Lore Segal on Virtue

Lore Segal, author, professor, Holocaust survivor

Photo by Alisa Douer

I posted this interview in January 2024 when Lore Segal was 95 and then learned that she had died at age 96. Obituary in the New York Times, October 8, 2024

This interview first appeared in The Missouri Review without the note that follows:

Note: Lore Segal was one of my professors at Ohio State University when I was a graduate student; she was no fan of my writing and greeted it with a deadening silence in my first workshop, causing me to consider leaving the MFA program as my colleagues not only pounced but later the gents went to Larry’s Bar to assert that I was old, wrote lyrically and was totally out-of-fashion. This was before I won the Fellowship award for my thesis The Woman Who Never Cooked, my collection of short stories when two of the stories had been published; later all of them appeared in literary magazines and many won significant prizes. MFA programs can be dangerous to the creative spirit, and Lore, whom I profoundly admired, proved that. In my last year in the three-year program, I decided to visit her to tell her what had happened and to ask for this interview. With apologies and with generosity, she gave me what she later told me was the best interview she’d ever had and we added to it a decade later. When The Missouri Review published it with her gracious permission, the bibliography was, of course, not included. I thought it might interest readers to know how I prepared for the interview. Thus, though long, the bibliography follows the interview.

Lore Segal on: How to Think About Virtue

Lore Segal, author of Shakespeare’s Kitchen, Her First American and Other People’s Houses, talked with me on thinking about questions of goodness and virtue, a conversation that began while Segal was working on Shakespeare’s Kitchen. In 2006, Segal was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Lore Segal, born Lore Groszmann in Vienna, March 8, 1928, escaped the Nazis when ten years old with 500 other children on an experimental transport to test whether the Nazis would allow a train full of Jewish children to cross the border. In England, Lore was placed in a succession of foster homes.

Lore when a child

Mary: Lore, let’s talk goodness—once again—now that your new book Shakespeare’s Kitchen is out. I know from talking with you that it gives you some anxiety to talk about goodness, but that’s my subject for you. You recall your “Hers” column in The New York Times and that I think hit the subject dead on?

Lore Segal: I wonder why the very words goodness and virtue embarrass us.

M.: In the “Hers” column you said, “To be good, sane, happy is simple only if you subscribe to the Eden theory of original goodness, original sanity and original happiness, which humankind subverted into a fascinating rottenness. Observation would suggest that we come by our rottenness aboriginally and that goodness, like any other accomplishment, is something achieved.” This essay raised for me a fundamental question about your work: Do you perceive that humankind is fundamentally evil or prone to evil?

Lore: I’m going to give you such a boring answer. I don’t see one as stronger than the other. One of my favorite images comes from Aldous Huxley in the Devils of Loudun. And I don’t know if I’m quoting it correctly. Huxley says, There is about the same amount of good and evil in the moral economy of the world. There is a certain quantity of each but once in a while, all the evil seems to collect in one place and settle there for a time. This is the world as I understand it.

M.: What then would be the keys to achieving goodness?

Lore: I have a suspicion that goodness, like cleverness, like being good at writing—is a talent which can and must then be educated and trained. I imagine that we might be born with a tendency to violence that can be encouraged or discouraged. I remember in Chicago, in a 7-Eleven watching a young, over-worked black mother with a little kid—and she was shopping. She was nervous and harassed and when the little kid put out his hand to a stand of women’s stockings—I think he must have been some three years old—and she hit him on the side of the head. Now I cannot imagine, unless that child is a saint, that he will have a friendly attitude towards the world. If, despite my experience of the Holocaust and having to leave my family at ten, my assumption is that this is not a basically violent world it might have something to do with having been treated kindly and with respect and with affection by the first people around me in my childhood.

M.: Aristotle says in The Nichomachean Ethics, “It is a difficult business to be good; because in any given case it is difficult to find the midpoint—for instance, not everyone can find the centre of a circle; only the man who knows how.” Would you agree with that?

