GD: (Note: I talk about a lot of hard times here. No matter my answers, I don’t want anyone thinking I wish people to feel sorry for me. I am simply trying to be honest and state the facts. I hate sympathy. I long ago came to terms with the tough stuff and, on balance, I am grateful for my fantastic life.)
When I first realized I was a writer, someone who was destined to spend his life writing no matter what else he did, I was entering my senior year in college. I was really at a loss. I didn’t know what being a real writer meant, how it can shape your life, how it can sometimes overwhelm it, how it can destroy a marriage or get you laid, how it can possess you. I wanted to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Now I am just grateful for the gifts that enabled me to move some people and, at times, to have some dignity among the papers that litter my days.
Looking back, I should have become a psychopathic killer. At least that is what some who know of my childhood think. But as the poet Robert Bly told an audience of writers a couple of years ago: “Nobody gives a damn that you had a rotten childhood. Don’t write poems about it. Tell it to your shrink.” (I don’t have a shrink and I despise them and believe that psychiatry is one of the great evils of the 20th Century. It makes people think only of me, me, me or overmedicates them or imprisons them, often wrongly. Perhaps I missed my true calling, since there are a lot of people I would passionately like to see dead….but I have only been involved in the deaths of two of them…and both were in self-defense.)
Okay, so I had a rotten childhood, moving all about the country (eleven schools before I finished high school, always the outsider…i.e. the Yankee in backwoods redneck Virginia, the Eastern ghetto kid among the Mormons in Utah), never learning how to have a friend until I was several years into college, the eldest son of two very abusive parents (both psychologically and physically) who made me feel worthless. (My mother called my third wife shortly after our marriage and said: “Oh, you saint and poor thing…I seriously considered having him committed when he was six.”)…a physical coward…(at the age of five in the slums of Chicago’s south side, I was picked on by an older kid, while I was playing in a vacant lot. I grabbed a piece lead pipe and cracked his skull. I was beaten so badly and so often for it, that I was afraid to fight anyone…until I found football at the age of fourteen. On the football field, I learned it was okay to beat the shit out of everyone and I became a high-school football star and found courage again.). But I was still out of place…unwanted both in my community and in my home… And somehow, that terrible loneliness led me a few years later to poetry…
Oh, yes, there was the mysticism. One night, standing on the back porch of a house in the Virginia woods, talking with a girl I didn’t care about, I heard the trees talking to each other…in tree language…the way trees talk…and I couldn’t tell anyone about it…no one would believe me…so I just put it away inside me…to be joined by other mystical events to wonder at, and that led me to believe that whatever…whoever… I was, I must be from outer space and could, therefore, bear being the mysterious being I was meant to be (although, to this date, at the age of almost 75, I still haven’t figured it out)…and instead of just feeling my own pain….I seemed to feel every body else’s pain…. So I don’t write poems or anything else about my lousy childhood.
I find that I can only write out of love or compassion for the human condition. When I’m angry or hate, I can’t write at all. My aims have always been somehow to find love, to learn to forgive the world although I think that generally man is a savage beast and that there are only a few people worth knowing, and to try to help people, to write poetry or fiction to repay the great writers who helped give me something to live for…to somehow do some good, even though the odds are greatly against that…to save some people’s lives (which I have done on occasion…112 people trapped in a church during the fighting in Lebanon)…to survive despite all the pain (the tree has no right to reject the lightning)…so much for philosophy! Except I do have one overriding morality: That is to try not to hurt anyone. We cannot help hurting people along the way. But to try not to…that is the ultimate stretch and reach.
I was born in Topeka, Kansas from an old Kansas/Missouri family of farmers, thieves, merchants, murderers…just plain folk trying to get by…and I left there at the age of one during the depths of the Great Depression in 1934 and moved to the upper peninsula of Michigan…and then at four to Chicago…then Pittsburgh…etc…and I am dying here in New York City….still writing, but no longer able to act (or barely even walk) because of my infirmities…and I have had one hell of a great life…and I believe I am reincarnated from an ancient Greek warrior/poet named Polycastor, whom I recalled in a dream 40 years ago…and that I am going on to some place else in some other time…in some continuum…or am already there and just remembering back to now…and perhaps my mother was right and I am truly insane…but I function so well and love my children…and still care about all the women I’ve loved….and all the friends… even those who betrayed me…I still love them… Being able to care and dream… even after all the terror… that is the great gift…and sometimes I can almost still hear the trees talking…each to each…and to me.
DS: Before we get into the meat of the interview, you are one of only two of my interviewees (the other being poet James Emanuel) whom I knew before this interview. Like Emanuel, you actually contacted me several years back via email, and we’ve emailed and conversed on the telephone several times a year since. Let me just open things up with these two, admittedly self-serving, queries: first, how did you find out about Cosmoetica, and what prompted you to contact me? Secondly, as you were once in the magazine/publishing industry, why do you think that industry ignores writers of quality- like me and those featured on Cosmoetica, who have a proven audience, and instead publishes only those writers who have gone through the creative writing mills?
GD: I came across your website by accident in another poet’s e-mail about eight years ago, went there, sent you some poems which you were kind enough to appreciate and publish, and I enjoy your various e-mail conversations and know that, even when I strongly disagree with you, you are always passionately telling the truth as you see it with no bullshit…that’s important. Life is too short for bullshit.
Regarding the publishing industry, the quality of education in America has gotten so bad that there are few people around who know how to read a poem or a good short story… so they feel reassured by the credentials (so-called) of those who come out of the writing mills (which have become one of the great curses foisted on literature in America). Honestly, I really think that very few editorial people in the U.S. today really know how to read a poem. Editors are worse than the normal person, because the editors have been trained with false standards, while the average reader just comes to the poem and tries to understand it without prejudices.
DS: We’ll
return to your ideas on the arts later in the interview. Let us now delve into
who George Dickerson is. You have several online bios at numerous sites, and
your careers are listed as an actor and poet. Yet, you’ve written a play,
numerous works of short fiction, worked as a United Nations diplomat in Lebanon
in the 1970s, and were an editor at Time magazine. How exactly did
you fall into each of these professions? In my real world life, outside of the
arts, I have worked many jobs, but no career, yet all of them are in the same
general fields: retail, wholesale, some telecom work, etc. Yet your jobs have
been so diverse. Is there a single thread running through all of them, with
skills learnt in one field that are easily transferable to another? If so, what
are those skills and which field was your least and most enjoyable?
GD: Most of the jobs I took, I took to eat or pay to raise my children, until I got into the editorial world. I always had to work to survive, being born in 1933 in the depths of the Depression to father with a law degree but who had to sell toilet paper door to door or chip ice for five cents an hour. My parents were too poor to feed me, so they fed me home brew and I weighed forty pounds when I was one year old. Then they tried to suffocate me to death with a pillow because they had no food. (This is a memory that was verified years later by my mother’s brother.) I started work at the age of four, going with my father down to the docks in Chicago to get fresh fruit and vegetables to sell door to door from the back of an old truck he had borrowed. At the age of five and six I sold magazine subscriptions door to door and gave the money to my parents so they would feed me. Shoveled snow, mowed lawns, did whatever work kids could get. At the age of ten, I picked cherries and strawberries with migrant workers in Utah, until my fingers bled and I was caught eating too much of the fruit myself. In high school and college summers, I did a lot of hard labor, digging ditches, laying macadam at 325 degrees off the truck, breaking up concrete with a jackhammer, working in typewriter and gun factories, working as a waiter at night, 19 hours a day…anything I could do to work my way through college…to supplement my scholarship at Yale. After Yale, I worked a few months in a nursery, learning about plants, worked my way around the U.S., even painted a barn and killed rattlesnakes on a ranch in western Oregon, then had the worst job I ever had, selling women’s shoes in a shoe store in Los Angeles (“Stroke my legs a little, will you, honey?”) I learned that most women go into shoe stores just to be touched.
