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volume 22, Number 1/2/3 (1998) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum ARIZONA’S LAWYER NOVELIST: RICHARD PARRISH TOM GALBRAITH* and therefore when I was rejected literally hundreds of times, I didn’t run through the house screaming, “Those dirty rats don’t know greatness when they see it.” I simply said to myself, “You better learn how to write, or you’re going to commit suicide, because you’re working too damn hard to fail at this.” TG: How hard did you work at it? RP: I would practice law from eight in the morning till about four in the afternoon, longer, obviously, if I was in trial, and then I’d go home, do the normal things until about nine at night, set the clock for twelve midnight, sleep my three hours, then write from midnight till seven in the morning. I did legal work five or six days a week, and I wrote seven days a week, three hundred sixty-five days a year, for three and a half years. I never let myself miss a day of writing, because I didn’t want to lose the discipline. TG: What launched you on such a punishing regime? RP: I had once studied to be a rabbi at the Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles, way back when I was a freshman and sophomore at UCLA, and in the mid-1970s, after I’d practiced law for a few years, I went to Israel to live for a couple of years. I was enrolled in a master’s degree in law program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but I quickly ran out of money. So I got a job as “Articled Clerk”to a high official in the Ministry of Justice—he later became the Attorney General of Israel—and I translated American traffic laws into Hebrew. I am the proud author of Israel’s statutes defining the right of way at unmarked intersections. TG: Rick, I always had faith in you. RP: Yes. It’s difficult to be humble about such things. Well, anyway, I came back to the States in 1975, to Tucson, where I had grown up, and starting practicing law again, and in March 1983 I read the decision of the Israeli tribunal which had been established by Prime Minister Menachem Begin to delve into the reasons behind the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Beirut in September 1982. TG: Perhaps, for us goyim, you could refresh our recollections about the historical context. RP: Sure. For most of its history, Lebanon had been politically controlled by Maronite Christians, who were the majority. Following large Palestinian influxes from Israel in 1948 and Jordan in 1971, the population majority shifted to Sunni Muslims. In 1976, Lebanon was wracked by a civil war between the Maronite Christians and the Muslims, led by the PLO, who deemed themselves a downtrodden majority and had the military support of Syria. The civil war resulted in increased PLO and Syrian sponsored terrorism (“Hisb ‘Allah”) into northern Israel, and in June 1982, Israel launched “Operation Peace for Galilee,” a full-scale invasion of Lebanon in an effort to keep the Maronites in power and oust the PLO and Hisb ‘Allah from Lebanon. In early September 1982, a Muslim-planted bomb destroyed the headquarters of the Maronite Christian Phalange Party in Beirut and killed Lebanon’s President-elect Bashir Gemayel and 25 members of the newly elected government. Days later, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, Maronite Christian military commanders met with the Israeli occupation forces commander and hinted that there would be a retaliation against two unarmed Palestinian refugee camps in southern Beirut, Sabra and Shatila. The Israeli commanders ignored the hints, even though it was their job to maintain the security of the camps and to keep the Maronites and Palestinians from murdering each other. That night, Maronite soldiers entered the camps and murdered at least 600 men, women, boys, girls, babies, dogs, cats, donkeys, and every other living thing they could find. The world press immediately blamed the Israelis for the massacre, leading to Menachem Begin’s famous remark, “Goyim kill Goyim and the Jews get blamed.”But bowing to pressure, he appointed an elite commission to study the Sabra and Shatila massacres. In early 1983, they published their report. The conclusion was that the Israelis had absolutely no role in the massacres themselves, but they had been forewarned of them and had simply stood by and let it happen. The commission likened this to Nazi Germany, where people had painted Jewish stars on the doors of their neighbors and simply stood by and watched them be rounded up and herded to the train depots to be delivered to the concentration camps. Well, I was so shocked by this portrayal of the moral delinquency of the Israeli government that I couldn’t come to grips with it. I thought that