Walled In with Robert Sullivan
Dave Weich, Powells.com
Last time we heard from Robert Sullivan, he was crossing the polluted Meadowlands in a canoe.  Now, in Rats, we find the author in a lower Manhattan alley, watching Rattus norvegicus in its natural habitat for a year to learn what he can about Earth's most disparaged mammal. Rats can mate up to twenty times a day, for example. A British rat-fighting dog named Jocko once killed one hundred five in five minutes and twenty-eight seconds. And this: Perfumes were invented as a response to plague.
"Thinking about rats," the former Oregonian writes, "as low-down as it seems, can easily lead to thoughts about larger topics, such as life and death and the nature of man."
"Some people call me a nature writer," Sullivan explains. "My books often get shelved in nature sections. I didn't think that's what I'd been doing. If you're from New York or New Jersey, I didn't think you were allowed to be a nature writer. I thought, If I'm getting put in the nature section, I'm going to try to write a nature book about something that nobody thinks of as natural. I'll write about rats." The result is funny, gross, and more than a little profound.
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"In this excellent narrative, Sullivan uses the brown rat as the vehicle for a labyrinthine history of the Big Apple....This book is a must pickup for every city dweller, even if you'll feel like you need to wash your hands when you put it down." Publishers Weekly
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"Provocative, audacious...by looking observantly, without trite moralizing, at the natural world...this book suggest a challenging new model for how we ought to pay attention." Robert Pinsky, The New York Times Book Review
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"Marvelous... Once you get beyond the uproar and the politics, Sullivan seems to be saying, we are all just people, trying to find meaning in a most confusing and changeable world." Nathaniel Philbrick, New York Times Book Review
Dave: When did it strike you that rats are maligned more than any other mammal in the world? How did you decide that it might be worthwhile
to observe them?
Robert Sullivan: In part, it was writing A
Whale Hunt. I went up to Alaska just to do a short piece for the New
York Times magazine, but I thought Neah Bay was the most amazing place.
It took me a whole year to write that short magazine piece, and by the time I finished
the Makah were going out to actually hunt. The piece I'd written was about what
to expect. I realized, I can't leave. I have to see what's going to happen.
Then nothing happened, and that was the most amazing thing, so I stayed
up there.
I started reading about whaling and whaling protesting, and I started to think
about how we went from being a whaling nation to a country that wants to put
whales on coffee mugs and what have you. People want to go whale watching and
swimming with cetaceans in general, swimming with dolphins; I saw people racing
up from California to go to this town that nobody wants to go to otherwise.
They have no economy, no tourism, nothing; everybody's racing up here on behalf
of whales.
What's the creature that nobody is going to race around for? It's rats. What's
the creature that nobody wants to swim with? Rats. I wanted to figure out why
nobody cares about rats.
I know they're disgusting, so that's part of it. But it got me thinking about
the whole natural-versus-unnatural split, which is kind of the high school essay
assignment I've never finished. When they told me to analyze man versus nature
in Hawthorne...
Did you get that assignment?
Dave: I grew up in Massachusetts, and in New England I think it's part
of the core curriculum, yes.
Sullivan: The whole man-versus-nature thing is part of why we try to
stop whaling, but then we drive up in SUVs. We think that's different somehow.
Some people call me a nature writer; my books often get shelved in nature
sections. I didn't think that's what I'd been doing. If you're from New York
or New Jersey, I didn't think you were allowed to be a nature writer. So I thought,
If I'm getting put in the nature section, I'm going to try to write a nature
book about something that nobody thinks of as natural. I'll write about rats.
In the city, the natural history is all the mammals that are walking around
in that place. The rat is perfect for illustrating that because the rat is not
there unless the human is there. They need each other. They're commensal. They
share the same table.
Dave: How did that idea turn into this project of spending your nights
in a Manhattan alley?
Sullivan: I was reading a lot of the transcendentalists, a lot of Emerson
and Thoreau,
and I thought of Walden
as the archetypal nature book. In a way, it's America's nature book people
look to it as a way to experience nature in that quotes-in-your-daybook way
but in fact if you read it, you see that it's really about living in
society. Thoreau was kind of freaked out by living in nature, frankly. He went
to the pond to think about how we live in society.
