I’m Grover Gardner, and today it’s my pleasure to be speaking with Audie Award–winning narrator and actor Bronson Pinchot, named Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010. Bronson has narrated over fifty audiobooks for Blackstone, including the memoir What It Is Like to Go to War, by New York Times bestselling author Karl Marlantes, which was released with the hardcover on August 30, 2011. Tell me something about What It Is Like to Go to War.
BRONSON PINCHOT: The book actually can be read on two levels. It can be listened to on two levels. It stands on its own as his statement of how his life has been changed having gone to war as a young person. If you know Matterhorn, this is an amazing companion piece because he’s talking about the primary experiences that he then restructured and recast for the book and what really happened. How can I put it? It’s almost like in Mozart, when there are three people singing all in harmony. There’s what really happened to Karl Marlantes. There’s how he felt about it when he was nineteen, and then there’s how he re-imagined it for the book. And in many cases for the book—for Matterhorn—he looked at it through the telescope of his grown-up post-traumatic syndrome self and post-therapy self and post-life self, because now he’s in his sixties. But in some cases— there’s a harrowing incident in Matterhorn where he shoots an NVA at point-blank range, and he describes his feelings about it, which are very compassionate. In What It Is Like to Go to War, he reveals that when it really happened he just shot him, and that the feelings he describes in the book are the feelings of a sixty-five-year-old. So it’s really wonderful to read it with the other book still so fresh in one’s head. You know what I mean?
GG: Do you recognize characters from the real-life story—do they translate into the novel?
BP: Well, it’s hard to say. Mostly you’re being told step-by-step by Marlantes how he has synthesized the experience of being a nineteen-year-old with being a sixty-five-year-old, so most of it’s not specific characters so much as the gut feeling of what it’s like to go to war when you’re nineteen and you’re full of testosterone and full of nationalism, and whatever else you’re full of in hindsight, and then there’s this grey area in between, which is what you’re left with, because you know the unconscious loves a mystery, and that’s what, in many cases, turns the brain over. So he leaves you with, “This is what it’s really like, this is what I feel about it now,” and you can weigh the both of them and see how you feel. It’s one of the most honest books I’ve ever read. It’s unbelievably naked. It’s impossible for me to gauge how it would sit with me if I hadn’t read Matterhorn. I also can’t tell what I would think of the Wizard of Oz if I just sat down and saw it now having not seen it as a five-year-old.
GG: Well that’s interesting. Would you not have appreciated his point of view if you hadn’t read Matterhorn?
BP: No, you would have. It’s ten times more resonate. There’s a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful character in the book of this larger-than-life Canadian, who was six-foot-five, and used to have two giant guns strapped on him that normally three people would be needed to fire, and he fired them himself, and he had this saber—he had this saber and he was this larger-than-life character…
GG: This is in Matterhorn, right?
BP: This is in Matterhorn, but he really existed, and Karl likens him to Hector, in the Trojan War. He’s just physically and psychically and courageously larger than life. And he’s clearly absolutely the same character in that book as in this. And when he gives little anecdotes about his heroism and about what he was like—and he absolutely just stood up and ran up a hill and got shot down to save the others and it enhances it. So it’s impossible to gauge—I would read both books. I mean, Marlantes is so good. It’s an incredible companion piece. I know it stands on its own. But together, they’re pretty powerful.
GG: You talked to him a lot when you were recording Matterhorn, right?
BP: I corresponded with him, yeah.
GG: Did you talk to him about this one?
BP: Yes I did. I asked him what voice he wanted me to read it in, what he wanted me to say with it. And he was very, very forthcoming—and then I realized as soon as I started doing it that there was only one way to do it, which was to do it as if I’m him, and he’s me, and it’s all written in the first person, and to say this is my experience. And I read it as if I was being interviewed on 60 Minutes, and it was my story. So my hope for it is that people grab the package and say, “Is this Marlantes reading it himself, or what’s going on here? Because it’s just written that way. There was only one way to do it. It’s very personal.
GG: It was interesting to me, too, because I e-mailed him, and I said, “Do you want Bronson to do this? Or is there something different maybe you have in mind, for yourself?” And he said, no, no, absolutely—that he thought it would be great to have you do it. And I think he was right, because you latched onto the central issue, as to exactly what kind of voice it was, and what needed to be heard.
BP: One thing I did not know about him before reading this—because I read quite a few interviews with him—I didn’t do that with Matterhorn—but, I wanted to get a sense of him. I read quite a few interviews with him. He’s a deeply religious person, he doesn’t feature that at all in Matterhorn, that I can remember. But anyway, in this book, there’s an incredible, almost—Joycean—he asked a priest to hold a mass for everyone that he had killed, or that he knew that had died, in Vietnam. And it was just the two of them, they imagined all of these souls filling up the pews. I don’t know if it’s eight minutes, or ten minutes, or whatever it is, but I was interested to see when the corrections came back there were absolutely no pickups in it, which I was glad of. Because it was just this sustained, astonishing—I didn’t know if it was two or four in the morning, or whatever, but they opened up the doors and welcomed—it sounds corny, but it was one of the most moving things I’ve ever read, and it’s just something he felt he had to do. They opened up this empty chapel in a mission, I think, in the middle of the night, and they welcomed all these spirits in, and they held a mass for them, and it was so incredibly moving. I told Karl if he ever wants to hear what a middle-aged man sounds like trying for ten minutes to stand on the trapdoor that leads to his emotions, so that it doesn’t pop open and engulf him, he should just listen to that section. But that’s almost the most intensely personal part of the whole book. Really personal.
GG: You do a lot of audiobooks now. You’ve really gotten into this.
BP: Well, um, yeah.
GG: You enjoy it?
BP: I do enjoy it very much—I like it very much. I get to sit in a dark, padded room, and pretend to be someone else. What’s not to love?
