Interview with Andrew Ferguson
Andrew Ferguson is an American writer.
[Sic] Questions
Contents
Max Raskin: I'm excited for this because you’re a real writer and really dedicated to the art of it. But there’s so much new technology, and it just feels like the world is making it difficult to be a writer. So high level, what I’m interested in is what it’s like to be a real writer today.
Andrew Ferguson: Well, I've kind of avoided a lot of the technology, so I may not be the most knowledgeable person to address that question.
MR: So the first question that I want to ask is, when you get an idea or you want to start drafting something, what is the first thing you turn to technical? What's the first technical instrument you turn to start putting down your draft or your thought?
AF: This sounds rather conventional, but I begin at the beginning. I try and find a lead or a first paragraph that will do two things. One is interest the reader, and two is give me confidence that I can actually make the piece or the chapter work. If I can come up with something compelling to start the piece with, then I feel like I'm on secure footing and I can proceed.
MR: Do you literally put a pen to paper? Do you write something in your phone?
AF: No, I have hardly ever written on my phone. I'll just get a piece of paper and jot something down. If the first paragraph comes to me and the organization seems natural, I'm scared to death that I'm going to lose it. So I grab whatever's at hand. Sometimes it would be my phone, I guess, and I just put down this sort of inspiration that I've had. And then it's incredible the calm that can overtake me after I have that little amount of work done. I feel I've got something that the reader will enjoy, and I've got a foundation I can build on.
For me, the whole process is about minimizing my case of nerves. I’m a nervous wreck while I'm writing. I assume I am failing at every turn. So if I feel that I've got a good first draft, or a good beginning, then that really calms the anxiety.
MR: What's the least anxiety-inducing writing for you?
AF: The least anxiety-inducing piece is the piece that I know no one will read. Years ago I was having a hard time writing, and it wasn’t getting any easier. At the time I was working for the Weekly Standard and Time and had a busy freelance career. It got so bad I quit writing for magazines that people read and became a columnist for Bloomberg News. It was almost impossible for an outsider, a non-subscriber, to read the stuff that was on Bloomberg News in those days. You either had to buy a Bloomberg terminal, the box, as they called it, or you had to pay some other exorbitant subscription fee. And the beautiful thing was, nobody was paying for a Bloomberg box to read opinion columns. So I had this blissful, two-year period where I was getting handsomely paid to write stuff every week, and I knew no one would read it. It was incredibly liberating. Eventually I went back to doing the normal, longer-form writing that I'd been doing for magazines. For a while I really felt as though I'd fought free of that constant anxiety by writing for an audience that was maybe 350 people, tops.
MR: Other than writing is there anything you get anxious about?
AF: No, not really. Sometimes before going on a reporting trip, which is different from writing, and I've got a bunch of important interviews lined up, or I've got limited time to do research in a research library — I always feel like I haven’t prepared adequately, and that makes me anxious. But I'm a pretty easygoing guy except for when I have to work.
MR: It's like, “Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”
AF: Exactly.
MR: Do you experience writer's block?
AF: Yes, very intensely. The most optimistic interpretation of a block is that it doesn't really exist. That all that's going on is certain parts of your body and your mentality are shutting down while unconsciously you're working through some deep problem in your work.
MR: I absolutely believe that.
AF: And there is a lot to that. It’s obvious for anybody who’s gone to sleep with a terrible problem in your head that you can’t seem to solve. And then you wake up in the morning and it becomes blindingly clear to you what the answer is. Obviously there are things going on in your brain while you’re not looking, so to speak.
MR: Like August Kekulé who discovered the structure of benzene from a dream of a snake eating itself. It was arranged as a circular or hexa whatever.
AF: So that's the most benign interpretation of a block. And it’s been borne out in my experience, sometimes. The problem is that if you're doing this for a living, which is what I've done for almost 35 years, you can't really afford to have a block. You can't afford to let your unconscious take its own sweet time tackling the problem while you're sitting there staring at a deadline. In that case the block is very, very real.
