RM: In your magazine writing, you generally avoid writing nonfiction in a third person omniscient narrator—in your Pale King review, I think you call it a “fascist wedge” between the reader and reality, that it’s hiding its machinations in some way—but when you’re writing history, it’s almost all in the third person. Like the piece about Rafinesque, I think the word “I” only appears on like the last page. What’s your philosophy on historical writing as opposed to journalistic writing?

 

JJS: I don’t have the luxury of having any philosophy on it. It’s an evolutionary thing that I’m living, you know? That I’m in the midst of experiencing, and struggling with, and trying to get on top of. I think both pieces, the Rafinesque one and “The Princes,” were steps on the way to the tone that I need for the book, and then this 50-page chunk that I just wrote as a proposal for the book was another step. And I’m still not there, but I can almost touch it now. Or at least I know what I want it to sound like.

 

RM: And what do you want it to sound like?

 

JJS: I kind of want it to sound like Tolstoy. But then, I only want the top two-thirds of each page to sound like Tolstoy. The bottom third will have these footnotes that are a narrative, that are first-person-y, that are running on a separate frequency harmonic to the main body of the narrative. Kind of like what [Edward] Gibbon does. But instead of a history being the main thing, something that feels almost more like a novelization, but is factually very rigorous.

 

RM: Which do you prefer? Writing with footnotes, or without?

 

JJS: I don’t know. It’s a damnation of being modern. You need them, but they always weaken somehow.

 

RM: Because they distract?

 

JJS: Because it’s a compromise, of some kind. A real book ought to just be full, and you turn the pages. The way the books of childhood are.