Excerpt from "Comments from a Modest Man: An Interview with Calvin Trillin" by Jonathan D'Amore

summer 2003, vol. 55, no. 3

           During the week of March 17-21, 2003, Calvin Trillin visited the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as the Morgan Writer-in-Residence. He spent the week meeting with students, faculty, and community members to discuss his multifaceted career.  He gave a public reading of several pieces of his humor writing on the evening of March 19 to the wide enjoyment of a standing room only crowd. 
            Trillin writes a few lines of politically-oriented verse each week for The Nation and has contributed articles and profiles on a variety of subjects to The New Yorker for more than 30 years.  He is the author of three humorous novels, including the critically lauded Tepper Isn’t Going Out, which, Trillin notes, “is the only known parking novel written in English.”  He has written a moving memoir of the fifties (Remembering Denny) and his journalism has been collected in several books, including Killings, which includes several of his pieces on murders and other grim deaths.  He is perhaps best known for his popular writing on food, travel, and his family, collected in books such as Travels with Alice, The Tummy Trilogy, and Family Man.  His most recent book, published in May 2003, is another collection of musings on good meals, Feeding a Yen: Savoring Local Specialties from Kansas City to Cuzco.
            On the morning of March 20, 2003, Jonathan D’Amore had the opportunity to meet Trillin and discuss with him a career spanning more than four decades and many  genres.

 D’Amore: Let’s begin with what we’ve been talking about all week here, your career as a writer who works in a variety of genres on a variety of subjects. Despite this multiplicity,  do you define yourself as, say, a journalist who’s also done novels or a humorist who’s covered murder stories or a memoirist with a career in reporting? Or do you really think of yourself as a writer whose subject suggests its genre?

 Trillin: Sometimes, when my daughters were little, they would say something like “Daddy can find it; he’s nearly a trained reporter,” or “Let Daddy write it; he’s practically a professional writer.”  I suppose I would describe myself as a reporter or a journalist who does some other things.  When I was first coming into the business, “journalist” was thought of as sort of a candy-ass word that we didn’t use very much—the English always used “journalist.”
          I think certainly the subject, for me, suggests the genre, though I would imagine that there’s in a way the same sensibility going through these various forms I use, even though some of the reporting I’ve done is very serious or sometimes grim and sad. If you ever had so little to do that you really went over all these things, I think you’d probably be able to detect the same turn of mind in the reporting as in the humor, or attempts at humor.

JD: If you describe yourself as a reporter, does that mean you feel most comfortable writing as one, or is there a certain mode of writing that you feel comes more naturally to you?

CT: I think probably it must mean something that when I use the first person in a New Yorker reporting piece, a non-fiction piece—what the New Yorker traditionally called a “fact” piece—it is almost always a “light” piece.  There probably are two or three reasons for that that don’t have anything to do with me, or at least don’t have anything to do with the way I write.  One of them is that, it seems to me, a piece that has very strong narrative line is best told as a story not having to do with the storyteller.  For example, I had a Wall Street insider trading piece a year or two ago in the New Yorker that had a strong narrative line—a beginning, a middle, and an end—and the best thing to do was to stay out of it, to try to remove the marks of my presence from the story.  Then, if you have a story that doesn’t have an obvious narrative line, maybe you’re more likely to be in it; I’m more likely to be in it if its a lighter piece.

Another example, in the collection of murder pieces I had done (Killings)—they weren’t all murders, some sudden deaths, but basically they were murder pieces—there’s no first person at all and it’s written in a very flat way that just carries on each story and tells you something of its setting and context.  On the other hand, the books I’ve done on eating are all first person.  I’ve never written a serious piece on food or eating; I don’t think of it as a serious subject, at least not to me.  I’m not interested in serious articles on eating.  So for me, writing about eating is a way of writing about someplace in a lighter way, just telling jokes, and, to some extent, traveling.

JD: Your political writing could be considered fairly light, too, if we consider rhyming, witty verse light material.  But you’re rarely overtly political in your articles or even your columns, so much.  You’ve met all these people in all walks of life across the U.S. How do their differing political views find their way into your writing?

