Nick Tosches’ Final Interview

On Sunday, October 20th, 2019, three days before his seventieth birthday, Nick Tosches died in his TriBeCa apartment. As of this writing, no cause of death has been specified. It represents an Immeasurable loss to the world of literature. The below, conducted this past July, was the last full interview Tosches ever gave.

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In Where Dead Voices Gather, his peripatetic 2001 anti-biography of minstrel singer Emmett Miller, Nick Tosches wrote: “The deeper we seek, the more we descend from knowledge to mystery, which is the only place where true wisdom abides.” It’s an apt summation of Tosches’ own life and work.

Journalist, poet, novelist, biographer and historian Nick Tosches has been called the last of our literary outlaws, thanks in part to his reputation as a hardboiled character with a history of personal excesses. But he’s far more than that—he’s one of those writers other writers wish they could be. He’s seen it all first-hand, moved in some of the most dangerous circles on earth, and is blessed with the genius to put it down with a sharp elegance that’s earned him a seat in the Pantheon.

Born in 1949, Tosches was raised in the working class neighborhoods of Newark and Jersey City, where his father ran a bar. Despite barely finishing high school, he fell into the writing game at nineteen, shortly after relocating to New York. He quickly earned a reputation as a brilliant music journalist, writing for Rolling Stone and authoring Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock ’N Roll (1977), the Jerry Lee Lewis biography Hellfire (1982) and Unsung Heroes of Rock ’N Roll (1984). After that he staked out his own territory, exploring and illuminating the deeply-shadowed corners of the culture and the human spirit. He’s written biographies of sinister Italian financier Michele Sindona, Sonny Liston, Dean Martin and near-mythical crime boss Arnold Rothstein. He’s published poetry and books about opium. His debut novel, Cut Numbers (1988) focused on the numbers racket, and his most recent, Under Tiberius (2015) presented Jesus as a con artist with a good p.r. man.

While often citing Faulkner, Charles Olsen, Dante and the Greeks as his primary literary influences, over the past fifty years Tosches’ own style has evolved from the flash and swagger of his early music writing into a singular and inimitable prose which blends the two-fisted nihilism of the crime pulps with an elegant and lyrical formalism. Like Joyce, Tosches takes clear joy in the measured, poetic flow of language, and like Dostoevsky, his writing, regardless of the topic at hand, wrestles with the Big Issues: Good and Evil, Truth and Falsehood, the Sacred and the Profane, and our pathetic place in a universe gone mad.

For years now, Tosches’ official bio has stated he “lives in what used to be New York.” It only makes sense then that we would meet amid the tangled web of tiny sidestreets that make up SoHo at what remains one of the last bars in New York where we could smoke. Tosches, now sixty-nine, smoked a cigar and drank a bottle of forty-year-old tawny port as we discussed his work, publishing, religion, the Internet, this godforsaken city, fear, and how a confirmed heretic goes about obtaining Vatican credentials.

Jim Knipfel: When I initially contacted you about an interview last year, my first question was going to be about retirement. You’d been hinting for awhile, at least since Me and the Devil in 2012, that you planned to retire from writing at sixty-five. And since Under Tiberius came out, there’d been silence. But shortly after I got in touch, we had to put things on hold because you’d started working on a new project. As you put it then, “I find myself becoming lost again in the cursed woods of words and writing.”

Nick Tosches: It is unlike any other project. I am indulging myself, knowing nobody has paid me money up front. Is it a project? Yeah, I guess anything that’s not come to a recognizable fruition is a project. So yeah. I do consider the actual writing of books to be behind me.

JK: Did thinking about retirement have anything to do with what we’ll generously call the dispiriting nature of contemporary publishing?

NT: Oh, very much so. Very much.

JK: There’s a remarkable section in the middle of In The Hand of Dante, it just comes out of nowhere, in which you launch into this frontal attack on what’s become of the industry. I went back and read it again last week, and it’s so beautiful and so perfect, and as I was reading I couldn’t help but think, “Who the hell else could get away with this?” Dropping a very personal screed like that in the middle of a novel? And a novel released by a major publisher, in this case Little, Brown. Was there any kind of reaction from your editor?

NT: Okay, is this the same passage where I talk about all these people with fat asses?

