Appreciating Literature’s Gay Genius Michael Silverblatt
The superlative does not exist to describe Michael Silverblatt’s passion hosting KCRW’s Bookworm, which the New York Times described as a “literary salon of the air.” Michael died from complications of diabetes at his Fairfax district home on Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day. He was 73.
Many, many famous writers and artists have described their appreciation for Michael’s unique, insightful depth of literary knowledge. Norman Mailer called Michael “the best reader in America.” Susan Sontag called him “a national treasure.” Joyce Carol Oates called him “the very Mozart of literary interviewers.”
“Michael was a genius. He could be mesmerizing and always, always, always brilliant,” Alan Howard, Michael’s friend and “Bookworm” editor for 31 of the show’s 33 years, told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s an extraordinary archive that exists, and I don’t think anyone else has ever created such an archive of intelligent, interesting people being asked about their work.”
Michael Silverblatt and Toni Morrison 2009 (Screen shot of photo by Gregg Lewis/KCRW)
A curious twist of fate landed Michael in what turned out to be his own wonderland, conducting more than 1,600 interviews with brilliant writers and artists such as Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, Margaret Atwood, Ann Beattie, Kurt Vonnegut, Salman Rushdie, Gore Vidal, Tom Wolfe, Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro, and David Foster Wallace.
Michael was born in Brooklyn, New York on Aug. 6, 1952 and raised in Queens by parents who were two accountants - children of Russia and Polish immigrants who didn’t quite know what to do with their reclusive, budding gay, Jewish intellect.
“My first crucial book was Alice in Wonderland. My mom used to take me with her to the beauty parlor, and I asked her to get me the big Walt Disney Alice in Wonderland with the colored pictures because it was so pretty and mysterious to me. I remember the Cheshire cat, pink and purple with a heckler’s smile,” Michael told Sarah Fay during an interview at the University of Iowa in 2010. “My mother instead bought me the Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland with the black and white Tenniel engravings, and I was very disappointed. She did it not because she had a particular investment in literature but because the Disney was so much more expensive and we were always mindful of our economy.
“And when I finally read it,” he continues, “it took me a good two years—I was absolutely fascinated and perturbed by it, particularly by the section where Alice finds herself in the wood where nothing has a name and she doesn’t know her own name. The engraving has Alice in the woods with her arms around the neck of a fawn, not strangling the fawn, but embracing it as if for dear life, or as if she doesn’t know if she is a fawn, too. The mystery of reading all of those poems that made less sense if you didn’t know the popular poems they were parodies of made it even stranger. I was absolutely entranced by Alice and Lewis Carroll.”
Through Lewis Carroll’s Symbolic Logic and The Game of Logic, Michael taught himself logic and math. “I developed quite a proficiency for abstract math.”
Intellectual challenges became games as when, in junior high, Stephen Sondheim published “Cryptic Crosswords” in New York magazine and Michael would “enter the words as a knight would move across a chessboard.”
As “[Donald] Barthelme has his Snow White character say in his first novel (1967), I want to hear words I have never heard before. I want the words and sentences to peacock around, to open their plumes,” Michael told Fay. “I have an experience of the book, and it’s as if I have not a flat surface in front of me but rather a beehive around my head. It’s very strange.”
In 1968, after graduating from Bayside High School at age 16, Michael enrolled in SUNY at Buffalo, where authors such as Michel Foucault, John Barth, Donald Barthelme and J.M. Coetzee were professors. Michael was awkward, shy and inhibited by a stammer – but he secretly considered the professors friends and spoke with them after class.
During summer vacation, his parents pushed him to be a postal worker with a mail route on the Upper East Side that took him past old bookstores. He subsequently bought the complete works of Charles Dickens while his literary tastes were also expanding to the experimental and avant-garde.
Michael refused to major in business, choosing math as a compromise. But he quickly switched to English, graduating with a BA in 1974. He went for a PhD at John Hopkins University but dropped out after a year, paralyzed by writer’s block. “I thought I wanted to be a writer, but that really didn’t turn out to be my gift,” Michael told Kristy Davis for Oprah.com.
After a screenplay he co-wrote received some Hollywood attention, Michael relocated to Los Angeles to pursue his dream of writing scripts and books. But the script wasn’t picked up and he found himself lost – broke, jobless and drinking a lot. “At the time,” he told Davis, “I resembled a homeless person who unaccountably had an apartment.”
Michael found a 12 Step program and his life changed. Friends helped him learn how to take care of himself and found him a job at Freeman & Sutton Public Relations in West Hollywood.
