I interviewed Tom Rachman, author of the fantastic The Imperfectionists, in advance of his Politics and Prose reading on January 7th.   He was thoughtful, kind, terribly intelligent, and indulgent– I loved talking to him. He spoke to me for about 15 minutes, but because he’s an erudite Canadian/Englishman, he speaks in almost full paragraphs, carefully considered words that are not meant to be cut apart and re-contextualized. This means that though he’s fascinating to listen to, I knew it was going to be hard to cut the interview into nibbly Washington Post Express bits.  So when it came time to turn in my piece, it meant some nasty cutting.  I was supposed to get to 350 words, and I got to 600 before I realized that THIS IS WHAT EDITORS ARE FOR, and I just passed the buck rather than Deborah Solomaning the hell out of it.  But of course when I saw it I was disappointed, because I knew how much MORE had been said.  So here it is, all 4 of my readers, the whole thing, the whole shebango, Tom Rachman uncut (with the Express lede intact):

I think that writing is certainly a more solitary pursuit than working in an office.  And for the millions of people who do work in an office or have done, we all know that they offer just as many frustrations as they do charms. There is, however, the social element of it, which is always a pleasure.  Or can be a pleasure.  The tough part is being compelled to be with people you might otherwise not choose to spend your time with.  On the other hand, you also find yourself among characters you might not otherwise find yourself, and that can be extremely agreeable.  When you’re just writing fiction, or writing on your own as I do, then yeah, you spend a great deal more time just with your thoughts.  When I was working as an editor at The International Herald Tribune in Paris, the way I was working at that point was that I would do about 6 months of working there full time and then I’d save my earnings and go and write.  So I did have some experience before I left journalism of that sort of lifestyle.  And while it is different, I do enjoy it.  I like the ability to pursue my own thoughts at length and indulge in the reading I want to do and need to do and organize my days according to the work I want to accomplish rather than according to the work my superior needs me to accomplish that day.  So it has its advantages and disadvantages.

The book gets to both the romantic idea of the foreign correspondent’s life– the drinking in Venice, the wandering in Paris and Rome– and the banal, day-to-day realities of any working environment. Did the pull of that romantic notion have any influence on your decision to become a foreign correspondent, and how soon did you see through that?

My initial intent in entering journalism was to gain experience for fiction I eventually hoped to write.  I was in journalism for approximately ten years, and during that period I was often caught up in the more particular motivations of wanting to do a story or get a particular posting, and amid all that there’s no question that I was drawn in by the hope that journalism would be a really creative, exciting, thrilling and exotic environment.  And in some ways it absolutely was; in other ways it really wasn’t what I expected.  The romanticized notion of the business I think is a combination of something that in a certain form did exist in the distant past that doesn’t exist anymore, and on the other hand something that was always a bit of a romantic notion of the business.  I think that it was pretty early on that I realized it wasn’t going to be quite as I had expected; it wasn’t likely to be like All the Presidents Men, or The Front Page, or the other classic films about what it’s like in the press.

So you didn’t relate personally to the Hemingway experience; the hard drinking, carousing international reporter?

One thing that declined, at least in American journalism, was drinking.  There was a lot less of it when I entered the business in the late-90’s.  It that point it was much more of a profession- most of the journalists had gone to journalism school, had been trained in journalistic ethics or other notions.  If you had gone back 50 or 60 years, it was more often a hodge-podge of characters who had come from all sorts of backgrounds, often with no particular kind of training, and were often just sort of flung into the pit of night cop reporting and the hazing that other journalists, almost entirely men in those days, gave them, in a very kind of macho, heavy-drinking attitude.  And it certainly wasn’t that world that I entered, and obviously in many respects it was better than that world.  It wasn’t very much like the Hemingway experience, no.

You have some characters– like the 70-year-old struggling freelancer Lloyd– who are really unmoored and lost in this new world.

