Perhaps you are going to change with older affluent children, to where … I remember in the first volumn of I think Joe Washington ….?

Yes.

I think that he talks about ….

His real name, by the way, is Lawrence Jefferson. That will show you the way I do these things. [Laughter]

He talked about ….

Not very subtle, is it?

He, as a matter of fact, doesn't have children, but he talks about being able to support his children and he is suppressing a sense of destiny, but that sense of destiny is still going to come into contact ….

Right.

I wouldn't think that you would find that sort of reflection among say, especially white upper-middle-class kids now eighteen, in a similar situation. Partly because with ZPG he might have decided that he's not going to have children. Is that true, or do you find all sorts of different senses of the family ….

Oh, there is definitely that. In fact, if I come back here twice in the spring, and maybe you can invite me again, I write actually in my room in the Carolina Inn, the yellow pages. I write all this down on legal pads, but I'm now weaving in, it's a boy who is eleven years old, who I'm giving the name … he's from the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, a Chicano family, and he is eleven years old. And I'm weaving in his relationship with a foreman of this large company, by the way, owned by Bentson … you've heard of him. He thinks he wants to be president. Wait until we start exposing him, that SOB, it just grows in the Rio Grande Valley, a miserable, wretch of a character if there ever was one, they own all these huge farms, that Bentson family. Anyway, don't vote for Bentson. [Laughter] He's not as bad as your Jesse Helms, no one can be as bad as your Jesse Helms … [Laughter] … but he's in the running.

What about Strom Thurmond?

Strom Thurmond, I don't think, is as bad as Jesse Helms. No one is as bad as Jesse Helms since Theodore Bilbow left the United States Senate, but …

The man that was a foreman?

Yes, he goes around with this foreman in the truck. And the foreman talks to him as a friend. And the foreman tells him all about his wife and his kids. Then, there is the daughter of the grower. She is a year older than he is. She has what we would call fantasies, but she is interested in freeing all the poor "Mexicans", as she calls them. And she tells the foreman and the boy, who sit around, they talk … "I want to get a magic wand some day and I'm going to free everyone in the Rio Grande Valley." The boy goggles at this. The boy has a much older cousin who was driven out of the Rio Grande Valley for political activity and is now up in Chicago. And the contrast of the foreman's child, the grower's child and the Chicano fieldhand's child, is just along what you are talking about … the upper-class child has a notion of power, privilege, of the relationship to history, of what can be done. The foreman's child is troubled by the imperatives of his father. "Stay in school," when the child wants to get out. "Do this " … and that's the rebelliousness, we all know that, and then there is the boy, the child of the field-hand, and what are his preoccupations? Well, should he become like his cousin? No, because his father wouldn't like it. A lot of conversation about the terrible things that the teachers say about Mexicans, elicited by me, of course, because I'm interested in that kind of thing. But, a lot of talk, really, about his father and his mother, and I describe … I weave in my own descriptions of him and summaries of his behavior that in the third person, with various quotes from him. Now, I think that there is a new … I'm developing something different that I'm trying to do and I should be … you might be interesting in helping, maybe, to see if the thing will work or not. I speak in the third person, and I work it so that I never mention myself in this narrative description. It's all impersonal, so that I remove myself and talk … but I also talk about the foreman the way the boy does. He never mentions the foreman's name, he always talks about "the foreman." But the foreman has no name. Mr. Long, who is the grower, has the name, "Mr. Long." And what I'm trying to do is to evoke the way that this Chicano child sees these people, through his eyes, but also bring in some contrast with the other people from different classes. Now, a lot of people probably say, "Well, why should you remove yourself?" But I feel that … I will be myself in the first chapter, which is a description of the scene, so to speak, the second chapter, I describe method. If I had real courage, I would put quotes on the word, but of course, I'm not going to do that. And then, moving into that, the nearest thing that there was, now if any of you saw that profile in the New Yorker on the old… called the anciana, that's the style, to … it's different from the other volumns. Where I am always talking about, "I saw this and I saw that … " and I just decided to get rid of myself. Not because I want to be anonymous. Really, anyone who writes this much is not concerned with anonymity, but because I think it brings the reader closer to what I would conceptualize, if I may, the mind of the child and the way that mind gets along with others, which is more important than the way the mind gets along with me. I'm so sick of the me, and that's all they do, anytime that anybody writes up my work, well, they always want to get into me, because, of course, that's what they are all interested in, is the upper-middle-class person who writes this up. Well, when they do these stories, you say, "Please, talk about the people. Never mind me." "Oh, no, no. Where was your father born, where did you go to school and what did you do when you were twelve and a half."

