Interview with Christopher Caldwell
Christopher Caldwell is a writer.
Zola, Balzac, and Kozodoy
Contents
Max Raskin: I notice you're drinking a Spindrift, and I really like Spindrift. When you're writing, what do you drink and what do you eat?
Christopher Caldwell: It’s an interesting question. I do like these seltzer waters. I don't drink anymore. I drank a lot as a young man and stopped drinking, and so I take pleasure in non-alcoholic drinks.
I drink a lot of coffee and a lot of seltzer water. I started drinking Perrier because in French hotel rooms, they always have a Perrier or a Badoit in the mini bar. Spindrift is not what I usually drink. I was sort of alarmed to see how expensive they were, but they’re excellent.
I don't eat and drink a lot when I work — just coffee, soda. I try and keep a fairly neat desk. It's good to break for snacks and walks. I'm not a person who can sit anchored at a desk for more than an hour or two.
MR: All your books are neatly ordered. Those books on the top shelf that you have behind you…what’s that set?
CC: Those are called Pléiades. These are beautiful French books that the Gallimard company started producing probably about 90 years ago. They're nicely bound, with pages in Bible paper. I'll show you a couple [picks out a book]. This is a Balzac.
These are really grand books, and I feel a little embarrassed that they're behind me where I sit at my desk as if I'm showing them off. The reason they're here is that this room is crammed with books, and I need to use absolutely every corner of shelf space. And this shelf is only six inches high. It doesn't really fit anything except these books.
Around the time I was working for the Weekly Standard and really starting to write about France in earnest, I wrote a long essay on Émile Zola for Neal Kozodoy at Commentary magazine.
I got the Pléiades of Zola's novels and I thought: This is a nice way to read these things. They seem expensive, but when you consider that you get four or five novels in one of these volumes, they're not really expensive. They allow you to assemble a nice library of French literature in a very compact and pleasant-to-read way. So that's what those are.
MR: What languages do you speak fluently?
CC: English.
MR: You don't speak French fluently?
CC: Well, I can do interviews in these languages. No one's going to mistake me for a native in them. But I can work in a number of languages.
MR: What languages can you work in?
CC: French, German, sometimes Italian, sometimes Spanish and then there are other languages that I can read. I can read Dutch. But when you say fluent, I think of someone who's really comfortable just sitting around cracking jokes and has a fully realized personality and an active social life in these languages. And I do speak these languages, but I'm never totally comfortable in them.
Drinking, Smoking, and Writing
MR: So you mentioned you don't drink anymore. Why don't you drink anymore?
CC: Because I didn't drink in a very productive way as a young man. Let's put it that way.
MR: Do you have any writerly affectations that you do because you just think it’s cool or the writer’s thing to do? So I like having a cigar and scotch — how much of it is that I enjoy the cigar and scotch and how much of it is I like the aesthetic and how it looks and makes me feel or whatever. Do you have anything like that?
CC: That's a very interesting question in this context, because I've often wondered why I drank so much when I was younger.
MR: What age are we talking?
CC: I stopped drinking about 25 years ago.
MR: Oh, wow. Tucker’s another writer who told me he stopped drinking a while ago.
CC: I started to move away from alcohol in my late 20s. And I have often asked myself: the excessive drinking that I did, why was I doing it?
Was it an affectation? Probably not. I think that we're generally less affected than we think. It’s just hard for me to explain why I did it. It wasn't rational. But there are other kinds of impractical behavior besides affectations.
MR: Like do you have a black cup of coffee in the morning because that’s what Camus did? Or like drink the way Hemingway did?
CC: I think that there was kind of an image of the writer that I was trying to live up to.
MR: Did you smoke cigarettes?
CC: Boy, did I smoke cigarettes. But there was a lot of smoking and drinking around me when I was growing up. I can remember the thickness of the smoke in the rooms at the holidays.
