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A Conversation with
Orville Schell

Schell's background points toward an academic career: boarding school at the Pomfret School in Connecticut, a B.A. magna cum laude at Harvard in 1964, and Chinese studies at Berkeley, where he earned an M.A. in 1967 and completed all but his dissertation for the Ph.D. But Schell abandoned a scholarly career for such un-academic activities as covering the war in Indochina, then returning to the U.S. to work as a carpenter and build his own house and ranch—and the Niman-Schell ranch and meat company—in Bolinas, and taking off on various journalistic adventures around the world, most often to China. Before he finished college, Schell had dropped out twice to go to Taiwan and study Chinese.

Under legendary editor William Shawn at the New Yorker, Schell developed as a writer—as did his younger brother Jonathan, whose influential books The Village of Ben Suc and The Fate of the Earth first appeared in that magazine.

Orville Schell's writing blends scholarly research and journalistic observation. He has written a book on California Governor Jerry Brown, a book (Modern Meat) about how meat is produced today, a volume of essays with Berkeley English professor Frederick Crews, and ten books on China, including Discos and Democracy, To Get Rich is Glorious, and Mandate of Heaven. When President Clinton visited China last spring, Schell covered the event for Newsweek. In April, Harper's ran his 13,000-word essay, “Virtual Tibet,” which will be included in a book he is now completing on the West's fascination with Tibet over the last three centuries.

Two interests in his life—China and human rights—are family affairs. Schell's grandfather was a missionary in China; his father, a lawyer in New York City, was co-founder of Helsinki Watch, a precursor to Human Rights Watch. Schell's father loved to get out of the city, and took his two sons and daughter on weekends and vacations to “very strange, screwball places” in the country, as Orville remembers, leaving him with an abiding love for the country and lots of practice in primitive living and amateur plumbing and carpentry.

Schell is married to the Beijing-born television and documentary film producer Liu Baifang, who earned her B.A. in psychology from Berkeley in 1984. He has three sons, one of whom just graduated in film from New York University; the other two attend the French-American School in Berkeley. We talked with Dean Schell in his office at North Gate Hall.

How did you become a writer?

When I first dropped out of Harvard, after my junior year in 1960, I came out here to study Chinese at Stanford. It was a catastrophe; I didn't learn anything. My head was just filled with a jumble of unintellilgible characters. So I decided I had better leave and go to Taiwan, which was the only place one could study Mandarin Chinese at that time. I got a job as a galley boy on a Norwegian freighter that went to the South Seas, where I had an errant uncle living in Tahiti.

On the ship there were 14 passengers, all of them going stir crazy on the two-week leg from Long Beach to Papeete. One of them kept coming down to the galley to talk to me. He had done some writing, and, since I was going to see all these great places, he kept asking why I didn't try to write about them. Actually, the idea had never occurred to me.

So, when I got to Tahiti, I wrote my first article. It was about a little outdoor movie theater—with a straw roof on stilts, benches, and pigs running around. On the Richter scale of public events, not a big story, but it was my start!

After that, I tried to write everywhere I went. When I got to Taiwan, I contacted the Boston Globe and said, “I'm out here, here are some articles, would you like me to send you more?” They not only said yes, they gave me a column, called “Our Man in Asia.” It was a wonderful, wonderful opportunity. And that's when I started to get involved in what was brewing in Indochina: the war to come.

Why were you interested in China and speaking Chinese?

It was a complete accident. When I was a sophomore at Harvard there was a legendary course—taught by John Fairbank and Edwin Reischauer—on China, Japan, and Korea. I was trying to find a course I could take with my sister, who was about to graduate from Radcliffe. That was the only course that fit our joint schedules.

It was a wonderful introduction to Asia, an incredibly intense course. It inoculated decades of students with an interest in Asia. When I got to the end of it, it was hard to stop. So I started to take more courses in Chinese history, philosophy, literature. And then I had an honors tutorial with the Japanese historian Albert Craig. There were just four of us. It set the template for some of the kinds of teaching we are trying to do here, at the Graduate School of Journalism. To have very, very small courses, no more than ten people, sometimes five. Tutorials really, with senior people who are the best in the world, who have come in from long careers in the field, from reporting or writing or making documentary films.