You're trying to be civil.

What?

You're trying to be civil.

Civil, in a way, that's right. Thank you.

I read you from the beginning and I'm going to be adequately confused now, for a bit. When I first began to read you, I thought this was Coles, Coles himself. And I rather resented that, as myself as a historian, I very much felt . And at first, I tried to get to know these people and my first book ended in 1877. My wife always says that I died in 1877. And I said, "How do you explain these three kids?" [Laughter] But, even then, even as I was writing about this period in 1877, I felt extremely frustrated about the representation, about the tools in the representation. I felt frustrated, for instance, because if you speak, and especially in terms of if you write, you have to have signals to get at the words, and you have to use one word at a time and at times, there are not even words so, what I found was that I tried to, the closer I got to the reality as I understood it, the more incomprehensible I became, the more audience I left. But then I found that if you are going to , if you are going to say anything, you've got to artificialize, you've got to be . In effect, the smoother you get, the more people read you, the more untruths you tell. And I suppose I dislike you for doing what I've done, so, this is Coles and so-and-so. This Yankee is, he comes down, he talks with the black kids and he violates them, he pushes in on them and I said, "Why does he want to do that?" And I see where you don't like that, I see where you are saying that words kill and . It's the affliction of our profession that you have to deal with words and that you have to kill in that way. And I was discouraged right now, even more that you seem to take your writing with gusto and I was going to ask you before if you ever resent any of the volums maybe hate to do it, because if you say it like that, even if it's true, do you have the option of being anything else? It's like Faulkner, I think, says that once you say it, it might be true and you can't say it's the other. So, it just struck me that that you are not dealing with individuals, but dealing with a whole and wanting to get yourself out of it, that's really amazing. Why do you think you are doing that? I think that going to third person is revolutationary for you, internally, it's revolutionary for you, it would seem to me.

Well, I think I'm struggling, I think that you have said it very well. I think, I thought to myself, "I know can do …" In fact, I once, in the sinful megalomania that writers have, said to my wife, "You know, I could write ten volumns. I have developed this into such a style" and then I felt that I've got to stop this. And I had to do something to break this, I could not do more of this. And I realize that in New Mexico, and the people that gave me that feeling were the older people I met, the seventy-five and eighty year old people who had a quality about them that put me to shame and made me feel that the only thing I could try to do is somehow respond to them. Now, you asked about … of course, I'm obviously a writer and fascile, and do other, you know, whether that be sin, compulsion, whichever way one wants to look at it. I do not approach the work with gusto, I get headaches at the thought of doing it. But I feel that I have to do it and if I don't do it, then I will be in some way, "this is wrong and bad and it must be done." But it is not with gusto and at times, I … I think that the reason I can write other things like book reviews and others, is because that gets me away from this. But I keep on doing it because it is a mandate to my responsibility, and then you get into, if I may bring into the whole extensialist tradition that Walker Percy would understand, I think, much better than I can ever put into words, but this is my fate, I mean, this is part of the everydayness of my particular life. With all its dishonesty and fraud and struggle, it's what and others have taught, trying to get oneself in a time and being. That I have to do this, it's my … you know, with all the dishonesty and yet, the effort, the struggle and whatever, this is what I have worked myself into and it's my way. Now, I'll tell you what … when this is over, there are people that mean a lot to me and I suppose that I will always be writing about people, but they won't be the people, these, the people that I've been talking with. They will be more in the tradition of the university. And they are people like Agee, who I keep on mentioning, and Walker Percy and Simone Weil and Flannery O'Connor and Ben Arnolds. I hope that all of you read Diary of a Country Priest, because you know, you talk about the poor … there's anovelist who does more justice to the life of the poor and their image, this 75§, God knows, these days, a dollar paperback, than all these damn social sciences put together. The Diary of a Country Priest. Read it as part of your field work, preparation. But those people, those particular people that I mentioned, I would like to somehow write something about their lives as I see them. I don't know what all this is about and, you're right, the letter killeth. Now, the letter killeth, in procedures, methodologies, etc., yet, the other side of that, in all the ambiguity is that we must go on trying. That's another mandate. And silence also can be sinful and arrogant and destructive, too. So, we are caught on these tightropes and I'm not "resolved" … that cool, sippery word that social scientists and psychiatrists use, you know, "resolved." "Resolve your conflicts," "resolve this." Nonsense. Nothing is ever resolved. But one walks this tightrope and hopes that one can somehow in the end have lived to some effect.