I grew up in Massachusetts, and the sun is low in the sky at Thanksgiving and Christmas. It would come kind of horizontally through the window. And I remember the sight of the smoke, swirling in the afternoon sun. I thought back: Well, who smoked in my family? I went over all the adults, and they all smoked. Every single adult in my extended family.
So let me try and answer this question about what led me to smoke. In part, it was the world I grew up in. But my parents, although they smoked, also hated smoking in a way. At least they didn't expect me, a nice suburban boy, to be a smoker. They wanted their children to get beyond that. You know what I mean? But to me, it looked really cool and I felt a little diminished by being expected not to do it.
There were a number of things going on. The first is women. People knew that smoking was bad for you, but maybe for just that reason, smoking was really cool. It was a real symbol of rebellion, let's say. Anyone who started dating in the '70s and '80s will remember this. People younger than me don't seem to see it.
“Nobody had a computer and everyone believed in Freud.”
MR: Who was your beau ideal? Was there someone in particular you wanted to be like?
CC: Well, you mentioned Hemingway, the hugeness of Hemingway. There's another thing about the '70s and the '80s that is important to understand: the culture I grew up in was, in many ways, exactly the culture of the modernists of the 1920s. The way we read T.S. Eliot and James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway in college was the way that our parents and grandparents had read them.
The end of the Cold War ended a whole world. Not just socialism but also modernism.
I graduated from college in 1983. When I graduated, nobody had a computer and everyone believed in Freud. There are kids I went to college with who were really planning to be psychoanalysts. Okay? So Hemingway was huge, but he didn't feel like an beau ideal, as you say. He was a presence.
There were certainly things that came out of Hemingway that really made an impression on me. One was drinking, one was traveling, and another was this attitude that there's something a little bit cooler about refusal than about acceptance. Do you know what I mean?
MR: So there’s this theory I really like about the seasons of history and how certain archetypes of generations and patterns exist in American history.
CC: Strauss and Howe?
MR: Exactly!
CC: I've looked at them. They seem to lend themselves more to dipping into than reading from start to finish. But maybe I'm wrong.
MR: I'm not going to put this in the interview, but it’s a bathroom book for me. You can flip to any page and there’s something fun about that moment in history or that archetype — and it’s relevant because their hypothesis is that we’re at another turning right now. And I just think in your writing, you're really interested in American history — not in a reporter kind of way, but in a social psychologist kind of way. You want to make generalizations, but true generalizations. Would you say that's right?
CC: Yes.
MR: I think that's why your writing is really good.
I guess, you're Gen X, technically?
CC: No, I'm technically a Baby Boomer. I was born in 1962. It's the tail end. For some reason, the Baby Boom runs till '64.
It’s an unusually long generation. So you have Baby Boomers who are now 77, and you have people who are now 59.
Expensive Association
MR: So let me do a little free association with you. I'm going to ask you some questions and can you just say the first thing that pops into your mind?
What’s the first book that comes to your mind right now?
CC: First book that comes to my mind, Crime and Punishment.
MR: And who's the first writer that comes to your mind right now?
CC: Hemingway. But only because he's in the air now. We've been talking about him.
MR: Do you have a particular pen you like using?
CC: Yes, I do. It varies from time to time, but I'll tell you, I've liked fountain pens in the past. I think it's very pleasant way to write.
MR: What kind of fountain pen do you have?
CC: I’ve had a few. I like a heavy fountain pen. I had a Waterman L'Etalon. That was my favorite one.
MR: That looks thin, I love a fat nib.
CC: You like a fat nib? I have always liked a thin nib.
MR: Oh, no. I like as fat as it can get. Why do you like the thin tip?
CC: I always have, but lately I've been writing with a slightly fatter tip.
MR: Why?
CC: Aging, probably. I think that a lot of people make this transition. I liked to write with extreme precision when I was younger.
MR: Is that literally, or you're saying metaphorically?
