Jonathan Harr
Here is the slightly edited transcript of remarks by
Jonathan Harr at a Nieman Fellows seminar February 22,
1999:
I
have to say that I actually didn't really ever consider
working at Burger King. (See
Intro.)
It was a passing thought [as I was] going through
the ads. But I did apply to a company [that] put out
new-age brochures, as night proofreader, and I was rejected
with a form letter.
I
got involved in writing this book in 1986. I was then
working at New England Monthly as a staff writer. I had been
writing pieces that were 8,000, 10,000, 12,000 words long,
and they would take me a couple of months. The amount of
research that I did for those pieces and the amount of
research I thought you would end up doing for a book didn't
seem to me to be that much different. It turned out to be,
obviously, a lot different. The way I got involved in the
project was very circuitous. I was looking for a book. I was
talking with my friend Tracy Kidder who had written three
books at that time. One of them had won the Pulitzer prize,
"Soul of a New Machine," and his third book, "House," in the
fall of 1985, was then on the bestseller list.
In
November of 1985 Tracy got a call from Harvard law Professor
Charles Nesson. For those of you who have read the book
you'll know that Nesson was the Harvard law professor that
Schlichtmann went down to Puerto Rico to the First Circuit
Judicial Conference to seduce into the case. He needed
somebody with credentials and with authority to help him
deal with the judge. So Schlichtmann seduces Nesson into the
case and Nesson, after initial reluctance, embraces the
case, becomes a big proselytizer. He thinks this is the case
that's going to ring the alarm bells in the corporate board
rooms of America; this is going to be a landmark case, and
he thinks it ought to be chronicled.
As
I understand it, Nesson was playing poker with a bunch of
friends and one of them was a college classmate of Tracy's.
Nesson was telling this story of the case and saying "It'd
be really great if somebody could be there to chronicle it."
[Tracy's classmate] said, "Why don't you call my
friend Tracy Kidder?" Which is what Nesson did. Tracy was
then in the midst of a book tour and kind of enjoying the
fruits of success and wasn't interested in embarking on
another project right away. But he did suggest to Nesson
that he knew somebody, me, who might be interested. I called
Charlie Nesson up. and met him in his office. I could tell
that Charlie was a bit disappointed. This was a guy he'd
never heard of as opposed to the Pulitzer Prize winner that
he wanted. But he talked to me for awhile and then he took
me over to Milk Street to meet Jan Schlichtmann and his
partner. I sat around the bird's-eye maple conference room
table with Schlichtmann and his partners, and they asked me
what I wanted to do. I wasn't quite certain. I was only
peripherally aware of this case. What was being offered to
me --at least what I thought was being offered to me through
Nesson -- was access behind the scenes, to the plaintiffs'
law firm. That's what really attracted me to it. So I told
them I wanted to write a book about how this group of
lawyers is working on this case. I wanted to be behind the
scenes in a big legal case.
'How
Much Are You Going to Pay?'
What
ensued was [a] long negotiation in which their
financial guy said, "Well, how much are you going to pay us
for that access?" I said, "Absolutely nothing. It doesn't
work that way. I'm not paying a thing." [Another
lawyer] said, "Well, of course, we're going to get to
read the manuscript and, you know, fix it up." And I said,
"Absolutely not. It doesn't happen that way." We cleared
those two hurdles pretty easily. I had at that point nothing
to lose. I mean, if they weren't going to grant me the
access then I simply wasn't going to do the story. What was
interesting about that meeting was that Schlichtmann was
very uncharacteristically silent throughout it and was kind
of studying me.
One
problem arose that was substantial. but at the time I was
unaware of it. When I went into this I did not know any more
about the law than the average lay person. I had no idea,
for example, that the plaintiffs had three main legal
theories they were following. They were nuisance, negligence
and strict liability. I had no idea what the difference
between those theories was. I had never heard of Rule 11
[allowing judges to dismiss frivolous suits]. I had
some kind of vague notions about what summary judgment was.
But I really did not know very much about it.
One
of the things I hadn't thought of, going into this, was the
attorney-client privilege. That seemed to pose a problem
that was going to be insurmountable. That privilege is,
essentially, if anybody other than the attorney or client is
present when the case is being discussed, then the privilege
between the attorney and the client is broken and the
opposing side is allowed to discover everything that went
on. When another lawyer who worked with Schlichtmann raised
this issue, everybody gave it pretty serious consideration
and the solution suggested was that I get to come into the
office briefly every day and they would debrief me about
what they were planning to do. But I wouldn't be there on a
full-time basis. And I, of course, would also get to do
exactly what every newspaper reporter can do, which is go
into the courtroom and watch the case unfold in the
courtroom.
This
to me was completely unacceptable. I have to admit that I
had no particular interest in this case. I did not consider
myself to be an environmentalist of any great passion going
into this. I mean, I cared about clean water and clean air
as much as the next person. But I didn't want to write a
polemic. I didn't know very much about the legal system. So
any notion the reviews talk about of me setting out to write
a legal expose is preposterous, because I knew too little
about the legal system. I wanted to be there on a daily
basis and I realized that if they were to grant me that kind
of access that it would be subject to withdrawal at any
point. They had to trust me, ultimately. And it was
Schlichtmann who finally said the next day, or two days
later, "Okay, why not?"
The
reason he said this still confounds me, I'm not exactly sure
why. I think his partners were largely against it. But
there's a couple things that went into it, I believe. One
was that discovery was largely over. They were just on the
eve of trial. And the second one, I think, was that you can
never underestimate the ego of the people you're writing
about. Schlichtmann thought he was setting out to do a great
and wonderful thing. They all thought they were going to win
a huge victory, that they were going to ring the alarm in
the corporate boardrooms. And nobody knew where the case was
going. So he allowed me in.
Getting
the Other Side's View
On
the other side, Jerry Facher and Bill Cheeseman, who worked
for Beatrice and Grace, respectively, really didn't know
about the level of access that I had. Once I understood this
problem of attorney-client privilege decided that I wasn't
going to spend a lot of time with Facher and Cheeseman
during the course of the trial. I'd wait till the trial was
over and then I would go about interviewing them. I realized
that there were limits. The attorney-client privilege was
one. My own physical limits to be present was another; I
couldn't be present in the same way that Schlichtmann
permitted it. even if I'd wanted to, in all three camps.
Moreover, the other two camps certainly never would have
permitted me to be present. Their clients would not have
agreed to it; these were traditional white-shoe lawyers and
they simply wouldn't have agreed to it.
So
I had only one avenue of access, and that was through
Schlichtmann. I'd say that was the primary reason I embarked
on this. I got this access. I got to go to a place where
journalists never get to go. And what I wanted to do, what I
saw here, was a good story, first and foremost. I saw
conflict, which is necessary for all dramatic narratives.
Usually when you have lawyers you have lots of conflict.
This was a case that was coming together in front of me and
there was going to be plenty of conflict.
There
was also going to be a resolution to that conflict, which is
the wonderful thing about court cases: in the end the jury
speaks. You're going to have some degree of finality. Or so
I thought. As it turns out it went on and on and on.
There
were also interesting characters. Schlichtmann was
interesting and so was Jerry Facher, And in the end it was
about something that was important, I think. It touched on
issues that are important to us in this society. But it was
my intention to write about those from a distance. I was
not, emphatically not, going to write a history of the case
or a polemic about the environmental or about the legal
system. I set out simply to tell a good story. And I tried
to keep the authorial voice out of the narrative. My aim was
to tell the story, to let it unfold, and to let readers
decide what they thought of it. Having said that, of course
I was largely in Schlichtmann's camp. I was largely telling
the story through his eyes.
