What's That Pig Outdoors? (25 page)

What wasn't helped was the long task of woodshedding the profile,
doing the homework before interviewing an author. That job still takes me longer than it does others, and this is directly related to my deafness. When I do an interview, the chances are that I will be meeting the writer for the first time. How easy will the author be to lipread? Given the nature of literature, we will be talking about highly abstract topics, in words not often used with ordinary speech. How will I be able to understand what my subject is saying? As I've said, much of the success of lipreading lies in being able to anticipate the words and thoughts others will employ. The more familiar I am with the person to whom I am talking, the more accurate my context-guessing will be. The only way to achieve this familiarity is to spend many hours doing research, skimming the author's previous books, if not reading them in their entirety, as well as digging up and studying every interview of the author one can find and every public pronouncement he might have made. It's like building up a thick dossier on a spy.

But no matter how many hours I spend trying to get inside an author's skin, to find out how he thinks and talks, they won't be enough. I may understand most of what the author says during the interview, but I also may—no,
will
—miss some vital statements, and forget others. Because I must keep my eyes on my subject's face, I cannot take notes. If I look down just for an instant at what I'm writing, I'll lose track of the conversation. Hence I must rely on a tape recorder and the transcript typed from it not only to refresh my memory but also to tell me the things the author said that I didn't understand during the interview.

During my first few years in the book editor's job, getting a tape transcribed was a chore. The overworked secretaries at the
Daily News
had no extra time to help me out. Hence I asked Debby if she'd type up the tapes, and in the beginning was able to get the paper to pay her a meager $25 or so for each transcript. Later the assistant managing editor in charge of parsimony told me that the budgetary turnip had been squeezed so tight that no blood was left to pay even that.

Asking Debby to do this work gratis was unfair to her. But she knew, bless her, that these interviews were important to my career, and insisted on making time to do the job. My speech is harder to understand on tape than it is in person, and many transcribers, especially hired temporary secretaries unaccustomed to my speech, cannot follow what I say. The
transcriptions often will be utterly one-sided—all answers, no questions. In practice that's not much of a problem. If I can't remember what I said, there's my notebook of prepared questions as a reminder.

But Debby, intimately accustomed to every vagary in my speech, was able to render verbatim everything I said. And being a bookish person herself (she not only is a professional librarian but also has written a monthly column on children's books for years), she knows the sometimes technical language of literary talk. What's more, she always made certain to indicate the tone of the interviewee's voice as well as the background noises, such as chuckles and moans, that colored his words. Unless instructed otherwise, most transcribers will simply type up flatly what is said, not how it is said. Unless I am alert, I might present an author's intended irony as a bald statement exactly the opposite of what he meant.

Sometimes she'd even go on the interviews with me if they were local. I'd make sure to hold them in the best restaurants in Chicago (the author's publisher footed the bill, of course!) so that she'd at least get a good meal for her pains. We didn't need to tape these encounters; she took copious notes instead, and that saved considerable time.

This state of affairs continued until that awful day in 1978 when Marshall Field finally threw in the towel and announced the closing of the historic old
Daily News.
I left for home expecting that I'd be out of a job in a couple of weeks, but almost before I got out of the building a reporter called me back. Our managing editor wanted to talk to me.

The staffs of the
Daily News
and Field's morning paper, the
Sun-Times
, were being consolidated. The managing editor was moving into the same job at the
Sun-Times
, he said, and he wanted to take me along as book editor. The morning daily's book editorship had been vacant for years, the tasks handled by the paper's arts and amusements editor, but Field wanted a full complement of staff to compete with the
Tribune
, now the only other paper in town.

On the spot I said yes. The choice was obvious. There are perhaps fewer than twenty full-time book editorships on American newspapers, and such jobs are hard to get. Besides, the
Sun-Times
was a profitable paper, and it assented when out of the blue a kindly editorial assistant volunteered to make my phone calls as part of her regular tasks.

I couldn't have been luckier. Shirlee De Santi, a veteran of the newspaper
wars under half a dozen or more book and arts editors, seemingly knew—and knows—everybody in the publishing business. She also has a soft and gentle telephone manner that could charm the wallpaper off a ballroom. More than one author has told me he really didn't want to review a book but just couldn't refuse Shirlee.

The paper also saw to it that after an author interview a competent staff stenographer would provide me with a full transcript of an interview at the office the very next day. And they have; I have nothing to complain about. But few stenographers have displayed the painstaking skill and insight with which Debby converted those tapes to transcripts.

All that fuss over researching and transcribing an interview may sound like a lot of trouble just to produce a few thousand words of copy that's going to end up the next day at the bottom of a reader's kitty-litter box. It
is
time-consuming. But in at least one way it often gives me a certain advantage over less prepared journalists.

Very early in our interviews, my subjects will suddenly realize that I take them, and their work, seriously enough to have spent a great deal of time preparing for the occasion. All too often they have had to deal with vapid media creatures whose first question is “Tell me, what's your book about?” and who then parrot a list of questions the publisher's publicity people have provided in a press kit accompanying the volume. Some of these authors are almost embarrassingly grateful that an interviewer actually would take the time to read their latest work, and they are more than forthcoming with their answers to my questions.

