a big rolled collar on his shirt—a “Billy Eckstine collar.” Wednesday nights and Saturdays I worked in the Monogramming Shop at Kaufmann’s and what with my employee discount I saved enough money to buy a pearl-gray, one-button-roll suit. My first suit. And when Billy Eckstine came back to Pittsburgh to sing in the Crawford Grill my friend and I sneaked in wearing our suits, and, oh, bliss was it to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!
INTERVIEWER: Second record?
EZRA BLAZER: “Somehow.”
INTERVIEWER: Billy Eckstine singing “Somehow.” After graduating from Allegheny College, Ezra Blazer, you too went into the service. What was that like?
EZRA BLAZER: I was in the army for two years. I was drafted, in the Korean War draft, and luckily I wasn’t sent to Korea but to Germany, along with something like a quarter million other Americans bracing themselves for World War III. And I was an MP. A military policeman. At Lee Barracks, in Mainz. Before age and illness laid waste to my frame and reduced my proportions to what you see now, I was six feet two and two hundred pounds. A big muscular MP with a pistol and a billy club. And my specialty as an MP was directing traffic. We didn’t have World War III, but we did have traffic. I was taught in MP school that the key to directing traffic is to let the traffic flow through your hips. Would you like to see?
INTERVIEWER: It sounds like dancing.
EZRA BLAZER: It sounds like dancing, yes! Do you know that joke?
INTERVIEWER: I don’t think I do.
EZRA BLAZER: A young rabbi-in-training is about to get married and so he goes to the wise old rabbi with a beard down to the ground, and he says, “Rabbi, I’d like to know what’s permissible and what isn’t. I don’t want to do what’s forbidden. Is it all right,” he asks the old rabbi, “if we get into bed together, and I get on top of her, and we have intercourse like that?” “Fine!” says the rabbi. “Absolutely fine.” “And is it all right if she rolls over on her stomach and we have intercourse that way? With me on top like that?” “Fine!” says the rabbi. “Absolutely fine. Poifect.” “And if we sit on the edge of the bed, and she sits on top of me, facing me, and we do it like that?” “Fine! Absolutely fine.” “And what if we do it facing each other standing up?” “No!” cries the rabbi. “Absolutely NOT! That’s like dancing!”
INTERVIEWER: Next record.
EZRA BLAZER: Well, it often happens to young fellows in the army that you meet someone who becomes your teacher, someone who knows worlds unknown to you. In Germany, I was stationed with a guy who’d gone to Yale, and at night—he had a phonograph with him, in the barracks—he’d play Dvořák. Dvořák! I didn’t know how to pronounce it, never mind spell it. I was ignorant of classical music. Ignorant of it and hostile to it, in a coarse kid’s way. Well, one night I heard him playing something that stunned me. It was the cello concerto, of course. I think it was Casals. Later on, I’d hear Jacqueline du Pré play it, marvelously of course, but it was Casals’s that I heard first, so let’s play him. What I liked was the electricity of it, the drama that was like voltage entering your veins . . .
INTERVIEWER: That was Pablo Casals playing Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B Minor, with the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by George Szell. And how was it, Ezra Blazer, being a soldier in Germany?
EZRA BLAZER: Well, it was not entirely pleasant for me. I liked directing traffic. I liked wearing a uniform, and being a tough-guy MP. But this was 1954. The war had ended only nine years earlier. And it was only in the years after the war that the total destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis had been revealed in all its horror. So I had no love for Germans. I couldn’t stand them, couldn’t bear to hear them speaking in German. That language! And then, alas, what should happen but that I met a girl. A pretty, blond, blue-eyed, strong-jawed, one-hundred-percent Aryan German girl. She was a student at the university, and I saw her in town carrying some books and I asked her what she was reading. She was lovely, and she knew a little English—not a lot, but the way she spoke it I found charming. Her father had been in the war, and this to me was not so charming. I was ashamed to imagine what my family would think of my falling in love with a Nazi’s daughter. So it was a very fraught affair, and I tried to make it the subject of my first book. I couldn’t do it, of course. But yes, the first book I wanted to write was about this love affair with a German girl when I was a soldier, and the war having ended only nine years earlier. I couldn’t even bring myself to go to her house to pick her up because I didn’t want to meet her family, and this was crushing for her. We never fought, but she cried. And I cried. We were young and we were in love and we cried. Life’s first big blow. Katja was her name. I don’t know what became of her, where she is now. I wonder if somewhere in Germany she reads my books in German.
