CATCHING UP WITH CLAIRE KEEGAN

What does a writer give as a hostess gift? I gave a book. A book I didn’t write. My favorite book of the last few years. It’s short: 128 pages. Precise: not a wasted word. And even when you think you know where it’s going, you’re only almost right. Read my review of “Small Things Like These,” by Claire Keegan.  The Guardian interviewed Keegan the other day. I collect anecdoes about her the way I used to collect batting averages off baseball cards. I’ll share:  Her five books to date run to just 700 pages. Next year: a film of “Small Things Like These,” starring Cillian Murphy. And this: “I love to see prose being written economically. Elegance is saying just enough. And I do believe that the reader completes the story.Her next book, “So Late in the Day” started life as a New Yorker story. Very much worth reading — it won’t take long.

A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT JOHN LE CARRÉ

A year before his death, John Le Carré (in reality, David Cornwell) was interviewed by Errol Morris for a documentary called “The Pigeon Tunnel,” which will launch on Apple TV on October 20. The interview was filmed at Cornwell’s country estate in 2019, a year before the author’s death at the age of 89. His sons note: “David knew already that it would be his last significant interview, his chance to put his ultimate persona on the record. For years before he first met Errol, David would speak glowingly ofThe Fog of War [Morris’s 2003 documentary], of the importance of Robert McNamara’s final testament, and of Errol’s ability to penetrate almost imperceptibly the heart of both the man and the matter. David wanted to make his own confession. But at the same time, perhaps he also wanted a last opportunity to sculpt his image and leave a reflective legacy that was every bit as carefully constructed as his fiction.” Watch the trailer.

Weekend reading… and streaming. “The Spy Who Came in from the Cold” and “Our Kind of Traitor.”

TOM McGUANE REMEMBERS JIMMY BUFFETT

Jimmy Buffett planned to be a surprise guest at the Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day weekend. “He was going to be part of the festival, as of two weeks ago,” said Tom McGuane, Buffett’s friend of 50 years and brother-in-law for nearly that long. McGuane was speaking at the Telluride premiere of a documentary that stars both of them, “All That Is Sacred,” which had its world premiere about 12 hours after Buffett’s death.

“There’s a Mexican expression that says everybody knows they’re gonna die, but nobody believes it,” McGuane told the Telluride audience. “And I think when you get to be my age and each week brings a phone call of a friend with cancer or a friend who’s passed away… Jimmy died last night, and he seemed to be so forceful and energetic all his life, every minute of it, that it’s hard to believe that he wouldn’t have ordered death out of the room.”

“I wrote Jimmy a letter, and my wife read it to him the day before yesterday. And the letter was all about when you know your death is imminent — how should you feel about that? …  I was able to assure Jimmy that whatever he had done certainly had quite a long life into the future. And I said, ‘You won’t be there for the applause. How big of a deal is that?’ And he was still speaking at that time and he said, ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ He said, ‘That’s great.’

“I think that for a lot of hip music people, Jimmy probably didn’t get quite the credit he should have for his originality as a songwriter. But there was a lot of resentment out there. The guy who was writing songs about blue collar people going to the beach having three jets, the picture didn’t make sense to some people, especially to the illuminati at the newspapers who sort of write about such things, you know? There was one of them in the Times today: ‘Jimmy Buffett, who made a fortune from writing songs about loafing at the beach, didn’t live that life.’

“But you have to remember, when I first met him, he was just a couple years out of stocking groceries, and (he and Laurie) were latchkey kids, growing up — lower middle class, I guess, is the way they would put it. So there was the magic of having more than you need and all that glamour. But he also hung onto the old gang, even after he became a boldfaced name suddenly. He was famous, and we were kind of famous. I’ve had a lot of my life where I was best known as Jimmy Buffett’s brother-in-law.

