BOOKS

Writers

at

work

'The Paris Review* interviews

'W RITERS J^T 'W O R K

NfRRCURY BOOKS NO 2 9

MERCURY BOOKS

1. FRED HOYLE Frontiers of Astronomy

2. D. H. LAWRENCE Selected Literary Criticism (Ed.) Anthc^i^ftal

3. A. c. CROMBIE Avgustine to 4i. Awc. CROMBIE Ai^ustine to Galileo vol ii 5. LIONEL TRILLING The Liberal Imagination 6. j. L. TALMON The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy 7. j. M. KEYNES Essays in Biography

8. THOMAS MANN Stories of a Lifetime: The Complete

Stories vol i

9. THOMAS MANN Stories of a Lifetime: The Complete

Stories vol i i

10. PETER F. DRUCKER The Practice of Management 11. JAMES REEVES The Idiom of the People 12. JOHN CARTER A.B.C.foT Book CollectoTS 13. w. I. B. BEVERIDGE The Art of Scientific Investigation 14. GIORGIO DE SANTiLLANA The Crime of Galileo 15. GRAHAM GREENE Three Plays

16. JOMO KENYATTA Fociug Mount Kenya

17. GEORGE ORWELL The Collected Essays

18. LESLIE HOTSON The First Night of Twelfth Night 19. MORRIS GINSBERG On The Diversity of Morals 20. s. A. BARNETT A Ceutwry of Dc&win 21. J. L. CLIFFORD Toung Samuel Johnson 22. JACQUES BARZUN The House of Intellect 23. NORMAN COHN The PuTstUt of the Millennium 24. HENRY JAMES The House of Fiction

General Editor alan hill

WRITERS AT WORK

THE

Paris Review

INTERVIEWS

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

Malcolm Cowley

MERCURY BOOKS LONDON

First Published in Mercury Books 1912

^ publication of

THE HEINEMANN CROUP OF PUBLISHERS

15—16 Queen Street ^ Ijondon fV\

Printed in England by A. Wheaton & Co., Ejceter

Contents

Introduction	Page 7
E. M. Forster	23
FRANgois Mauriac	35
Joyce Cary	47
Dorothy Parker	63
James Thurber	77
Thornton Wiu>er	91
WnjLZAM Faoulner	109
Georges Simenon	129
Frank O’Connor	145
Robert Penn Warren	165
Alberto Moravia	187
Nelson Algren	2X17
Angus Wilson	225
William Styron	239
Truman Capote	253
FRAN901SE Sagan	269

Introduction

How Writers Write

Tbis is the best series of interviews with writers of our time that I have read in English. The statement, though swe^ing, isn t quite so eulogistic as it sounds. As compared with Continental Europeans, the English since Boswell, who was Scottish, and the Americans from the beginning have seldom been good at literary interviews. Everything in their badcground has been against the development of the form. Editors haveq t been willing to give it much space because of a probably justified feeling that their public was not interested in literary problems. Authors have been embarrassed or reticent, often at the wrong places, and inter- viewers by and large have been incompetent. 1 can think of recent exceptions, but most of the interviewers either have had no serious interest in literature or else have been too serious about them- selves. Either they have been reporters with little knowledge of the author s work and a desire to entrap him into making scanda- lous remarks about sex, politics, and Cod, or else they have been ambitious writers trying to display their own sophistication, usually at the expense of the author, and listening chiefly to their own voices.

In this book the literary conversations are of a different order, perhaps because of the changing times. The interviewers belong to a new generation that has been called “silent,” though a better word for it would be “waiting" or “listening” or “inquiring.” They have done their assigned reading, they have asked ^e right ques- tions, or most of them, and have listened carefully to the answers. The authors, more conscious of their craft than authors used to be, have talked about it with an engaging lack of stufiBness. The

7

WRITERS AT WORK

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editors of The Paris Review have been generous with their time and space, and the result is a series that seems to me livelier and more revealing than others of its kind. Unlike most of the others it is concerned primarily with the craft of fiction. It tells us what fiction writers are as persons, where they get their material, how they work from day to day, and what they dream of writing.

