Interviewing a man widely acclaimed as the world's greatest living interviewer is daunting enough. When your subject, the 89-year-old Pulitzer prize-winner and American institution Studs Terkel, has lately become profoundly deaf, it certainly adds to the challenge. "I can't hear a word you say. My hearing's shot," he announces merrily as I walk into his hotel room after several loud knocks on the open door. And when the topic of his latest book, death, is (he admits) generally regarded in Western society as a taboo, the whole thing could be a farce.
There are, indeed, moments of pure farce. The bedside telephone rings, but the amplifier Studs puts over the earpiece fails to work, so I end up acting as intermediary between Joan Littlewood (the theatre legend on the line) and Studs in their plans to meet up over dinner with Eleanor Bron, Victor Spinetti and the architect Cedric Price. Every time Littlewood tells me to stop shouting, Studs shouts for me to speak up. "Are you meant to be interviewing him?" Littlewood asks me before hanging up. "All I can say is: good luck."
As it happens, I don't need it. Studs Terkel, sprightly and perched on his hotel bed amid a pile of papers in his trademark red checked shirt, red jumper and red socks, is an unmitigated joy. It may be unfashionable to say that about your interviewee, and perhaps it is just that we have both recently written books about death and afterlife, but for me he is the sort of erudite, probing and amusing almost-90-year-old who gives old age a good name.
His, after all, has been a life built on conversation. Neither age nor infirmity, nor even the death in 1999 of Ida, his wife of 60 years, has diminished the performer in him. Today he is applying that gift to being both death-defying and death-defining.
"I'm still a hambo actor at heart," he says, as he reaches for a book of poems by the Polish Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska and reads, beautifully, "On Death without Exaggeration". "There is no life that couldn't be immortal if only for a moment/ Death always arrives by that very moment/ Too late, in vain it tugs at the knob of the invisible door/ As far as you have come cannot be undone."
He puts down the book in awe. "The moment of immortality," he says, as wide-eyed as a teenager. "That's a hell of a thing." He pauses for a moment. "So when I did the book Working, there was in it a portrait of a waitress, Dolores Dante. She was a girl. And at the end she starts crying about her life and being a middle-aged woman when the kids have left. And much later a guy stops me in the street and says, 'You son of a bitch. After reading about that waitress in your book, I'm never going to speak to a waitress again the way I did before.' So I affected that guy. Dolores affected that guy. It was her moment of immortality."
Before I can reply, or at least make my reply heard, he is reaching into his jacket pocket. He pulls out a crumpled piece of paper. "Read that," he says. I try, but with none of his panache. He takes it back and does the job himself. It is quotation from Brenda Maddox's book on Nora Joyce, about the epilogue to Finnegans Wake. She describes it as "a great final hymn to the acceptance of death because of the permanence of life".
His new book, Will the Circle be Unbroken? (Granta, £15), says Studs triumphantly, "is about just that. This is a book about life. If you discuss death, you discuss life. This is the most alive book I've ever done. Yes, people hate to talk about death, but once you get them started, they won't stop."
Our meeting is beginning to feel like a vintage hour of the daily radio chat show Studs Terkel hosted on Chicago's WFMT for almost half a century until 1999. He has no British equivalent. He has the broadcasting gravitas and accumulated wisdom of Alistair Cooke, the folksy chumminess of Michael Parkinson, and a track record as an oral historian that on this side of the Atlantic only the late Tony Parker (who was Studs's biographer) came close to touching. He has been, his many admirers are fond of remarking, "the voice of America" in the 20th century, charting its progress or not in his books, whose subjects - the Great Depression of the 1930s, racism and the Second World War - mirror his own concerns as a self-confessed man of the left.
His technique is to record faithfully, and with minimal comment, the words and speech patterns of thousands of ordinary Americans as they talk about their lives, "their truth". "It is bottom-up history. There is that Bertolt Brecht poem. Do you know it? 'Who built the pyramids?' The immediate answer is the pharaohs, but the pharaohs didn't lift a finger. It goes on: 'When the Chinese wall was built, where did the masons go for lunch?' And it ends up, 'When the Armada sank, we read that King Philip of Spain wept. Were there no other tears?' It's those who shed those other tears that I'm interested in."