One
great difficulty I had writing this book was figuring out
the structure, and I didn't figure out, believe it or not,
until five years into it, that Schlichtmann had to be at the
center of the thing. I had some crazy notion of a Russian
novel where all of these different camps are out there and
they finally come together. My friend Kidder called it a
tapestry sort of approach. But I finally decided that the
structure was like a wheel, essentially. Schlichtmann was
the hub of the wheel and all of the spokes were the elements
that came into it. When I finally concluded that that was
the only way that I could tell this story and make it
coherent things began to work a lot better for me. I had
written up to that point lots and lots of pages and I'd
repeated myself quite often.
The
Dramatic Opening
Q.-You were saying earlier that you got conflicting advice about how to open the book. Could you tell us about that?
A.-After
the trial, and after the settlement process, I went back
home. I'd been living in Boston, essentially. I wrote a
proposal that was 50 pages long. My approach to the
proposal, to try and sell this to a publisher, was to have
all the characters convene in the courtroom corridor as
they're waiting for a verdict. I'd followed Schlichtmann; I
was with him every day. It was very dramatic. Schlichtmann
was walking back and forth in the corridor. He was getting
increasingly worried about what the jury was doing. And all
of the other characters would come in too. Jerry Facher
would drop in periodically, and Bill Cheeseman. Everybody
came together in that corridor. So I thought it was a great
device. This also happened to be the time when Schlichtmann
was suffering financially, hugely. His Porsche was
repossessed on one weekend while he was waiting for the
jury's verdict. So that was in my proposal.
When
I finally finished with the book manuscript [it] was
pretty clean and pretty pared down. It began with the Woburn
section, which is the place where the story begins, the
genesis of it all. Robert Loomis, my editor at Random House,
said, "You know, I really loved the proposal. Can't you do
something with that-use it as a sort of prologue?" Well, you
know, prologue didn't make sense to me, because the
courtroom corridor business happened in the middle of the
action. But I understood what Loomis meant.
It
was my aim, too, to telegraph to the reader that this was
not going to be a book wholly about the experience of the
Woburn people. I wanted to put the lawyer front and center.
One way of doing that is to write something short in front
of the Woburn section. But I had real problems with it. I
thought it was very gimmicky and in the end I spent a lot of
time working on it, rewriting it, cutting the stuff down and
making it interesting, I hope. I'm glad I did it. I think it
serves a few functions. One, it tells the reader that this
lawyer is going to be the central character of the book.
Secondly, it's sort of mysterious. I mean, this guy's
working on something; he's about to lose everything, and
mystery is truly the greatest element to drive the narrative
that there every was, or is, or could be. Mystery and
conflict are the things that you really need and I had that
sense of mystery.
Tracy
Kidder, who was working with me, would come over and read
what I'd written a couple times a week. Tracy and I had an
odd relationship. He gets to work at about 6:30 in the
morning and he writes all morning. He's exhausted by 10.
He's got to call somebody up and read them what he's
written, and it was often me he called up. He was doing it
not for criticism, but just to hear the words and to hear
how they sounded to him. I would kind of nod. I'd say, "That
sounds nice; that's good." But what Tracy did for me, having
put me through (sometimes) punishment of listening to him
for half an hour or 45 minutes on the telephone, was he'd
come over in the afternoon and read what I did. And he would
typically scrawl all over it too.
In
"Soul of the New Machine" Tracy has a prologue, about the
main character, Tom West, who is not very much present in
the body of the narrative. This established Tom West as the
main character of the book and it also was sort of
mysterious. Who was this guy? I think that that short
section that I wrote serves essentially the same function,
although it was more accidental, coincidental, than
intentional mimicking of Kidder.
Upstaged
by Schlichtmann
Q.-What's your relation with Jan Schlichtmann today? You wrote this best seller; he's broke.
A.-He's not broke anymore. He got a lot of money from Hollywood. They acquired his life rights and he got a substantial sum of money. My relationship with him, as with virtually every character that I wrote about, is quite good. I talk to Jan several times a week. I talked to Kevin Conway, his partner, this morning. I'm in touch on a regular basis with Jerry Facher and Bill Cheeseman, and with the Woburn families too. Part of it is Schlichtmann and I are sort of tied together almost as if by an umbilical cord because of this book. People want to hear the real-life character and see him and there's been lots of media attention. So we end up doing some things together.
I
should say, though, that the Miami Book Fair was the last
time we were together on stage. We were each given
instructions to talk for 10 minutes. Then they were going to
show a clip of the movie, which hadn't been released at this
point and then we were going to take questions. So I talked
for 10 minutes. I introduced Jan and Jan talked for 45
minutes about renewal and rebirth, waving his arms like a
Baptist preacher. I was quite astonished. At the end we took
questions. All of the questions were for him. One of the
first questions was from a guy who introduced himself as a
law student. He began by saying, "Mr. Schlichtmann, in your
book you state-"" And I thought that would be absolutely the
last time I would appear with Jan. I was clearly
marginalized.
Fly
on the Wall Reporting
Q.-When you were in with Schlichtmann and the lawyers, what was your demeanor or what was your interaction at all with them? Were you literally a fly on the wall with no asking questions for clarification or were you just sort of taking it all in?
A.-I
rarely asked questions for clarification. In his office it
was always several people at once: four, five, six people.
And they were interacting. They were putting together the
case and I would simply take notes. If I didn't understand
something, and it seemed important, if it seemed crucial,
then I would ask somebody else later. Usually it was Kevin
Conway, not Jan, during the case. Jan was simply too busy. I
tried to be as invisible as I could possibly be. I don't use
a tape recorder. I take notes on a little reporter's
notebook. I don't use a tape recorder for a variety of
reasons. One thing is I think people are, initially at
least, more conscious of what they're saying. But also
taping things is a huge waste of time. I didn't have the
money to pay for a transcriber, and you get so much dross
and slag on a tape recorder, especially when you're watching
something evolve, as opposed to a face-to-face interview, in
which a tape recorder might make sense. When Schlichtmann is
asked that question about my presence he says, "He's a fly
on the wall, like a piece of the furniture." He says, "A
very nice piece of furniture, but a piece of furniture." My
anxiety was that at some point I would do something-they
could have pulled the plug on me at any point. So I tried to
be as neutral, as distant, as invisible as I possibly
could.
Some
Conversations Recreated
Q.-There's a scene where I guess there's settlement discussion, where Schlichtmann's paid a lot of money for a room and for food and everything, overlooking the Boston Common.
A.-I wasn't there.
Q.-You weren't there. When they were meeting with the other attorneys, were you [present]?
A.-I was never present.
Q.-You didn't want them to know?
A.-Well, they would have said, "Who's this guy? He's a journalist; we're not going to talk in front of a journalist." Some of the conversations in this book are obviously recreated. But I was a beneficiary of the fact that they would go to these meetings and there would be four or five of them at the meetings, usually four, and the other side would also have several people there. So there were lots of sources about what went on at the meetings. But the great benefit to me was they would come back and they would tell everybody else in the office what had gone on. They would debate it ad nauseam. "What did they mean when they said this? How did they react when this was said?" So essentially, without sitting down and interviewing them directly I got fairly detailed accounts that were not contemporaneous but right after the fact. The same was true of the negotiations in New York when they went to the Grace building.
