Webcast Transcript:
Willy Walker: Good morning, everyone, I'm out on the West Coast today, and it's a real joy to have my old friend Amor Towles with me today. Let me jump into a quick bio and then Amor will jump into our discussion.
Born and raised in the Boston area, Amor Towles graduated from Yale College and received an M.A. in English from Stanford University. Having worked as an investment professional for over 20 years, he now devotes himself full time to writing in Manhattan, where he lives with his wife and two children. His novels, Rules of Civility, A Gentleman in Moscow and The Lincoln Highway, have collectively sold more than five million copies and been translated into more than 30 languages. Amor and I have known one another almost our entire lives, with our grandparents being friends, our parents being friends and his sister, Kimbrough, brother Stokely and my brother Taylor spending long summer days on Martha's Vineyard together. And I would be remiss if I didn't add that Amor’s Uncle Bob Doran is one of my heroes and major mentors and how he built Wellington Management into the amazing company that it is today.
So, Amor, first of all, thank you for joining me and in The Lincoln Highway, which is about 18-year-old boys. As you say, that's the age when you “fashion your future”. I knew you at age 18 as you were headed off to Yale. At that time, were you thinking about being an author, a banker, or a tennis pro?
Amor Towles: First of all, thanks for having me. And how come I look so much older than you?
Willy Walker: I've actually always been younger than you, so it's all good.
Amor Towles: Not that much, right? but watch out for the next three years, Willy. In answer to your question, I began writing fiction as a kid. And so really, I began the interest in writing fiction around the same time, I learned how to read in first grade, and so that became my driving passion from that point forward, I would read something, write something, read something, be influenced by it, write something kind of right up through high school and into college and graduate school, as you mentioned. So, by the time I was 18 and I went to Yale writing fiction, reading fiction was really at the top of the heap for me. I certainly didn't imagine myself becoming involved in tennis because I wasn't good enough compared to you and I certainly didn't think I was going to end up in the investment business either. I graduated from Stanford having got my masters and moved to New York City with the intention of being a full-time novelist back in ‘89.
Willy Walker: So, on that, that's interesting because a lot of people wrote me asking sort of after getting your master's in English from Stanford, why you pursued a career in finance? One piece of your history that many may not know is that your father, Stokley Towles, was a legendary banker at Brown Brothers Harriman. Was it your dad's influence or just sort of, if you will, needing to make a buck that kind of got you into finance rather than pursuing your dreams of writing?
Amor Towles: It’s a combination of things. I had moved to New York City. I was 25 years old. I was living in an illegal sublet in the East Village with another friend from our childhood, Claudia. And I was writing fiction during the day, but feeling claustrophobic, a little lonely, a little frustrated. The work wasn't going very well, and I was broke, that’s the other thing. My father's influence comes in right away on that front, which was that he was not in favor of me writing fiction as a broke person and he wasn't going to fund it himself. So, there's that influence. But you're right that my father's love of being in the investment arena/financial services because he was a banker, as you mentioned, but he ultimately was really in the financial services serving mutual fund industry, in the global custody business. And my uncle Bob Doran, had been in the investment business his entire career and was an executive in the field. My godfather, in essence, Sam Bodman, who also you knew was at the time at Fidelity. And so, I grew up around people who were in the financial services. What I learned from that is that they were all having a great time in their fields like nobody was coming home frustrated, miserable. And I think it's because the field was so intellectually stimulating, and they all worked in very collegial organizations. There was, of course, growth and a better than average compensation profile in the financial field, particularly at the time. And so, for all these reasons. You know, it was a very outgoing arena.
So, when I realized I got to get a job, I mean, I'm not going to sit here in this dark room all day with my roommate's cat. And so, I kind of looked at my options and I was like, the way I thought of it was, you know, I had friends who were artists who were doing the bartender-waitressing thing. And as a way of funding time with their art, I look at them and they would all get home – like my buddy was a bartender, get home at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, and haven't had a grand old time. And you know, sometimes he wouldn't come home at all. He was exhausted the next day. He wasn't getting a lot of art done. And then, you know, I had friends in the arts who would go and work in collateral jobs. So, like my friend, who was a painter, answered phones at the Castelli Gallery and I had a friend who was a writer who was an assistant to an editor at a publishing house. And what I found was that those guys, their jobs were not very interesting to them. They were working long hours and weren't paid very much. And by the time they get home, the last thing they wanted to do was their art because if you spend your whole day reading manuscripts for your boss and typing in front of a computer screen, the last thing you want to do at home is write fiction.
So, I was like, “well, neither of these seem to be working”, maybe I'll do a look for a job in the investment field because as you say, my father loved it, my uncle loved it, my godfather loved it and I knew it was a research-driven space and that appealed to me as a student of the humanities. So, I began looking for work around that time, a little bit before this friend of mine had started his own investment firm. And at this point, he was still working alone. And so, he ended up taking me in. And we used to joke that he said, “Why don't you work with me until you get a job?” And I just never got a job. So, 20 years later, we were still working side by side, in a thriving investment management business and that was a great career, and I loved it. I had great clients, a great practice, great craft, great colleagues. The whole thing was great. And it was his dream, not my dream. Right. So, along the way, I knew I had to get myself back to writing fiction in my spare time. Or I would end up miserable and ill, emotionally, and spiritually. So, I began writing fiction again on the side. I spent seven years in my late 20s, early 30s writing a novel I didn't like, so I set that aside. I learned a lot from that experience, and then I set about writing a novel based on what I had learned and that failed novel and Rules of Civility came out of that. And when that became a bestseller, I retired from the firm.