the portrayal was dead wrong, and I started avidly reading everything I could find on the subject. Then I suddenly became gripped with the need to write a fictional story about it, and voilà, there arose three and a half years later my first novel Our Choice of Gods. TG: Did you accomplish what you set out to do in explaining the massacres? RP: I thought I had. So not knowing anyone in publishing, I bought a book entitled Writer’s Market 1987, read it carefully, and set about to get an agent. I sent “query letters”and the first 30 pages of the manuscript to 100 agents, together with self-addressed stamped envelopes for their reply. I knew that I would interest at least 90 of them. TG: And were they interested?” RP: I received at least 90 letters back, none of them more than a scrawled handwritten note on my query letter, all of them saying some variation of, “This is the worst junk I’ve ever read. Keep your day job.” It was the most terrible period of my life. I had spent years writing a Nobel Prize-winning novel, I had spent thousands of dollars on stamps, copying, manuscript typists—in those days I didn’t have a PC or printer yet—and all I had to show for it was a large pile of rejections. I was humiliated, shocked, hurt, depressed, and my self esteem was severely battered. I sent off another 100 queries and had precisely the same result. The process took until the end of 1987 and plum blew my mind. I had slaved away at Our Choice of Gods like a possessed Raskalnikov, had spent thousands on it, had convinced my wife and sons that I was crazy as a coot, and ended up with nothing. TG: What did you do? RP: I put the manuscript up on a shelf and vowed never to look at it again. TG: What happened to get you back to it? RP: In 1981-82, I had represented a Catholic priest in Tucson who had been defrocked for allegedly amorous, drunken behavior with some women in his parish. I needed a Canon law expert, and I was directed to Sister Arlene Violet, a lawyer and a Sister of Mercy Nun in Providence, Rhode Island, and she became my co-counsel in the case. She was very courageous vis-a-vis the Church hierarchy and had earned the nickname “Attila the Nun.” She came to Tucson five or six times during the case, always stayed at our house, and she and my wife and I became very close friends. In 1985 or ‘86, she left the Order and ran for Attorney General of Rhode Island, won, and came to Tucson to visit my wife and me over New Year’s 1987-88. She had just had her autobiography published by Random House, and she asked me how it was going with my novel. I told her I’d been rebuffed by everybody, and she urged me to get the manuscript off the shelf and to send it to her so she could have her editor at Random look it over. Arlene was certain she could get it sold. TG: And did she get it sold? RP: No. After I reworked the entire manuscript for three months, back to my 21-hour days, the editor turned it down in a New York minute. “Good story,” she told Arlene, “but the guy can’t write a lick.” TG: Another high point in your life? RP: This time I wasn’t just humiliated. I was so mad at myself for again having spent a huge number of hours and a bundle of bucks that was getting me nothing but constant rejection, that I got mad as hell. I wouldn’t let them defeat me. I was going to get this novel published if I had to die doing it. TG: In other words, by the middle of 1988, you had gone completely insane. Pat Parrish: Long before that. RP: Thank you, my beloved. TG: So what did you do? RP: Arlene recommended that I hire a freelance editor she knew to edit the manuscript. The editor only wanted a dollar a page. So I hired her, and $700 later she returned the manuscript to me and told me it was just too lousy to be edited into salable condition. TG: Yet another blissful moment for you. RP: Well spoken. So by now as I was mad as hell and I wasn’t going to take it anymore. I rewrote the manuscript and bought a new copy of Writer’s Market, and I queried another 200 agents! TG: With what results? RP: I got two replies from agents who were willing to look at the entire manuscript. I chose one as my agent. A horrible and frustrating year later, she calls me to tell me that she had submitted the manuscript to Doubleday, and the editor at Doubleday rejected it and told her, “Tell Parrish to read The Physician by Noah Gordon. When he can write like that, he’ll sell his novel.” I was sick at heart, simply unequal to doing it all over again. But I bought The Physician, and I read it, engrossed, enthralled. I spent 15 hours a day for the next three months rewriting Our Choice of Gods from the first word to the last, and sent it back to my agent. And on December 23, 1988, Ruth called me and said, “Sorry I couldn’t get this for you on