On Michael Silverblatt
In memory of the host of KCRW's "Bookworm," who died last week.
1.
Michael Silverblatt, who died on Valentine’s Day, was the greatest literary influence of my life. He hosted Bookworm, a radio show out of KCRW Santa Monica, for 30 years and you can hear him getting emotional when he's interviewing Junot Diaz and the author suggests that literacy is a gift in two senses: a skill, of which some are better equipped than others, but it's also a thing that somebody gave to you. Wanted you to have. They sat and walked you through a picture book with their fingernail gliding patiently under some line of text as you sounded it out.
Silverblatt was moved by this. The constant charity. The giving and receiving.
He was “a depressive,” in his own words, and could be seen to physically sag, in conversation, when conversation broadened out from the book at hand, or literature, into an assessment of the larger world, which he lamented. The cruelty of it. His voice would soften and crack and his chin would seek some hovel in his collar. His fingertips tapping some heartbroken morse on his brow. 50 years later he would cringe at the cruel charity of classmates who planned to botch a baseball game so that he would look like the star player.
His view of the world was one in which even compassion is shattering.
But in his studio, across the desk from an author, Silverblatt created—with conversation that was plain, accessible, but also labyrinthine, playful, giggly, tearful, heavy—an interplay in which, somehow, nobody was an outsider. The author, whom he’d perhaps never met, was known to him intimately, through the books (he’d read or re-read all of them before the interview); the listener, having not read this new book they were discussing, was also somehow plugged into the themes they were soon discussing.
Silverblatt was endlessly tolerant and embracing of everybody; the one thing you could not be was a stranger.
2.
I had been listening to Bookworm’s archive for 20 years when Silverblatt died last week after a long illness that isn’t named in obituaries but it came up when I was reporting a story about Silverblatt in 2024.
Bookworm had gone off the air, after 30 years, in somewhat suddenly in 2022, albeit with great ceremony, and a 10-episode tribute of greatest hits.
I pitched a literary journal saying I wanted to write a tribute to Bookworm and they gave the green light.
It was my first time calling around to ask people questions. At first they were cagey and claimed not to have answers and they pointed me to other people who were cagey and claimed not to have answers. Finally I started calling relatives. It was my first time reaching out to strangers to ask sensitive information and I didn’t know how to do that. I was clumsy. In hindsight I understand why people were not forthcoming. But when I got one of Michael’s close relations on the phone I think I was just so nakedly reverent that they started to cry. They told me about Michael’s health.
I spoke to his sister Joan Bykofsky. I pointed out that most people I’d spoken to had been so discreet about Michael’s illness and asked if she’d rather I not name it. She paused. Thought about it. Then said: “I don’t think Michael’s Alzheimers is a secret.”
3.
She was in New York overseeing his full-time care in California. She said he had visitors (indeed some of them have since posted photos on Instagram) but it didn’t look like Silverblatt could converse. Art Spiegelman, remembering a late conversation, said it was hard to follow.
Michael would reach up to an overhead shelf and pull down a book and study it. Clutch it. Turn it over and over and open it and stare and then close it and put it down.
His mail was being forwarded to his sister.
She didn’t know what to do with all the books.
4.
Art Spiegelman first met Michael when he was on a book tour promoting his graphic novel Maus. He was nervous. Said he didn’t want to be anywhere or talk with anyone if he couldn’t also smoke and so Michael told him, It’s fine, we can do that, and so they went out onto the terrace whenever Spiegelman wanted a smoke break and then they came back and recorded.
Michael interviewed me for The Wild Party and he took issue with a poem I was illustrating. He said, “It’s not worthy of you.” I said I needed a holiday after Maus. I needed a break. So we had an interview and a back and forth and I went out to the car afterward. He followed me out, he said I have to come back to the studio. He said, “I need to do this interview again.” I said, “Michael, I have to be somewhere in 20 minutes.” He stood in front of the car. He said, “No. I was a jerk. We have to do this again.” So we went up to the studio and did it again. I didn’t mind if we had some bickering on the air, but this was a totally different thing. He said, “My dislike for the material has nothing to do with your choice to pursue it.”
They became friends after that. Silverblatt stayed with the Spiegelmans when visiting New York, “And I love them,” he told Colin Marshall on Marketplace of Ideas, “I love their kids.”
Spiegelman recounted over the phone how, years later, he and a friend were trying to coerce Michael into joining them for a party at Dennis Hopper’s house.
I said, “Michael, why don’t you come with us?” He blanched. He said, “I don’t go out, I don't go to parties, I'm not social.” Eventually after a little back and forth he said, “I'll do it if one of you stands next to me for the whole thing.” So we did and later on we found out he had a good time. But he had a phobia of being among people. After that he credits us with bringing him out of a cave of depression he’d been in for a few months.
He later arranged for another comic artist to appear on the show, someone whose work Michael had fallen in love with (he would later credit Spiegelman with “teaching” him how to read and appreciate comics). Spiegelman sat in on it. Witnessed “the zaniest most difficult interview i’ve ever seen him conduct.”