INTERVIEWER: And your efforts on this first book? Where are they? In a drawer somewhere?
EZRA BLAZER: Gone. Long gone. I wrote fifty terrible pages full of rage. I was twenty-one. She was nineteen. Lovely girl. That’s the story.
INTERVIEWER: Record number four.
EZRA BLAZER: Well, I wanted to see more of Europe after my service, so I took my discharge there, and I stayed. I had a big duffel bag, my army duffel, and my army overcoat, and my separation pay, which amounted to about three hundred bucks, and I took a train to Paris and moved into a shabby little hotel in the Sixth. One of those hotels where you get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night and go out to the hallway and you can’t find the light, or if you do blindly find the switch you turn it on and go six steps and the light goes off again. And if you ever do find the bathroom, you’re in worse trouble, because the toilet paper in those postwar years—May I speak about toilet paper on a family program?
INTERVIEWER: You may.
EZRA BLAZER: The toilet paper was like emery board. Not sandpaper: emery board.
INTERVIEWER: So you lived in Paris for a year—
EZRA BLAZER: A year and a half.
INTERVIEWER:—after your service in the army.
EZRA BLAZER: Yes. I lived near the Odéon Métro station and I used to go to the Café Odéon and of course I met a girl. Geneviève. And Geneviève had a sputtering little black motorbike—they were all over Paris then—and she would roll up to the Odéon at night and meet me there, and somehow, this girl, who was not . . . Well, she was pretty, certainly, but she was kind of a street girl, and yet she too had musical taste, like my army pal, and it was she who introduced me to the chamber music of Fauré. And that’s also when I learned about the beauty of the cello, which of course I have Marina Makovsky play in The Running Gag. For months that was the only instrument I wanted to hear. The sound of it thrilled me. There are beautiful piano passages in Fauré, but it’s the cello, that wonderful [growls like a cello]—Those sounds whose depths only the cello can reach. That got me. It has this lilt, this freshness, just gorgeous. I’d never heard music like it before—a long way from “Mam’selle,” you see, though we’re in the right city. It’s crazy how everything comes at you. Everything is an accident. Life is one big accident. I didn’t love this girl the way I loved the German girl, by the way. Maybe because there wasn’t so much sturm und drang.
INTERVIEWER: That was Gabriel Fauré’s Cello Sonata no. 1 in D minor, performed by Thomas Igloi with Clifford Benson on the piano. Now remind me, Ezra Blazer, wasn’t it around this time The Paris Review started up?
EZRA BLAZER: Oh, yes. I think those fellows got there in fifty-three, fifty-four. So this was just a year or two later. And sure, I knew everybody. George, Peter, Tom. Blair. Bill. Doc. Wonderful guys. Charming, adventurous, serious about literature, and, blessedly, wholly unacademic. Paris then still had that aura of the American expatriate adventure: Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Malcolm Cowley, Transition, Shakespeare & Company, Sylvia Beach, Joyce. And the Paris Review crew, they were romantic about what they were doing. You know that E. E. Cummings poem? “let’s start a magazine / to hell with literature . . . something fearlessly obscene . . .” They were romantic but they were hard-nosed, too, and they were doing something brand-new. Though in the end, like me, they were in Paris because it was fun. And plenty of fun there was.
INTERVIEWER: Were you writing by this time?