Lore: Yes, I would. What my “Hers” column on goodness meant to say, along with my sense that your genes tend us towards the good or the bad, is that meaning well is a complication. I think Tolstoy is wrong in his oft-quoted opening sentence of Anna Karenina: All happy families—and by happy I mean sane and good—are not the same. If they seem the same it’s because we tend not to investigate how they got to be happy. For a little while I would question people. I wanted to talk about where, in literature—in novels—we locate the author’s interest in virtue. Emma corrects her faults with the help of Mr. Knightly, the good man who is in love with her. Jane Austen is intensely interested in her characters’ good behavior.

M.: Ilka, your main character in Shakespeare’s Kitchen and in your novel Her First American takes very firm positions and questions and argues in favor of virtue, don’t you think?

Lore: Here’s a bit of autobiography: I have always had both women and men friends who have been my political and philosophical adversaries. I have admired and respected and loved—and argued with them. That is not a virtue. That’s a pathology, if it’s anything at all [laughs]. I hope to have figured that one out. It has to do with the Holocaust and the bottomless misperceptions that create racism and anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism truly believes that it knows the Jew—knows all about the Jew—has the lowdown on the Jew. By an extension that may be beyond logic, my bête noire is any type of true-belief even if it’s a belief I share. I’ll climb onto the other side of any absolute opinion and start arguing. I am terrified of opinion that believes in itself. I have to tell you, Mary, that Ilka’s addiction to arguing has something in it of comedy.

M.: When we first began this conversation a decade ago, you said, “My Ilka stories, after Her First American, are trying to become a novel called Shakespeare’s Kitchen, and you noted, “actually the title came long after out of an interview, but that might not matter—and it’s not working very well. I still have some work to do or I have to let it be.” Now your book, connected short stories, has been published. Can you talk about why you chose this form and not another novel about Ilka, for clearly that had been your aim. What changed?

Lore: Novelists think by writing stories. I had a theme in search of a plot—another modern dilemma. I have known the state of grace in which everything I thought and heard and saw and read and remembered dovetailed into a novel. Here everything dovetailed into these stories. I once allowed myself to be persuaded to turn my novel Her First American into a film script. The would-be producer plied me with script-writing lessons. They were very interesting. They said that in a good plot nothing happens that is not the result of what happened before or causes what happens next. I like reading stories like that, but I don‘t write them because that’s not how my life happens to me or the people I know. The mental hunt for happenings and causes produced ever more stories. Each story created its own choreography, became fixed in its shape and might not attach to what happened before and what was going to happen next.

M.: The first story doesn’t actually include Ilka but deals with questions of both perception and identity. A poet appears to win a major prize but his name is misspelled in the newspaper, but he hasn’t ever been actually called and told about the prize. His friends and colleagues think he’s won it, but he never gets the award money and he’s never sure he actually won. So you get us off on the foot, so to speak, of questioning our assumptions and you do it with humor. Ilka, when she appears, asserts: “We are, all of us, ridiculous.” How do the comic, the ironic inform your world view?

Lore: Comedy, like tragedy, derives from the gap between what ought to be and isn’t. I once arrived at a fancy PEN event, and found myself left off the list of invitees. To think you are being honored and find yourself forgotten seems to convey some deepest truth—the incarnation of the nightmare in which you are prevented from arriving where you are going. We know that Kafka thought of himself as a comic writer.

M.: From your experience of the past it amazes me that you can find that humor and not see the world as absurd.

Lore: It’s absurd and lovable. It’s funny in a sweet way, though one of my favorite writers is Swift, and he sees nothing adorable in the world. To him absurdity is bitter. That’s not my first take.

M.: Does that view relate to the reason you began to write children’s stories?

Lore: Why did I write children’s stories? I had my two children. My mother was telling them stories. I was telling them stories. I’m a writer and I began to be interested in getting these stories right on paper. One of my favorite quotes is Howard Nemerov saying “Poetry is getting something right in language.” I am moral when I tell the truth in language. I don’t allow myself a word that is bigger or smaller than the thing I mean. You know the wonderful phrase in the Declaration of Independence, “Our sacred honors.” What does that mean off the battle field? It’s in the matter of writing that I understand the word honor.

M.: Is that the only place it’s possible to be moral?

Lore: It’s the place I know how. For the rest I’ll be satisfied if I am decent. My moral ambition is to translate what I know into true—that is to say the right—words.

