Interview

An interview with Ian Jack

by Justin Webster
September 2002

Ian Jack talks to Justin Webster about what Granta publishes, how it functions and what
it believes in—and about being an 'occasional reporter'.

JW: You were a contributor to Granta before you became its editor, and the type of
writing you contributed has become a hallmark of the magazine. In America it
would probably be called 'literary journalism'. What would you call it? And how
would you define it?

IJ: Literary journalism means different things in diferent countries. In Britain, a 'literary
journalist' is a writer of book reviews and essays about literature. The kind of piece you
mean—and I'm glad that you think it one of the hallmarks of the magazine—goes by a
variety of different names here: 'extended reporting', 'narrative reporting', and sometimes
'reportage'—which is just the French for the English 'reporting' of course, but we're
suckers for the idea that using a French word elevates and dignifies the ordinary—and
perhaps very Anglo-Saxon—process of discovery and description. In fact none of these
terms are used much in this office. There is something slightly embarrassing about all of
them. Why say 'narrative' when the simpler word 'story' will do equally well? At Granta,
we talk about 'stories' and 'pieces' as in 'Wouldn't it be good if we could get excellent
writer X to write a piece/a story about interesting situation Y'. A working definition of
such pieces would be (a) they're non-fiction, (b) they tend to be longer than a newspaper
could cope with (c) they're narratives (sorry) not essays, (d) they should illuminate people
or events—not necessarily current events—by description and inquiry (e) they should be
written in a way that will stand the test of time and for an audience that may not be
predisposed to be interested, on the principle that anything can be made interesting so
long as it is written about well enough, which can mean, among other things, 'clearly
enough'. I say the last because many reporters who want to be 'writers' imagine that
writing for Granta means that they have to import all kinds of floridity and tedious vanity
to make their stories into 'literature'.

It's kind of you to mention me as an exponent of such pieces, but their publication at
Granta predates my career here. One of the finest things the magazine has ever published
is James Fenton's 'The Fall of Saigon', which appeared in 1985. One interesting thing
about that is that it was written and published long after Saigon actually fell. So topicality
is not a necessary ingredient for the kind of non-fiction stories we're talking about.

In Spanish, the idea that literature is one thing, and journalism another still goes
largely unquestioned. For example, Mario Vargas Llosa can say, in the new
collection of El Pais's best writing over the last twenty-five years that, after
literature, journalism is the most thrilling occupation he knows. Is 'The FaIl of
Saigon literature'? If it is, what does that mean?

'Literature' is a troublesome word. It suggests an absolute standard of greatness—

excellence throughout the ages: Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Dickens. Tolstoy etc.
But really the only way to define it is as a label that certain kinds of people have stuck on
writing. Recently in Britain, a conceptual artist was asked to define 'art' and he replied
that it was anything that could be displayed in an 'art' gallery. So with 'literature'. Is it
writing in the form of a book? Does the author think of it as 'literature'? Might the
publisher think of it as 'literature'. Might it be taught on a university 'literature' course? If
so, then 'literature' is what it will tend to become. Whether it is any better, more
interesting, more thoughtful, more illuminating, more pleasurable, more pertinent than a
piece labelled 'journalism'—these are good questions.

Until relatively recent times, only the novel, the story, the essay and the poem were
thought of as literary forms. Non-fictional forms such biography, history, travel, science
and reporting lay outside this magical fold, perhaps because 'imagination' didn't play a
big enough part in their creation: 'imagination' and 'fiction' are words that go hand in
hand, as do imagination and invention. But that way of dividing up writing into 'literature'
and 'not literature' isn't sustainable. Take the new Nobel winner, V.S. Naipaul. 'A House
for Mr Biswas' is novel and therefore allowable as literature, even though it depends
largely on the facts of his father's experience. But what about his many great books of
non-fiction? Are his explorations of India and the world of Islam not literature, because
they depend on his reporting of the external world as well as his internal imagination?
And would we discount Orwell's wartime essays as literature simply because they were
written for periodicals—as journalism, if you like, if the definition of that word means
something topical and written for publications less permanent than books?

To go back to your question about Fenton and his piece on Saigon. I don't really care
whether people call it literature or not. It is a very good of writing, and in the end that's
all that counts.

Do you sense that non-fiction writing in English is at an important moment of

development? You mention V.S. Naipaul, who stopped writing novels to write non-
fiction—rather than go the other way, like Tom Wolfe, or George Orwell. Non-
fiction books, which do not fit into the usual categories like Simon Winchester's The
surgeon of Crowthorne now regularly become best sellers. Or is high quality non-
fiction writing as old as Daniel Defoe, and it's just the publishing fashions that
change?