EZRA BLAZER: Trying to. I wrote some delightfully poetic little short stories, very sensitive short stories, about . . . Oh, I don’t know. World peace. Pink sunlight on the Seine. That was one problem: the rampant sentimentality of youth. Another was that I was constantly trying to shoehorn characters into each other’s lives, planting them on street corners or in cafés together so that they could talk. So that they could explain things to each other, from across the great human divide. But it was all so contrived. Contrived and meddlesome, really, because sometimes you just have to let your characters get on with it, which is to say coexist. If their paths cross and they can teach each other something, fine. If they don’t, well, that’s interesting, too. Or, if it isn’t interesting, then maybe you need to back up and start again. But at least you haven’t betrayed the reality of things. In my twenties, I was always fighting this, always trying to force meaningful convergence with my ravishing prose. And the result was these airless little short stories that could not be faulted on the sentence level but that had no resonance, no reason for being, no spontaneity. Nothing happened. I showed one to George once and he sent me a note that began, “You plainly have gifts, dear Ez, but you need a subject. This is like Babar written by E. M. Forster.”
INTERVIEWER: Next record.
EZRA BLAZER: Well, at one of the clubs we used to go to we heard Chet Baker play, with Bobby Jaspar, I think, and Maurice Vander, a wonderful pianist, he was around a lot, too. I remember one night listening to them play “How About You?” and feeling just overcome by where I was and what I still had in front of me. All of it! When you’re young you can’t wait for the main event to begin. I couldn’t wait for anything back then. No thinking, just charging—always charging ahead! Do you remember that feeling?
INTERVIEWER: That was “How About You?,” performed by Chet Baker, Bobby Jaspar, Maurice Vander, Benoit Quersin, and Jean-Louis Viale. And can you tell us, Ezra Blazer, why did you leave Paris?
EZRA BLAZER: Why did I leave. A part of me has always wondered. A part of me—the audacious part—has always said to the sensible part: Why didn’t you just stay? If only for the women. Because the erotic life in Paris had nothing to do with what I’d known as a boy at Allegheny. But then, after about a year and a half of it, I really had to come home. My writing, if you can call it that—Well, I didn’t know what I was doing. As I said, it was all this lyrical sentimental crap about nothing. So I came home. To Pittsburgh. My parents were there, and my sister was there, married with children now, and certainly after Paris that wasn’t for me. I’ve always loved Pittsburgh, especially when it looked its worst. I’ve written about that, of course: Pittsburgh before they cleaned it up. Now it’s this immaculate city, all finance and technology, but back then you could die just from taking a breath on the street. The air was black and steaming with smog—“hell with the lid off,” they used to say—and there was the clanging of trains, and the great mills, a very dramatic place, and maybe had I stayed and got lucky I might have been the Balzac of Pittsburgh. But I had to escape my family. I had to go to New York.
INTERVIEWER: Where you discovered ballet.
EZRA BLAZER: Ballet and ballerinas. These were Balanchine’s great days, after all. Spectacular stuff. All new. I discovered Stravinsky, I discovered Bartók, Shostakovich. That changed everything.
INTERVIEWER: Your first wife was a dancer.
EZRA BLAZER: My first two wives were dancers. Who didn’t like each other, as you can imagine. But that was another education. I married Erika—
INTERVIEWER: Erika Seidl.
EZRA BLAZER: Yes, Erika Seidl. Later she became famous, but when we married she was still a girl in the corps and I was enchanted. Everything was new. Everything! It just burst upon me. And the newness, the thrill of discovery, became embodied for me in this exquisitely beautiful young woman. Born in Vienna. Trained in the Vienna State Opera Ballet School and her family lived there until she was fourteen and then her parents divorced and her mother, who was American, took her to New York, and she just disappeared into Balanchine. It was about a year after we married that she soloed in The Seven Deadly Sins and that was it, I never saw her again. It was like being married to a boxer. She was always in training. When I went backstage to see her after a performance she stank like a boxer. All of the girls stank; it was like Stillman’s Gym on Eighth Avenue. She had this little monkey face—not onstage; onstage it was a great skull, all eyes and ears, but backstage she looked like she’d gone fifteen rounds with Muhammad Ali. Anyway, I never saw her. I’d found what few men found in that era, which was a woman wholly occupied by what she did, and wedded to it. So we parted. And I drifted to another dancer. Not smart. Dana.
INTERVIEWER: Dana Pollock.