The comic artist, he said, was “not a linguistic person.”
“I guess it’s not for every writer.”
5.
The story I was writing got canceled. I had quotes from roughly a dozen sources and the editor wanted it cramped into 500 words and the story just didn’t work.
After that I tried pitching it to other places but there were no takers.
I’d bothered famous authors for their time and they’d hopped on the phone with me or sent emails and then I’d had these grueling emotional conversations with friends, loved ones, on- and off-the-record.
I was embarrassed at the failure and the quotes sat on my computer unmentioned for a couple years.
6.
Junot Diaz was in Tokyo and I was in South Beach but we jumped on Zoom, 10 p.m. his time and 7 a.m. mine, and told me that, on meeting Silverblatt during promotion of his debut story collection, Drown, in 1997, “I vibed with him right away,” recognizing, in Silverblatt, what he’d seen before in Samuel R. Delany: “genius toward books and literature.” But there was a distinct generosity too. Knowing, with ever visit, that “[Michael was] going to bring his entire mind and sensitivity to this moment.”
We started talking about William T. Vollmann (“I read everything that motherfucker writes”) whose name and voice I’d first heard on Bookworm and whom I’d just interviewed, a few months prior, about his forthcoming book.
So I called him next.
7.
Norman Mailer, after first appearing on Bookworm in 1991 for a two-parter, would tell his publicist he didn’t want to be booked for anything else on the days he spoke with Silverblatt, because he needed to be sharp, and Vidal ended up doing the same thing.
“I wouldn’t call what I ask questions; I consider them to be lengthy Rorschach blots in words, in language.”
-Michael Silverblatt, in conversation with The Believer
He agreed to appear on the show. But he wouldn’t visit the campus. Michael and his producer, Melinda Siegel, would have to meet him at his room in the Beverly Hills Hotel. And so they gathered some equipment and schlepped over and if I’m remembering correctly Vidal met them at the door in his bathrobe. Didn’t so much welcome them in as direct them to a chair.
Silverblatt wrote an essay about the experience after Vidal’s death in 2012:
Like children waiting for an appointment with the school principal [we] cringed and swallowed nervously until an irate Gore Vidal opened his door. He was in a fury, how could his publisher have put him in such a tiny room? It was an insult! How could he be expected to hold interviews here…there wasn’t even a reception area, he and his companion were still in bathrobes.
But Silverblatt and Siegel did what they could. The conversation begins, Vidal sounds a bit tense, and there’s at least one irritated sniping (he forgets a name and Silverblatt supplies it and Vidal says yes if you’d let me finish—), but overall, as Silverblatt recalls, “It’s good enough for a first time interview.”
The recording done, Gore looked grave. He pleated his fingers. “You have asked me,” he intoned slowly, “many questions I have heard before.” Painful courtesy was his gift. Was he readying himself for the kill? “That is inevitable. Also many I have never heard. These were very good.” My innards started to unwind.
“Henceforth,” he predicted, “you will not need to come to my hotel room. I will come, escorted, to your studio, where I will treat you with the respect I afford to the members of your profession I take seriously, people I look forward to talking to, and speak to with pleasure.” I dimly recall that he mentioned Larry King in this regard.
8.
I left a voicemail at Vollmann’s Mexican restaurant-turned-art-studio bunker and left a voicemail asking if he’d be willing to give me a quote for a tribute piece about Michael Silverblatt and Bookworm.
Vollmann called back a few days later. It was raining on the Beach and my phone’s caller ID said “JOHN Q PUBLIC.”
I answered the phone.
“Hi.” Vollmann’s normal pep. “This is Bill Vollmann. Returning your call.”
I said something like Hey Mr. Vollmann and Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.
He said, “Oh sure, oh sure.” Then shifted gears. “So!” Like there’s a task at hand. “Michael’s dead, huh?”
I said no he’s not dead but the show’s been canceled because it doesn’t look like he can work anymore. I mentioned the angle I was taking with the article. He said something like, “Oh that’s too bad,” which looks trite as I type it but his voice dropped somewhat. And then he told a story. I don’t know if I believe it. He said he had these two friends who had commiserating about the fact that each of them, respectively, had lost a parent; and each of them, now, had become a caretaker for the surviving parent. Each of those surviving parents, it turned out, had Alzheimers. One was caring for their mother, another cared for their father. Then one day they got an idea: Let’s introduce them. And so they did. One mistook the other for his late wife, one mistook the other for her late husband. They became, he said, amorous. They became happy. Eventually a spiteful sibling learned about the setup and said that it was extremely inappropriate. That it had to end. And so the elderly lovers were separated into different care facilities and then pretty soon after that, he said, wouldn’t you know it: they were dead.
The midday sky was black and the rain falling sideways and wind was bending the palm trees as William T. Vollmann told me this story on a telephone, 20 years after I’d first heard his name on Bookworm.