JK: Yeah, that’s part of it.

NT: Okay, my agent at the time, Russ Galen, said he heard from {Michael} Pietsch, the editor who’s now the Chief Executive Officer of North America. And the moment he became so, he went from being my lifelong friend to “yeah, I heard of him.” He complained about the fat ass comment, and my agent told him, “If you go for a walk with Nick Tosches, you might get rained on.” Apart from that, no. And I have to say, he considers that one of his favorite novels, ever. When I tried to get the rights back because of a movie deal, he said “no I won’t do that.” I said “Why?” And he said because it was one of his favorite books. So no, there was no real backlash. A lot of comments like your own. A lot of people saying “Boy, that was great.”

JK: As we both know, marketing departments make all the editorial decisions at publishing houses nowadays, and over the years you must have driven them nuts. There’s no easy label to slap on you. You hear there’s a new Nick Tosches book coming out, it could be a novel, it could be poetry, it could be a biography or history or anything at all. I’m trying to imagine all these marketing people sitting around asking, “So what’s our targeted demographic for The Last Opium Den?”

NT: I just set out to do what I wanted to do. If they wanted to cling to the delusion that they could somehow control sales or predict the future of taste, fine, let them go ahead and do it. I’ve always found it’s the books that gather the attention, they just try to coordinate things. All they’re doing is covering their own jobs. If they can wrangle you an interview with Modern Farming, well, there’s something to put on a list they hand out at one of their meetings… They’re all illiterate. Thirty years ago there was still a sense of independence among publishers. Now they’re just vestigial remnants that mean nothing because they’re all owned by these huge media conglomerates.

JK: To whom publishing is irrelevant.

NT: Right. It’s all just a joke.

JK: I guess what matters is that the people who read you will read whatever you put out. If you put out a book of cake decorating tips, I’d be the first in line to buy it. Actually I’d love to see what you could do with Nick’s Best Cakes Ever, right? It’s something to consider.

NT: Maybe not that particular instance, but what you have so kindly referred to as my current project, which is very…eccentric. It’s the herd of my obsessions that will not remain corralled as I intended.

JK: What brought you back to writing? You’ve said in the past that writing is a very tough habit to kick.

NT: Well, what brought me back? I have no idea. Maybe just actual, utter, desperate boredom. There was none of this Romantic need to express myself. Just a lot of little obsessions, that’s all. As I said…well, I didn’t say this at all. There’s nothing at stake. There’s no money, there’s not going to be any money. There’s no one I need to give a second thought of offending or pleasing. But that having been said, I’m taking as much care with it as I have with everything else. I’ve always thought of myself as the only editor. And having had the good fortune to work with good titular editors, which means their job consists of perhaps making a suggestion or stating a preference or notifying me that they do not understand certain things, and beyond that leaving it be. As I told one editor,I forget when or where or why, “Why don’t you go write you’re own fuckin’ book and leave mine be?” He had all these great ideas. The best editors are the ones that aren’t frustrated authors.

JK: I was lucky enough to work with two editors like that. One had a nervous breakdown and is out of the business, the other just vanished one day.

NT: Well, you’re fortunate. Not only do most editors, a majority of editors, which are bad editors, like the majority of anything, really. If they don’t interfere with something, and nine times out of ten make it worse, they’re not justifying their jobs. The other thing is, we’re recently at the point where the new type of writers, which are the writers who are willing to do it for free, think the editor’s the chief mark of the whole racket. But it’s not—he’s not, she’s not. Their job is to get you paid and leave you alone. That’s the thing. Now you got pseudo editors, pseudo writers. If you think of a writer such as William Faulkner. Now there’s a guy who just screamed out to be edited. Fortunately the editors were willing to publish him and leave him alone, which is why we have William Faulkner. That was the editor’s great contribution, protecting William Faulkner from that nonsense. People speak about, what’s that phrase applied to Maxwell Perkins? “Editor of Genius.” Well, the genius was you find someone who can write really well, and don’t fuck with ‘em. There’s something to be said about that. It’s to Perkins’ credit.

JK: If I can step back a ways to your early years. You were a streetwise kid who grew up in Jersey City and Newark. Your father discouraged you from reading, but you read anyway. So what was the attraction to books? Or was it simple contrariness on your part because you’d been told to avoid them?