EZRA BLAZER: Dana was never the dancer Erika was, but she was something. I don’t know why I did it again. I did the same thing again, and the same thing happened. So next I married a bartender. But she was out nights, too.
INTERVIEWER: You never had children?
EZRA BLAZER: After the fact, I consider my girlfriends my children.
INTERVIEWER: Do you regret never having children?
EZRA BLAZER: No. I love my friends’ children. I think about them and I call them and attend their birthday parties, but I had other fish to fry. And monogamy, insofar as it’s conducive to good parenting . . . Well, I’ve never been inordinately fond of monogamy. But ballet, and ballet music, that was the next education. And then came everything else. Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, the Schubert piano pieces I love, the Beethoven quartets, the great Bach sonatas, the partitas, the Goldberg variations, Casals playing those growling cello pieces. Everyone loves those; by now they’re a little like “Mam’selle.”
INTERVIEWER: Let’s hear about your sixth record then.
EZRA BLAZER: A friend recently gave me a copy of Nijinsky’s diary, the first edition, which was put together by his widow, Romola, who I’m told suppressed what she didn’t like. Having to do with Diaghilev, I suppose. Because she was jealous of Diaghilev and his power over Nijinsky and she blamed Diaghilev for Nijinsky’s illness. Anyway, there’s a new edition out now, where the edited-out parts have been restored, but it’s the widow’s I read, and whatever may have been done to it it’s still marvelous. All of this sent me back to “Afternoon of a Faun,” another first love. [Laughs.] But now I can hear the rebellion in it—the perversity, the enslavement to imagined forces. Alas, we don’t have any footage of Nijinsky dancing the Faun, so we have to make do with what we do have, which is Debussy.
INTERVIEWER: That was Debussy’s “Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune,” performed by Emmanuel Pahud and the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Claudio Abbado. Ezra Blazer, you’ve written that depression is “the inevitable crash after an untenable happiness.” How often has that been true for you?
EZRA BLAZER: Well, it’s true whenever depression hits, which fortunately for me has been only two or three times. Once when I was left by a woman I hugely loved. Twice when I was left by a woman I hugely loved. A third time when my brother died, and I was the only Blazer left. All right, maybe four times. But anyway, it’s true of any sort of depression—emotional, economic: it occurs only after you’ve been riding too high. We ride too high on deceptive notions of power and security and control and then when it all comes crashing down on us the low is made deeper by the high. By its precipitousness, but also by the humiliation you feel for having failed to see the plummet coming. As I said: sometimes it’s personal, sometimes it’s economic, sometimes even a kind of political depression sets in. Lulled by years of relative peace and prosperity we settle into micromanaging our lives with our fancy technologies and custom interest rates and eleven different kinds of milk, and this leads to a certain inwardness, an unchecked narrowing of perspective, the vague expectation that even if we don’t earn them and nurture them the truly essential amenities will endure forever as they are. We trust that someone else is looking after the civil liberties shop, so we don’t have to. Our military might is unmatched and in any case the madness is at least an ocean away. And then all of a sudden we look up from ordering paper towels online to find ourselves delivered right into the madness. And we wonder: How did this happen? What was I doing when this was in the works? Is it too late to think about it now? Anyway, what good will it do, the willful and belated broadening of my imagination? A young friend of mine has written a rather surprising little novel about this, in its way. About the extent to which we’re able to penetrate the looking-glass and imagine a life, indeed a consciousness, that goes some way to reduce the blind spots in our own. It’s a novel that on the surface would seem to have nothing to do with its author, but in fact is a kind of veiled portrait of someone determined to transcend her provenance, her privilege, her naiveté. [Laughs softly.] Incidentally, this friend, she was one of the—Well, no. I won’t say that. I won’t say her name. Never mind. There it is. What’s the line? War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.
INTERVIEWER: You don’t believe that.
EZRA BLAZER: I think an impressive number of us cannot readily point to Mosul on a map. But I also think God is too busy arranging David Ortiz’s home runs to be much concerned with teaching us geography.
INTERVIEWER: More music.
EZRA BLAZER: How many do I have left?
INTERVIEWER: Two.
