“Late-Night-Radio Talk-Show Host Tells All” is a brand new story by Cynthia Ozick. To mark the story’s publication, Ozick and Oliver Munday, the affiliate artistic director of the journal, mentioned the story over electronic mail. Their dialog has been evenly edited for readability.
Oliver Munday: Your story, “Late-Night-Radio Talk-Show Host Tells All,” is about an growing older radio host named Nicky. It’s a beguiling and profound character research. What drew you to after-hours radio as a fictional setting?
Cynthia Ozick: Chronic insomnia, to start with, which turned, for a time, right into a nocturnal habit. So a lot of evening radio is repetitious detritus: climate, visitors, headlines, sports activities, nostrums for this and that ailment, the excitement and miasma of voices, voices, voices with uncooked cawings of what passes for tune. Who listens (tens of millions do, from their beds), and why? Yet the true spur to this story was a query that was put to me in a dialog not lengthy earlier than—what do you most need out of your fiction? The reply got here so rapidly, and so unexpectedly, that it startled me to the marrow: feeling, pure feeling. And I assumed I’d search for it.
Munday: Nicky is described ambiguously and stays considerably enigmatic to the reader. We’re left unsure about particulars together with gender. Why withhold and obscure on this means?
Ozick: But it’s evening radio itself that obscures. When the listeners within the story—primarily outdated males and a lesser contingent of outdated girls, all of them hoarse, sick, fatigued, worn, resentful, opinionated—are roused to talk, we hear 100 accents and origins that puzzle, whereas the overlay of the native yawp of New York scrambles all of them. Even extra noticeably, a number of the extra well-liked real-life talk-show hosts typically sound unidentifiably in-between (high-pitched male? low-pitched feminine?). No surprise, then, that when the attractive boy arrives, he’s shocked to see that Nicky is definitely Nicole.
Munday: At one level within the story, Nicky muses about potential listeners: “If you call me, you hallucinate.” What is probably the most notable distinction between the act of listening and the act of studying?
Ozick: Hmm. This would be the very first time this query has come into being. So let’s see … When we’re bodily gripping a guide or something in static print, we’re free to look once more, to suppose once more, to moon and muse and ponder and dally, however responding to a voice (whether or not on the radio or to a instructor in a classroom or whereas talking at a lectern) means a fleeting one-time-only alternative, and we’re caught with no matter we’ve mentioned. Reading, then, is comparatively riskless. Listening is all danger. Reading can take its time. Listening is flying sans wings. Nor does listening to a voice on a recording provide a security internet: Awareness of the persistent machine all the time intervenes. A guide, too, could also be a form of machine, nevertheless it’s our unconscious respiration that’s its motive and engine: We dwell in a guide.
Munday: Radio and podcasts have come to dominate media. Nicky apparently describes the floating voice of radio as a god that may reprimand and seduce. Does the disembodied but guiding nature of audio enchantment to a world trying to find idols?
Ozick: Immersion in late-night radio can definitely level to such an remark. Though there are occasional rebels and cranky dissenters who’re quickly dismissed, allegiance to the talk-show host prevails—reliance on his private knowledge (largely his, extra hardly ever hers), devotion to no matter of house life he chooses to disclose, whether or not for comedian reduction or suspense (what is going to the brand new child be named?). Talk-show hosts change into authority figures, if not like monks then like therapists. They are trusted to supply continuity, connection, consolation, comfort, intimacy. Intimacy above all. You are alone with the one who provides solace, at midnight, within the quiet of evening. Even in the event you don’t take part, even if you’re too diffident to name the quantity that’s infinitely repeated, the aura is that of prayer. Of petition. Of alleviation. Of submission.
Munday: One evening, Nicky is visited by an intruder on the radio station who accuses Nicky of being an impostor and faux. This incident leads Nicky to query notions of efficiency and pretense; to the thought of “pure feeling.” This motif recurs all through the story. How does one attain the state of pure feeling?
Ozick: Imposture and fakery are a double-bladed razor. They are the units and designs of the impostor and faker, the deceptive talk-show host himself. But on the similar time they’re what are most desired by the late-night listener, who can be shocked and stripped of delusion if confronted with the pragmatic indifference, the insincerity, of the radio performer. “We must not let daylight in upon magic,” Walter Bagehot mentioned of royalty (an outdated quote evoked by a brand new coronation), and the state of pure feeling could also be one with that magic: It urges—it instructions—the muffling veil of evening.
Munday: I used to be reminded of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice whereas studying this story. Nicky turns into, very like Mann’s growing older protagonist, Aschenbach, obsessive about a younger boy’s magnificence and purity. You describe “the pathos of a boy’s lone big toe.” Are magnificence and purity carefully linked?
Ozick: Mann’s Tadzio is an erotic incarnation, and in addition an emblem of Aschenbach’s craving for his personal irretrievable youth. But Nicky, the septuagenarian Nicole, sees within the stunning boy and his imaginings an immaculate but wayward harmless who represents magnificence, pure magnificence, proper all the way down to his least flesh-and-bone embodiment. Call him her aesthetic precept; he might certainly be not more than an apparition. As such, he’s additionally a check case: It is his presence that asks, as you do, Are magnificence and purity carefully linked? The reply I discovered—or, slightly, the reply that this story discovered—isn’t any; one thing extra urgent, extra needful, is at stake. Late-night radio is an outlet for pity, pure pity, and what’s pity if not emotion distilled?
But is there a catch lurking right here? Can pity be pure if the talk-show host, like Nicky herself, is merely an actor? I’ve left the conclusion to the reader, however right here is my personal view: Feeling, pure feeling, is a prepared collaboration between the godlet and the believer who’s carried away.
Munday: You’ve written many novels and short-story collections … How does the method of writing brief fiction examine to that of novel-writing?
Ozick: Writing for me is difficult labor, regardless of the size or the shape. I begin out in worry and doubt, and proceed on this state of extended discontent and acutely aware forcing, till sure unpredictable moments of pleasure take over, when the factor begins to know itself and its personal trajectory. In the long-distance run of a novel, this may come as late as three-quarters of the way in which by means of. The brief story at occasions is aware of what it intends to occur from the beginning, however is wholly perplexed as to the right way to get there. When the dam all of the sudden breaks, even the phrases discover themselves. All in all, it feels higher to have written than to have to write down. But not writing, as each author will testify, is much more punishing than writing!
Munday: Aside from brief tales, what are you at present engaged on?
Ozick: How to not lie when writing make-believe.