CC: I'm saying literally…lots of words on a page. That gets harder to do as you get older. It takes a lot of fine motor coordination to keep it up for 1,000 words. And the writing that results is actually hard for a person of my age to read on a page.
MR: What about your non-fountain pen?
CC: In the old days, I used to write with pens made by Uniball. I went to Japan about five years ago. It made a big impression on me. One of the things I discovered is that Uniball had a line of ballpoint pens called “Signo” that were hard to find in the United States. So I brought back a bunch of them.
This is the way I do it: I carry two ball points, one thick and one thin in each of the colors that they make. Blue, black, and red.
MR: If an idea comes to you while you’re walking down the street do you write in a notebook? Do you use your phone?
CC: I try to carry a notebook [takes out notebook from jacket pocket]. This is a Moleskine — it's the soft-cover one. And the reason I use it is that it fits inside the pocket of a tweed jacket unobtrusively. I always wear a jacket outside. I pretty much always have a tweed jacket.
MR: Where do you get your tweed jackets from?
CC: Generally they're Harris Tweeds, and I get them at J. Press, but they're getting harder to find. I went into J. Press the other day looking for another one. And the people there clearly didn't know what a Harris Tweed was.
MR: And why Harris Tweed?
CC: It’s just a versatile thing that you can wear about 240 days of the year in New England.
It's like a piece of upholstery. It's a thick, rough, scratchy tweed. Even in Washington you can wear it from November to April. You can wear it all winter long. With a warm vest like this one I have on, you can wear it as your outer coat. So you don't have to think of…
This is another Freudian thing…I just wanted to say that there's something that I always admired about Freud. In college, I read the Ernest Jones biography of him. I believe Freud had three suits, and he would just cycle them day by day. He had a Sunday suit for walking, but his other suits, he just wore every other day. So Freud owned three suits, and that's pretty much all the clothing he owned. And when I read that, I thought, "That is so cool. That is so simple." You know what I mean? It basically unclutters a whole area of your life that a lot of people spend so much time thinking about.
MR: Do you feel like you have a uniform?
CC: Yeah. I often wear a jacket. It used to be kind of an anonymous look, but now people have stopped wearing these things. And so sometimes if you wear a tweed jacket, people say, "Wow, that's really an interesting jacket you're wearing."
MR: But you haven't changed. It's just the times have kind of changed.
CC: That's right.
MR: What's the first song that comes to your mind right now?
CC: “Julie, Do Ya Love Me” by Bobby Sherman.
It's from 1970. And the reason that it comes up is basically because we're talking about Freud and recovered things. So I'm tempted to look back to my childhood. And when I look back to my childhood, I remember how much my sister loved this song.
Sometimes these free association things are not terribly productive if you go about them in the real spirit of them.
MR: They're always productive!
What about the first movie that comes to your mind right now?
CC: Jaws or The Towering Inferno because we’re in that time now.
Okay, Okay, Computer
MR: I want to make sure I ask you about ChatGPT. Have you played around with it at all?
CC: No.
MR: What's your thoughts about it?
CC: I’ve talked to people who describe it as kind of a bullshitter, coming up with over-elaborate answers to simple questions.
MR: I think it is just incredible for spitting out certain kinds of copy and doing certain kinds of research. It’s like an untrained undergraduate and it does well with instructions.
CC: That's one of the most depressing things I've ever heard. Do go on.
MR: Let’s try it right now. I just asked it what Freud thought about Balzac. I don't know if Freud ever wrote about Balzac.
CC: I bet he did.
ChatGPT: Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, had a high regard for the works of Honoré de Balzac, a prominent French novelist and playwright. Freud admired Balzac's keen insight into human psychology and the complexities of social interactions. He considered Balzac's novels to be rich sources of psychological understanding, as they intricately depicted the motivations, desires, and conflicts of their characters.