“I remember one time he said, ‘These are the best eyedrops you can ever get. David Geffen gave them to me.’ Those were some of his references that wouldn’t have been in our previous lexicon. Or you want to go fishing someplace and he’d just take the jet there and the rest of us would schlep to get to the destination. So that physically changed things a little bit. But he didn’t ever lost touch with any of that first group. All of us stayed friends all our lives.

“Jimmy was a reader. A friend of his gave me his copy of E.B. White’s collected essays, and every sentence had his comments in the margins. He grew up in a household that was working class, but cultivated people, really, especially his mother. His mother was very literate and a very good book reader. She’d always wanted to go to college, and couldn’t afford to. And she finished her working life and went to college and graduated after starting at 65.

“He was always working very hard on his music, even when there was little support for that [in Key West days]. We’d all gather around and he would play his songs for us, and some of them later became famous songs that were very much professionally produced, but I was really stuck back on the version where he just picked them out on his acoustic guitar and sang them. I always felt they kind lost something in production, but I don’t think anybody else feels that way.

“Years later, I was with him when his book (‘Tales From Margaritaville’) went to No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. Every Parrothead in America walked into a bookstore and bought that book. Some booksellers said, ‘We never saw those people before. We never saw ’em again.’ None of us resented it (from the Key West writers’ group) — all of us were happy about it. I think maybe Jimmy thought it was kind of a triumph of the old nag, but it wasn’t that way.

“He loved other people, and he was lovely in the context of his family, of his sisters and his parents. He took very good care of his parents, and sent my wife to college. He and I sent our nieces to school. He really didn’t change very much through not just a long, illustrious life, but a long life of, after pretty early on, extreme wealth. You would expect those to create bigger changes in an individual than they did in his case.

“He was just smart. One time we were casting a film that I was involved in, and we went to New York with the director and we were looking at footage of different actors that we were considering, and we were making snide comments about everything we saw. And Buffett’s were so ingenious, I remember the director saying, ‘We might as well give up. His mind is so much faster than ours.’

“He lived a long life, was very successful, is very renowned, and did pretty much what he wanted to do. I mean, he was on top of the world for a half-century, still a huge deal at the time he died. And most music careers are not like that; you just have Bruce Springsteen and a few other people. His following was so huge, they’re going to name streets after him —commemorations are gonna be like a national holiday.

“I’m not religious, but I’m not convinced that death is the end. For 150,000 years, people have believed that there was something beyond death, and it’s not some guy with a beard and robes, but that there’s something inextinguishable about the human spirit. … I was interviewed for a profile not too long ago, and the guy said, ‘What are you hoping for when you die?’ And I said, ‘A surprise.’

I told Jimmy several things when I wrote him a final letter. ‘So you don’t really know what’s coming? I don’t either. Just leave a little room.’”

AMOR TOWLES: “I didn’t write for 10 years but then I began to feel if I don’t start writing again, I run the risk of being a very bitter, drunk, and so I started writing on the weekends.

Amor Towles worked at an investment management firm for 21 years. He grew up writing fiction. His dream was to be a novelist. But in 1991, he quit writing and got a “real” job. He eventually started writing again: “The dread of failing to realize my dream really began to hover over me. I knew if I didn’t start writing fiction again, I would end up a bitter drunk.” Towles said that in stuffing down his dream, gradually, something inside him began to harden and toxify. And that toxicity oozed out of him and onto the people he loved and cared about: his wife, kids, friends, and colleagues. “People say, ‘you must have loved fiction so much, that must be why you went back to it after a ten-year hiatus. No, it was the dread of not doing it.” So to get rid of the dread hovering over him, Towles began writing again. While still working full-time at the investment firm, he carved out a 4-hour block of time every Saturday or Sunday. During the week — in the shower, on his commutes to work, on the treadmill — he would ideate and figure out what exactly to work on during the upcoming weekend’s 4-hour block. With this process, Towles completed his debut novel, “Rules of Civility,” which was such a critical and commercial success that, after 21 years, he left his “real” job and realized his dream of being a full-time novelist.

THE WEEKEND POEM