In his case, it’s a variety of factors: it‘s partly that the work world has changed significantly, but it also had something to do with age.  To be a reporter, as you get older, gets tougher and tougher.  There are some people who go on into their 70’s or 80’s, and continue to perform at a very high level.  But it requires an awful lot of energy and the ability and willingness to hop on a plane at a moment’s notice, to get a call in the middle of the night being told to run across the country if necessary, and to deal with a completely irregular and punishing schedule.  Also, there’s an intense competition that tends to be the terrain of slightly younger people.  You do see that there’s a more common progression from reporter to, in middle age, the editing side, because they’re just sort of tired of the exhaustion of reporting.  In addition to the present day context that Lloyd is struggling with, there’s the fact that he still, even in his personal pife, up until that point, has been clinging to the young person he was and that he no longer is.

Then you have Arthur, who though he’s younger, still doesn’t want to leave his family to go interview a woman two countries away for her own obit.  That was such a vividly drawn scene.  Did you draw on any personal experience for that scene?

I have written some obituaries; just because when I was a reporter for the AP, you tended to do a bit of everything.  So there aren’t many journalism pieces I haven’t written.  Obituaturies were often among my favorite to write because they have elements that no other news story have, which is that they’re the story of an entire life.  A story from start to finish with a proper conclusion that almost no normal news story has.  A news story is usually ongoing with a next step.  In an obituary, it’s a completed story of a person’s life in its entirety, and i always found that fascinating, and a way to recognize the full breadth of a person when viewed within its start and conclusion.  So I aways had a particular affection for reading and writing obits.
There was no personal experience that that scene was based on: a character came to mind and I used that scene to discuss many of the issues, both within that story and within the book at large: issues like ambition, and death and the way things fade in life, and all those are discussed quite directly in that chapter.  The character, Ertzberger, was a great one to be able to use in that way, because she’s an intellectual with decades of thought and discussion behind her, but in the situation arthur finds her in, she’s aging, unwell, in a sort of forced state of isolation, because she is a rather difficult woman, and she’s not terribly likable, and as a result she has a mind that’s still fizzing with ideas but has very few outlets.  So when he arrives there there’s a great opportunity to talk about her thoughts and all that she’s been battling and striving for over the decades that have now been coming a fairly rapid end.  She has the prospect now, of looking back on it all, almost as an obituary writer could, because of course, she’s aware that’s what he’s there for.  It ended up a very rich scene for discussing some of the ideas central to the book.

You did that really well, because intellectual dialogue can often sound rather stilted, just as it does, I suppose sometimes in real life?

Yes, it was actually quite tricky for exactly that reason.  Because on the one hand you want to convey all sorts of thoughts.  But the thing is that in regular conversation, people don’t typically speak in a particularly intellectual way.  They might have ideas, but they’re guarded and hidden behind other claims and statements, and people tend to be uncomfortable talking directly about intellectual things.  Very few people ever do.  To get into fascinating, even philosophical issues like that and make it seem like dialogue is tricky, so I’m glad to hear it came off.

I know you admire George Orwell, who was also both journalist abroad and fiction writer.  What did you take from how he approached fiction and/or nonfiction writing?

I think the process of the two is quite different.  The journalism I did was predominantly daily news with deadlines, so it’s a very different experience from having a long period to work over a piece of fiction.  On the other hand, there are certain principles of writing that do translate quite well, and I would say there’s almost nobody whose principles of clear writing are better than Orwell’s.  The training of having been a journalist, of having worked with words for thousands of hours over the years, is an extraordinarily useful experience for a fiction writer, and I think that in past decades it was pretty much common if not standard.   The old style of the Hemingways or the Orwells and Graham Greene and others who thought, ‘I want to become a writer’ as a broad term, which meant eventually writing fiction and doing nonfiction and the whole thing.  Today you have journalism schools and creative writing programs and often there’s a sense that there’s a very strong distinction, that they’re almost separate professions, and they usually are dealt with that way.  I think perhaps because some of my idols were people like Orwell, I was looking to a model that was outdated, and that was why I pursued journalism.