I asked about his friendship with Silverblatt outside the studio and he surprised me by saying that there wasn’t one, that yes he’d been a guest on the show since the early 1990s, and felt a real warmth and kinship with the guy, but they hadn’t hung out or anything. “We’re both non-drivers,” he said, and they had bonded over how hard it was to get around LA without a car.
Almost every author I spoke to said the same thing. George Saunders, referring to the sanctity of the relationship, said he “didn’t want to fuck it up by playing golf together.”
I asked Vollmann if he’d be willing to offer a quote for my article, something about Silverblatt’s gifts as an interviewer?
“Oh sure!”
The quote appears in a profile I wrote about Vollmann for The Metropolitan Review but I’ll post it here again.
What I respected most about Michael was that he respected the book more than he respected the author and he was not interested in doing puff pieces. If he didn’t like a book, he couldn’t be bothered. That’s very, very refreshing. So often [in an interview] it’ll be, “Well, Mr. Vollmann, I haven’t had time to read your book, and we only have five minutes, so could you tell us what questions to ask?” And I’m not averse to that. An honest hack like that deserves an honest prostitute like me. But Michael isn’t like that. He cares about the books. He asks some really good questions. I find probably the journalists who ask the best questions for the most part are the Germans. There’s also a little bit of schadenfreude. They hope to trip you up. But when it’s clear that I’ve done my homework, [and that I] remember what I write, it’s really interesting to get into abstractions and minutiae and so forth. American journalists are not that way. But Michael is somewhat that way. So it’s a pleasure to talk about my books with him. I consider him a friend.
9.
When I was 14 years old I picked up American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis and didn’t understand it so I looked up interviews with the author and it led me to Bookworm. There were conversations with Ellis about his other books and they were enlightening and then I checked out other interviews on other shows and realized Michael was the only one who seemed to ever be talking with Ellis about the books he’d written as opposed to the controversy they stirred.
Then I saw he’d recorded interviews with other novelists whose work I’d also wanted to read but couldn’t understand (or told myself I couldn’t understand): Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace and Susan Sontag and Gore Vidal and Marilynne Robinson and Toni Morrison and Dave Eggers.
It took some finagling but I loaded them onto my iPod and at school I’d thread those long white gummy earbuds up my sweater, plug the left earbud into my head and then put my head down on the desk, hiding it.
Slowly, over the course of that year, I failed math to the sound of Michael’s purring insights, his giggling, his crying.
The sound of authors, on a book tour, flowering out from their talking points as they realized they were finally, for the first time in weeks of interviews, talking with someone who’d read the book.
10.
When I was 15 I sent Michael an email telling him how much I admired the show and how he’d given me the confidence to pick up some otherwise daunting books like White Noise and David Foster Wallace’s essays and and Year of Magical Thinking (books that I now realize were uniformly short) and I thanked him for teaching me to read so much more constructively. I asked what his favorite book was. I told him he had really changed my life and that I hoped to meet him one day and apologized in advance if the hug was too abrupt.
He wrote back the next day and thanked me for the kind words.
He said, “My favorite novel is The Master and Margarita by Mikhael Bulgakov.”
He said, “I read your email to my mother.”
He said, “I look forward to collecting that hug.”
11.
Same thing that happened to Susan Sontag as happened to Vidal: she came on the show in 1992, same year as Vidal, to promote her novel The Volcano Lover. Famously as pugilistic an interview subject as either Mailer or Vidal, Silverblatt, in this case, kicks things off with a perfect note:
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT: I wanted to begin by talking about what kind of book The Volcano Love is because much of what I’ve been reading about it doesn’t seem to correspond to my experience of it.
SUSAN SONTAG: Doesn’t correspond to my experience, either, Michael.
They’re going back and forth, talking faster, Sontag’s voice gets breathy and somewhat romantic about the book, the fact that she wasn’t propelled by ideas or by the conviction of an argument—she sounds self-conscious to talk about the fact that she really just luxuriated in the emotional experience. Falling in love with her characters. Crying over the desk when she inflicted some awful fate.
The interview proceeds with such warmth and enthusiasm on both parts, at times spoken in what seems like a treehouse code, it’s no surprise that it ended, off-air, with an exchange SIlverblatt recounted, years later, on The Martketplace of Ideas:
“I said to [Sontag], ‘Do you think perhaps we could be friends?’ And she said, ‘Friends? What are you talking about? We’re already friends. We’ve lost too much time. When you come to New York you will tell me and I will arrange to spend entire days with you, and when I come to Los Angeles I will tell you and you will make yourself free to me and we will be in constant contact.’”
And so they were.
And so, in this and other recordings, do they remain.
A very lovely tribute. And now I apparently have 30 years' worth of interviews to add to TBR, damn you.
Extraordinary, Alex! I’m keen on listening to his interviews after reading your moving and insightful piece. Thank you!