Chanukah, but I guess Christmas is good, too. I just sold it for $35,000.” TG: All right. So now, being a published author, was it easier getting your next novel published? RP: Not much. Carol Communications Company decided to stop publishing fiction altogether and to concentrate on celebrity exposés, so I was without a publisher. Also, my agent hated the next novel I wrote, and we parted ways. So I was again without an agent. That wasn’t so bad, since as a published author getting an agent wasn’t very difficult any longer. But my new agent couldn’t sell my manuscript and dumped me. TG: Déjà-vu all over again? RP: Precisely. So one morning I finished reading a Hillerman novel, and I closed it and said to myself, there’s an Indian reservation a half hour from here, and I’ve known Papagos all my life, and if Hillerman can make a few bucks writing about Navajos, why can’t I do the same with the Papagos. So I hopped in my truck at six o’clock in the morning, drove to the San Xavier Reservation, walked around the Mission area, attended mass—the priest wore a brown linen cassock and white Nike tennis shoes—walked up Lourdes Hill to the east side overlooking the Santa Cruz River valley, and suddenly I was thinking all kinds of thoughts. There’s a sand and gravel company down there. What if it were owned by a powerful, crooked U. S. Senator who was digging into Indian land, stealing their gold or silver or whatever? And who would the hero be? How can I make him someone unique, not just the usual hackneyed hero of legal thrillers: ex-drunk trial lawyer, back from disbarment or probation, teetering on the edge of ethical conduct, trying to stay on the wagon? Let’s make him different, an admirable lawyer. How about a lawyer from Brooklyn, who is wounded in WWII and is sent to the VA in Tucson for rehab? And he has to have a couple of kids, and I’ll make him a Jewish guy, because then he has to work part time for the BIA and get at least a little bit of salary, because a Jewish lawyer in Tucson in 1946 isn’t going to attract too many private clients. And he gets in all kinds of trouble trying to keep the Senator and his son from robbing the Indians blind. And there it was. I went home and spent the next 11 months writing the novel, but I got bogged down with it and was having trouble making a really good story out of it. In desperation, I decided to call the editor-in-chief of Carol Communications, who had published my first novel, to see if he was interested in looking at it. I called and was told that he had retired. I called him at home and asked if he would look at my manuscript. And literally out of the goodness of his heart, he said to send it. A couple of weeks later, I got a short letter from him. He told me to “Give Joshua a book. Have the children discover it. Make them unhappy that he has a girlfriend, even though their mother is dead. Give him one arm.” He also sent me a volume of short stories by Irwin Shaw and told me to read the story about the guy with one arm at least 10 times. TG: Did you have any idea what that meant? RP: Not a clue. “Give Joshua a book?” What the hell does that mean? And my wife said, calm down, quit screaming. He’s been the editor-in-chief of publishing companies for the last 40 years. Maybe he knows more about it than you do. Think about it for a few days, and read the story by Shaw. Quit groaning. Maybe you’ll understand what he’s looking for. TG: And did you understand? RP: Yes, thank God. It took me a long while, but I finally understood what elements made a story. I understood that taking an arm away from the central character made you concentrate on characterization and not just plot, because every time that character opens a can of tuna or pulls on his shoes or drives a car, you have to concentrate on him and tell the reader how he does it. In truth, that editorial help, and the earlier advice from another editor to read The Physician, have been the two turning points in creating a writing career out of what could easily have been a desperately unsuccessful waste of time, energy and resources. TG: Did that novel sell? RP: Yes. And that agent sold three more of them, and then, sadly, he suffered a serious illness which made him unable to continue as my agent. I then got John Grisham’s agent, who sold two more of my novels, and then he died. TG: So now, I suppose, no agent will want to represent you. RP: They think I’m the angel of death. But I managed to find a brave soul. TG: What’s up for you next? RP: My sixth novel came out in February 1997, and my seventh will come out in February 1998. I’ve just finished writing my eighth and ninth. TG: Has writing supplanted the law as your way of making a living? RP: Yes. I quit practicing law in April 1992 to concentrate on writing