New Yorker writer Trillin brings light touch to weighty subjects
Trillin, left, was interviewed by Alan Acosta, associate vice president and director of University Communications. When Acosta noted that he had once been Trillin's waiter at a Greenwich Village restaurant, Trillin deadpanned, “You spilled my soup.”
BY BARBARA PALMER
Facts are messy and inconvenient, and nonfiction writers are obliged not to clean them up, writer Calvin Trillin said in a campus conversation last week that touched on topics as diverse as the ethics of nonfiction writing, barbecued mutton in Owensboro, Ky., the deployment of National Guard troops in Iraq and the writer's childhood dog.
"The facts are really clumsy and they don't fit into paragraphs easily—and that's part of the point. If you don't have to stick to what actually happened, then why do it?" Trillin said about writing nonfiction during the Aurora Forum's "An Evening with Calvin Trillin" on March 16. The event, which drew an appreciative, capacity crowd to Kresge Auditorium, was co-sponsored by the Stanford Center on Ethics and the John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists.
Trillin's singular way of fitting facts—and his own dry observations—into prose and verse have made the Kansas City native one of the country's most admired writers. A staff writer for The New Yorker magazine for more than four decades, Trillin also is the author of 17 books. He regularly contributes comic verse to The Nation magazine, and has performed in two critically acclaimed one-man plays.
Trillin was interviewed at Stanford by Alan Acosta, associate vice president and director of University Communications. Acosta, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a former editor at the Los Angeles Times, had spoken with Trillin before, Acosta reminded the writer. In the 1980s, Acosta had been Trillin's waiter at a restaurant in Greenwich Village in New York City, where Trillin resides. ("You spilled the soup," Trillin deadpanned.)
Trillin said he is orthodox about the use of factual matter in his nonfiction articles. He doesn't believe, for example, that it is possible for a writer to reconstruct another person's thoughts. "Most people when they try and think of why they did something, it's never one thing, it's a combination of motives," he said. "I guess you can distinguish between the facts and truth—but I don't think it is up to me to do it," he added.
Trillin took a generous view, however, in his assessment of the ethics and intentions of journalists in general. "Most reporters do their best under circumstances that are difficult," particularly those who work under daily deadlines, he said.
And "the rules have changed, somewhat," the 70-year-old writer said. It used to be that everybody sort of took it for granted that the "tough-guy" daily newspaper columnist may have invented or dressed up some quotes, Trillin said. "Now, that doesn't go." At Yale University, where Trillin earned a degree in 1957, the definition of objective journalism at the college paper "was to try and be equally inaccurate about both sides," he said.
Trillin's hour-and-a-half-long appearance was regularly punctuated with laughter from the audience, as he weaved funny anecdotes and comments—many of which had previously made their way into his work—into his responses to Acosta's questions.
Throughout his writing career, Trillin has used lighter pieces, such as pieces on "eating" (he claims no expertise on food or cooking), his family or travel, as "comic relief" from his work on more serious topics, he said. "It's not completely true, but usually if the word 'I' is in one of my nonfiction pieces, it's a lighter piece. I guess I am not a very serious person."
An exception is the first-person story published in the March 14, 2005, issue of The New Yorker about helicopter pilot Brian Slavenas, a lieutenant in an Illinois National Guard unit, who was killed when the helicopter he commanded was shot down by a missile in 2003.
Trillin was on his way to visit his young grandson in New Jersey when he heard a short National Public Radio news story on the car radio about Slavenas and found himself in tears.
"I have never been secretive about the fact that I thought the Iraq war unconnected to the war on terrorism—at best. And that people from my part of the country joined the National Guard to get into college," Trillin said. Slavenas "just sounded like the kind of son you would want to have."
Trillin said he "never really forgot about" Slavenas, and a year later he went to talk to the soldier's family. Trillin set out for Illinois not knowing exactly what he was after—which was unusual for him, the writer said. "With this one, I just thought I'd like to meet these people" and talk about their son, he said.
When Trillin met Slavenas' parents, who are divorced, he learned that the mother was an antiwar activist and the father, a military veteran, was a supporter of the war. Trillin's story, about Slavenas' parents' differences and their shared love for their late son, was moving to readers in part because it represented how deeply the country is divided over the issue, suggested Acosta.
"Yeah," Trillin said. "One of the things that is troubling about the war is that the burden of it very much falls on a section of the people unrelated to those who are making the decisions," he added, drawing applause.
Trillin also addressed the recent debate over memoirs, including James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, which was marketed as a memoir but contains fictionalized accounts of events. "Now, in order to write a memoir in the U.S. that will sell and will show your redemption, it has to be pretty horrible. This kid was a middle-class druggie—they're a dime a dozen," Trillin said. "I was in jail longer than that kid."
Trillin's only confession? He had a happy childhood. The most traumatic incident the writer could dredge up, he said, was a story of how the family collie, Chubby, was quietly put to sleep. His parents had told him that the sickly Chubby had been taken to a farm, an account that Trillin questioned only years later. A week after a story about the dog was published, Trillin's sister called to challenge his memory.
"The collie was not called Chubby, the collie was called George," she said. "You were called Chubby."