Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
Years ago as a young reporter in Southern California, I ran into various absurd delays on my way to a campus visit by the great Toni Morrison, some of which were not even my fault, and found myself in the odd predicament of beseeching this woman to please talk to me briefly in the rain before she stepped into a car waiting to carry her away. She was aglow with the rapturous response she’d just generated with a warm, witty address to a mostly female crowd of students – and graciously agreed to stand there, half-protected by an umbrella, giving me enough material for a good piece for my newspaper.
This was 1987, soon after Morrison had published the amazing novel Beloved, and she was fifty-six. It was generous of her to give me thoughtful replies, but what stays with me is the entertained, compassionate look she had in her eyes, amused at the prospect of me the twenty-something would-be writer, intelligent enough to ask decent questions standing in the rain but still quite funny to her, in an easy-going sort of way.
You can tell when people are good to the bone, as opposed to bad to the bone, truly nice people. We have – or once had – a romantic notion of great writers as walking disasters, like tin cans ripped open to reveal slashing edges, tortured souls with rheumy, burning eyes, sucking down a pack of cigarettes every couple hours and shaking with outrage and bad nerves.
When a guy named Pete McLaughlin showed up at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods last year, wanting to read his poetry, I talked to him a couple minutes, saw he was clearly a nice guy – and a part of me thought: This guy writes poetry! Can a nice guy like that be any good? In fact, once he read aloud from his work, I realized: He’s both brilliant and brave, two of the most essential qualities in a writer.
Last month we hosted novelist Matt Gallagher, whose debut novel Youngblood received an enthusiastic review in the New York Times, and Viet Nguyen, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Sympathizer. Quite a pair! We were in awe, hosting the two of them, and had more than sixty people turn up to check out their Author Talk on May 28. Here’s a video of Matt talking about his book. Besides being smart and eloquent, besides holding the attention of the audience with effortless grace and panache, both Viet and Matt were, at every turn, unbelievably nice. I still can’t get over it. Seriously.
The point is not that you’d better be nice or else. For plenty of writers, being gruff or mysterious or aloof is always going to be a given, at least in many of their dealings with strangers. That’s understandable. Thanks, Viet and Matt, for showing us that even major stars can come across as both admirable and down to earth.
– Steve Kettmann
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