So now I think I'm going to go and do a bad Thoreau imitation, but instead
of going out to the so-called wilderness, I'm going to go into the city, which
in its own way is just as wild as anything, and I'm going to look at the rat,
this most reviled creature, this example of what simply can't be natural. I'm
going to try to show not just that it's natural but that we live right next
to it and we're part of why we don't like it. All these things man versus
nature, natural versus non-natural, disgusting versus eloquent, and rats
there's a lot there. Rats are kind of amazing.
And here's a little joke: Walden Pond is a joke on the walled-in-ness of
that pond, surrounded as it was by those hills and woods. So here's the walled in
alley; I had my own walled in space to look at.
Dave: The book is more or less the product of your observations in
that alley. What you find there drives the research you end up conducting. The
alley shapes the narrative.
Sullivan: I never would have found these subjects to research if I
hadn't been in that alley. If I'd been in another alley, I would have
had a completely different rat book.
When Thoreau died, Emerson said, "That guy loved the plot of ground he stood
on more than anything." Thoreau himself said, "I think that we haven't explored
the pellicle" that's the word he used that I like "the pellicle
of land that we stand on." You don't have to go to Mount Katahdin, where he
went [see The
Maine Woods], where he may have seen God or may have flipped out, it's not
clear which; you can just look where you're standing. That's the amazing thing.
We think we have to pay all this money to experience nature, and yet we can
probably just go into our backyard.
Liam
O'Flaherty, an old Irish fiction writer, at the end of his life came back
to the town where he grew up in the Aran Islands. This story may be apocryphal,
but it's the story I heard. There was a huge rock where he landed, and he clapped
the rock with his cane, and he said, "If this rock could tell the stories that
it knows... If this rock could tell us everything it's seen, all the people that
have come and gone from this island..." I feel like that's the thing: What are
the stories in the rock? Likewise, what are the stories in the disgusting alley?
Cities are where people have been living and are living now and will continue
to live in the future. In cities are all our courses and trails; we've been
going over the same ground over and over again. One time I wrote something about
a light rail station. It was about how that trail was probably an animal track
first, then a Native American path; then early white settlers came in and by
the fifties it was a paved highway; now it's a light rail track. All this history
in layers.
Dave: And the rats bring you to the idea, literally, of what's underneath
us.
Sullivan: Literally. When you go down underneath cities, you see the
way the city was built.
Dave: There's a memorable, if revolting, anecdote in the book where
they send a dog underground after the rats, and the rats eat the dog.
Sullivan: In Riker's Island, right.
Dave: Do any of those anecdotes stick out in your mind? Any personal
favorites?
Sullivan: Amazing things that rats did? I always think that I've heard
the most amazing thing, then another story comes along. Rats having sex twenty
times a day seems to be the fact that everyone embraces, for lack of a better
word.
I'm on the "Rats Over America Tour" now that's what we're calling it
at home, in my house so I go on talk radio shows and people call in with
rat stories. It's so much fun. Yesterday somebody called up and said that one
time in the financial district of San Francisco they saw four businessmen standing
over a sewer grate, and there was a rat stuck in the grate. These four men in
suits had their white handkerchiefs out and they were trying to help the rat
out of the grate. That story is not in the book, but it could have been on the
shortlist had I heard it in time.
The ones I wrote about were the ones that amazed me personally. The woman
who was attacked by rats near the entrance to Theatre Alley that was
interesting in a lot of ways, including the fact that you don't really know
what happened. She never checked into a hospital, as far as anybody knows, although
maybe she did. It's fun because it's true and an urban myth at the same time.
I like that.
Dave: Some of the statistics you present beg to be read a second time.
For example, one pair of rats can create 15,000 offspring in a year. And other
things too, not statistics but facts: If you remove part of a rat population,
the others will breed faster.
Sullivan: It's amazing, huh? So don't use poison, which is a good rule
of thumb.
Dave: But what the book keeps pointing to is sanitation. Essentially
this comes down to what we're doing with our garbage.