novels. I had just finished a lawsuit which resulted in a huge fee for me, and I decided that it was time for me to be a full-time novelist. TG: Is the story true that after the lawsuit was over, and you knew how much money you were getting, you never went back to your office? RP: Not at all. I went back to get my Mont Blanc pen. TG: I want to ask you about another legend: Did you really once sing a closing argument? RP: Sort of. I was prosecuting a securities fraud case, and the defendant’s lawyer was Jordan Green. He was so terrific, I had to do something to win the jury over. So my summation was like a musical where there’s some talking and some singing, only I couldn’t tap dance because I gave the summation within hours after I was released from the hospital after undergoing an unnecessary appendectomy, and the stitches were still in. I sang a few songs from the Broadway musical Fiorello, because they were dead on point, particularly A Little Tin Cup. TG: You were a partner in the firm of Flynn, Kimerer, Thinnes & Galbraith back in the early 1970s. And one day you up and left and went to Israel to live. RP: I wasn’t getting a whole lot of satisfaction from my personal life or the practice of the law at the time, and I thought I’d like to be a farmer on a kibbutz for a while. TG: And were you? RP: Yes, on Kibbutz Na’on, in the southern Negev Desert. It was hotter than Phoenix and much more humid. And then one day in October 1973 it really got hot. October 6, to be exact, as I was jumping up and down on cotton in a bin beside a huge field, there were suddenly Israeli Air Force jets flying practically overhead, shooting, and lo and behold!, there were Egyptian jets shooting back, and then all hell broke loose, and my farming career—as well as everyone else’s on the kibbutz—took an abrupt recess. TG: So you decided to become an American lawyer again. RP: It actually took me two more years to make that decision. TG: But later, after winning that huge fee, you stopped. Why? RP: Because I came to understand what all trial lawyers know after twenty years of practice: that our job is to take the mantle of other peoples’ suffering on our own shoulders for money. It is an extremely stressful career. With doctors, at least they often see healthy and happy people. But we don’t. We see only people in pain. We don’t have any relief from it. After a while, it gets to you. Moreover, in 25 years of practicing law, no one ever came to me and said, “Rick, my lad, I’m giving you this 25 grand, and I intend for you to be utterly without moral taint in the discharge of your duties on my behalf.” We all know what the person says who plunks the money into our sweaty palms: “Lawyer, I’m paying you a ton of money, and I expect to see results.” That’s all. And the truth of it is that you damn well better understand that you are not a priest who hears confessions and assigns penance, you are a lawyer who receives money from a person to win for that person, come hell or high water. So when you represent a client, you learn to leave your personal concepts of good and evil at home. Right or wrong is what the law deals with: “Just give me the facts, ma’am.” Good and evil are for philosophers and rabbis seeking universal truth. The lawgivers came to that conclusion many years ago when they scuttled the whole notion of “substantive due process” in favor of “procedural due process.” In other words, instead of lawyers arguing about truth as though it might be discoverable, the courts told us to forget that fruitless approach and concentrate rather on defining the processes most useful to attempt to arrive at the truth. I think the mavens of the law made a wrong turn there. TG: Then why did you come back to this profession? RP: For two reasons. First, I was just plain lonely and insular, and I wanted to be with people whom I liked and admired. So last October I went to see Mike Kimerer and Mick LaVelle. They offered me an office and the role Of Counsel to their firm, and I was delighted. And second, I needed to have some excitement back in my life, and I can’t think of anything that is more exciting than trying lawsuits and banging up against judges and opposing lawyers. TG: Did the motion and brief writing you did as a lawyer at least help you as you tried to become a fiction writer? RP: In a word, “No.” Although the purpose of both types of writing is to convince, the art of the legal writer is entirely different. What a lawyer does at his best is to write a black and white declarative sentence, or two or three, and follow with a citation to a legal decision that more or less supports his assertions. But what a novelist does is to create color with words, create pictures, images, things which attract a reader, seduce the reader