I learned how to work hard and long and never to complain about it, just be grateful you had a job. I taught school for a year and a half in Vermont, then moved to New York with a wife and baby and another baby on the way, so I could read poetry with some of the Beat poets (Gregory Corso, Dianne di Prima, Ted Joans, etc.) at the Gaslight Café in 1959, working at the same time in the advertising department of the Home Insurance Company, where I got fired because I could do a week’s work in half a day. So I got bored and kept calling in sick and fell off the chair laughing when the head of personnel fired me. (I was just so relieved at being able to escape that place.) Oh, I was in the U.S. Army from December of 1953 to the fall of 1954, when I left college temporarily…I got honorably discharged for medical reasons.
But I was 27 before I got my first job in publishing in the summer of 1960…working in the production department of the Macmillan Publishing Company. It was a hot August day with no air conditioning and as I sat down for the interview, my threadbare grey flannel suit stuck to my right leg. The pant leg split open from mid-thigh to mid-calf and I calmly reach down and pulled the pant leg together. The editor said: “You really need this job badly, don’t you? “ (I was supporting my family and was living separately myself in abandoned buildings and some days had only a dime in my pocket.) And I nodded and said I would be the best person he had and he hired me. A few months later, a résumé I had dropped off at “The New Yorker” paid off and they hired me to be a fact checker in their editorial department. (I had also done some free-lance editing and writing for some junk magazines to have some stuff to put on my résumé…and I had won the Yale fiction prize my senior year there for a short story I had written about being locked up in the Army’s psychiatric ward… that story, “Chico” later appeared in The Best American Short Stories of 1963.) Now I was really in the magazine world. I got fired from The New Yorker for forgetting to come into work on an odd Sunday because I had gotten into a ferocious argument with my second wife (an original jet-setter and associate fashion editor for Mademoiselle.) Unfortunately, the editor that Sunday was one I had told to “go fuck yourself” after he had thrown a bottle of India ink on another fact checker’s white suit. But my writing was getting known and I was getting known and I was immediately hired to become managing editor of Cavalier magazine when it was the chief competitor of Playboy. I now knew many top writers and agents and Cavalier wanted me to upgrade the literary side of the magazine….which I did.
I was jet-setting around the world, skiing in Zermatt, Switzerland…interviewing François Truffaut and a stripper for the Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris, sharing a Fire Island house with some of the top models…(Veruschka once asked me to run off with her) following my wife around as she discovered and made popular the Peppermint Lounge in New York, and, as she got high shooting up amphetamines from Dr. Feelgood (the one who supplied the Kennedys), hating it all while I wrote more short stories and got my poetry published in The New Yorker and Mademoiselle. And then Cavalier started doing badly and I got fired for being “over qualified.” (That’s what they told unemployment..) I was scapegoated by the editor who got fired himself shortly thereafter.
Now I was well known enough as a writer to get free-lance writing jobs from “The Saturday Evening Post,” “Esquire” (never published), “Cosmopolitan,” etc. I split from my second wife, and one of her lovers, a young, rich jet-setter blew his brains out in Denver, so I got interviewed by a detective, because I was the only one with a motive and his prominent family didn’t want to accept his suicide. So I divorced my second wife (no children), remarried and went off on my honeymoon to Hydra, Greece to spend some time with my closest friend, Leonard Cohen. (It was 1965, the summer that Leonard decided to stop writing novels and become a singer/songwriter.) When my third wife and I came back from Greece, I discovered I was famous enough as a writer that I was being offered a lot of money to write a novel about the world of the fashion models. (I had known some of them intimately.) I accepted and wrote myself into a creative writer’s block, (More on this later.) Meanwhile, Scholastic Magazines decided it wanted to revive Story, the famous literary magazine which had discovered Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, etc. so they hired me to become editor in chief. The first issue was great, devoted to the new violence in America…this was 1967-68…(And I flew to Chicago to have a private interview with Cassius Clay about his views of violence America.., this was when he had his title taken away for not going into the draft). The magazine so horrified some of the school systems, particularly California’s, (which bought Scholastic’s other magazines) that Scholastic was forced to shut it down. Hell, I was becoming really good at getting fired or destroying magazines. (The rule in publishing was that, if you weren’t fired at least twice, you weren’t any good.)
So Time magazine hired me to be their top fiction and poetry reviewer. At first I was in heaven. I was getting paid to read books and write whatever I wanted about them. I wasn’t that interested in reviewing the famous writers or attacking some of their lesser work, I preferred discovering new writers and helping to put them on the literary map… John Irving, Cormac McCarthy, Robert Stone, Don DeLillo, and many of the other well known writers today. Knopf tried to hire me away to be one their top editors; I stupidly refused. The problem was I couldn’t write any of my own fiction or poetry, and then I got a new editor who thought he could rewrite my reviews. He couldn’t, and I told him his own writing sounded like it came off the back of cereal boxes. I walked out of the “Books” section, demanded to be assigned to another section, wrote in most of the other sections of the magazine and ended up in world news for the last year-and-a-half there. I wrote the first cover story on the “troubles” in Northern Ireland. The 60-70-hour weeks were getting grueling and I was getting old fast. I forced my firing (April of 1972). I was now an expert at that. I wanted the huge severance pay so I could go to the race track and play the horses every day and stay out all night playing poker. I started to make a living as a professional gambler.
But one day, shortly before Christmas, my young son came home from pre-school and bragged that he had told his teacher that my profession was “a card player.” That humiliated me. I had to do something else…and I was burnt out on the New York publishing scene. So I submitted my résumé to two jobs advertised in the “New York Times.” This was a huge turning point in my life. The famous young writer, editor, was on the run, anything to get out of New York. I got hired for both jobs…the first was as Press Secretary and speech writer for U.S. Congressman Robert Steele (during the Watergate scandal), and the second one (which came four months later) was to become Head of Press and Publications for UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) at its headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon.
I
went to Washington, D.C., got my fill of it fast, but learned about the corrupt
machinations of the U.S. government and the coming oil crisis.
(Steele was a straight shooter, Nixon wasn’t, and some of the
congressmen were fruit cakes… like J.J. Pickle from Texas who used to jump out
of his office door at me as I passed, pulling out a little plastic pickle that
he would squeak at me and say: “Hi, I’m J.J.
Have a pickle!”) I decided
I preferred doing something on the world stage, particularly in the hotbed of
the Middle East. So, off I
went (with my family) to change my life forever…feeling mystically that I was
going to the Middle East as part of my destiny to save lives.
The thread through all these publishing jobs was learning to be professional as a writer and editor and learning how to make things (particularly) magazines work, and, of course, figuring out really creative ways to get fired without ruining my future prospects. And I hoped desperately that somehow the changes would bring back my fiction and poetry. I was wrong. The young, brilliant rising superstar writer (as recognized by the industry) had become a few crumpled pages in the wastebasket of time.
The career as an actor happened when I came back from the war in Lebanon with a lot of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and found myself unable to write at all, barely able to function, in fact suicidal, unable to work in an office. I started taking acting classes at the age of 43 at H-B Studio, the professional acting school, just to have something to do…and that led to my success as a stage, TV and film actor. My years of writing and creating fictional characters made it much easier for me to understand the characters of other writers in their plays and screen plays.
I guess, the one thread that leads through most of my better jobs was the love of and power of the use of words.
DS: Let me go
one by one through your careers. Let’s start with poetry. I’ve read that you
studied poetry at Yale University with Robert Penn Warren. Most well known for All
The King’s Men, he actually won two Pulitzer Prizes for poetry, and
that at a time when Pulitzers were awarded more for merit. He’s actually a
good poet. Were you friends with the man, or was he a mentor? What specifics did
you learn from him re: poetry or fiction?