NT: I got lost in them. It was dope before I copped dope. I used to love to drift away, in my mind, my imagination. I loved books. My father was not an anti-book person, but he was the first generation of our family to be born in this country. A working class neighborhood where okay, this guy worked in this factory, and that guy owned a bar, and that guy delivered the mail. Nobody was going any further than this. And I remember my father saying, “These books are gonna put ideas in your head.” I guess I enjoyed that they did. Terrible books, some of them. Terrible books, but it didn’t matter.

JK: You’ve also said that very early on you wanted to be a writer.

NT: Yes.

JK: Or a farmer.

NT: Or a garbage man or an archaeologist. Those were my childhood aspirations.

JK: Considering the environment you were coming out of, three of those seem counterintuitive.

NT: Garbage men got to ride on the side of the truck, and that looked great. Archaeologists, wow. I didn’t know they were spending years just coming up with little splintered shards of urns. Yeah, writer. Writing had a great attraction for me, because writing seemed a great coward’s way out. You can communicate anything while facing a corner, with no one seeing you, no one hearing you, you didn’t have to look anyone in the eye. It’s a great coward’s form of expressing yourself. That coupled with the fact that what I felt a need to express was inchoate. I didn’t even understand what it was I wanted to express. Sometimes I still don’t.

JK: You’ve also said that in your teens you started to listen to country music, which given the time and place also seems counterintuitive.

NT: Did I say my teens? Maybe I was nineteen or twenty. Yeah, I never listened to country music until the jukebox at the place on Park Avenue and West Side Avenue in Jersey City.

JK: It was right around that time, when you were nineteen, twenty, that you published your first story in the music magazine Fusion. Which means we’re right around the fiftieth anniversary of your start in this racket.

NT: Let’s see…that was 1969, so yeah, I guess so. Fifty years ago.

JK: Then for the next fifteen-plus years you wrote mainly about music. You were at Rolling Stone and other magazines, and you put out Country, Hellfire and Unsung Heroes of Rock ’n Roll. So How early on were you thinking about branching out? About writing about the mob, or the Vatican, or anything else that interested you?

NT: Before I ever wrote anything. You have to understand, these so-called rock’n’roll magazines provided two great things. First as an outlet for young writers whose phone calls to The New Yorker would not be accepted. And they all, back then before they caught the capitalist disease, offered complete freedom of speech. So yes, in the course of writing about music you could…or actually, forget about writing about music, because nobody even knew anything about music. We were just fucking around.

JK: I remember an early piece you did for Rolling Stone back in 1971. It was a review of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid album, but all it was was a description of a blasphemous Satanic orgy straight out of De Sade.

NT: Yeah, I remember that one.

JK: It was pretty amazing, and even that early, your writing was several steps beyond everything else that was happening at the time. But from an outsider’s perspective, your first big step away from music journalism was actually a huge fucking leap, and a potentially deadly one. So how do you go from Unsung Heroes of Rock ’N Roll to Power on Earth, about Italian financier Michele Sindona?

NT: After Hellfire, someone wanted to pay me a lot of money to write another biography. But I realized there was absolutely no one on the face of the earth whom I found interesting enough to write about other than Jerry Lee Lewis. I’d caught sort of a glimpse of Sindona on television. My friend Judith suggested “Why don’t you write about him?” But how am I gonna get in touch with a guy like that? And she said I should write him a letter.

JK: He was in prison at that point?

NT: Yes, he was in prison the entire time I knew him, until his death. He died before the book was published. I met him in prison here in New York, then they shipped him back to Italy to be imprisoned, and I went over there.

JK: You were dealing with The Vatican, the mob, and the shadowy world of international high finance. Were there moments while you were working on the book when you found yourself thinking, “What the fuck have I gotten myself into?”

NT: Well, yes, because the story was too immense and too complicated to be told.

JK: Something I’ve always been curious about. Publishing house libel lawyers have been the bane of my existence. Whenever I write non-fiction, they set upon the manuscript like jackals, tearing it apart line-by-line in search of anything that anyone anywhere might conceivably consider suing over. And I wasn’t writing about the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis, Dean Martin, or Michele Sindona.