You published your first books while you were a graduate student at Berkeley. How did this come about?

Random House had asked Franz Schurmann, a professor in the history and sociology departments, to do a reader on China. He agreed but then realized he was very busy and could use some help. I was one of his students and was willing to do practically anything. So I started to help him—find articles, do xeroxing, one thing and another. The project grew into three volumes, covering three different periods of history.

Then Schurmann graciously suggested that maybe I'd like to co-author the books. Well, that was beyond my wildest dreams! For me, it was a kind of master-apprentice initiation into book writing. It was a seminal experience in my life: it familiarized me with publishing, with New York editors, with how books get produced. It's the kind of learning that surpasses, by light-years, just sitting in a lecture hall and listening.

What made you decide against an academic career?

It just sort of happened. Partially it was having spent a lot of time in Asia and writing for newspapers and magazines. And then, when I came back to graduate school here, in the mid-1960s, it was a highly politicized period, the height of the anti-war movement. It was really hard for anyone to concentrate on pure scholarship. Anyway, I had gotten the journalism bug and had started writing a kind of journalism that was between reporting and scholarship, trying to combine the best of what the academy has to offer with reporting.

What do you call this mixture of scholarship and journalism?

I don't have a name for it, but it is a unique form. There's a narrow kind of littoral where journalism overlaps with scholarship. One of the things I got as a graduate student at Berkeley was an awareness of the field of history and area studies and their importance to journalism. Now, when I write about something, I ask what the historical parallels are; what themes recur; what literature has resonance. What did the Neo-Confucians have to say that so infuriated the communists? Or what were the symmetries between the past and the present that the communists might not want to admit?

I think this hybrid form is one of the great forms of writing and, alas, one for which there are fewer and fewer places to publish. It's long-form, it's thoughtful, it's calm; it combines history with current events.

It sounds like the New Yorker under editor William Shawn.

Yes, in fact, the New Yorker was where I came of age as a writer, and it was at a time, the 1970s, when the New Yorker was expanding this kind of writing. William Shawn was very respectful of writers. You'd go up and see him—he was almost a Wizard of Oz figure—and you'd get your five minutes. You'd say what you wanted to do for an article. And then he'd say, in a very soft voice [whispering]: “Well, that sounds very interesting.” Or: “You know, I don't think that would work for us.”

And if he liked the idea, he'd write it down in his book, and you could have six months—or six years. It was yours. And you would be given expenses to do whatever you needed to do to write your article. And then, when you'd written it, you'd have months to edit it.

The editing process was absolutely brilliant. There was no rush. Shawn abhorred trends and fads. He never wanted to publish something if it was in the news. So you'd have a long time to edit. Sometimes I'd work every day for four or five hours on the phone with one of my editors. You'd go over it and send it in, and they'd send you back clean galleys. You'd mark them all up, talk to the editors some more, go through it line by line, word by word, and send it back. More clean galleys. Go through it again. This could go on ten times, until you really felt it was just right.

Alas, this process is a dying art. But it's one of the things I'm trying to revive here at the journalism school. Last semester, I was teaching a course in magazine writing with Diedre English, former editor of Mother Jones. My book editor, Tom Engelhardt, came out to Berkeley and took the writing our students had been doing and ran it through the mill, as only he can—X-raying it structurally, as well as line-editing it. Then the students would go at it again and give it back to him; and he'd go edit it again. This is how good writing gets done. And this is what our students need to learn: that everything needs ten drafts.

Ten drafts is not the norm today. Why is the media in such a sad state?

Part of the reason is because the press gets so carried away with salacious, exciting, but really epiphenomenal things. And I think the reason for that is obvious: it seems to sell. The American press has had a hard time disentangling the imperatives of the marketplace—on which it must depend—from such things as integrity, accuracy, and thoughtfulness. There is a kind of collision going on here.

And lately, I think, market forces have become even more powerful than they once were because we're living in perhaps the most tectonic commercial age in world history.

A globalized economy has changed the culture, including the press?