GD: “Red” Warren became the country’s first Poet Laureate. I studied about poetry with him and Cleanth Brooks, the pillars of the New Criticism. They taught that only the poems mattered…not the biography of the poets or the culture. Then I applied to Warren’s small fiction writing class, submitting one of my short stories. I studied fiction writing with him my senior year. We corresponded after I left Yale and he read my first novel and gave me critical feedback on it, saying it lacked the sine qua non of a novel, a strong narrative line. He was right, of course. I published parts of the novel as stories. Red Warren and I kept in touch for a few years and he always encouraged me in my work. He told the Guggenheim Foundation that they should keep their eyes on me for a possible future grant. He was more a mentor than a friend. He helped strengthen in me some of the fiction craft elements that I originally learned in the rigorous writing course at Yale called “Daily Themes.” Unfortunately, (or fortunately), I never showed him any of my poetry, which I was shy about at that time. If I had, I’m sure he would have been of help to me in that area. He was a lovely person, generous with his time. Our loss of contact was my fault.
DS: Warren is
one of many famous people you’ve known throughout your life- a fact I’ll
later touch upon, and one which casts you in a sort of Forrest Gump-ish
type role. But, sticking with poetry, when did you start writing it, and how
long have you written. I ask because we’ve spoken of your several decades long
‘writer’s block.’ How did such a thing occur, and how did your block
resolve itself?
GD: I have been blessed (or cursed) with having gotten to know many famous people in my time. Once I won the Yale fiction prized and then started working in the world of the arts and journalism, I was living and working in those worlds of the famous, so it was not at all a Forrest Gump type thing. I was viewed by them as a rising literary star and I belonged in their circles. I met Leonard Cohen in a comparative literature class at Columbia University’s graduate school. He was sitting behind me when I opened at letter from e. e. cummings praising my short story “Chico.” Cohen and I became close friends, sharing our writing every night. Leonard introduced me to the Black actor Roscoe Lee Browne, who also became a close friend and who introduced me to many of the top Black artists of the time, such as Leontyne Price. Through Roscoe, I met Edna St. Vincent Millay’s sister, Norma Ellis, and spent many weekend at the Millay estate in Austerlitz, New York. I also became a member of John Farrar’s writers group (John Farrar of Farrar, Strauss…later Farrar, Strauss and Giroux), where I became friends with Mark Strand, later to become Poet Laureate.
Regarding the poetry: I really didn’t know anything about poetry until I entered Yale. I was mostly a jock, having been on the varsity football, basketball and baseball teams in high school, with my only real intellectual interest in science, and that helped me, as a Westinghouse Talent Search regional finalist, to win the Yale Club of Virginia’s one scholarship to Yale. But when I got to Yale, I was so culturally backward (my parents were anti-cultural) that I had never read any real literature, read any poetry or even heard the name of William Shakespeare. I thought that Mickey Spillane was great writing. Yale wanted to put me in a remedial English program, which I refused. The first book I read at Yale was “The Great Gatsby,” which blew my mind and changed my life. I took that book into class and plaintively asked the professor if there were any other books like that. He looked at me as if I were someone from outer space….after all, his other students were all from elite New England prep schools. Because of “The Great Gatsby,” I changed my major from chemistry to English. I encountered the poetry of Chaucer, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and started writing my own first poetry…at least 100 poems that freshman year. After all, I still didn’t have a friend or someone else to talk to, so I talked to myself in my poetry. It was all very formalist poetry and all embarrassingly bad. (One of my roommates that freshman year was the fat, class comic named Harvey. I made the mistake of leaving one of my poems on top of my desk. Harvey found it, climbed up on my desk, with poem pressed against his forehead and recited mockingly from it: “Oh, Cloud! Oh, Cloud!” Unfortunately, the humiliation didn’t deter me.)
I later discovered Rilke, Lorca, Yeats, Stevens, the great French poets… I didn’t write a really good poem until 14 years later, since mostly I was trying to be a fiction writer. Leonard Cohen, visiting my apartment in Greenwich Village in 1964, read the poem, “The Coming on of Night,” and said, “You’ve finally done it.” That poem was published in The New Yorker, and got a lot of attention. And soon I was publishing poems in Mademoiselle and other magazines. I ran into Norman Mailer in an elevator and he praised my poetry…I was surprised that he even knew it.
As I said earlier, I came back from half-a-year on Hydra, Greece, where I visited Leonard Cohen and wrote more poetry. I was broke, with a new wife, needed work and my agent, Carl Brandt of Brandt & Brandt arranged a large book contract for me with New American Library/World…a novel about the world of the fashion model. It wasn’t exactly selling out because I had contemplated writing about my times in the early 60s in that jet set fashion world. The problem was I was not used to showing first drafts of my fiction to anyone. They were terrible…a springboard to the much better writing of the second draft. I agreed to hand in the number of words they wanted on such and such a date as long as the editors didn’t comment on it. They agreed…but unfortunately, that was not put into writing in the contract. When the time came for me to turn in 15,000 words, I turned in 25, 000. When 30,000 were due, I turned in 60, 000. I got back a seven-page single-spaced letter from the editor. It was a vicious attack, along the lines of: “Does George Dickerson think when he sits down to write? There’s not one good scene, not one believable or well conceived character….’ I got drunk with my agent. They had violated their agreement and wanted their money back. I tried beginning the book over and it was still lousy. I started again….writing even fewer pages. And finally I froze and couldn’t write a word of it. That started the creative writer’s block both in fiction and poetry. From 1967 to 1984, I was unable to write fiction. From 1967 to 1996, I was unable to write poetry. I lost that huge central arc of my career that should have made me a very accomplished and more famous creative writer.
It was not until my wife and I were leaving Hollywood in 1984, that I suddenly found myself writing “The Man Who Loved Butterflies,” the first story in all those years. It was a beautiful, powerful story, which was the only piece of literary fiction published by “Penthouse” (Dec. 1985) that year. Still the poetry would not come. Then late one night about 3:00 in the morning in January 1996, I got out of bed, went into my kitchen and, without intending to, found myself writing a poem, “Relativity,” on the back of an envelope. I started crying. My wife heard me, got out of bed and came to console me. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Nothing,” I said. I’m crying because I’m happy…I just wrote a poem.” A flood of poems followed, much of it far better poetry than I had written in my earlier years, poems that won me a number of literary prizes and which make up more than half of “Selected Poems: 1959-1999.”
DS: I first came
across your writing from your Selected Poems, 1959-1999, published
by Rattapallax Press, in 2000. Frankly, I had never heard of you as an actor,
and reading of your career in that role, was very skeptical as to the quality.
Yet, there are quite a few good poems, and some excellent ones, as well- some
which are featured on Cosmoetica. However, poetry is larded with bad celebrity
poets from a singer like Jewel, to actors Leonard Nimoy and Richard Thomas (who
played John-Boy on The Waltons), to even playwrights like
Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill, and many others. Why do you think so
many celebrities think they can be poets? A friend of mine, Jason
Sanford, opines that people see poems that are only 8 or 10 lines long, and
think, ‘I can do that.’ And because it is not a long thing, like a novel,
and only requires a pen and paper, and not paint, brushes, canvases, nor
expensive film or photographic equipment, it’s seen as something ‘anyone can
do.’ Do you agree?
GD: I regret that some people consider me to be a celebrity actor who decided he could write poetry. Actually, I was a somewhat celebrated poet and fiction writer who later became somewhat of a celebrated actor. I think writing good poetry is very hard to do. I sometimes work for months on a poem. Other celebrity actors write poetry, paint, do sculpture, because they are artists. As actors, they don’t get enough work and their artistic impulses get frustrated and start to dry up so they desperately turn to other art forms to try to fulfill themselves. Whether celebrity actors or not, most people don’t realize how demanding the craft of poetry it is. They see so much tripe published as poetry, they feel that they could certainly write as well or better than that. And some of them can, but it still isn’t any good. And remember, an artist is an artist. e.e. cummings was a painter. David Lynch was a painter who got into films. Each separate art form is a difficult consuming craft in its own right. Even stage and film acting are somewhat different crafts. Excellence in one doesn’t mean excellence in the other. But the artistic urge is the same. I knew a TV and film actor named Fred Beers in Hollywood. He made his living acting, but he was also a sculptor… and I think he was a better sculptor than an actor, but he was not recognized for his sculpture. I am lucky to have been somewhat successful in several crafts.
