>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> Good afternoon, everyone.
It is my distinct pleasure
to introduce one
of my favorite authors
Stephen L. Carter.
I am a devout Stephen Carter
fan for many, many years.
And one of my favorite
books that he's written
in the years past is the Emperor
of Ocean Park which is set
in Martha's Vineyard where my family
and I have spent some
20 plus summers.
Stephen, as you know, is the William
Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law
at Yale University where he
has taught for almost 30 years.
His law degree is from Yale as
well, and he was privileged to clerk
for the Supreme Court
Justice Thurgood Marshall.
Stephen is the author of seven
acclaimed works of nonfiction
and three best selling novels.
His latest novel is Back
Channel, a suspenseful reimagining
of the events that became
the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Please join me in welcoming
Stephen L. Carter back
to the National Book Festival.
[ Applause ]
>> Stephen L. Carter:
Well, thank you very much,
Joanne [assumed spelling]
for that lovely introduction.
And thank you all for coming out.
It's lovely to be back at
the National Book Festival.
It's lovely to be back in
my hometown of Washington,
D.C. Last night it was
wonderful to be at the stadium.
I was there to watch the Nationals
come from behind the victory.
They're only five games back now,
the Mets lost so there's
hope, there's hope.
It really is a great joy.
And I've over the years
spent a lot of time talking
about books, writing
books obviously.
And when you write a book
you go on these tours.
But the only part of the touring
I ever enjoy is actually talking
to people who read the books.
And as Joanne told you I write
both fiction and nonfiction.
And a lot of my nonfiction books
are what my sister-in-law calls the
everybody is entitled to
my opinion kind of book.
The reason I mention that is when
you write the kind of nonfiction
that I do you go on book tour, and
you go and speak to an audience,
a lot of the people there are angry.
And they're not necessarily
angry at me.
They're angry about the
subject of the book.
They probably haven't heard of
me and haven't read the book,
but they heard someone is
going to be talking about it.
So, for example, I published a
nonfiction book a few years ago
about the United States and war,
one of the subject I teach at Yale,
where by the way, Joanne,
was very kind of you,
I've actually taught for 34 years.
This is my 35th year
of teaching at Yale.
But one of the subjects I
teach is the ethics of war
so I wrote a book about that.
And you'll be surprised
that when I went to talk
about it there were a
lot of angry people.
They weren't angry at me,
but they wanted to vent,
they wanted just to
vent about things.
And so they would come and ask
questions, what were supposed
to be questions, that were
these speeches that go
on for 10 and 12 minutes.
Well, that's why it's not fun
to go on nonfiction tours.
But fiction is nice
because the chances are
if people come they've read the
book or want to read the book.
Or at least they're smiling
as though that's the case.
They're not usually angry.
Although in one of my earlier books
I did once have someone who came
to a book signing, in fact I think
it was in Politics and Prose here
in the city who said how dare
you write a book about me
without my permission,
one of my novels.
Now, I've fallen a little
behind in my writing.
As some of you may know I was ill.
I'm doing fine now by the grace of
God so I'm back to my writing again.
[Applause] And one of the
things I'm trying to work out,
I'm at work on several different
novels, when we get to the Q
and A period if you're interested,
and one of the things I need
to decide is which of those
several novels I'm going to turn
into my next published
novel, and I'd be interested
in your input about that.
Today I'm going to talk a
little bit about writing,
at least my writing process.
And I'm going to talk a
little bit about Back Channel,
the most recently published novel,
the one that Joanne mentioned.
And then I'll be delighted to take
questions or comments from you.
I am as you know a law professor.
That's a full-time job.
I work very hard at it.
You'd have to ask my students.
One of my former students
I discovered is here today.
You'd have to ask my students
if I'm any good at it.
But I like doing it.
It's a lot of fun.
It's a full-time job.
Writing fiction is a part-time job.
Years ago my publisher wanted to
turn me into one of those people
who could turn out
a novel every year.
And they told me, they said
you'll sell a lot more books,
you'll make a lot of money.
But the only way I could
do that would be to give
up being a law professor, and
I never wanted to do that.
I enjoy teaching, I
enjoy legal scholarship.
And I find that when I write fiction
it exercises a different part
of my mind.
I'm not sure what the difference is.