M.: You’ve translated Bible stories and written essays on the Bible. Does that work inform your question, which of course goes to the question of goodness in the world?

Lore: I’ve written an essay called, “The Dream of a Good God.” I am amazed when I read the Bible especially the marvelous stories in Torah, that God is not always good and yet we go on instinct that He is. We believe He is almighty, all knowing, at once just merciful and kind, but that’s not what the story says. God makes the world, destroys it, and regrets destroying it. He takes his anger out on those who deserve it and those who don’t. Abraham questions him about that. God asks Saul to wipe out the Almalekites. He says, Have no mercy. Kill the women, the babies at the breast, the men, the oxen, the ass and if you don’t, I will do to you worse than I tell you to do to them. What interests me is that having read that, we continue to say that God is merciful and kind. I think we have to have One who is all good. We yearn for a good Someone above us. We have a yen that we cannot suppress for that good God. And those who are saying, If He’s not good, I won’t have Him, are operating out of the same yen. A proof that we love virtue is that we have created, against the evidence of the world, a good God.

M.: Do you believe in this good God?

Lore: Not in the least, unless He is that for which we yearn against the evidence of our experience.

M.: Since we’re talking about the Torah, I’d like to talk about a Talmudic story I was reminded of when I read in Her First American the part when Ilka and her mother have returned to Austria to remember where they had been before they escaped the Nazi scourge. They talk of a neighbor family that put their heads in their gas oven instead of trying to escape or face what was ahead. And Ilka’s mother says, “The next time, I can see that one might rather put one’s head in the gas oven.” Ilka responds, “One might survive again.” This passage remains marked in my memory.

Lore: I’m not sure that I have made clear what I meant: Imagine having survived those first refugee years, having had your living to make in a foreign language, at a loss, much of the time, among alien ways and rules, and now you’ve arrived at the moment where you are catching your breath. Now imagine the prospect—we never quite stop expecting it—of another—of the next calamity, and mightn’t you long to put your head in that gas oven?

M.: The passage brought to my mind a Talmudic question I’ve puzzled over and written about—the one about the two men in the desert. Only one has water. If he shares it, they both die; if he keeps it, he lives and his companion dies. What should he do? Rabbi Akiva taught that the man should drink it. This has been a very difficult question. Elie Wiesel has said that “Rabbi Akiva was very hard, very hard on the survivor.” I think Wiesel is saying that it is very difficult for the one who survives. What do you think?

Lore: I feel respectful toward the assumption of survivor guilt; I don’t recognize it particularly in myself. If you’ll remember in Other People’s Houses, it was because of a piece of cheating on the part of a relative’s girlfriend that I got on that train. I might have got on it; I might not have got on it, but I was pushed to the front, not by any act or choice of mine, but I did take the place of someone in that long line. I do not recognize any sense of profound guilt. It does not take up my nightmares. I would lie if I said it did. Once every two or three years I look it in the eye, but I do not suffer over it. Primo Levi is my hero on this subject. He is the most subtle and the most honest. He says something which interests me more about survivorship than the sense of guilt: He says he suffers a sense of shame to be of the same species as those who perpetrated such horrors.

M.: Is that the sense of shame that you are dealing with in the short story, one of my favorites, “The Reverse Bug” in Shakespeare’s Kitchen?

Lore: “The Reverse Bug” is not so much about survivorship, which we can do nothing about, but our failure to be aware of those who are suffering while we live and eat and make love, our failure to be horrified 24-hours a day.

M.: Doesn’t that include the shame that Primo Levi describes, the shame to be of the same species as those who perpetrated the horrors?

Lore: You may be right. It’s awfully close to that. You’re absolutely right. I’d never really connected it.

M.: Does that shame include the son of the Nazi torturer who continues to shout, who keeps interrupting, who wants help to find his father? In this story his screams and the screams of others invade an auditorium, echo into the surrounds through the “reverse bug,” a device that puts into a room “what those inside would prefer not to hear.” Ilka says, “Those screams are from Dachau and Hiroshima.” But the son of the Nazi torturer continues to assert, “That is my father.” When the desert howls with the screams from Dachau and Hiroshima, does it howl for that child as well?