In fact, Naipaul has gone back to fiction again. His last book was a novel—this despite
the fact that he has repeatedly stated that the novel is finished as an important way of
describing the world—that as a form the novel is exhausted, its best work over.
Personally, I don't know if this is
true. The 'death of the novel' is an easy idea to go along with—there are (but there again
there always have been) a great many duds, a great many pieces of dutiful invention
which are about as interesting as a piece of stale cake. On the other hand, the novel has
this persistent habit of rising from the grave. The wonderful thing about fiction is the
freedom it allows. The freedom is still there. It may be that just now not too many people
know what to do with it.

As for a certain kind of non-fiction—let's call it narrative non-fiction—yes, there is a

fashion for it. In the 1980s, thanks in part to Granta, the memoir and the travel account
began to be seen as just as interesting as the novel and perhaps even as 'literature'. Today
I'd say that narrative history and narrative science have joined them—maybe surpassed
them in the amount of interest they create. After Dana Sobel's Longitude every publisher
wanted a small book about a hitherto obscure (but potentially fascinating) subject, and
there have been some very sorry and slapdash results—things with titles like 'A Short
History of the Shoehorn'. I wouldn't know if this kind of writing is at an important
moment of development. I wouldn't have thought so. The real development came when
writers imported many devices of the novel into non-fictional areas such as travel and
autobiography. That has been going on for a very long time, though not to the same
extent as today. Its recent, celebrated and influential exponents include Paul Theroux,
Norman Lewis and the late Bruce Chatwin. You might also include Frank McCourt.

How does advocating such an open-minded approach to writing work when it comes
to being an editor? Does it pose problems when deciding what is, and what is not the
type of writing that Granta publishes?

Granta doesn't have a manifesto, but over the past twenty-two years it has developed a
tradition. Broadly, it favours realism and story-telling, so you might say that it was the
home of the 'realistic narrative'. I realise this is a fairly catch-all definition, which can
include, say, Richard Ford as well as Salman Rushdie as well as somebody you've never
heard of reporting a mining disaster, but it's the best I can do. What we don't publish is
easier to say. One, no poetry (with three exceptions in the past two decades—poems by
Michael Ondaatje, Vikram Seth, and Rushdie). Two, no 'writing about writing', no essays
about literature, no reviews. We do publish documentary photography, however, which
maybe gives a clue as to what we're about. The London Observer said recently of Granta
that it has 'its face pressed firmly against the window, determined to witness the world'.
I'd be happy to settle for that as a definition of purpose.

I get the impression that at the beginning Granta published a smaller number of
writers more often, and that names became associated with Granta—or vice versa—
more closely, names like Raymond Carver, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Bruce Chatwin,
Milan Kundera, for example. Whereas now, it seems, Granta publishes a much
broader spectrum of writers, and goes further afield to look for them. How do you
think Granta has changed?—and how much of this change is due to your own
editing aims, as opposed to Bill Buford's and how much to broader changes in
writing and publishing?
I'd still be delighted to publish any of the names you mention in Granta— those who are
alive that is—and in fact we published a piece by Kapuscinski a couple of issues ago. But
writers move on, and sometimes their relevance lessens. For example, writing from
Eastern Europe had a vitality and interest all through the Cold War; it was in one sense or
another political writing because it was up against a political writing because it was up
against a political system which set firm boundaries around free expression. Since 1989,
that has changed. Rightly or wrongly, people feel they need to know less about the Czech
Republic now than they did in 1982, and writing which was 'oppositional' then is casting
around for something else to do.

I don't know if Bill and myself are all that different in our tastes. One of the main
differences may be that I try to commission more, which has its pitfalls. But generally, I
think and hope the magazine has changed because the world has changed around it.

Going back to the persistent habit of the novel rising from the grave. Granta has forged a
reputation for spotting signs of life (in Spain, for example, it's credited with launching the
Amis, Barnes, Kureishi, Swift generation of British novelists, whose work is being
published together under the slogan 'The Return of the Dream Team'). Where have you
found vitality recently?

The Return of the Dream Team? That's an interesting idea. It makes them sound like old
footballers playing an exhibition game. I can hear the commentator: 'That perfect pass
from Hristo Stoichov (Martin Amis) show that all the old skill is there even if the energy
in the legs has gone.' Fortunately, writing isn't football—a writer at fifty can be better
than he was at twenty-five. Philip Roth, to take an extreme example, is over seventy and
producing marvellous novels—for my money the best he's written. So the answer to your
question about where we find 'vitality' these days is: from many places and from writers
of different kinds and ages—it's a mistake to think of it as a preserve of the young or of a
particular culture. That's fashion, not vitality, and the kind of thinking that leads
publishers to buy up any old nonsense from India simply because it's written by an Indian
who might be that terrible thing, 'the next Salman Rushdie,/ Arundhati Roy/ Vikram
Seth'. On the other hand, a country such as India is more liable to produce 'vitality'
because writing about it, creating prose fiction from it, is a relatively new phenomenon
for the people who live there. There is experience to be explored, described, illuminated.
'I want to tell other people about this' is a powerful and good urge for a writer, and it may
be easier and more exhilarating in places where the ground is fresh, out of which writers
haven't been digging novels for the past 200 years.