Willy Walker: But so, hang on a second. How did you learn from the first novel that you didn't publish, in the sense that you wrote it? Did somebody else read it? Did you get feedback on it? How did you know that that wasn't your best work?
Amor Towles: So, you have to picture that at that point, I've been writing fiction for 20 years or something like that. I mean, even though I was only in my mid-thirties, I had a meaningful amount of experience of writing fiction. But the vast majority of it, like for most, was in short story form. And the shift from a short story to a novel is a meaningful shift because it's a much more complicated mechanism. And so, what I reflected on after the sort of failed novel was that one of the things I had not done is outline it very carefully or really at all. And this proved to be a big problem in that book. It was, if you look at (for those of you who've read my work, hopefully you have a sense of this) but different people are trying to achieve different things in the novel as an art form. One of the things that I have been trying to achieve so far is I'm very interested in how the novel can work together as sort of a cohesive mechanism. I think the best parallel for me is like a symphony. And if you think of a fine symphony of Mozart or Beethoven, there is this: as you're listening to it, you're shifting, making transitions over the course of the symphony into different moods, the notion of different musical ideas being presented. But at the same time, there are motifs which are recurring and being replayed by different instruments, being played as a solo and then by the entire orchestra. You have a moment where the music is growing quiet and then it is rising and it goes through diminuendo, in a crescendo and then ultimately, when you get towards the end of the symphony in the best of Mozart and Beethoven, there's that feeling of it's all coming together for you as the listener. And finally, and this sort of in the final movements, it's over and you're like, “Yes, that was beautiful.”
And you don't say, I really wish there were like seven more movements to that symphony. You don't say that. Nor do you say, I wish this was done 15 minutes ago, right? I mean, a fine symphony comes to a conclusion when it should. So I'm interested in trying to achieve the same sort of experience in a novel which has the motifs which are recurring, to have the transitions, to have the crescendos, diminuendos and the shifting sentiments and to have this sort of feeling, when it's done – it was just the right length and everything has come together in a way that hopefully is satisfying and in all the ideas you know are swirling in your head and emotions are stimulated. That's the goal. And it is very hard to achieve that as an outcome if you don't plan the book. The unplanned novel, it was just sort of driving me crazy because as I was discovering what it was, I was shifting gears but that meant that the first 200 pages weren't really in harmony with what the story was becoming and where it was going, and I was constantly having to go back and to tinker with it to make it sort of all work together and it just never gelled. So, I was like, all right, next time I'm going to do a very detailed outline.
I really felt in rereading the failed book that some of the best parts were written in the first year, and I never even touched those parts. And some of the worst parts I've been laboring over for four years, and I couldn't get them right. And so, I sort of felt, there is this element of that first year of really going after the project where it's fresh and new and exciting and you want to make the most of that and ideally have that energy that you're feeling shared with the reader, and experienced by the reader, as much as possible. And so, I thought, you know what? I'm going to give myself a year to write the first draft of this new book. Having outlined it, I'll give myself a year to write the first draft. For those of you who've read Rules of Civility, you may be interested in this: that book opens on New Year's Eve because I started on New Year's Eve. I designed it over a period of years, and then I started writing chapter one on New Year's Eve. That book ends on New Year's Eve because I ended that book on New Year's Eve. And in writing the first draft, it has 26 chapters because there are 52 weeks in the year, and I wanted to write a chapter for a week, edit that chapter for a week and then move on no matter what. Just keep moving on until I could capture it. So then, that first 12 months, all of those were the raw material of the first draft. I then had to revise that book from beginning to end three times before you would have read it. But anyway, that's the way I ended up approaching Rules of Civility. That process worked out better than the drifter seven-year effort.
Willy Walker: It's interesting about the drifted seven-year effort, obviously focusing full time on writing now versus having been in the investment business, writing on the sidelines has a big impact on how much time you can focus on it. But just diving a little bit deeper on that, Amor as it relates to that ability to focus and the really good work done in the first year, if you will, rather than kind of trying to get back to it further on. Do you find now that sticking to a process the way that you did there is where you find your genius, if you will? And I know that's kind of a tough conversation or a tough answer, but I guess do you right now when you're on your next project, do you plot it out exactly the same way as you did on Rules of Civility?
Amor Towles: The short answer is yes, but I want to elaborate because of something you said. That worked so well for me that when I set out to write A Gentleman in Moscow, I did the same thing. I spent years designing the book. I spent another year outlining the book and by design, what I mean by that, what my practice tends to be: I come up with a notion that intrigues me. Since I've been writing since I was a kid, I always have ideas for books or stories, and occasionally one of these ideas would really kind of grab my attention for a while and I realized, okay, yeah, I want to imagine this story in greater and greater detail. And you know, that's what will happened with A Gentleman in Moscow. I was walking into a hotel when I was in the financial field, a hotel I went to every year in Geneva. I recognized a guy in the lobby from the year before. And I thought, “Oh man, you know, it's a nice hotel, but you imagine if you actually had to live in it?” And that's what got me thinking, oh, what an interesting idea for a book, a guy gets trapped in a hotel for a long period of time. And so when I have a notion like that, which I had like a decade before A Gentleman in Moscow was published, I will then begin in notebooks imagining every aspect of that story that I can, you know, everything that happens what the settings are, all the individual cast of characters, their backgrounds, their personalities, what they end up doing, what they end up saying, I am imagining it all. Once I kind of know everything that's going to happen and the feel of it all, then I'll start a detailed outline and then I'll go into that process that I described a minute ago. A Gentleman in Moscow, it took me a year and a half to write the first draft, and that book is 50 percent longer than Rules of Civility, but at the same price. (Both laugh.)