Just one more question. Do you think that to get to where you are now, you had to go through the earlier thing, that you have to go through the early part ….

That's of course, the best question. And it's awfully hard to answer, because here you are in the classroom and there are people that are different from you by virtue of their age and if I answer this one way, it can come out condescending or patronizing. If I answer it in another way, it can come out as a new kind of program. Skip process xy, because Coles said that z is the new short circuit methodology and I don't know how to answer that except to answer it personally. I know that I had my life, and I came out of a certain kind of background and you know, it was inevitable, given my life, that I would go through certain things. I would hate to prescribe to someone else. Some people, you know, grace abounded, and some people might not, and other people, if I may sound arrogant, might be whirling around. We know from Dante, a social observer of sorts with a grand scale of interests and a contemporary anthropological and social visionary, there are circles within circles and so, I don't know. I can tell you, though, that it is inconceivable to me, given my life, frankly at times inconceivable that I ended up doing this at all, given my life. I know that it is still inconceivable to my parents. So, now that sounds also a little snotty, too. But you know, I think that a genuine … now, you might ask how, the question is how you get interested in this and how … now, there's the psychodynamical explanation, you know. It's always forthcoming these days, which tells us both everything and nothing. And then there's just accident, fate, chance, sometimes, you know, in the more nervous existential shudder moments, I will say, "What would have happened if I hadn't been riding my bike on that Sunday morning in Biloxi, and what if I had chosen not to go to church that morning?" But then, of course, I worry about that with my wife. If I hadn't exchanged emergency ward duty with a friend of mine, I wouldn't have met someone who in turn, who … through that person I met my wife. Therefore, I wouldn't be married to her and I wouldn't have the children that I do and that's what we have to face in this lousy earth. That's what it is to be a human being. Anyone that can come up in the face of that, with some lousy stinking explanation of life based on this or that, that this is due to that, anyone that can dare insult us with those uncertainties, deserves, you know, a prayer from us, along with a few for ourselves. But that's ….

May I ask a series of questions?

[Laughter] Got it.

First, who are you trying to reach in these books? Are you trying to reach the upper-middle-class, the intellectuals, the Archie Bunker types or the readers who

Well, let me ask you a question, who do you think Faulkner was trying to reach? This may sound very arrogant, but who do you think a novelist like Faulkner was trying to reach when he writes his novels?

Well, I don't know a man like Faulkner, but I felt that you were tyring to reach, whereas Faulkner may not have been trying to reach anybody in particular, you have more of a purpose. I think that maybe you would have written it in novel from ….

Well, I would have written it in novel form if I had the gifts of the novelist, which I don't have, and I tell you, I envy novelists. Because I would exchange … you may find this hard and ultimately sacrilegeous, but I will say it anyway, if I could write one novel like Walker Percy or Faulkner writes, I assure you I would not have done any of this work. That's a pretty sad confession, but it has to do with my own vanity and my own particular something. Yes, I'm trying to reach the … first of all, who is it that buys books that cost twelve and a half dollars? Not the migrant sharecroppers or mountaineers who populate the book. Not the Archie Bunkers, I can't stand that lousy stinking rotten program. It's gross, brutal and insulting. Archie Bunker, that Archie Bunker program belongs in educational television with all the other lousy programs, with Julia Child and Upstairs Downstairs and Zoom, which makes everyone of us feel as if we are mentally retarded, and just all the other crappy nonsense with those announcers who sound as if they were trained at Oxford for five years to patronize the American taxpayers who are paying for it. But Archie Bunker, I think, has better things … I'm not being only facetious, I guess I'm reaching out through people like you, who buy those books. And me, who buy those books. I'm a writer. I write books, they are sold by Brown, twelve and a half dollars. You try to get them to bring it down to ten, and they look at you as if you are naivee, a simpleton, and then you know, and on and on and on. Now, Still Hungry in America, which was a book that came out, was directly the product of a political campaign, an effort on the part of Robert Kennedy and others to deal with the problem of hunger in the rural areas of this country, so that you can call it a tract, a polemical tract. So, it would vary. I don't know. I did a book on Dorothy Day and the Catholic working woman, because I love her and love what she stands for. And I didn't do it in order that the book would reach … I guess that I didn't think of anyone. Those books that were a little more self-consciously attached to social and political problems, but I think that party of the reason I'm doing this is because I want to write and I won't to write these books, and part of it is because I'm doing a research project and I have a foundation grant from the illustrious Ford Foundation and they are paying for me not only to do the work, but I can assure you, to write the books, and believe me, if I didn't write the books, they wouldn't … the work to them means nothing. Which is an interesting thing I hope that we all consider. I could go and talk to all those families and in fact, spend twice the amount of time with them and be the greatest healer since I don't know who came around, and they wouldn't care, the Ford Foundation, they would only care because the books come out. And the articles. And the say, "Oh, I think that's wonderful work," but what they mean is, that you are writing these books and you have become someone that has an input into American life, that's what they would say. Of course, justifiable, concerned foundations get someone like you to exteriorize his experience for public enlightenment and whatever. But you know who reads these, you and I and all the others.

