"You're WRONG Knowles!" After That, The Dark | Andrew Klavan
Andrew Klavan joins Michael to discuss literature, the arts, and Drew's newest book, After That, The Dark. Give it a read today!
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Here on this very show is Mr. Andrew Klavan.
Drew, good to see you.
Hey, what's the matter with my voice?
I don't know what you're talking about.
I've never heard that.
I thought of all the things to criticize about you.
I'm sitting here listening.
You're talking Latin.
You've got like plain song going on.
This is like being in the omen, you know?
This show chanting.
Drew, for the four people who watch it, they are getting an experience like none other.
You know, it's a little niche.
It's a little esoteric, but so someone, by the way, just like my mass was taking place.
My show at this point is like the Ku Klux Klan.
You know, it's just all FBI agents and like Bubba.
That is the audience of my show.
And they don't.
So someone pointed out the other day, I said, whenever it was like two months ago, I said, I'll get Drew on to talk about his new book.
And my team, what are they?
They go out.
I don't know what they do.
They smoke cigarettes behind the building.
They go play pickleball.
They go.
Jacob goes and buys nice leather jackets.
They said to me, they say, Drew's really angry because you haven't had him on to talk about his book.
I said, well, then he should be angry with you because I've told you multiple times to get Drew on to talk about his book.
This book at this point, I think, came out in like 2018.
I don't know.
It's been like so long since it came out.
The book is after that, the dark, which, by the way, refers to one of the poems like nearest to my heart, Alfred Lord Tennyson's Crossing the Bar.
Yes.
Yes.
It's a poem he wrote.
It came to him in a moment, he said.
And after he wrote it, he ended all of his books with it because it was about dying.
It was about sailing off into eternity.
Sunset and evening star and one clear call for me.
And may there be no moaning of the bar when I put out to see.
I think I forget the rest of it.
That's very good.
That's it.
And after that, the dark.
And that is, that's where it comes from.
And it's in the book.
Why?
You know, I'm a Philistine.
You know, I certainly haven't read enough.
Yours are like the only novels I read.
I know.
You've read two works of fiction, The Divine Comedy and Me, and you quote them incessantly.
I don't understand why you don't read so much more.
Then you'd have so much more to quote.
Your soul would be bigger.
This is the thing that really drives me crazy: conservatives are all, they talk spiritually.
You know, they're always talking about the spirit.
They talk about God.
We're not afraid to talk about God.
We're not afraid to do that.
And then art comes.
It's like, why should I read fiction?
I was a fiction.
And it didn't really happen.
It's like it's to enlarge your imagination so that you perceive the world in a bigger way.
And that is actually.
And by the way, there's basically nobody, there's no good conservative writer left.
But now that Cormick McCarthy is dead, it was me and him.
It's just me.
I mean, if you're not reading me, you are literally not supporting conservatives in the arts.
Yes.
I realize this.
Occasionally I am forced to read fiction.
And when I say fiction, I mean like Tolstoy.
I mean, works that I should have read 15 years ago.
And I have to do it for my book club show or whatever.
And then every time, well, unless I read a bad book, but like whenever I read good books, by the time I get to the end of it, I say, wow, I feel refreshed.
I feel like I've just seen something.
I've lived something.
My soul feels bigger.
Wow, I'm viewing the world in a new and interesting way.
And then I say, well, I'm never doing that again.
Now, what do I need to do that for?
It's like Charles Murray discovered God.
And I said, do you pray?
And he said, no, I tried it once and it worked.
So I never did it again.
That's you in fiction.
But no, I really do think that this is a serious thing that I think as you ingest more art, you start to walk around the world and say, oh, I recognize this situation.
Just like if you live as many hundreds of years as I have lived, you've seen things before and you see them again and you kind of know how they're going to go.
But that happens with art too, because you think, oh, yeah, Shakespeare said this or, you know, I read this in a book and you can see what's going to happen.
It's the reason that I am continually right.
Like when we have those friendly fire shows, we're all talking and you guys are saying, well, I read the polls and this is going to happen.
And I'll sit there and go, no, that's not what's going to happen.
It's going to be this.
It's because I read the arts.
It's because I read fiction.
I do wonder how much the, I don't want to be too harsh here, but that the conservative Philistinism is, you know, affects our, especially our more contemporary politics.
Because I think even though I, you know, I'm mostly a Philistine, I have, I have read a decent amount of, I don't know, poetry or something.
