Alex French: Can you tell me a little bit about your background?

Philip Gourevitch: I graduated from Cornell in ‘86. I was originally in the class of ’83, but I took three years off along the way because I had this idea that I wanted to become a writer, and I figured I ought to determine if I would write on my own. I did. I was only writing fiction at that point. It had never occurred to me to write nonfiction, probably because I hadn’t read much of it that sparked my imagination the way short stories and novels did. After college, I settled in New York, and eventually I got an MFA in fiction at at Columbia. While I was there, I ended up becoming the nonfiction editor of The Columbia Journal, largely because it struck me that for writers who are still developing their chops and finding their voices nonfiction can offer a much more concrete foundation than unfettered imagination, and I enjoyed working with writers whose work was firmly grounded in an external, objective reality.

By then I’d published four or five short stories in quarterlies, and I’d started reviewing books for newspapers, including the Forward newspaper, which was just then – in 1991 – getting started as an English language Jewish weekly after nearly a century as a Yiddish paper. In my last semester at Columbia, I stopped by the Forward to edit a book review. The editor of the Forward, Seth Lipsky, happened to be looking for a new New York bureau chief. I told him I had no experience as a reporter, and he said, "Good – no bad habits." He asked me what kind of yearly salary I was looking for. I named a number, and he said, "I’ll give you five thousand more than that," which tells you not that I was a valuable commodity but that I knew nothing of the business and had sold myself ridiculously cheap. (Later I learned the guy who had the job before me had been working half-time, and earning half again as much as I did.)

So I became a weekly newspaper guy. I reported and wrote three stories – about 2,500 words altogether – each week. Once I got used to that, I wanted to write at greater lengths, and started doing freelance magazine work. I wrote a couple pieces for Commentary – on the Crown Heights Riots and Leonard Jeffries, the anti-semitic, black-supremacist professor at City College -- and my first piece for a mass circulation publication was a profile for the New York Times Magazine of the film maker Errol Morris, who made The Thin Blue Line, A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, and most recently Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. Later on I developed some writings I’d been working on at the Forward into a critical essay for Harper’s about the Holocaust Museum in Washington, which was the first piece that really got discussed and remembered. After a year and a half as New York bureau chief, and a year and a half as cultural editor, I left the Forward to be a fulltime freelancer, and I wrote for a number of magazines before fetching up at The New Yorker.

AF: Would you say then that your move from fiction to nonfiction writing was a career move?

PG: I’d say it was a happy accident. I don’t think of writing as a career in the sense that there’s a coherent job track that one can follow. Writing is a craft; if you’re lucky it’s a calling, and if you’re really lucky you may not have to have some other career to support the habit. But I never thought of myself as moving from fiction to nonfiction. I just thought of nonfiction as a way to expand my range, and I continued writing fiction, and continued publishing it, especially at first.

AF: If someone who had never read a word of your writing asked me ‘What does Philip Gourevitch write about?’ I think that I would say that you write about conflict. It seems to be a common thread throughout your writing – whether it be Jean-Marie Le Pen and the French Nationalist front, the Rwandan Genocide, the war in the Congo, a student protest at Harvard, the murder of Frankie Koehler. Where does this fascination with conflict – if it is in fact conflict – come from?

PG: Conflict is too broad a word. All writers are interested in conflict. I’m more interested in the issues at stake in a conflict than in the conflict itself, and my interests are quite broad ranging. I write about all sorts of things, and that’s important to me: I’m not restricted to a particular beat, and I don’t like to do the same thing twice. But of course there are themes and concerns that keep cropping up in my work.

I guess I like to look at things that might normally make me prefer to look away, but which in fact I feel more uncomfortable ignoring. So, with Rwanda, the challenge was to take this terrifying slaughter that people often spoke of as unthinkable, unspeakable, and unimaginable, and to figure out a way to imagine it, think about it, and speak about it clearly, carefully, and with respect for its complexity. I’m very wary of the journalistic urge to explain by simplification, by reducing everything to its most basic elements, because there are some stories you can only understand by respecting their complexity. That means getting inside of the stories, prowling around and pushing against the places that most invite one to ignore them. Being ignored is precisely what the people who inflict great suffering hope for, and I don’t like to see such people getting what they want.

