Chapter 123: The French Art of the Interview
We meet French journalist and writer Richard Gaitet on a boathouse-bookstore whose name translates as The Water and the Dreams, in Paris’ Quai de l’Oise. The author of seven books, including fiction and non-fiction, travel writing, and everything in between, he also hosts the widely praised Bookmakers: Writers at Work podcast on Arte Radio.
It's an interview inspired by a love of in-depth interviewing, a pleasure and an art easily forgotten amidst the usual predigested quotes of slick subjects. A masterful rendering of the craft, as found in Bookmakers, reminds us of all that a single conversation may hold.
Gaitet’s interviews bring out the best in writers. What they share with him, spurred by his distinctive questions, proves as meaningful as what they bring to the page. It complements their work, completes it, and sparks the listener’s desire to crack open a book or return to a body of work with added insight.
You started early in journalism and moved to the capital to work in magazines, then radio. What remains of those formative years?
There is a childhood memory, I must be seven and I'm with a friend, we're on the roof of the garage making a radio show with a cassette player, and I'm the interviewer. I don't remember how we got up there. A desire to be heard, I'd say, like all children, and I was rather talkative. The funny thing about these memories is that it's indicative of a desire to ask questions. There's an age when kids can't stop asking questions, but for me, it's like I've never stopped, I kept playing.
I went to Paris at the age of 22, to work for a magazine, arriving first and leaving last, to learn the trade. That's when I began to understand the questions of angles, the finesse of editing, how to work headlines, hooks, punchlines, how to find information. It's also about guessing the mood of the moment. Having personal criteria. What makes a work relevant and what will stand the test of time? Or does it merely reflect the zeitgeist? Telling the story. It's a very slow and rewarding learning process, on the art of interviewing and writing.
In radio you have to learn to express yourself in the right rhythm, pause when you want to emphasize something, know how to vary registers: very, very enthusiastic, or, on the contrary, as a confidant. My goal was to develop my writing skills; to arrive every day with my texts written to the comma.
Due to my lack of self-confidence, for the first years, I was actually doing a cartoonish version of myself, more eccentric, more extravagant. Over time I realized that I could just be myself on the air as I am here. You have a unique personality; you just have to know how to express it without necessarily adding tons of effects. The sum of our qualities and flaws produces something surprising. There's no need to overdo it.
I had confirmation of something, of a path that was opening up. It was going to connect different aspects of my personality.
Over time, what have you come to think is the purpose of an interview?
Around 2005, I was in the embryonic stage of writing my first book, Les heures pâles, and wondered how to put together a novel, where the characters come from, and what goes into a sentence. I had a long interview with one of my heroes at the time, Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club. I said to myself “I'll just ask him how he does it.”
I decided early on about something that continues with Bookmakers today, and that’s duration. From the very first interviews I made, I refused to go under half an hour. I always want an hour. I try to have two hours, as much as possible, because I understand that the superficial things, the short and sweet interviews, start to fade as soon as they're published. There's nothing left unless you're dealing with someone brilliant, whose fragments form aphorisms, or mysterious mantras. But people like that are rare. I remain convinced that you have to ask for a lot of time, as much as possible, to get quality. Time is the only luxury. The time we have to prepare, to record, to post-produce and broadcast. Without that, we'd be doing something average.
One of the main reasons for practicing cultural journalism, for me, is to find out how works of art are born. That's a mysterious thing in every age, in every field, in every country. How does someone come up with an idea that results in something moving, or disturbing? How do we get there? I think we'll never stop being curious about this. And strangely enough, it's not well documented. So, the interview is the way to get first-hand information from the artist, to find out what their path has been and where their mind has gone.
On the one hand, we have a documentary vocation, because if the words of the journalist and the interviewee are precise, it will make it possible to fix in time the origin of a work. If it’s done properly, there's a strong gesture of transmission: to enable younger artists or beginners, whatever their age, to understand how certain tools have worked for others, and to use them in their own practice. In other words, to try and demystify the creative act, which isn’t the muses coming to visit us in the early hours of the morning because the gods have chosen us. Most of the time, it's 90% discipline, 90% schedules, and constraints, to be able to produce songs, films, books, and so on.