I
tried to describe in the back of the book my method for
reporting on this. Tony Lukas read the manuscript and he
said, "The one thing I'm not sure I believe is this long
section of dialogue, debate between these guys after they
come back from W.R. Grace and they're in the Helmsley
Palace." And he asked me how I'd done it. I hadn't by then
written the afterward explaining my method. I said, "Well I
was there. I was taking notes." And he said, "You must have
used a tape recorder." And I said, "Actually, no. I just
took notes." And I could tell that he was a little dubious
that I could write that fast. In fact, that conversation
occupies two pages, two-and-a-half pages of the book and it
seems to go on for a long time. But you can read it in five
or six minutes,. The actual conversation itself occupied
three-and-a-half hours. So there was lots of repetition.
What you have there is something that's culled out-the parts
that I'd deemed to be the important parts.
No
Effect on Outcome of Case
Q.-Just to follow up on that question about the process of being a fly on the wall, how long did it take you before it appeared to you that they lost the consciousness that you were there as a journalist, that they stopped playing to you as a journalist?
A.-That's
a good question. The Heisenberg Principle is [that]
the observer affects the thing that he observes. That's what
people ask: Did I have an effect on the outcome of the case?
It's my belief that I did not. You know, you can never prove
that. But this case had started long before I got there and
was on its tracks going wherever it was going. And people
simply can't maintain a pose for very long. I think they
were conscious the first few days. After that I think I was
kind of unremarkable. It takes probably more than a few
days. It's probably a couple of weeks before I just became a
regular guy who was sitting in on these meetings and taking
notes.
'Hardest
Thing That I've Ever Done'
Q.-I wondered how you started working on the book and on the subject. The way you describe it, you knew something about it; you were not terribly interested in the environmental aspect of it. [You] were not terribly interested at the beginning. How did you do it, and was there a point, and when was it, that you fell in love with this story?
A.-I don't know that I ever fell in love with it. It was really hard. It was the hardest thing that I've ever done, and there were many times when I regretted getting involved in it. What interested me was the process of storytelling. I knew that I had stuff, that I could make characters come to life on the page. I'm a storyteller. That's what I do. I'm not a polemicist and I'm not a zealot for a cause. And I saw a good story that could be told. I wanted to find out what that story meant in the telling. As far as the families, I had a very close relationship with several of them, and my heart went out to them. But they were not the reason that I was writing this. They were the reason the court case was happening. That was their venue for getting their story told. I've been criticized by one of the family members because she believes the book should have been more about the families and what they went through, but to me that was a story that had already been told in a variety of different ways. It was the genesis of the case; it was the seed out of which everything else grew. But it wasn't the thing that I wanted to focus on, it wasn't what I was interested in writing an entire book about. So I would have given up on this book, I think, at a certain point, when I realized how complicated it was.
Random House [gave me a] contract for $80,000, which was parceled out in increments. The contract called for me to finish the book in two-and-a-half years. I think in about two-and-a-half years I would have given up. The problem was that I'd already spent the first increment, which was $35,000, and I either had to pay them back that money or give them a book.
Also,
this is what I-putatively, anyhow-wanted to do. I wanted to
write a book. I had material; it was great. It was the
process of sifting through it and making it in some way come
together. In the process of a writer, you know, when
something comes to life on the page-when there's a scene
that happens. There's a scene, for example, that's really my
favorite in the entire book. It happens near the very end;
it happened in 1988, '89 maybe, where Schlichtmann goes out
to find this well driller he wants to convince to come in to
the courtroom. It's this incredible scene that I witnessed.
He begs the guy to come. The guy's very angry with him and
drives off in his truck and Schlichtmann then goes up and
the truck pulls over on the side and Schlichtmann goes up to
the truck and starts trying to ask him to come, and
Schlichtmann can't speak. It's so important to him that this
well driller comes that he can't even articulate the words.
And he takes off his glasses and he starts to cry.
Schlichtmann didn't tell me this. I was sitting in the car,
so I didn't see it. But the well driller did. And then I
asked Schlichtmann if it was true. I wrote that scene almost
immediately. I mean my habit was to type up my notes, or try
to, at least, at the end of every day. And I wrote a large
part of that scene right away, and it came together so well.
I knew that I had something being revealed about characters.
And that's what excited me, that process of the
storyteller's art of making something come to life on the
page. That's what drove me through it rather than any kind
of belief. I didn't embrace the cause. I just wanted to tell
a good story. Other people could figure out what it meant. I
think all too often writers begin with an hypothesis,
embracing a cause, and then they alter the facts to fit that
hypothesis sometimes.
Making
Sacrifices in Writing
Q.-What happens when the needs of the story conflict with the needs of journalism? Because narrative often seeks a very clear beginning, middle and end and a clear resolution, but journalism often leads in the direction of ambiguity and complexity.
A.-I think it's real life that leads in the direction of ambiguity and complexity.
Q.-Well, the more you know about a subject, the more you find out about how complex it is.
A.-Right. And that's the hard part. That's why I had a 1500-page manuscript. And you have to make some sacrifices. You hope that your intention is not to sacrifice the truth of the events. I had a talk with [an editor] a year ago and he used the phrase that to me was absolutely wonderful, and I've used it a lot since. It's called "the bias of coherency." It's his belief that even the most classic newspaper article, an inverted pyramid sort of article that is purportedly purely objective journalism, even that is biased. The bias comes about because there's an event in which a lot of people participate. How do you tell the story of that event? How do you tell it as accurately as you can? The fact is that once you begin assembling the elements of that event and once you begin trying to tell that story, you're immediately entering into a bias. In order to make it coherent you have to elect to put certain facts before other facts. And so the story becomes slanted in a fashion.
One
of the criticisms of my book, in fact the worst review I
got-it wasn't a terribly bad review but it wasn't great-was
Richard Bernstein's, in which he said, "You know, this book
would have been a lot more balanced and a lot more valuable
if Harr spent as much time with the defense lawyers as he
had with Schlichtmann, the plaintiffs' lawyer." First of
all, what annoys me a lot about reviewers is not reviewing
the book that I did write but telling me that there's
another book that I should have written instead. But the
fact is that that was impossible for me to do. Secondly, I
wasn't setting out to write a history, a Ph.D thesis on this
case. I was setting out to tell a story. So this story is,
without question, biased in some way. It's seen largely
through Schlichtmann's eyes. The reader always knows that
Schlichtmann is at the center of the stage and when
Schlichtmann goes off the stage the reader knows that he's
gone off but he'll be back. This is a very circuitous way of
answering your question about real life and its
complexities. Sometimes you just have to address those
complexities. I follow Orwell's dictum, which is that
writing should be like a pane of glass, you know-a constant
struggle to make sentences simple and clear and as pared
down as they can possibly be.
'I
Rather Liked the Movie'
Q.-I wanted to ask you a little bit about the movie that was based on your book, because I thought in the book, despite what you say about Schlichtmann being the center-and he is the center indeed-but your scenes of the Woburn people are very vivid and very poignant, and I find some of the most strongest and most moving scenes in the book. But yet I found it puzzling that the movie didn't seem to be able to capture that vividness or that pain or that incredible dynamic that went through that community that you have in your book. I wondered if you thought that the movie did your book justice.