But at any rate, it took me longer to do the first draft. But then you go into the process, and you go from beginning to end, the beginning to end, beginning to end until you have something. And so, the thing I wanted to add, though, is because I know that you would appreciate this. And my guess is many of the people on the call would appreciate this. Having said that, there's an aspect of the first year that I really want to capture in the first drafting thing. Every aspect, every phase that I just described is extremely important to the quality of the outcome, and each of those phases is very different in its satisfactions and its demands on me as an artist.
And what I say is this is something which I know you have experienced professionally and that your listeners have experienced, which is that, when you're bringing a new financial product to market, well, there's an exciting phase around that, but there's all kinds of different phases around it, whether it's the design, the debugging, the marketing of it, getting it up to scale, building an expertise around it, refining the craft, diversifying it – all these different elements that lead to the ongoing pursuit of excellence in all these different elements that are required towards really doing a good job in financial services of any kind, there's a parallel there, right? Which is that you wouldn't say as the boss, well, the most important thing is we've got to get the idea right. You know, you do got to get the idea right. But you don't want to suggest for a second that all that other stuff that's going to come after doesn't matter. That's going to matter just as much, if not more. And you know, it's going to get increasingly intricate and demanding from this initial kernel of an idea. So, it is like that in the writing process. The imaginative process where I'm inventing it is totally fun because it's risk free, it is zero cost, free floating, and it's entertaining. It comes natural to me so that makes it easier.
But the part of actually beginning to assemble the outline is beginning to be a little bit more analytical. And I like that too. And it's that you get into the Rubik's Cube aspect of designing a novel: what's the sequence here and what is being revealed when? What theme is introduced when? And when can this character go through this experience? And when do they have this revelation? How does that affect the other characters? And if I change this, what's the right structure for this story to make it work? You know, this is what's going on? And then there's the actual writing of a pair of the original draft, and that's kind of exciting because it doesn't exist yet. That's a little daunting. The editing can feel like manual labor. It is manual labor, but that's really where you're really making it work. You know where you are taking all this great material you have and cleaning it up, fixing it and sharpening it and refining it. And you know, I say that's a lot of hard work, but that is in a way, you can't be lazy about that part.
Willy Walker: Does anybody else see it before it goes to that editing process? In other words, does Maggie read it? Does anybody else get their eyes on it before you've gone and done that sort of winnowing down process?
Amor Towles: I don't share. At least in this. Going from when I had an idea and a lot designing it, outlining it and then the writing of the first draft – I don't share it with anybody. I don't talk about the idea. I don't share the pages. And until I'm done with the first draft, and I've gone through it once, just to clean it up, that I will share usually with about six people on the same day. So, it goes to my wife, my agent, my editor in New York, my editor in London, and a couple of friends who are very good readers. I give it to them all on the same day and I say, you know, Kim would be great if you could all give me feedback in the next six weeks. And I set up a series of lunches with the six of them and where I basically hear what they think. You know, one at a time. What did you like? What didn't you like? What was boring? What was, you know, thrilling? What was confusing? What do you think it’s about to you? You know, what would you change? Which character didn't work for you, which one did? And so just a real host of gathering sort of impressions from different angles. And then I kind of retreat with the feedback from those conversations.
In the meantime, I've been getting my own sense of what's right and wrong about the first draft and beginning to take my own notes about how I might go about my plan for revising the book. And I really think of it as a plan for revision. You know, and I start coming up with ideas. You know what? I'm going to eliminate that middle part. I'm going to kill that character. I'm going to throw out the first chapter or start chapter two. And, you know, whatever you start coming up with a plan to make the book better. And as I said, these other conversations influence that strategy. And then I go into the game and dig in and go from beginning to end. And when I'm done with that, I'll give it again out to a handful of people. Maybe it's three or four, and that'll be all different people, except for my New York editor and my English editor, who will also be in round two. You know, then you start to move, you know, ideally you leave the second round of conversations with fewer things to do with the first round, you know?
Willy Walker: So, you mentioned that you came up with the idea for A Gentleman in Moscow when you were in Geneva. Why did you end up picking Moscow and there were a number of grand hotels that had all grown up at the same time? So, you came up with the concept of wouldn't it be interesting to have someone trapped in a hotel? But why did you go to the Metropole versus going to the Ritz in Paris?
Amor Towles: You're right, the Grand Hotel, between 1890 to 1910, was being built in every major capital in the world. It was in every major city in the United States, throughout Latin America, throughout Europe, of course, even in Asia. I could have set the story anywhere. The reality is that when I have a notion like I described, “guy gets trapped in a hotel for a long period of time.” Usually what happens is and I'm like, Well, that's a good one. That would be interesting. Usually, what happens is within an hour, I will have some key elements that will present themselves, maybe even minutes. So, in that case, I said, oh yeah, oaky, great, I'll do it, I’ll do a book about a guy trapped in a hotel, it'll be set in Russia. It'll be great. And there'll be an aristocrat and he'll be sentenced to house arrest by the Soviets. And you'll have that. It'll be, you know, the fancy hotel across the street from the Kremlin. And the story can last from the revolution all the way to the Cold War. You know, all that came to me in a matter of minutes.