That’s where I met Michael in the mid-80s. Brad Bessey, Michael and I became the gay troika in that office. I was a fellow 12 Stepper so Brad and I helped brainiac Michael with living in the real world – like cleaning up crumbs. Showbiz-sharp Brad helped me and Michael with the who’s who in Hollywood. And I learned how to write spin-filled press releases about “causes” like I used to read as a journalist.
“We were odd friends,” Brad remembers about Michael. “Back in the mid-eighties, we met in the glittering churn of celebrity PR. I was young, handsome, brash, and built for the room. Michael, on the other hand, was quieter and a little awkward—as if words lived more comfortably on the page than in the room. I loved his laugh, his intellect, and the way, when I trusted him with my poetry—shared with few—he met it with tenderness: an encouraging question, a precise insight, never once making me feel small. When he landed KCRW’s Bookworm, it felt like a metamorphosis—awkwardness transforming into flight—his brilliance suddenly finding a home, audible at last, lifting literature into the air. And always, that laugh.”
We three broke up in the late 80s: I went to live with Wallis Annenberg in Beverly Hills, intending to write plays; Brad wound up as E!’s Director of Talent & Development where he resurrected Joan Rivers career by putting her on the Red Carpet; then on to Entertainment Tonight where he encouraged actor Michael Jeter to come out in 1997 as a gay man with HIV/AIDS and highlighted transgender actor Alexis Arquette.
In 1988, Michael had a famous encounter at dinner in Santa Monica where he was representing actor Ray Sharkey (Wiseguy). He overheard KCRW’s general manager Ruth Seymor talking about Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, a victim of one of Stalin’s purges in the 1930s.
“I had just gotten back from Russia, and we were at this dinner with an actor, a producer and director who were talking Hollywood,” Seymor told Lynell George for a 3,596-word LA Times feature on Michael in 1997. “And Michael and I got into this whole discussion about Russian poetry, talking to the exclusion of everyone else. He’s a great raconteur and so the rest of the world just vanished….So afterward I just turned and asked him: ‘Have you ever thought about doing radio?’”
Soon thereafter, Michael started volunteering as host for Bookworm on KCRW, a public radio station on the campus of Santa Monica College. Five years later, thanks to enthusiastic Lannan Foundation support, he was paid, treated like royalty on college campuses and other venues for the special Lannan Foundation “Readings and Conversations” series and became syndicated nationally.
“The purpose of the show is to help my listeners look through writers’ eyes,” Michael told The New York Times in 1999.“It’s to show them, whether they’re reading or not, how writers re-enchant the world, how they surround us with the miraculous. That’s what books do to me and what I want my show to do, to remind people how odd and special writers’ minds and imaginations are.”
But Michael also cared about public relations, as he shared with his friend Tosh Berman in this 1987 interview. “For people like me, wearing a sports jacket [for PR work] is like the best rebellion of all,” Michael says. “It’s like wearing a clown suit every single day – and enjoying the formality of it, too. The great joy, as William Burrows pointed out, is to feel completely costumed and to be absolutely anonymous.”
“I care about deeply serious writing in America – dance, art. Why should all sorts of less valuable forms be winning attention in the press and the media when the arts languish in need of budgets and government funds,” he says. “This is very important - that we have a government that supports the arts. But it’s more important that we have a culture that supports the arts.”
However - it needs to be created. “I think it is there but very embryonically,” Michael says. “That’s the kind of thing I’m interested in doing – in helping the arts reach their audience and making that audience aware that like an addiction to drugs – there are those of us who are art addicts – whose lives are changed by the brilliant people who make new things, new forms, new forms of culture.”
One of Michael’s most famous interviews was with David Foster Wallace in 1996 after the publication of Wallace’s 1078-page ultimate mega-meta novel Infinite Jest. Michael immediately stuns the author by observing that the book was written and structured in fractals. After an awe-struck Wallace agrees and explains, Michael goes deeper.
“[W]e’re entering a world that needs to be made strange before it becomes familiar,” he says. Infinite Jest isn’t difficult “for difficulty’s sake; it seemed like immense difficulty being expended because something important about how difficult it has become to be human needed to be said and there weren’t other ways to say that.”
Wallace is heard quietly saying, “I feel like I wanna ask you to adopt me.”
Over the years, Michael’s vision becomes clearer. “There are all sorts of other things that you get on radio and television,” he told Oprah.com in 2009, “but I wanted listeners of ‘Bookworm’ to hear words, ideas, but particularly emotions that don’t get discussed in public, if at all elsewhere. That is to say, for one reason or another, the show is a crusade that’s much larger than the subject of books.”
