My Life in Italy: Tales about Shirley Hazard, Peter Robb, Morris West, Doris Lessing and others – Desmond O’Grady

Melbourne born Desmond O’Grady has lived in Italy for decades where he worked as the Rome correspondent for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. His many books include   Dinny Going Down and his most recent A Word in Edgeways which records his experiences over decades among some of the great literati – close encounters with writers such as Saul Bellow, Tennessee Williams, Shirley Hazzard, Jorge Luis Borges, Tobias Wolf, Doris Lessing and Niccolò Ammaniti, filmmaker Sergio Leone, photographer Oliviero Toscani and painter Jeffrey Smart. On a visit to Sydney on Tuesday 25 May 2010, Desmond O’Grady  addressed The Sydney Institute to talk about his new book.

MY LIFE IN ITALY: TALES ABOUT SHIRLEY HAZARD, PETER ROBB, MORRIS WEST, DORIS LESSING AND OTHERS

DESMOND O’GRADY

Well the title of the talk makes it sound as if I am living among the pros – those who make a full time living out of creative work, either as writers or as artists of various forms.  This is not the case – I did not live with the likes of Doris Lessing or Shirley Hazzard, but simply interview them on occasion, or write essays about them if I find them interesting enough.

A sub theme of A Word in Edgeways is the shifting relations between the oral, the written and the visual. In these years, the written word is finding very stiff competition from the visual, but writing still has great resources. For that reason I pursue writers, either through their writings, or by visiting their houses, such as with Dostoyevsky and James Joyce. I am particularly interested in those who feel impelled to tell the truth, as in the case of Vaclav Havel, the Czechoslovakian writer who said that he felt impelled to live in truth. But this extends beyond communism. This necessity to tell the truth was also felt particularly by Azar Nafisi, the woman who wrote Reading Lolita in Tehran, and who found that the regime regarded even Henry James as a subversive writer because he taught people that he had an interior life.

But someone who apparently felt less compelled to tell the truth was Peter Robb when he wrote Midnight in Sicily, which is centered on the trials of the seven-times prime minister of Italy, Giulio Andreotti, for alleged collusion with the Mafia. My objection to Robb is that he presents the case for the prosecution, and acknowledges his Italian sources, but doesn’t give the reader any idea that there was a contrary case for Andreotti. It was a hatchet job. If matters were as Robb presented them, it would be inexplicable that Andreotti was not condemned to prison. Yet this book won prizes in Australia as non-fiction.

The first part of my book is essays on various people. The second part concerns interviews, my interviews with various people. I have an attitude to interviews and am rather worried about many aspects of journalism such as the use of phone and email interviews. The trap with things phoned is pretty obvious: they can be completely garbled, as was illustrated on the death of Pope John Paul II. There were some reports that as he was lying in state, there was a part of a bird’s anatomy beside him – a crow’s ear – when in fact it is pretty obvious that what was telephoned in was not a “crow’s ear”, but a crosier. That story went around the world, of the Pope lying beside a crow’s ear.

Emails are even worse, and some interviews now are done entirely by email, so that the questions are sent off and the answers are received but there is no interplay. You do not know if you are getting an answer from the interviewee’s PR outfit or psychiatric nurse, or who it is coming from. My idea of an interview is eye to eye. You see the person and this at least gives you the chance to view body language as well as verbal language. What you perceive as the person’s psychology gives background and the experience is part of the mix. You let it simmer for some months at a low temperature, and then you serve it up. In this case it is something written, and like a short story it should have a resonance. It is not always possible. You do not report everything verbatim but you do not distort. You give the words but also you give a sense of the person. Often it is telling a story about the interview, it is not just the words.

For instance, when I interviewed Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges he had been brought to Italy by an Italian publisher. I met him at a reception and asked could I do the interview; the publisher did not want me to do the interview for the ABC because he was interested only in having news about Borges in Italy. When I arrived at the hotel, the publisher was standing at the entrance to the hotel. He said Borges was not there but I went in all the same. I talked to some staff and found Borges had gone to have breakfast in tea rooms at the bottom of the Spanish steps. I find that a lot of Borges stories are altogether too cerebral for my taste but we had a very interesting conversation going back up the steps, and one of the things he said was that he would like to be able to write stories like Rudyard Kipling.

Borges also spoke about Keats who had died at a lodging near the Spanish Steps. Borges is blind, so I had to explain the scene for him. I found him very warm and interested in everything, and he quoted a Lord Dunsany poem about Australian soldiers in North Africa, which gave me an excuse to tell him a hoary story which I had from my father. We got back to the hotel where the publisher was pacing up and down. Inside we did the radio interview, which was fine, but the publisher kept opening the door and looking in, to say that’s enough, it’s finished. But as Borges couldn’t see him, he just went on. I put all these things together so that the piece on Borges is not just about what was said in the question and answer in the interview, but the whole event.

When Czeslaw Milosz came to Rome to give a lecture, I found we had a mutual friend, so I was able to make contact and went along to see him at his hotel. He gave an interesting interview.  All the while during the interview he was rubbing something between his thumb and his forefinger which made the exchange difficult, but I got enough out of him and then put in other things from what I knew about him from his past. When I said goodbye, I saw that what he held in his hand for the entire interview was his hearing aid. That provided the punch line.

I interviewed Rebecca West, whom I admire greatly. I took her side against H G Wells. To get an interview, I rang her in London from Rome for almost a year; it was very difficult to convince her. Then I went to London, to the ABC offices, but said they didn’t have a technician to go with me for the interview. I’d never done an interview without a technician. They gave me the contraption anyway, which they said was foolproof.  Off I went off and did the interview. It was a wonderful interview. West talked about Bertie Russell as a snake and her relations with Joseph Conrad and how her father worked in Melbourne, being a newspaper man there. She brought out a painting he had done of the St Kilda foreshore. I went back to the ABC office and said this is great, listen to this. But there was nothing, not a word on the tape. I had not captured a word. And they said, oh sometimes that mic’s a bit faulty. I had to then ring West up and do the whole thing again. It didn’t come out so well.

A friend in Rome told me that Tennessee Williams had converted to Catholicism. This was true, briefly. But he retained his sense of sin all the time. I was told he’d welcome an interview so I rang him up. He was very welcoming and told me to come along at four the next afternoon. When I arrived, his companion who opened the door had obviously not heard of any interview, and he went away and had to parley a bit with Williams. Finally, I was ushered in to a room where Tennessee was prone on the bed. He seemed hostile and was lisping. Beside him on the table was a nearly empty bottle of Cutty Sark. He said he had flu and was taking pills. But Williams also, I knew, had a Doctor Feelgood who supplied him with barbiturates. So with a solid diet of barbiturates, whiskey and anti-flu tablets, he was really stoned.

Williams said “I never give journalists more than ten minutes for an interview.” So I asked him about a novel he’d written on Rome which I had read when I was at university in Melbourne. I got the title slightly wrong and he jumped on me saying, “You haven’t read the novel, you just checked it out for the interview.” To which I replied that if I had looked up the title for the interview I would have had it right. And I added it wasn’t worth waiting the ten minutes for an interview. And I walked out. He jumped up off the bed and said what’s gone wrong.

With the famous, it’s not just what they say but how they engage with an interviewer that makes for a good interview.