I suppose you could also say that I like stories that have interest in villains. With Jean-Marie Le Pen and the French National Front (New Yorker April 28, 1997) you have this modern day European fascist, and what was interesting to me was not to say simply, 'Oh what a nasty, creepy man,' but rather to say, 'What’s going on that a guy who has such gross, discredited and destructive ideas is winning a sizable vote in large parts of France?' At least thirty percent of the French electorate has, at one time or another, voted for the National Front, a party that is pretty plainly Hitlerian. So what’s that about? Well, guess what? Le Pen is not simply repellant – he’s an eloquent orator, whose speaking style is admired even by French intellectuals who are appalled by what he says. He’s not just a reactionary, but a populist reactionary, and he has a kind of roguish, contrarian candor and even a charm. That interested me. It’s interesting to go to such a man and say, ‘Ok, charm me.’ I’m pretty immune to Le Pen’s charms, but the only way to represent him accurately is to show his charms, to show his humor—even if his humor is gross—and to think, ‘Well, yeah, I can see how this would appeal to somebody.’ That’s his danger, and it’s interesting to grapple with and write about precisely because it’s not simple.

A villain who is simply villainous is, frankly, fairly boring, and is not likely to be anywhere near as successful in his villainy as a villain who is seductive and cunning, and part of whose wickedness is that he presents himself as a good guy. Satan in red, with horns and tail and a trident, is a one-liner, but sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace. Then you’ve got something to work with. So, while I’ve also grappled a lot with writing about people who aren’t bad at all, who are often very much on the side of the right and the good, bad guys tend to keep cropping up pretty prominently in my stories.

AF: Frankie Koehler?

PG: Frankie Koehler – the murderer in A Cold Case – for sure. He, too, had a kind of sinister charm, and not only sinister, just plain old roguish charm. And he had another key quality of a good villain – or of a good character in general: he’s self-dramatizing. I like self-dramatizing characters, and in the case of villains that tends to mean self-deceiving. Unraveling the mechanisms of a character’s self-deception – if it’s on a grand, murderous scale – tends to make for quite absorbing moral drama. Even in Rwanda, the villains had many dimensions: they were unambiguously bad guys, but they didn’t think of themselves that way, and their self-deceptions were often fairly sophisticated and complex. They weren’t career villains, either: you had schoolteachers and priests who became mass murderers almost overnight, and the president of the genocidal regime was a pediatrician, of all things, a man who’d taken the Hippocratic oath presiding over the extermination of an entire people.

AF: How do you approach an interview with somebody like that? You interviewed that ex-president in exile. And Jean-Marie Le Pen is not a fugitive criminal against humanity, but he has done and said morally and politically outrageous things. How difficult is to be fair in your questioning?

PG: Being fair isn’t hard. What’s fair? To let the guy present himself as fully as possible in his own terms. If, in doing so, he basically spews out a length of verbal rope with which I’m going to hang him – that’s not unfair. In fact, I believe that fairness requires me not be to neutral in the face of such a person, but rather to be objective – and objectivity means absorbing the facts and making a judgment. It’s not fair to my readers to be neutral about genocide. In fact it’s indefensible to straddle the fence in the face of such a crime. I read stories that say on the one hand the perpetrators say this, and on the other hand the victims say that, as if this is the fair way to present a conflict. But it’s doing a disservice to the truth to be morally ambiguous about something that’s unambiguous.

It was funny, you know: the Rwandan genocidal president in exile, Theodore Sindikubwabo, gave me a long lecture about journalistic neutrality. I’d asked him a bunch of tough questions about specific massacres he’d been instrumental in orchestrating, and he lied through his teeth for a while, then he began telling me that in the name of journalistic fairness I had to give his word equal weight to that of his accusers. He walked me out to my car at the end of the interview, telling me that the notion that there was a genocide in Rwanda was just a fabrication of his enemies. It was pure propaganda. Pure nonsense. After an hour listening to his lies my head hurt, and I just wanted to get away. And he stood at his gate, admonishing me, "You are a journalist, and by profession you must be scientifically objective." I said, "Yes, sure, and sometimes that means saying that objectively so-and-so is a mass murderer." Apparently, he hadn’t thought of that.

So it’s as easy to be fair to a villain as it is to a hero – although, by the way, heroes are often the more ambiguous class of humanity. Nobody I’ve written about has ever denied saying what I reported he said. Le Pen made an absurd quip during my interview with him: "What do I have to do to prove that I’m not a racist – marry a black? With AIDS?" This got picked up in the French press, who jumped all over him for it, and Le Pen wrote a letter to my editor saying he was worried that I’d missed the nuance in his remark. He claims that he’d said, "un noir," meaning a black man – not a black woman – and that this made his remark funny to French people, whereas he feared that in my rendition the subtlety of the humor might be lost. Well, this was a totally bizarre complaint. He wasn’t denying the remark’s offensive outrageousness, he was amplifying it. And his letter was very cordial. The piece had made him out to be just what he is – a nasty piece of work – and he was essentially agreeing with the portrait entirely, save for this absurd semantic quibble. So he certainly felt fairly treated. Perhaps that should bother me, but so be it – after all, we have different audiences.