I'm obviously no sort of neuro
scientist, but it's a different part
of my mind that's being exercised.
I was at a writer's conference once,
and an aspiring young writer asked a
panel where do your ideas come from.
We were all novelists.
And one of the panelists
said you should never ask
that question to a writer.
I don't know if any of you ever
follow the Twitter hashtag ten
things not to ask a writer
which is actually very funny.
Although some writers are very
bitter it turns out towards it
so you might not enjoy
reading it, I don't know.
But he said you should
never ask that question
because the only honest
answer is I have no idea.
And I think that's partly true.
It's hard for me as a
part-time novelist to figure
out where the ideas for my novels
come from except that they all tend
to be in the characters I
want to write about instead
of with a story that I want to tell.
I come up with a character and try
to embed the character in a story.
That's what I try to do.
But it's hard for me.
That is it's not that writing
nonfiction is easy, it's not,
but writing fiction is even harder.
It does something to me.
I don't know exactly what, but
it's emotionally exhausting I find
to write fiction.
I can spend hours and
hours and hours
on a single page or
even a single line.
Literally there's a line
in the second chapter
of my novel New England White
in which I spent two
weeks on one sentence.
That's literally true.
I was very proud of the
sentence when I finished.
But I have to make a better
investment of time than that.
That wasn't a very
sensible thing to do.
It exercises a different
part of my mind,
and in that sense it gives
me a break from the work
of a law professor and writing
nonfiction and doing my scholarship.
I do some op eds and
things like that.
Different parts of
my mind I can't say
that I enjoy one more
than the other.
They're just very different.
I mentioned that I've
been a little ill
and my energy isn't
what it once was.
And because of that the trade
offs are harder to make.
That is to say it's not as though
I can spend five hours a day on one
and five hours a day on the
other or something like that.
I make choices about
which to do when.
That's taken some getting used to.
But I do enjoy writing fiction.
And one of the reasons I
think I really enjoy it is I
like getting to know the characters.
I am one of those writers I
will confess who has the problem
that Kurt Vonnegut used to talk
about that I'm often
surprised by my characters.
They take control of the
story in certain ways.
They won't do the things that
I have instructed them to do
when I was writing the outline.
Years ago on Martha's Vineyard as
a matter of fact I went to a talk
by a very successful novelist,
one of these people who turns them
out and they do very well.
And I was sitting all
the way in the back.
And at the end of her talk I
was one of the people lined
up to ask her a question.
And I asked her something like this.
I said do you ever find out when
you're writing that you have
to throw your outline because you
lose control, the characters end
up doing things they're
not supposed to do?
And she said no.
And I realized that there's a
reason that certain people are able
to turn things out at a faster
rate because they have this kind
of discipline that I
suppose that I lack perhaps
because I am just too
fascinated by my characters
and therefore let me get
away with things the way
that you might spoil a child.
And my characters end up
being like that sometimes.
You may not know this, but
in addition to the novels
that are published under my own name
I've also published a few novels
under a pseudonym which I'll
tell you which is A.L. Shields.
And in the A.L. Shields novels I
also had that problem but even more
so of my characters
refusing to do what it is
that they're supposed to be doing.
And, therefore, I haven't
published one of them in a while.
Having said that, though, I should
explain further about my process.
That although the characters
become unruly when I'm writing,
I know that's going to happen later.
When I'm first writing where I begin
is I have characters, as I said,
whose stories I want to tell.
With minor exceptions they
are almost always people
from an earlier novel or related
to people from an earlier novel.
And so I asked myself what would
be an interesting story to tell?
And I can almost never
think of one at first.
So what I do is I ask
myself if I had a novel
about these characters how
would I like it to end?
And I have no story,
I have no beginning.
Where do I want them
to be at the end?
And I tend to sit down, this is how
I've written almost all my novels,
I tend to sit down
and write the ending.
I write how I want
things to come out.
That's without having a story yet.
Then once I know how things are
going to come out I ask myself
where could they start off that
I could make an interesting story
about how they got to that ending?
And then I sit down and
I write the beginning.
So in all but one of my novels the
way the novel begins is pretty much
the way that I sat down and wrote it
when I didn't have a
story with minor changes.
The one novel in which that
was not true was Palace Council
where I wrote an entirely
new beginning.
In every one of my novels but one
the ending is pretty much the way
that I originally envisioned
it or put it down on paper.
