VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Interview by Sheryl Kraft and Martha Mortenson
Verlyn Klinkenborg is the author of Making Hay, The Last Fine Time, and most recently, The Rural Life. He is a member of the editorial board of The New York Times and has written for The New Yorker, National Geographic, Esquire, Mother Jones, Harper's and The New York Times Magazine . After earning his Ph.D. from Princeton University in English literature, he served as assistant professor of English literature at Fordham University and as Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard. Having spent many of his young adult years burrowed in the stacks, fifty-one-year-old Klinkenborg now prefers the fresh air. Though he commutes two days a week to New York for his position at The Times, email allows him and his wife to enjoy their farm in upstate New York, where they grow vegetables and flowers, keep bees, and tend to their animals (three horses, two dogs, three cats, ten ducks, two geese, twenty-nine chickens, two turkeys, and two pigs, to be exact).
This past fall, Klinkenborg visited the Sarah Lawrence campus. Sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor of the college library, he spoke easily and enthusiastically about his career, his time spent writing for academia, his passion for farming and his newest book, a unique meditation written in the voice of an 18th century tortoise. Klinkenborg's passion for his life and work was as evident in his spoken words as it is in his writing.
KRAFT/MORTENSON: You started out writing about fly fishing. Did that jump-start your interest in writing about nature?
KLINKENBORG: It did.to a certain extent. It helped get me into the world, out of the library, and back into nature. In that sense, it was really very important. Like most graduate students, I had chained myself to the library and I was not going to come out until my life was over. Fly fishing was a way of reminding me to deal with something much larger. It was a way of discovering the other book, the other library, which is nature itself. I had come out of the library of real books and into the book of nature.
Nature is a dominant theme in your writing. Do you consider yourself to be a nature writer?
I don't make any distinction at all between nature writing and any other kind of writing. I consider myself a writer. Nature happens to be one of the things I write about. I also write about agriculture; I'm not an agricultural writer. I write editorials but I'm not an editorial writer either. I reserve the right to write about anything I want to write about, to retain the liberty to be interested in whatever it is I am interested in. There is no generic distinction from subject to subject. There is only writing. I don't want to be pigeonholed in my career. It's important for every writer to realize when you come up against that point where you've been boxed in. You have to keep defeating efforts to typecast you. So many writers suffer from the laziness of giving into the same subject, the same manner over and over. My goal-and the goal of many writers-is to write something new every time.
Is there a connection between farming and your writing?
When I'm doing chores or just working outside, it's a way of going out and basically, every day, re-enlarging my world, which tends to contract around me. There's a profound emotional gratification to being among these animals. I couldn't even begin to explain the way it affects me. The ducks make me laugh; the pigs interest me enormously; the horses are endlessly instructive. It's about the refreshing kinds of things that matter to me emotionally, as well as the fact that everything is always different every time I go outside. And I just pay attention to it; I notice it.
You wrote Making Hay while living in the Bronx . Would you mind talking a little bit about how life in that kind of urban environment affected the writing of a book set in Iowa ?
Not at all. That would imply that writing is mood-driven. I did a lot of research. I spent three weeks out haying with my aunts and uncles; I took lots of notes, photographs, interviews. More importantly, it was the raw experience of having been there. The important thing to me was to find a way to invent the meaning of being in those places in a way that told me that I had said something accurate about them. I was writing about those feelings, I was writing about the place, and those feelings were actually an index of the accuracy of my reporting and my writing.
How did you come to write the Rural Life essays for The New York Times ?
The Times used to have natural history essays on the editorial page. The tradition had elapsed. The editor of the editorial page had seen some of my work and had heard about it from other friends and invited me to write natural history essays on a freelance basis. After doing that for a couple of years, they realized I was a quick study and could write about lots of things and they invited me to join the editorial board. I write about all sorts of things, mostly pieces about culture in Manhattan . For example, the emotional impact of 9/11, including the very first piece we ran the next day. I have a very broad portfolio there. So, the answer to how I got to The Times is just a bit of dumb luck.
Your book, The Rural Life , is a compilation of those essays. How did you select which pieces would be included in the book?
That was just a matter of my literary discretion. I played around with them for a period of a couple of months, rearranging them in different ways. There was some re-editing involved, trying to get the starch out of the pieces.
Are there certain writers who have influenced your work?