I think so. Business has become the engine of so much of our lives and influences us in so many ways that nobody's accounted for. It has entered our culture, our sense of what is heroic, how we conduct our relationships, what we esteem and aspire to be, our values, whom we want to be around.

Three decades ago, Asia was afire, and the world was afire, with politics. It isn't now. It's afire with business and nationalism, not politics. Today there are fewer countervailing forces to the imperatives of the bottom line and the marketplace. And this has had a very profound effect on the media and on journalism. As a result, I think there are fewer and fewer islands that survive outside of this business culture.

Both journalists and the politicians they cover have come under attack for how they conduct themselves.

I think there's a terrible disease aloft in the land that affects both politics and the media: a lack of leadership. People in both worlds are following, instead of leading. The media is following by taking and heeding ratings; and politicians are following by taking and following polls. This has led to a real impoverishment of the things we talk about in our public dialogue, particularly on television.

In a democracy, indeed in any intelligent society, the media and politicians have to lead. The media should be introducing us to new things, interesting things, things we don't already know about; helping us change our minds or make up our minds, not just pandering to lowest-denominator wisdom. Politicians should try to make us think, and lead in directions we might not know we want to be going. They should risk disturbing us.

What media are doing what you think they should be doing?

There are some magazines, occasional television programs, and certain newspapers that try to operate not solely according to what sells. A magazine I like is Harper's because it's unpredictable. It's sort of cantankerous; it's not ideological. It may outrage you sometimes, but you never know quite what you're going to get. The New Yorker still has some very good things in it.

What about newspapers?

I think the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times are great papers; the Washington Post is more Washington-bound, but is still very good. I think it's interesting that the great papers of the country are, by and large, family affairs. Knight-Ridder is a very good chain; it has the San Jose Mercury News, the Miami Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer—but they have corporate imperatives. A couple of years ago, word came down that newspapers had to make a 22 percent profit, to compete with other investments. Because if people are going to invest in Knight-Ridder, they want a return that's commensurate with what they would get if they owned Boeing Aircraft or Amalgamated Ball Bearings. And Knight-Ridder fired people left and right; there was blood all over the newsroom floor.

All the television networks are owned by companies that don't have anything to do with the news. They're treated as if they're just subsidiaries that could be computer companies, nuclear power plants, or cigarette companies. I don't think that's a healthy thing.

And it's increasing.

And it's increasing. And that sort of brings me back to the journalism school and why I'm here. When [former dean] Tom Goldstein called and asked me about taking the position, I thought long and hard about it. At first, I was not able to imagine myself as a dean. But then, it slowly began to occur to me that it might be a wonderful opportunity. The school's in a protected environment, on a university campus, and I began to think, Why couldn't it become a media outlet for students?

So I thought, okay, if I can't find a place I want to be outside, where I really feel good—and I might add that very few of my colleagues feel particularly good about where they are in the media—maybe we could create such a place here. We could invite lots of great journalists in to do their work here and to teach. We could have the best students in the world here in a master-apprentice relationship.

Who are some of the journalists you're bringing in to teach here?

New Yorker staff writer Mark Danner, who has just done a magnificent nine-part series on the meltdown of Yugoslavia for the New York Review of Books, will teach “Complications: Coups, Wars and Revolutions.” Barbara Ehrenreich, a book author and essayist for Time and other magazines, is here. Michael Lewis, who writes for the New York Times Magazine and wrote Liar's Poker, is coming in the spring. Jeffrey Bartholet, the Newsweek bureau chief in Tokyo and before that in Jerusalem and Nairobi, is going to do a sequence that ends up, I hope, with students going to South Africa.

The North American bureau chief for the Far Eastern Economic Review is here, and every year we send a class to Hong Kong, to study Hong Kong and China.

Carlos Chamorro, the Nicaraguan editor and a member of the Chamorro family, is here; he'll be teaming with Lydia Chávez, a former New York Times Latin American reporter and tenured faculty member here, to do a sequence on Central America; students will go down there.