On the tear-drenched subject of death, he has assembled a cast of 60, made up of doctors and nurses, firemen and police officers, a Vietnam veteran and a former Death Row inmate, a Hiroshima survivor and someone with Aids. Unusually, too, he includes his own voice. In previous books, you have got a strong sense of Studs, but subliminally. He has never been one for guiding his readers. He has left them to reach their own conclusions.
This time round, though, he goes on the record about his own thoughts. "In this case I had to. It was doctors who told me to do this book. My cardiologist and the doctor who did my quintuple bypass [in 1996], they all said, 'You gotta do this goddamn book.' So I had this book in mind before my wife's death, but that added a certain urgency. It has been a palliative for me in a strange way. Therapeutic. She was 87, and people will say, 'You had 60 years', but that's bullshit. I still see her when she was arrested in the anti-war protests, or in the forefront of the Civil Rights things.
"I married her in the Depression. The old gag is that I married her for her money. She was a social worker making $125 a month. I was making $85. Oh, man! And then I took her to a French movie. I borrowed 15 bucks from her and married her and never paid her back. I'm going way back. I have a thing a friend of mine calls 'disenfranchised grief'. Because we had 60 years, and it was a good life, people tell me not to grieve, but I do."
Has doing the book gone farther than easing that grief? Has it changed his view on life after death? "I envy people who believe in an afterlife," he says firmly. "In no way do I denigrate them. I respect them. Their belief gives them solace. That's pretty good. Why not? But I remain an agnostic, which I describe as a cowardly atheist. It's best to cover all bases."
Not that he is planning to depart this mortal coil quite yet. He's busy on a book about hope and another, called The Listener, that collects his conversations with great recording artists, including Mahalia Jackson - whose gospel music he introduced to white America in the 1950s and 1960s.
There are, he points out, two sides to his career. The first was the interviews with famous names on his radio show, which he gave up on account of his hearing. The second is where he remains a peerless listener to "ordinary" Americans. "It's pretty exciting stuff," he says, "asking people, often for the first time... about their lives. If I have any gift for it, one of the things in my favour is that I'm inept mechanically. The people I interview think I need them to help me work the machine. I can't drive and I goof up with the tape-recorders. I've lost Martha Graham. I lost Michael Redgrave. I almost lost Bertrand Russell.
"The only other American who was as bad with a tape-recorder as me was Richard Nixon. I described Nixon and me as neo-Cartesians. I tape, therefore I am."
He is puzzled that there are so few oral historians to follow in his footsteps. I suggest that it is because writers today are fond of making their own voices heard. He is resolutely non-committal, though he does decry the current, TV-fuelled obsession with celebrity at any price. The irony, of course, is that by striving to remain anonymous in his books, Studs has inadvertently made himself famous.
Peter Stanford's new book, 'Heaven', is published by HarperCollins next month
Studs Terkel: Biography
Studs Terkel describes his career as an accretion of accidents. Born Louis Terkel in New York in 1912, he took his nickname from Studs Lonigan, the doomed Chicago street kid in James T Farrell's trilogy of novels. He has lived in Chicago since he was 12. After law school, he fell into acting, getting parts as gangsters in radio soap operas, then read the news, had a stint as a DJ, and finally, in the early 1950s, fronted his own improvised TV show, Studs' Place. Blacklisted as a Communist sympathiser in the McCarthy witch-hunt, he started work on WFMT radio in Chicago in 1952, and discovered a gift for talking and listening. His daily show ran until 1999. He is the author of 10 books of oral history, starting with Division Street: America (1965), about class in Chicago. Others include Working (1972), the Pulitzer prize-winning The Good War (1984) and Race (1992). His memoir, Talking to Myself, was published in 1977. This week, Granta publishes his book of interviews about death, Will the Circle be Unbroken?.