DS: Yet, despite
its ease in being able to physically do, I believe there is a tacit
acknowledgement that it is, by far, the highest of the arts, for when people
speak in superlatives about art, or even in other fields, they always use
comparisons to poetry- things as ‘pure poetry,’ ‘poetry in motion,’ or
‘poetic.’ Do you think there is some cognitive dissonance between the tacit
acceptance of poetry as the highest of the arts and people’s idea that it is
the easiest art to do? If so, from where does this spring and is there a way to,
perhaps, dissuade bad poets from clogging up the Internet and wasting their
lives?
GD: I don’t know whether poetry is the highest of the arts. Maybe so. I do believe that no poem is greater than Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony” or Bach’s “Chaconne” or Michelangelo’s “David.” And no matter what language you speak or read in, those great art works are accessible to you, while the poetry of another language is not as accessible, even if you have some understanding of that language. But poetry is certainly one of the great arts. I have tried my hand in most of the arts. I studied painting briefly at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris. I wasn’t any good at it. I sang for a while…I had a good voice, but I wasn’t really a musician. Acting is the toughest of the arts. The more you know and the better you become, the harder it is. That’s why Olivier got stage fright in his 50s. Painting goes back to the caveman days. I was lucky enough to view the cave paintings of animals and hunting at Lascaux, France, before they were shut off from the public. They are haunting. Still, poetry has been more central to the advance of civilization, probably because it was used to carry forth our tribal histories when we did not yet have access to writing or a press to read. The clan storyteller kept alive the trials, tribulations and heroics of the clan members. Rhyme and other poetic devices were used to make the stories more memorable. So poetry was central to our common good, to our sharing of experiences, to our early attempts to grapple with the mysteries, the terrors of the night…the wonder of the stars, the possibility of god or gods. Music and dance became adjuncts to that…visual arts, sculpture and painting were developed to describe the gods, to formalize religions…to use religion to control the populations… But even in that formalization, words were necessary to convey the rituals which bound us together in belief…and the highest use of those words was poetic.
In ancient Persian poetry, the “I” was not the poet, but god or his prophet. The “I” didn’t really become personal until Rousseau and Descartes made the personal “I” important…and then it started to infect and degrade poetry. Freud didn’t help…he made the self all important. (I am not trying to pontificate here… these are just my beliefs and observations.) The more personal the “I” in art became, the more debased the art has become, and the more just anyone felt he could be a poet. After all, it isn’t about the craft any more…”it’s about my feelings and my feelings are all important.” This has also become the central teaching of most of the writing programs… and, from my viewpoint, that is dreadfully wrong. I personally don’t write poetry to express my feelings. For me, a poem is a cup I create for the reader to drink from, to savor the taste of his own feelings, to experience the experiences of others. I try to think of myself as the ancient tribal story teller…I don’t always live up to that goal. No, there is no way to discourage the bad poets, particularly because most of the publications are devoted to their kind of work and reward it with prizes and fame. This is not sour grapes on my part. I learned long ago not to care about what all those people were doing. I write because I love poetry and because I have a debt to the great artists who made my life bearable and filled it sometimes with joy and beauty… I’m not comparing myself to them. I am only out here as a lonely “keeper of the flame.”
DS: I mentioned
your poems being published by Rattapallax Press. You were one of its founders,
correct? How does one get involved in such a venture?
GD: Ram Devineni, a young poet and filmmaker, and Michael Graves, a poet, knew of my poetry and my background in publishing. They also knew that I didn’t think much of the other literary journals. They asked me to join them in creating a magazine to publish poetry by better poets who weren’t getting published. I agreed as long as I could have total artistic control, which I got. I designed the magazine, chose most of the poetry and fiction and created the first four issues. I also picked the name, “Rattapallax,” from an onomatopoetic word coined by Wallace Stevens to describe the sound of thunder (in his poem “Frogs Eat Butterflies, Snakes Eat Frogs, Hogs Eat Snakes, Men Eat Hogs.” My own work (whether poetry or fiction) that appeared in the magazine was chosen by the other editors and Ram, the publisher. When the journal started to get some fame and stature because of its quality, Ram decided to create the Press to publish books of poetry, along with CDs of the poets reading from their work, as we had in the journal itself. This was Ram’s innovation in the industry. I had no part or editorial input in the book part of Rattapallax Press, although I could have. (I did not have the time or energy. To do the first four issues of the magazine took me forty hours a week for two years, for which I received no pay. My recompense was the pleasure of doing it…my desire to help discover which good poets might be out there and give them a platform for their work.) Ram chose me to be one of the first poets published by his book press.
DS: Yet, if one
looks at their website now, it’s
just another hipster wannabe press publishing reams of garbage, and even worse,
abandoning the written word almost entirely in many cases. What has gone wrong,
and how does what they’ve become differ from the initial vision?
GD:
Ram and I had a falling out over a number of things.
I chose to resign rather than compromise my standards. Chief among those standards was to find the best work being
done without caring about the author’s name or past achievements or
recognitions. I rejected a number
of famous writers because their work wasn’t as good as the work of some
unknowns. “Rattapallax” was my
baby, my last gift to the publishing world, which
I had to abandon. I knew
that what Ram and subsequent editors (not including Judith Werner, whom I had
trained and hoped to make editor in chief) would do to the magazine. They would degrade its original vision and eventually destroy
it. (It’s the kind of thing that
cost me some of my other publishing jobs, such as “Story” magazine.) I
regret the loss.
DS: Let’s speak of acting next. In looking over your acting credits at several sites it seems you last acted a decade ago. Why have you stopped working; was it by choice, or just the roles dried up? And how did you transition from your career in diplomacy to acting?
GD: I didn’t intend to lose my acting career. In the year-and-a-half leading up to my involvement with “Rattapallax” (in the summer of 1998) I had major leading roles in three independent films, “Broken Giant,” “Ties to Rachel” and “Stranger in the Kingdom.” None of those three received wide, general release. That hurt my career. My involvement with “Rattapallax” and the world of poetry became an obsession and I did not go out to Hollywood (from New York) to pursue my film career properly. I spent the next two years totally devoted to my own poetry and “Rattapallax.” Some agents, casting directors, and directors actually thought I had died. Then my severe spinal problems started and I became physically unable to spend the 12 hours a day necessary to perform in film or TV. Those problems have increased and I am today pretty much a cripple. So my acting career basically ended in 1998. I got involved in professional acting in 1977. I came back from the war in late 1976 and had the PTSD I talked about earlier. I had acted at Yale as an undergraduate, and dabbled in the amateur theatre over the years. I was even cast as the lead character (although I am neither fat or Jewish) in an amateur production in Beirut of Neil Simon’s “The Last of the Red Hot Lovers.” The theatre was blown up a week before opening night. So we did a one-shot performance of the third act on the back porch of the dean of agriculture’s house on the campus of the American University of Beirut (AUB) as grenades exploded in the near distance and planes roared overhead as they landed at Beirut’s airport. So, I long had the itch. After the war, unable to write or work at a normal job, I started taking acting classes at the professional acting school, H-B Studio, in New York. It was just something to fill my time with, something to keep me alive. I started doing off-Broadway plays, one after another for two years, got some work in soap operas. Then, after a six-month stint as the head of the Mafia from New Orleans on “Search for Tomorrow,” they killed off my character. The next day, my wife and I packed up and drove out to Hollywood. I got my first job in TV there in “A Man Called Sloane” in three weeks, then two other jobs, then got hired for the recurring role of Police Commander Swanson in the first season of “Hill St. Blues” and my career took off. My friends, who knew and loved my writing, hated my becoming an actor…so did my third wife who had been with me in Beirut…so I married an actress (Suzanne Hartman) whom I met in a class at H-B Studio. Acting helped save my life.
DS:
You are a member of the Screen Actor’s Guild, as well the Academy Of Motion
Picture Arts And Sciences, and therefore get to vote on the Academy Awards,
getting many screener DVDs, etc. What other unions are you involved in?
GD: I am a member of SAG (Screen Actor’s Guild) AFTRA (TV actor’s union), Actors’ Equity (stage actors’ union), the Dramatists’ Guild, the Author’s Guild, a number of poetry organizations (including the Academy of American Poets), as well as AMPAS.