For all of this to work, as the interviewer, you have to succeed in creating a relationship of trust and find the right distance so as not to be buddies or reverential. I also don't think that general hostility or suspicion will get you what you're looking for. Adding interest to the interview implies being able to express yourself, to present who you are from the right distance, rather than acting as if you were a cold, detached interlocutor who's just there to get information. It means expressing your subjectivity, but without letting it devour the interviewee's speaking space. Nor should it be an egocentric exercise. If I'm there to serve my own interests or promote my own personality, there's no point. What counts are the works and the words of the artists.
You rehearse difficult questions at home, on your guest’s most challenging moments. Among them, Luz, one of the survivors of the Charlie Hebdo attack, and writer Pierre Jourde, who lost a child. How do you ask questions when there are no words?
With politeness, with empathy. As when you feel there's something stuck in a person’s throat that needs to come out. It’s often walking on eggshells, with precautions: do you feel like talking about it? Sensing if it's possible. When I see that there has been enormous drama in the lives of my guests, the question I ask myself is if it has had a literary dimension, in other words, has it provoked in this person a different awareness of the making of a book, of his or her practice? We’ve cut sequences because we were actually moving towards pathos, towards too much emotion and we'd left the angle of questioning the practice. I think it's really a question of distance. It's a question of ethics.
“Above all, writing is a craft," you declare in the first episode of Bookmakers. Where did the idea come from to take on the myth of inspiration, to emphasize the work, the concrete and economic facets of it?
I wear two hats. I'm a reader and a writer, and as such the programs on the literary world mostly bore me. Most of the time, it stays on the surface level, either repeating promotional arguments or recalling the same anecdotes. I want to get rid of all that: I just want to know how this person works.
Money is a taboo subject, so it's really good to be open about it. We place the figure of the writer very high, but writers mostly have no safety nets. The only way to make a living from your pen is to do a lot of odd jobs and hope that one day you'll have a hit. So, first of all, there's this desire to explain what exactly a writer's life corresponds to. Because nobody really knows. And secondly, the choice to be outside of the promotional mechanism frees you from burdensome words. It's really annoying to hear everywhere “These are the five books that matter,” with the same five arguments, the same questions and answers. I'd rather see writers when they’re in between books, back in the uncertainty of 'will I ever manage to finish a book again.'
Your methods have earned you a reputation "between the shrink and the policeman", as the “detective of the literary interview." How much do you rely on intuition?
Sometimes my intuitions don't work. I think I've got a good idea, and it's a false lead. But the good thing about having time is that it allows me to make some eight assumptions about the making of the work or its intentions. Four don't work, but there are four that do. And then the person says, “Oh, that's funny, I've never been seen like that before.” And that brings something to life.
There's one important thing that's hard for a lot of people in culture to admit: you can't be afraid of looking like a fool. You shouldn't hesitate: there are so many times when I'm unsure of my question, but I try it, and it results in something precious. If I have an intuition, I write down the question, rework it, and repeat it. If it seems to make sense on paper, I ask it. Either it works, and I was right, and I hadn't seen it anywhere. Or it doesn't work but the person contradicts me by saying something interesting. Either way, you have to ask the question.
To prepare for your interviews, you read everything writers have written. How do you handle all this material? How do you develop a structure that encompasses a life, a work, and a world?
There's a general skeleton that emerges. The first episode is often about childhood, schooling, and literary apprenticeship, right up to the first novel. That gives us the initiation period. Then, I try to see if there's a strong point in the beginning of the work, already an aesthetic framework, choices that will be fundamental for what follows; the first occurrences of the affirmation of a character, and how these take place. And then, in the third episode, there's very often the successful work, which is deconstructed to try and uncover the writing process of a particular book. And money matters. That's the general structure. But within that, I'm looking for good stories. As I've been documenting, I've noticed things and said to myself, ‘This is exactly what I’d want to tell my friends.’ It's the material you can obtain that dictates the content.