EZRA BLAZER: Two. And we’ve only gotten up to my thirties. We’ll be here forever. My next record is from Strauss’s Four Last Songs. I didn’t listen to them in Germany. I couldn’t listen to Wagner, either. Only later did I come to my senses. I love the Four Last Songs, with Kiri Te Kanawa singing. Who doesn’t?
INTERVIEWER: That was Dame Kiri Te Kanawa singing “Im Abendrot,” with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Andrew Davis. Ezra Blazer, you said earlier that you have no regrets about not having had children, but there have been rumors that you did in fact father a child, in Europe. Is there any truth to those rumors?
EZRA BLAZER: I fathered two children.
INTERVIEWER: You did?
EZRA BLAZER: Twins. Since you asked. Impertinently, I must say. I told you about my friend? With the little black motorbike, who introduced me to Fauré? Well, she became pregnant, just as I was about to leave Paris, and I didn’t know it at the time, and I came back to America. I had to. I had nothing left to live on.
INTERVIEWER: You didn’t keep in touch?
EZRA BLAZER: We corresponded for a while, but then she disappeared. That was 1956. In 1977 I happened to be spending a week in Paris, promoting the French publication of one of my books. I was staying at the Montalembert, near my publishing house, and I was in the bar, talking to my editor, when a young woman came up to me, very pretty, and said, in French: Excuse me, sir, but I believe you’re my father. I thought, Fine, if that’s the way she wants to play it. So I said, Sit down, mademoiselle. And she told me her name, and of course the last name I recognized. My French lover, Geneviève, had been the same age as this girl when I knew her. So I said, Are you the daughter of Geneviève so-and-so? And she said, Oui. Je suis la fille de Geneviève et je suis votre fille. And I said, Can that be? How old are you? And she told me. And I said, But how can you be sure I’m your father? And she said, My mother told me. I said, Were you waiting for me here? Oui. You knew I was in Paris? Oui. Then she said: My brother’s on his way. Oh? said I. How old is he? The same age. That’s right, you have a daughter and a son. And at this point my editor stood up and said, “We can discuss the translation another time.”
INTERVIEWER: You tell this story so calmly, but it must have been a shock.
EZRA BLAZER: A colossal shock and a colossal delight. I hadn’t had to raise them, you see. I met them as adults, and the next night we had supper with their mother, and we had a wonderful time. And now they have children, my grandchildren, and I’m besotted by them. I like my children, but I’m besotted by my little French grandchildren.
INTERVIEWER: Do you see this secret family?
EZRA BLAZER: I go to Paris once a year. I see them in France, but rarely in America, to keep the gossip at bay. Maybe now I’ll see them in America. I help them out financially. I love them. I didn’t know there were rumors. How did you hear? How did you know?
INTERVIEWER: A little bird told me.
EZRA BLAZER: A little boid told you. That’s delicious, you know, in an English accent.
INTERVIEWER: A Scottish accent.
EZRA BLAZER: You’re Scottish. Everyone’s Scottish. You’ll be telling me next Obama is Scottish.
INTERVIEWER: Anyway, Ezra Blazer, I thought you might appreciate an opportunity to set the record straight. In your own voice.
EZRA BLAZER: Well, it’s certainly been a more significant Q & A on the radio than I was expecting. I’ve been outed as a father. There it is. It’s a wonderful thing, what happened to me. A miraculous thing. As I told you earlier, life is all accidents. Even what doesn’t appear to be an accident is an accident. Beginning with conception, of course. That sets the tone.
INTERVIEWER: Has this particular accident affected your work?
EZRA BLAZER: It would have, if I’d had to raise them. But I didn’t. And no, I’ve never written about them, not obviously. I’m amazed even to find myself talking about them now. I don’t know why I didn’t lie to you. You took me by surprise. And you’re just such a charming young woman yourself. And I’m a decrepit old man. It doesn’t matter any longer what biographical facts get added to or subtracted from my life.
INTERVIEWER: You’re not decrepit.
EZRA BLAZER: I am the soul of decrepitude.
INTERVIEWER: Last record. What are we going to hear?
