Charlotte Bauer in the 15-minute interview. By CHARL BLIGNAUT
FORMER Mail & Guardian arts editor, now assistant to the editor at the Sunday Times, Charlotte Bauer, has been awarded the Nieman Fellowship. Along with her family, she gets to study at Harvard University in Massachusetts, United States, for a year. When she heard the news she drank champagne for two days, then came down. On Monday she was really depressed, but returned to normal just in time for this interview over a very early breakfast at the Hyatt Hotel in Johannesburg.
Charlotte Bauer: Shame darling, you should go back to bed.
Charl Blignaut: Thanks. I can’t, I’m on deadline all day.
Charlotte Bauer: Well, just make sure you don’t take it out on me.
Charl Blignaut: What am I going to do when I write this? Both our initials are CB.
Charlotte Bauer: I got it first, right? I am older than you. I’m CB.
C: Fine. So, tell me, why do you think you’ve become a Nieman fellow?
CB: Why I went for it or why they chose me?
C: Why you went for it. I mean, they generally choose political writers or editors.
CB: It’s the right time for me, after 15 years in journalism. I don’t want to seem like an ungrateful bitch, but I’m bored. I’m bored with the media, I’m bored with the art scene, I’m bored with myself. I need to learn new things. It’s the perfect opportunity to stop writing for a year and go fill up on stuff. I’m broadly interested in artistic society and I really do think – okay seeeriously now – that people are sick to bloody death of reading about politics with a capital P. It’s different in a time of revolution, then politics drives people. But once normality, democracy, freedom, blah blah, have been established, people are again driven by social impulses and sex and movies and their kids and whatever. Our media have been struggling to make space for some time out. The only celebrities we have are bloody politicians. I’m sick of it!
C: Particularly when you consider there’s a cultural revolution happening.
CB: It’s an exciting time for artists and critics – if we can move beyond where we fit in to the RDP and be normal human beings.
C: Did you say these things to the Nieman selection committee?
CB: I tried to, but I was even more nervous then than I am now. I babbled about wanting to further my studies in contemporary discourse, but I was very on edge. It’s called nervous rhetoric.
C: You’re nervous now?
CB: It’s so weird being on the other side of the table. [Wipes her hand across her face] Oh my God! I think I just wiped off my fake beauty spot. No, don’t write that!
C: I think your writing is wonderful because you keep it light …
CB: I’m a sincerely frivolous person. Excuse me, I must go and get some fruit from the buffet. [She does so]. Where was I? Working in journalism in the Eighties was intensely serious. People often didn’t trust me because I was writing in this glib, frivolous way, but frankly, someone hugely famous once said that the knack is to be serious in a light way. What interests me is the tension between style and content; between text and subtext. I also think that, if you’re making jokes, you’ve got to be able to laugh at yourself. That alone should consign you to the Outer Mongolia of womens’ magazines.
C: For which you have written?
CB: Oh yes. I got into real deep shit when I wrote about an acid trip I took at the Baaba Maal concert last year. I mean, I wasn’t even saying the drugs were cool, I was saying how pathetic it was that at age 36 I was taking acid for the first time. There was a flood of hate mail. The editor wanted to print a retraction and say that it was because I was going through a mid- life crisis.[Ruth Motau, the photographer, arrives and clicks away happily]
RM: Okay, now I want to get a tight one.
CB: Tight baby, just make sure my double chin is also tight. I want to look like a novelist on a book sleeve, like Andrea Dworkin.
C: I think you’d make a very fetching novelist. I bet you’ve got a grotty manuscript in a bottom drawer at home somewhere …
CB: [Orders her fourth cup of coffee] No. I don’t. I really love journalism. I love its instant gratification. I have no desire to write a book. I think a lot of journalists make the mistake of thinking a good journalist makes a good novelist. [Lighting her tenth cigarette] I’m going to give up smoking next week. I just can’t afford the energy to become a pariah in America …
C: I’m told you were a ruthless bitch when you were arts editor of the Weekly Mail – like refusing to take calls from Mrs Pofadder who insists her pottery class is feature material.
CB: I just didn’t take the Des and Dawns or the Pieter Toeriens seriously. Why should I? That was zeitgeist time. I survived. Pieter Toerien survived, Des and Dawn didn’t. But I suppose that’s the risk you take. Being a ruthless bitch on that level is a double-edged sword. People then consider you to be invulnerable. Look, I don’t think I’m a bundle of insecurity, but everyone is vulnerable … Anyway, I’ve softened with age. I’m a pussycat now. To the detriment of my writing, I think. I’ve found myself a luxurious space now and I don’t want to waste it. I think Harvard will help me refocus my gaze. I need a detour on my pretentious cultural journey. Excuse me, I’m just going to get myself a little croissant.
C: Did you always want to be a columnist?
CB: No, but after about three minutes at the Rand Daily Mail I knew I didn’t want to be a news reporter. I’m very bad at putting my foot in other people’s doors. It was the time of the boys on the border and they’d send me out to interview families of slain soldiers. Some, who had just heard the news, told me to go away. When I returned to the office, they’d tell me to go back and get the story. I spent many Sunday afternoons driving around Johannesburg pretending to be going to get the story. After what I felt was a suitable time, I’d drive back. I hated it. I managed to get out of the newsroom about five steps ahead of being kicked out. I was an extremely unmemorable news reporter. I was far happier to move on to features and arts and into deconstructing people’s hair-dos.
C: As a Nieman fellow and all, tell me, what are the problems facing our arts journalism?
CB: The thing is that the media here are such a young thing. If you look at people our ages in the media in Hong Kong or wherever, there’s no way they’d be arts editors or assistant editors. They’re still scribbling away. Problem is, by the time you’re thirtysomething you’re all washed up. You’re devoid of ideas by the time you’re fifty. Where are our Pauline Kaels and Dominick Dunnes? That’s why I really want to go to Harvard. I want to scratch beneath the surface.
C: Now we know why you went for it. So why do you think you got the Nieman?
CB: I really, really do not know.
C: Just like that?
CB: Ours is not to question why, ours is just to go there and make the most of it.