The series started with the first issue of The Paris Review in the spring of 1754. The new quarterly had been founded by young men lately out of college who were in Europe working on their first novels or books of poems. Their dream of having a magazine of their very own must have been more luminous than their pictiu-e of what it should be, yet they did have a picture of sorts. They didn’t want their magazine to be “little" or opinionated {engagSy in the slang of the year) or academic. Instead of printing what were then the obligatory essays on Moby Dick and Henry James’s major phase, they would print stories and poems by new authors — and pay for them too, as long as the magazine kept going. They wanted to keep it going for a long time, even if its capital was only a thousand dollars, with no subventions in sight. They dreamed that energy and ingenuity might take the place of missing resources.

At this point The Paris Review took a different direction from that of other magazines published by Americans in Europe. Like them it wanted to present material that was new, uncommercial, “making no compromise with the public taste,” in the phrase sanctified by the Little Review, but unlike the others it was willing to use commercial devices in getting the material printed and talked about. “Enterprise in the service of art” might have been its motto. The editors compiled a list, running to thousands of names, of Americans living in Paris and sent volunteer salesmen to ring their doorbells. Posters were printed by hundreds and flying squadrons of three went out by night to paste them in likely and unlikely places all over the city. In June 1757 the frayed rem- nants of one poster were still legible on the ceiling of the lavatory in the Caf^ du Ddme.

The series of interviews was at first regarded as another device — ^more dignified and perhaps more effective too — ^for building circulation. The magazine needed famous names on the cover, but couldn’t afford to pay for the contributions of famous authors. “So let’s talk to them," somebody ventured — ^it must have been Peter

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9

Matthiessen or Harold Humes, since they laid the earliest plans for the Review — “and print what they say." The idea was dis- cussed with George Plimpton, late of the Harvard Lampoon, who had agreed to editor. Plimpton was then at King’s College, Cambridge, and he suggested E. M. Forster, an honorary fellow of King’s, as the first author to be interviewed. It was Forster him- self who gave a new direction to the series, making it a more thoughtful discussion of the craft of fiction than had at first been planned. Forster began by saying that he would answer questions if they were given to him in advance so that he could brood over them. The questions were submitted, and a few days later when the interviewers appeared, Forster gave his answers so methodi- cally and slowly that his guests had no trouble keeping up with him. It was a simple interview to transcribe, and it furnished the best of patterns for the series that followed.

Interviewers usually worked in pairs, like FBI agents. Since no recording equipment was available for the interviews, they both jotted down the answers to their questions at top speed and matched the two versions afterwards. With two men writing, the pace could be kept almost at the level of natural conversation. Some of the later interviews — with Frank O’Connor, for example — were done with a tape recorder. After two or three sessions the interviewers typed up their material; then it was cut to length, arranged in logical order, and sent to the author for his approval. Sometimes he took a special interest in the text and expanded it with new questions of his own. There were important additions to some interviews, including those with Mauriac, Faulkner, and Moravia, whHe this volume was being edited.

It seems strange that famous authors should have devoted so much of their time to a project from which they had nothing to gain. Some of them disliked the idea of being interviewed but consented anyway, either out of friendship for someone on the Review or because they wanted to help a struggling magazine of the arts, perhaps in memory of their own early struggles to get published. Others — notably Simenon, Cary, Warren, and O’Con- nor— were interested in the creative process and glad to talk about it. Not one of the interviewers had any professional experience in the field, but perhaps their inexperience and youth were positive advantages. Authors are sometimes like tomcats: they distrust all the other toms, but they are kind to kittens.

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“Kind” in this case means honest and painstaking in one’s own fashion. Rereading the interviews, this time as a group, I was impressed by the extreme diversity of the characters and talents they present. The sixteen authors have come frem the ruling class, the middle class, or the working class of five different countries. They are Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, or agnostic; old or young; married, single, or divorced; and they have had all sorts of educa- tion, from those who never finished secondary school (Simenon, Faulkner) to those who are university professors or fellows. One started life as a gunman, another as a bindle stiff, another as a soldier and government official; several went straight into profes- sional writing. All have strongly marked personalities which are revealed — asserted, one might say — in their simplest remarks, and no personality resembles any other. Yet in spite of their diversity, w'hat emerges from the interviews is a composite picture of the fiction writer. He has no face, no nationality, no particular back- ground, and I say “he” by grammatical convention, since two of the authors are women; but they all have something in common, some attitude towards life and art, some fund of common experi- ence. Let us see how they go about their daily ta.sk of inventing stories and putting them on paper.

There would seem to be four stages in the composition of a story. First comes the germ of the story, then a period of more or less conscious meditation, then the first draft, and finally the re- vision, which may be simply “pencil work,” as John O’Hara calls it — that is, minor changes in wording — or may lead to writing several drafts and what amounts to a new work.