EZRA BLAZER: Something from Albéniz’s Iberia, which he wrote in the last years of his life—he died in his late forties, of kidney disease, I think—and bear this in mind, while you’re listening to it: that it sprang from a mind, a sensibility, that so soon afterward would be snuffed out, leaving behind this magnificent burst, this smoking flare . . . If I were in charge, we’d sit here and listen to the whole hour and a half of it, because each of the pieces builds on the last, they’re discrete and yet all the richer for being heard together, and you just ache with the mounting intensity of it. The vibrancy. The innocence. The concentration. I like Barenboim’s version, partly because of his association with Edward Said, who of course before he died wrote an essay on late style—the notion that an awareness of one’s life and therefore one’s artistic contribution coming to an end affects the artist’s style, whether by imbuing it with a sense of resolution and serenity or with intransigence, difficulty, contradiction. But can you call it a “late style” if the artist died at only forty-eight years old? How did he compose such a marvelous, buoyant, triumphant masterpiece while contending with the excruciating pain of kidney stones? As I said, I’d like to listen to the whole thing with you, but as you’re motioning for me to wind this up, let’s go with the second track, which is called “El Puerto.” The technical term, I understand, is zapateado, which I suspect is Mexican for tap music.
INTERVIEWER: “El Puerto,” from Isaac Albéniz’s Iberia, performed on the piano by Daniel Barenboim. Now tell me, Ezra Blazer. Why not monogamy?
EZRA BLAZER: Why not monogamy. That’s good. Because monogamy is against nature.
INTERVIEWER: So is writing novels.
EZRA BLAZER: Agreed.
INTERVIEWER: But certainly you’ve experienced benefits, pleasures, from monogamy.
EZRA BLAZER: When I’ve been monogamous, yes. But now I’m celibate, and have been, for some years. And to my astonishment celibacy is the greatest pleasure. Wasn’t it Socrates, or one of his ilk, who said that the celibacy of old age is like finally being unstrapped from the back of a wild horse?
INTERVIEWER: Surely celibacy is against nature.
EZRA BLAZER: Not in the old. Nature loves celibacy in the old. Anyway, I contributed my twins to the longevity of the species. They’ve contributed their children. I did my job.
INTERVIEWER: Unwittingly.
EZRA BLAZER: Which is perhaps the best way. I’ve enjoyed being a tool of evolution. Usually it’s when you’re young, young and charging, that Evolution says, “I want YOU.”
INTERVIEWER: Like Uncle Sam.
EZRA BLAZER: Yes, like Uncle Sam. Not bad for a Scot. Evolution dons his top hat and tugs on his goatee and he points at you and he says, I. WANT. YOU. It is in the unwitting service of evolution that people are crazed by sex.
INTERVIEWER: Which I suppose makes you a highly decorated soldier.
EZRA BLAZER: I saw some action. I have a Purple Heart. I hit the beaches. Long before the sexual revolution began in the sixties I was one of the generation who hit the beaches in the fifties and struggled under fire up the shore. We valiantly fought our way up the beaches against heavy opposition and then the flower children traipsed right over our bloody corpses having their multiple orgasms along the way. But you asked about decrepitude. What it’s like to be so old. The short answer is that you go about your business reminding yourself to look at everything as though you’re looking at it for the last time. Probably you are.
INTERVIEWER: Do you worry about the end?
EZRA BLAZER: I am cognizant of the end. Maybe I have three, five, seven years, at most nine or ten years. After that, you’re beyond decrepit. [Laughs.] Unless you’re Casals. Casals, who also played the piano, by the way, once told a reporter when he was in his nineties that he had played the same Bach piano piece every day for the past eighty-five years. When the reporter asked whether this didn’t get boring, Casals said, No, on the contrary, each playing was a new experience, a new act of discovery. So maybe Casals never became decrepit. Maybe he took his last breath playing a bourrée. But I’m not Casals. I didn’t draw the Mediterranean-diet straw. What do I think about the end? I don’t think about the end. I think about the totality, my whole life.
INTERVIEWER: And are you happy with what you’ve accomplished over your whole life?
