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Morrissey answers questions quietly, with a kind of practiced serenity, as if he is the sanest man on the planet. In many ways, he actually is, but the cost of maintaining this sanity has been a kind of insanity. (In much the same way, a sophisticated maturity is all tangled up with a seemingly incurable immaturity, robustness battles sickliness, niceness meets nastiness, and billowing self-assurance snakes around chilling insecurity.) His conversational style is funnier than it seems in print, and he laughs a lot, at/with/by himself, sometimes at the same time as seeming in terrible pain. He does not volunteer information easily. An interviewer has to dig for it, as if, in front of his eyes, and with his help, even if you are being gentle, or flattering, or innocuous, you are digging his grave, and asking him to lie down in it so you can bury him alive with his own utterances.
Consequently, after being almost buried in such a manner so many times over the past 23 years, he is understandably reluctant to supply the material that might completely cover his body and face. He hands out just a little soil that he can easily rinse away later.
Certain questions – is the new record your masterpiece, are you happy, do you find yourself repeating yourself, what were the last three things on your credit card statement, what excites you these days, are you so desperate for our attention, is all of this an act of revenge on Marr – receive one of the following replies, occasionally accompanied by a gloriously forced winning smile, a faraway look, a clenched pause and a subtle, sinister sneer: 1/What do you think? 2/I couldn’t possibly comment, 3/I don’t know/care/remember.
Occasionally, there’s no sound, just a look, brutal and artistic, to indicate that the question is monumentally stupid or too profound or unstable to adequately deal with, a look containing elements of a weary, oddly happy acceptance, a faint smirk as if he might indeed be swooning, a faraway, slightly old-fashioned look, a flash of boredom and/or bad temper, a glimmer of contempt and a subtle, radiant sneer. Occasionally there is a peeved but somehow polite sigh that seems to stretch from the beginning to the end of time. Also, for the record, I visit the bathroom three times during our time together – just to check my expression in the mirror – and each time I return, Morrissey has moved to a different seat and is wearing a slightly guilty expression on his face that I can’t quite pin down.
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One of the first things the listener will think on hearing the album [Ringleader of the Tormentors] is: Morrissey’s in love, and it’s not nosiness to want to ask about that…well, it is…but it’s also wanting to give the songs a wider framework…So, are you in love?
I’m in love with something. I often am.
Not someone.
Not a human being, no. And on these new songs, I’m in love with something. So, keep stabbing away.
You’ve moved to Rome?
I travel so much that I actually live nowhere. I live in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. I left Los Angeles last year after seven years. I became an Italianophile, yes.
You moved to Rome to be with someone.
Something.
Because of someone.
Something.
Someone?
Something.
You met someone and moved to Rome to be with them.
That’s the tabloid journalist in you, as if there is no story unless there is a greasy little tabloid element to it.
So you haven’t.
I haven’t [sigh]. I can’t say anything other than I haven’t if I haven’t. Don’t put the innocent face on me. Does it really matter in the end one way or another whether I have, haven’t, have never, have soon?
-- Paul Morley, Uncut, May 2006
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[Oriana] Fallaci’s interview with [Ayatollah] Khomeini, which appeared in the
Times on October 7, 1979, soon after the Iranian revolution, was the most exhilarating example of her pugilistic approach. Fallaci had travelled to Qum to try to secure an interview with Khomeini, and she waited ten days before he received her. She had followed instructions from the new Islamist regime, and arrived at the Ayatollah’s home barefoot and wrapped in a chador. Almost immediately, she unleashed a barrage of questions about the closing of opposition newspapers, the treatment of Iran’s Kurdish minority, and the summary executions performed by the new regime. When Khomeini defended these practices, noting that some of the people killed had been brutal servants of the Shah, Fallaci demanded, “Is it right to shoot the poor prostitute or a woman who is unfaithful to her husband, or a man who loves another man?” The Ayatollah answered with a pair of remorseless metaphors. “If your finger suffers from gangrene, what do you do? Do you let the whole hand, and then the body, become filled with gangrene, or do you cut the finger off? What brings corruption to an entire country and its people must be pulled up like the weeds that infest a field of wheat.”
Fallaci continued posing indignant questions about the treatment of women in the new Islamic state. Why, she asked, did Khomeini compel women to “hide themselves, all bundled up,” when they had proved their equal stature by helping to bring about the Islamic revolution? Khomeini replied that the women who “contributed to the revolution were, and are, women with the Islamic dress”; they weren’t women like Fallaci, who “go around all uncovered, dragging behind them a tail of men.” A few minutes later, Fallaci asked a more insolent question: “How do you swim in a chador?” Khomeini snapped, “Our customs are none of your business. If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it. Because Islamic dress is for good and proper young women.” Fallaci saw an opening, and charged in. “That’s very kind of you, Imam. And since you said so, I’m going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now.” She yanked off her chador.
In a recent e-mail, Fallaci said of Khomeini, “At that point, it was he who acted offended. He got up like a cat, as agile as a cat, an agility I would never expect in a man as old as he was, and he left me. In fact, I had to wait for twenty-four hours (or forty-eight?) to see him again and conclude the interview.” When Khomeini let her return, his son Ahmed gave Fallaci some advice: his father was still very angry, so she’d better not even mention the word “chador.” Fallaci turned the tape recorder back on and immediately revisited the subject. “First he looked at me in astonishment,” she said. “Total astonishment. Then his lips moved in a shadow of a smile. Then the shadow of a smile became a real smile. And finally it became a laugh. He laughed, yes. And, when the interview was over, Ahmed whispered to me, ‘Believe me, I never saw my father laugh. I think you are the only person in this world who made him laugh.’ ”
-- Margot Tablot, “The Agitator,” The New Yorker, June 5, 2006
Fallaci in 1979,
interviewing Ayatollah Khomeini, whom she calls "the most
handsome man I'd ever met"
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