So, the influence of public policy is of minor concern?

Yes.

Well, have you thought about trying to reach more people, I had heard that

Yes. I have … I rather envy photographers, they don't have to use words, you see. And they just … it's a picture. So, yes, I have worked with photographers on a number of occassions. A number of people have said to me, "How about doing documentaries?" Well, I can't do a documentary, I'm not into that, as they say these days, but I have nothing documentaries. I have nothing against anything that will reach people. I would love to see us all reached in ways, but certainly not only by the likes of me. Frankly, I would think that if the whole nation could be reached, if I could choose the kind of person that I would like to reach, the whole nation, from Gerald R. Ford, not to mention his predecessor, to the people I work with, I would give precedence to the sensibility, the spirit, of whether it be Dr. Williams, or Walker Percy, whatever. I urge upon you, by the way, for some more collateral reading for this cause … do any of you know the triology that Williams wrote, called White Mule, The Buildup, In the Money? It's a triology of novels that he did about an immigrant family in America. It is just astonishing. It's a brilliant, brilliant triology of novels. And you read that and you'll see what he knows of what you might call "Archie Bunker people," or immigrant families, that I somehow haven't seen justice done to by all those who are writing about what are now called "ethnics", and all these other words that come and go across this screen of American social science. They pop across and fade in and then another one succeeds then, "ethnics," "working class", all these terms. Yes, any extension of this, that would lead to the demise of the Republican party, yes.

But your work has a different, a slightly different dimension than say Williams's would, because you are a child psychiatrist. You talk about reaching out to people, communicating to who you are trying to reach in your books, you talk about your kind of fate-responsibility that you feel yourself to write and so on, the question that remains in my mind is that it is obvious that you have communicated with these people who are the subjects of these books, you know. And what as a child psychiatrist, you are talking about writing the things up, and Dr. Williamson is talking about the violation of truth in putting it into words, the violation, perhaps, of the trust of these people, by exposing them to the whole nation or whatever, but what do you bring these people that you talk to, the subjects, the basis of all of us talking?

What do I bring to all those people?

Right.