Willy Walker: Wow, that’s amazing. Wow.
Amor Towles: Now to the particular question. I'm not a research guy. So, when that's coming to me really quickly, it's because I like to write about things I already have a great deal knowledge about or a longstanding interest in, something that I've internalized as opposed to studied. And so, I became a fan of the Russian novel. As you know, in 1920 and around that time, I had read all the Russians closely. The great 19th century Russians: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gogol, Chekhov, ultimately. And that led me to an interest in the avant-garde in Russia before the revolution, which was extremely active in all the arts. And then that led me to an interest in the Soviet era works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. So, over a 30-year timeframe, I had studied Russian culture and I had visited the country once as a result. It seemed like the Metropole Hotel although I'd never been inside. And so, the leap of saying, “Oh yeah, great, it could be set in Russia.” I never would have made that leap if I didn't have this long since highly accumulated sense of Russian life, because that was sort of an excitement to me to be able to take what I knew and it made sense to me instinctively, oh right. You know, Soviet house arrest is a perfect way to do this story. And the clash between the Grand Hotel and 19th century sensibility and revolutionary Russia and this forward looking, rapidly modernizing, very disruptive, dangerous sort of power structure, it was a perfect sort of way to tell the sort of grand story and about the fight of an individual in the scope of all this change. So that's why, you know, if I had spent 20 years reading about Latin America, I would probably be set in Brazil. It really came out of the comfort of my affinity to the material, I guess.
Willy Walker: How much, Amor, you clearly are incredibly well read on the great Russian writers and novelists, but as you were pulling it together, how much research did you have to do to kind of go back? And if you will refine some of your memory of a Russian history class that you might have taken at Yale or whatever else. The thing that was so incredible to me and reading it was the way you weave the history into it and the specificity with which you reference the events that are going on and so as one reads it, you're obviously focused on the Count and the Count’s life and experience there. But there's so much else going around that you so incredibly weave into the story. How much of that was actually specific research versus just it's in the back of your brain, you got it and you're just applying it as you're writing this wonderful novel?
Amor Towles: The way I approach my work, which is different from others, I'm very wary about doing applied research before or while I'm writing the first draft. Applied research. I feel that that kind of research, that gathering of factual concrete information in the service of the story can be very detrimental to imagining the story well and bring it to life in a way that has a spark in the language, in the service of the reader. And so, I feel that from my experience both as a reader and as a writer, the risks of doing that kind of applied research on the front end where you can sort of feel it being plunked, dropped down into the text, you know, brand names and musical numbers from the period and what's on TV. And you know, Kraft macaroni and cheese was invented that year, the names of the cars and now a celebrity on the radio, Kennedy was shot that day. You know, it's like, oh my gosh, you sort of push all that back and say, what's the story here?
The point was to say that you could set a story in Texas about a young girl who's at odds with her mom and she got a big presentation the next day in school and she's having a fight with her friend or whatever… and if you set that on the day that Kennedy is assassinated, the whole thing, you know, doesn't make a difference what you write. The Kennedy assassination is a part of the story, and everything in the story will be in conjunction with what happened later that day or earlier that day. And you know, and now all the characters have to talk about it too. So, you have to be very careful also in terms of picking these things that you bring in from the historical record into a narrative because they become the narrative very quickly if they're prominent, right? So, I don't like to do the research. I want to imagine the thing fully. And yes, you're absolutely right, Willy, that I do not start that process remembering the day Lenin died, I have a rough sense of the year and I don't totally remember, certain aspects of the Constitution but I remember generally some of the problems that were created for society by virtue of rules and regulations or whatever. So, I'll go on the seat of my pants, but I'll take that general awareness and I'll use a lot of Xs in the narrative as necessary, you know, and maybe when I'm plotting out the outline, I'll just double check what's the year Lenin died so that I don't make sure that it's in the right chapter of the book, but that everything else gets pushed back. And when I'm done with the first draft, then I'll actually start to go out and do some applied research.
Willy Walker: You went and spent a week at the Metropole after you'd done the first draft, right?
Amor Towles: Most important example is I had never spent a night in the Metropole Hotel when I wrote the book and when I finished the first draft, I got on a plane, flew to Moscow, moved into the hotel into the Count's suite at the opening of the book with my first draft and began revising while I was there. And the other thing I did is I realized that the Metropole hotel was really one of the only fine hotels in Russia throughout 1900 to 1970. It was the National, the Savoy and the Metropole. So, in this six-to-seven-decade span, if a famous person came to Moscow, they either drank at, ate at, or slept at the Metropole. That's just basically a reality of life. And so, I realized that you could go out and find memoirs of significant Americans who had visited Moscow in any of the decades between the revolution and the Cold War and, if you went through the index, the Metropole was often there. So, I started gathering them. So, as I was getting near the end of the first draft, I started accumulating firsthand accounts of events in the hotel. John Steinbeck, in his memoirs, talks about his experiences in the hotel. Lillian Hellman, the great Pulitzer Prize winning playwright who you know was Dashiell Hammett’s lover. She writes about it. John Reed, the great American who wrote the Ten Days That Shook the World, writes about the Metropole Hotel. E.E. Cummings, the poet does. Now, in addition, I realized and sort of discovered that all the journalists wrote about it because the international press office was about a block from the Metropole because they wanted to keep it close. It was right in between the Kremlin and the KGB office. That's where the international press office was. You betcha. And so, the closest bar to the International Press Office was basically the bar at the Metropole. So, for 50 years, that's where they all drank. And so, you could just kind of go you could pick in decade 20s, the 30s, the 40s, any British or American journalist who wrote a memoir. And they all did. You could get anecdotes from the Metropole. So, I gathered all of this Xeroxed it. Had a big stack, flew to Moscow, moved into the hotel, began reading through those and began planning the revision for the book. And that was totally fun.
