Philip Gourevitch On the Art of the Q&A

Because interviewing the editor of The Paris Review is like running lines with Olivier or cracking jokes with Carson.

By Nick Haramis

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Philip Gourevitch has an impressive résumé. A veteran staff writer at The New Yorker, he took over as editor of The Paris Review in 2005, two years after the death of former editor George Plimpton. His first book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families, about Rwandan genocide, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Guardian First Book Award. His ‘70s homicide investigation A Cold Case was set for movie theaters in a film starring Tom Hanks (the project is now scheduled for a 2008 release). He recently teamed up with Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris on an upcoming project about Abu Ghraib. Using the same material, Morris is making a film, while Gourevitch writes the book, and they intend to release both projects simultaneously. As if this weren’t enough, The Paris Review ushers in the second installment of its celebrated interviews next week, featuring candid conversations with William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Stephen King. Below, the literary giant discusses lying politicians, Plimpton’s giant feet, and why he used to flip through Playboy for the articles.

BLACKBOOK: What book are you currently reading?

PHILIP GOUREVITCH: [Laughs.] The Paris Review Interviews: Volume II. It’s on my desk in front of me. Honestly, I’m not reading books right now because I’m writing one.

BB: Do you have many guilty pleasure reads?

PG: I have no guilt about pleasure. Do you mean lowbrow genre literature?

BB: Yes, I suppose that’s what I mean.

PG: My guilty pleasure reads are things that are just fabulously written. I don’t know how to say it without it being pretentious—I’ll read a chapter from Moby Dick or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at random, where the language is just rocketing around, where there’s absolutely no urgency to read it. It’s like putting on one of your great anthem songs. It’s like cranking the stereo.

BB: Have you always been an avid reader of The Paris Review?

PG: I began reading The Paris Review in the college reading room at Cornell, this really nice glassed-in room with racks that were angled so that you could actually see the front covers of all the magazines. Somehow, I discovered it there, and I loved the interviews from very early on, as I think a lot of aspiring writers do. It’s one of the very few places to hear the masters talking in a very concrete way about craft, and in a way that also affirms the insanity of one’s aspirations, as well as the realization that all these people are simply mortals pushing pencils around.

BB: In the introduction to The Paris Review Interviews: Volume I, you mention the “art of the interview.” Maybe you could explain what you mean by that.

PG: There are a lot of different kinds of good interviews out there, but these particular interviews are a very specific thing. They are deeply informed, and they are about the scope of a person’s entire writing life rather than in many cases, “Let’s talk about your latest book. Let’s talk about your response to the latest episode in your life.” This is an attempt to look at a writer’s life the way a writer might look at him or herself. One of the things about these interviews which is crucial is that the interviewer is downplayed. We edit out the cleverness or presence of the interviewer. In fact, we don’t even give them names. And I think that anonymity serves the interview well because the subject always remains the subject, the interviewee. It also makes them endure, because you’re never caught up in, “What is the relationship between this one and the interviewer?” And yet, there’s a big difference between this and if you were to take out the questions altogether to form some sort of essay. A good interview has this back and forth punctuation, and it allows for digressions of a sort that in an essay would seem awkward or unlikely. Part of the trick is always to observe conversational flow, but to give it an arc of its own. George Plimpton used to talk about giving them their own little dramas. And in the end, a really great interview depends on having a great subject.

When these interviews first began, most people had not been interviewed much. Nowadays, if you publish even the most obscure first book, you’ve been interviewed a dozen times, and develop a fairly automatic set of responses to a fairly automatic set of questions. Part of the trick is how to get through the loop tape. For many writers, The Paris Review interview is a form in itself, it’s an opportunity, and they know that if they go into a three paragraph explanation of what they really mean to say, they will be heard. They get the chance to look at the transcript, and it’s like, “Okay, that’s a point I’ve been wanting to make for a long time. Everybody always cuts it down. Here we go. Let me make it just right.”

BB: The collaborative way that The Paris Review conducts its interviews—allowing the subject the opportunity to edit copy before it goes to print—is anathema to the way most newspapers and magazines run their own interviews.

