The Carson of the Literary Set

By Laurence Zuckerman

He has the agility and intelligence of Ted Koppel, the authority and credibility of Walter Cronkite in his heyday and the popularity of Johnny Carson. When his show comes on French TV every Friday night, right after a dubbed version of Miami Vice, it is something of a national event. Some 6 million people tune in faithfully -- cab drivers as well as business executives, concierges as well as intellectuals. But even more remarkable than the lofty status of Bernard Pivot is the subject of his program: books.

Pivot is host of Apostrophes, an urbane 90-minute discussion of literature and ideas with some of the world's most famous authors. Henry Kissinger has appeared, as have French Presidents Valery Giscard d'Estaing and Francois Mitterrand. Most weeks, however, writers like Saul Bellow, Carlos Fuentes, Gunter Grass, Milan Kundera, Susan Sontag and others of lesser renown are the stars.

A talk show that is both highly rated and uncompromisingly literary would be dismissed by U.S. television executives as a contradiction in terms, an impossibility. But in France, intellectuals are often as celebrated as movie stars, even among nonreaders. In a recent survey of French viewers, 38% said Pivot was their favorite TV personality. (His closest competition: a German shepherd named Junior who is featured on a hit show about pets.) Nor is his popularity an exclusively French phenomenon. Apostrophes is also seen in Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, French-speaking Africa, Poland and even on a cable channel in Manhattan.

Apostrophes (the name comes from both the punctuation mark and the word for a rhetorical statement) is so successful at boosting book sales in France that Pivot reigns as the most influential literary figure in the country. "Ask a publisher or bookstore owner what it would be like without Pivot," declared the French newsmagazine Le Point, "and then look at the expression on his face. It's one of a lone sailor at sea who's just lost the mast of his ship."

What Pivot has done, of course, is adapt that venerable French institution, the literary salon, to television. Each week the program, live and unrehearsed, arranges four or five guests around a low table, with a small studio audience behind them and Pivot at the head. Pivot devises a specific theme for each show (the body and how we conceive it, love in the ancient world), carefully choosing his guests in order to orchestrate a lively discussion. Each is given the works of the others well in advance and is expected to read them thoroughly. Current books are discussed along with older, often obscure works. "The show is intended to make people read," Pivot explains, "to trap the viewer by letting him know a little of what is in a book and then making him go out and buy it to learn the rest."

Although Pivot adroitly keeps the spotlight on his authors, he has his own flair as well. At the end of a show devoted to French collaboration with the Germans during World War II, Pivot suddenly pulled out a piece of paper and ( began to read. It was a letter from Albert Camus to fellow Novelist Marcel Ayme explaining why, despite a colleague's treasonous embrace of fascism, Camus was willing to plead for the condemned man's life. The unpublished letter had been sent to Pivot by a friend researching a Camus biography. As his guests sat in silence, awed by Camus's beautifully written and powerful denunciation of collaboration, Pivot bade his audience good-night.

Pivot has had his share of scoops. In 1983 he was the first to be granted a television interview with Alexander Solzhenitsyn after the Russian writer moved to the U.S. This spring he made headlines after he flew to Poland and surreptitiously taped a lengthy conversation in Gdansk with Solidarity Leader Lech Walesa, whose autobiography was recently published in France.

Almost always dressed in a natty but rumpled suit, Pivot, 52, is an unlikely candidate for stardom. The son of a winegrower and grocer in Lyons, he attended journalism school in Paris. In 1958, after dabbling in financial reporting and writing a novel, he applied for a job on the literary supplement of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro. Pivot knew little about literature, but the editor happened to be a wine connoisseur and was impressed by Pivot's knowledge of Beaujolais, the wine from the countryside near Lyons. Thus Pivot broke into the life of letters "totally by chance," as he recalls. "I could easily have gone into something else." In 1973 Pivot launched a literary talk show on France's main television channel, TF1, and was soon given an ultimatum by Le Figaro: TV or print. Pivot stuck with video, moving over to the state's new color channel, Antenne 2, in 1975 to start Apostrophes.

Pivot spends a minimum of 70 hours a week reading, making it a point to finish at least one book a day. In order to plow through more pages, he commutes to work by public transportation and when on vacation often asks his wife to drive. Besides being host of Apostrophes, he is founder and editor of France's largest (circ. 175,000) literary magazine, the monthly Lire. In addition, he has managed to write books about two of his sustaining passions, Beaujolais and soccer, and to serve as deputy mayor of the town of Quincie-en- Beaujolais in southern France.

Not surprisingly, Pivot's status as literary czar has fostered some resentment. In 1982 Writer Regis Debray, then an aide to President Mitterrand, denounced Pivot, accusing him of exercising a "virtual dictatorship over publishing markets." The public outcry over Debray's criticism was so strong that Mitterrand quickly endorsed Pivot, forcing Debray to beat a hasty retreat.

Not only has Pivot no peers, he has no rivals either. He was offered five or six times his current salary (reportedly $160,000 a year) to bring Apostrophes to one of France's new privately owned television networks, but he decided to stay with Antenne 2. However, he says, "I would be perfectly happy to see other shows like mine." It is not a likely prospect. "We had thought of starting a literary show," says Herve Bourges, former head of TF1. "We never did. We didn't think we would ever be able to do a better job than Pivot."

With reporting by William Dowell/Paris