The Bookhugger Author Panel: Reportage
Bookhugger asked three top-notch non-fiction writers to tell us about the techniques they use to research, imagine and depict their subjects.
When recreating actual events through interviews – how difficult is it to stop your imagination running riot and what techniques do you employ to prevent this?
More information about the panellists
Ian Thomson
I interviewed more than 300 people for my penultimate book, a biography of the Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi. What for? I was determined to construct a life of Levi not found in his books. It seemed to me dishonest, as well as dangerous, merely to recast his printed words in a biography. (Levi contrived some elaborate autobiographical fictions.) So I set out to interview as many people as possible; under no circumstances would I take Levi’s own words as writ.
My ambition, in fact, was to chronicle Levi’s life and work through interviews. I used a tape-recorder, as it seemed important to keep a record, though that would later involve hours of weary-making transcribing. I began to worry that the mere act of translating (usually from the Italian) might distort the sense of what was intended by the interviewee, so I developed a scruple (probably an over-zealous one) for accuracy in the transcribing. Early on, I decided not to include any description of my interviewees in the biography, but to let their words speak on the page unadorned. That way I hoped to attain a degree of documentary verismo, and keep a lid on any imaginative tendencies.
(I still have two carrier bagsful of C-60 and C-90 micro-cassettes: an entire life – Primo Levi’s – is contained in them.)
Daniel Kalder: That is a monumental number of interviews and I shudder to think what the transcription process must have been like. Did you start bleeding from your ears and eyes? I admire your dedication and thoroughness, however. I met a Polish journalist once who told me that he had a two tier system of interviews. If he was talking to an ordinary schmuck, he just made quick notes freehand; only if he was talking to someone important ‘like the president’ would he crack out the tape recorder.
I also like the idea of carrying another man’s life around in a carrier bag, although I prefer a shoebox.
John Geiger: This is admirable. As someone who has written biography, Nothing Is True Everything Is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin, I realized as Ian obviously did with his Levi book the necessity of interviewing people who knew Gysin and not to rely on his own accounts. Gysin, an artist and hipster, was also a self-described mythomaniac and storyteller, so everything had to be tested with people who knew him. Interviews are critical in such a work, and I really admire Ian’s exhaustive efforts. In the case of my new book, The Third Man Factor, an account of an unseen “Third Man” who intervenes to save people in life and death struggles, I also interviewed as many people as possible, those who had the experience. So while it is a book about an idea, notably that there is a mysterious force for survival in apparently impossible situations. But in a sense, also, The Third Man Factor is a biography of the Third Man, the central character of the book and the source of the mystery.
My most recent book, The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica, was a very different sort of animal. This time I gave lengthy (I hope, vivid) descriptions of some of my interviewees, and allowed for a degree of license in the descriptions. There is always a special risk when putting real-life people into books, however, and not all those whom I interviewed for The Dead Yard appreciated what they clearly saw as a transformation. But, at the risk of sounding pretentious, each of us is three different persons: the person we really are, the person we believe we are, and the person other people see us as. How to reconcile all there strands a description? Complaints about fictional distortions and misrepresentations are an inevitable part of the whole process of transposing life and literature, I should say, not least because the process is so subjective.
As for the techniques I used to avoid fictional distortions, none springs to mind in particular, though I tried at all times to be alert to the dangers of caricature (not always easy, as many of my interviewees were larger than life.) The truth is, most writers – of both fiction and non-fiction – make life more interesting than it is, by telescoping, selecting and transmuting the facts into something approaching semi-fiction. As the Italian proverb has it: “The tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it.”
The Dead Yard is not “the” truth; it’s only as I saw it.
Daniel Kalder
I first faced this problem while writing my book Lost Cosmonaut. During the research phase I had visited a republic in Russia called Mari El which is home to an ethnic group called the Mari. About 30% of the Mari never converted to Christianity and still follow their ancient, traditional religion which revolves around numerous gods, regular animal sacrifice, appeasing evil nature spirits and various rituals carried out in sacred groves. This makes them more or less the last true pagans in Europe, much more interesting than the various bearded men and ladies who have cooked up their own wishy-washy brand of pseudo-paganism since the 1960s.
Anyway, before going out there I had planned to reconstruct in graphic and haunting detail the sacrifice of a horse, which was carried out by the Mari every five years or so in order to regenerate the world. As the dead animals mediate between men and the gods, the degree of their suffering during sacrifice is directly related to the degree of pain humanity is feeling at the time. In Russia, this is usually quite a lot. As I was arriving out of season I figured I’d conduct interviews with priests and witnesses about the most recent horse sacrifice and then pull together an evocative reconstruction that would horrify and yet fascinate the reader, while totally up-ending the fashionable, warm and fuzzy ‘noble savage’ view some people have regarding the nature of pre-Christian religions in Europe and elsewhere.