Your 'Gibraltar', a detailed, trenchant dissection of the Thatcher government's

extrajudicial killing of three members of the IRA in 1988, grew—if I am not
mistaken—from your coverage of the story for the Observer. How did you start as a
journalist, and how did your writing develop towards this longer format brand of
story?

In fact the Gibraltar story happened the other way round. It was Granta's idea that I went
there, but as I was under contract to the Observer at the time I wrote a few pieces for that
paper as well. It was the only way to make it work financially—both for me and for
Granta. Very few people get rich as freelance journalists, and that kind of piece, which
relies so heavily on information, takes a long time to research and to write, especially in a
situation where nobody wants to tell you very much, and the few things that you are told
are probably lies. Neither the IRA nor British intelligence could be called transparent
organisations.

I wanted to be a reporter from about the age of sixteen. I didn't have the right
qualifications to study English literature at Edinburgh university—you needed Latin in
those days—and went to work in a library for a couple of dismal years. Eventually I got a
job with a newspaper in Glasgow, which sent me off to learn the trade in a tiny weekly
based in a place called Cambuslang, which you won't find easy to discover on a map. It
had a steel works and a few redundant coal mines. After that came the Daily Express and
then, in 1970, the Sunday Times. That was my best piece of luck. Under the editorship of
Harold Evans, the Sunday Times encouraged what was then called 'investigative
reporting' and had a philosophy that anything could be made comprehensible and
interesting, provided that you wrote about it clearly enough—it was a self-improvers'
newspaper in those days. I did very little investigative reporting, which was a preserve
guarded zealously by the Insight Team, but Evans's ideas rubbed off on me. I love the act
of finding out. I became a feature writer and foreign correspondent, mainly in India. The
challenge for any foreign correspondent is to make the place he or she is writing about
'real' to the reader—something you can best achieve by transmitting the observed detail.
So I tried to do that. And because the Sunday Times had a very good magazine, you
sometimes got space for 5,000 to 9,000 words. I f I have as kill, that was where I learned
it. I didn't know then that magazines such the New Yorker and Esquire in the USA had
been doing the same thing—and better—for many years. The truth is that I didn't know
what the New Yorker was. They didn't read it in Cambuslang.

As a writer, what do you consider the benefits of being a journalist—in terms of

how you write, and how you approach writing—and what are the dangers?

I think Graham Greene wrote that on his early days on The Times as a sub-editor—what
Americans would call a copy-editor—that him something about simple sentences and
clear expression—how one good word of description could be more effective than three
mediocre ones. Journalism can—or should—teach you that, and also of course the
techniques of finding out and simple story construction. Otherwise, I'm not sure that it
has any great benefits to a writer, if by a writer you mean a novelist, a biographer, a
historian, a poet, an essayist. It could even damage you: one of the things writing
journalism can do is to make you almost too aware of your audience—you're not writing
for yourself but for the people who buy the newspaper. Your pieces need to interest them
—and pretty quickly, before they turn to something else on the next page. Remember Mr
Biswas in Naipaul's novel. He was based on Naipaul's father who was for a time a
reporter on a Trinidad newspaper. His stories usually began: 'Amazing scenes were
witnessed when…' This need to create interest doesn't necessarily mean distortion or
sensationalism—'amazing scenes'—but it does mean that by the time the reader reaches
paragraph four or five he needs to have a good idea of what he is reading about.
Sometimes a reporter can begin slyly or tangentially—a specific detail or scene or
conversation or whatever—but soon the reader will reach that section called the
'establishing paragraph'—in America they call it the 'nut-graph'—where the kernel of the
piece's theme or argument will be exposed. This isn't a bad thing, but it's the opposite of
what any decent novelist would do. A conventional piece of wisdom, which you can hear
in any creative writing class, is that writing is about 'showing' and not 'telling'. A reader
of fiction isn't reading to be instructed. He makes a different pact with imaginative
writing, in which his own imagination comes into play.

So I don't know if I am a 'writer' in that sense. That kind of writing comes from a
different part of the brain. That's not to say that journalists can't be good novelists, as
some people have sometimes said, but I'd say that they had no better chance than anyone
else—a lawyer, a bus-driver, a housewife. Of course, novels by journalists are more
likely to be published, because publishers tend for marketing reasons to choose authors
who already have some prominence in the media, but that's no real indication of their
quality.

One other thing: journalism is a gregarious way of life, writing is a lonely occupation.
They tend to attract different kinds of people. Myself, I would be happy to be called an
occasional reporter.