Sullivan: Yes. Which comes down to our presence. What does our presence
do? In Medieval Italy, there was a plan at one point... They thought it was amazing
how much garbage rats ate, and they thought, What if we just give all our
garbage to the rats? Then the rats would eat it and make it into these easily
managed little... scat. Then they could just sweep it away and that would take
care of all their garbage.
We think rats are disgusting, but they're not. They're just another creature.
It's not their fault they live in our garbage. In fact, our garbage is our
fault, if there's any fault. The reason people are so disgusted by rats is that
rats point to what is disgusting about us. We always have to have something
bad in our sights to highlight our goodness. You need evil so that good can
exist. Really, in nature, it can seem evil, but it's not.
Dave: Rats got a pretty bad rap with the whole Plague thing.
Sullivan: No question.
Dave: Something I thought was funny: You're spending all these nights
in the alley, but at one point when you're trying to count the rats, you admit
that your estimate might be too high, "factoring in [the] possible hysteria"
of standing among them. I'd think after hanging out in the alley that whole
time you'd have grown accustomed to them enough that hysteria wouldn't be an
issue.
Sullivan: No. You're like, Oh my God, it's a rat! I don't know what
it's going to do. It might go up my leg!
Dave: What kinds of precautions did you take?
Sullivan: I was kind of nervous, but it's not as if I was sitting down
on the floor of the alley having my dinner. My shoes were always gross. I left
my shoes outside a lot. I was really worried about the shoes. But I wasn't touching
anything, except when we were trapping.
Basically, I was just standing there. I was observing. I was in the alley,
and the rats were right there, but if I got close to them I'd be like, Oh
my God! I'm getting close to them. I should get away. An easy fallback was,
I'm just observing. I don't want to upset them. I don't want to affect their
habitat. Which is kind of funny because as a human I'm making their habitat.
Dave: It's a very different book than Meadowlands,
but at its heart is the same premise of investigating something that's right
in front of us and completely overlooked.
Sullivan: Right, and I always joke that they're all funny books about
death. Rats ultimately point to decay and deterioration. So does garbage. But
rats really offer hope in that no matter what you do to them, they survive.
They survive en masse, not as individual rats they're each going
to die but they survive, incredibly, in some instances, like with nuclear
testing.
It's the same thing with the Meadowlands. The swamp seems to be a gross, disgusting
place, and we always thought Just fill it in, get rid of it. But the
joke's on us because it's clearly the spot where so much happens. All this decay
brings new life.
With a whale hunt, a whale dies, but there's a ritual around that. If the
ritual works, it's to help people get through life. Some people say, "Well,
they just killed a whale. What does that matter?" But other people would say
that it meant something to these people. Rituals are about facing death. You
probably think I'm nuts on that one.
Dave: Well, rituals ceremonialize what might otherwise be forgotten. They're markers.
Sullivan: They're markers. They're attempts to remind you, to help
you deal with things. We could all come to work in the morning and not say hello,
but these are ways of saying, Oh, right, I'm with other people. That's
one level. On another, you go to a funeral, which is one way we deal with death.
Dave: In Meadowlands,
you say at one point that "the Meadowlands had become a bad habit for me." And
you're referring to a time before you decided to write a book about them.
Sullivan: I liked to go there. My wife was pregnant with our son. We
lived in Brooklyn, but we had to get down to New Jersey to her doctor. It's
a long way, but I figured out these routes, shortcuts, and I could do it quick
because there was never any traffic on the roads that I would drive. That was
incredible to me. Here we are in the midst of these freeways and turnpikes,
and there was no traffic certain ways. It was a scenic route, too, because you
got to see all this industrial decay.
I told the doctor, because she was getting close to having the baby, "Don't
worry. I can get us there. I can do it in forty-five minutes even at rush hour,
through the Meadowlands." And he just looked at me. She wasn't allowed to leave
the hospital after that.
Dave: You have a friend named Dave who seems to be a willing participant
in whatever you cook up.
Sullivan: Dave is my friend from high school. He's an artist, a painter
in Brooklyn. For me, the written Dave symbolizes when you just want to go out
and check things out with a friend at lunchtime or just take a walk and look
around, the idea that it's even more fun if you say, "Did you see this? Come
check this out." Also, basically, my wife doesn't like me to go alone to these
things and I don't either. He's up for it.