Another collection of Williams's, which is more to the point of what you are bringing up, is Life Along the Passaic River, in which he describes his own relationship as a doctor of these patients and in the format of the short story, with a kind of candor that you won't hear from social scientists. He works in beautifully his own anger and annoyance and resentments and lusts that we are traditionally trained not to talk about. We have to have it analyzed out of ourselves before we even approach it. What a fraud that is, it's never analyzed out of anyone. But we do learn to be coverse and maybe sly. There is a difference, and maybe there is no difference, but anyway, to answer what you are talking about with what do I bring to them … well, I would imagine that the answer would come forth, I hope, if I may be presumptious enough, this has been written about by … do any of you know Gabriel Marcel? Well, Marcel has written about this, Kierkegaard has written about this, this comes across constantly in the three novels of Walker Percy, how do we get along with others? And this, I know that existentialism has become a kind of fad, which has both come and gone, but this has to do with being, and presumably, in some of these homes, I began and proceeded to be and ended up being a royal pain. In other homes, some things happened, in other homes, some other things happened. And this is various and diverse and it's hard to catagorize as these variations in human life that we all are. So, in some of these homes there were these moments, in other homes, there were some other moments. And that is something, now, if you want me to give, to get more officious about it, I can say this, "Look, in certain cases," I brought a child …" this, we'll all be happy with, and boy, does this make us feel great … I brought a child, in Roxbury, a black ghetto section of Boston, to the Children's Hospital, who needed medical help. Great! "He not only was taking something out of him in these interviews, he was performing an active service." I participated in the hearings and etc. that ultimately led to the food stamp program. I was involved in that. Great! The proceeds from Still Hungry in America went to the Southern Regional Council for distribution among the needy. Great! We can all understand that. There is a family here that I got in touch with an agency there and this came out … O.K., I'm not denying that. I don't want to say that I don't do that. But I am not going to go on the defensive, to the point that I feel that this is the only thing that, you know, I can fall back on for the justification of this work and that anything else is "exploited." I do not apologize for those moments that we had, some of us, in the course of this work. By "some of us", I mean me and my wife and even occassionally my oldest boy who went with me to Alaska to talk to the Eskimo people and what happened there. And I don't mean only the good moments, the bad moments too. It isn't necessarily hurtful and exploitative when a strange. kooky guy comes on the scene and talks and maybe a little news is exchanged, you know, something. That doesn't have to be looked upon as political oppression or manipulations for the point of view of aggrandisement in a professional career. I'm not saying that that isn't something that should be taken into consideration too, but why do we have to strip these meetings, these encounters, these moments of the fact that they have to do with human beings on the planet, for a moment, a brief moment of eternity, that we are in addition to social scientists and social observers and all these things and this … we are after all, men, women, people, citizens, a lot of things. But you see, I think … we get into these … everything in the university has to be given a structure and maybe everything in life does, and obviously, it ill behooves anyone who gives a structure of a book to his experience, to denounce that to the point that he sounds like he doesn't do this, but everyone else does. Obviously, everything that I … I hope that you understand that this is not, the strenuous load of this crankiness is directed not at you, but it is a self-directed thing. It has to do with my own arraignment of myself and an examination of myself, and I don't mean for counter-transferency by the way, but for, you know, I mean the kind of arraignment that one would call upon Kierkegaard of as a model, rather than the latest psychoanalytic supervisor, of which there are plenty in civilized towns like this. I guess that I'm being signaled to depart on to the next moment. I'm sorry that … having said all of this, I of course, immediately proceed to assuage my own sense of misgivings and incompleteness and failure by saying, although I'm sorry if I've been somewhat provocative, but I think I know, I want us all, at this moment, one would say, using Erikson's model of thinking about things, you know …at this moment, in this history of the work that we are doing, one needs, first of all, the courage to fight the powers and principalities, which I presume that you all have, or you wouldn't be here. Secondly, the willingness to undercut oneself without destroying your ongoing, by you know, getting a little sense of humor into this. There is room, you know, in all this work for a little bit of humor, a little bit of willingness to relate oneself to some larger sphere of things, namely, you know, a lot of other kinds of people. Writers and thinkers, essayists, just plain people are interested in talking to people. My father is just an ordinary human being, but I remember as a boy that he used to tell me about when he would go down to London from Yorkshire, he was interested in talking to people. Well, he wasn't doing it because he was a social scientist or anything, but he … I have to tell you one more thing, even if we are going to be late over there to that thing at Duke … we went to South Africa, my father, my son and I went to South Africa at the end of August to give this lecture on the apartheid. They bring in outsiders to say things that South Africans cannot say. We stopped off in Rio de Janeiro and on the beach, my son and I went for a long walk and we came back and my father was talking to four young people of a whole range of racial backgrounds, by sight, who … he struck up a conversation with. He wasn't doing any fieldwork and he had no taperecorder, but they were smoking a lot and he told them that they shouldn't smoke so much. And that led to a whole series of things and then he went and bought the some ice cream to tell them that it was much better to have some of this ice cream than to smoke all those cigarettes, "it is going to hurt your lungs." Part of this he was doing with some Spanish, he knew spoke Portuguese, and broken English and whatever. So then we came back, and with this mind that I have, which is just like all of our minds here, I said, "Oh, this is interesting. He's talking to these people, I must get … " [Laughter] So, I started questions, you know, other kinds of questions and then they didn't seem as interested, they were beginning to get ready to leave. So my father resumed by talking to them about the cigarettes and then of course realized what I was. I was hungry and greedy. We were going to leave the next day and I thought, "Ah ha, I'll just snatch something and get it." Meanwhile, my father, who has no methodological training and you might consider politically to be rather conservative, not as liberal and generous and kind as I am, had got something going. Him and them. That's because I haven't worked it out, I have problems with my father … thank you.