The only one, interestingly, in
which that was not true was a novel
that I'm going to talk about in
a moment which is Back Channel,
the novel that I published
last year.
That was the only time
I changed the ending.
Then when I have a beginning and an
ending I then still have a story,
I write some scenes, I try to write
some scenes with the characters
to get to know them better.
Maybe half a scene,
maybe a page and half.
Sometimes the scene
is just something --
it's like the creative
writing exercise you might have
if you take a writing course.
You know, you might have this
homework that says write 250 words
in which someone goes into
a room and something happens
and she changes her mind.
Have you ever had exercises
like that?
And some of the scenes are just
like that, nothing more than that.
Others may be more tensing, a chase
scene, someone being attacked,
someone finding a secret,
someone finding a dead
body, something like that.
And I have three or
four of these scenes.
I then say to myself, okay, now I
can write an outline that gets me
from the beginning to the end
and uses all of these scenes.
You might think this is hopelessly
complicated and it's a case
of the tail wagging the dog,
and you'd probably be right.
But nevertheless that's my process.
That's how I do it.
Now, having said all
that Back Channel came
about a little bit differently.
Back Channel as Joanne
told you is a novel
about the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Or more to the point it's a novel
about how the Cuban Missile Crisis
could not have been resolved
successfully without the help
of a 19 year old Black woman
who is a college student.
And this novel, unlike the others,
came to me as a high concept
in a way based on two things
that actually were true.
The first thing that was true
was that part of the solution
to the Cuban Missile Crisis,
we don't know how much,
the historians still debate this,
but part of the solution came
about as a so called back channel
which was to say in addition
to the official negotiations there
was an unofficial negotiation
that ran from the President,
President Kennedy,
through his brother Bobby
to a Soviet intelligence
officer Alexander Fomin.
His real name was Aleksandr
Feklisov.
And that story is true.
And they met at various places
around Washington including
most famously a restaurant
up in Cleveland Park now
closed a few years ago.
So that's one.
That was one fact.
The other fact is that when
Robert Dowick [phonetic] wrote his
biography of JFK about
seven or eight years ago,
he disclosed President
Kennedy's affair while he was
in the White House with a
19 year old college student.
And later you may remember the
networks made a big deal of this,
and they found the college student,
and she said it was true and so on.
But for me the high concept is
suppose that there wasn't an affair.
Suppose that instead the 19 year
old college student was the conduit
to Alexander Fomin, the
Soviet intelligence officer,
and the affair was a cover.
You add that to the 19 year old
college student being Black,
and I had a new story.
And that was where the idea -- I
still had to come up with characters
and write a story, but that
was where the idea came from.
And I kind of ran with
it after that.
I had a lot of fun with that.
It was the second novel I've
written in which I tried to write
about a particular
historical period,
and that meant doing the work
to bring that period to life.
Those of you who have read my
novel from 2012, The Impeachment
of Abraham Lincoln,
might remember that there
in particular I put an
enormous amount of care
into creating the City of Washington
as it would have been at the time
of the events, the imagined events
in that story which is 1867.
I worked so hard on
getting in that novel
and getting not only the
sounds right of the city,
even the smells right of the city.
I wanted to get the
city right to the extent
that if I describe a scene
where two people were sitting
on a porch I wanted what they
could see from that porch
to be what they really
would have seen from a porch
at that location in 1867.
That was very hard work.
But it's also the kind of work I was
accustomed to because in addition
to be a legal scholar my formal
academic training is in history.
And so that was actually a lot of
fun although the work was hard.
And so in doing Back Channel, all
set mostly in Washington, D.C.,
a footnote it also takes place in
and among other places
Ithaca, New York and Bulgaria.
But what I tried to do once again
was to bring to life the City
of Washington as it
would have been in 1962,
that is half a century before
the events of the novel.
Now, I lived in Washington in
1962, but I'm not going to pretend
that I was old enough to remember
in detail everything about it.
I remember some little
things about it.
But most of what's
there is research.
Now, when I sat down and
decided to write a book
that involved the Cuban
Missile Crisis
and involved this young Black woman
who I think I rather cleverly found
a device to put her in the midst
of the story, because you're
probably sitting there saying why
in the world would a 19 year old
kid be at the center of the story?
