About Schmidt
by Louis Begley
List Price: $12.00
Pages: 306
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0449911160
Publisher: Fawcett Columbine
Louis Begley is the author of four novels. Wartime Lies, which
was written when he was in his mid-fifties, was followed by The Man
Who Was Late, As Max Saw It, and About Schmidt. He is
currently finishing a fifth novel.
Begley has another life, that
of a lawyer. He is a senior partner at Debevoise & Plimpton, one of America's
most prestigious firms, and is the head of its international practice.
Wartime Lies was the
winner of the PEN Hemingway Award, The Irish Times--Aer Lingus International
Prize, and the Prix Medicis Etranger, France's most coveted prize for
fiction in translation. It was a National Book Award, Los Angeles Times
Book Award, and National Book Critics' Circle Award finalist. About
Schmidt was likewise a National Book Critics' Circle Award and Los
Angeles Times Book Award finalist. Begley has received the American Academy
of Letters prize for literature and numerous other awards.
Begley was born in Stryj,
a town that was Polish and is now part of Ukraine, in 1933. Being Jewish,
he survived the German occupation by pretending, with the help of false
identification papers, to be a Catholic Pole.
Begley and his parents left
Poland in 1946 and settled in New York in 1947. Begley graduated from
Harvard College in 1954, and after having served in the U.S. army, from
Harvard Law School in 1959.
Since 1974, Begley has been
married to Anka Muhlstein, a prize-winning French author of biographies
and other historical works. The combined family includes five grown children.
His are a painter and sculptor, a book critic, and an art historian. Hers
are a foreign relations specialist and a television journalist.
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Q: You grew up with fear, danger, and deception. Has your success in life changed your outlook on mankind? Are you fully able to enjoy your successes, or are they tinged with other emotions?
A: I can't give you a yes or no answer. I'm a complicated person, and my responses to things that happen to me are seldom simple. I certainly enjoy doing well and being told that I have done well, but I am always conscious of what seems the fundamental futility of work, efforts, successes, and failures.
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 whenI 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.
Excerpted from About Schmidt © Copyright 2008 by Louis Begley. Reprinted with permission by Fawcett Columbine . All rights reserved.
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