Willy Walker: There's a story that I've heard you tell, and I'm not going to ask you to tell it again because there are a number of listeners who probably heard you tell it before about Harrison Salisbury being on Martha's Vineyard and finding a bottle that you'd put into the ocean thinking that it was going to make its way to China, and it ended up going around from West Chop, East Chop. But you work Harrison Salisbury, who was a writer for The New York Times, who was stationed in Moscow into it, where at the end the Count (I don't want to give the story away to anyone who has not read the book) but as the Count is going to try and steal a coat and a fedora, it's Harrison Salisbury's coat and fedora, which you've worked into the theme. As I was also researching that, I also realized that your father was known for wearing his fedora walking down the street in Boston and sitting outside of the Brown Brothers Harriman office and just sitting there and talking to people as they would go in and out of the building. And so, was that literally and figuratively a tip of the hat to your dad at the same time as you were mentioning Harrison Salisbury?
Amor Towles: I think so. Bogart plays a big role in A Gentleman in Moscow, the movie Casablanca does and Bogart to some degree, another famous fedora wearer of course and my father was a big Bogart fan, and I grew up watching the Bogart movies with my dad at the at the double feature houses in Cambridge. So, yeah, there's clearly some sort of thread of the fedora, which my father is very much a part of. Of course, I'm a big Sinatra fan, he is a big fedora wearer. So, yeah, that's definitely true. And as you say, yes. Salisbury adding this guy who I corresponded with as a child and met when I was 18. He had been the Moscow Bureau Chief for the Times, had written extensively about the Metropole. I didn't remember any of that about him being in Russia until kind of as I would begin gathering materials. But so, I carried his memoirs with me to Russia. And there in the hotel, I opened up his memoirs and the first pages was, “I got in the taxi, and I told him to take me to the Metropole Hotel” because that's where Salisbury lived while he was the Moscow bureau chief. And so, he talks about it a lot. And in the revision of A Gentleman in Moscow, I began to incorporate some material that kind of sprang out of his memoirs. And ultimately, as you say, I put his actual person in the book as a tribute, I guess.
Willy Walker: So, the fact about the actual research and not letting it impact the way you create the story is fascinating and waiting until you've got the first draft to go back and do that. As I read all of your books, the vocabulary you use, Amor, is astounding. And I know you're an incredibly well-read person and you have an amazing vocabulary. But I'm just curious whether you ever pick up the thesaurus to put in a word? So, for instance, as the Count is sitting there looking at his room and describing the grandfather clock, you write: “it sloped asymptotically from top to bottom”. And so, my question is, was "asymptotically" just a word in your mind? Or did the Thesaurus come in there as you were trying to describe the clock?
Amor Towles: No, I did not. I don't know how you would use a Thesaurus to find that word.
Willy Walker: Yeah, I don't either. How did you come up with that word?
Amor Towles: Slope. I studied geometry and the asymptote is a curve that moves and gets closer and closer and closer without ever touching the line, right? So, I had this oh that's what the shape looks like. You can describe this clock or the woman on her side, the highest of her hip. But “asymptotically” sounded more like the Count.
No, I don't use the thesaurus. And you know, it's funny – no one's ever asked me that. And I've never really used one in my life, and I probably don't use them for the same thing as research. I feel like when you read someone who writes with a thesaurus, you can usually tell, you know, there's something like they've taken some words to replace another word that isn't quite right or it's a little off or something. So, it's either more highfalutin than it should be or not enough falutin. But anyways, I have to trust what sounds right to my ear. But a big difference in my work compared to some others, is that I'm very interested in tone and point of view and how it shapes the reading experience and the understanding of the human mind for the reader when considering a character. So, for me, if you read A Gentleman in Moscow, if you read The Lincoln Highway, if you read Rules of Civility, my sincere hope would be that you find them to be very different linguistically. That the gentleman in Moscow sounds like a 19th century aristocrat who's very refined and has sort of a big opinion of himself. Whereas, you know, Rules of Civility sounds like a young woman from a working-class background in New York in the 30s. This young Midwesterner in the 1950s who opens The Lincoln Highway, the actual writing for each of those three characters is very different intentionally. So, the vocabulary has to in a way spring from my sense of their personality and as well as sort of their upbringing. What would they say? How would they put it? What would sound right to them? The thesaurus is not going to help me with that, hear that person in a way that's organic and natural of how exactly she would put that, or he would put that. And that's a big part of the art, as it were. But it comes from the practice of trying to imagine how different people sound, in dialog.
Willy Walker: How much of your writing is pulled from your own personal experience versus what you're creating in your own mind? As I think about the young girl Nina in A Gentleman in Moscow, how much of Nina is reflective of your daughter Esmé?