Dave: Your canoeing trip across the Meadowlands was spectacular.
Sullivan: Thank you very much. It was really fun, but it also was a
little like, "Are we going to be okay?" When we were carrying the canoe across
those tracks we were wondering, "Are we going to die? What are we doing?" But
it's fun.
And we do all sorts of things just for fun that we don't write about. It's
fun just to go look at stuff. Just check stuff out. One really fun thing about
having a kid is that it doesn't seem that ridiculous that you're going
to check stuff out. My father did it with me. Let's go look at the railroad
track or Let's go watch the planes land. Mundane stuff that doesn't
cost any money.
Dave: If there's an author that you think more people should read,
who would it be and where would you tell them to start?
Sullivan: A guy I love to read is Colm Tóibín. He wrote a novel that blew me away, The
Heather Blazing. It's such a beautiful novel. It's pyrotechnical, almost,
in its lack of pyrotechnics. It's like still water, so beautiful. After I read
that novel, I wanted to read everything that he wrote.
He's written some nonfiction, too. The nonfiction book that I read by him
that really affected me was called Sign
of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe, where he went around Europe and
looked at the different kinds of Catholicism and how they informed each country.
They're so different. It was funny and revealing and not funny at the same time.
How do you get undressed when you're going to take the healing waters at Lourdes?
Where do I put my underwear? I love the mundane, loopy quality. Then
he went to walk the martyr walk in Spain, and he says, "I don't think I'm going
to make it. I think I'm going to hitchhike this last part."
I love that he mixed the high and low in that book. And I thought it was a
really great example of putting yourself in a story that's not talking about
you or how you feel or your personal life, but just putting you in the story
the way Thoreau does, as a real person that feels representative and people
can identify with... looking for a spiritual path but not being able to remember
where you left your car keys, not being able to reach the full spiritual enlightenment.
He's an amazing writer. His last book, The
Blackwater Lightship, that was great, too. A great novel.
Dave: You've written about whaling and rats and industrial decay. What
other kinds of subjects interest you?
Sullivan: So many. That's the problem. Sometimes people say, "I've
got a really good story idea for you," but that's not the problem. The problem
is not writing about things.
Dave: For example?
Sullivan: Anything to do with flight. Anything to do with printing
or typesetting or fonts or the history of language.
Ireland is a real problem for me. I'm very happy that I've only written one
thing about Ireland, and that was an assignment. I'm afraid that I'll try to
write something about the whole ancestor thing, and I'll get all misty and weepy
and start crying and it'll be really bad writing. I'm doing my best not to write
about Ireland.
I hiked to Mount Hood for ten years, every season on the same trail. I've
done so well in not writing about that.
Dave: Which trail?
Sullivan: The Topspur Trail, on the backside. I like it because it
hits both climates, the dry and the wet. I have a bunch of things I'd like to
write about Oregon, but I try not to. It's the other way around. You have to
not write so the ideas get thicker and you realize what it is you like
about them.
Dave: Are you working on something now?
Sullivan: I'm doing a biography of Thoreau.
Hopefully it will be short because me on Thoreau for a long time will be a problem
for more than just me, even.
Then, I'm not really sure. I've written about the city in Rats.
I've written about the country, a faraway place, in A
Whale Hunt. And with Meadowlands
I wrote about the stuff in between that everybody is racing over.
I always wanted to be a painter. I've always been fascinated with landscape
painting, especially the Hudson River School. Even though I'm not a painter
and will never be a painter, I want to try to paint a landscape of the United
States, something between a map, a painting, and a book.
Dave: Any impulses or directions for that?
Sullivan: On the literal level, it's kind of about roads. Traveling.
We've gone back and forth across the country so many times. Recently, I went
across and back, five round trips, in one year, so I feel like I've got something
to say about it.
I have no expertise in anything that's my problem but it could
be said that this is my area. I know all the rest stops on Route 90. I know
where to get the best burrito between here and Minnesota. Even if I were just
to write a travel guide, it might not be great but it wouldn't be bad.
Robert Sullivan
visited Powell's City of Books on April 21, 2004. He won us over immediately with his colorful shirt and tie.
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