sharpened my attention to how people speak. I also read all
the time. I love reading… Curiously, for a guy who writes
fiction, I don’t read fiction. I certainly don’t read murder
mysteries. But I read a lot of science books or mostly
history books, that’s my primary … And what I’ve
discovered is that the English language may be one of the
richest, multi-faceted languages on the face of the earth. It
is extraordinary, especially if you compare it to something
like Zulu which is very, very thin. It does the job, but it
doesn’t go into the curlicues that we indulge in. And they
say that the Eskimos (or the Inuits) have 33 words for what
we call, “snow”. Well, we have a fair number of words for
darn near anything… We [tend to] oversimplify a
magnificent musical tool that we have at our disposal.
And it’s fun to ask my readers to stretch, sometimes, just
a bit. I had a father-in-law who said that he really liked my
books, but he always had to keep his hands free when he
read them … He said, “Yeah, I keep your book in one hand
and the dictionary in the other hand.” … I don’t want to
apologize for putting to use a wonderful language in a
musical way. So when I write, I write as much for my ear as
for the information I’m trying to impart.
Sherman: You mentioned that you read primarily history
books. You were a history major at Yale, correct?
Mayor: I chose U.S. History, because when I arrived, I
spoke English with an accent. I knew very little about
the country I intended to make home. I recognized the
United States as being a truly terrific place; a place of great
offering; magnificent flaws and blunders; and energy and
potential. This was a place of vibrancy that I wanted to
inhabit. I had loved living in the cradle of antiquity in
Western European terms, but it’s not where I wanted to
spend the rest of my life. And in coming to the United
States, I needed to learn about the United States. We go
back to the same theme that drives me all the time: What
do I know? Not much/not enough. History … has a
certain energy to it. That’s investigative work … I liked the
interpretive nature of history, also. It ain’t objective. It’s
never been objective. It’s interpretive. It’s what you find.
And did you find it? And who told it to you? And you
check once and check twice and check three times, but
that doesn’t make it “the truth”. That just makes it what
you THINK is the truth - and that’s good enough. I later
became a newspaper man, and I applied the same rules, but
I was also cognizant of the fact that I was on less-than-firm
soil … There are a few times I’ve encountered irrefutable
truth. Water is wet, I’ll give you that. But other than that,
there are few truths that I’m going to really take to the bank.
Sherman: After Yale, where’d you go to next?
Photo by Archer Mayor
54 VERMONT magazine