Up Close With Worcester Journalist/Author James Dempsey
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Worcester's James Dempsey is a journalist-turned-author that just published the darkly satirical novel, Murphy's American Dream.
In the promotional copy for Murphy's American Dream, it calls out to fans of The Big Lebowski and Pulp Fiction. What in your novel prompts this shout-out?
These comparisons were made by my publisher, Dusty Sang, who liked the mixture of the comic and the dark in all these works. The book is also a satire, a genre I love, which happily seems to be enjoying a bit of a renaissance right now.
Your next book is a wide swing away from Murphy's American Dream–a biography of Scofield Thayer. What's the relevance of Thayer in Central Massachusetts, and how can two such far-reaching projects exist in one mind?
Scofield Thayer was editor of The Dial, a New York magazine of the 1920s that did much to introduce modernism to America. He published T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and E.E. Cummings, as well as the art of Picasso, Lachaise, Chagall, Demuth, and many, many others. Thayer’s fabulous wealth came from his father, Edward Davis, who made a fortune in textiles and textile machinery in Worcester. Thayer was analyzed by Sigmund Freud for two years, but eventually succumbed to madness and was under care most of his life. His art collection was on loan at the Worcester Art Museum, and ,after he died in 1982, his will was found to leave just about everything to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. So that fantastic collection was loaded into trucks and driven away. A black day for the museum and Worcester.
I enjoy working in markedly different genres. Another of my books is a translation into modern English verse of Geoffrey Chaucer. I like a challenge. If I’m working with words, I’m happy.
You're a journalist beloved by many in the region. Do you miss the beat?
What I loved about being a journalist was writing about the city, which was very familiar to me, as if it were new. To write, you must always be a kind of tourist, always seeing things fresh and for the first time. The Buddhists call it “beginner’s mind.” And the city continues to surprise and enthrall me. I spent fifteen minutes the other day gazing at and photographing the huge wooden doors to the courtyard of the old Northworks building on Grove Street. Those things look medieval! Then I look at the empty and unused Worcester Memorial Auditorium, a building that is full of magic and majesty, and which is rotting before our eyes, and I get pissed off at the city all over again.
It would take something special to lure me back into the news business, but the door isn’t closed.
You also teach at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, an local institution famed for turning out top engineers and scientists. What's it like working in the humanities in this community?
Hard-working, interesting, creative students. The split between science and the arts is largely a false dichotomy. The two are intimately connected.
If you could have anyone write your biography, who would it be? Why?
Writing a biography is the study of the detritus of a person’s life—letters, photos, invoices, diaries, the memories of others—and trying to recreate the being that left behind this “human stain,” to repurpose a title from Roth. In a way, biography is as creative as a work of fiction, although of course one is restrained by the need to be as truthful as possible and to base one’s speculations on fact. It’s hard, but it’s fun. The research is undoubtedly the best part of the process. There’s a trust the biographer builds up with his subject—even if the subject is dead.
For myself, however, I would prefer an unrepentant hagiographer.
Tell us the 3 books stacked on your bedside table.
I never could read before sleep, and I don’t understand anyone who reads to become sleepy. Reading for me is an active endeavor whose full enjoyment requires alertness and energy.
Right now I’m reading Cold Mountain Poems by Han Shan, translated by J.P. Seaton, Joan of Arc by Marina Warner, and a whole bunch of writings from the time of the European settlement in this country for a course I’m teaching in the fall.
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