EXPOSING PEOPLE, NOT ISSUES
Samuels, Charles Thomas
BOOKS EXPOSING PEOPLE, NOT ISSUES CHARLES THOMAS SAMUEI~ I~lurderers & Other Friendly People DENIS BRIAN McGraw-Hi/l, $7.9.5 Deciding to interview interviewers, Denis Brian seJected a...
...paperback - $2.95 $7.50 Concerning Death THE LIVING EDITED BY EARL A. GROLLMAN What do I say to a dying person...
...should the interviewer tip his hand, he might be ejected---or worse--and subsequent 26 April 1974:192 4 ~[-I'al'La~ RESISTING THE THIRD REICH m ONE WOMAN'S STORY BY HILTGUNT ZASSENHAUS Beginning with the day a 17-year-old German schoolgirl refused to give a ritual "Heft Hitler" salute in class, this dramatically intimate memoir unfolds as a prophetic revelation of the cost of conscience in the modern world, and raises the question of personal responsibility for one's own government, tliltgunt Zassenhaus has been nominated for the 1974 Nobel Peace Prize for the actions now brought to light in this autobiography of conviction and personal courage...
...ttow do I administer an estate...
...If the interview can lay no secure claim to essential truth, what more modest job can it perform...
...Was it ever any good...
...An authority on the problems of terminal illness, psychological acceptance of death in a youth-oriented society, and the complicated needs of intimate survivors provides the answers to these and other questions in one of the most comprehensive resources ever assembled for dealing with the facts and emotions of death...
...And on both sides...
...but they also show that interviewing is never wholly fruitless...
...Justifiably popular as a means for satisfying curiosity, the form adds the pleasure of drama to the illumination of reportage...
...He died last month at the ege of 38...
...How valuabIe it would therefore be to learn something about an interviewer's methods of inquiry and whether he finds his work hazardous or useful...
...Here, the reporter, who knows exactly what he wants to unearth, ignores the subject's total character and zealously pursues individual facts...
...But by what fiat...
...But what if the first impression is of something duplicitously staged, or if the source is having an off-day, or if the very act of interviewing distorts...
...7.50 DEATH OF A MAN ,. ,.,, ,O.E, WERTENBAKER This is the story of noted journalist Charles Wertenbaker's last sixty days, his discovery that he had cancer, and his decision to die a death of his own choosing - a death free of euphemisms and kind lies...
...However, an interview normally transpires in a far more limited time and is usually offered to us a literal, hence unarranged (albeit often abbreviated) version of the actual encounter...
...Instead, they offer thumbnail sketches, putting us for a privileged moment in the company of men we wish we knew...
...But I doubt that artifice should go as far as Plimpton himself let it go when he permitted Hemingway both to frame and answer questions...
...Since depth rather than fact is what he is after, editing is also more warranted in this than in the previous sort of interviewing-where, as Gay Talese remarks, joining quotations together falsely turns the subject into a monologist...
...Paul, after all, had to warn some early Christians away from incest, and St...
...In good hands, it can make a virtue of selectivity by turning the partial into provocalion...
...Francis of Assisi received the gospel from a corrupt church...
...and his book contains if not food for thought, at least crumbs...
...Rex Reed and Richard Harris counter-charging over a nasty meeting at a Malibu brunch...
...Whether even an accurate interview can be paradigmatic rather than presumptuous they do not ask...
...Currently some right-wing fundamentalists r e j e c t "churchianity"--all you need, they say, is to "believe on the Lord" and the rest is folly...
...So we have, among others, Truman Capote taking credit for teaching Gay Talese how one produces in-depth reports and Talese impatiently denying that assertion...
...biguity of their revelations, and of the deep mystery of human interaction they cannot help but display...
...At the left is a radical puritanism which, seeing the church's involvement with the world's corrupt powers, will have nothing to do with the church...
...Although he supports no-fault divorce, Wheeler points out ambiguities in the new taws that some states have enacted and ways that they could be improved...
...On a milder level, it is a method for packaging wisdom--conveniently, because everyone finds it easier to express ideas before a sympathetic, guiding witness than to organize them into discursive prose...