DS:
Please go into some detail about what a typical Oscar season is like, how many
films you watch, how you decide what is good and bad, etc. Many people would
like to know what that process is like. Also, what are some of the worst films,
actors, directors, and other fields that you’ve seen nominated, since you’ve
been involved in the process, and are there any votes for a category that, in
retrospect, you regret?
GD: Being a member of the Academy (AMPAS) is both an honor and a burden. It is very difficult to become a member. You gain membership by being nominated for an Academy Award, or by election by your peers. The latter method, by which I entered, is arduous. You have to have significant roles in a number of movies (not TV or stage) of quality. You must be nominated by a member of your branch (actor’s branch in my case) and seconded by another member. Then the leaders of your branch must vote on you. Then the governors of the whole Academy must vote on you. All of them most know of your work and approve of you. You cannot apply. The first time I was nominated, I was turned down. The second time, I was elected. You are elected for life. There are only about 1,350 members of the Actor’s Branch. of the Academy. (This is compared to 120,000 members of the Screen Actors’ Guild and thousands of other film actors.) To have my work recognized by my peers, starting out as I did in my mid-forties, is quite an honor. And I take my duties, which include nominating and voting on the Academy Awards, seriously.
The process of nominating and voting for the Oscars is widely misrepresented, often giving the impression that awards are manipulated by cliques or influenced unduly by studios etc. Yes, there can be influences, such as the predeliction towards rewarding previous winners, or rewarding an actor because too many of the Academy members feel that I’ll vote for this actor this year because he should have won it last year. This can actually be a drawback, with the Academy not wanting to give an actor too many awards…but this is not a desired part of the process. I believe that most of the Academy members take their votes seriously and do it with honesty and diligence.
I’ll describe the process. Most Academy members, especially those in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and London, get to see free screenings of most of the eligible quality films throughout the year. There are about 300 of these English language films, made eligible by being shown in theatres for a certain number of days during the year. Additionally, films showing in the fall and winter in the regular theatres give free passes to Academy members to see the films in their theatres. Plus, the studios send out free VHS or DVD copies of their films (the ones that the studios are behind) to the Academy members to view in their homes. The studios also set up special screenings in screening rooms in some of the major cities. About 80 to 100 feature films fall into this category. This process starts in October. The nominations are sent in to the Academy by its members in January.
Voting members of the about 7,000 total membership in all branches (directors, cinematographers, etc.) are allowed to make five nominations for Best Picture and nominate for achievements in their own branch. An actor nominates for Best Picture, and up to five nominations for each acting award: Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress. It is the nominator’s choice whether to vote for the nominee as Best Actor or Best Supporting Actor (or both). You nominate in order of your preference, with the first position given the weighted, highest rating. The nominations are sent to an auditing house anonymously. To get a nomination, a nominee must get at least one first place nominating vote, plus be in the top five of all weighted. nominations. After the nominations are tallied they are sent out to all voting Academy members to be voted on. While I nominate for only Best Picture and Best Actors, etc., I can vote in all categories…including costume, editing, sound, script, etc. (19) categories.. The Academy then sets up special screenings for all the pictures which have nominations in any category, as do the studios. In early February, we send in our votes, which again are tabulated by an auditing house. The Awards Ceremonies are held in late February in Los Angeles, with Awards dinners in New York, London, etc. I have been to both the big TV production ceremony in Los Angeles, but in my 19 years of membership, my wife and I have mostly attended the dinner in New York, where we cam eat., mingle with other members, and watch on TV. During the heat of the awards season, I see about 80 to 100 films. I watch some of them two or three times, especially if I am voting on a film that hast a lot of nominations….so I can watch the craft in those categories. I do not vote in a category if I haven’t seen all the nominated films in that category.
Voting on foreign and documentary films is different. The nominations limited by committees who have spent all year judging the films put forward. (A foreign country may propose only one of its films for nomination.) After the nominations are made, Academy members may vote in those categories if they sign in to see the films at Academy movie sites or vow that they have seen a couple of them in public theatres. They must prove that they have seen all five nominees.
The process, unfortunately, allows for people who are not necessarily qualified to vote for the best actor, the best, editor, etc. They may be experts in their craft but not have enough expertise in the other crafts. This allows for some awards that I disagree with, but I would rather have the system as it is than not be allowed to vote in the other craft categories.
It would be inappropriate for me to name actors or films which I don’t think should have been nominated. There are always some each year, but by and large, I am satisfied with the outcome.
My disappointment is usually with Best Picture. For example, my top choices for Best Picture in 2007 did not get nominated. Some of the lesser choices did. At other times, a film will win best picture because two other films (either of which should have won) split much of the vote, while the third picture had a hard core band of supporters that stuck with that film and made it a winner on a small plurality of the vote.
And sometimes the vote is influence by the hoopla surrounding the winners of earlier awards ceremonies…such as the Golden Globes. The Academy actually moved its process up a month, from the end of March to the end of February in an effort to cut down on this influence.
In terms of how I myself vote, I choose the actor or other worker on the film by how well I feel they fulfill the craft involved, how their use of their craft added to or helped fulfill the needs of the film. For example, I vote for the cinematographer not by the beauty of his shots but by how well his shots tell the story and enhance the artistry of the whole film.
I heard many people complain about the nominations for Sofia Coppola’s film, “Lost In Translation,” which actually won for Best Screenplay in 2003. They found the film incredibly boring and felt that there were many more deserving films and scripts, etc. This is a case where some Academy members felt the politics of personal influence came into play. There are also cases where a film or performance may be ignored because the members may have a quarrel with a director or actor, etc. I believe this may have been the case with Oliver Stone’s “Nixon.” There have been campaigns against Oliver Stone in Hollywood (not necessarily connected with the Academy). I thought the film might have deserved a nomination and I thought that Anthony Hopkins gave a towering performance as Nixon and should have at least been nominated. Most of my disappointments come not with those who win but with those who were left out of the nominations, usually I think because not enough people saw their performances before the nominations were due.
However, by and large, I think the Academy does its best, both ethically and artistically, to reward the right people for their work.
DS: What are your thoughts on the recent Writer’s Strike, by the WGA, and how that affected the Oscars and other awards shows?
GD: I don’t think the strikes affected that much the Academy Awards. It did demolish the Golden Globes. The strikes were necessary. I am just hoping that SAG and the producers are able to come to terms, because another strike would be devastating. Many films have been put on hold until the situation with SAG is settled, not wanting to shut down production and have a strike disrupt it.
DS: It seems
your only recurring role was as a secondary character on the 1980s cop series, Hill
Street Blues. Not a fan of cop shows, I watched maybe an episode or two
of that show. What was your role, how large was it, and was it a good
experience? You also appeared in cameo roles on such shows as Three’s
Company, Charlie’s Angels, Little House On The
Prairie, and LA Law. Are there any memorable anecdotes you
have from such times? I also note an appearance in the late 1980s sitcom Sledge
Hammer! I actually liked that show and David Rasche. Any tales from that
stint?
GD: Re: “Hill Street Blues:” I was auditioning for a one-day small role of a cop checking in to HQ from a payphone. When I went in to audition, Steve Bochko, the top producer/writer said he had “bad news.” The part had just been cut. However, would I read for this other role. They gave me the sides (the pages) for a four-line part and as I was taking the script out to study it, Greg Hoblitt, the other producer stopped me and said. “I’m sorry, but you have a string on your lapel, and it will just distract me.” There was indeed a small white piece of string on the lapel of my dark suit. He got up to remove the string. I said, “But my mother gave me that string.” He took the string and put it on the coffee table between me and the producers and said, “It will be right here, so you can have it back when you leave.” After I auditioned, I picked up the string and put it back on my lapel. That bit of business helped me to get the recurring role of Police Commander Dave Swanson…Capt. Furillo’s boss. I was hired to be in the last six regular shows of the original 12 shows of the season. Some of the scenes were very substantial; one was a seven-page continuous scene (almost unheard of in TV). I got fired from the show in part because I raised the issue of my billing (where my name was placed in the end credits). That was a no-no in Hollywood. Only agents discuss that kind of thing with casting directors or producers. It was a bitter lesson for someone new to the protocols of the industry. Actually, they did me a favor, because if I had become too identified with the role and the show, I probably would not have gotten the part of Detective John Williams in David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet,” a part that helped boost my status as a film actor.