Amor Towles: Very little. I'll tell anecdotes saying that, you know, Esmé, this is true, it's sort of having the father of a five-, six- or seven-year-old girl, that's where you realize how shrewd a little girl can be. That was helpful as I was inventing Nina and Sophia in A Gentleman in Moscow. But beyond that, there is no aspect of my daughter's personality, which is reflected in Sophia's or Nina's, who themselves are very different people. And so, I don't really use, nobody in The Lincoln Highway is based on someone I know. So, I do invent the people kind of from scratch. It's really the way that works for me.
Willy Walker: And I've heard you tell the story about La Princessita and your daughter showing up at Smith & Wollensky and asking them to treat her as the way she used to be treated at the local Italian restaurant around the corner from you all. So, there are pieces of a nine-year-old girl and the way that she's acting that influence the way that you're describing what Nina is like in the book, but it's not sitting there and saying, I'm going to base this off of Esmé in the way she lives her life. Is that a fair assessment?
Amor Towles: Yeah. And it's even, you know, you couldn't even say. “Oh, I'm going to take Willy’s sense of charm and Taylor's this and so and so’s that and put them together” and make a person because you can't do that either. This is one of the more mysterious aspects of the writing process, I suppose, or one of the ones is more difficult to articulate, and it may be because it is principally through decades of practice that it has become second nature for me. But what I'm imagining, let's say in The Lincoln Highway, and there's going to be these three 18-year-old boys interacting right from Chapter one. And one is born in the Midwest, and you know, one is from a rougher section of New York in the mid-fifties. One is from an aristocratic sort of Upper East Side upbringing in New York. I kind of know that very early and then you start to get into what they sound like? Who are these people? That's where it's as I say, I don't reach outside to look at somebody, I sort of listen in. And then you kind of get this sort of cycle of where you're saying, okay, you know, it would be the kind of kid who does X right early on, you know what's going to happen. He's going to get into a fight, is going to kill somebody by mistake and he's gonna bear the sense of guilt like that and early in the first chapter of The Lincoln Highway.
The premise of the story is an 18-year-old is being on the opening day. A younger teenager gets into a fight at the county fair in Nebraska in the mid-50s, punches a kid who's a bully. The bully falls back, hits his head and dies. And our hero is sent away to a work farm. Juvenile work farm. The book then opens the day, the warden is driving him home, Emmett to the family farm. And in the meantime, his father has died. The farms in bankruptcy and the warden is saying, you know, you've paid your debt to society. You're a good person, an honorable person. You know, you should start your life anew. And the hero says, that's my intention. But when the warden drives away, it turns out that these two other kids from the work farm have hidden in the trunk of the car, and they have this sort of different vision of how to spend the near future. And that's when everything sort of starts in the case of The Lincoln Highway.
Well, imagining Emmett, I had early on this sort of thing of the warden saying, you know, you've paid your debt to society, and you should start your life fresh. And then Emmett would say to himself, in essence, that whatever he done, to repay the debt, it wasn't enough yet. And in fact, when you kill another person, you shouldn't be able to pay that back until it takes you the rest of your life. This is the notion that this young person would have that to make up for this error is going to be a lifelong project. Once I hear that: Oh yeah, that's the guy he is. Doing time wasn't enough. He's entering his life carrying this debt and he's going to be paying for it again and again and again and again, you know, and without bitterness, but with a feeling like that's the way it should be. There is a sense of sort of really stoic, practical, hard-edged honor in that. Oh, okay, that's the guy, and that means that he would do this. And then I go, that's a different aspect of his character and you get a better and better sense of the dimensionality of the individual. This is all before writing the character. How does he feel about his mother or how she fit into this? And you sort of think that through and then you go back and revisit your assumptions so far and tinker with them and you get closer and closer and closer. What I really should be doing is moving inward, which is, getting closer to this is the person. And then hopefully that comes also with the sense of “what they sound like” naturally, not simply how they would talk, but how they would think when they walked into a room, what they'd observe, how they say it to themselves, how they'd reflect upon it later, which is very different than dialog and in a way more important than dialog. And so, but yeah, this is all part of the process of inventing the individuals.
Willy Walker: I believe that you originally had the book titled Unfinished Business and then changed it to The Lincoln Highway. Why'd you make that shift?
Amor Towles: So, the book was called Unfinished Business and kind of related in a way to what I was just saying about Emmett. This idea, these things that you do, and they open up this ledger that you know you're trying to bring to conclusion. And meanwhile, his buddy from New York is a grudge guy. And so, you know, he's got unfinished business of a different kind. He wants to go and get paid back for what the people have done to him. And so that's kind of where I began. Parenthetical note here. Years and years ago when I had this idea for this book and began designing it, that was on the cover of my notebooks maybe to 2014 or something like that. And then Vince Vaughn was having a movie called Unfinished Business and I was like, “Oh man, you know, I'm definitely not going to use it now.” I didn't invent that phrase, but I certainly didn't want the thing popping up in a Google search alongside Vince Vaughn. I'm a huge fan of Vince Vaughn’s.