EZRA BLAZER: I’m satisfied that I couldn’t have done any better. I never shirked my duty to my work. I worked hard. I did the best I could. I never let anything out into the world that I didn’t think I had taken as far as I could. Do I regret the publication of certain lesser books? Not really. You only get to book three by writing books one and two. You’re not writing one long book; that’s too poetic a way of looking at it. But it’s a single career. And each piece is, after the fact, necessary to going on.
INTERVIEWER: Are you working on something now?
EZRA BLAZER: I’ve just begun a massive trilogy. In fact I wrote the first page earlier today.
INTERVIEWER: Oh?
EZRA BLAZER: Yep. Each volume is going to be 352 pages. The significance of the number I needn’t go into. And I’m writing the end first, so it’ll be end, beginning, middle. The first two books will be middle, beginning, end. The last will be only beginnings. And this is a scheme that I think will prove to the world that I don’t know what I’m doing, and never have.
INTERVIEWER: How long do you think it will take you?
EZRA BLAZER: Oh, a month or two.
INTERVIEWER: And tell me, Ezra Blazer, if the waves were to crash upon the shore, threatening to wash all of the discs off your desert island, which one would you run to save?
EZRA BLAZER: Oh my. Only one? Where is this island?
INTERVIEWER: Very far away.
EZRA BLAZER: Very far away. Is there nobody else around?
INTERVIEWER: No.
EZRA BLAZER: Just me on a desert island.
INTERVIEWER: That’s right.
EZRA BLAZER: What else can I take?
INTERVIEWER: The Bible. Or the Torah, if you prefer. Or the Koran.
EZRA BLAZER: Those are the last books I would take. If I never see those books again I’ll be quite happy.
INTERVIEWER: The Complete Works of Shakespeare.
EZRA BLAZER: Very good.
INTERVIEWER: And one more book of your choosing.
EZRA BLAZER: I’ll come back to that. What else?
INTERVIEWER: A luxury.
EZRA BLAZER: Food.
INTERVIEWER: We’ll take care of food. Don’t worry about food.
EZRA BLAZER: Then I’ll take a woman.
INTERVIEWER: I’m sorry, I should have said. You can’t take another person.
EZRA BLAZER: Not even you?
INTERVIEWER: No.
EZRA BLAZER: Then I’ll take a doll. A blow-up doll. Of my own choosing. In whatever color I want.
INTERVIEWER: We’ll give you that. And your record?
EZRA BLAZER: Well, I’ve chosen only ones I truly love, so it’s hard to say what I would like to hear over and over. Some days you’re in a Finian’s Rainbow frame of mind and other days the mood is Debussy. But I think it would have to be one of the great classical pieces, and that I could always appreciate the soaring—that’s S-O-A-R-I-N-G—in Strauss’s Four Last Songs. May I take all four of them with me?
INTERVIEWER: I’m sorry . . .
EZRA BLAZER: You drive a hard bargain.
INTERVIEWER: I didn’t make the rules.
EZRA BLAZER: Who did?
INTERVIEWER: Roy Plomley.
EZRA BLAZER: Is he Scottish?
INTERVIEWER: I’m afraid we’re running out of time.
EZRA BLAZER: Fine. “Im Abendrot.” And with that I think I would have the spirit to get through my island days, me and my blow-up woman. We might even have a nice life together. Very quiet.
INTERVIEWER: And your book?