A.-Actually, given what could have happened, I do. I rather liked the movie. I think it's a different narrative form. It's compressing into two hours a story that I told in 500 pages and a story that played out in real life in over a decade. There's a lot of stuff that's obviously not in the movie that's in the book. And there's a lot of stuff that's in real life that's not in the book. Jerry Facher once said (we were actually watching the movie being filmed in Waltham and he was out there watching Robert Duvall and John Travolta), "This is four degrees of separation." And I said, "What do you mean by that?" And he said, "Well, first there was the event, then there was the trial about the event (Jerry obviously acknowledging that the trial about the event is not anywhere close to approaching the truth of the event). and then there was the book about the trial about the event, and now there's the movie based on the book about the trial about the event." They're all different iterations of a story that has in common certain things. I take no credit for the movie whatsoever. I did not put pen to page in writing this screenplay. I did become quite good friends with the screen writer, a guy named Steve Zaillian, who had written the screenplay for "Schindler's List" and for "Searching for Bobby Fischer," a wonderful movie he also directed. And he directed "A Civil Action."
He and I talked a lot, mostly about the development of character, and the point at which Schlichtmann begins to disintegrate. It was a difficult problem. Steve's first screenplay was 190-some pages long, which means the movie would be over three hours, and it simply wasn't going to work that way. I think he did a pretty good job; I think it's a good movie.
I
also didn't feel this sort of pride of authorship that I
think that some writers do feel. I didn't want to delude
myself into believing that I could have any effect on the
making of the movie. There are just too many people and too
many events that come together and there's so much money.
The budget for this movie was $65 million. Studios lean on
people very heavily to do what they want, but Steve actually
got away with writing a movie in which the ending was
unhappy. You know, the character's broke. Which is pretty
remarkable for Hollywood. I said I didn't feel pride of
authorship because I didn't feel like this was my story. It
didn't come out of my head the way a work of imagination, a
novel, might. This story belonged, I think, to Schlichtmann
and the Woburn families and Jerry Facher and to Bill
Cheeseman every bit as much as it did to me. Plus, I think
if I'd really invested myself in it I'd have been unhappy
anyhow.
Tracy
Kidder's Help
Q.-Could I find out more about your writing practice and the decisions you made in coming up with this structure where it's kind of sliced and sometimes chronological, sometimes not? And to what extent your editor at Random House could help you? If you got stuck did you have the right to call him up and talk things through, or was it more a thing where you would hand something in and he would tell you what he thought was wrong with it and send it back?
A.-It was more of the latter. I would hand things in and he'd tell me what's wrong. He didn't know the details to the level that I did, so it didn't pay for me to call him up and say, "I'm having problems with this section. What should I do?" I like to solve my own problems as best I can rather than have other people impose solutions on me. Kidder was my biggest help in terms of editing. [Random House editor] Bob Loomis was great, too, when the manuscript was pretty well in shape. But Tracy Kidder was the guy who came over and basically grabbed me by the scruff of the neck when I was lying on my couch in despair, and got me to see how I could do things. I find that I can write set pieces pretty well, or descriptions of characters, or some kind of action. But I had a lot of problems with transitions, moving from one thing to the next. I always called it turning a corner. And Tracy always seemed to be very good at that. In a lot of ways it's very obvious how you turn a corner. You simply stop writing and there's a blank space and you begin again. Sometimes it's not easy. Sometimes the first sentence of that new paragraph is very important. And for some reason it was difficult for me.
I write in this sort of lapidary way, even though I'm lost in the middle of the jungle and can't find my way out. I write sentences and I don't move on until that sentence is perfect in my mind. And the problem with that is the sentence rarely survives. I mean, I'm writing something that is huge that has so many strands through it that things are going to be changed. It's very unlike writing a magazine piece, which you can hold in your head and basically juggle the parts. Pace and proportion are absolutely vital to writing a narrative that's readable. In a magazine piece you can basically judge pace and proportion. In a book, I found that I couldn't. I'd spend my time crafting these perfect sentences and these perfect paragraphs only to realize that they didn't fit at all there. They were completely wrong.
I
often wish that I could write in the way other friends of
mine do. Tracy is once again a perfect example. Tracy
employs what I call "the vomit it out" technique. He gets it
all on the page. He keeps telling me that I have to learn to
write badly, just to get it on the page. And then once it's
on the page you can begin assessing it: what needs to be cut
away and how it'll work. But for some reason-I guess I'm too
anal or something-everything has to be right. That's one
reason why it took me such a long time. I have a bunch of
things that I do when I'm stuck. I have a 1948 Royal
typewriter, manual, and I often write on that if I get
stuck. The great virtue of that as opposed to a computer is
you can't erase stuff. You can't just click a button and
it's gone and start over again. It's actually there. And
unless you want to go through the process of "x"-ing it out,
it's going to be there, and you're forced to go on. Plus
it's manual labor. You know, pushing keys on this old
typewriter is hard. So I use that when I get stuck.
Closer
Friends Than Ever
Q.-And your friendship with Tracy Kidder survived this process?
A.-Yes,
it did. I hold it against him sometimes that he got me
involved in this. Yes. But it did. We're closer friends than
ever. He relies on an editor named Dick Todd to read his
stuff. Todd is his first critic. But he also now relies on
me after Todd to read stuff. I'd have to say I'm more
dependent on him than he is on me.
One
Request for Deletion
Q.-I was just wondering if during the writing process after the trial was over if anybody came to you and said, "Well, could you not put [in] this part of what happened or something I said?" Because some of the stuff they said was not really flattering.
A.-Well,
the thing is, people don't remember exactly what they said.
There was only one person who asked me to change something,
and that was after she had read the manuscript. The book was
published in what's called a reader's edition five months
before publication, and that edition is a paperback thing
that's sent out to bookstores with the idea of getting the
bookstore clerks interested in the book so they'll recommend
it, they'll hand sell it. When I got that edition I sent it
to all of the characters, the main characters in the book,
the sole exception being Judge J. Walter Skinner. One of the
people I sent it to was Rikki [Klieman], the lawyer
who had a brief affair with Jan Schlichtmann. I was very
worried about sending it to Rikki even though she'd told me
explicitly that I could use this material about her night
with Schlichtmann. I'll tell you the way that it came about.
We were having dinner. Jan, when Rikki calls up and wants to
go out with him, always asked me to come along. He didn't
want to be alone with Rikki for some reason. I wanted to
talk to Rikki. I'd talked to everybody else who'd gone down
to New York. And I wanted to talk to Rikki about what it had
been like. She told me the story about how they ended up
spending the night together. Schlichtmann was quite
uncomfortable with it. His head was descending into the soup
as she was telling the story. I stopped writing at a certain
point because I thought it's not something I can put in the
book. But she said, "I want you to write this down." So I
did. So I felt like I was licensed to use it. You know, out
of discretion I probably wouldn't have used it. Schlichtmann
asked me afterwards, "Do you have to use that?" I said, "No,
I don't have to, but I'd like to." He shrugged. There's a
line in the [reader's edition] which read, (as
Schlichtmann is getting out of the cab and going up to his
office and Rikki is still in the cab) Rikki said to me,
"That was great sex, and he'll never remember a moment of
it." When she read that she asked me to change it. It was
the only thing she asked me to change. I changed it to "That
was a great night for me, and he'll never remember a minute
of it." That satisfied her.
Was
Judge Skinner Unfair?
Q.-I just want you to say a little bit more about Judge Skinner. He comes across in the book to me as being sort of slanted toward the defendants and as sort of frustratingly unfair. I've heard that he's really a better judge than he comes across in your book, and that some law schools now have tapes of him that they include with your book and such things.