So that aside, what ended up happening is that in The Lincoln Highway, the book, the characters are supposed to be going to the main character and his brother going to California, the two interlopers from New York City and from the trunk of the car convince them, in essence to go east to New York. And you know, that's where they head. The whole story's a 10-day series of events. In my notes, it always just said, you know, they're going to go out to take a ride out of the farm and head east on Route X. And I've begun writing the book in earnest, and it was still kind of Route X and I had designed the whole thing. And finally, I got to the point where I got to go back and look more closely at the road they're going to take. It's going to influence what they're going to see and what city they might stop in and blah blah blah. And so, I open up a map of the Midwest and I'm looking at I'm like, okay, yeah, that's the right route from this town in Nebraska, 10 miles north onto that route, go straight east and its Route 30 and in small print, it said, formerly known as the Lincoln Highway. And I say, Oh, what's that? And so, this is a case where I was like, alright, set this aside. Just go figure out what the Lincoln Highway is and then everything I learned about the Lincoln Highway. I was like, oh, this place, this is crazy. This is amazing. And, you know, changed the title of the book like that and The Lincoln Highway is the first highway to cross America and very strangely in terms of modern sensibilities for us to imagine, it was built by an individual. It was an entrepreneur guy who had made an equivalent of $100 million by inventing the first all-weather headlight for cars called the Presto lamp. He sold it to Union Carbide and sold his company, Union Carbide, in 1911. And then he built the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. He launched the Indy 500. He discovered Miami Beach back in 1915. He was vacationing in Miami with his wife as a rich man and everybody lives and on The Biscayne Bay. Miami goes up to the Biscayne Bay and then across the bay there was a barrier island and then the ocean and the barrier island was nothing farmland and scrub. And he went out there and built the Flamingo Hotel and created Miami Beach. So, he's sort of an unbelievable American guy. And so, one of the things he did is he's like, you know, there should be a road that crosses America? It's crazy. There's no road across America. And in 1915, there were two million miles of road in the United States, and 95 percent of them were unpaved. And he's like, it's going to be a paved road and there are no roads across America. You know, what would happen if you went west of Pittsburgh, let's say the roads from Pittsburgh were sort of peter out into the countryside where people lived, you know, and then there'd be like, but there was no road to go from Pittsburgh to Denver. Trains went from Pittsburgh to Denver. So, he was like, we're going to have one connected road. And so, he built it. He raised money, putting his own money and starts in Times Square and ends in Lincoln Park in San Francisco and goes almost straight across the country, goes through 12 of the states and he built it in 1915. And this is kind of interesting aside. It was so hard to drive across the country in 1912 that only 100 people did it, literally 100 people, and you keep in mind there were no gas stations or hotels. So, in the expedition, you drove across the country, you look at the pictures. It was like a polar expedition. You had gas, water tools, tents, food, goggles, and all that. And so, he builds the Lincoln Highway. And two years later, 20,000 Americans drove across the country. Like that. And so, by 1918, it was the most famous road in America. By far it is the most famous road in America, the 20s, the 30s and the 40s. And when the 1950s came, Eisenhower built the interstate highway system and made it obsolete. So anyway, it’s amazing. None of that's in the book, but it was a great symbol.
Willy Walker: So fun, so fun.
I would only recommend to people who are listening that what Amor just went into, as it relates to the Lincoln Highway, there are a number of interviews he's done around A Gentleman in Moscow that gives the backstory of what was happening in Russia at the time, which you don't get it in the book. The narrative in the book is amazing and you're watching the life of Count Rostov. But there's so much behind it that Amor goes into as it relates to what was happening of the seat of power moving from St. Petersburg, back to Moscow, and a bunch of other things on why the hotel was being used for meetings of the Communist Party. That is well worth people taking the time to listen to because he's so insightful on the broader topics going on that all informs his writing.
Amor Towles: Or you can find all that on YouTube for sure.
Willy Walker: Yeah, you can, exactly. I want to talk about editing. You get a lot of feedback and you're incredible at taking the feedback. My understanding is that when people come up with some particular comment about something that you might not have gotten exactly right at the time period, when you go from hardback to paperback, you actually go in and make adjustments to it. And I just wanted you to give the two anecdotes that I've heard you tell before. One on the bees in A Gentleman in Moscow and the other on the goalposts in The Lincoln Highway.
Amor Towles: So, in A Gentleman in Moscow, there's sort of a meaningful scene early in the book where the Count goes to the roof of the building. His intention is to throw himself off the roof, and he runs into an old maintenance guy who keeps bees on the roof and makes honey. And they end up having this lovely conversation where they're tasting the honey and the Count observes that the honey tastes like the lilacs out in the Alexander Gardens, which border the Kremlin. And he says, yeah, that's the way the bees work. You know, the boy bees go out to the lilac and when they come back, the honey tastes like lilac. When the boy bees go out to the cherry blossoms, they come back, and the honey is just like cherry blossoms. And yes, so when a book comes out in the modern age, you go www.amortowles.com and send up a message to the contact page, which comes right to me. You can reach me. And, you know, in the modern era, it takes about seven days for the errors in your book to start coming through email, which is a lot of fun. And so, but some of them are great and lovely woman who writes to me, and she says, “You know what? I love your book A Gentleman in Moscow really moved me, but you should know that as a keeper of bees, the boy bees do not go out to the lilacs and come back when the honey is made. It's the girl bees who do that, you know, the boy bees don’t go anywhere.” So, I fixed that by going from hardcover to paperback, you know?