In his writings, Freud occasionally referenced Balzac's works to illustrate his psychological theories. For instance, he cited characters from Balzac's novels as examples of certain neurotic behaviors or to demonstrate how unconscious desires can manifest in complex ways in everyday life. The richness of Balzac's characterizations and his profound insights into human nature made his works a valuable resource for Freud in developing and explaining his psychoanalytic theories.
CC: Oh, boy.
MR: Does that depress you?
CC: It does and it doesn't. From my work and from what I understand of life, I think that the quest for acquiring and organizing information is very human. It's one of the traits that I recognize as most human. And I hate to think of it being farmed out. You know what I mean?
But if it really is a human need, then we’ll find ways to honor it and to give it a workout.
MR: You mean without a computer?
CC: Yeah.
I mean, when we invented the car, people really stopped walking. When I was a boy, people were just totally sedentary. You’d be amazed how little people exercised. I had an uncle who used to ride his bike from his house to our house, which was about seven or eight miles, and that was considered the height of eccentricity. Not just unusual — bizarre, at least for an adult. But now we say exercise is essential to being a healthy human being, and you’ve got to do it, right?
So I assume we'll find a way to do the equivalent with our curiosity in the age of artificial intelligence.
MR: Let's just stipulate that it gets to the point that a computer could write things people want to read as much as other human beings. What do you view your role as a writer?
CC: I feel we’ve already arrived at the point where a lot of writerly things have been threatened by technology.
For instance, I do a lot of foreign corresponding, because I think that if you’re writing about a place, it’s important to talk to people there and absorb the mood. But I can't really put into words what it is that I'm absorbing that I can't find on the Internet or over the phone.
And sometimes I wonder if maybe, on a reporting trip, it's not so much the trip that is helping me to understand as the carving out of a window in time for reading and research and thinking. In other words, the key thing is the focus. Sometimes I think that if I had the discipline, I could create that type of research environment artificially. But I don't really believe it, and I still think there's something in the craft of reporting that can’t be replaced.
Maybe it’s an act of faith already to do the kind of reporting that I do. I can say I'm not as alarmed by technology as some people, but I’m a little uneasy.
MR: You must love travel?
CC: I do. I have a lot of curiosity. I like foreign countries. I like foreign languages. I hate airports.
Reading and Writing
MR: When you write a first draft of something is it on the computer?
CC: There are a lot of written notes, but yes, on the computer.
MR: And your notes, you write in those Moleskine notebooks?
CC: Yes; they'll come directly out and go into my typed draft.
MR: Do you have marginalia in your books?
CC: Oh yeah.
MR: What's your system?
CC: I write it alongside the text. I'm reading this book again now, The Origins of Totalitarianism.
I scribble notes. I underline short passages that I think are important. I put vertical lines in the margins where a longer argument is important. Next to those, I put a star if the argument is something I really need to go back to. And then I will write a couple of words if I am going to need to explain to myself what I found interesting about it. And so I'll write something like “inconsistent with what he said in the first part of the book.”
MR: What book do you think in your entire library do you think is the most marked up?
CC: I don't know. It would be some non-fiction book. Some of them are really, really marked up. In fact, the reason I have a new copy of The Origins of Totalitarianism is that I read the book about 30 years ago and marked it up so much that I worried my own old notes might unduly influence the way I’m understanding the book this time around. I’d kind of like to compare my reaction this time to my reading last time. I don't want it to be like a palimpsest.
MR: Interesting.
Ferguson just wrote a piece about Nixon's marginalia.
Who are some of the writers today that you enjoy reading?
CC: Well, I mean, Andy Ferguson is certainly one of them. Writers today, do you mean book writers, journalists?
MR: Sure. Open-ended question. I'm assuming you don't follow people on Twitter.
CC: I don't. I don't even have an account on Twitter. I actually read a lot of books in French. In fiction, I read a lot of Michel Houellebecq. In non-fiction, I read a lot of Alain Finkielkraut, for instance.
MR: For someone who has never read your work — which book and which article would you point them to?
