Waiting for Holdengräber
An Attempt to Interview an Interviewer
It was an innocuous April afternoon a few years ago, when I went down a social media rabbit hole and read an intriguing interview by the sculptor and writer, William Corwin: His subject was Paul Holdengräber, who, although I did not know it at the time, is himself an interviewer extraordinaire. Holdengräber is a sort of intellectual dandy from a bygone era, a charismatic cosmopolitan who speaks four languages and can quote Proust from memory, yet it’s his warmth, ebullience, and keen interest in people that allow him to cajole even the most verklempt of guests into a revealing repartee.
Holdengräber’s events are a mix of This is Your Life and a cross-examination ~ William Corwin
But in Corwin’s interview, which took place over a long lunch in a New York City diner, the tables were turned as he casually grilled Holdengräber , asking him: Are you still a nomad? And besides “impresario,” what did they [your parents] actually expect from you?
And, Paul Holdengräber, who has conducted interviews with the likes of Elvis Costello, Patti Smith, Werner Herzog, Mike Tyson, Helen Mirren, David Lynch, and Margaret Atwood (to name just a few) on stage in front of hundreds of people, who has been lauded internationally for his work, sounds suddenly uncomfortable with the spotlight shining squarely on him. He wriggles and demurs. I feel I should lie down on a couch! What a complicated question. How can I respond?
Holdengräber then proceeds to answer William’s questions, one by one, with such assurance and wisdom, that I have to stop reading several times so I can write down his brilliant meditations on language, exile, and elective affinities.
William asks about the trauma Holdengräber’s family endured during WW2, which forced his parents into exile in Haiti from their home in Austria. Holdengräber answers etymologically ~ My trauma is a secondhand wound; it’s a transmission of trauma. The [words] transmission and tradition are the same in Hebrew: they [translate to] “what is passed on.” So I’m living with the memory of something I never experienced, the memory of something I don’t know.
Corwin’s interview is full of revelations that I continued to transcribe into my journal. Eventually I came up for air, entirely intrigued with this Holdengräber fellow. There is the frisson of recognition as I realize that we have both lived in the same cities: Paris, Los Angeles, and New York, and that our PhD’s covered similar terrain. There was an unmistakable feeling of familiarity with this warm, witty and erudite stranger. It’s a feeling he knows well: I do love certain occasions I’ve had of speaking with people I feel I’ve known forever, even though I’ve only met them two minutes before going onstage. When I met Edmund de Waal onstage, the line from Baudelaire’s poem Spleen came to mind: “I have more memories than if I was a thousand years old.” I felt I had known him forever.
After I finished reading William’s interview, aptly entitled LUFTMENSCH (one who has his feet planted firmly in midair), I left a comment under the original post saying how much I enjoyed the interview, and, lo and behold ~ a single word floated across the universe. It said, simply: Merci.
A quick Google search and I learned that after finishing university in Belgium, Paul made his way to Paris and while a student in philosophy at the Sorbonne he sat in on classes at the College de France of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Claude Levi-Strauss. After his Paris years, he went on to get a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton. For his role as an international interlocuter and cultural curator, he has been awarded the Chevalier and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in France, and the Cross of Honor in Austria.
Over the next few months he occasionally sends me a link to his podcast, The Quarantine Tapes, deeply intimate conversations with writers, thinkers, painters and poets around the globe; these phone calls should be included in the official time capsule for the pandemic era ~ when the whole world shut down and we were ravenous for human connection.
I listen to an episode: a conversation with actor and director, Tim Robbins, and it’s a bit shocking how thick Paul’s accent is. He definitely knows how to speak beautiful French, but the accent isn’t French. It’s sounds a bit British at times, and then almost German, but not quite. Perhaps it’s Swiss. I have to know more, so I send him a question. This is the start of my covert interview: I’m so curious what age you were when you came over. Your accent!
Paul lobs back, forgoing capitals and with exclamation points in triplicate: oh. thank you. came here to go to graduate school and stayed. what accent!!! Ha!!! When people ask me where my accent is from, I tell them it’s affected. took years to develop! ha!