AF: You spoke earlier of being a writer as a calling, and also an impulse not to allow people to turn their heads away from things that may make them feel uncomfortable.

PG: People can do what they want. I was saying only that I try not to let myself turn away from too much.

AF: Well, it seems to me that whether or not you want to be, you’ve placed yourself into the position that you’re going to be labeled a moral witness. I think it’s probably even a phrase that’s used on the back cover of We Wish to Inform You...

PG: Is it? Maybe – but it’s not my phrase. Why speak of moral witness instead of just reporting or observation and representation? I think the term "moral witness" was probably coined to elevate writing about events of extreme gravity, and it speaks of the weight of the events as well as the attitude of the observer/writer in attempting to come to terms with them. But it can also suggest someone who moralizes, and I hope I’m not a moralizer. I don’t think there’s any need to preach over the stories I tell.

AF: Are you in some sense, without being prescriptive or didactic, taking on the responsibility of showing readers your perception of reality?

PG: I’d like to think that I represent things as I see them, and I’d like to think that how I see them is as close as I can get to how they are. In order to see how things are, one has to be open and prepared to see things that one doesn’t expect, that one doesn’t understand, that are confusing, that don’t fit one’s preconceptions and wishes and dispositions. But although I do, of course, think about how I represent reality, beyond adhering to a firm belief that writing nonfiction means not making things up, I try not to bind myself up with theories or rules about it because I tend to think of rules as restrictive. I mean, I’ve come across people debating whether humor has any place in the representation of genocide. That’s a theoretical literary question – but it’s not very interesting in the abstract. If the humor works, your answer is yes, if not, it was obviously a very bad and tasteless idea.

AF: There is a degree of absurdity in the subject.

PG: Yes. Extremity and absurdity keep very close company, so if you’re going to write about the extreme it helps to have a solidly developed sense of the absurd.

AF: How would you say that you developed this sense of the absurd? Is it something innate, or is it a sensitivity to perspective that can be cultivated?

PG: I don’t know. I never thought about it. Where does the sense of the absurd come from? From observing and reading about the world. Isn’t that appropriate? Absurdity is only meaningful and effective if it’s true.

AF: Absolutely. In that sense I’ve always been interested in the character of Odette (from We Wish to Inform You...) and this instance towards the beginning of the book when she is recounting Rwanda’s genocidal history she stops and digresses into a story about a medical professor who makes a sexual advance on her. For me that was the moment where I was able to make the connection between the life that I live in United States and the reality that existed throughout the 20th-century for people in Rwanda. What I mean is, Odette, for me, was the person that allowed me to wrap my mind around Rwandans as people and not simply victims and génocidaires. What effect did that instance have on you?

PG: You know, at the moment Odette told me that story about the professor patting her butt, she didn’t make much of it, and it didn’t really strike me. But later, going over my notes of the interview it jumped out at me as an odd moment. My first impulse was to ignore it as a minor digression – it doesn’t advance the larger story, it tells us nothing obvious. But then I thought, No, pay attention to it and draw attention to it and say, 'Look here’s a woman who is speaking as a genocide survivor to a reporter, and the way that she is telling her life is going to be limited by that, but here for a moment she broke that mold and just started drifting off into an anecdote about this peculiar little moment of sexual tension and awakening and harassment.' That was probably an upsetting event at the time – a professor making a pass at her – but in the context of the genocide it’s sort of reduced to an odd little bump on the road. Odette wasn’t trying to make a point by it, but to me it made the crucial point that there is so much of life in so-called normal times that might be a big deal but which shrinks in the perspective of ultimate events. I felt that it was worth reminding myself and my readers of that, and of talking about how these two levels of experience co-exist side-by-side in a person’s sense of herself.

AF: In the opening paragraphs of your critique of the Holocaust Museum that was published in Harpers you discuss how – on a subconscious level, without really having a firm grasp of the Holocaust – your life was shaped by the experience of the Holocaust through your parents’ and grandparents’ escape from Nazism . . .