A.-I didn't realize exactly how the judge came off looking when I wrote this book. I didn't realize that people would see him as the villain. I think he did some things wrong. I do think that at the end there was a bias for a bunch of reasons, which I'll go into in a moment. But I didn't see him as the villain. I was a bit disturbed when the book reviews kept coming out saying that and people kept telling me that. I don't believe he's a bad judge; I don't believe he's a bad person or an evil person. The one problem that I suffered was he would not sit down for an interview with me about the case or about the people involved in the case. I think that that was a matter of judicial discretion on his part, largely. I think he felt he couldn't do that. That's unfortunate. I would love to have seen the world through the judge's eyes. I would especially have loved to see Jan Schlichtmann through the judge's eyes. Because Schlichtmann can be abrasive and arrogant and infuriating. and he did abrade and infuriate the judge. There's no question about that. Nonetheless, I do think the judge made a wrong decision at the end. I don't fault the judge at all for what he did during the course of the trial: not the directed verdict, not even the questions. And certainly not dividing up the case, which is what Charlie Nesson faults him for. Nesson says the case was lost the minute the judge bifurcated it in the fashion that he did.
It was pretty clear that the judge didn't believe in the Beatrice case. He thought that Beatrice was the victim, and Jerry Facher kept hammering on this in front of the judge. He thought that Beatrice was the victim of third party dumping. In fact, in directed verdict, he had said to Jerry Facher, "You know, I invite you to make a serious pitch at this," and then he said to Michael Keating -- it was a sort of backhanded slap-"As for you, you just dumped the stuff in the ditch, slap,, so don't try." The judge had pretty clear opinions about the defendants in the case.
In the end the reason the judge made the decision that I think was wrong-and that was no penalties, no sanctions at all for what the appeals court called "deliberate misconduct" on the part of Beatrice and its lawyers-was that the judge said that civil cases are about resolving disputes. [He said], as far as the truth, I can't hope to know the truth. It's way too complicated. I have two different sides telling me what the truth is. And as far as justice (Schlichtmann would always bang on the counsel table and talk about justice) that's in the eye of the beholder. Neither one of those is the business of a civil case. We're here to resolve the dispute.
These families had gotten $9 million, $1 million from Unifirst and $8 million from W.R. Grace, and Schlichtmann, who had occupied the judge's courtroom for the better part of the year, was back, once again, demanding more time. You know, actually, if there were things I could rewrite, this is something I would get into the book.
The
judge, moreover, made it clear that he didn't believe the
second phase, that the plaintiffs could possibly prevail in
the medical phase of the case. Everyone agrees that that was
going to be a far more difficult part of the case than the
first phase of the case. So why should this case be
occupying this courtroom anymore? That's why I think he made
the wrong decision. I think he made it at some cost to our
legal system. I don't think you can tolerate the misconduct
of the kind that occurred in the Woburn case. I think
Schlichtmann made a very convincing argument-and the appeals
court supported him-that this was deliberate, it was done
with an aim in mind, and that it prevented him from fairly
trying his case. And yet the judge essentially brushed it
aside, acknowledging that they had engaged in misconduct,
but then saying that Schlichtmann had also engaged in
misconduct by filing a frivolous lawsuit. That I do not
understand.
Did
Documents Bog You Down?
Q.-If you got a whole set of the documents and pored through them, did it bog you down or did you spend that much time wading through it? Also, on a day-to-day basis, when did you begin writing the manuscript, and did you rely strictly on those notes that you finished at the end of the day?
A.-As far as the documents, they were both a curse and a blessing. The blessing was that a lot of these documents were transcripts-deposition transcripts and certainly the trial transcripts. The deposition stuff I wasn't present for. And a lot of the story is told in these depositions, under oath with a stenographer transcribing this stuff. So it was absolutely wonderful stuff there. The problem was, of course, that there were 190-some volumes of it that I had to read through.
Once I got into it, once I understood how to read these things fairly quickly, they were great. Lawyers do an incredible amount of research and that benefits the journalist writing about the case. When I was sitting in the courtroom watching the case happen or in the hearings post-trial, I took notes, but I wasn't religious about getting down every word because I knew I would rely upon the transcripts later. I knew that I would have them available. So I was interested in the dynamic that was going on, how people related to each other and what the temper of the place was.
As
far as writing, after I wrote the proposal, which was
November of '86, I went back to reporting, and I reported
for most of the year. I think the summer of '87 was when I
actually sat down and began writing. The first thing I wrote
was the section about the Woburn families, because it was
the easiest thing to write. It was contained. I understood
that story from beginning to end. I could figure that out
pretty clearly. It was going to stand on its own. The thing
I came to realize was, unlike magazine reporting-well, it's
also true in magazine reporting-is that once you sit down
and start to write, and having done this job of reporting,
you never finish reporting. Virtually every sentence you
write has a question in it. How was he feeling, or what did
he think, or did he really say that? What was said back to
him? It's this endless process. Sometimes it results in me
actually making telephone calls to find out more. Other
times you figure out a way around it in some way so you
don't have to know what you either cannot know or what you
simply failed to get.
Quotes
and Chronologies
Q.-When you were going through all of these tomes-documents-did you pull out quotes that you liked and then write them down, transcribe them and add that to your daily-?
A.-Yes. Stuff that stood apart from the narrative, like Jerry Facher making comments on the law, which were wonderful. A lot of them were in his Harvard classroom. But a lot of them were contained in the transcripts of hearings. I pulled out a lot of that stuff and just made a separate document of Facher quotes. And I had one for Schlichtmann too. Bill Cheeseman, I guess, didn't say that much. But Jerry was the best, and I isolated [his] stuff.
The
other thing I did constantly at great, great length was
chronologies. I did chronologies for everything you can
imagine. What happened in Woburn -- that's an obvious
chronology. The chronology of Schlichtmann's life: how he
got interested in law school, his first case, the ACLU up
through his other cases-the airplane case. The chronology of
the W.R. Grace plant, and when it opened and who worked
there. I could figure all of this out from the deposition.
My chronologies got to the point where they're almost
narratives. I would have a date and an event and I'd usually
put in this notation where I found this, things like "Barbas
deposition, page 33," and cross-reference it with other
depositions and they'd get fairly long.
Q.-Physically what did you do with these chronologies? Did you tape them up on the wall and then draw lines between them so you could see?
A.-No.
Keeping
Material in Your Head
Q.-I'm still trying to figure out how you came up with this outline for the book.
A.-You mean the structure?
Q.-Yes. I mean what did you do so you didn't get it all mixed up or lost in the computer or something?
A.-Well
a lot of it's held in your head. I was constantly afraid of
losing stuff. But a large part of the process is just
becoming so familiar with the material that I'd keep it in
my head. And especially if I was writing about something
specific, like Schlichtmann's early life, with the Woburn
section, or W.R. Grace, or John J. Riley, I would know that
stuff really well. I didn't have room to put stuff up and
make elaborate diagrams.
Did
You Ever Give Up?
Q.-The hero is unsympathetic, your ending is somewhat inconclusive, you're talking about events that occurred a decade ago, your title's boring. I thought it was a great book and I couldn't put it down. And I'm just wondering, at any point did you say to yourself, "Gee, I really don't have a story here?"
A.-I knew I had a story. The problem was in telling it. I went through this period of time, having spent 8 1/2 years working on this and having people ask me, "So what are you working on now?" My experience was usually [that] people within 30 seconds or so stop nodding and within a minute their eyes glaze over and then they're reaching for the person next to them. I could never find a way of telling this in the 25 words or less that seem demanded of me all the time.
Three times this has happened to me. I was in New York with Loomis working on the manuscript and we came back from lunch one day and saw Alberto Vitale, who was then the CEO of Random House, standing by the elevator. Loomis introduces me to him and says, "This is Jonathan Harr. He's working on a great book." Alberto says, "Oh yeah? What's it about?" We get on the elevator and I start sweating like the guy in "Broadcast News." Twenty seconds later Alberto gets off the elevator and says, "Sounds interesting," and it's clear he doesn't mean it. Exactly the same thing in the elevator happened with Harry Evans. And also in Jason Epstein's office.