I suggest a proper interview and send him a list of questions which he essentially ignores. When, months later and only half teasing, I call him a recalcitrant subject, he says nothing about answering the questions, but remarks how much he loves the word recalcitrant. And when you hear him speak, it’s obvious that he loves words, so many words, in French and English and Italian, any language, really. He breaks them down syllable by syllable, teasing them apart aurally, seduced by their etymology. In conversation he delights in wayward digressions, his chats are a freewheeling intellectual scatting over subjects and genres; always associative, playful, and intriguing. He is curious in a way that only the brightest people are. He leans in, hungry ~ in love with not knowing, always eager to be schooled in something. He says, One must keep the urgency alive. I speak of the euphoria of ignorance, the notion of approaching things through non-knowledge of the subject and the skepticism of knowing too much. In some way one must carry the desire for openness and not be afraid of where it might lead you.
He is, however, not an easy man to interview. After several months, I attempt to get answers from him by sending this cheeky envoy: You are required to answer the questions set before you. Don’t impede my interview.
He counters: You’ll have to try harder. In order to interview…you’ve got to…do your research! ha! I tell him that instead of reading other people’s interviews with him, I would prefer to discover him myself, in real time, and he messages back, not with answers to any of the questions, but with a single word: do!
He does tell me that the most profound experience of his childhood was reading Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, a book given to him by his father during a period of convalescence. I ask him about the interview with William Corwin: How much time did that interview take? Did you meet or speak several times in person?
He responds vaguely: do ask William but as I recall one long lunch at a diner in Time’s Square.
I send William a message asking about the interview. William replies in what feels like an elongated game of Chinese whispers: “It was a long process, and we talked a lot and edited a tremendous amount, but the result was very beautiful.”
Ever the optimist, I proceed by stealth, asking a few questions at a time over the next few months. I have a couple questions for you I announce hopefully. I’m sure you do, he counters. At least two. I learn that he has a dog called Bartleby, that he doesn’t like to talk on the phone while driving, that he is left-handed and used to play the violin “very badly”. He tells me he loves the writer Enrique Vila-Matas, and when I proffer my theory that the very best people often love coffee and animals and have usually smoked cigarettes at some point in their lives, he concedes to the first two, but admits to not smoking cigarettes.
Holdengräber is a man of vigorous opinions and he certainly isn’t shy about sharing them. When I mention one of Rainer Maria Rilke’s translators whom I thought was universally adored, Paul eviscerates him in two sentences. When inquiring about his experience at a silent retreat in Big Sur during the pandemic, I ask, What was the take away? He pauses, his mind hovering over the words TAKE AWAY and then as if by royal decree, he says with utter conviction: Strike that from your vocabulary and at once I feel like a schoolgirl who has displeased her professor.
I ask him about his mother tongue and get another roundabout answer that is essentially a non-answer. I say I have several father tongues but no mother tongue OR I am confused, I grew up in a ~ in so far that I did ~speaking 4 languages simultaneously, nothing that 10 years of therapy couldn’t help.
Eventually I solve the mystery of why his accent is mix of Germanic ‘ja’s’ and French ‘oui’s’ with a few ‘si’s’ thrown in. He describes his peripatetic childhood ~ born in Texas, he spent his earliest years in Mexico, speaking mostly Spanish and English at home. His family then made a series of international moves, with periods in Zurich and Lucerne, a brief return to Vienna, then onto Dusseldorf where he started primary school, and finally settling in Brussels where Paul lived from the age of 8 to 18 before studying philosophy at a the Catholic University of Louvain not far from Brussels.
He has a vast command of the arts, encyclopedic knowledge of literature, music, visual art and architecture. During an interview with one of his favorite guests, Adam Phillips, the British psychoanalyst, Phillips mentions a rather obscure text, asking Paul if he knows of the author. Holdengräber immediately nods in recognition, The psychoanalyst? Yes, he wrote a book on Freud.
I ask Paul what he loves most about what he does, which he often calls chatting for a living. He tells me he wants to discover and reveal things in his conversations which might be beyond the scope of more conventional interviews. In a Princeton alumni profile, we get a view of his process: “On stage, armed with weeks of research and literary quotations that he sprinkles into the conversation, Holdengräber is highly engaged with his guests and clearly takes pleasure in the process.”
I believe people are hungry for culture and hungry for true conversation. ~Paul Holdengräber
In surveying his catalog of interviews, he cites the one with boxer, Mike Tyson, as one of the most profound ~ This was one of the most extraordinary conversations. He both listened very carefully and responded with great candor and intelligence and feeling. My mother had me ask what it feels like to be hit so hard in the head. He said, ‘What I did for a living is what you try to avoid your whole life.’