“Sledge Hammer” was fun to do, but filming got behind, ran late and cost me a better part in a cop show set in Boston. I couldn’t get on a plane soon enough to be there for the next day’s shooting.
“Little House on the Prairie” was a wonderful experience. Michael Landon ran the nicest, calmest set because as he said, “I have to, otherwise the little kids would just freeze up at any sign of upset or tension.” I played the part of a farmer who wanted to adopt only one of two brothers. In one of my scenes, I had a long monologue directed toward Michael Landon’s character in a courtroom scene. In the first take of the master shot with all seven characters, I went through the whole monologue before Michael (who was also directing) said “cut.” He turned to me and said, “George, we’ll have to shoot that over from the top. I should have stopped you right away, but you were so wonderful I couldn’t bear to stop you. The problem is that you don’t know who you are. You went through the whole monologue calling me by your character’s name.” We laughed, did it over and I got it right.
“Three’s Company” gave me a chance to work with John Ritter, one of the great comic geniuses, especially with physical comedy. His ability to turn words into physical comedy was unmatched except by people like Chaplin, etc. The show was tough to do because, unlike most TV shows, it was done in four days, not five or seven, and shot before a live audience as if it were a stage play. We had two days of rehearsal. The third day was dress rehearsal, shot before a live audience. The fourth day was the final production, shot live. They would then edit the third and four days to get the best of what was done.
DS: How did
television acting compare to film acting? Often I’ve read a film or tv star
who loathes one form and loves the other. Also, you have done some stage work,
including a one man show called A
Few Useless Mementos For Sale.
Did you write that? What was it about? And, how does that compare to the
other two media?
GD: I started out as a stage actor and had to learn to be good at that. I learned about film acting by working on New York University student films. I learned TV on the job. All three media are quite different. I like all three. Stage is the actor’s medium. TV is the producer/writer’s medium. Film is the director’s medium. Stage acting is very big…with voice and gestures large enough to be seen and felt by people at the back of an audience with 2,000 people. Stage acting is fast paced. The words are all important. TV acting is like a smaller stage acting, not as fast paced, with climaxes built to the ad breaks. Film acting is the most intense, the smallest and slowest. John Wayne (not a great actor but a great screen persona) was asked what was the key to film acting. He said: “Walk slow, talk slow, and wear comfortable shoes.” Try sometime to talk as slow in real life as Michael Caine does on film. It’s almost impossible. Film acting gets smaller and smaller, the closer the camera gets. The best film acting is in the eyes…with the camera reading your thoughts. What is acted between the words, (the sub-text), is most important. Film acting is as close and intense as if you were in bed with the other actor…unless you are involved with action sequences. Film acting is my favorite. Once you get good at film, it is hard to go back to TV…
My one-man, stage drama, “A Few Useless Mementos for Sale,” was produced in Hollywood ten years after I had done it in New York off-off Broadway as “Fragments from a Broken Window.” Yes, I wrote it and performed it. It was an autobiographical piece about my life in relationship to my poetry and included many of my early poems. I included it in my book: “Selected Poems: 1959 – 1999.” It was tough to do because I had to act myself as a different character from myself. It was an hour-long monologue using and addressing the audience as if it were one character dropping in on my yard sale, with all the objects for sale related to dramatic moments in my life and related to my finding and losing poetry.
DS: You also did
a telefilm called Son Of The Morning Star, about General Custer,
based on the book by Evan S. Connell. You played General William Tecumseh
Sherman. Was it a large role, and did they allow you to raze Georgia?
GD: It was a moderate-sized role. My part was to convince President Ulysses Grant to send Custer out to deal with the Indians one final time…there were three or four scenes, including Custer. The whole show was about Custer’s Last Stand. I enjoyed the role and read five books to research the character of Sherman, who is one of the most fascinating characters in American history. He was a failure at whatever he did until his famous march, which won the war for the North, by cutting off supplies to Lee. By the way, he didn’t burn Atlanta. The retreating Southern troops set the fires to destroy their arms, etc. Sherman and his lieutenants rushed to try to put out the fires. His troops did set other fires on their way across to the sea. After retiring from the army, Sherman went to New York and became a stage-door Johnny, dating showgirls. He became a close friend of Mark Twain and toured America, doing stage shows with Twain.
DS: Connell’s
an interesting writer because his work is so damned hit and miss. The Custer
book was a good work of nonfiction, and his Bridge novels are superb, as is some
of his short fiction; yet his long book length poems, Notes From A Bottle
Found On The Beach At Carmel and Points For A Compass Rose,
are atrocious, his Diary Of A Rapist
is not good at all, and other of his short fiction is bad, as well. It’s hard
to imagine a published writer who seems so unaware of whether his work is good
or not. Any thoughts on Connell as a writer? Also, did you get a chance to meet
and speak with Connell on writing or anything else?
GD: I read the book “Son of the Morning Star” and thought it was excellent. Connell, unfortunately, did not write the screenplay for the mini-series based on the book. He was not around and I did not have an opportunity to meet him.
DS: You also
appeared in some movie sequels, Death Wish 4: The Crackdown, and Psycho
II. As I recall, neither of these roles are things you take pride in.
Were they just bad scripts? Exploitation films?
GD: I am very proud of my work in “Death Wish 4,” although it is not wonderful film. I rewrote most of my character’s lines, with the permission of the screenwriter, the director and the other actors. I wanted to make my character not a caricature of the tough cop and succeeded in doing that. It was a great pleasure to work with J. Lee Thompson, one of the professionally great film directors. He directed, I believe, something like 50 films, including “The Guns of Navarone” and “Cape Fear.” I learned a lot from him about film acting, some of the techniques required for working in front of the camera. He was a lovely English gentleman and fine filmmaker. Gregory Peck said that Lee was one of only four directors he could trust. “Psycho II” was a total disaster and very embarrassing for me. I was never allowed to see the whole script before we shot my one scene and I didn’t know what my character was talking about. Also they put me in this western sheriff’s outfit with a cowboy hat that didn’t fit. I felt and looked ridiculous. I wish the footage didn’t exist.
DS: Probably
your most well known role on film was as Detective John Williams, in Blue
Velvet, the David Lynch film. I’ve found the few films of his I’ve
seen to be willfully obscure and just plain dull. Blue Velvet is
not a bad film, but afterwards I found it the kind of film I just shake my head
at and forget. If you had a chance, which directors or film projects that you
had a shot at getting would you have loved to work on?
GD: I, personally, think this is the best of David’s films, that it is a strong, psychological thriller dressed up as a black comedy. It certainly is a seminal film and has influenced many of the filmmakers who followed it with their work. I heard of some female filmgoers who went to see it every day for a month. Many find it to be a disturbing work. My manager, an elderly woman, hated it and said the negative should have been burned. My favorite remark by a critic was: “The only person who can enjoy this film is someone who likes to suck dirty socks.” It is the film that David best balanced the bizarre with an examination of the human condition. I am proud to have been in it. My biggest regret is that I lost at least a third of my role in the editing room, the whole central arc of my character’s actions. David was forced to cut the film below two hours and a lot of wonderful scenes got lost.
I would have loved to have played Anthony Hopkins’ character in “Silence of the Lambs.” I regret that many of Hollywood’s top directors died before I had a chance to work with them. I am also happy to have played the character of Doc Goldman in “After Dark, My Sweet,” a strange, death obsessed, closeted gay doctor. I would like to have worked with both David Lynch and James Foley again. I lost three or four of my scenes in Foley’s film in the editing room. That is one of the terrible things about film acting: you don’t have any control over which takes of your scenes are used, or how the scenes are edited to enhance other aspects of the film. The film does not belong to the actor, but to the director.