...Frontiers for the Church Todag ROBERT McAFEE BROWN Ox/ord U. Press, $5.95 The Fire We Can Light MARTIN E. MARTY Doubleday, $5.95 The New Agenda ANDREW M. GREELEY Doubleday, $6.95 A New American Reformation JAMES F. DRANE Philosophical Library, $7.50 JOHN GARVEY The tension between the church as it is and the church as the gospel indicates itshould be, has been a problem ever since Pentecost...
...JOHN OARVEV is an editor with Templegate and edits a hi-weekly education newsletter, University Today...
...Even an intellectual interview should leave some chink for the unexpected, so that beriefs the subject had not realized may suddenly shine through...
...We need to recognize-issues of quality aside--that most interviews belong to art rather than objective journalism and that most interviewers share with fellow artists full responsibility for what they express...
...paperback - $3.95 $7.50 THE ROAD EAST DISCOVERY OF EASTERN WISDOM BY HARRISON POPE, JR...
...as The Paris Review series makes clear, in such cases, the transcript may even be reworked until speech attains the luster of writing...
...in the words of Arnold Gingrich, "the cruelest thing you can do to anybody is to quote him literally...
...But Brian has, at least, inspired us to contemplate a journalistic mode that demands searching review----~cause it is no less widespread than problematic...
...Yet it seems obvious that a life can no more be summed up in an interview than in any other moment...
...In general, his efforts only prove a remark that Malcolm Cowley makes to him ("it's hard to give an intelligent answer to a stupid question...
...The growing popularity of Eastern thought, Pope concludes, represents a massive new opposition to technology and science, even a rejection of the philosophical foundations of Western thought...
...At the lowest level, it encourages moral exposure...
...Confidence in the truth rather than the entertainment value of interviews rests on a series of assumptions that can and must be questioned...
...If ideas are what an interviewer desires, his method must differ sharply from that of an interviewer seeking the trapped confession...
...We are naive when we take the latter as a sort of anonymous machine for the production of questions or--to change the metaphor--as a headlight in which the subject is indelibly caught...
...For the most part, however, Brian exposes people rather than issues...
...Conduit for quarrels, occasionally Brian transcends his gossip-lust to provoke real drama, as in the Mary Hemingway interview, where egotism only gradually shakes through the artfully arranged conciliations, bringing a complex character to sudden life...
...Face to face with George Plimpton, for example, he asks little about The Paris Review conversations with writers that Plimpton runs...
...The simple fact is that traditional divorce laws do not reflect the realities of contemporary marriage, and he advocates changing our laws to make marriage dissolution more truthful and more humane...
...Mind-starved by his questions, we are the more likely to seize and chew over the odd tidbit of an answer--like Lillian Ross' casual assertion of the very raison d'etre for interviews: "you're fresh in coming to your subject and first impressions and first instincts about a person are usually the sound, reliable ones that guide you to the rest of what the person has to offer...
...DANIEL MORRISSEY is the editor of the Georgetown Law Weekly...
...Armed with taperecorder, an interviewer is often lethal, his friendship sometimes dangerous (though even this Brian is too dullwitted to underline...
...It may also be the source of everything interesting in Christian history...
...Joseph Fletcher's introduction to this new edition - one of the most poignantly personal accounts of terminal illness ever published - gets to the heart of the complex human dilemma of euthanasia...
...Such interviews demand strong nerves and also considerable tact...
...Nor should the sleuth hesitate to trick his quarry (the preferred means, according to Talese, Capote, Haley and Studs Terkel, is a confidence offered by the interviewer that seduces his subject into reciprocity...
...What these matters have to do with the art of interviewing we are left to surmise, just as we are left to wonder why anyone would ask Truman Capote what he might say "on international TV" or would care whether Rex Reed thinks there is life after death...
...To read interviews properly is to have a sense of doubleness of their content, of the am0 0 0 0 0 00.00 REVIEWERS CHARLES THOMAS SAMUELS, a previous contributor to these pages, was a member of the English Department of Williams College...
...Here, spontaneity may be counterproductive and trickery downright foolish...
...to reveal the higher faculties, conversation must be clothed in knowledge...
...Hence, we are not getting hard facts or assertions but rather a subtle and diffused interplay between two halves of a human event...