On his experience with poet W.S. Merwin at the New York Public Library, Holdengräber recalls ~ The interview with then-poet laureate W.S. Merwin was deeply moving. When he came on stage, I felt guilty. I said, ‘I don’t read enough poetry.’ He said, ‘Don’t read poetry. Read poems.’ To my mind, that was very liberating.”
Holdengräber often seems to be mining for buried treasure, often asking for elaboration when an answer is worthy of greater explication. One of the marks of a great conversationalist is an ability to listen, intently and without judgement, and at that, he is a master ~ acutely aware that silence in conversation is a virtue, listening to his guest, he often leans in patiently and lets them unravel their thoughts for as long as it takes. One of the most important parts is to listen, to slow things down and be silent, ~ seeing what happens when nothing seems to be happening. A lot does happen. It’s anguishing to be silent. Talking is much easier.
He generally goes in with an idea of where to start and where to end, but it’s the road in between that is the compelling part of the journey. His guests seem to revel in these tête-à-têtes as much as he does. He speaks about being the porte-parole ~ I’m trying to see what happens, and how long we can keep the rally going, but I’m not trying to win, to prove, to demonstrate. I’m trying to, in a Socratic way, be the midwife — to bring about, to be the porte-parole (as they say in French), the spokesperson, the person who carries the word, who makes it emanate, who makes it emerge. To have the adventure of speaking come out, that’s what I’m interested in.
His subjects often return for more conversation, some on stage and others over the phone. Filmmaker Wes Anderson usually isn’t thrilled to talk about himself, but the he felt differently about his talk with Paul at the New York Public Library. He admits, “I usually tend to look forward to a Q&A-type public experience with a combination of fear, dread and terror. But Paul’s talks are actually, genuinely fun.”
I asked Merve Emre, esteemed scholar, critic and Creative Writing Professor at Wesleyan University, to describe what it feels like to be in conversation with Holdengräber. “Paul is, in my experience, the most passionate and intellectually curious interviewer I’ve ever known. He has the rarest gift of all: he makes you feel seen, completely.”
Writer Rebecca Mead was very keen to discuss her book “My Life in Middlemarch” with Holdengräber, though, initially, he wasn’t convinced, as he is not an ardent Middlemarch fan, but Rebeca persuaded him. “There’s an element of the psychoanalytic in his questioning. He’ll interrogate the pauses and the places where your sentence fades out because you’ve come to something that you don’t want to say. He made me almost cry.”
On the subject of the spoken word he told Corwin: I believe deeply that we come to thought through words — thought is made in the mouth, or some such sentence from Tristan Tzara. Philosophy, as we believe it to be, started with a conversation…I suppose my claim to a profession is to make other people speak, to find a way of giving them words and to find a way of bringing about a thought. I feel that through speaking we can discover ourselves.
It has been a delighful four year odyssey to get to know something of the bookish bon vivant that is Paul Holdengräber, a splendid son of Europa who lives quite happily in LA, and can be found jetting around the world these days, talking, listening, and teasing revelations out of the most gifted minds of our time. At the moment, he is working on a new endeavor in the City of Angels. Will end on this musing of his: As I think of it, I’m after the perfect conversation. I’m after the Platonic idea of what the best possible conversation could be, and therefore it eludes me like a collector who would hope in some way never to have the last piece in his collection. If he did, then it would be the death of the collector.
Paul Holdengräber is an Interviewer, Instigator, Curator of Public Curiosity; Former Founding Director of OnassisLA & Director of the acclaimed series of conversations know as LIVEfromNYPL. He was also the Founder and Director of “The Institute for Art & Cultures” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and a Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.
His series of podcasts, THE QUARANTINE TAPES and QUOTOMANIA are a delight to listen to and can be found via dublab here ~ https://www.dublab.com/shows/the-quarantine-tapes
Paul has an enormous following on Twitter ~ find him @holdengraber
Watch Paul and Mike Tyson in conversation here ~
Eavesdrop on this conversation with Christopher Hitchens & others via Open Culture ~
Watch more thought-provoking discussions with cultural luminaries hosted by Paul Holdengräber via Occidental College ~ https://www.oxy.edu/oxylive