Well, you have to read the
novel to find out why she was,
and maybe you'll be
persuaded, I hope so.
But when I sat down to do
that I discovered something
else that I had forgotten.
I am also a chess fan.
I'm a chess player but not
particularly a great one.
But I'm a big fan of especially
the game and its history.
And in 1962 during the Cuban Missile
Crisis the Chess Olympiad was taking
place in Varna, Bulgaria.
And heading the U.S. Chess Team,
each country has a team of players,
and they play each other
for a month and so on,
had on the U.S. team was a 19 year
old genius named Bobby Fischer.
And suddenly that gave me
a structure for the story.
That is today I could run part of
the story through the Chess Olympiad
and bring Bobby Fisher
in as a character
who someone actually I'd always
wanted to include in a novel.
And I finally had the
chance to do it.
And then I had a story.
I added in some bits and pieces of
characters from my other novels,
and the story kind of
wrote itself after that.
And I want to emphasize
in that sense writing Back Channel
although wasn't easy was much more
straightforward than
writing my other novels.
I wrote it much more as I think
a traditional novelist would
as opposed through the structure
that I mentioned before.
Having said that I'm going to say
one other thing about my novels
and then I think I'll stop and
take questions that you might have.
When people talk about my
fiction there are different things
that they call it.
I've heard my novels
called thrillers,
and I always appreciate
that as a compliment.
I've heard them called mysteries
which I always appreciate
as a compliment.
I've heard them called multi-
generational family sagas
which I really appreciate
as a compliment.
But I don't think they're
any of those things.
They're just entertainments.
I'm not writing to make a point.
Reviewers are always accusing
me, whether in a friendly
or unfriendly way,
of making a point.
They always talk about the
social commentary they always say
and things like that in my novels.
I'm not sure exactly
what that means.
I'm not writing to make an argument.
I'm not writing to tell people
the way things are or should be.
I'm writing because
it's fun to write.
They exercise a different
part of my brain.
And I'm writing because
apparently novels entertain people.
That is to say when people stop
reading them I'll stop writing them
because no one will publish them.
But as long as people will
read the stories that I write
about these characters whom I
really love, then I will keep
on writing them until
the day that I die.
So I think I'll stop there and
take questions and comments
that you might have if any.
[Applause] I understand
there's microphones.
I can only sort of see
them because of the lights.
So if you have a question please
come up to the microphone,
and I'll just go back and forth.
Yes?
>> Hello. Again, Professor Carter.
>> I told you one of my former
students was here and here she is.
>> I can testify to
the whole audience
that he's much more enjoyable as
a writer than a law professor.
[Laughter]
>> I don't know quite how
to take that but alright.
>> Well, I've always
thought he was most akin
to the terrifying professor
in the Paper Chase
if you ever saw that [inaudible].
>> I hope not.
But, alright, go ahead.
>> Alright.
Perhaps you never thought
about this, perhaps you have,
but I was wondering if in some way
tied to this or not the characters
and the lives that you
take on and develop
in your books have any
relationship to your perspective
on jurisprudence either
in some sense
that indirectly they would benefit
from changes that you think ought
to happen based on your work?
Or you see them as people whose
lives in a positive way squarely fit
within existing structures
in the law?
>> That's a really good
and really hard question.
I'm going to answer part of it.
I may not be able to
answer all of it.
I'll give you three small and
different answers to that.
First, only once in my
novels have I actually tried
to imagine legal argument and set
it out as actual legal argument,
and that was in The Impeachment of
Abraham Lincoln, the second half
of which is this hypothetical
imagined impeachment trial.
And there I worked very hard
to put legal arguments including
constitutional arguments
in the mouths of the lawyers
and other participants
in the proceedings.
But I don't know that I did
so in any sense trying
to model my own views.
But it's funny you asked that.
Because when that novel came out
in 2012 I got a number of questions
on tour about what current
controversies I thought the novel
might be applicable to.
And I didn't know how
to answer that.
I said it was interesting
that people wanted to do that.
Having said that and I'll go back
and said I'll give you
three small answers,
of course my work is
necessarily informed
by what I do and by
what else I know.
I wouldn't say that I try actively
to associate my fiction
with my jurisprudence.
But I'm sure there
must be an association.