The brief summary description of this book is: "It's about dead children, toxic waste and a lawsuit that drags on and on." I think that was the problem in selling this book. After Harry finally read the book (and he read it only after the movie rights had been sold) he called me up and invited me down to New York, and we went to lunch at the Four Seasons. It was then Harry asked me what else I was working on. I said, "Well, as it happens I've got this contract to write this piece for your wife [Tina Brown] at The New Yorker." He says, "How's it going?" and I said, "Not too well. You know, I'm only getting 5,000 words." He says, "Well, we'll take care of that right now," and he [makes a call]. My editor called me the next day and said, "Jonathan, is there a problem?" That story came in at 16,000 words.
Q.-Was that the plane crash?
A.-Yes. They ran it all. In fact, Tina asked for more, a couple hundred words more.
Q.-This was the reconstruction of the investigation of an NTSB special investigative unit called the Go Team that comes in after every plane crash and investigates. Jonathan wrote about a plane crash in 1994 that was one of the three or four I think in the history of American aviation that the NTSB didn't conclusively solve. The investigation spread out over the course of four years. The magazine piece took about two years to complete.
A.-Plus I was slow, too.
Q.-It was a great piece though.
A.-The
problem was describing what this about was about to people
and the booksellers' problem. Lunch with Harry at the Four
Seasons: Harry said, "This book is great. We're going to
make it into a bestseller. It'll sell four or five hundred
thousand copies in hardcover." "That's incredible. You
really can do that? That's great." And it didn't work. I
mean the first printing was 100,000 copies and they
ultimately printed two or three more, but very small
printings, 5,000 copies. It ultimately sold about 100,000
copies in hardcover, but the trajectory was a very slow
beginning. Word of mouth essentially is what sold the book.
The first week it came out in paperback, it was on the
bestseller list. It had never made the bestseller list in
hardcover. And the problem was how do you tell people what
this book is about? And I never solved the 25 words or less
problem.
A
Good Read Is Vital
Q.-Wasn't the book initially perceived to be a book about the environment and an investigation of this environmental problem?
A.-Yes.
Random House, or any publisher, looks for a hook to get the
news people interested, so you can get on "Good Morning
America" or some of these shows. And so their hook was, "an
important environmental case about the legal system." Nobody
wants to hear about that. You know, it's really a hard sell.
It was only when people started saying, "This is actually a
pretty good read; this'll keep you up reading late into the
night" and people began telling other people that, that it
started working as a book-became successful, anyway.
Were
You Ever Tempted to Jump In?
Q.-Was there ever a time when you were working on these chronologies and just being a fly on the wall where it occurred to you that you'd figured something out that you felt tempted to point out something, give an opinion? Were you ever tempted to say, "Oh my God, he's missed this point?" What did you do if that temptation occurred?
A.-You're talking during the reporting process?
Q.-During the reporting process, and you're sitting there and you're hearing the lawyers as you're working out this chronology. And did you ever think, "Hey, there's something here, but I can't tell them?"
A.-You would think so. You would think I would have. But I did not.
Q.-I'm thinking better of you than I should.
A.-It's a complicated business. There's usually several people together. Schlichtmann had two partners and three or four other people working on the case, lawyers that is, and they covered all the ground. I think even if I had noticed something amiss, something that they had missed, I wouldn't have said it. But I can't recall a single instance in which that was true.
Now
Schlichtmann had the habit of asking my opinion, but he
asked everybody's opinion about things. And basically if you
didn't agree with him he didn't care about that. He'd try
and convince you that he was right. The first day I was
there, it was his opening argument. "How was it?" he asked.
"Wasn't I great? Did you see what I did?" It doesn't make
any difference. It didn't to him. So there was never an
instance in which I felt like I could step in and help them.
And I would have resisted it. I like to think I would have
resisted it even if there had been such an instance.
How
About Errors?
Q.-(inaudible)
A.-First of all, I'll address how I did it. I obviously wasn't there the morning Schlichtmann's Porsche was being repossessed. I would have been if I knew it was happening, but I had no reasonable expectation that anything interesting would happen that Saturday morning. So my process was to ask Schlichtmann time and time again about what happened. And when I sat down to write about it I realized that I still didn't know some things, and I called him up and asked him about it again. I asked James Gordon, who played a small role in the repossession of that Porsche-it was Gordon who had gotten called that morning. Schlichtmann had tried to call Gordon and then later told Gordon about the repossession. I tried to find the actual guy who repossessed it, the sheriff, and did not find him, couldn't locate him. But when the movie was being filmed he turned up and he was there, and he was enjoying himself greatly. Schlichtmann recognized him immediately. And I asked him, "Was it right? Did I get it right?" "Yeah, it was great." I think, who knows, I might have gotten some small facts wrong. The way you can do it, I believe, is through very assiduous reporting. I sort of follow McPhee's dictum on this, which is you keep asking them what happened until they end up repeating themselves, and by the time they've repeated themselves three or four times, you realize that [you have] squeezed that lemon for all the juice you're going to get.
My other technique was to ask anybody involved in the thing. So you triangulate it and you come to what's likely the most accurate rendition of events.
Richard Bernstein in The New York Times pointed out something that I got wrong. It was the scene where Schlichtmann and Albert Eustis go to the Harvard Club and Schlichtmann is full of anxiety. He's being pushed to the limit financially. He said he was afraid of breaking the bread because crumbs would get all over his plate, over his lap, and so he didn't have bread. That's the kind of great thing that only Schlichtmann could possibly tell me about. But then he also said that the waiter put the check on the table. It doesn't happen that way. I called Albert Eustis, and I called him probably four or five times, not to ask him about that, specifically, but to ask him about a whole lot of things. And Eustis would never talk to me. I've never heard from Eustis, ever, to this day, about the book. I don't even know if Eustis is still alive. He was close to 70 when he was dealing with Schlichtmann, and that was 12, 13 years ago.
So I got some things wrong. Jerry Facher has pointed out a bunch of things. He got a copy of the reader's edition and he said, "You know, I don't have thick glasses. You said I had thick glasses here on page 81." Then he said I repeated that on page 233. He really took offense. He said, "My glasses are no thicker than your glasses. Everyone who knows me knows I don't have thick glasses." What was the reason for Jerry acting this way? I think Jerry did not like the physical description I gave of him: his mouth pursed, his eyes and nose, this lugubrious expression on his face. And Jerry, being a trial lawyer, figures you can't take issue with somebody's subjective description of him, but you can take issue with the factual matter that his glasses are not thick. Jerry never pointed this out to me, but he called me one day-this is eight months after the book had been out-and he said, "Now you wrote in the book that I got these little decals, the Porky Pig decals, out of cereal boxes." I said, "Well, that's what you told me." He said, "Well, somebody came up to me at a legal conference and asked me what kind of cereal I eat. And I don't eat cereal." I said, "But you told me that." And he said, "But I don't eat cereal, so how did I possibly tell you that?" I went back to my notes and my notes say decals out of a cereal box. And we talked about it a bit. And we finally came to the conclusion that what he probably said was that it was the sort of thing you'd find in a cereal box. But now I have Jerry eating cereal, and he doesn't eat cereal. So it's inaccurate, you know? It's a book full of facts and it's a long book, and I got some things wrong. I don't think I got anything substantively wrong.