Tim Reiterman, who's an investigative team leader for the Los Angeles Times, is here; he'll be half working for his paper and half leading a course on investigative reporting. Ken Turan, the L.A. Times film critic, will be up here doing a film reviewing course. The L.A. Times book review editor, Steve Wasserman, is coming to do a book reviewing course. Peter Schrag, a columnist for the Sacramento Bee, is doing a course on reporting on education. There's more, but I can never remember everybody....

You mentioned teaching a course in magazine writing. Do you teach other courses too?

Last spring I did a course that was just reading and memorizing Shakespeare.

In the journalism school?

Yes [laughs]. I thought it was important for students to have a little time to just read good literature and let it ring in their ears. We did Othello and Hamlet, among others. Then everybody memorized a soliloquy or a sonnet. It was a lot of fun.

I have another idea for a course I'd love to do. One where we just listen to music. Go into the library and listen to classical music; each time, a student would be responsible for telling us about the piece we're listening to. So that people would know how to write about things other than city council meetings.

It all sounds pretty wonderful. What are the main problems at the journalism school?

Well, we're shaking the trees every day for more funding. Let me give you an example. We have a wonderful documentary film program here, with one of the great documentary film makers in the country, Jon Else. He did Cadillac Desert, and he's just finished an incredible film I've only seen a piece of, about Wagner's Ring Cycle viewed from the vantage point of the stagehand. It's called “Sing Fast.”

Okay, so here's Jon Else. He's got more students than he can deal with, but where are these students going to work? In a vibrant, well-financed studio? Well, there isn't one. We do have a “Frontline/West” production office. But it's that little room next door to my office. That's the pity of it.

Our television program has just hired a new faculty member, Paul Mason, from ABC. We could really do some great things with what is a relative pittance in the world of corporate culture. But, of course, one needs that pittance! If one believes in the necessity of pluralism and having a seedbed in which really intelligent young people with diverse views can move up into television news, to serve as vectors for the intelligent purveying of information, we need the culture tray in which to grow them.

Is there such a thing as a mainstream press?

I think there is. One of the problems with the mainstream press is that it gets in these frenzies—some are much less obvious than Monica Lewinsky. One moment it's Japan that can do no wrong and is going to bury us; then it's the Five Asian Dragons, in the face of which we're hopeless. Books and articles pour out about these amazing economies. And then they crash. There are very few examples of media outlets which stand aloof from this.

Could you name some?

I think the New York Review of Books keeps getting better and better. I think the New Yorker still does some very good things, and I hope its new editor, David Remnick, will make it even better. There are lots of little places, like Lingua Franca, the review of academic life; “All Things Considered” and “Fresh Air” over NPR; the “Jim Lehrer NewsHour” and “Frontline” on PBS; “Nightline” on ABC. And, ironically, I think the kind of magazine that you do—California Monthly—and the alumni magazine that Harvard does represent a kind of freedom not found in the stricly commercial media outlets. You aren't ratings driven because you have an audience that's built in. But such publications are small and so, while they play an important role, they aren't key ingredients in the national and international dialogue. And that's what we really miss.

One final question. Is there a liberal bias in the media?

I don't know. You could ask another question: Is there a liberal bias amongst educated people? Probably there is. If you ask what I am, I don't know; and I feel many of my kindred spirits in the Fourth Estate don't know what they are either. We are basically truth-mongers, I hope.

Orville Schell's Agora

One of Dean Schell's ambitions is to make the Graduate School of Journalism a lively center of intellectual activity on campus. Starting with an endowment in the name of the late San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, Schell has presented conversations with people in the media, politics, and culture.

“We were looking for something like a Periclean agora,” Schell says, “a kind of a forum for discussion. We felt it should be thrown open to the University, rather than being limited to the journalism school. And we felt that the idea of a conversation rather than a lecture was much more exciting, spontaneous, and unpredictable; it enables us to steer guests into areas they might not go on their own accord.”

Two years ago, with Herb Caen in the audience, Schell held his first on-stage conversation in Zellerbach, with former CBS-TV newsman Walter Cronkite. Since then, talks have been held with former Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien, NBC-TV newsman Tom Brokaw, NPR's “Fresh Air” host Terri Gross, and the Dalai Lama.

1998 California Monthly
Reposted with permission.


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