MR: Do you do anything to speed up the discovery process?
AF: Well, sometimes I'll drink. I know that sounds frivolous. But if I'm really in a bad period, I find if I go out with some friends and have a couple of pops and a nice dinner and get it out of my mind, then I'll come home slightly inebriated and it really will shake something loose. I start to jot down things that I can use to push off of the next day, to get the piece started. I’d never write drunk, though.
MR: If you could only drink one drink for the rest of your life, what would it be?
AF: Oh, well, I'd miss gin martinis, but I guess it'd have to be scotch. Scotch doesn't take as much out of you as gin does.
Moleskine and Mount Blanc?
MR: Are you interested in any writer's habits?
AF: Oh, yeah.
MR: I know you’re a big E.B. White fan. Right?
AF: Right. He said later in life that he would often have a martini before he sat down to write. But just one!
When I was younger I’d read the “Writers at Work” series of interviews from the Paris Review. George Plimpton would do them, and he got in early enough in the 1950s and sixties that he did really penetrating interviews with great journalists who were still alive, like Dorothy Parker. I used to just gobble those things up. I loved the idea of finding out how they actually worked, the tricks that they used, that kind of thing. Reading those interviews was much more fun than writing.
MR: Do you have a particular pen you like using?
AF: I really worked at developing a pen affectation years ago. It was very precious — I decided I had to have a particular fountain pen. So I went to this great store here in Washington called Fahrney's, which only sells fountain pens, and I’d pick out a pen. And I would only use Moleskine notebooks too. I had all that kind of stuff. I thought it would be beyond cool in case anybody like George Plimpton ever asked me. I could say, "Oh, no, I only use my Mount Blanc. If I don't have my Mount Blanc, I can't really think." But it never took. I mean, the affectation never really gripped me. I could never sustain it. If the inspiration comes and you don't have your Mount Blanc and you don't have your Moleskine notebook, then what are you going to do? All you've got is to tear off a piece of newsprint from that day's New York Times, and you can just jot it down with a pencil. You're left with what you're left with.
MR: Is there any pen you do really like?
AF: I finally settled on a plastic disposable fountain pen called the Pilot Varsity. It’s a fountain pen, so it seems classy, but it’s also plastic and disposable, so it’s also cheap and proletarian, a nice blend of high and low.
MR: What kind of nib do you use?
AF: I always use medium now, or thicker. As I got older and my handwriting began to deteriorate, the thinner the line, the less readable my notes were. I just kind of scratched across the page. I guess I would prefer the thickest nib you could get, short of a fat Sharpie felt tip.
MR: I’ll send you my favorite fountain pen — it’s a stub nib from Easterbrook.
AF: Okay, great.
MR: So you don’t really use Moleskine anymore?
AF: Well, I do actually. I've got a reporting trip coming up, and I don't know whether by habit or superstition, I'm sure I'll pack a Moleskine notebook, the small pocket-size that have the elastic band on them.
MR: What point do you put things into the computer?
AF: Usually from the start. Even though I had a word processor back in 1983, I still needed a hard copy at some point to be able to think, but I abandoned printing out a draft a long time ago. One of the great things about magazines, at least up until the last few years, even if everything you did was digital, you still got a paper galley, assuming it was a paper magazine. That’s always been a huge help, to see it in the typeface that the reader was going to see it in. And I really do think that it changed how you read your own stuff. If you can see it in The Atlantic, which has a gorgeous typeface, or the New Yorker’s famous Irvin type, it has a solidifying effect. I remember the first time I got a galley back from the New Yorker, my heart was in my throat. They’ve used the same font for a hundred years. And I just thought, "God, this is the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me."
To see your own words on a galley — that was not only a great thrill, it was also indispensable, especially if you'd done a big, long piece. You’d get a paper galley and sit down at your desk and just sort of calm yourself down, roll up your sleeves, and then have at it, with a pencil or a Pilot Varsity. You felt like you were seeing the piece in its entirety, beginning and middle and end, in a way you can't if you're just scrolling through a screen.