The germ of a story is something seen or heard, or heard about, or suddenly remembered; it may be a remark casually dropped at the dinner table fas in the case of Henry James’s story. The Spoils of Poynton), or again it may be the look on a stranger’s face. Al- most always it is a new and simple element introduced into an existing situation or mood; something that expresses the mood in one sharp detail; something that serves as a focal point for a hitherto disorganized mass of remembered material in the author’s mind. James describes it as “the precious par- ticle . . . the stray suggestion, the wandering word, the vague echo, at a touch of which the novelist’s imagination winces as at the prick of some sharp point,” and he adds that “its virtue is

INTRODUCTION

11

all in its needle-like quality, the power to penetrate as finely as possible.”

In the case of one story by the late Joyce Cary, the "precious particle” was the, wrinkles on a young woman’s forehead. He had seen her on the little boat that goes around Manhattan Island, “a girl of about thirty,” he says, "wearing a shabby skirt. She was enjoying herself. A nice expression, with a wrinkled forehead, a good many wrinkles. I said to my friend, ‘I could write about that girl . . .’” but then he forgot her. Three weeks later, in San Fran- cisco, Cary woke up at four in the morning with a story in his head — a purely English story with an English heroine. When he came to revise the story he kept wondering, “Why all these wrinkles? That’s the third time they come in. And I suddenly realized,” he says, “that my English heroine was the girl on the Manhattan boat. Somehow she had gone down into my subcon- scious, and came up again with a full-sized story.”

The woman with the wrinkled forehead could hardly have served as the germ of anything by Frank O’Connor, for his imagi- nation is auditive, not visual. “If you’re the sort of person,” he says, “that meets a girl in the street and instantly notices the colour of her eyes and of her hair and the sort of dress she’s wear- ing, then you’re not in the least like me I have terribly sensitive

hearing and I’m terribly aware of voices.” Often his stories develop from a remark he has overheard. That may also be the case with Dorothy Parker, who say a, “1 haven’t got a visual mind. I hear things.” Faulkner does have a visual mind, and he says that The Sound and the Fury “began with a mental picture. I didn’t realize at the time it was symbolical. The picture was of the muddy seat of a little girl’s drawers in a pear tree, where she could see through a window where her grandmother’s funeral was taking place and report what was happening to her brothers on the ground below. By the time I explained who they were and what they were doing and how her pants got muddy, I realized it would be impossible to get all of it into a short story and it would have to be a book.” At other times the precious particle is something the author has read — preferably a book of memoirs or history or travel, one that lies outside his own field of writing. Robert Penn Warren says, “I always remember the date, the place, the room, the road, when I first was struck. For instance. World Enough and Time. Kath- erine Ann Porter and I were both in the Library of Congress as

WRITERS AT WORK

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fellows. We were in the same pew, had offices next to each other. She came in one day with an old pamphlet, the trial of Beauchamp for killing Colonel Sharp. She said, ‘Well, Red, you better read this.’ There it was. I read it in five minutes. B<it I was six years making the book. Any book I write starts with a flash, but takes a long time to shape up.”

The book or story shapes up — assumes its own specific form, that is — during a process of meditati'^n that is the second stage in composition. Angus Wilson calls it “the gustatory period” and says that it is "ver)' important to me. That's when I’m persuading my- self of the truth of what I want to say, and I don't think I could persuade my readers unless I’d persuaded myself first.” The period may last for years, as with Warren’s novels (and most of Henry James’s), or it may last exactly two days, as in the extraordinary case of Georges Simenon. “.\s soon as I have the beginning," Simenon explains, “I can’t bear it very long. . . . And two days later I begin writing.” The meditation may be, or seems to be, wholly conscious. "The writer asks himself questions — “What should the characters do at this point? How can I build to a climax?” — and answers them in various fashions before choos- ing the final answers. Or most of the process, including all the early steps, may be carried on without the writer’s voli- tion. He wakes before daybreak witli the whole story in his head, as Joyce Caiy' did in San Francisco, and hastily writes it down. Or again — and I think most frequently — the meditation is a mixture of conscious and unconscious elements, as if a cry from the depths of sleep were being heard and revised by the waking mind.