Jerry
Facher also said at a conference two weeks ago at the
Harvard Law School-a symposium in which everybody came
together on this- Bill Cheeseman was there, Michael Keating,
Schlichtmann, Conway, the Woburn families all came
together-he did me the great service of saying in this
symposium that every one of the things I had him saying-the
quotes-were accurate. He took no issue with it. I'm very
appreciative of him having said that.
Cutting
the Corners on Narration
Q.-Your full disclosure on some of these errors seems relatively minor compared with the criticisms that have been leveled at other very high-profile narrative nonfiction books, like John Berendt's "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" and Sebastian Junger in "The Perfect Storm." How do you respond to criticisms of the narrative as a form, that it leads to cutting corners-the composite scenes and composite characters-that the temptation is it leads writers into fiction. John Berendt admitted rounding the corners. And the famous Janet Malcolm charge that journalists are simply into playing these games of seduction and betrayal with their subjects, and exploiting their subjects; there being this whole school of criticism against the form. Is there something inherent in the form that leads to these problems, or how do you respond to that? How do you keep your own narrative from going off the rails into fiction?
A.-I think that they're two different issues. Janet Malcolm's seduction and betrayal thing is a different thing that applies to all journalists. I think the issue of narrative nonfiction and accuracy is a big issue. Some people simply don't trust stuff that reads too much like fiction. Three devices that fiction typically uses are now being employed in narrative nonfiction: dialogue, scene-by-scene construction, and character development. It's my contention that you can use those, and you can use them with absolute accuracy as long as you're assiduous in your reporting, you're very careful in your reporting. What it requires of a writer writing narrative nonfiction is a deeper level of reporting than is required of somebody writing history, for example. I mean, you don't need to know what somebody thought at every step of the way. You might in a history, but to construct something scene-by-scene you need to know what somebody was wearing, how they were acting, what their gestures were.
Some of that, in writing history, is simply unknowable. People are dead; you can't recover that. You can't make it up in history, and I don't believe you can make it up in a book you call nonfiction, a true account of something. It also requires a deeper level, obviously, than writing fiction. You don't just make things up willy-nilly in fiction, presuming, of course, that's it's plausible every step of the way, and it engages the reader. I'm not saying that this is a better form. It's a hard form of journalism. The levels of reporting that you have to go through to convey the sort of texture that you want and yet make sure that you're accurate require simply a lot of reporting. I did not, to my knowledge, make up anything in this book. I did get some things wrong, apparently, but I didn't make up a single thing. And how do you resist that? I don't know. I'm always interested in finding out exactly what happened.
Sebastian Junger [in] "The Perfect Storm" I thought actually qualified himself by saying, We can't know what happened on this boat, and what I'm giving you is an account that's probable, what might have happened on the boat. And rather than qualifying it in every sentence of what he's writing, he tells you in advance that that's what he's doing, and I think that that's legitimate.
People are very disturbed by these kind of writings, the belief that something could have the texture and the pace of fiction and yet be all true. How can you possibly do that? Well, I tried to do it. It's a form of journalism that's not new. I wanted to write something that engaged the reader. I didn't want to write a Ph.D thesis. I was not going to footnote it. But I wanted to give the reader at the end some indication of how I went about the reporting. Obviously I recreated a substantial number of scenes that I wasn't there to see. But I interviewed virtually everybody in those scenes to be as accurate as I could.
Once again it gets back to the bias of coherence. Even if you know all the factual minutiae of an event, simply the way that you elect to tell that event is going to bias it in some way. So what is objective? Facts are objective. But assembling those facts into a narrative skews the objectivity immediately.
Janet
Malcolm has just written a book called "The Crime of Sheila
McGough," which is about this very issue. She says in a
court case what the lawyers are vying to do is to construct
a narrative using the facts that they are given, and to make
that narrative the most persuasive they can on behalf of
their client, and to get the jury to believe it. The jury
ultimately speaks about what the truth is, or that's the way
it's supposed to happen in this system. But do they really?
All narratives are constructs by people who have an interest
in constructing them, and hence they're all shaped in the
direction of what these people want to say.
Writing
and Napping
Q.-You've talked about these devices and these formulas for all of these things. You typed up your notes at the end of the day, and I think you told us that [you then had a problem].
A.-As my father used to say to me, "the application of the ass to the seat of the chair." But I would spend a lot of the time lying on the couch.
Q.-I understand that. But how do you come up with a structure? Even in these magazine pieces, when you don't want to go strictly chronological, how do you know these moments when shouldn't go chronological? When do you [use] those moments to slip in something where you step out of the time?
A.-The
problem in writing is there are so many opportunities. There
are these junctures, these junctures at which you can go any
number of directions. There's so many different ways to tell
the same story. You have to decide. That's the process of
writing, deciding where something fits and where it doesn't
fit. How big or how small it should be. Real-life things are
all the same size. But in narrative you can take something
small and make it big; you can make it stand for something
that the reader will remember, and later say, "Oh, yeah, I
remember that." Just a small gesture that can later come
back. That's what you can do as a storyteller. You can put
spotlights on things. Deciding when to put those spotlights
and where; deciding how big and how small; how fast or how
slow; when to go back in time; when there's an opportunity
for you to do what the movie people like to call "the back
story" -- you know, the little digression-that's the
problem, the same problem I'm having right now in The New
Yorker story I've been working on for another two years. I
don't know a solution except you keep trying. You set a
dozen writers to work on the very same story, even a fairly
simple story-it has these given sets of facts and these
characters-they're going to turn out vastly different
stories.
Outlets
for Narratives
Q.-There are fewer publications publishing narrative journalism. Where do you turn when you want them in books?
A.-That's a problem. I don't know. If I were 18 years old today I'd probably do film instead of the written word. There are publications: Harper's does stuff and Atlantic Monthly does stuff, and there are a dozen publications out there. Vanity Fair still does some stuff like that.
Q.-Outside does it.
A.-Outside magazine. Yeah. Rolling Stone still does it. So there are places. The New Yorker is kind of the most visible. And they're not even doing very much any more-profiles and shorter hits.
Q.-So how do you support yourself?
A.-Well,
fortunately I don't have to worry about that anymore. I've
been very, very lucky. There are 50,000 books a year
published and most of them end up, as H.G. Wells once said,
in the dustbin of history. I've been hugely fortunate.
Families
Were Paid for Movie
Q.-Did the families make any money on the movie release?
A.-Yes. They were paid a sum, not even for their life rights, because another producer had acquired their life rights. Disney in the end finally did the right thing. It was a very painful and protracted negotiation. It was more complicated and crazy than is worth going into here. But they got a substantial sum of money.
Q.-[How about the actors?]
A.-John
Travolta was great [in the film] They initially had
Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks under consideration. And it was
horrible. Travolta does this thing where he can be the
selfish rogue at one time, but you understand. He's so
magnetic that there's something nice underneath that
selfishness.
Hawaii
Swim Scene
Q.-One of the scenes that you create to great dramatic effect but I wonder whether you thought twice about or had any doubts about the truth of was the Hawaii swimming scene, the potential suicide.
A.-Yes. I didn't have any doubts about the truth of that. Because I'd finished the book, essentially. I had written the last scene of the book, which was going to be Schlichtmann -- I was there for this-at the Safe and Sound Storage on Morrissey Boulevard [in Boston] throwing away the documents and saying he dug one great hole for himself. The seagulls were wheeling about and it was this November sky. It looked like it was going to snow and seemed like a very sad and tragic ending. That was the end. Schlichtmann went away in 1990 to Hawaii. He came back several times, but basically lived in Hawaii until '93. And when he came back he'd give me a call. He'd ask how I was doing. I was actually very aggravated with him because I had so many questions for him. I had so many questions for him, so many things I needed to know, and I couldn't get in touch with him for long periods of time. He came back and I asked him what he'd been doing, you know, what he did right after he left Boston, what happened. And he told me about it. I actually had the name of the hotel in there, and the Random House lawyers made me take it out. I called Hawaii to make sure it existed, too. But they wouldn't let me describe it as a dilapidated, run-down, bathroom-down-the-hall place, and use the name.
