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The Art of the Profile with David Remnick of ‘The New Yorker’

David Remnick writes for fun. That might seem an odd sentiment coming from the editor in chief of The New Yorker, a magazine known for an eminent tradition of literary and journalistic gravitas. But his kind of “fun” shouldn’t be misread as trivial. What Remnick considers fun to write are the signature New Yorker profile pieces, which involve weeks or months of rigorous research and legwork for the writer (running to many thousands of published words). On the occasion of Remnick’s comprehensive profile of Bruce Springsteen in the new issue, we picked his brain about the art of the modern profile and how the form originated and evolved at The New Yorker.

He may write for fun, but David Remnick is his own harshest critic. When meditating on writing, he talks frequently of disappointment, of failure, of missing the mark or chasing a subject forever beyond his grasp. But he has no patience for blaming uncooperative interviewees or logistical obstacles – particularly the increasingly thorny issue of access to famous people. “Speaking to the subject is the most overrated thing in journalism,” he says. “I’ve written profiles where you never even meet the person. Janet Flanner wrote an amazing profile of Adolf Hitler. I don’t think there was a lot of Hitler access!”

Access – having it or not having it, or what it takes to get it – may define a profile’s content, structure, or tone. While maintaining that access may not be necessary or even useful once obtained, Remnick dismisses journalists unwilling to work hard to get it. As he describes the profession, reporting often means “making the same phone call over and over and over again until you’re so irritating that the person you’re calling makes the calculation that it’s better to give you the time that you need rather than have to endure the constant assaults of your phone calls and emails.”

As an example of this tenacity, Remnick recalls the efforts of Seymour Hersh, “one of the greatest reporters I’ve ever known.” According to Remnick, Hersh “was working on the Watergate story. The New York Times needed to catch up with the Washington Post … it was killing them. He needed to get Charles Colson, one of the bad guys of Watergate, on the phone. How did he do that? He got to the office at eight a.m. – nobody gets to a newspaper at eight a.m. – and on a rotary phone, he called Chuck Colson’s home number every 15 minutes till seven p.m. Eight a.m. to seven p.m., every 15 minutes on a rotary-dial phone. … He got Chuck Colson, and there was the front page story.

“When I hear a writer say that they ‘put in a call,’” Remnick concludes, “I want to pull my hair out.”

Seymour Hersh is just one august personage Remnick invokes. He freely admits that his motivational pessimism comes from aspiring to the heights of accomplishment demonstrated by other New Yorker writers. In a conversation of less than an hour, he mentions literary gold standards established by the likes of Mark Singer, Ian Frazier, Roger Angell, AJ Liebling, John Updike, Donald Barthelme, Alice Munro, Dexter Filkins, Jane Mayer, Janet Malcolm, Kenneth Tynan, and George WS Trow. And no roll call of modern profile writers would be complete without Gay Talese and his journey into the alternate universe surrounding Frank Sinatra at the height of his celebrity.

“Gay Talese’s great achievement,” says Remnick, “when he was writing for Esquire in the 60s and 70s, was to meld basic short story form – conservative short story form, like Irwin Shaw, that kind of short story – to fully reported pieces about sometimes famous people. … When he’s writing about Frank Sinatra, there aren’t huge block quotes from Frank Sinatra … in fact he has no access to Frank Sinatra at all. At all! Except from at a distance. So he learns how to make that deficit into an advantage, and he writes a masterwork.”

Whatever happens with access, the rest of the profile is up to the writer. Remnick sees this as creatively and intellectually liberating, and he counsels against the typical and the formulaic. “Profiles that are just: opening scene, elaboration of opening scene, biography scene, resumption of present tense, and end, are a job. They can be okay, they can be interesting, but they’re a job – they’re not formally interesting.”

Instead, he admires and aspires to emulate writers who take risks, as long as they get their story straight. “The thing about the profile – with the exception of the parameter that it has to be true, where its facts have to be facts, and I’m a big believer in that, in a conservative sense – everything else can be radical. Structure, sentence structure, word choice, descriptive powers … all those tools that are open to you as a literary writer should be open to you as a profile writer.”

Remnick’s new Bruce Springsteen profile may not be radical in structure, but it’s nevertheless compelling and humanizing – a difficult accomplishment for a subject like Springsteen, who’s been famous a lot longer now than he’s been not-famous. “I found him very genuine,” says Remnick of the few hours of Springsteen face-time he enjoyed. “As someone who’s covered a lot of politics, I know what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a great wind of bullshit.”

Of course, that doesn’t mean Bruce Springsteen opened his psyche completely to Remnick, who describes him as “very shrewd – about his own press, his own powers, his seductive powers.” Remnick hastily adds, “I don’t mean sexually – I mean journalistically, he’s not unaware of his own charm. At this point he is incredibly well spoken. When I was first watching him and he’d get interviewed on TV, he was a shore rat. He was an unlettered guy who knew about rock ’n’ roll. And he talked with a Jersey Shore accent. Now he’s reading The Brothers Karamazov. Now he’s talking at great length about his oracular powers and his relationship with the audience.”

Despite his articulate nature, it’s not as if someone like Springsteen hasn’t been through a million interviews already by this time in his career. “There’s some element of rehearsal,” Remnick says, “and for some of these questions, it’s probably not the first time he’s heard them, and the answers come out in fully formed paragraphs in a way they wouldn’t have when he was 24 years old. He’s 62! And he’s been at the top of his powers for a very long time.”

And does Remnick think Springsteen will appreciate the piece when he sees it? Will his reaction be negative or positive or somewhere in between? “There are journalists,” says Remnick, “who think that the best thing to happen after your piece is published is that both you and your subject get hit by a bus so you never have to encounter that. If a subject really loves the piece, you question whether you were discerning enough in your reporting and your writing. If the opposite happens, and they’re hysterically angry at you, you might question whether you went the other direction. I prefer not to know. I’m not writing for the subject.”

For the few profiles he has time to write, Remnick tends to pick subjects he’s personally intrigued by – musicians, writers, politicians, even tyrants. But he’s acutely conscious of the potential for failure or misdirected ambition. “I used to think that I wanted to profile Bob Dylan,” he says by way of example, “and I think now that would be a terrible mistake. First of all, there’s enough written about Bob Dylan to last us twenty-seven lifetimes, and I think he would be the most elusive of subjects, and I’ve seen everyone else do it and I think it would be a disaster.”

It’s hard to imagine such a restless nature leading the New Yorker masthead – arguably one of the most respected magazines in history, widely viewed at the top of its game under Remnick’s leadership. But the editor in question is not inclined to creative or intellectual rest. “To be too satisfied too early is probably a mistake of youth,” says Remnick. Then, dissatisfied even with that thought, he qualifies pensively, “Or middle age. Or whatever it might be.”

– Chris Mohney