There are several issues at stake in the questions. I try to propose a framework that is as clear and as open as possible. It can't be closed, because I very often express my doubts out loud. They're like crutches to help us move forward, or illuminating beacons so that everyone can move along and follow us on the journey. It reflects a perpetual concern for understanding.
Your first book, Les heures pales, is based on your own life, on a fracture in your family, which was almost fatal. What conversations and research were necessary, and what precautions?
Given that it was the first novel I’d written, at a time when I didn't know how it was done, I had no structural superego to tell me I should do it this way or that. The writing process took about five years, very rich in terms of learning, reading, and talking to young and old writers, who tell me a lot about the practice.
Intuitively, there's a degree of intimacy and revelation I don't want to get into: the pure diary writing, the big spill. I'm not interested in that, but rather a few steps prior, and how to hold it all together with the tools of fiction. I get the impression that my book is 88% exactly what happened to me: the places, the characters, and the words. There were times when I was stuck when I didn't know how to tell the rest, and fiction was a great help to link scenes, events, and emotions together. A novel is the place for that, which is why there are 12% of invented things that are quite practical.
The facts that can arise there shift from reality to magic, and seem to me most fertile for the imagination: I'm going to tell you the truth, but it's dreamy at times. We make do, we console ourselves with fiction.
I had my family read the text six months before its release. I arrived extremely stressed, with printed copies of the book. I was terrified. I said to myself, ‘This is going to break their hearts.’ It's not a trivial gesture to make, to say ‘I'm becoming the scribe for our family history, which has been hidden for so long.’ They didn’t approve of everything - but they agreed. And that was a strong gesture of love for me, them saying 'This is the path you've chosen, we support you in it.'
It's the only one of my books that I couldn’t redo.
Where do Richard the radio journalist and Richard the writer meet? Where do they part?
I can see that when I describe a place or a character, I feed it with my journalist's reflexes: You have to be clear. You can experiment with language, you can work on sound, but I feel the need to explain reality, even when it's not true. I have a taste for description, even of interior landscapes.
I'd like to diversify. I accumulate little texts that free me from the perpetual obligation of telling a story. In other words, I can create, fasten sensations, or be purely in the imaginary, with no connection to reality. And that does me a lot of good. I'd really like to move towards a form that mixes both, to have the documented narrative, and to have poetic openings interspersed with it. What I'm always going to keep is the taste for research. It's a cliché to say that, but reality has a lot of imagination. If you understand what your subject is and keep looking, you make great discoveries.
In the book Rimbaud Warriors, you write: "I'd like this moment to be frozen and write only this: fields covered with Belgian snow, stop thinking that everything you do isn't enough, doesn’t suffice." Is it looking back at the hurried young man you’ve been or the harbinger of something else?
It's my main neurosis. The question I ask myself every day, several times per day about everything: “Is it enough? Am I doing enough in love? In friendship? Have I thought of everyone today? Am I doing enough in my professional practice? Did I write enough every day? Is my commitment to this work sincere enough?” Sometimes, as happened in that passage, you have to go so far as to fall asleep on a path, on the eve of a storm, to understand that it is enough. I still ask myself those questions every day, but it felt good at the time to write it down.
I'm acutely aware that life is short and everything can end overnight. There's only so much time to give birth to all the books and stories I have in my head, and then it'll be over. So I'm always in doubt.
When I commit to a subject, I say to myself, “Well, this might take me two years so I'd better not be wrong,” because there’s only so much I can do, working slowly as I do. I always have the impression that it's going to go fast. But each book has its own rhythm. It takes a long time to make.
My writer friends think –and I think it's the nicest of compliments– that I make books that are like me. I don't write books that could be someone else's, which for me must be the first condition. That was one of Phillipe Jaenada's –a mentor– very first pieces of advice when I was starting out: never make a book that you think you have to make to please others. Make a book that is you, with your qualities and flaws.
Illustration: Sylvain Cabot
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Our newest story has just been published. “Escape from Kashmir” by Bupinder Singh tells the story of a young couple who fell in love with Kashmir. But then, as too often happens in that magnificent but troubled corner of the world, the threats began.
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