And in the case of The Lincoln Highway – Woolly, a very endearing character who hates a Thesaurus by the way. You know, that's probably where that comes from. He goes on about the problems with a Thesaurus, he loves a dictionary and hates the Thesaurus. And so, he goes out on the football field around Thanksgiving to burn his Thesaurus using gas, but it gets out of control, fire gets out of control. And he describes the fire, and he steps back. The fire goes, the goalposts and then out on the arms. And the whole thing looks like a man with his arms raised on fire. And so, very quickly I received the note that said: “Your book is very good, but I love that scene. I love Woolly. But you should know that in 1954, the football goal post did not look like a Y it looked like an H. So, yes, you know, I went back and made some minor changes to the language there to tighten that up in reality. So, I will certainly hunt for that stuff before the book is published, and I kind of exit the first draft or even the second draft for the list of 30 things I want to double check. But no matter how carefully you do that, there's always something that doesn't even occur to you to be off, by a decade or more or whatever. So, people do provide some help on it.
Willy Walker: And one that you mentioned, 1954, you end A Gentleman in Moscow in June of ‘54 and The Lincoln Highway begins in June of ‘54. And the house where you are in right now in upstate New York is both in Rules of Civility as well as The Lincoln Highway. Living in a stone house on the side of a lake that looks a lot like where you are right now is in both. Is there anything else Amor, that runs through either one or two or potentially all three of the novels?
Amor Towles: There are many things, and I would not tell you them all. There's some big ones and a close reader of my work, particularly you've read the book, I know you’d know. Dicky Vanderwhile, is a meaningful character in Rules of Civility. He is a meaningful character in A Gentleman in Moscow, right? But in Rules of Civility in 1938, Dickey is unemployed at 25 and right out of college and kind of devil may care at the end of Rules of Civility, it says in the epilogue that when the war begins, he ends up going into the navy and becomes an officer and does a great job, ends up in the State Department. In A Gentleman in Moscow, he appears after the Second World War as an attaché to a general (of course, we were allies with Russia at the time). He appears throughout the 50s in A Gentleman in Moscow, ultimately at the State Department, where he's of course, a CIA operative. So, he's in both books in The Lincoln Highway and Rules of Civility the Wolcott family is very central. The house that they own in the Adirondacks appears in both books. Wallace Wolcott in Rules of Civility, his nephew is in The Lincoln Highway. A watch that plays an important role in the Rules of Civility is then handed down and ends up in The Lincoln Highway. So, there's things like that that are going on here and there.
Willy Walker: That's great. We're coming to the end here. I've got two quick final ones. First of all, the fame and fortune that comes with being a bestselling writer. Was it really fun to go on the Seth Meyers show and be on national television answering questions about your writing? Or was it kind of something that, yeah, it's neat, but it was never anything I really was hoping to get to, just kind of do it as part of the job?
Amor Towles: There are definitely fringe benefits around your book reaching the audience. Seth Meyers is a fan. That's how I ended up on the show. And I'm a Seth Meyers fan. I met Tom Hanks because he was a fan. You know, and I've met George W. Bush because he was a fan. And you know, Jackson Browne, asked me to come see his show at the Beacon because he was a fan. So that's amazing, right?
But, you know, as fun as all that is, as an artist what is particularly moving, and why you are in it, is for your work to reach readers. I would be writing whether the books were successful or not. I can be happy to write for 10,000 people instead of a million. It's nice to have it to be a bigger group who finds your book meaningful to them, but the biggest satisfactions really are that knowing that the book is finding an audience, that it's resonating with people that has made an impact in their lives in some interesting way.
I've been written by a person trapped in a hotel. You know, I've had people write to me about going through a serious illness where they couldn't leave the room for a year, and how the book affected them or helped them go through this confinement that happened during COVID. You know, people wrote to me, particularly people who lived alone and suddenly couldn't see their families and didn't have friends. And, you know, and who turned to the book as a companion to get them through COVID and sort of thinking about the Count. I've had people write to me from Eastern Europe about General Moscow to say what life was like for them during the Soviet era, what they went through and the appreciation of seeing the struggles of an individual under the Soviet umbrella.
People say, I've read it to my husband, or I've given it to my daughter or, we did it as a family. That's really what's exciting. You're going to do the work and you hope that it resonates with people. And you know, to have people come back to you to tell you, this is what the book meant to me is, you know, that's the most satisfying thing of all.
Willy Walker: So, looping back to where we started about fashioning a life, I've heard you use the quote that Keith Richards gave when he and Mick Jagger were walking down the street in the town where the two of them grew up together. And his quote is, “I imagined it all. I just didn't think it would happen.” Did you think this would happen?
Amor Towles: I tell that story because I felt the same way. Not that I'm Keith Richards. What happens is a young woman who's a peer of Keith’s and meets a friend from childhood sees them when they're famous. And she says, Keith, you know, oh, man, rock star rock. Could you ever have imagined? You know, that's what prompts the answer. And he says, “Oh, I imagined it all. I just never thought it was going to happen.” And there is a moment that I've wanted to write fiction since I was a kid. So yes, in ways with delusions of grandeur, I imagined it all, but I just never thought it was gonna happen. But then eventually you get a book out and go into the world and now it's part of my job.
Willy Walker: Yeah, it's just great. Amor, I'm so happy and thankful for you taking the time. Thank you. You've been extremely generous with it. Congrats on all you've done. Look forward to seeing you sometime soon. And my best to your family.
Amor Towles: Thanks, everybody for listening in. Appreciate it.
Willy Walker: We'll see you.