CT: In fact, even with The Nation poems, some of the old Nation readers find me insufficiently political to write for their magazine. They think I’ve let the agony of the Scottsboro boys slip from my memory somehow.  I’ve always separated the commentary and reporting, and I’ve never had any problem.  I should say that part of the separation is that I really don’t cover political campaigns.  In the U.S. Journal series for the New Yorker, I did do a piece on the first serious black mayoral candidate in Cleveland, one on the campaign of Sissy Farenthold, who was a reform candidate in Texas who lost the governor’s race, and a piece on Al Lowenstein—who was a sort of a perennial student leader even after he grew up, who led the movement that resulted in Lyndon B. Johnson not standing for office in 1968—when he ran for Congress, but I did those because there was a special reason to do those stories.  Also, I did them after the election, not as actual campaign coverage.  Other than those stories, if you look at the stories in that series—and there are couple hundred of those or more—there aren’t really any political stories, not any that are on obviously political issues. 

Even when I was at Time, I wanted the story out in the country much more than the Washington story.  When I worked in the South for Time many years ago, I used to think that that the story got less interesting when the federal government got involved because it inevitably became a story about the federal government’s involvement.  And with U.S. Journal, I think in all of those stories I stopped in Washington once, maybe twice, for part of a story.  I’ve always been more interested in writing about people who aren’t ordinarily in the paper. I did one profile of Penn and Teller, the anti-magician magicians, and I think they’re by far the most famous people I’ve ever written about in my reporting. 

JD: Well, as a reporter who has to interview a range of folks who might not often be interviewed otherwise, do you find there are certain people who reveal themselves in interviews more honestly, more candidly? Do you have a certain method of conversation that gets the best information from folks?

CT: Usually, although not always, my interest over the years has been not in the person I’m interviewing, but in the information I‘m getting from the person I’m interviewing.  Sometimes the person becomes a sort of a character in the story and so I am also interested in the person, but the information is the story. I’m not a very aggressive, push-to-the-wall, demand answers kind of reporter, but in doing a 3000-word story every three weeks for fifteen years, I almost never left a place thinking that I didn’t have the information I needed to write the story, that some of it was kept secret or withheld from me.  Mostly, I think that’s just a function of talking to a lot of different people who, in the first place, all have differing ideas of what’s supposed to be secret. So, if you talk to enough people you eventually learn what happened or what the issue is.  I mean, I’ve left places thinking I didn’t understand the information that I’d gotten, but just gathering up the information comes from just talking to enough people so that one thing leads to another and you eventually figure it out. 

Also, I often find—and I’ve heard other people, other reporters, say this too— that people say the most revealing things as you leave.  As you sort of close your notebook or turn off the tape recorder, they let that tense, defensive posture down a little bit and they’re relieved that it’s over, so they say something that they wouldn’t have said at the beginning of the interview.

JD: “Lighter” or not, you’re obviously well-known for your food writing and for being a plainly funny writer, and you do it quite a bit.  Do you find that frequently writing funny pieces helps you do the more serious subjects?

CT: Well, when I was doing a piece for The New Yorker every three weeks around the country (which, for a magazine writer seemed a grueling pace—my magazine colleagues would say to me, “How do you do that?” and newspaper people always said  “What else do you do?”) I think I wandered into writing about eating as a way of getting some comic relief from doing, say, an argument over development or a murder or a labor dispute every three weeks—and I don’t mean comic relief for the reader, I mean for me. I needed it so that I could do a story where I wasn’t constantly worried that I didn’t have the one document or the one interview that was vital to putting together some element of the story. I kind of had two notebooks working all the time. Also, I think there’s always some humor or, if not, some irony even in the serious stories.  I think the saddest story I ever wrote was about this boy who’d gone to China, but was brought home with encephalitis and died, and about his parents’ attempt to deal with that.  I mean, I can barely read the piece, it’s so sad, and yet I remember two or three things in the piece that, to me, were very funny. 

I think there’s always some overlap—because you can’t totally change your turn of mind just because of the subject.

cquarter@unc.edu
 © 2003 The Carolina Quarterly