That includes books by and about LGBTQ+ people. In a 2006 interview, Brokeback Mountain author Annie Proulx shares how Ang Lee’s film Brokeback Mountain reflects her vision that the main romantic characters of Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist are not traditional “cowboys” but poor ranch hands in 1963 rural Wyoming. She’s also annoyed with gay fans who have inundated her with alternative “happy” endings.
In an introduction to his 2014 interview about Hilton Als’ book, Michael writes: “White Girls (McSweeney’s), his first book in 14 years, is a series of essays that defy easy categorization - in each he takes the risk to say what must be said. Countering books that define ‘blackness’ in the title like Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Als, a black gay male, is interested in making words opaque. He chronicles longing, loss of loved ones, and the establishment of his voice in the New York of the late ‘80s and ‘90s. He looks back to Richard Pryor and forward to Eminem. His ‘white girls’ are neither necessarily girls nor white. They are Diana Vreeland, Michael Jackson, Truman Capote, Louise Little. He posits: what if we existed in a world that was not ‘categorizable?’ Wouldn’t we be left with something more humane and complicated?”
Michael is keenly aware of the importance of identity.
“A book about English children in a castle,” he tells the LA Times, “that was the training, when I was young, to imagine a world that didn’t include me. Books and television are our cultural mirrors… and when you look into the mirror and you don’t see your face, this is possibly a nightmare situation--the act of looking but not finding yourself, or looking and finding yourself where you don’t belong. So until I found books that had a Michael in them, part of me didn’t fully yet exist.”
Finding an image was also startling. “When I learned that there were [such] books--Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, Henry Roth, that generation of Jewish writer--my first impulse was to resist. ‘This isn’t the castle!’ I was frightened. It was the language I heard around the house. If you’re any kind of minority, to open a book and hear the people around you, your aunts and uncles talking to you . . . that that language should be in a book? I mean, this is an enormous day!”
In 2005, Michael and his team produced a 10-part series entitled “Escaping the Cage: Identity, Multiculturalism and Writing,” playing off Angelou’s autobiography, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” about the human desire to make one’s voice heard even when shackled. Michael “inverted the concept: Writers of defined backgrounds -- such as ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation -- can become imprisoned by it, he believes, an effect of everything from publishers’ marketing strategies to the editing decisions of anthologists,” The Times reported.
“The cage became the cage of ethnicity,” Silverblatt said. “People were being asked to see literature as entirely a matter of identity.... People were not being allowed to be writers. They were being turned into spokespeople.”
Part 6 is devoted to Sexuality and Literary Theory: “James McCourt discusses the emergence of ‘queer identity’ and gives an overview of French literary theories and their influence on multiculturalism--while Camille Paglia explains the destructive nature of such theories. Booker Prize winner Alan Hollinghurst, who writes about the gay experience, reveals that he reads very little popular gay literature. Edmund White explains how he has turned away from the aesthetic and has embraced social realism in his desire to document the AIDS crisis.”
Author John Rechy, famous for the 1963 gay classic City of Night, wrote a letter to Michael agreeing with his premise. Quoting from one of his essays, he writes: “There is counterattack by the `mainstream’ to consider. One of its main tactics to effect that countering is through the creation of `liberated ghettos’. When book-chains assign labeled sections to `Chicano literature,’ `Gay Literature,’ `Women’s Studies,’ they segregate. So do `mainstream’ publishers who aim minority books only at minorities and who promote such works, if at all, with restricted advertising.”
Brad Bessey is now director of Communications and Talent Relations at Project Angel Food, where he used to volunteer in 1989. And after 46 years as a journalist for the LGBTQ+ community, I am now writing a Substack called LGBTQ+ Freedom Fighters.
And Michael – he found loving friends, deep admiration and captured his dream. “I’m as fantastical a creature as anything in Oz or in Wonderland,” he told the Cornell University English department in 2010. “I like it if people can say, ‘I never met anyone like him,’ and by that they should mean that it wasn’t an unpleasant experience.”
I never met anyone like him.
Your profile of Michael Silverblatt is so much appreciated, as I only knew him though the remarkable Bookworm. You make me want to uncover some of those old groundbreaking episodes. While I was driving through the Southland to another "important" project, it was bookworm and the Car Guys who were wonderful company on those adventures. Now, Karen here you are centering another important community voice that may have gone unremarked or forgotten were it not for you. Don't you think we are overdue to have you center yourself? Where is the definitive Karen Ocamb memoir? Maybe I'm being selfish.