CC: It depends. I’ve written two books about Western countries turning into multi-ethnic societies. The one that’s better known in this country is The Age of Entitlement. It runs from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the nomination of Trump. It pays a lot of attention to the effects of the Civil Rights Act. That made it seem a bit edgy when it came out, which was in 2020, just before the death of George Floyd. But I think it looks pretty sensible now, in the Claudine Gay era. There’s a lot about generations in there, too.
Reflections on the Revolution in Europe takes a similar approach. It’s about immigration and the social and political changes it brings. That would be the one to read if you’re exhausted by American political controversies, as you may well be.
For articles, in the Claremont Review of Books, I get to do long essays on historical subjects. I like those. A few years ago, I did one on the Pilgrims that described their arrival as the Wampanoag Indians would have seen it. For them, it was an immigration crisis.
Ocean, Not Beach
MR: You have a lot of books behind you, and you're obviously well-read and cultured. You read French newspapers and things like that. What are your most normal guy things?
CC: I have a pretty normal-guy life. I walk every afternoon, but I also like to take hikes. That's something that I do with my sons.
MR: What kind of boots do you have?
CC: I have a couple of pairs of Vasque boots. They're called a backpacking boot, which usually means a heavy boot, but these are lightweight.
MR: Do you ever camp overnight? Or is it just day hikes?
CC: Day hikes, mostly. Sometimes in the White Mountains in New Hampshire, I'll go up and take a two-day hike, stopping in a hut. That's something that I've done with my sons. It's something that I've done with my wife.
MR: Where do you go when you leave D.C.?
CC: We used to go a lot to the beach.
MR: Are you a beach person or a mountain person?
CC: It's a funny thing. I grew up near a beach in Massachusetts, and for the last 21 summers, we've been going to a town near the one I grew up in, and staying in a house near the ocean.
MR: In Cape Cod?
CC: No, no, no. In Cape Ann, north of Boston. There’s a beach there. But I am emphatically not a beach person. I am an ocean person. I love to look at the ocean. I like the culture of these places that are open to the world. There's a lot of culture in a port city or a seaside city. I like that a lot. But lying on the beach, that's not anything that has ever really struck me as a fun way to spend the day.
MR: Got it.
CC: But I've always loved the mountains. I love the look of the mountains. I love being in the mountains.
The True Believer
MR: How would you define yourself religiously?
CC: Catholic.
MR: What does your religious practice look like? Do you pray every day?
CC: Well, these are kind of personal questions.
MR: You don't have to answer them.
CC: We go to mass every weekend.
MR: Do you believe in God?
CC: Yes.
MR: Do you believe in an afterlife?
CC: Provisionally. I'll tell you when I get there.
MR: But you're much quicker to say yes to God than the afterlife.
CC: Yes. A lot of these things are…they're not knowable. And I'm used to conversing with people, particularly ones that I'm meeting for the first time, about…about the knowable aspects of things. I make certain assumptions, and I live my life according to them.
MR: Do you think your writing has changed over the years?
CC: It’s essentially the same. I would say in general, when I started out, I thought of myself as writing artistically and, over time, transitioned into writing intellectually. But it doesn’t feel different. I've come to think that the artistic effect of writing is more a byproduct of writing that has an ulterior purpose.
MR: I like that. That sounds like something Lenin would say — you write for the Revolution and anything nice that comes out, that’s good too. But we’re here for the Revolution.
CC: No, I definitely am not writing to make any political point. I'm writing to clarify a situation that may well have a political consequence. But I'm not writing for the Revolution.
I think that there are certain writers in all walks of life who you just look at and you say, those are really good writers. You know what I mean? And I think that the art of the writing is a byproduct of someone going about a writing project with care. But the end of the writing is not beautiful writing. The writing is a means. And if a person uses that means well to convey meaning, then it will have a beauty to it. I don't think I've quite said what I mean.