DS: Let’s step
backwards in your careers, and talk about your time as a UN diplomat in Lebanon.
War permeates several of your better poems, and also, if I recall, contributed
to your writing block. Were you suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),
or as it was known, shellshock? After all, you have told me that you were
kidnapped in that country. How long did it last and what were the circumstances?
GD: Yes, I had PTSD, as I mentioned earlier. My experiences in that war (the 1975-76 Lebanese Civil War) have strongly influenced the rest of my life. Yes, I was kidnapped briefly. I was driving down the Mediterranean coast from Beirut to the Christian town of Damour on a reconnaissance mission for the U.N. It was supposed to have been a day a truce. I was stopped at a flying (a moveable) roadblock by a couple of thugs who were part of a mafia-like group called the Mourabitoun, (meaning the avengers who lie in wait). They grabbed me at random. They put me in a mud-brick hut with two other people, both of whom were killed. I managed to survive because I let them know who I was and they checked me out and were told by their leader that they would eat their balls if they harmed me. I was held for about a day. I have written extensively about this event, in fiction, drama and, now, as part of a screenplay.
DS: Have you
ever returned to Lebanon? Was it similar to stories we read of Vietnam vets who
have returned there?
GD: I was trying to write a novel about the war and got stuck in it in 1998. The State Department lifted its travel ban to there that spring, so I went back with my son (who was with me as a young boy in Lebanon and had to be evacuated from the war with his mother) who in 1998 was now 29. He and I spent a tense week there that March, and were almost shot to death by a squad of Syrian soldiers when my son pulled out a camera to film some of the city’s desolation. Again, we were lucky to get out of there alive.
DS: The
Man Who Loved Butterflies is an excellent short story, first
published in Penthouse (12/85), you wrote about your experiences
in Lebanon. What was it about, and how much of it was based on reality? It also
was reworked into a play, in the early 1990s, one that almost got produced. What
happened that caused its cancellation? Also, since fiction is art, what
‘truths’ did you discard in favor of narrative ‘lies’ to make the tale
work better as a story?
GD: The short story and the full-length play were both mostly a fictionalized account of my kidnapping. The play was due to open off Broadway in the spring of 1994. It was cancelled a week before opening night because of a disagreement caused by the producer, the wife of the director. I was playing the lead role. It left me very bitter and I walked away from the theatre and have not gone back. There are always things you have to change to make a story or play work. The fundamental events were all factual. I had to change one of the main characters held in the hut. I didn’t discard “truths.” I changed facts to get at the truth.
DS:
Of course, I asked that last question to dig at your views on art. Like
me, you don’t believe that ‘art is truth’ bullshit. What is your opinion
on art, in regards to its ability to distill the essence of a situation, be it
in a poem, film, play, story, photograph, painting, piece of music?
GD: I don’t say that art is truth. I think art tries to understand what may be truths in life. Of course, there are many truths (or no truths), often contradictory. Art tries to understand life, or make it survivable, or enable us to endure it. It tries to make experiences capable of being shared by many people. Art is a beautiful lie... Michelangelo had to make one of David’s legs unnaturally long, otherwise the proportions of the statue’s two legs, one of them bent, would have looked wrong.
We are terribly lonely creatures…each of us, uncertain in the illusions of our own identities…each of our identities lost from moment to moment to that terrible trickster, Time…unable to say “hello” without being misunderstood. Art is an attempt to find out what we can share impossibly. Art is an act of defiance against…against…what cannot even be properly named…it is the last refuge of the hopeless. It is the ineluctable shape of delight and even, impossibly, joy… It cannot be attained, only striven for. Art is the ultimate, king’s Fool, who weeps when he takes off his cap and bells. Any attempt to describe it is meaningless…it is only to be recognized. It still shouts, “Yes,” when all else has turned to shit. For all my struggles, I really don’t know anything about art except that it is the only betrayer I trust.
Those in the know, the cognoscenti, claim that Art is a great con man, the master swindler. His rap sheet says his real name is Al and he was born in Brooklyn. He was last seen smoking dope outside of Kabul in a field of poppies. People on the street whisper he was killed by friendly fire.
DS: How did you get you diplomacy job at the UN, since before that you were in the publishing industry? You worked in the U.S. Congress, did you not? You were Press Secretary to former U.S. Congressman Robert H. Steele, a Republican from Connecticut. What exactly does a Press Secretary do, and how did such a job materialize? Also, as we have talked much, you seem to be of a liberal political bent, so was the Republican congressman a friend, or a John Lindsay ‘limousine liberal?’
GD: As I wrote earlier, I answered two ads in the New York Times in the same week. I interviewed with my future boss, at the U.N. Secretariat Building in New York, the week before New Years. I went to Hartford, Connecticut and interviewed with Congressman Steele on New Year’s Day 1973. He asked me to stay all night and write a speech for him. He said he didn’t like me, but if he liked the speech, he would hire me and I had to fly to Washington with him the next day, leaving my car in Hartford and my family in New York. I went with him to Washington. As Press Secretary, I wrote his speeches, his statements for Congress, his press releases. I attended certain Congressional meetings in his place, including the Joint House and Senate Subcommittee on Atomic Energy, where I learned all about the coming oil import crisis. I set up press briefings. I handled visiting groups from his congressional districts, introducing him to them. This was early in 1973, during the Watergate brouhaha. I was a liberal Democrat working for a maverick Republican. It was not uncommon for many of the Republicans to have Democratic press secretaries. Steele was a straight shooter and moderate enough that I could write his stuff without severely violating my own political positions. Steele and I never really liked each other, but we were able to work together.
After four months, the U.N. job came through and I moved my family from Washington back to New York, while I went to Beirut. They had to wait several months for all our FBI full-field security clearances to come through. Then they joined me in Beirut. They arrived in the summer of 1973. Beirut was a wonderful place to live and work in then. That was before the Yom Kippur War in October 1973 and the Lebanese Civil War, which started on April 13, 1975.
DS: Your
official UN title was Head Of Press And Publications For The United
Nations Relief And Works Agency For Palestine Refugees In The New East (UNRWA),
quite a mouthful. One can assume that you’ve seen the Arab-Israeli conflict
closer than most Americans, so do you see any resolution to that problem in the
lifetimes of anyone alive? And, is not Arab tribalism really more of the
problem, because even without the Israelis, the Arab factions would likely still
be slaughtering each other, no?
GD: Although Lebanon did not go to war with Israel in 1973, there were Israeli air strikes on Lebanon, particularly on refugee camps on the outskirts of cities. The Israelis were purportedly hunting down PLO members. Sometimes, when the planes overflew Beirut on bombing runs, my wife, my son and I would duck under the stairs of our building for shelter. The strikes, of course, affected UNRWA’s abilities to provide food, educational and medical services to the refugees in the camps.
Arab tribalism is, of course, a problem throughout the Arab states. It is not much different than the European tribalism that led to two world wars. Linking the problems in Israel and the occupied territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip only to Arab tribalism is simplistic. As long as Israel continues to illegally occupy the West Bank and the Gaza Strip (or in the case of Gaza, keep the people in a virtual prison there) and to build settlements illegally, taking Arab land and destroying Arab homes, there will be no peace. As long as Israel tries to own Jerusalem only for itself, there will be no peace. Jerusalem is one of the three cities of the Sunni Haj. There will be no peace until Jerusalem is internationalized and is open to worshippers from all three religions, Christianity, Islam, Judaism. Many of the Jews are passionately against this idea, so there will be no peace. In April of 2002, the Arab states and African Islamic countries, including Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and Yassir Arafat’s PLO, made an extraordinary offer, including total recognition of Israel’s right to exist, dropping of all trade barriers to Israel, guarantee of Israel’s border, and peace. It was the opening of the golden door. All Israel had to do was return to the 1967 borders (with some adjustments of land for some of the Israeli settlements) and the use of Jerusalem by both Israel and the Palestinians as capitals of their respective states, and make some accommodations for the loss of the refugee’s homes. It was an extraordinary offer. Israel, with the U.S. backing it up, said “no.” Israel did not want peace.
