Q&A with Vanity Fair ’s International Correspondent William Langewiesche

Portrait by Basso Cannarsa/Agence Opale/Alamy

Let’s start with the hardest question. How do you pronounce your last name?

I  don’t even know how to pronounce it. It’s a very ethnic name and I’m not ethnic. It’s German. The problem is that most American pronunciations [like “lang-wishy”] are so ugly, I kind of stick with the German one, long-gah-vee-shuh. Or if I have to spell it for a reservation at a hotel, I might say, “Yeah, it’s L-A-N-G and it goes on after that.”

You’re talking from Kosovo. What are you working on?

I’m here basically doing a story about a man who was the prime minister [Ramush Haradinaj] and his war crimes trial. He was an Albanian warlord—well, “warlord” is the wrong word; an Albanian military commander in the Kosovo Liberation Army. He was heavily involved in the heaviest fighting in Kosovo, and then became the prime minister for 100 days [from December 2003 to March 2004] and was indicted on war crimes charges. I’m kind of looking at him as a vehicle for looking at other aspects of this new nation.

You’ve reported from countries all over the world—Sudan, China and Iraq, to name three. Which has been the toughest in terms of gaining access to people and information?

The most closed culture that I’ve run into probably is the Green Zone [a heavily guarded area that houses many government entities, including the U.S. Embassy] inside of Baghdad. Washington, D.C., is a mixed bag. It’s not completely closed, but it’s full of spin and bullshit—everyone has an agenda. But the Green Zone is like Washington on a really bad day. It’s horrific. I spent much of three years in Iraq, on and off, and by far the greatest stress for me was not the combat, the killing that I saw or being chased. It was dealing with the civilian operations in the Green Zone. The military, it’s not so bad. It’s predictable. But in the rear echelon, people are extremely political, very closed, full of spin and self-delusion—they don’t know what’s going on.

And when you go into a foreign country and you’re looking to get a feel for the story, how do you approach folks? Do you just say, “I’m with Vanity Fair?”

I always identify myself: “I work with Vanity Fair.” And Vanity Fair  requires a little explanation sometimes because people think it’s a fashion magazine and don’t realize that it’s running the serious stuff. So we get through that introduction and then get into it. I don’t think anybody knew in advance that I was coming down here. I just kind of showed up and picked up the phone. I had one guy, one contact, and I met him the same night I arrived three days ago. Things proceeded very rapidly from there. It’s happening fast—doors are opening and people are willing to talk. I [recently] spent well over a month in China trying to break into a certain circle of people, and it was very difficult. Kosovo is a much more open society than China is inherently—culturally, politically, in every way. It’s barely born as a nation; they have not erected significant defenses against people like me—yet. And I hope they never will.

Speaking of China, at the end of your piece on the Beijing Olympics in the April issue, there was a note of reservation about how well executed it was going to be. What’s your forecast?

Well, short of a major blowup in Tibet, I think that it’s going to be, by official standards—and by that, I include television and newspaper reports—a huge success. But the mandate of reporters is not necessarily to pass judgment on the context, so you have to kind of look beyond that. And the context in China, in my point of view, is that the problem is not so much that it’s suppressing Tibet or, for that matter, western China, but that the entire political culture of China is abysmal.

Tibet and western China are just manifestations of that. It’s a very unpleasant, ultimately self-destructive political culture. And the problem, of course, with the Olympics is that it’s a celebration of nationalism. It’s not really about sports. I mean it’s kind of about sports, but you could do sports [without] identifying the athletes with nations. So this is hyped nationalism.

In the case of a country like China, which is totalitarian, and very uptight and oppressive politically, then that’s an unpleasant thing. This cannot be forgotten. To see the Olympics performed in Beijing is not quite  like seeing the Olympics performed in Berlin under the Nazis, but the elements are there. My job is to call it like I see it.

You’ve covered your share of wars and other violent conflicts. What sort of tight spots have you been in, and how did you handle the risk?

I’ve been in I don’t know how many firefights. I’ve had people pull guns on me and had people accuse me of being a spy and arrest me. It’s part of the job. If you deny it, you’re a fool. Accepting it and understanding it and being aware of the environment you’re in is the No. 1 component of safety, or such safety that can be found. Also, the people close to me, they know that if I get killed somehow, I would have gone into it with open eyes. I’m certainly not the guy who’s saying, “There’s no problem, it’s all safe, blah blah blah.”