He
told me the story of going out swimming, and I knew the
second he told me that story that that was how I wanted to
end the book. And he wasn't telling me with the idea that
this was going to be the last scene in the book. I was just
asking what he was doing, how he was recovering. So I don't
think it was artifice on his part. I think it was actually
true. The reason I liked it so much was it resonated with an
earlier scene when Schlichtmann was flying to New York to go
on the "Good Morning America" show right after the verdict.
He was having this anxiety attack on the plane, although he
didn't realize it was an anxiety attack. He said that when
he was on the plane he wanted to unzip himself, unzip his
skin and get into warm water, like going back to the womb.
And then when he told me this story of going swimming in
Hawaii, stripping his clothes off and going in to the water,
which was warm, and swimming, it just was this wonderful
resonance, which clearly nobody ever caught, but I did.
Change
and W.R. Grace
Q.-Did W.R. Grace or Beatrice try to affect the outcome of the movie?
A.-Not Beatrice. Beatrice essentially doesn't exist anymore. It was bought in 1987 in a leveraged buyout. So Beatrice wasn't a party to it. W.R. Grace made many efforts. Lots and lots and lots of letters back and forth between the lawyers. It's a pretty rare event, I think, a movie like this, where real people's names are used throughout, and a company's name is used.
W.R.
Grace has actually changed fairly dramatically. They were
concerned largely about employee morale. I think that they
have their Web site up which is called "A Civil Action."
Other
Work in Those 8 Years
Q.-Did you work on anything else during the eight years that you were on this? Could you put it aside and write another story, report another story?
A.-I did write a story for Outside in '91 or something like that. And then I actually began the Caravaggio story because we really needed money. My wife teaches only half time at Smith College. There's a laboratory school that she teaches at. We were in pretty desperate shape.
Q.-But only twice?
A.-Yes.
But as soon as I finished the manuscript I began working on
the airplane story, believing fully that this book would be
like most books and nobody would buy it. So I needed to make
a living, and I thought I was going to do it at The New
Yorker. I thought I was going to become a New Yorker staff
writer and turn out good stories on a regular basis. I'm
glad I didn't have to.
Difference
With Daily Coverage
Q.-While you were working on the book, the trial was being covered in newspapers. Did you use any of the materials the way it was covered in newspapers and magazines?
A.-Rarely.
Q.-How was it different? Were you ever tempted to say, "Okay, it's a great book, but I have this story. I want to publish it now."
A.-I was never tempted by that. I was briefly a daily journalist but it's not to my taste. I do things that are longer. Somehow it comes by reflex, I think. So I didn't want to publish when I was writing it. When I started out, I thought it was going to be a book, but I was working at New England Monthly, and my fallback was that I would get paid by New England Monthly for three months, and if it turned into a magazine story, I'd write the magazine story. If I thought it was a book after those three months I'd go on a leave of absence from New England Monthly. Because New England Monthly paid me for three months they would get the first serial rights to the book. That was the deal I had. And if I had finished the book in a timely fashion I would have gone back to work for New England Monthly. But by the time I finished New England Monthly had gone out of existence.
Q.-Could you imagine having written this as a screenplay instead of the way it was? While you were going through this eight-year struggle, did it come into your mind that maybe you should just stop doing it as a book and try it as a screenplay?
A.-I've
never written a screenplay. I find them very difficult to
read. The first draft of the screenplay for this book, I
kind of couldn't read it. You don't get any cues to what's
surrounding you and pace and proportion. That's left to the
director. So it's very unlike reading a work of prose. I
never thought that this had the remotest potential for
becoming a movie. It was a very complicated case. I never
believed it could be made into a movie. So I never gave it a
thought, really.
Looking
for Another Book
Q.-Are you working on another book now?
A.-I'm working on a New Yorker story. I'm looking for another book.
Q.-It's scary, isn't it?
A.-It is scary. This one I just fell into. Now, I think that I have to meet all these criteria. Will it resolve? Is it interesting enough? Does it have enough moments of drama? Is it going to meet all the criteria for being a narrative of a sort that I like to write? Will I have the access that I need to all of the parties? I think that I'm over-thinking it this time. But it's a scary business. It wasn't scary when I started it but it seems-it is actually immersion journalism, as some people call it. You're there watching an event play out and unfold in front of you. It's got wonderful things. It's a great blessing. You get all of the stuff that's evanescent, ephemeral, that people won't remember-gestures and dialogue and stuff. That's the blessing. The bane of it is that you don't know where it's going and how it's going to turn out, whether there will be a satisfactory resolution to it. And that troubles me.
I'd like to do an autopsy-write about something that's already happened, where you're simply recreating it, interviewing all of the people. At least you know in advance what the dimensions of the story are.
Q.-It's not a moving target.
A.-Right.
Exactly.
As
a Kid, Wanted to Be a Writer
Q.-I just want to ask you a question about how you got into this because I know a lot of people in this group are very interested in learning how to write narratively. Could you tell us a little bit about how you got interested in narrative writing? Who were the writers or pieces of writing that served as models? Or how did it work for you?
A.-I basically knew I wanted to be a writer when I was 11 or 12 years old. I was writing short stories and I thought I wanted to be a novelist. And actually when I was living in New York I drove a taxicab part-time and had a girlfriend who was supporting me. I was writing a novel, a terrible novel. I ultimately got a job working at ABC News, which lasted a fairly brief time. And then I got a job at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, which was also fairly brief. I got fired from them. I went to New Haven, where my wife-to-be was living, and I wanted to make my living writing. And when I got up there I started working for The New Haven Register, very briefly. There was an alternative paper in New Haven called The New Haven Advocate, which was a far and away superior paper to The New Haven Register. In fact, the editor was a former investigative reporter for The New Haven Register. And it was just a great paper, very alive. It also gave me more space. I was writing 1,500 word stories and then 2,000 word stories and 3,000 word stories on a weekly or every two week basis. And they gave me more space to figure out what interested me most, and that is, "something happens-why does it happen?" Somebody makes something happen. It's my belief that character essentially drives all narratives, all stories, all events. People are what make things happen, and the more room you have to write the more you can explore character.
So
I started writing 3,000-word pieces for this newspaper and I
liked it. I gave up the idea of writing fiction and I was
reading John McPhee then. I often read Edmund Wilson. His
pieces for The New Republic were just great in the
Depression era. It all is collected in a book called "The
American Earthquake", and they're just wonderful stories. I
became friends with a writer named C.D. B. Bryan, who wrote
a book called "Friendly Fire," which attracted a lot of
attention. It was a narrative nonfiction about a family that
had lost their son in Vietnam, and they were trying to find
out what had happened to him. They finally found out that he
was killed by friendly fire. Just an incredible book. I got
along well with C.D. Bryan. Around that time, Mailer's
"Executioner's Song" came out. McGinnis came out with "Fatal
Vision," a book that I didn't much care for, but it was a
narrative nonfiction. There were a lot of people who were
doing this stuff, and, of course, before them, Truman Capote
and Joe Mitchell. A lot of it was being done in The New
Yorker. 