NT: “Conceivably” is the key word in this country, where anyone can sue anyone without punitive repercussions. That’s the key phrase. What these libel lawyers are also doing above all else is protecting their own jobs.

JK: Were you forced to cut a lot of material for legal reasons?

NT: Yes, including proven, irrefutable facts. So yes I did. And it’s not because it was libelous, but because it was subject to being accused of being libelous. It’s a shame. Some of the things were just outrageous. I once threw a fictive element into a description that involved a black dog. “Well, how do you know there was a black dog there?” I said there probably wasn’t, that it was just creating a mood. “Well, we gotta cut that out.” So what’s offensive about a black dog? It sets a precedent. Misrepresentative facts? Morality? I don’t know. These guys.

JK: I don’t know if this was the case with you as well, but I found out I could write exactly the same thing, and just as honestly, but if I called it a novel instead of nom-fiction. They didn’t touch a word. Didn’t even want to look at it. As it happens, your first novel, Cut Numbers, came out next. Had that been written before Power on Earth?

NT: Let me think for a moment…Well, the order in which my books were published is the order in which they were written. The only putative exception may be Where Dead Voices Gather, because that was written over a span of years with no intention of it being a book. So yeah, Cut Numbers. What year was that?

JK: I think that was 1988. I love that novel. There’s a 1948 John Garfield picture about the numbers racket, Force of Evil.

NT: Yeah, I’ve seen that.

JK: But of course they had to glamorize it, because it was Hollywood and it was John Garfield.

NT: I like John Garfield. Terrible movies, but a great actor.

JK: What I love about Cut Numbers is that it’s so un-glamorous. It’s not The Godfather. It’s very street-level. And I’ve always had the sense it was very autobiographical.

NT: I’ve never written anything that wasn’t autobiographical in some way, shape or form. The world in which Cut Numbers is set was my auto-biographical world. “Auto,” self and “bio,” life. My auto-biographical world. The world I lived in and the world I knew. It’s a world that no longer exists. Like every other aspect of the world I once knew. Except taxes. Which I found is a really great upside to having no income. I’m serious.

JK: Oh. I know all too well.

NT: I mean, but It comes with “Jeeze, I wish I could afford another case of this tawny port.”

JK: A few years later, after Dino, you released your second novel, Trinities. While Cut Numbers took place on a very small scale. Trinities was epic—the story spans the globe and pulls in the mob, the Vatican, high finance. You crammed an awful lot of material in there. It almost feels like a culmination.

NT: I wanted to capture the whole sweep of that vanishing, dying world. It was written during a dark period of my life, and I was drawn to a beautifully profound but unanswerable question, which had first been voiced by a Chinese philosopher—sounds like a joke but it’s true: “What if what man believes is good, God believes is evil?” Or vice versa. And we can go from there, the whole mythology, the concept of the need for God. To what extend is our idea of evil just a device? We don’t want anybody to fuck our wives. So God says thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. We don’t want to be killed, so thou shalt not kill. It’s a bunch of “don’t do this, because I don’t want to suffer that.” I don’t want to get robbed. I dunno, what the hell. Yeah, this has something to do with Trinities, and I somehow knew as I wrote Trinities I was saying goodbye to a whole world, not because I was leaving it. It was basically half memory, as opposed to present day reality.

JK: I remember when I first read it, recognizing so many locales and situations and characters. At least from the New York scenes. That was right at the cusp, when all these things began disappearing.

NT: Yes, and now it has to such an extent that I walk past all these locales, and it’s a walk among the ghosts. That was a club, now it’s a Korean laundry. This was another place I used to go, now it’s Tibetan handicrafts.

JK: I don’t even recognize the Village anymore. I used to work in the Puck Building at Lafayette and Houston. Landmark building, right? It’s since been gutted completely and turned into some kind of high-end fashion store.

NT: Yeah, it’s all dead.

JK: Now, when Trinities was released, I was astonished to see the publisher was marketing it like a mainstream pop thriller. You even got the mass market paperback with the embossed cover treatment. I love the idea of some middle management type on his way to a convention in Scranton picking it up at the airport thinking he was getting something like Robert Ludlum,, and diving headlong into, well, you.