Then I met the Chief Druid, only to discover that he was a totally eccentric not to mention hilarious character, sometimes very open, only to suddenly turn very, very cagey- and he was a total egomaniac to boot. Although he spoke for hours I quickly realised that it would be totally impossible to come up with anything even faintly resembling what I had planned. The reality of the human personality and the flaws of memory and perspective had intervened. The solution came to me quite quickly however- rather than try to reconstruct past events from an imaginary ‘objective’ point of view, I would simply use his words, juxtaposed with my own experiences in his company, and data I had culled from other interviews and ethnographic studies to give a much more partial and subjective view of what happened at Mari rites. The result would be fragmentary, ambiguous and contradictory version of reality. I set these fragmentary mini chapters alongside each other, allowing different tones and viewpoints to collide. That’s generally how I construct my books – as a collage of alternating perspectives and styles, some of them clashing with mine.
That was pretty much my epiphany when it comes to reconstructions, and I used the technique again in my book Strange Telescopes, which depicts encounters with lots of Ukrainian exorcists and the followers of a Siberian Messiah, as well as a meeting with the Messiah himself. Here what I had discovered in Mari El was reinforced a thousand times. As the subjects of the book were living in worlds filled with demons, or occupied by the living Son of God the only way to get close to the world as they experienced it was to report it through their own words. And so once again I cleaved religiously to the principle of only using edited versions of our conversations to evoke all past events in the book. However I didn’t just let them blather on. As I use the collage approach I am able to set one account alongside another contradictory vision, or interject my own thoughts, or maybe insert something apparently unrelated – and it’s in the tension between all these contrasting perspectives that the meaning arises.
I’m not advocating this approach for everybody of course, but it fits my view of the world – as a random, disjointed and chaotic place, where multiple versions of reality vie with one another for dominance, or simply to be heard. I freely admit that as the organising mind I have more say than anyone else in the book, but even so I do my best to let everyone have their chance to get their viewpoint across. From out of the apparent cacophony and discordance, a strange symphony of voices and visions emerges.
John Geiger
Recreating real events is an activity that is fraught for writers at the best of times. But when the real events involve interaction with incorporeal beings then the danger is greatly increased. The subject matter is sufficiently incredible. To allow imagination to run riot would cast serious doubt on it. If there is a topic less in need of dramatic license, then, it is appearances by the Third Man, a benevolent companion who aids survival. Invariably the people I interviewed had overcome harrowing ordeals, often of the life-and death variety. As one reviewer wrote, with evident distaste: “Pus shoots from an infected foot like a fountain when a mountaineer saws off his boot on Kilimanjaro; the skin of a Finnish deserter from the French Foreign Legion sheds in the manner of a lizard as he desiccates on a raft in the Indian Ocean; and an American trekker cuts off his trapped arm with a Swiss Army knife.” In other words, I did not need to make them empathetic by kind-to-small-animal-type devices. It’s not hard to develop empathy for people in such situations. We all feel for people in peril, and most of us are pulling for them to get through it.
My job, then, was to go where the action was, to tell their stories accurately, and with as few adjectives as possible. I did not need to pretend to read their minds, because the Third Man seems very much to reside there anyway. Besides, I remember something that a writer I knew, William S. Burroughs, told me. He said, “you can’t write a best-seller with your tongue in your cheek.” I took that to mean readers will very quickly see through you. It’s enough that they can see through the book’s protagonist.
The panellists
Ian Thomson – ‘a chronicler of formidable power’ (Guardian) – is the author of Bonjour Blanc, an acclaimed book about Haiti, and of Primo Levi (‘one of the best literary biographies of the year’, Observer). He lives in London with his wife and children.
Daniel Kalder was born in Dunfermline and currently lives in Texas. His first book, Lost Cosmonaut, was published in 2006. His most recent work is Strange Telescopes, published by Faber in 2008.
John Grigsby Geiger was born in Ithaca, New York, and graduated in history from the University of Alberta. The author of four books of non-fiction, his work has been translated into nine languages. He is Editorial Board Editor at The Globe and Mail, and was 2004-05 St. Clair Balfour Fellow at Massey College, University of Toronto. He is a Governor of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society and Chairman of the Society’s Expeditions Committee, and a Member of the Advisory Board of Wings Worldquest.