emotionally to continue turning the pages. A judge doesn’t want to be moved emotionally, he wants to be convinced rationally. In fact, most judges are antagonistic to colorful legal prose laden with emotion and wit, imagery and symbolism. They stop reading on page two, and your client loses his case. But in one respect, legal writing and novel writing do share something. Every lawyer who writes a motion or an appellate brief is skirting the edges of fiction on every page. We call it the “adversary system.” You write your most attractive version of what your client’s position is, the opposing attorney writes his, and his Honor has the difficult task of trying to cull the truth from the fiction. It’s the same kind of writing that a novelist does, but we leave out citations. TG: You and I practiced law once in a firm that included Mike Kimerer, Clark Derrick, Tom Thinnes and John Flynn. I once remember a speech that Tom Thinnes made to some group or other, and he was asked: “Suppose you had a situation in which you represented somebody whom you knew was a dangerous murderer and you felt had the propensity to kill again, and because of mistakes of the prosecutors who were not as good lawyers as you, and your remarkable skills, you were able to get the man off. How would you feel?” Tom’s answer was, “Great! Next question.” What would your answer be? RP: I actually think about that every day of my life. It’s the reason why I write novels that are legal thrillers, because I pose that issue and other legal conundra of equal gravity to my characters and watch them work out their own answers and justify them to themselves and others. Joshua Rabb, my one armed lawyer for the BIA, gets a confessed murderer off on a motion to suppress, and he then has to deal with his teenage daughter’s wrath and disbelief that he could do such a thing. He has trouble with it. I have trouble with it. TG: Well, I’d like to talk to you a little bit about the influences on your life. Who are the authors who have had the most impact on your writing? RP: There have been many, since I learned to write by reading. But I think the most profound influence has been The Hebrew Scriptures, which you goyim call The Old Testament, which provides me an endless wealth of stories; Noah Gordon’s The Physician, as I previously described; John Fowles’ The Magus (First Edition, not the Revised Edition) and The French Lieutenant’s Woman; everything that Irwin Shaw wrote, and especially The Young Lions, which was the structural model I used for my first novel, Our Choice of Gods; Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, which was the inspiration for my two children in the Rabb series, and which ranks in my opinion with The Magus as the two finest novels in English in the second half of the 20th century; Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, which I think is the best novel written in English in the decade of the ‘80s; From Here to Eternity by James Jones and Herman Wouk’s Caine Mutiny; Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms; Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck; The Godfather by Mario Puzo, for sheer brilliant characterization of evil; and a stunning love story, The Thorn Birds, by Colleen McCullough. As for legal thrillers, the classic Anatomy of a Murder by Robert Traver, and a recent excellent example, Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent. TG: You’ve left out some very famous names: John Grisham, Danielle Steele, Sidney Sheldon, Mary Higgins Clark. RP: Well, in my opinion, if you want to learn to write, simply reading bestsellers won’t do it. You may easily emulate Danielle Steele’s or John Grisham’s style only to discover that luck and marketing played a far greater role in their success than writing skill. Those are variables that have nothing to do with you and which you can do nothing about. So learn to write by stocking yourself full of good writing by the best authors on the shelves. TG: And what have been the major influences on your legal career? RP: I think that John Flynn was, as I’m sure he was for you. And while the Miranda case had made him the most famous lawyer in America for a decade after 1966, his greatness was far more than just Miranda: He had a fabulous instinct for people. In the years that I worked very closely with John, it didn’t appear to me that John was a genius of the law per se, but he had a charisma with juries and a manner of approaching judges that I think was born of simply having lived life to the hilt and imbibing all of the lessons that experience can impart. John’s favorite statement was, “Be good to the little guy.” And what that meant to him was that far from being an elitist, he truly understood average people—the little guy—and he