NT: I can explain why all that was. It was volume. It was the same publisher as Dino. They were happy with Dino. Dino was a great success. I think that was 1992, because that was when my father died. This is now, what, 2019? There has not been a single day where that book has not sold. Not that I could buy a bottle of tawny port with it. So whereas with Cut Numbers I was paid a small amount and eagerly accepted it. Eagerly. In fact it’s one of the few times I told the editor, ran into him at a bar, and said all I want is this, and he said “Nah, that’s not enough, we’ll pay you twice that.” Then Dino was double that. And look, I really want to do this book Trinities and be paid a small fortune for it. They had to say yes. They had to believe this was going to be the next, I dunno. Yeah, mainstream. Most of these things are ancillary and coincidental to the actual writing.

JK: There were a lot of strings dangling at the end of the novel, and I remember reading rumors you were working on a sequel. You don’t seem much the sequel type. So was there any truth to that?

NT: Not that I was aware of. I’m sure that if they’d come back and said, “Well, we pulled it off,” and offered twice that, there would’ve been a sequel. Because I loved that book, so if they were going to offer me more to write more, I would have. I hated saying good bye to that world and the past.

JK: Maybe you’ve noticed this, but the people who read you often tend to make a very sharp distinction between your fiction and your non-fiction, which never made a lot of sense to me. To me they’re a continuum, and any line dividing them is a very porous, fuzzy one. Do you approach them in different ways?

NT: Oh, god. Do I approach them differently? Yes. In a way, I approach the fiction with a sense of unbounded freedom. But parallel to that, that blank page is scarier knowing that there is not a single datum you can place on it that will gain or achieve balance. With non-fiction, I am constrained by truth to a certain extent. That’s also true in fiction. They just use different forms of writing. There are poems that have more cuttingly diligent actuality than most history works. It comes down to wielding words. Tools being appointed with different weights and cutting edges and colors. Words, beautiful words. Without the words, no writing in prose is gonna be worth a damn. Used to be, I get in a cab, and back then cab drivers were from New York, and they’d ask me what I did. Now I don’t think they really know what city they’re in. They know it’s not Bangladesh. But if I told them what I did, it was always, “Oh, I could write a book.” Yeah, you’re gonna write a book. Your life is interesting. So what’re you gonna write about? Great tippers, great fares? Become a reader first. Read the Greeks sometime. I decided next time a cab driver asks me what I do for a living. I’m gonna tell him I’m a plumber. “Oh, my brother-in-law’s a plumber!”

JK: As varied as your published works are, there are two I’ve always been curious about. Two complete anomalies. The first was the Hall and Oates book, Dangerous Dances, which always struck me—and correct me if I’m wromg—as the result of a whopping check for services rendered. And the other. From thirty years later, is Johnny’s First Cigarette. Which is, what would you call it? A children’s book? A young adult book?

NT: Right. Of course they’re many years apart. Okay, Hall and Oates, Dangerous Dances. I knew a woman who was what you’d call a book packager. I owed money to the government. Tommy Mottola, who was at the time the manager of Hall and Oates, wanted a Hall and Oates book. She asked me if I wanted to do it, and I said yeah, but it’s gonna cost this much. And Tommy Mottola, in one of the great moments of literary judgment, was like, “How come he costs more than the other people?” She said something very nice about me. He has got on his desk a paperweight that’s a check for a million dollars in lucite. We weren’t talking nearly that much. So I came up with the title Dangerous Dances. I had never heard a Hall and Oates record. So I met them. It was over the course of a summer. So I did that and made the government happy. That’s one book I try not to espouse. But everyone knows I wrote that, it has my name on it. As I wanted, as my ex-agent says.

Now. Johnny’s Last Cigarette, which as I said was many years later. I don’t even think that was ten years ago.

JK: I think that came out in 2014, between Me and the Devil and Under Tiberius.

NT: I get so sick of all this political correctness. I mean, every man. Every woman was once a child. And there are all these good. Beautiful childhood moments and feelings. Which is the greatest step on earth that we lose. It’s not a nefarious book like Kill Your mother—which may not be a bad idea—but sweet. Why do we rob these kids of the dreaminess of the truth? So Johnny’s First Cigarette, Johnny’s First whatever. I was living in Paris at the time when I wrote that.. I knew a woman who was one of my best translators into French. We put the idea together with a publisher I knew in Marseilles and a wonderful artist-illustrator we found and were so excited about.

