August 21, 2006
From the Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers
[Note: There is a lot of text after the jump.]
As those who keep an eye on the middle column have noticed, I am currently making my way through the Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers. It's a gold mine of well-thought-out commentary about the craft of writing, and the best interviews in the volume (Daphne Beal and Janet Malcolm, Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan, George Saunders and Ben Marcus) come off as conversations that might have occurred naturally, without the impetus of publication, and are laden with hard-won insight. Here is a long passage from the Beal-Malcolm talk, and a shorter excerpt from a point made by George Saunders.
Daphne Beal: Being so thoroughly engaged in one of those inherently unkind professions, how do you reconcile the "not-niceness" . . . of the finished piece with the process of asking your subject for his or her trust? Does that person occupy a different place in your thinking by the time you've finished writing than he or she did when you were in the thick of interviewing?Janet Malcolm: In answer to your first question: You do not reconcile it. That is the moral problem of journalism. But journalists don't ask for the subject's trust—they don't have to. Subjects just give it. They are eager to tell their story and don't seem to realize that they are not invisible as they tell it. Incidentally, the final product of the inherently unknind professions isn't always not-nice. There are photographs in which the subject looks beautiful, and there are biographies and journalistic portraits from which the subject emerges as a great soul. I recently had the pleasure and privilege of writing about Anton Chekhov, about whom it is simply impossible to find anything seriously bad to say. Some of his biographers have tried—and failed.
I'm not sure I understand your second question. Could you put it more simply? (I'm reading Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans [which led to "Someone Says Yes to It: Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and The Making of Americans," published in the New Yorker on June 13, 2005], which may explain my difficulty in understanding a sentence that isn't simple and hasn't been repeated a hundred times.)DB: I think what I'm really asking for is advice. In my own experience I find it incredibly difficult when writing about someone to transition from the human connection that happens in the most fruitful of interviews to the more critical stance I need to take afterward. Because Chekhov seems to be part of a very small minority of people, dead or alive, of whom one can say nothing bad, and because people's contradictions are among their most interesting qualities, the writer has to be able to step back from that intimate place of interviewing (or research)—where pratically anyone's reality can seem like the truth for at least a moment—to a more object point of view. This often feels like an almost painful betrayal to me.
What I wanted to find out (in my thickly veiled previous question) was how do you make the switch from supplicant or equal interviewer to authority writer? . . .
JM: I'm glad I asked. What you write is very eloquent. Yes, I wrote about this dilemma in The Journalist and the Murderer, but I did not exhaust the subject by any means. You bring something new into the discussion with your comment about the journalist's momentary identification with the subject. Since you are a novelist, you probably have more capacity for this kind of imaginative leap. I am incapable of writing fiction, so I am probably less empathic. But this doesn't seem to make any difference to the subject. He or she assumes your empathy—and then feels betrayed when what you write isn't like something he or she dictated to you.
I put it another way in The Journalist and the Murderer (if you'll forgive me for quoting from myself again): "The journalistic encounter seems to have the same regressive effect on a subject as the psychoanalytic encounter. The subject becomes a kind of child of the writer, regarding him as a permissive, all-accepting, all-forgiving mother, and expecting that the book will be written by her. Of course, the book is written by the strict, all-noticing, unforgiving father."
But getting back to your anxiety about the discontinuity between the coziness of the interview andt he coldness of the act of writing—yes, it is a problem and no, it can't be resolved. When you make the switch from "supplicant or equal interviewer to authority writer" you are, like every other journalist, committing some sort of moral misdemeanor.
I have encountered precisely this problem in both my limited experience as a journalist and my broader experience as a reviewer. When responding to an exhibition, honesty and thoughtfulness always trumps a sense of social obligation, of course, but on several occasions, weighing the merit of what I was assigned to write about, the decision to be forthright has seemed difficult. I'm sure I have alienated a few friends and would-be friends—the punishment for my "moral misdemeanor"—based on those decisions.
Later in the Believer book, George Saunders offers this, which also rings true to me:
I've seen, time and time again, the way that the process of trying to say something that matters dignifies and improves a person. I've seen it in my own failures, in writing and otherwise. I think it comes down to the motivation of the individual student. If the student writer wants to get over, become famous, dominate others with his talent—then no matter what, he's going to lose. On the other hand, if he wants to go deeply into himself, subjugate his own pettiness, discover some big truths about life—there's no way he can lose. And the thing is, we all have both of those motivations within us, every second that we're writing. So it's an ongoing, lifelong battle to write for the right reasons.