could make the little guy think that they were blood brothers. That was a wonderful ability that had legendary effects on juries and judges alike. And John had the uncanny ability to draw around him a coterie of highly motivated and capable young lawyers who filled in the chinks in his own talents and were intensely loyal to him. Tom Galbraith, the contemplative and scholarly Yalie; Tom Thinnes, the most knowledgeable criminal lawyer I’ve ever met—and the funniest; Mike Kimerer, phenomenal negotiator, warm and personable and terrific with clients, and John’s closest friend for many years; and Clark Derrick, John’s indispensable second chair in an astounding string of successful cases. And John would have been the last one to belittle the contribution of these lawyers to his own success and mystique. TG: How do you feel about criticism of your novels? RP: Some reviews are adoring, some are scathing. De gustibus non disputandam est (“There is no arguing about tastes”). But I’ve learned to take all of them in stride, and at least I get noticed and reviewed. As Oscar Wilde said, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.” TG: Do people ever walk up to you or write or telephone and tell you what they think of your books? RP: All the time. I get telephone calls and letters from an amazing array of people, mostly older women who are outraged at the language I use in my novels and the extent of the sex scenes. At my book signings, people come up and unload on me, some nice, some not so nice. But I’ve learned to take it all in stride, because of something that really happened to me. I was at a book signing in Green Valley a couple of years ago. It’s mostly a retirement community. A blue haired great-grandmother came up to the table and asked me, “Do you write like John Grisham?” I smiled in my (hopefully) most impish and endearing way and responded that I wrote much better than Grisham. She said, “No, I mean do you use his language?” I shrugged and asked her what she meant. She said, “He never uses dirty words.” I said, “Oh, really? I read A Time to Kill, and then I went back and counted the number of times the word ‘nigger’ was used by good guys and bad guys alike, and by the time I got to 300 I wasn’t even halfway through the book.” She looked at me very insulted and said, “ Well that’s not dirty. That’s just what we call them.” I said, “Well, madam, I stand by every goddamn word in my books.” She pirouetted on her heels like a portly ballerina and was out the door before I could say, “Oh don’t forsake me, O my darlin’.” TG: Well, do you have a word or two of wisdom to impart to us in closing? RP: I hope it’s wisdom, but that’s not for me to judge. You and I don’t belong to the Young Lawyers Division of the State Bar of Arizona anymore. And what that really means is that we have come to grips with a lot of things in our lives that once kept us unsettled. We have learned that the reputations of too many supposedly great lawyers are pure hogwash, and there are many unsung lawyers out there in big cities and small towns alike who are just as good or better. We have seen the ranks of our leaders from presidents to governors to judges filled by too many jaded mediocrities and too few really honorable, high-quality men and women, and we have learned that the Harry Trumans and Oliver Wendell Holmeses and Benjamin Cardozos and William Copples and Robert Buchanans are rare treasures indeed. We have come to grips with what success means for us on our own terms, how much money we think we have to earn to live as we desire, what we need to achieve in order to respect ourselves, and how best to go about doing those things. And finally, we have learned to stay a bit above the fray and to observe it objectively, assess it, and try to act with fewer knee-jerk responses than we had 20 years ago. That’s what I call maturity. And God willing, I have a little. TG: You mean, no more fighting, screaming, and trying to murder opposing lawyers? RP: Hell no! No trial lawyer ever gets that mellow. As an old Yiddish proverb says: Halt mich vee a rov, oon hit mich vee a gonnif. Treat me like a rabbi, but watch me like a thief! * Partner, Lewis and Roca, LLP. I wish to acknowledge that I was once a partner with Richard Parrish in the practice of law. [Editor’s Note: Mr. Galbraith’s interview is reprinted here with permission of the State Bar of Arizona. The interview can be found on the State Bar of Arizona’s web-site at: <http://www.azbar.org/bar/aside/ 697rpar.htm>. Mr. Parrish’s novels include: NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH: A JOSHUA RABB NOVEL (New York: Dutton, 1995); THE DIVIDING LINE (New York: Dutton, 1993); OUR CHOICE OF GODS (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1989)]. |