Years ago, for instance, I talked with William Styron just before his novel
Sophie's Choice
arrived in the bookstores. When he ushered me into the living room of his Connecticut home, he seemed chilly and suspicious, as if a deaf writer interviewing an author was an outlandish
People
magazine notion, like photographing him in his bathtub. By then I had hit upon the gambit of devoting my very first question to some obscure point in the book, to demonstrate to the author right at the beginning that I'd done my homework. I don't recall exactly what the question was, but it had to do with his intention in creating a minor character who made a brief appearance in a single chapter.

Styron slapped his leg in delight and a broad smile appeared on his face. He hunkered forward and gave me two hours instead of the customary sixty minutes, and it was one of the best interviews I have ever had. If he had any suspicions or reservations about my deafness from that point on, he never showed them.

Just once did my deafness call into question the success of an interview, but the result was happy. I asked Bernard Malamud, who was preparing to publish his novel
Dubin's Lives
, if he would mind if I taped an interview with him. He wrote back to say that he indeed would mind. Some novelists, especially those with one eye on posterity, have less faith in the spoken word than the written one and worry about the existence of tapes containing imprecise oral statements that might compete with their carefully considered prose. They prefer their obiter dicta to be their own, not filtered through the prose of journalists. Malamud was such a novelist.

But when I explained the situation and proposed that I destroy the tape and the transcript after the interview appeared in print, Malamud agreed. Perhaps because our negotiations had made him wonder just how successful this enterprise was going to be, he seemed quiet and reserved for the first half hour of our interview, but eventually the chill burned off and we had a true conversation, not just a simple question-and-answer session, the kind that makes a literary profile exceptional. That was because he turned out to be easy to lipread.

If the authors are difficult for me to understand—and fortunately, there aren't many of them—our talks don't take on a conversational life. More than once an interview has ended without my understanding a single word the interviewee said. The transcript reveals controversial statements not questioned, promising avenues not taken. Generally, however, there's enough material for a publishable piece, and most writers, when asked, will give me their phone numbers in case I need to call them to fill in the gaps.

Edward Abbey was such a writer. When the late author of
The Monkey Wrench Gang
and
Desert Solitaire
sat across a table from me one morning in a Tucson hotel, I could not for the life of me understand one word he said. He spoke with considerable expression but deep from the back of his throat, with very little lip movement. I think he knew I was working
in the dark, and he made up for it by playing to the tape recorder, rattling off amusing and outrageous answers to my questions as well as thoughtful and considered replies. Sure, he said after the interview, I could call him later if needed. It wasn't necessary. Fortunately I'd asked the right questions and he'd given back highly quotable answers.

This sort of solicitude is not necessarily indicative of a caring character who wants to help out a handicapped journalist. Writers who appreciate the value of publicity know that eager cooperation helps sell their books, and they'll work hard to make the interview a success. On the other hand, a lack of concern can be revealing.

One such interview was with Anthony Burgess, the British novelist. He was in Chicago on a publicity tour for a new novel, and we met along with Debby and his publisher's publicist in a downtown restaurant. He spent much of the interview gazing boredly out the window, offering desultory answers to my questions. A couple of times the publicist had to elbow him sharply to pay attention to me. I don't know whether he couldn't handle my deafness, as some people cannot, or he was simply tired and bored with the long, a-new-city-a-day publicity tour American publishers require of their authors. Whatever the truth, the result was one of the shortest and least inspiring pieces I've ever done on a major writer.

Burgess's countryman Eric Ambler, the spy novelist, turned out to be a wholly different sort of Englishman. He, too, was doing a long, grueling tour (one he would discuss with considerable distaste in his memoirs) for a new espionage tale. I met him with a photographer in his hotel room and immediately got off to a bad start. Instead of lurking in the background, the photographer, an aggressive young man with a street-punk demeanor, climbed all over Ambler, who was trying to listen carefully to the first question from his interviewer, who had a peculiar way of speaking. Suddenly the photographer rapped Ambler sharply in the leg with a lighting tripod. “See here!” the Englishman said severely. “I won't have this! You wait outside and come back after we're done talking!

“We've blown it,” I thought. But Ambler, ever the professional, had agreed to do a publicity tour, and by God he was going to make it a success no matter how difficult his interlocutors. He sat back down and in forty-five minutes gave me one of the liveliest, most readable interviews I've ever had. And a year or so later the punky young photographer, Anthony
Suau, moved on to the Denver Post, where he redeemed himself with a Pulitzer Prize.

In small ways my deafness sometimes reveals interesting bits of character about the authors I encounter. Early on, I tried taping luncheon interviews, only to discover that the background noise, of which I was unaware, often nearly obliterated everything that was said. One talk I had with the illustrator Maurice Sendak in a Manhattan restaurant was very nearly ruined by the waiters' clattering of cutlery and china on nearby tables, and only Debby's careful listening as she constantly wound and rewound the tape saved the piece.

But when my interview subjects are journalists or former journalists, they often anticipate such problems. Tom Wolfe insisted that we talk about his book
The Right Stuff
at lunch, and when I hesitated said, “Trust me.” We ate at his favorite Italian restaurant in New York City, an establishment jutting out on the sidewalk that featured tiny private cubicles just large enough for a table for four, with a door that could be shut to seal out waiterly noises. The meal was excellent, the interview splendid, and the tape crystal clear.