I'm sure if somebody sat
down to write a paper,
and I don't know anybody who
would, but if someone did
and they were trying to look at
some of my articles and books
of nonfiction and look at my fiction
they could find these parallels
I suspect.
Which leads me in a
way to my third point
which isn't quite what you asked
but which I want to answer anyway.
I said that the novels
are entertainments.
And they're works of
the imagination.
And the reason I emphasize
that is remember I told you the
story a few minute ago about,
or I mentioned a few minutes ago the
woman who came to me on a book tour
and said why did you
write a novel about me?
I [inaudible] questions
that go something like this.
I've written two novels that are
told heavily from the point of view
of a woman rather than a man.
And people say, well, how can
you do that, you're a man.
The people are very
outraged about that.
And I appreciate and
understand I think the outrage.
But I think that when that
question arises I as a novelist look
at the world slightly differently.
Everything in the novel is invented.
The question, not your question,
but when the question arose it
presupposes that if I write a novel
from the point of view of a man it
must be me, it must be my own views.
And I hope that's not true.
And so, for example, the novel
that Joanne was kind enough
to say those kind of things
about, the Emperor of Ocean Park,
was told from the point
of view of a Black man
who is a law professor
at an Ivy League school.
So people said it must
be autobiographical.
Why else would he have written that?
And I cringed to hear that because
I didn't myself find the narrator
of the Emperor of Ocean
Park particularly admirable.
There were things about him that
I liked, but there were a lot
of things about him
that I didn't like.
And it was very hard to persuade
people it was an invented
personality as they're
all inventions.
And whether it's a man
or woman or a Black
or white they're all inventions.
But I think the burden of your
question is no doubt right,
and there have to be connections
between my jurisprudence,
my writing of other kinds
and fiction even though I myself
don't exactly what they are.
Yes?
>> Yeah, just a question.
I'm almost nervous to ask this
based on what you said earlier.
But I was wondering have you
ever gotten in a situation
where you're writing a novel
and you run into a situation
where your plot just kind
of like grinds to a halt
and you don't know how
to like take it forward?
And if so what do you
do to break the logjam?
And part of what informs
my question is
when I've been doing my writing
I've never belong to a book club,
it's always just me alone in my room
which may be part of the problem.
But, anyway, I'm wondering
if you could maybe give some
insight on how you [inaudible].
>> Yes. The question do I
ever run into situations
where the plot just seems to break
up and not make sense anymore
when I think about it, and according
to my critics all the
time I run into that.
But, sure, everybody
has writing blocks.
The one advantage I have when I
have a writer's block is I can do
something else.
That is I can say, you know what,
the thinking cap isn't working
for the novel right now,
and so I'm going to go work
on my nonfiction book or on
this article for a law review
or do some more research
on my teaching day
after tomorrow or something
like that.
So I can always find some
other intellectual activity
that will take hold.
But every writer suffers that.
And I've talked to some of my
friends who are writers about it,
and some of the better
writers I know tell me
that whenever they have writer's
block they just write through it.
It's the old Graham Greene idea.
Graham Greene's theory was you
should write for the same number
of hours every day whether it's
blank page after that number
of hours or you've got 20 pages.
He will sit at by typewriter he
said for that period of time.
And I understand that.
And most writers I know who
are serious are like that.
They will fight their
way through this.
And it is a fight.
When you're writing a novel it's
hard, you're wrestling all the time
with so many different strands and
trying to get these unruly people
to do as they're told
only to find out it's kind
of like you have a little Goldberg
problem, you fix it over here
and something's popping
lose over there.
But really I don't think there's
any other solution but that.
Either you can work on something
else that also stimulates your mind
or you can write through it.
Now I know people who say that's
when I like to take a walk,
that's when I go swimming,
that's when I do this or that.
And those strategies may help also.
But for me the best
thing has always been
if the novel is not working I
can go work on something else.
Now, the downside of that is it
means it takes me longer to write
because I won't sit there
and just write through it,
and I'll go work on something else.
And then by the time I get
back to the novel I will want
to do what Francis Ford Coppola
called the cardinal sin of writing,
I want to go back and
look at page one again
to make sure that it's right.
Francis Ford Coppola was famous
I suppose around Hollywood
for writing these screenplays
really, really fast.
He could write a draft of a 90
page screenplay in two weeks.
And people said how do
you write them so fast?