EZRA BLAZER: Well, certainly not any of my books. I suppose I’d take Ulysses. Which I’ve read twice in my life. So far. It’s endlessly rich and endlessly baffling. However many times you’ve read it, you confront new enigmas. But it yields its pleasures up to steady concentration. And I would have plenty of time, of course, so, yes, Joyce’s Ulysses, with the notes. And I’ll tell you why you need the notes. His genius, his comic genius, keeps you splendidly entertained, the erudition is exciting, and then this city of Dublin, which is the landscape of the book, it is the book, is not my city. I wish I could have done as he did with Pittsburgh. But I could only have done this if I’d stayed in Pittsburgh with my sister and my mother and my father and my aunts and my uncles and my nephews and my nieces. Not that Joyce did that, mind you; as soon as he could get out of Dublin he fled, to Trieste, to Zurich, and then eventually to Paris. I don’t think he ever went back to Dublin, but he was obsessed with the city and its billion particulars all his life. Obsessed with capturing it in a way utterly new in fiction. The erudition, the wit, the richness, the great novelty of it all . . . My God, it’s magnificent! But without the notes I’d be lost. The Homeric analogue doesn’t interest me too much, by the way. In fact, it doesn’t interest me at all. But I suppose on a desert island it would start to, because what else would? You can only spend so much time with your blow-up woman, perfect though she may be. So yes, I’ll go out with Joyce.
INTERVIEWER: Thank you, Ezra Blazer, for letting us hear your—
EZRA BLAZER: The thing I like best about a blow-up woman, though, is that—and I don’t mean this in the physical sense, I mean it in the emotional sense—there’s no friction. Much as I loved my darling dancers, there was friction constantly. Because they belonged to Mr. Balanchine, not me.
INTERVIEWER: . . . Do you always use the language of possession when talking about love?
EZRA BLAZER: It’s impossible not to! Love is volatile. Recalcitrant. Irrepressible. We do our best to tame it, to name it and plan for it and maybe even to contain it between the hours of six and twelve, or if you’re Parisian five and seven, but like much of what is adorable and irresistible in this world it eventually tears free of you and, yes, sometimes you get scratched up in the process. It’s human nature to try to impose order and form on even the most defiantly chaotic and amorphous stuff of life. Some of us do it by drafting laws, or by painting lines on the road, or by damming rivers or isolating isotopes or building a better bra. Some of us wage wars. Others write books. The most delusional ones write books. We have very little choice other than to spend our waking hours trying to sort out and make sense of the perennial pandemonium. To forge patterns and proportions where they don’t actually exist. And it is this same urge, this mania to tame and possess—this necessary folly—that sparks and sustains love.
INTERVIEWER: But don’t you think it’s important to cultivate freedom in love? Freedom and trust? Appreciation without expectation?
EZRA BLAZER: Next record.
INTERVIEWER: Now that we know you do have children, Ezra Blazer . . . Any regrets?
EZRA BLAZER: That I didn’t meet you sooner. Is this what you do for a living?
INTERVIEWER: Yes.
EZRA BLAZER: Do you enjoy it?
INTERVIEWER: Of course.
EZRA BLAZER: Of course. You know, I know a poet, who lives in Spain, a wonderful Spanish poet who’s in her sixties now, but when she was in her thirties, late twenties or early thirties, she was extremely adventurous, and she went around to all the bars in Madrid, trying to find the oldest man there, so that she could take him home with her. That was her mission: to sleep with the oldest man in Madrid. Have you ever done something like that?
INTERVIEWER: No.
EZRA BLAZER: Would you like to begin now?
INTERVIEWER: . . . That would be with you?
EZRA BLAZER: That would be with me. Are you married?
INTERVIEWER: Yes.
EZRA BLAZER: Married. Well. That didn’t stand in Anna Karenina’s way.
INTERVIEWER: No.
EZRA BLAZER: It didn’t stand in Emma Bovary’s way.
INTERVIEWER: No.
EZRA BLAZER: Should it stand in your way?
INTERVIEWER: Anna and Emma came to no good end.
EZRA BLAZER: Children?
INTERVIEWER: Two.
EZRA BLAZER: Two children and a husband.
INTERVIEWER: Correct.
EZRA BLAZER: Well [laughs], let’s forget about him. I find you a very attractive woman and I’ve enjoyed this enormously. I’m going to a concert tomorrow night and I have two tickets. A friend of mine was going to go with me but I’m sure he’ll be content to go another time. Pollini is here, the wonderful Maurizio Pollini is here, and he’s playing Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas. So, my final question for you? On Desert Island Discs? Tomorrow night, Maurizio Pollini, at Royal Festival Hall, and I can bring only one woman, and I would like that woman to be you. So. What do you say, miss? Are you game?