I've been dragged into reading some of the great books.
And it does gives you a bit of a lighter step.
So much so that people will call you gay.
They'll say like, you're, you know, come on, what are you reading poetry for, you Fanouk?
You know, come on.
We got to get, we got to start reading, you know, like Hitler or something.
What do you, and it used to be it was a manly thing to do to read the arts because you were sophisticated.
You know, you knew that a guy like James Bond read all the great British novels, you know, that say he wouldn't be that way if he hadn't.
It is enculturating, if that's a word, that it gives you culture.
And I think, you know, I really do think this because it's been frustrating in some ways.
I feel like I feel like like 20 years ago, I started fighting this fight to take the culture and all the means of communications away from the left because they had this stranglehold on it and they were killing our country by basically producing this toxic atmosphere.
You were talking about Jonathan Haidt, you know, this is like, this is the toxic atmosphere that he lives in that he, you know, he can't see through.
I interviewed him about his atheism and like he seriously can't get past it and see the truth because of the atmosphere that he lives in.
And we've won so much of this fight.
You know, we have defeated their news media.
Their news media is now almost virtually irrelevant.
They're just this kind of font.
They just kind of stink up the place with their lies.
But we still have not come back and taken the arts away.
And like Hollywood is dead.
Hollywood is, when I say it's dead, it's like lying on its back with its feet.
It's what the cops call tits up.
It's like just dead.
And we're not doing anything.
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What do you make of, because there is in the trattier world, you know, which is kind of on the upswing, the traditionalists, people going to high liturgy churches and stuff, that's on the upswing.
I'm definitely part of it.
There is a longing for high art, high culture.
Even if most of them never go to the opera or ballet or something, but there's still a longing for it, a gesture toward it.
But what you're talking about is novels and Hollywood.
What should we be aiming at?
You know, is there, because I would love, I was in Hungary for CPAC Hungary, and one of the organizers comes up to me and goes, Michael, you look kind of cultured.
Do you like the opera?
And I said, I actually do like opera, but I haven't been in ages.
I said, okay, well, here's some opera tickets.
And I go and it was really terrific, actually, all things considered.
And I thought it was almost entirely empty.
And the people who were there were dressed in t-shirts.
Like there was no sense that this is a real to-do and we should dress in a respectful way for this, you know, and we should fill up that.
It's amazing, beautiful opera house.
Should we be aiming at the high arts or the low arts?
Or am I even misthinking, misconsidering this?
You're kind of misthinking.
I'll tell you what.
I was at the opera Sunday.
I saw the marriage of Figaro at the Kennedy Center.
It was wonderful, wonderful cast, wonderful production, and packed.
It was just packed.
Although, I mean, I was the youngest person there.
So that might tell you something about the audience.
But Mozart was in the audience.
And look, it is very, very hard to match the European arts and culture at their highest.
There was something about that culture that produced the greatest art that humankind has ever produced.
And that is intimidating for Americans and has been ever since America began.
But there was something really different about the European arts, is that Europe was a number of small countries.
So each, what we would call a state, was a country, and each one could address the entire country in a single work of art.
So Dickens could write Britain.
You could write the entire country of Britain.
We can't do that in America.
Too many of us, too big, and too individualistic.
And that's why Americans have found their expression almost always, their greatest expression in genre, in musical comedy, in detective stories, in Westerns, in science fiction.
We're really good at those.
I mean, you look at, you know, you look at somebody like Conan the Barbarian.
He's tossed aside as junk.
No, these are some of the greatest adventure novels ever written.
And they say something about American life without, of course, ever talking about American life.
I work mostly in the crime genre, sometimes in fantasy and horror.
You and I did another kingdom trilogy together, which is still selling quite well, by the way.
I just got some royalties for that.
It's doing very nicely.
When do I get my royalty?
Yeah, you get zipped.
I'll send you a bagel.
I don't know, maybe.
I could use it immediately.
In the shape of how much money you get.
But somehow the American dream is expressed in dreamlike stories that are genre stories.
And that's a really interesting fact and really different.
But we shouldn't be cowed by the high culture of Europe, though we should ingest it so we can put the stuff that's in there into our works.
But it's just different.
I mean, a movie like Casablanca, The Godfather, these are works of art.
There's no question about it.
And the fact that they're not, you know, Macbeth, they don't have the language that Shakespeare had is not to be, doesn't mean that we should turn up our noses at them.
I think it really is important.