PG: As refugees, yes. I didn’t grow up steeped in Holocaust stories, but some sense of this event happening in Europe that caused flight – yeah, that was always there. As a kid, growing up in New England, I had a recurring dream of horrific destruction, and we were fleeing, and the basic title of this dream, the underlying notion, was, "The Nazis are coming." So there was this sense of a powerful part of my inheritance that came from somewhere else in the world, as would I suppose be the case with many people in this country. And this sense of my family’s legacy has definitely informed my interest in refugee issues, and in the recurrence of genocide half a century after the slaughter of European Jewry. But to the extent that I’ve alluded to this family background in my writing, I’ve always done so briefly, as an acknowledgment of a formative point of reference.

AF: I want to talk to you about Primo Levi’s essay in The Drowned and the Saved, where he talks about a fifth grader. After giving a lecture about his captivity at Auschwitz, this young boy pulled Levi aside, diagramed potential escape routes on the chalk board and said, ‘If this should happen to you again, do as I have told you and you will get away.'

PG: Yes, listening to this child, Levi realizes how unreal his experience in the camp must remain to those who weren’t there, because if the child was so optimistically imagining, ‘Well look, hey man, you should have escaped,’ then that child hasn’t understood that escape was not a possibility. And that means he doesn’t understand the true nature of imprisonment. Levi tells this story to express a kind of deep despair at the difficulty of communicating such ultimate conditions accurately.

AF: Levi attributes this sense of misunderstanding to an imaginative gap created by approximative books, films, and myths. In what sense is your work geared to bridge that gap?

PG: I think about that every time I sit down to write. I don’t expect that everybody is going to understand my work the way it was intended, or that people are going to want to know what I have to say. There is a resistance to this knowledge of extremity, and I think that resistance makes sense. But I have had very good readers, who are as keen and wise as you could ever hope for, and I have had readers who are frustrating in the way that that fifth grade boy is. Of course, Levi is a special case. He often said that one of the things that kept him alive in Auschwitz was a desire to tell the world what it was like there. So for him to feel that the world doesn’t really grasp or believe what he has to tell must have been devastating. When he spoke of approximative representations that have distorted people’s understandings of the hell he experienced – well, yes, sure, to some extent if one is writing about events that others have written about inadequately one can feel a need to set the record straight.

AF: It seems to me that one of the major issues that you struggle with in both of your books is the question of what allows one person to kill another. Have you come to any conclusions?

PG: In fact, I don’t really try to understand why people kill. I do sometimes explore how killers understand killing, although their explanations may or may not be convincing. But, basically, murder is not that extraordinary – it’s a constant human possibility, and I think a lot of people don’t feel that far from it. I don’t in any way want to say ‘Oh well, we’re all sort of murderers at heart, so whatever.’ That’s not how I look at the world. I think that when you become a murderer, you cross the line; you forfeit your place amongst the rest of the people who aren’t murderers. But, in reality, we live with a lot of them, and I’m much more interested in how we live with them than in being shocked that we do.

AF: I’ve always wondered how do you prepare yourself to go into a place like Rwanda? On the other end I’ve also wondered how does spending time in a place like that change a person? How does it change the way you view the world?

PG: I didn’t spend a lot of time preparing. The opportunity arose to go to Rwanda for The New Yorker, and the next week I was on a plane. I’ve never been able to say how it changed me. I’m sure it did, but the fact is I went to Rwanda with a pretty pessimistic view of history, and I came out with that view largely confirmed. But I also came back with a much deeper appreciation of, and gratitude for, the great good luck I’ve had to live in a time and place where I’ve been spared such historical calamity and violence and upheaval. Contemplating the worst of human possibilities can be a shock to the system, and it can also make one much more careful to count one’s blessings, and seek to protect and defend them.

AF: What is the process that you go through in picking and writing about a subject?

PG: That’s a little mysterious even to me, and that mystery is part of a story’s appeal. I’m drawn to stories that I don’t entirely understand at the outset, stories that perplex me. I report them intensively, gathering as much material as I can, until I sit down to write – and each time, both in the reporting and the writing, I find myself stuck at the outset, wondering, 'How the hell did I ever get the notion that I know how to do this?' Eventually, I trust that I’ll figure out how to do it, according to the demands of the material. But the starting point is always the same: 'Oh no, I don’t know the first thing about how to do this.' And it’s true. I don’t. I’ve never done it before, because this is a new piece.

Alex French is a writer living in New York. His work has appeared in Men's Journal, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, Slackfaith.com, the fourth coming edition of City Secrets: New York. He is the Nonfiction editor of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. He is currently working on his first book.