Interview With Adam Hochschild

Interview With Adam Hochschild Sue William Silverman Adam Hochschild began his professional writing career in 1965 as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, before moving to Ramparts magazine in 1966. In 1974 he co-founded MotherJones,America's largest progressive magazine . He has publishedfive widely acclaimed books of nonfiction, the first his personal Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son (1986). The Mirror at Midnight: A South African Journey (1990), The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember StaUn (1994), and King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (1998) follow in the investigative journalism tradition of Mother Jones, though with a more historical slant. Hisfifth book, Finding theTrapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels (1997), is a collection ofsome twenty years' worth of essays that won the PEN/Spielvogel DiamonsteinAwardfor theArt ofthe Essay. He has won numerous other awards, most recently the 1999 Lionel Gelber Prizefor King Leopold's Ghost. Hochschild was born in New York City in 1942 and spent summers on hisfamily's estate in the Adirondacks, a life he describes in exquisite detail in HalftheWay Home. Hisfather was an influential businessman and executive of a multinational corporation, which included copper mines in southern Africa. In a 1994 interview in The Adam Hochschild Photo by Mikhail Lemkhin Sue William Silverman Photo by J. Jackson 203 204Fourth Genre Progressive, Hochschild, who neverfelt at ease with hisfamily's wealth, claims that "Igradually became more aware, the older Igot, that the comfortable lifestyle I had was indirectly dependent on the labor ofminers working under the earth at the other end of the world, in very hot, dark, dangerous, low-paid conditions. " Later, when he was nineteen, he spent a summer working as ajournalistfor an anti-apartheid newspaper in South Africa. This experience, which he describes both in his memoir and in Mirror at Midnight, was the critical and political turning point in his life. Aftergraduatingfrom Harvard he moved to San Francisco, choosing a path vastly differentfrom that ofhis industrialistfather. What Hochschüd calls a "quiet rebellion" from his staid and polite upbringing, others might note as more profound,for little in his earlier privileged life seemed to indicate that he would later explore icy gulags in Russia, travel ravaged South Africa, or uncover torture and corruption in King Leopold's Congo. Hochschild is the strong moral center in his work, asking his readers to bear witness . Hochschild helps make this possible by presenting irrefutable evidence ofevil and denial. Hochschild startles and commands attention. In his elegant, intelligent, powerful prose, we read of kings and peasants, of dictators and the dispossessed. Adam Hochschüd was interviewedfor Fourth Genre on February 12, 2000. Silverman: You write about an early unpublished novel of yours, about wanting to be a novelist. Why were you first drawn to fiction? Hochschild: I think that I originally wanted to be a noveUst because my own experience of reading fiction in my twenties left me thinking it -was a way of probing into areas of human experience and evoking human emotions in a way I found tremendously exciting and challenging—I envied people who could do it. I stiU envy people who can do it. But by today one of the things I've learned is that the kingdom of words is a large one, and that you can evoke emotions and talk about aU aspects ofhuman experience in nonfiction as weU as fiction, and that perhaps we should not be so stuffy and particular about the divisions between fiction and nonfiction. I don't mean that in the sense that it's okay to make something up and put it in a newspaper column, but rather that the set ofwriters' skflls involved, and the set ofreaders' emotions that are evoked, can be pretty similar in a novel and a work of nonfiction. Silverman: In King Leopold's Ghost you write about how much ofHeart of Darkness is based on fact. If that book were written today, do you think it would be called creative nonfiction? Interview with Adam Hochschild205 Hochschild: No. It's written clearly as a novel, with fictional characters and framed by beginning and ending scenes on a yacht where Marlow...