About Schmidt - Louis Begley [106]
Q. Have you always had the desire to write? What really kept you from starting earlier? I know you have said you’ve been busy creating a life.
A. I think it’s really quite simple. I used to write short stories when I was in high school, and in college I also wrote occasional poems. But toward the end of my junior year in college I came to the conclusion that I didn’t have anything in particular to say and that it was better that I stop writing.
Q. In Dangling Man Saul Bellow writes about how overwhelming it is to face one’s inadequacies; to discover whether one has any talent or ability. Were you afraid to sit down and start writing?
A. I don’t think that I was “afraid” to start writing. At the time I decided I had nothing to say I was, unlike Saul Bellow, someone without a “current milieu.” I did not think I wanted to write about a “milieu” or a history I believed I had left behind me in Poland. I realized that I knew nothing about this country. Perhaps if I had been more imaginative, I would have realized that one could write about being nowhere, and knowing nothing, and being in a state of confusion. Perhaps someone could have suggested it to me. But, as it turned out, I did not think of it myself, and no one told me that one could write about being lost in a fog.
Q. How did you get out of that fog?
A. The fog lifted. I began to understand this country. And, I also began to understand better the past. Perhaps in that respect, I was slow to mature. That’s very possible.
Q. What triggered About Schmidt? Is it at all autobiographical?
A. Of course not.
Q. Is there any significance in your having chosen the word “about” for the title? I’ve read a reviewer mention that “re” or “about” is a legal term that “would invite us to treat Schmidt as a case for judgment or prosecution.”
A. The title means what it says.
Q. I also found it very interesting that you write narrative without using quotation marks. Where does that particular technique come from?
A. It comes from my particular dislike of the way quotation marks look on a page. I think they look like little bugs.
Q. What sort of pressure have you felt from receiving such good reviews on your first novel and your subsequent ones? Have you felt any pressure from yourself or from others expecting you to continue writing?
A. When I wrote my first novel, I came to the conclusion immediately that I needed to write another one so that no one would be able to say that I was a one-book writer. Then I found that I liked writing.
Q. Was it difficult for you to write about anti-Semitism?
A. No, I found it amusing.
Q. What’s next?
A. I am finishing another novel.
Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion
This book is about a man whose life, as he has always known it, is about to change forever. What happens to a man who loses everything: his profession, his wife, and his daughter in a short span of time? How does he go about building a new life for himself in his sixth decade?
How are today’s views on aging different from what they were at the turn of this century; or, perhaps, even as recently as the mid-1950s? How was a man in his sixties viewed one hundred years ago, fifty years ago? How was he “expected” to behave? How do older people today view their future, now that life expectancy has been so dramatically increased?
How do you think Schmidt’s feelings about his own childhood and parents have affected his relationships with his wife and daughter?
Schmidt says he expects all lives to end badly. How does he feel about his own life? How do you think Schmidt’s life will end?
What problems or concerns might older people have today that they might not have had eighty, or even less than forty years ago? Where might they turn for help, solace, affection, understanding? How does aging and its accompanying problems expose one’s frailties and flaws? How