One of the things I really dislike in reporters or writers is when they sort of play the hero, like, “There I was, the bullets were whistling by, and I was quaking in my boots.” I mean, if you were quaking in your boots, don’t bother readers with it. I get annoyed because there’s a lot of that in writing, a lot of grandstanding. And usually it’s only half true.

When you’re not reporting, you live in Davis during the school year and spend summers in France. What attracted you to Davis?

It’s got a great public school system, which is why I’m there for my [two] children. I like Northern California—I like it better than Southern California. I think of all the places in the U.S., talking in terms of intellect and culture, Northern California’s obviously one of the better places.

You also keep a plane in Davis.

I have a great little airplane—one person sits in the front, one person sits behind. It’s called a Husky. it’s designed for flying in the mountains. It’s got great visibility—it’s almost like being in a plastic bubble.

Northern California is an aviation paradise. I’m not a big fan of San Francisco as a city—I think it’s overly genteel and self-satisfied. But flying over San Francisco at night is just one of the most beautiful things you can do in an airplane. And flying over the Central Valley is just beautiful. Then over the coastal mountains and the Sierra Nevada—it’s all gorgeous flying country. There’s gorgeous flying country in China, too. But they’ll shoot you down.

When you finish reporting a story and come home, what’s your writing process like?

It’s basically get up early in the morning, work all day, work all night. Not all night, but work until you hit the wall. I don’t know how many hours a day, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it was 15 hours a day. Sometimes productively, sometimes terribly unproductively. I know I should just get up and break off and go for a run and get away, but I don’t do it. I lock into the fight.

I read that the great master [Nobel Prize winner] V.S. Naipaul, who is certainly one of the best writers of our time, said that it’s impossible to write well  more than 300 words a day. I think that’s probably accurate for me. I can easily spend a day on 300 words, and sometimes I’ll spend a day on half a paragraph. So it’s very, very slow and kind of obsessive and a little bit feverish. I think of it often as a mountain climb.

There’s a lot of anxiety among journalists that readers no longer have the patience or time for long-form feature stories. What’s your take?

I deny that attention span is an issue; I think that’s an excuse. Strictly from an editorial point of view, it’s an excuse that editors and writers—especially writers—give themselves for not producing the right kind of copy that can justify length. Basically, you address a subject at whatever length the subject requires, and your reader will stay with you. This is not the end of time. The apocalypse is not upon us in terms of writing. In fact, I really think that—and I don’t believe I’m speaking from a privileged position—this is the golden era. We are sitting at a time of liberation for nonfiction rather than a time of restraint, because the readers understand the possibilities better than they would have before.

Besides being a pilot, your father, Wolfgang Langewiesche, was also an author and magazine writer. How much did he influence your career choice?

Probably biologically. It’s probably not by chance that he was a writer and I am one, too.

I saw how much my father suffered. He always said to me, “Do what you want to do, I don’t care. But don’t be a writer.” And I believed him, I truly believed him. This is not rhetoric. He truly suffered as a writer, more than I do. He was tormented by it.

So what happened?

It was John McPhee. I was in high school and reading The New Yorker  and discovered this guy who was writing about such an unimportant subject: the birch bark canoe. But he was writing about it so beautifully. And I realized this guy is making a living writing for The New Yorker. It had really nothing to do with content; it had everything to do with style. And I thought, if you can make a living doing this kind of stuff, then this is what I’m going to do.

Have you told your kids not to be writers?

No, I don’t go to that degree. I doubt whether they [his son, 18, and daughter, 15] would choose to do what I do. I don’t think that they look at me and see me suffering. But what they do see is me working extraordinarily hard seven days a week. Daddy’s always working. And beyond that, they also realize that I have to travel a lot and I’m rarely home and sometimes I go to places that are of concern to them. It’s not like having a father who’s a movie star. It’s a rough road.

Do they read your stuff?

Yeah, my son reads it on and off. He brings [my stories] up. And my daughter reads it, too, but she’s a little younger. Anyway, he says, “Dad, this is so boring. Come on, you write for Vanity Fair ! Why don’t you investigate some singer or a movie star? What’s this stuff about prison gangs in Sao Paulo? It’s boring!” And he’s probably right.