DS: Since you
have actually lived in an environment where the Islamic influence is strong,
what are your opinions on American policies, post-9/11? Were we right to go into
Afghanistan, but wrong on Iraq? Do you see the Sunni-Shia rift as intractable?
GD: We were absolutely right to go into Afghanistan and absolutely wrong to go into Iraq. The Sunni-Shia rift in Iraq is no more intractable than it was in Lebanon. There will be more bloodletting. There will be more revenge. There will eventually be a settlement between them, if foreign influence (including the U.S., Iran, Turkey, Syria, etc) is gotten rid of. Kurdistan is more of a problem than the Sunni-Shia problem. The Kurds want their own country, which was denied them by the settlements with the Turks and the Iranians following WWI. Part of Kurdistan lies in South eastern Turkey, North western Iran, and possibly even North eastern Syria, as well as northern Iraq. And that latter area (northern Iraq) lies on a huge supply of oil. Iraq has the third largest supply of the world’s known oil reserves. The Kurds in Iraq, under U.S. protection, have had relative autonomy since the first Gulf War in 1991. They are doing well today, except for occasional attacks on them by the Turkish military. The Kurds are not going back to domination by the Iraqis. The oil will give them money to acquire large armaments. War with the Turks is probably inevitable.
DS: What
prompted your change in career? Also, how did it affect your personal life? You
are now on marriage number four, correct? You also have several children with
different women, five in total. Correct? Did any of your personal relationships
crumble because of this change, or any others you’ve made?
GD: My third marriage was destroyed in part by the Lebanese war. After evacuating my wife and my son from that marriage in late October 1975, I was separated from them for much of the next year. My wife did not want to move with me to Amman, Jordan, where my part of headquarters was relocated. That caused my departure from the U.N. The separation exacerbated other problems in our marriage. My PTSD didn’t help, nor my need to become an actor. In 1977, I divorced my third wife and married my fourth wife. We will have our 30th anniversary this year. I have five children, two daughters by my first wife, a son by my third wife, a daughter by my fourth wife and a son born out of wedlock with a Finnish journalist. The latter son is Dome Karukoski, the Finnish film director. I legally recognized him as my son and we are very close, although he chose not to take my name. Having completed his third film, he is visiting me as I am finishing writing this interview.
DS: Finally, you have mentioned to me that you were involved in security activities for the U.N. in Lebanon, during the 1975-1976 Lebanese Civil War. What exactly were you doing there? And, did your UN duties ever conflict with your status as an American citizen? If so, where did your first loyalty lie to?
GD: My U.N. duties did not conflict with my U.S. citizen’s status. When you go to work for the U.N, you sign away your first allegiance to your home country. When I left the U.N., my first allegiance was returned to the U.S. The U.N.’s member states are signatories to this arrangement.
When the war started in Lebanon in April 1973, the U.N. had no security operations to protect the activities of the eight U.N. agencies operating there, or the lives of its 2,000 international staff and family members. Since, Sir John Rennie, the Commissioner General of UNRWA was the highest U.N. official in the Mid-East, the responsibility for security for all eight agencies devolved on our agency. My immediate superior, John Defrates, Director of Public Information and Contributions, was given the task of organizing the security effort and heading it. Each of the other agencies sent one representative and Defrates chose me to assist him on behalf of UNRWA. This was in addition to my regular duties as Head of Press and Publications. After all, I now had an increasing expertise in the politics of oil, and the politics of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, The West Bank, Gaza, and Israel, having traveled around there to the various refugee camps and field offices. I had a growing network of contacts with members of the international and local presses. I was to use these contacts to help analyze daily the growing nature of the war and the threat to our people and our operations. I was to help in the decision making on the safety of travel or whether or not we should open or close all eight agencies, depending on the escalating threat. Sometimes I had to make instantaneous decisions for people who called and asked whether they could go out and get food for their babies. As the war progressed, I found that the information from my sources was drying up, so I had to go out into the streets with the gunmen and find information to trade with the journalists and even some of the many spies located in the country. This put me at the kind of risk that caused my kidnapping. Sir John and John Defrates could rely more and more on my analysis and information. Unbeknownst to them, I secretly built my own small espionage organization--on the behalf of the U.N. and to help save lives--with voluntary informants in the headquarters of some of the major combatants. (With some of the information gathered from my informants, I blackmailed a Christian militia leader to send in armored personnel carriers to rescue 112 men, women and children trapped in a church during a major battle.) Days as a kind of “spy master” ended when I became too much of a target and left Lebanon a week or so before we evacuated all international staff members. I relocated to Amman, Jordan and took several trips back into Lebanon during the rest of the war in 1976. I left the U.N. after the war ended.
DS: You also
speak languages other than English: French,
German, some Arabic and Italian. Were these learnt early in life, during your
diplomatic career, or whilst becoming an actor?
GD: French and German were learned at Yale. I took the two-year intensive speaking course in German that was still taught by the same four old ladies who taught our spies there during WWII. My French was not as good, but I improved it when I spent a year in France in 1957, writing my first novel. I learned some Italian and Spanish and Greek while traveling in those countries. The Arabic was learned during my three-and-a-half years in the Middle East. I have forgotten most of the languages now because of disuse, except for the French, because I have visited France often over the years. The French came in handy in Lebanon, because that country had been a French mandate until France gave it independence in 1943 and the Lebanese (mostly the Christians) spoke French. It also is the main diplomatic language.
DS: Let’s now
get to you earliest career, at least that which is know, your role on the staffs
of several magazines in the 1960s and early 1970s. I mentioned Time
magazine. What was your role there, and do you ever regret having left that
industry?
GD: I discussed this earlier. My first role as Contributing Editor for Time was as their top fiction and poetry reviewer. I chose which fiction and poetry books were to be reviewed and wrote reviews. Eventually, I wrote in many sections of the magazine, and spent the last year-and-a-half there writing world news stories, most notably a cover story about the “troubles” in Northern Ireland. The involvement with world news and politics helped me to get my job with the U.N.
DS: You have
also been published in high profile places like Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan,
and The Saturday Evening Post, as well as having stories published
in the 1963 (Chico) and 1966 (A
Mussel Named Ecclesiastes) editions of The Best American Short
Stories anthologies, which, like the Pulitzer Prize, once meant something
about the quality of the work. Let me briefly digress and ask you where and why
do you think both American fiction and poetry have gone wrong? And what writers
and poets do you think are vastly overrated, and how do you think they’ve been
able to con so many people? Is it part of the NEA system of cronyism, the MFA
writing mills that scam the untalented, both, or both and other factors, and
what are those factors?
GD: Most of today’s poets and fiction writers are overrated. But that is nothing new. Alexander Pope complained about that in his time. Unlike in the 1950s, ‘60s and even into the early ‘70s, today’s publishing world is not governed by the editors but by the sales departments. The salesmen decide what books are to be published and what writers are to be pushed to the giant book chains. There has always been cronyism in university circles (witness Oxford and Cambridge). The MFA writing mills are an abomination. The writer’s conferences are only marginally better. One famous writer (I believe it was Nelson Algren) gave the following as his major address to a top writer’s conference. “If you want to be a writer, never eat at a place called ‘Mom’s,’ never play poker with a man named ‘Doc’ and never sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own.” And he left the stage.
It’s always lucky when you get published. “Chico” was rejected by twenty magazines before it was published and then made The Best American Short Stories. “A Mussel Named Ecclesiastes” was rejected by fifteen before publication and then “The Best American…” The top fiction editor of The New Yorker had a meeting with me about the story before rejecting it. He loved the writing but couldn’t believe that “Pony,” the lead female character, or a woman like her, “could exist.” She was too much of a free spirit for him. This was in 1964, a good number of years before Women’s Lib hit the fan in about 1970. I was writing a cutting-edge piece capturing the birth of that movement in a woman, the need to be free and not bound by all the old stereotypical expectations that men had imposed on women. You read the story today and it doesn’t seem that exceptional…after all, we have had almost 40 years of the