To tell you the truth I think the idea of legislating feeling is like…How the fuck do you legislate feeling? And forbidden words. It may have been Aristotle who said, when men fear words, times are dark. You and I have spoken about this. Sometimes we don’t even understand what it is about this or that word. It’s like that joke—a guy goes in for a Rorschach test, and the psychologist tells him. “Has anyone ever told you you have a sexually obsessed mind?” And the guy says, “Well, what about you, showing me all these dirty pictures?” What do these words mean? I don’t know. Why is it a crime to call a black man a crocodile? I have always consciously stood against performing any kind of political correctness. And I have written some long letters to people I felt deserved an explanation of my feelings.

JK: Whenever people get outraged because some comedian cracked an “inappropriate” joke, and they say, “How could he say such a thing?” I always respond, “Well, someone has to, right?”

NT: Yeah. So one book came from the government’s desire to have their share of what I’m making. We’re all government employees. The other was, why can’t I write something that’s soft and sweet with a child’s vocabulary that’s not politically correct?

JK: If Dangerous Dances and Johnny’s First Cigarette were anomalies, I’ve always considered another two of your books companion pieces. Or at least cousins. King of the Jews and Where Dead Voices Gather are both biographies, or maybe anti-biographies, of men about whom very little—or at least very little that’s credible—is known: Arnold Rothstein and Emmett Miller. And that gives you the freedom to run in a thousand directions at once. They’re books made up of detours and parentheticals and digressions, and what we end up with are essentially compact histories of the world with these figures at the center. They strike me as your purest works, and certainly very personal works. More than any of your other books, it’s these two that allow readers to take a peek inside your head. Does that make any sense to you?

NT: Yes, it makes perfect sense. In fact I couldn’t have put it any better myself. This whole myth of what they called the Mafia in the United States—there’s no mafia outside of Sicily. Or called organized crime, was always Italians. The Italians dressed the part, but the Jews made the shirts. It was always an Italian-Jewish consortium. And this Irish mayor wants to play ball? So now it’s Irish. Total equal opportunity. It was basically…Well, Arnold Rothstein was the son of shirt makers. Not only did he control, but he invented what was organized crime in New York. He had the whole political system of New York in his pocket. Emmet Miller was this guy who made these old records that went on to be so influential without his being known. Nobody even knew where or when he was born. The appeal to me was as both an investigator and then to proceed forward with other perspicuities, musings and theories. I never thought of them before as companion works until you mentioned it, but they are.

JK: People have tended to focus on the amount of obsessive research you do. Which is on full display in these books, but what they too often overlook, which is also on full display here, is that you contain a vast storehouse of arcane knowledge. It’s like you’ve fully absorbed everything you’ve ever read, and it just spills out of you. These forgotten histories and unexpected connections.

NT: I’ve always kept very strange notebooks. I still do, except now it’s on the computer. There’s no rhyme or reason to these notebooks, it’s just,”don’t want to forget this one.”

JK: Speaking of research, has your methodology changed in the Internet Age? I’m trying to imagine you working on Under Tiberius and looking up”First Century Judea” on Wikipedia.

NT: The Internet demands master navigation. There are sites which have reproduced great scholarly, as opposed to academic, works. There’s also every lie and untruth brought to you by the Such-and Such Authority of North America. This is what they call themselves. I experienced this within the past week. It was not only complete misinformation, but presented in the shoddiest fashion, such as “Historians agree…” I mean, what historians? I couldn’t find a one of them.

So my methodology. I love Ezra Pound’s phrase, “the luminous detail.” Something you find somewhere or learn somewhere…They don’t even have a card catalog at New York Public Library anymore, let alone books. You want an actual book, they have to bring it in from New Jersey. Who cares anymore? What they care about is who’s in a TV series, and they whip out their Mickey Mouse toys and, “look, there he is!”

JK: I was thinking about this on the way over. You and I both remember a time when if you were looking for a specific record or book or bit of information, you could spend months or years searching, scouring used bookstores an libraries. There was a challenge to it.