I would say the prose essays and writings of John Dryden. You can see a very modern prose style emerging from what is not yet a modern prose style; it's a glorious thing. And there are authors who, in their own way, have taught me a great deal-Joan Didion, for example. But here's how convoluted an answer this gets to be. Where did I learn about rhythm in prose? Well, I learned from two places: I learned from the King James Bible, 1611 translation, which is the great source of everything we know about how English moves as a language; and, I learned it from Joan Didion. I've also learned it from John McPhee, who is the most profoundly non-rhythmic writer there can be. Although I love McPhee's work, he speaks to nothing in me as a writer, in a certain sense because his prose is deeply a-rhythmic. What strikes me with this question is that we should all be reading. Follow your nose and see where it goes. If you like something, read more of that, if you don't, read something different. We've trained ourselves to become passive readers; we read the way we watch television. You need to be an engaged reader, listening for that magnetic current. It's there-it's audible-it's palpable. But you have to teach yourself to listen for it. You have to sit up when you're reading and pay attention.
What kind of academic writing did you do earlier in your career?
I was doing the best kind of academic writing. I was doing historically based literary criticism, mostly on Samuel Johnson. I wasn't writing theoretical criticism. I wasn't engaged in the polemics, the politics. And like everybody, I was manipulating the jargon, a closed universe of words. To indulge in analogy, the writing had to be elaborate and pompous, overstated analogy. The sentences were over-long and over-qualified. The sentences were deeply imbedded in dependent and subordinate clauses. You could not tell half the time what was being said.
If this makes me sound like a reactionary, I'm not. What we've witnessed in academics over the last thirty years is a profound political shift, a power struggle between the authors and the critics. And the critics pretend they won, but they lost; they lost the ability to be creative and deeply simple, and at the same time, engaging. So what I had to do was to teach myself to stop doing all the things I'd been taught as an undergraduate that would signify to someone I was smart. I had to learn how to write sentences so naked they were terrifying. I had to learn how to allow silence to appear in my pieces. You cannot find a silent moment in a modern academic essay if you tried because there is no room for silence, it's overcrowded. My goal is to write a kind of prose where the silences themselves are audible, the implications are intelligible. There is no implication in modern academic prose. At best, there is irony. An entire generation of people, who should have known better, taught themselves how to forget to write.
Is there one piece of writing of which you are particularly proud?
Yes, The Last Fine Time , because its ambition and because the prose is unrelenting. It's always reaching for something. There's an urgency to that book in the feel of the prose and in the power of the subject. I'm also getting very happy about my new work-in-progress, which I hope I'll like even more than The Last Fine Time when it's done.
Can you tell me a little bit about your new book?
It's a very strange piece of work. Two years ago I was gathering material for an essay about pigs, of all things, which I care a great deal about. I was going back into the late 18th century journals of a natural historian by the name of Gilbert White. He was an Anglican cleric who kept detailed weather notes and made very detailed observations about what happened in a single day. I knew and had read about his tortoise, Timothy. White had inherited the tortoise from his aunt. Because White was interested in the question of hibernation versus migration, he watched Timothy very closely-studied him, weighed him, examined his excrement, watched for when he hibernated, when he came out of hibernation. When I was reading all this, I realized it would be fun to write a book in which the tortoise watched the naturalist watch him.
This book is literally a very loose meditation by Timothy. Timothy's shell was preserved by the White family and is at the Natural History Museum in London . It was examined by scientists at the end of the 19th century who discovered that Timothy was a female; White had never known. Here is a tortoise that is plucked, somehow, we don't know how, out of an ancient Mediterranean city, transported to a port city in England, and then to a clergyman's house where it lived in a small brick courtyard for forty years. The book is really about being human from a reptilian, cold-blooded perspective. It's also about looking at one of the last great moments in the history of agriculture because White died in 1793, which is just as Britain was beginning to go to war with France in the aftermath of the French Revolution, and that war absolutely shifted the character of English agriculture. England ran up an enormous war-debt which led to all sorts of problems in the agricultural economy. By the time the war was over, in 1815, English farming looked very different than it had, say, in 1790. My new book is set just before those agricultural changes took place.
The book is coming out either the end of this coming year or the beginning of next year. It will be called The Timothy Observations or Notes of an Abject Reptile . There is no real narrative to it, no real thrust except the thrust of the language, the thrust of the observations. The material is just so much fun. What's interesting is that it's nonfiction; the voice is fictional, but everything Timothy sees and reflects on is true. Everything.