...William Buckley and Benjamin DeMott squaring off on a book review...
...Although, as Harrison Salisbury reports, while discussing his interviews with Russian bureaucrats, there is often a threat of actual blood or, in the "free world," of injunctions and lawsuits...
...Should one of his interlocutors try to force relevance Brian simply dodges...
...BOOKS EXPOSING PEOPLE, NOT ISSUES CHARLES THOMAS SAMUEI~ I~lurderers & Other Friendly People DENIS BRIAN McGraw-Hi/l, $7.9.5 Deciding to interview interviewers, Denis Brian seJected a promising task...
...paperback - $3.45 f{.S&-i,~& $7.50 from your bookstore or BEACON PRESS 25 Beacon Street Boston MA 02108 A bold non-profit exploration of human possibilities...
...Having framed the questions and psychologically affected the talk, he has set up the parameters of its meaning...
...Although he is indifferent to issues, they nevertheless get raised...
...Monologizing poses no threat to propositional interviews...
...A profile, in which the reporter has substantial contact with his subject and then arranges his findings, obviously intends an interpretation (Brian's failure to distinguish between profiling and interviewing is one of the primary causes of his own sorry performance as investigator of the latter mode...
...the wisdom-seeking interviewer should know as much as possible about his interlocutor, for knowledge, like wealth, comes only to those who already possess some...
...Sleazy in the performance, this can be redeemed in the result, if only the bagged fact is large enough in human or journalistic significance...
...Frequently, however, the interviewer's victims are more accurately perceived as suicides...
...Here are four books which all begin 26 April 1974:194...
...and each of several "Hemingway-hunters" declaiming that he alone captured the great man's soul...
...But having conceived of an interesting topic, Brian seems unable to maintain interest in pursuing it...
...Instead Brian wants to know about people who were not interviewed, whether Plimpton would sign on for a moon flight, and if the famous omnicompetent thinks that life contains "an overall purpose...
...it allows us to discover instead of being told...
...Occasionally, Brian's vulgarity even throws excellence into high relief, when a subject resists the invitation to querulousness and gives us instead a display of magnanimity (Alice Roosevelt Longworth) or of professional commitment (Alex Haley...
...Moreover, interviews are life-like, because we constantly put questions to each other in our hope that truth will loom behind the strategies of response...
...This implication of raw truth is fundamentally specious, because the character of the interviewee is brought ~to us only through the character (interests, sympathies, alertness) of his interlocutor...
...7.95 NO-FAULT DIVORCE BYMICHAELWHEELER This is the first book to provide an overview of the efforts toward divorce reform and to explain in straightforward language what no-fault divorce is and how it works...
...he calls his book Murderers & Other Friendly People not as a comment but only because two of its subjects, Truman Capote and William Buckley, consorted with killers...
...How do I explain death to my children...
...confrontation with his subject could be bloody, if only figuratively...
...For him, nothing can be sacrosanct--as Gay Talese correctly maintains...
...there have been attempts since the beginning, anyway, to resolve the tension...
...Even Brian's wide-eyed sympathy doesn't keep people from succumbing to egotism, pettiness, or back-biting...
...Regrettably, the practitioners with whom Brian talks scarcely do more than wonder if the tape recorder facilitates accuracy or insures artifice...
...With its appearance of unmediated drama, however, the form offers manifold opportunities for disguised and thus dangerous tendentiousness, even when the interviewer merely records what was said...
...How do I choose a funeral director...
...Unbuttoned, we are all beasts...
...When an interview approaches a character sketch, its significance is the interviewee's manner rather than the substance of his response...
...In the middle, and probably as wrong as the other viewpoints, is fhe attitude that the church is more or less all right as it is...
...However, most interviews contain neither surprising revelations nor interesting ideas...
...That such matters are barely suggested in Brian's book makes it unsatisfying...
...Based on conversations with devotees of numerous Eastern disciplines, Harrison Pope explores and interprets young America's surging interest in Oriental religion and meditation, tie finds that many of the same youths who first experimented with drugs have since turned to Eastern thought as a means of realizing self-awareness and fulfillment...
...In one of its forms, then, the interview contains the thrill of a detective story...
Vol. 100 • April 1974 • No. 8