NT: It was not just a challenge. It was a whole illuminating process unto itself, because of what you come to by accident. So in looking for one fact or one insight, you would gather an untold amount. That is what it’s about.

JK: Nowadays if I’m looking for, say, a specific edition of a specific book, I take two minutes, go online, and there it is. I hit a button, and it’s mailed to me at my home. Somehow it diminishes the value, as opposed to finally finding something I’d been searching for for years. Nothing has any value anymore.

NT: No, definitely not. When I was living down in Tennessee, all those Sunday drives, guys selling stuff out of their garages. Every once in awhile you hit on something, or find something you didn’t even know existed. Now education on every level, especially on the institutional, but even on a personal level, is diminished. People are getting stupider, and that probably includes myself.

JK: And me too. Now, if I could change course here, you’re a man of many contradictions. Maybe dichotomies is a better term. A streetwise Italian kid who’s a bookworm. A misanthrope who seeks out the company of others. A libertine who is also a highly disciplined, self-educated man of letters. It’s even reflected in your prose—someone who is always swinging between the stars and the gutter. It’s led some people to say there are two Nick Tosches. Is this something you recognize in yourself?

NT: Yes. It’s never been a goal, it’s just…

JK: How you are?

NT: Yeah. I’ve noticed it, and much to my consternation and displeasure and inconvenience, yeah. But there’s no reward in seeking to explain or justify it.

JK: One of the most intriguing and complex of these is the savage heretic who keeps returning to religious themes, the secrets of the Church and the sacred texts. And of course the devil in one guise or another is lurking through much of your work. Again it’s led some people to argue that since you were raised Catholic, this may represent some kind of striving for redemption. You give any credence to that?

NT: No. Absolutely not.

JK: Yeah, it would seem Under Tiberius would’ve put the kibosh on that idea.

NT: I don’t even consider myself having been raised Catholic, in the modern made-for-TV sense of that phrase. I was told to go to church on Sundays and confession on Saturdays, and I usually went to the candy store instead. I was confirmed, I had communion. To me, it was a much deeper, much more experiential passage when I came to the conclusion that there was no Santa Clause than when I came to the conclusion there was no God. I remember emotionally expressing my suspicions about Santa Claus to my mother. Toward the end of his life, I was talking to my father one day, and I said, “By the way, do you believe in God?” And he said no. I said me neither. And that was about the only real religious conversation we ever had. I think religion, without a doubt since its invention—and God was an invention of man—is a huge indefensible evil force in this world. When people believe in a religion which calls for vengeance upon those whose beliefs are different, it’s not a good sign. Not a good sign.

JK: This is something I’ve been curious about. Two of your novels—In the Hand of Dante and Under Tiberius—are predicated on the idea that you come into possession of manuscripts pilfered from the Vatican library. The library comes up a few other times as well. You write about it in such detail and with an insider’s knowledge. Either I was fooled by your skills as a convincing fiction writer, or you’ve spent your share of time there. And if the latter, how does a heretic like you end up with Vatican credentials?

NT: Okay. You go buy yourself a very beautiful, very important let’s say, leather portfolio with silk ribbon corner stays that keeps the documents there. Then you set about…Well, my friend Jim Merlis’ father-in-law, for instance, won the Nobel Prize in physics right around then. So I went to Jim and said, “Hey Jim, do you suppose you could get your father-in-law to write me a letter of recommendation? I know I never met the man.” Had a tough life, but won the Nobel Prize. Did a beautiful letter for me. I don’t even know that I kept it. You put together five letters that only Jesus Christ could’ve gathered. And he probably couldn’t have because he was unwashed. It was twice as difficult for me, because I had no academic affiliation, not even a college degree. But the Vatican was so nice. There are two libraries. One involves a photo I.D. and the other one doesn’t. They gave me two cards, and they made me a doctor. That’s how you get in. So what do you do once you’re in? They have the greatest retrieval library I’ve ever seen. The people that you meet. One guy was a composer. Wanted to see this exact original musical manuscript because he wanted to make sure of one note that may have changed. So this was all real—I just hallucinated the rest. If you can use a real setting, you’re one step closer to gaining credibility with the person who reads you. I still have my membership cards, though I think they must’ve expired. They were great. You go to a hotel and they ask you to show them photo ID? “Ohhh…”

JK: One of the themes that runs throughout your work is fear. Fear as maybe the most fundamental motivating human emotion.

