But he also elicits and attends closely to anecdotes, rewarding them with squinting laughter and jolts of empathy that can seem just as helpless. He speaks in a baritone, for the most part seriously, on history and politics as often as on literature. He wears jeans and a pocket tee around the house, his reading glasses loose in the pocket. (He was named, in part, after Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party’s recurrent candidate for president.) Today, in his mid-seventies, Rush is an imposing presence, bearish, with iridescent white hair and an almost eerily unwrinkled face. Rush was born in San Francisco, in 1933, to an aspiring opera singer and a socialist trade-union organizer.
Our four longest and most freewheeling conversations, though, were all taped on his back porch, near a defunct old well, and away from any tidying influence. The eight meetings for this interview included two at the Paris Review offices and two at the Skylark, in Nyack, Norman’s favorite Greek diner. Lawns and suburban tidiness have overtaken most of Rockland County since 1961, but the Rushes’ two acres, still largely wooded and bound by a stone wall, feel incorrigibly rural. Norman and Elsa Rush on a visit to Mount Pleasant, New York, in 1965.įor forty-nine years, Norman Rush and his wife, Elsa, have shared a small farmhouse on New York’s High Tor Mountain, off an unmarked, crumbling road that narrows as you drive up it. Interviewed by Joshua Pashman Issue 194, Fall 2010
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