And he said because
I never change it.
When I'm on page two I never
go back and look at page one.
He said you write the whole thing no
matter how bad it is, then go back
and try to make your changes.
He said once you stop and say,
wait a minute, maybe I didn't have
that right on page one
you'll never get to page two.
And I have that problem
a little bit.
I am an inveterate tinkerer.
I will go back and look, and go back
and look and say what if I did it
that way instead of this way?
And that's really bad for writing.
It's not the same as a writer's
block but it has the same effect.
Yes?
>> I want to play a
little bit with an idea.
You say you write to
entertain others.
But is it really entertainment or is
it work when you're writing a book?
Or is it like most work like being
a law professor something you love
to do so it doesn't seem like work
even though other people watching
you would insist it's a lot of work?
>> Well, that's a complicated
question.
Let me just answer very briefly
the second part and then the first.
I think most novelists would say
that when they are
writing they hate it.
They love being a novelist.
The people who love
- - I've heard this
at so many conferences
over the years.
The people who say they love being
a novelist they really mean they
like writing the end.
That's the part they love
or seeing the book come out.
But the rest of it it's drudgery.
It's awful.
There is no reason to do it except
that sometimes you have to do it.
Sometimes you have no choice.
Anna Deavere Smith once
said that the only people
who should become actors are people
who when they are acting there is
something that happens to them,
something that comes out
of them that never comes
out on any other occasion.
Therefore, that thing would
otherwise always be inside them.
She said the only people who
should act that's who should write
because it is absolute drudgery.
It's horrible.
It is a lot of work.
When I say I write to
entertain I don't write
to entertain myself at all.
I work really hard in often
ways that are quite exhausting,
and my wife would say
injurious to my health,
because I like to entertain.
Because then when they come
out people come and they smile.
And I like that part.
So I do a lot of work
to get those smiles.
You need only to keep smiling
or I won't be able to
do the work anymore.
Yes?
>> So I learned today from your
comments I did not know you wrote
under a pseudonym.
Can you talk about why you have
done that and what the difference is
between writing as Stephen L.
Carter and writing as A.L. Shields?
>> Why did I write
under a pseudonym.
I don't know the complete answer.
The best I can tell you is
that I went to my agent,
and we started talking about
what would happen if in addition
to my other works I decided what
we labeled, and this wasn't meant
as a criticism, but a more
conventional thriller is the way
that we put it.
By which I think she meant something
short that people would be able
to read and not have to go through
these long, convoluted paragraphs
and plot twists and so on.
I think that's what she meant.
She was trying to be nice.
But on the other hand by doing that
it would strip away a lot of --
remember I told you
people are always talking
about the social commentary.
So if you strip all that out, they
say never mention other writers
when you're giving a talk because
they'll go buy their books instead
of yours, but I love Elmore
Leonard's line that I leave
out the part readers skip.
He leaves out the parts
the readers skip.
And I really wish I could do that.
I wish I had the discipline to
leave out the part readers skip.
My editors try to cut out the
part they think readers will skip,
but I will usually fight
and keep some of it in.
So I tried to write these
novels that would leave
out the part readers skips.
They were not my most
successful novels.
They didn't sell all that well.
But writing them was kind of fun.
And, again, maybe that
was yet a third part
of my brain I was exercising.
I suspect I'll probably write
more of them under that pseudonym
or under possibly another one.
>> Thank you.
And I'm glad you mentioned
Graham Greene.
He's one of my favorite writers.
>> Oh, good.
>> Hi, good afternoon.
I've read a number of your books.
>> Thank you, I appreciate that.
>> But I think that my
favorite is the one on Civility.
And because we are about to go
into an election which we're going
to need a lot of civility in that,
would you mind giving the
audience just a brief overview
of what that book is about?
>> Well, first of all I'm
glad you mentioned that.
I'm often asked what my
favorite of all my books is.
And like most authors my
favorite is the one I just wrote.
But Civility is the one book I
wrote that when I go back and look
at it I think it came out
the way that I wanted to it.
I'm like most writers, you
talk to almost any writer
and they will tell you how much
they hate going back and looking
at their own published work.
I can't belief I wrote that
paragraph, that sentence,
ridiculous, I don't know why I
didn't fix that hole in the plot,
things like that, it's awful.