NT: Any man who thinks he’s a tough guy is either a fool or a liar. Fear is I think one of the fundamental formative elements. And I’m just speaking of myself becoming a writer. Choosing to express yourself with great subtlety in some cases, when what you want to express is so inchoate. But that was a long time ago. I still believed in the great charade. These days I’m just living the lie. But it’s so much better than fear. To convey fear. The more universal the feeling, the easier it is to convey powerful emotions. There was a line in Cut Numbers; “He thought the worst thing a man can think.” Michael Pietsch my editor said, “What is that thing?” And I said “Michael, every person who reads that will have a different idea.” It’s an invocation of the Worst Thing. One woman might read it and think of raping her two-year-old son. Some guy might think of robbing his father. To you or I it might not be that bad a thing, but to that person it’s the Worst Thing.

JK: That’s the magic of reading.

NT: That is the magic of reading. That’s the bottom line. Writing is a two-man job. It takes someone to write it and Someone to read it who’s not yourself.

JK: Exactly. Readers bring what they have to a book, and take away from it what they need, what interpretation has meaning for them.

NT: It’s also possible to write certain very exact phrases and have them be evocative of nothing but a thirst for an answer that the person who wrote them doesn’t know. Readers never give themselves enough credit. Now all the experiential and soulful depths of all our finite wanderings, roaming imaginations and questions thereof are relegated to a Mickey Mouse toy. That’s what I see, people who interact with these toys instead of another person. I don’t care. I was here for the good times.

JK: There’s another idea that’s come up a few times in various forms and various contexts in your work, where you say, in essence, “once you give up hope, life becomes more pleasant,” which is a wonderful twist on Dante.

NT: It’s true!

JK: I know, and I’m in full agreement with you. Hope, faith, belief, are all great destroyers. But I’m wonderinh, when did you come to that conclusion?

NT: A lot of the things I write or think I do put in that notebook I mentioned, and I usually put the date. That was one where I did not put down the date. I do believe it’s true. People say, “never give up hope.” Why the hell not? If you don’t give up hope, it leads you, at a craps table, betting you’re aunt’s car. Where did hope ever get anybody? It’s terrible.

JK: Now, there are two quotes which have appeared and reappeared throughout your work, and I think you know which two I’m talking about. The first is from Pound’s Canto CXX: “I have tried to write Paradise// Do not move/ Let the wind speak/ that is paradise.” And the other’s from the Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” As you look at your life and work now, and look back over the last half century, do you think you’re closing in on that point where Pound and Thomas finally come together?

NT: Yes. I never thought of that phrase you choose, “come together,” but yes. They’ve become more and more deeply a part of my consciousness. Yes, every day I pause. And I still hold the 120th Canto to be the final one. It was just one person who insisted no, this is not how he would have ended. Which is why the current modern edition of the Cantos goes two cantos more. There’s this line that is so bad. It’s hilariously bad. The joke of history. The line that Pound was supposed to have written to go beyond that beautiful line was, “Courage, thy name is Olga.” The other of course, the meaning of that line, that line being the one you were referring to, if you bring forth what is within you it will save you, if you do not bring forth it will destroy you. Of a hundred translations from the Coptic, that, to me, is the perfect translation. What is that thing? That’s what everybody wants to know. That’s me. That thing is just the truth of yourself. If you do live in fear, that will destroy you. If I speak the truth, the worst it’s going to do is frighten another. That will save you. That will set you free. Those two things, yes. And there’s another element, if I can add it unsolicited. I’ve noticed this pattern with people such as Pound and people such as Samuel Beckett. The greatest depth, the most majestic wielders of language as a communication form, slowly trail off to silence. Which is what Pound refers to in what I know is the last Canto. Be still. Paradise. Ezra Pound’s own daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz, translated The Cantos into Italian. Her translation had moments when it was an improvement on his phraseology. In Italian, “Non ti muovere” is much better than “be still.” Books, reading, writing, lend themselves to interpretive subtleties which are by no means pointless. What can people get out of an app?

by Jim Knipfel