You know, one of the true crisis resolutions in my life, I was just writing about it for somebody else.
And so I'm on top of my mind, is I knew that I had, let's just say, a sophisticated vision of what the world is.
It was a complex, sophisticated vision, but I knew my skill was writing fast-moving, you know, crime stories.
That was really the talent I'd been given, right?
And I thought, how do I do that?
How do I put those things together?
And I read a great Victorian thriller called The Woman in White.
And I was lying in bed reading this.
And I sat up in bed and I thought, that's how you do it.
And then the trick became taking a slow-moving Victorian novel and turning it into a fast-moving American novel, which has been sort of the work of my life.
If you read After That the Dark, you will see the results of that.
And I'm not, I am selling the book.
I hope everybody goes out and buys the book.
But this is when I finished that, I thought, yeah, that's what I'm trying to do, because it is full of complexity.
It is full of a vision of the world, but it is done as a fast-moving American thriller because that's America.
America is not a slow-moving, ruminating culture where we sit around and worry which fork goes on.
You know, Henry James, who was an American writer, became a British writer, we talked about where the fork was.
And if you didn't know where the fork was, then that told you something about character.
It doesn't tell you anything about an American.
An American is a very different kind of character who I think is expressed in musicals, Westerns, detective stories, and science fiction and fantasy.
That's how we talk to each other.
And I think it's right and proper that we do.
We shouldn't look down on it.
Right.
I've never considered that, that in America, you can't have this totalizing vision in a totalizing work of art because we're just, it's a weird country that was founded by like pilgrims, religious separatist zealots, and kind of miscreants and moneymakers.
And then we got a bunch of slaves and then a ton of immigrants.
You know, it's like pretty hard.
And yeah, and you get these wonderful moments when like, you know, Bing Crosby listens to Louis Armstrong and thinks, I want a little bit black stuff in my life.
And, you know, Bing Crosby is singing songs written by Jews.
And, you know, it's like, yeah, it's different than Mozart, you know, because Mozart is embodying an entire culture.
But it is a work of genius.
It's a work of genius.
When you hear the American songbook written by all these Jews for blacks, for whites, and, you know, and Irish guys singing, you know, all this stuff, you're hearing something new and beautiful and unique.
And I think we should be proud of it and understand it as an expression of ourselves, this incredible, wild country that's nothing like it.
I mean, maybe Rome a little bit at its peak, but nothing like this.
No, that was the comparison I was thinking.
And in terms of genre, you know, for gigantic globe-encompassing decadent empires, I was thinking of the poetry of Catullus, much of which is just pornography.
And, you know, I guess that's a prolific genre in decadent global empire as well.
But better to focus more on like the crime stories and the musicals and the uh no, I mean, you know, Yates made fun of the critics of his day, the poet, the Irish poet Yates, made fun of the critics of his day because of they were stuffy.
He called them bald heads, you know, old bald heads.
And he, the last line of that poem is, what would they say if their catullus came their way?
In other words, the art in its time was filthy and it was fun and it was big and dirty.
And now the critics are going, oh, it's cutullas.
And so I really do think the critics get in our way, get between us and the things we love.
One of the reasons I talk about video games is because I think they are a stunning visual art form at their best.
Obviously, 90% of them are crap, but every now and again, you do something and you think, wow, that's beautiful.
And I'm being sucked into it by gameplay, which has never happened before.
And these are just new things.
And I think, you know, yeah, art is a two-way street.
So if you're sitting in your mother's basement smoking dope and playing video games, you are not participating in art.
But I've played video games that have stuck with me and have changed the way I see things and have enhanced the way I see things.
So I just don't think, I don't think snobbery is what works.
I think recognizing quality, both in European style art and in American art is what brings it to life.
And I think that's why conservatives get lost.
You know, they will go to the opera.
They will watch A Guy's Eyes Plucked Out in King Lear.
But then when they see it in Game of Thrones, they think, ooh, you know, it's violent.
Naughty, nasty.
Yeah.
You, Drew, you might have convinced me to stop being such a Philistine and to go read After That The Dark, a book that is out right now.
Everyone needs to go get it.
I believe I'm seeing you in about three seconds to go do Friendly Fire.
Is that right?
I'll be there.
See you then.
One.
Both of you wearing these incredible sweaters.
I know.
This is this is we got to get you.
Isn't it?
Is that a nice Michael Knowles sweater?
I don't, if not, we have to get you one.
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