PG: The idea that you don’t want to show somebody what you’ve written about them before you go to press comes from the notion that you don’t want to show either fear or favor. You don’t want to be accommodating or bullied, but there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t go back to somebody and say, “You know, I was looking at this and you say the following thing, and I’m not sure I really got it right. I’m not sure I understand that. I’m not sure you finished the thought. Can you elaborate?” It’s more of a follow-up question.

Now, if you’re dealing with a public figure about a public scandal, no, this is not going to be a successful method. They will immediately retract and recoil because they are professional liars. But if you are trying to interview somebody who is not by profession inclined to lying to you or hiding from you, there is a good reason to do this.

BB: But by the same token, people must sometimes come back and say, “I’d really rather this weren’t in the piece.”

PG: I’ve been amazed at how little gets taken back. Often people look at it and say, “Yeah, that’s my opinion. Goddamn right! Let me sharpen that a little.” One of the advantages of this sort of thing is that a subject will be open if they believe they’ll get a chance to see the piece. People are usually very reserved because they don’t trust an interviewer.

BB: Canonization is always a hotly contested subject—who to include, or more importantly, which traditionally marginalized groups to include. When putting together a collection like this, when you’re anthologizing, are you deliberately looking for variety?

PG: Not particularly, no. We try to get a mix of literary forms. You could go through and put together a book of high modernist poets, or of the great novelists of the ‘70s and ‘80s, and who knows, maybe we’d strike a different balance between men and women, or what you call ethnic groups. We wanted, in the course of four volumes, to come up with a representative greatest hits, a collection of writers whose stature makes them of enduring interest. These are interviews that are masterpieces of the form. There are cases where there’s a writer I’m really interested in whose interview isn’t as good as I’d hoped it was. This is a great writer, but this isn’t a great interview. So, then what do I do? I try to find both.

BB: You’ve spoken to so many interesting people throughout your career. I’d love to hear some of the more surprising or daunting conversations that you’ve had.

PG: As an interviewer, I’ve confronted—in a quiet way, usually—criminals. When I’ve doorstepped criminals, it’s always a little daunting, because you are essentially going to talk to someone who not only doesn’t want to talk to you, but doesn’t want you to know they exist. As a practical matter, the most difficult time I’ve had has been from politicians, because they’re unfortunately designed in this country to have eradicated any sense of personality, character, or the ability to say something that would be worth having recorded, lest it actually have meaning. That’s a dreadfully dismal business, because you’re often watching people of incredible intelligence, energy, and ambition present themselves as dreary blatherers reciting lines they couldn’t possibly expect you to believe.

BB: It’s been said that the Q&A has become static, merely a grouping together of soundbites. The Paris Review aside, do you enjoy reading straightforward Q&A’s?

PG: A really good Q&A is a incredible amount of work. It’s about crafting the thing. I’m working on a book now, which is going to be entirely prose, but I’m working in large measure from over a couple of million words of transcripts, of interviews that Errol Morris did for his new movie about Abu Ghraib. I’m writing a prose narrative out of the same material, and, you know, you can look at that stuff and see at any given moment that raw transcript is a nightmare. People repeat themselves, there’s a lot of choppiness, errors of memory—but as you compress these vast amounts of material, as you edit them and really extract them, it’s an incredibly vibrant form. It always has been.

BB:Do you find yourself reading Q&A’s from other publications and thinking that they’re poorly done?

PG: You’re not going to get a good line out of me about…

BB: That’s not what I’m trying to do.

PG: Well, I find them very uneven. I know that we work about as hard as anybody on these things, and mostly, I think, the long form Q&A’s can get pretty diffuse. The classic Playboy interviews were great, as were Warhol’s. Both, by the way, were influenced by Plimpton’s interviews. The real difference between a profile and an interview is voice. The writer of a profile might use long quotes in putting together a verbal portrait of someone he has interviewed at length, but it will be his language, his description, his construction of the armature into which the quotes are inserted. In an interview, there is a different kind of structure, because it’s the voice of the subject. But a good interview really depends upon a good subject. Anybody can be clever for five or ten questions, but great subjects have something to say, some sort of verbal agility.