Lore: Yes. I am very sorry for him because he and I share a childhood grief I have not written about adequately. My father said to me, when I was leaving Vienna for England, “You must bring out mother and me and your grandparents and the cousins.” And I did come to England and did think that’s what I was supposed to do. I did it some of the time. But it seemed to me that it was something I should be doing constantly, constantly. That I should be doing without doing anything else, and here I was part of the time sleeping and part of the time I was playing with my friends. Some of the time I was laughing. When I caught myself laughing, I would feel a shock in the heart that I was laughing instead of asking somebody to save my parents. That is what I perceive to be driving the Nazi’s child crazy. If it didn’t drive me crazy, it’s because I have a talent for sanity. I am sane—not completely, but reasonably sane. I’m not liable to the depths of depression.

M.: I was struck by the shared compassion in that story for all of those who are suffering.

Lore: The story is really about the failure to share. It’s only when you hear the actual noise that you go like this [putting hands over her ears] and you want it to stop, but the screaming goes on whether you are hearing it or not. Now I don’t say that we should be constantly in a state of compassion. I am dazzled, morally dazzled, by the people who go over to Somalia—nurses and doctors, who walk among horrors and actually do something about it with their own persons. I am dazzled by that. They seem to be extraordinary people doing extraordinary things. That is very amazing. You ask me, Do I believe if people are good? Yes! There they are! I think the people who took that feisty little uncomfortable alien child, Lore, into their inmost homes did something extraordinary and good.

M.: Can we teach our children to be good?

Lore: I taught mine without setting out to do it. One of the charms of my life is that I have good children. My daughter is a social worker. I said to her, “Beatrice, you really are a good soul.” And she said, “I hate it when you say that. I am not trying to be good. This is what I want to do.” And I said, “How interesting that if you did it against your will, you would be good, but since your wishes are virtuous, that’s not good?” How odd that we tend to think that people who work against their nasty instincts are better than those who have good instincts.

M.: Then that the source of Beatrice’s goodness could be thinking, as a rational mind reasoning what is best to do?

Lore: I believe it’s her good instincts. If you ask her, she will say it is because of her grandmother’s stories of the Holocaust and because of the death of her father when she was little. That’s her reason. I think she has a talent to be useful and helpful.

M.: You think she was just born this way?

Lore: Yes.

M.: Don’t you think you had something to do with it? If you remember the beginning of our talk, you told me the story of the harassed woman in the store with the small child—.

Lore: Yes, I think if I had smacked her around and not listened to her, she might be different. Let me tell you about my son, Jacob. I once took Beatrice’s class on a trip (I was one of the mother assistants) and I took Jacob along. He was three and Beatrice was five. One of the five-year-old kids stepped on a bug and three-year-old Jacob let out a howl that you could hear to the other side of the Hudson River. I said, “Jacob, that fly, it only had a day to live.” And Jacob said, “A whole day!” He was inconsolable.

M.: A great deal of mercy in that little child. This makes me think of a passage in Her First American when Ilka’s black lover Carter Bayoux has died, and Ilka says to their friend Ebony (who is also black), “Fishgoppel sent me Blake for my birthday, and, Ebony, you know that poem ‘Mercy has a human heart, Pity a human face’?” And Ebony says, “I don’t know that poem.” That poem ends with this line: “Where Mercy, Love and Pity dwell/ There God is dwelling too”? Do you agree?

Lore: First I want to say that when Ebony says she does not know that poem, she means that in her experience—mercy does not have a human heart. That’s the irony in her comment. I don’t know that poem and that’s not the world as I know it.

M.: But then Ilka says, “I have thought that Carter and I were merciful to each other,” and Ebony says, “I think that you were.”

Lore: Reluctantly, she says that.

M.: Does this poem have meaning for you as an expression of belief in mercy and pity in the human soul?

Lore: When you asked me, Do I think the world tends toward good or evil, I said both, and you can demonstrate both. I remember a class in Shakespeare that I attended at the University of London, and I remember thinking that I am wrong that all evil is the result of suffering, that you’re bad because somebody has been mean to you. There is evil. We were reading Othello. I believe in an Iago. I believe pity has a human face, and brutality has a human face. And I suspect so does God.

M.: In both places.