MR: For someone who has never read your writing, which is the first piece that comes to mind that you would recommend to them?
AF: I guess one that actually ended up becoming a chapter of a book that I did about Abraham Lincoln. It was about a group, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who were protesting a statue of Abraham Lincoln that was going to be set up on federal parkland in Richmond, Virginia. So by now it's hopelessly dated.
MR: It's not dated at all!
AF: Yeah, I guess that's right. It’s the mirror image of what’s going on now.
Talking Balls
MR: What is your favorite polemic piece? Where you said to yourself “I really nailed it.”
AF: Well, years ago for the New Republic, I wrote a piece on Bill Moyers, who at that time was the king of public television. He’d got his start as a hatchet man for Lyndon Johnson. And then somehow he transformed himself into this wise man, this all-purpose liberal sage for PBS — which means he wasn’t really a wise man at all. He was just a BS artist. Andrew Sullivan had just become editor of the New Republic, and he chose the story to be the first cover of his editorship.
MR: Everyone thinks Bill Moyers is this grand old man. But I think that was the point of your piece…wasn’t he the guy who went after Johnson’s aide for being gay?
AF: Walter Jenkins. No, let Jenkins alone.
He investigated homosexuals who were on Barry Goldwater's staff when Goldwater was running against LBJ. He knew about the bugging of Martin Luther King. There was all this sordid stuff in his background. He was just a bottom-feeding political hack from Texas. And then he got himself laundered, which was what the piece was about. It goes to show you how low the standards are. If you've got enough guile and know who to suck up to, you can become a sage. I remember finishing the story and thinking I really nailed him. The piece came out and he went ballistic. He wrote a long letter to the editor in which he said, “If he were a gentleman, I would challenge him to a duel.” Not a bad line, actually. But instead he tried to get me fired from my job.
MR: You remember Murray Rothbard?
AF: Oh, yeah.
MR: Rothbard has this great quote where he says, “Hatred is my muse.” I think he said he learned to write from Mencken.
AF: Yes, that's right. I've forgotten about that.
MR: What's your motivation?
AF: I think that's the motivation of some of the best things I've done. Usually when you're a working journalist, sometimes your motivation is nothing more than the deadline and the paycheck. You don't have the luxury of waiting till you get really pissed off. But a lot of times it's just a matter of, "Oh, who the hell does he think he is?"
The first book I did was a collection of magazine pieces, and the working title was Culture of Bullshit. We couldn't use that, not back then, but it did summarize my feeling. There was a whole catalog of people covered in that book who, when you see them on TV, are being treated so reverentially, like Moyers, and you just think, "Oh, cut the crap."
There's a great line from Raymond Aron, the great anti-communist French philosopher from the fifties and sixties. He said, "Do I have to talk balls to be taken seriously?" Do I have to treat Bill Moyers as a real personage before anyone will listen to what I have to say? Or can we just start from a grounding in fact, which is that this guy is a bullshitter, a highly paid bullshitter. Then we can move on from there.
MR: In your polemic writings when you have someone who you just really want to take down and there's so much, how do you decide which arrow to use?
AF: Well, I don't really. You’ve got to trust your own native sense of taste and proportion and appropriateness, and hope that you don't go too far. And I've done that sometimes, gone too far.
This wasn't really my fault, but I remember there was a well-known film critic who wrote a really flimsy book about Marlon Brando that I was asked to review. And I really ripped into it and kind of into him, and the review appeared and it made some noise. And then I got a note from a friend of his saying that the morning the review appeared, his wife had died. And I just thought, oh, shit.
…but, that wasn't my fault.
MR: The nice way to look at it is so he's not going to be upset about what you wrote.
AF: He's got other things on his mind.
MR: Exactly. If it was a great day and you wrote this review…
AF: …you ruined it.