But when I go back and look
at Civility and I read it,
and I wrote that book almost 20
years that book was published,
I think I agree with what I
said, let me put it that way
which might sound obvious.
But that is not usually the
case with my nonfiction books.
I find a lot of things
usually to disagree with.
Instead of giving you an overview of
the book which might take a while,
let me tell a little story, a
piece of which I tell in the book
which will help illustrate what
I mean especially, as you say,
with an election coming up.
Because one of the things that
really bothers me about politics
in the United States, and this
is true across the spectrum,
is how dismissive we've become
of people who disagree with us,
that they're either
idiots or they're evil.
It can't possibly be that
issues are hard and divisive
because they're hard issues
in which reasonable people
of good will can disagree.
But I think that is why
most issues are hard.
So let me tell you a story.
Joanne was kind enough to
mention that I was a law clerk
for Justice Thurgood Marshall.
He's one of my great mentors
and favorite all time people.
What you may not know
is that in addition
to being his law clerk
during the last year
of his life I was also the
interviewer for his oral history.
We didn't finish.
He died before he could finish.
But we recorded probably I think
32 or 34 hours of tapes there
in the Federal Judicial Center
if you ever went to
read the transcripts.
I don't think the originals
have been released, the tapes,
but the transcripts are there.
And one thing that was
particularly striking as I worked
on the oral history,
one of the things
that he really enjoyed doing was
talking about people he'd known
over history, the great
people he'd known and so on.
And we talked about a lot of
the well known segregationists
of the day, politicians and others,
many of whom he actually
knew for various reasons.
Because he used to spend
a lot of time with some
of these segregationists
governors and senators.
As he used to put it in back
rooms, he would say he spent time
with them playing cards and drinking
whiskey was the way he put it.
And he used to say, he said
I don't care what a man has
to say to get elected.
I care can you do business with him.
By which he meant was his word good.
When he sat down and made a
deal would he stick to it?
And then he would tell these
stories in the oral history
about these backroom
deals that he made.
Ever notice that the cases
that he tried and so on,
and if you've read any biography of
him you know about the times he had
to flee lynch mobs, sometimes
in one particular case
led by the local sheriff.
But the untold story, this other
part of him, the part of him
which would sit in these back
rooms to avoid litigation,
to avoid a demonstration, to
avoid various other problems
and make these deals with people
who had these horrible views.
But when he spoke of them
toward the end of his life
when I was doing the interviews
he spoke often with respect
and sometimes with affection.
He would laugh and tell stories.
And he would clearly at this
point looking back be glad
for the time he spent with them.
And he could look across that
divide over what I think most
of us would agree was the greatest
moral horror in the United States
in the 20th century as it had
been in the 19th and in the 18th
and in the Colonies in the
17th, the divide of race.
He could look across that divide
at people on the other side
of that question and still say
there are human beings who happen
to be wrong, let's sit down in
the backroom and do some business.
And the notion that the things
that we argue about today are
so much more important than
that, that we cannot sit
down with those people and can
only be dismissive or derisive
on either side I find
that terrifying.
I find that absolutely terrifying.
Marshall I think was right.
It's not to say we
can't criticize people.
This is democracy and we should
speak loud and forcefully on behalf
of the things we think are right.
We should never shy to do that.
But once we lose the ability
to respect those who disagree
with us we're not a
democracy anymore.
So how's that for a
summary of the book.
>> Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> I think we only have time
for a couple more questions.
They're going to shove us
out of the room in a minute
so let's keep these last
few very, very short.
>> Thank you, Professor Carter.
One of the things you
said at the end
of your organized formal remarks was
hugely interesting to me which is
that something to the effect
that you will stop writing
when we stop reading, when
the readership stops reading.
A keen awareness of the
relationship to the audience.
And perhaps you partly
answered this question in terms
of what you just spoke
about in terms of civility.
But no law professor has
ever said I will stop writing
when they stop reading.
[Laughter] It strikes
me that you have a voice
in two very different spheres,
one of which I would say is
perhaps a bit of push and one
of which is a pull, the way you
described how you may be pulled
by your readers to do that work.
It strikes me it's also the two
most important spheres if you will,
law jurisprudence and storytelling.
But they have very
different ways of acting
on the body politic,
on the audience.
What are your thoughts on the
relevance of academia as somebody
who is probably more
read as a novelist.