Lore: In both places. It’s a very Hebrew notion. You know that line, by their fruits, you shall know them? You know God by his creation. It’s wonderful that we thank God for healing our illnesses and don’t blame him for allowing them.

M.: In Christian Morgenstern’s poem #10, “Korf’s Clock,” [Segal translated Morgenstern’s poetry with W.D. Snodgrass] The “clock circles with two pairs of hands/ Which point not only to advance/ But also point back to the rear.” And the result is that “Time is canceled out by Time.” I want to ask you from that lovely and humorous place, how has time worked for you on memories of the past? Has time canceled out some of the pain of memory?

Lore: Writing does. I don’t know if time does. But writing does it in a peculiar way. When you begin writing about it, there it is again. You know Wordsworth’s famous line, “Poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility.” I think that’s the best possible answer. I told my mother that I am lucky, though I certainly wouldn’t have chosen it, to have had the privilege of living in other people’s houses. Who gets to live inside the household, at the hearth of a railroad stoker, the milkman, my upper-class Victorian ladies, the Jewish furniture manufacturer? Who gets, in one lifetime, the privilege, the unbelievable advantage of seeing life without having to turn into an au pair or seeing it in some willed way. I once said this to my mother who said, “You poor thing. You wrote me a letter to say how lonely you were.” She could not bear for me to find elation in what she needed to see as a grief. People want me to feel grief and to stay appropriately grieved. And so I do. But it was also a tremendous and fascinating experience for a future writer.

Love,

Bibliography

Books

Shakespeare’s Kitchen, The New Press, 2007
Other People’s Houses. New York: Harcourt, 1964.
Lucinella. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1976
Her First American. New York: Knopf, 1985

Short Stories

“An Absence of Cousins.” New Yorker, August, 17, 1987, pp. 22–29.
“The Reverse Bug.” New Yorker, May 1, 1989, pp. 34–40.
“Money, Fame, and Beautiful Women.” New Yorker, August 28, 1989, pp. 28–36.
“At Whom the Dog Barks,” New Yorker, December 3, 1990, pp. 44–49.
“Fatal Wish.” New Yorker, July 1, 1991, pp. 26–37.
“William’s Shoes.” New Yorker, November 25, 1991, pp. 48–54.
“Commencement.” Antioch Review, 50, 1992, pp. 472–74.
“The Talk in Eliza’s Kitchen.” New Yorker, April 6, 1992, pp. 28–37.

Children’s Stories

Tell Me a Mitzi. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1970.
All the Way Home. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1973.
Tell Me a Trudy. New York: Farrar Straus, 1977.
The Story of Old Mrs. Brubeck and How She Looked for Trouble and Where She Found Him. New York: Pantheon, 1981.
The Story of Mrs. Lovewright and Purrless Her Cat. New York: Knopf, 1985.

Translations

(with W. D. Snodgrass) Christian Morgenstern. Gallows Songs. University of Michigan Press, 1967.
Wilhelm Grimm and Jakob Grimm, The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1973.
The Book of Adam to Moses. New York: Knopf, 1987.
The Story of King Saul and King David. New York: Schocken, 1991.

Essays

“Hers,” The New York Times, November 19, 1987, Sec. C, p. 2
“Hers,” The New York Times, November 26, 1987, Sec. C, p. 2.
“Hers,” The New York Times, December 3, 1987, Sec. C, p. 2.
“Hers,” The New York Times, December 10, 1987, Sec. C, p. 2.
“Hers,” The New York Times, December 17, 1987, Sec. C, p. 2.
“Hers,” The New York Times, December 24, 1987, Sec. C, p. 2.
“The Bough Breaks.” Testimony: Contemporary Writers Make the Holocaust Personal. Ed. David Rosenberg. New York: Times Books, 1989, pp. 231–248.

Other

Cavenaugh, Philip. “The Present Is a Foreign Country: Lore Segal’s Fiction.” Contemporary Literature 34, 1993, pp. 475–511.
Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics. Translated by J. A. K. Thomson. England: Penguin Books, Revised Edition 1976, Book Two, ix, pp. 108–109.
“The Divine Image,” The Essential Blake. Selected by Stanley Kunitz. New York: Ecco Press, 1987, p. 17.