But he's probably thinking, "How can my day get any worse?" And then, oops, he picks up today’s Wall Street Journal in the waiting room.
In the Shadow of Mencken
MR: Who is your favorite polemicist?
AF: Oh, Mencken. Far and away. My first real job in magazines was with the American Spectator back in the 80s. It was a much different kind of magazine from what it became later. It was sort of like a right-wing New York Review of Books. It was very high-toned, but at the same time it had this raucous, almost scurrilous humor-writing by the founder and editor-in-chief, Bob Tyrrell. Tyrrell is a very gifted man, but he had read Mencken as a young man and hadn't quite gotten over it. That's the power of a stylist like Mencken. There aren’t that many of them. But they can ruin you, really. I don’t think Mencken ruined Tyrrell, but when somebody has a voice that strong, you end up singing his tune whether you want to or not. Think of all the writers who drove themselves into a cul-de-sac trying to sound like Joan Didion.
MR: I think a lot of people do that with Mencken.
AF: And it never works. When I was at the American Spectator, P. J. O'Rourke used to write a lot for us. We’d get dozens of unsolicited manuscripts that were obviously done by a college kid who wanted to be P. J. O'Rourke. Well, we all wanted to be P. J. O'Rourke. But we had to figure out how to do it without impersonating him on the page.
MR: Do any writers come to you for mentorship?
AF: Nobody uses that phrase exactly, but that was the great delight of working at the Weekly Standard — we had this fresh crop of young talent coming through every year.
MR: Are there any books or essays that you tell people to read?
AF: I do. At the Standard, I would go out and get everybody one or two books and give it to them at the holidays at the end of the year. Depending on what I knew that they had read or what their ambitions were, it was always Orwell's Selected Essays, maybe Nora Ephron, Dorothy Parker, a Mencken collection, A.J. Liebling or Joseph Mitchell, just sort of the standard pantheon of 20th century essayists.
MR: Are you a Strunk and White guy?
AF: Yeah. My view is that it's nearly worthless as a guide to usage, which is what most people seem to want to get out of it. But it's still a fantastic book for a young writer to absorb. It teaches you that you're supposed to have prejudices in your writing if you want to develop a voice. You think, I want to say it this way and not that way. Maybe you think, I don't believe in splitting infinitives. Well, that's a stupid rule. But somebody who takes it seriously is somebody who's taking writing seriously. And that's the attitude that the book encourages.
The Kid Can Write: Tucker Carlson at the Weekly Standard
MR: Tucker Carlson, is someone who takes writing very, very seriously.
AF: Yes. I don't see him anymore, but in his little opening monologues, you can still hear the same voice, the same style that he had when he first came to us at the Weekly Standard in whenever, 1995.
MR: Someone told me that you said that he either had the potential or was the great journalist of the generation.
AF: He had as much talent as anybody who ever came through the door, that’s for sure. I remember John Podhoretz, who was the editor then, we had three weeks in the office before the premiere issue came out. Everybody was scrambling to write a good debut piece. And Tucker turned in two or three, I think, and John came into my office slapping the galley against his knee saying, "Jesus, this kid was born knowing how to write a magazine article. There's nothing I can do." His copy needed zero work. It was always camera ready. He is a great writer.
MR: Do you remember the piece he wrote about the trip to Africa with Al Sharpton?
AF: Oh, yeah. And Cornell West. It's brilliant.
Almost Cut My Hair
MR: I loved your piece about San Francisco aging hippies — do you have any sympathy towards any hippie anything?
AF: Absolutely. I thought the hippie movement was fantastic. And I hope that's what came through in that piece. The hippies went to shit, of course, which maybe was inevitable. Maybe the seeds of the movement’s destruction were planted within it. But I'm old enough to remember what American pop culture was like before the Beatles, before the hippies. Go back and watch a Bob Hope special, Chrysler Presents Bob Hope on NBC in 1963 or whatever. It's not funny, it’s just shit. The music was shit. The clothes were stupid. The architecture was stupid. Everything was exhausted. And then the Beatles come and wipe it all away, and the hippies come in their wake right behind them. And I thought that was glorious.