GG: Did you expect to like it this much when you started?
BP: Well you had actually found me my first audiobook, which was Happy Days—about this young fellow who’s kind of a nihilistic Frenchman, as if there is any other kind, and he commits himself to a home full of aged people who are all dying, and he just lives there for the rest of his life. And, we improvised a booth in my house in Pennsylvania of multiple layers of furniture pads, and obviously we couldn’t have the air-conditioning on. And I sat in there for a second and started the book, and when I came out of the booth to get a drink of water, I thought, “Oh, I want to get back in there and see what happens next.” And there was something about sitting in a little dark room, spinning a tale, and thinking about these other people’s lives. I liked it right away. I liked it right away. I mean, I wasn’t good at it, but I liked it.
GG: Well, you were good—but you caught on.
BP: No, I mean I had to be tutored to make it as pleasurable for the audience as it was for me. But I enjoyed it right away. I found it extremely diverting, and—just like when you lose yourself in acting—I mean, it’s easier to lose yourself in a book than it is in a character, because you’re everybody. I found it very hypnotic and pleasurable. I’d never listened to an audiobook in my life up to that point. What’s really funny, Grover, is every time I get a good review for an audiobook, even though next year it will be twenty years since the series ended, somebody blogs somewhere that one of my audiobooks has knocked ’em sideways and inevitably it says, “Well at first I didn’t think I should buy this because of who it is, I thought it would be schlock, and then I was delighted, and now he’s my second favorite…”
GG: (laughs)
BP: (laughs)…“he’s my second favorite narrator of all time, behind Jim Dale,” or something like that. But it’s very common to get the little slap before the pet. “Uh, and you know, when I saw that it was Bronson Pinchot reading Walt Whitman, I projectile vomited…”
GG: (laughs)
BP: “…and then I was chained in a chair and made to listen to it, and now he’s my second favorite narrator of all time.” I see that all the time!
GG: Yeah…
BP: It’s fine, it’s fine—
GG: I wonder what Mark Twain would sound like as Balki? Yeah, but, yeah.
BP: Well yeah, then it’s “Oh, but now…” It’s all fine.
GG: All right.
BP: I mean, it’s all fine. It’s … the left-handed compliment. It’s all good. But does it have to be like fifty years before they just say “this is quite…” The only people who never do that are the real reviewers. You never see that in AudioFile, or Publishers Weekly, or anything like that. They just say, “This is a book, and it’s good because.” They don’t say, “It’s good in spite of…” (laughs)
GG: (laughs)
BP: But it’s fine. I mean, I’ll take anything, you know. I’ll take any kind of compliment. You have to fish, and then they finally give you one with the preamble that you are a pusillanimous person for having fished, and then they’ll give you a little one.
GG: All right. What are you working on now?
BP: I’m actually selling a lot of antiques these days.
GG: Your own, or…?
BP: Yes.
GG: Is that good or bad?
BP: Well, I actually have found that finding them and buying them is like a ten on a scale of just adrenaline and excitement. And selling them, well—a ten. It’s everything in between that’s a little bit … soupy. I mean, having them and dusting them and figuring out why did I buy that? But selling them is really quite fun, and I love to buy a hundred antiques and find that one of them is exactly what I wanted and sell the other ninety-nine. It’s quite fun, actually. Except once in a while, people get stroppy, and think that because they’re buying it that you should kowtow and I always gently explain to them that that’s not gonna work. (laughs)
GG: What’s your favorite antique you’ve ever bought? What’s the most exciting thing you’ve ever found?
BP: Well, I actually found a head—the head of a deity from the second century BC, that actually fits directly onto a famous statue in a European museum. And I took a cast of it and went there myself and fitted it on, and it fits join to join. It’s from the same identical period as the Venus de Milo, so it’s sort of like finding the arms of the Venus de Milo. That’s by far the most exciting thing ever.
GG: Where did you find it?
BP: I found it in the living room of an antiquities dealer in New York. And it wasn’t for sale, and—I don’t know if you know this about me—but I can be very persuasive, and it was sitting half in and half out of a crate, with this straw. It had been packed in straw, and I said, “I have to have that,” and he said it’s not for sale, yet, and I walked out with it. Well, actually, it’s too heavy to carry—but I did buy it.
GG: (laughs)
BP: As you know I am like a public-park squirrel. When I really need something, I just have to have it.
GG: (laughs) What’s the most exciting piece of furniture you’ve ever bought?
BP: Most exciting piece of furniture I’ve ever bought? Well, there was an early eighteenth-century—I love that they call it a secretary, because I think it’s fun to tell your friends you’ve bought a two-hundred-year-old secretary, just so they can imagine her shape. But they call—you know a thing you sit at, which has a desk—
GG: Yes—
BP: … and shelves for books. They call it a secretary. I bought an early—very early eighteenth-century Swedish secretary …
GG: Oh, Swedish—
BP: Yeah, beautiful. And just original paint—extraordinary thing. But I used to have it at Malibu and I used to sit and listen to the waves, and not do anything, because you can’t do much when the waves are crashing.
GG: All right. Well—hey, thank you.
BP: Thank you, Grove.
GG: I didn’t want to do the, you know … “So what about your life in showbiz” interview. We don’t need that.
BP: (laughs) Well, if we ever do that, you just have to really, really, really cross-fade, because I’ll just laugh the whole time.
GG: Okay.
BP: You’ll just have to cross-fade from one guffaw to the next.
GG: All right. With that, thank you, Bronson!
BP: Okay! Bye boys!
GG: Thank you for joining us for Blackstone Audio’s exclusive interview with Bronson Pinchot.
This interview was recorded in September 2011.
Disclaimer: This transcript has been slightly edited from its original recording for readability.
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