David Remnick: a man of two hats and many interests
To judge how adroitly David Remnick wears two demanding hats -- editing one of the country's leading magazines while sustaining a writing career -- consider the fact that most of the 23 lengthy pieces in his new collection, ''Reporting," were written after he became editor of The New Yorker in 1998.
More duality: His interests are both journalistic and literary, as ''Reporting" makes clear with absorbing profiles of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Havel, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Katharine Graham, Amos Oz, Natan Sharansky, Vladimir Putin, Al Gore, Tony Blair,, Larry Holmes, and Mike Tyson. But life inside the ring has lost its allure for Remnick, the author of a biography of Muhammad Ali. ''I frankly don't care if I never write another boxing piece in my life," he says. ''It's not just a guilty pleasure; it's a very guilty pleasure. The boxers I know, they never come out of it undamaged."
Remnick will take part in an interview Thursday onstage at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge with Tom Ashbrook, host of WBUR-FM's ''On Point." The event, sponsored by Harvard Bookstore, will be followed by a question-and-answer session with the audience. He recently spoke with the Globe about his work.
Q: Since many of your subjects are well known, what did you set out to discover about them? Was there a fundamental question in each case you wanted to answer about them or a dimension of them you wanted to capture?
A: There's the reality and the fantasy. But you start out hoping to get past as many levels of press secretaries and public relations people as you can, and all the stock answers that people have in their holsters. You usually can only accomplish that by hanging around for a while and, if that's not possible, by catching people not at the moment of their most intense activity. For example, I thought I did pretty well by catching Al Gore quite a while after the election but before his reemergence with his movie. He had begun to fight a kind of wilderness campaign against Bush. The same with Solzhenitsyn. It's a very different thing to interview him while he was in the Soviet Union and a dissident and was limited in what he could say. But while he was living in Cavendish, Vt., he had all these things he wanted to say to the world -- happily, through me.
Q: Do habits of mind from your writing flow to your editing, and vice versa?
A: It does help me in the long run as an editor to get out and see things and hear things. I love doing it. I love editing this magazine, but I also love indulging the passion for filling your bucket -- in other words, reporting -- learning something new, and then figuring out how to make a story of it, so it is not just a leaden ball of quotations but something that the reader can see and hear and that may bring the reader to a remote place in a way that a CNN or some of the faster forms of journalism can't.
Q: Your editorship of The New Yorker has overlapped with the Bush era. It's a presidency that has obviously shaped political humor, with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert rising to stardom. How have the Bush years shaped The New Yorker?
A: I do think there's more overtly political humor in the magazine in the last several years than there might've been in any similar period. The tradition of the cartoons has been to go at politics more obliquely, but we've had covers that have been more overt, with Cheney or Rumsfeld or Condi Rice. After Katrina, you had the Oval Office where everyone was hip deep in water. After the Cheney shooting, you had a kind of ''Brokeback Mountain" cover. But I don't want to turn The New Yorker into an opinion magazine in disguise.
Q: As a writer, you show a great deal of interest in the working methods of your subjects. What is your own working method?
A: I do a lot of reading. Before going to London to interview Tony Blair, I'll have read half a dozen books -- on New Labour, on Gladstone -- and I'll do some phoning around, though not the kind that will scare the subject and make him think, ''Aha, here comes the missile." You spend as much time as you can in as many different circumstances as you can. You want something to look at, you want people in movement doing what they do. With Blair, for example, watching him humbling himself in a campaign and watching him being interviewed by two [wiseacre] 10-year-olds is not only comedic, it also tells you something about running for prime minister.
Q: You seem dubious about the phrase ''clash of civilizations" with respect to the West and the Muslim world, but there are times when that is what seems to be happening. Do you see a way out of this confrontation?
A: Not a quick way. Even though I was very much sickened by Saddam's regime and was unfortunately led to believe that all the WMD information was true, I don't think we've exactly acquitted ourselves well since the beginning of that invasion, on the level of competence at the Pentagon, or on a moral basis, with Abu Ghraib. I am not hammering men and women in uniform -- quite the opposite -- but I think we've been rather badly, maybe even disastrously, led, in so many ways. . . . We can make fun of various speeches and amuse ourselves with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who I think are really funny, but it doesn't ease the anxiety that this presidency has in excess of 2 1/2 years to go, and, as others have noted, that's as long as the entire Kennedy presidency.
Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com. 