MR: Why do you have long hair?
AF: Because I hate getting my hair cut. I really, really hate getting my haircut, so I get it cut real short twice a year.
MR: Did you ever try acid?
AF: Yes.
Is my daughter going to read this?
MR: I don't know.
AF: No, she won't read it.
MR: Do you believe in God?
AF: Yes.
MR: Do you have any formal religious practice?
AF: Yes. I'm a practicing Catholic.
MR: And were you born Catholic?
AF: No. I was born into a family of Baptists who became Episcopalians. When they moved to the suburbs of Chicago, in the 1950s, it was clear where the up and comers went to church —the very picturesque Grace Episcopal Church. I always took it very, very seriously. From the time I was a little kid, it always made perfect sense to me that there was a God and that we had a personal relationship with him. I got into Eastern religions a lot when I was in college. I was serious about meditation. But I never really doubted the fundamental premise that there's a personal God.
MR: How often do you go to church?
AF: Well, the Catholic Church says you got to go once a week. So I go at least once a week.
MR: And from that meditation experience, do you have any religious practices today?
AF: I learned Transcendental Meditation because the Beatles did it…Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It was a tremendous boon in my life. It really did rescue me from overdoing drugs and from a lot of other bad habits.
MR: Do you do it now?
AF: No, I haven’t done it in years, really. But it was a huge watershed in my life, finding that practice. And I continued it for years. I didn't eat meat for years, lots of stuff like that.
John, Paul, George, Ringo, and ChatGPT
MR: Who is the first Beatle that comes to your mind right now?
AF: John Lennon. I don't know why…he’s not my favorite.
MR: What's the first Beatles song?
MR: What's your first Beatles song that comes to mind right now?
AF: “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
MR: What about the first Beatles album?
AF: Meet the Beatles! I remember when my brother brought it home.
MR: Did you watch Ed Sullivan?
AF: I did. I've written about this, but now, as I get older, I distrust my memory more and more. But my brother has confirmed it. The show came on, and it was so clear how great they were. From the first notes, I’m just looking at them and …they're obviously awesome. But my mother and my father were so dismissive. I was eight at the time, and I remember having the thought for the first time in my life that my parents were wrong. I mean, how could it be that my parents, who were all-knowing and the ultimate authority in all things…how could they not see what was in front of our eyes? That was kind of a watershed too.
MR: I want to ask you about ChatGPT.
AF: You know what? Last night I was going to go on and try it out for the first time. And I didn't for one reason or another.
The first thing that occurs to me is that there is really a great benefit to a human being who is sent by the local paper to write about a really boring school board meeting or a high school football game or a sewer break in a neighborhood. They're usually boring events, and writing about them can be boring. But it is the way to learn how to write. And if, all of a sudden, that whole tier of the craft is removed from the ladder of becoming a better and better writer, and we turn it all over to AI, and if we don't have newspapers that hire people to do that kind of elementary writing, I think that that's really going to have a cost.
A lot of people are going to lose opportunities to become better writers and, who knows, maybe become great writers, because those kinds of rudimentary chores are going to be done by the bots. I really worry about that. It's bad enough that we're losing all these local newspapers anyway. But if you now get to a point when the whole thing can be done by a fucking software program…that bothers me a lot.
MR: So I have two emotional feelings about this — the first is this John Henry side that’s nervous and upset about the machines taking over and what that will do to our spirit. But in general I don’t like Luddites and see this thing as an incredible tool that will make life more productive and free us up to do more human work. Throughout history, people are always complaining that when a new technology comes in, it's going to destroy man…but we always figure out a way to adapt. So that side of me says that if a free people wants to use that software, they should be able to.
AF: I agree with that part too.