Thank you.
>> I'll try to be very brief.
I know we only have two
or three minutes left.
One of the things that
scares me about the academy,
about college universities generally
is they're becoming less relevant.
Which is to say --
don't get me wrong.
I don't think that
everything that happens
that professors do
has to be practical.
I think there's an enormous space
for abstract theoretical work,
people digging up old civilizations
that most people will
never know or care about.
Or finding subatomic particles that
won't have any effect on our lives.
Or coming up with abstruse
philosophical theories
because they make sense, not because
they're going to change the world.
There's room for all of that, and
that's terrifically important.
Nevertheless, at the end of the
day the traditional function
of so called liberal education is
to prepare young people for life,
for responsible life as
adults in a democracy.
And I worry that in that sphere
we're becoming less relevant
and not more.
But I also worry that literature
is becoming less relevant.
The tastes of the reading
public are changing a lot.
People have ideas that are
shorter and less complex.
I'm happy -- I enjoy things that
are short and less complex also,
but I think there's room also
for more complex reading.
It's quite striking to me
that someone like, say,
John Updike his last few novels
didn't even make the New York Times
best seller list.
He wrote novels of enormous
depth and complexity,
and I think that's
really unfortunate.
I'm troubled that someone like Toni
Morrison is selling fewer novels
than she used to when one comes out.
Because, again, she writes with this
beauty and depth and complexity.
And the reason that matters is
that reading complex literature,
readings that are hard to get
through I think stretches the mind.
And stretching the mind is
also really important I think
to adulthood and to citizenship.
One reason I'm so glad to see all
of you here today is precisely
because people who come to a book
fair tend to be the kind of people
who are not afraid of complexity,
who want to talk about literature,
read literature, think
about literature.
And so as long as book fairs get big
crowds I think we're in good shape.
When you all stop coming, put
aside whether you read my --
if no one ever reads another one
of my books, when people stop going
to book fairs, they don't want to
hear from authors, they don't want
to read books that are hard, then
I think we're in serious trouble.
I think you can have
the last question.
It's got to be real short.
>> Thanks, Professor Carter.
Just a brief question about how
you started writing fiction.
Were you always a reader?
Is this something that
you've always wanted to do?
Were you yanked in?
Just curious.
>> I started writing fiction when
I was a little kid in Washington,
D.C. That's a true story.
I went to Margaret M.
Amidon Elementary School
in southwest Washington, and
I lived about two blocks away.
And in between Margaret M.
Amidon Elementary School
and my house was an
important building
with a little store in the basement.
I guess nowadays it would be
called a convenience store.
And this is going to tell you
how old I was, how old I am now.
I got my allowance on Fridays,
25 cents was my allowance.
That's not the part
that will tell you.
[Inaudible] my parents
didn't have any money.
No, this next part will
tell you how old I am.
So when I got my allowance, when
school got out at three o'clock
or whatever time it was,
I would stop at the little
store on the way home.
And with that 25 cents I bought
a comic book, baseball cards,
and for ten cents a little notebook
that was only eight
pages about this big.
I think it might have been spiral
bound but I can't remember.
Maybe it had some other
kind of binding.
Maybe it was four pages.
And I would take this notebook home,
and I would spend the weekend
writing what I called my stories.
And the stories would be, you know,
about dinosaurs conquering the Earth
and they were defeated by a
little boy from Washington,
D.C. Aliens conquer the Earth
and are defeated by a little boy
from Washington, D.C. Steven
Spielberg stole all his material
from me as a matter of fact.
I would write these stories
and they were terrible.
They had no punctuation,
no paragraph breaks,
but I always loved it.
And every job I've had that
I've liked has involved
in some way writing.
One of the things that attracted me
to being a law professor as opposed
to being a legal practitioner, I
obviously admire legal practitioners
and I train them, but
when one is expected
to be a law professor I could
write about the subjects I wanted
to write about, and the
writing attracted me.
When I was an undergraduate
I spent all my years,
four years as an undergraduate,
working very hard
at the student paper which
I was the [inaudible]
which then became the
managing editor.
And it was the writing
that I enjoyed.
Everything I've done
I've liked to write.
Fiction, nonfiction, whatever it is,
I just like writing
and I always have.
Thank you all very
much and God bless you.
[Applause]
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.