BB: Were you hesitant to take on the job at the Review? Those are huge footsteps to follow.

PG: Size fourteen, I think. Plimpton had huge feet.

BB: What was your reception like, initially?

PG: It’s always been great. I’ve never presented myself as some kind of second George. I’m going to be me, and so far, people have been comfortable with that. The magazine, when I took it over, was in need of revitalization, and that was completely understood. There wasn’t anybody who really argued with that. Since then, the circulation has grown, our retention of long-term pre-me subscribers has been very high—that’s pre dash me, not premie. Also, to me it’s an honor to be able to work for a magazine with a very strong tradition. I’ve never thought of it as this shadow, this daunting thing. I’ve never worried about not being as good. We can never be the same. We won’t be the same, and we’re not trying to be. We’re a great tailwind, not a shadow.

These magazines don’t normally last more than ten years, which is a natural life span for something that is usually founded by young people, quite often to publish themselves and their friends as they’re establishing themselves. In many ways, it represents a moment. It draws its energy from that moment, and burns that energy. This magazine has been around for fifty years, in part because George continued to be interested in newer and younger writers. And the magazine, despite the fact that it had one editor throughout all those years, had many identities—he was always publishing a different magazine for a different moment. It’s fun to be able to take something with an existing identity. I didn’t want to keep the name and tear up the idea. I think the magazine is still recognizable to someone who last saw it in 1955. The current cover looks like those from 1952 to 1957, the spirit is still very fun, there are surprises, there are intemperate voices in the interviews. A lot of that is still going on.

BB: How would you define the role of today’s little magazine?

PG: The role of the little magazine is to grow. The Internet is perfect for us. It’s not a competitor. The Internet gives one the opportunity to have things instantaneously, and that’s crucial. The Internet is tough on daily newspapers because you can get all of your news hourly, without having to schlep around with something that makes you dirty, and makes you bang into the person next to you on the subway. You can get it in fits and starts on the same screen you’re supposed to be doing your work on. What’s better than something that can keep you from doing your work? You don’t see people whipping out The New York Times and covering their screens with them to read, you know, the weddings section. But for all you know, seven people in your office are doing just that on the Internet.

But we’re fiction, and fiction, past a point, is not overwhelmingly being published on the Internet. It’s also a technique that’s hard to improve upon, where the editorial vision becomes an anthology of a kind, something you come to expect and trust. I think there’s also a shrinking space out there in the larger circulation of magazines for fiction, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s a shrinking fiction readership. Now, that’s a good and a bad thing. The bad thing is that there are fewer places for people to make a buck writing short stories, so there are fewer people writing short stories. The golden ages of the short story have always market driven. In nineteenth century Russia, those guys were all cranking out stories to pay the rent. In the ‘20s, Hemingway and all those guys were writing for Saturday Evening Post, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and so on, to make a buck. In the late nineteenth century, O. Henry—I’m going to get these dates wrong and look like a… anyway—in these periods, there was a market that created a demand that capable fiction writers then supplied. And if that’s missing, it means there’s slimmer pickings for all of us. But i think there’s a lot of interest in a type of writing that’s less journalistic, less of-the-minute, where someone is out there rustling the bushes and finding the stuff you will want to read down the road. So, I’m not convinced that this is a bad time for literary magazines. All signs point to the contrary.

BB: You won a number of awards for We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families and A Cold Case. Do they mean anything to you?

PG: It’s always nice to be appreciated for the work you do. But it would also be meaningful to have your work sink into oblivion as soon as it’s published. That’s also pretty meaningful for a writer. To be honest, with the Rwanda book, people were like, “Well that’s gonna be plenty obscure, isn’t it?” So it’s very gratifying that people continue to read it. It’s lucky. It’s nice. But do awards mean anything in terms of going about getting one’s work done? Of course not. You still have to start over every day.