MR: But then there’s something romantic to me about writing. There's something romantic about thinking that humans are do capable of doing something that machines can't do. Those are the two emotional things that I'm feeling right now.
AF: I think that summarizes the tension I feel. I go more towards the latter of those two emotions most days. But I'm a little bit like you, I don't really like Luddism. I think there's something kind of anti-human about Luddism. It suggests you have no faith in people's ability to grow and improve through technology.
MR: Did you ever read the Unabomber’s manifesto?
AF: I did when they published it.
MR: So that’s the case for industrial society making man miserable.
AF: Right. But there's a lot of things that make man miserable. If it wasn't an industrial society, it would've been malaria.
MR: But do you think an algorithm could ever be trained up on your writing so that it could replicate what you do to the point you couldn’t tell the difference?
AF: I guess that's the hundred-thousand-dollar question. And I have to say, I'm glad it's being asked at the end of my career rather than at the beginning.
Blended Scotch with Old Friends
MR: When you're writing, do you eat? Do you snack?
AF: Yes. I eat fruit all day.
MR: Really? What kind of fruit?
AF: Well, they have those little tangerines now, those little tangelos. And I have sliced up apples, and berries. It's kind of fey. But I generally eat fruit all day.
MR: Do you listen to music while you write?
AF: Yes. I have to have music going. I don't know why that is. And it usually has to be some kind of simple, uncomplicated baroque music. No vocal music.
MR: What's the last song you were listening to while you were writing?
AF: Well, it would just be, I don't know, some sort of Telemann sonata, something that’s not taxing. Anything that sets one part of my brain listening to it so that the other part can be freed up to worry about words and ideas. At least I think that's why I listen to that kind of thing.
MR: What’s the first thing you do when your eyes open up in the morning?
AF: Get out of bed.
MR: And then what?
AF: Take a pee.
MR: And then what?
AF: Well, let's see. I guess I go downstairs. I still get a paper edition of the Wall Street Journal delivered, which is the highlight of my day. There are two highlights of my day. One is when I wake up, make a cup of coffee and sit down with the Journal in my favorite chair by the window. And the second favorite part of the day is when I'm sitting up late drinking a glass of scotch and reading something really fun to read.
MR: What kind of scotch do you drink?
AF: Well, again, some people would scoff, but I only drink blended scotch. I'm a firm believer that the reason we have blended scotch is because single malt scotches are terrible, and they're blended so that they will be less terrible.
MR: What is your favorite blended scotch?
AF: Johnny Walker Black.
MR: And how do you drink it?
AF: Usually with just a splash of water and maybe a couple of ice cubes.
MR: If you want to talk about the people getting upset…what I do when I drink scotch, I pour way more water than you would think in it. And I think you get so many more flavors when it’s about a third water and it’s so much easier to drink.
AF: Absolutely. I am totally in. You know who also would strongly argue in favor of our position? Christopher Hitchens. He’s the first one who told me about Johnny Walker Black. He thought it was almost kind of barbaric for people to drink their scotch neat. And he usually didn't use ice, although he would sometimes, but he would usually have a healthy splash of water to bring out the flavor, as you say.
MR: Who is must read for you?
AF: These days?
MR: And historically.
AF: Well, I’d hate to piss off any of my writer friends by not mentioning them.
MR: How about historically?
AF: Well, what I'll do at the end of the day, as a way to clean my mind out from all the things that I've been working on all day…I read nothing new then. I'll read something by Orwell or Walker Percy or Chesterton, people whose work I've already sort of absorbed, but I just want to get reacquainted with. It’s like sitting down with an old friend in front of a fire at the end of the day. I hardly ever read anything overstimulating or something that I haven't already read, because that would keep me up.
MR: So many of the habits you have and so many of the things that motivate you just resonate with me so much. Reading things that you've read before to calm you down at the end of the day. Writing because you feel like you need a correct a wrong. I guess that’s why you're my favorite writer today.