Often the meditation continues while the writer is engaged in other occupations; gardening, driving his wife to town (as Walter Mitty did), or going out to dinner. “I never quite know whe.n I’m not writing,” says James Thurber. “Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a dinner party and says, ‘Dammit, Thurber, slop writing.' She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, ‘Is he sick?’ ‘No,’ my wife says, ‘he’s writing.’ I have to do it that way on acexjunt of my eyes.” When Thurber had better vision he u.sed to do his meditating at the typewriter, as many other writers do. Nelson Algren, for example, finds his plots simply by writing page after page, night after night. “I always figured,” he says, “the only

INTRODUCTION 13

way I could finish a book and^get a plot was just to keep making it longer and longer until something happens.”

The first draft of a story is often written at top speed; probably that is the best way to write it Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who is not among the authors interviewed, once compared the writing of a first draft with skiing down a steep slope diat she wasn't sure she was clever enough to manage. "Sitting at my desk one morn- ing,” she says, "I ‘pushed off’ and with a tingle of not altogether pleasurable excitement and alarm, felt myself ‘going.’ I ‘went’ almost as precipitately as skis go down a long white slope, scrib- bling as rapidly as my pencil could go, indicating whole words with a dash and a jiggle, filling page after page with scrawls.” Frank O’Connor explains the need for haste in his own case. ‘‘Get black on white,” he says, "used to be Maupassant’s advice — that’s what I always do. I don’t give a hoot what the writing’s like, I write any sort of rubbish which will cover the main outlines of the story, then I can begin to see it.” There are other writers, however, who work ahead laboriously, revising as they go. William Styron says, “I seem to have some neurotic need to perfect each para- graph— each sentence, even — as I go along.” Dorothy Parker reports that it takes her six months to do a story: “I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence — no first draft. I can’t write five words but that I change seven.”

O’Connor doesn’t start changing words until the first draft is finished, but then he rewrites, so he says, “endlessly, endlessly, endlessly.” There Ls no stage of composition at which these authors differ more from one another than in this final stage of preparing a manuscript for the printer. Even that isn’t a final stage for O’Cyonnor. “I keep on rewriting,” he says, “and after it’s published, and then after it’s published in book form, I usually rewrite it again. I’ve rewritten versions of most of my early stories, and one of these days. Cod help. I’ll publish these as well.” Fran9oise Sagan, on the other hand, spends “very little” time in revision. Simenon spends exactly three days in revising each of his short novels. Most of that time is devoted to tracking down and crossing out the literary touches — “adjectives, adverbs, and every w'ord which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sen- tence-cut it.” Joyce Cary was another deletionist. Many of the passages he crossed out of his first drafts were those dealing

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14

explicitly with ideas. “I work over the whole book,” he says, “and cut out anything that does not belong to the emotional develop- ment, the texture of feeling.” Thurber revises his stories by re- writing them from the beginning, time and again. “A story I’ve been working on,” he says, “. . . was rewritten fifteen complete times. There must have been close to two hundred and forty thousand words in all the manuscripts put together, and I must have spent two thousand hours working at it. Yet the finished story can’t be more than twenty thousand words.” That would make it about the longest piece of fiction he has written. Men like Thurber and O’Connor, who rewrite “endlessly, endlessly,” find it hard to face the interminable prospect of writing a full-length novel.

For short-story writers the four stages of composition are usually distinct, and there may even be a fifth, or rather a first, stage. Be- fore seizing upon the germ of a story, the writer may find himself in a state of “generally intensified emotional sensitivity . . . when events that usually pass unnoticed suddenly move you deeply, when a sunset lifts you to exaltation, when a squeaking door throws you into a fit of exasperation, when a clear look of trust in a child’s eyes moves you to tears.” I am quoting again from Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who “cannot conceive,” she says, “of any creative fiction written from any other beginning.” There is not much doubt, in any case, that the germ is precious largely because it serves to crystallize a prior state of feeling. Then comes the brooding or meditation, then the rapidly written first draft, then the slow revision; for the story-writer everything is likely to happen in more or less its proper order. For the novelist, however, the stages are often confused. The meditation may have to be repeated for each new episode. The revision of one chapter may precede or follow the first draft of the next.

That is not the only difference between writing a short story and writing a novel. Reading the interviews together, I was con- firmed in an old belief that the two forms are separate and that mere length is not their distinguishing feature. A long short story — say of forty thousand words — is not the same as a novel of forty thousand words, nor is it likely to be written by the same person. Among the authors interviewed, the division that goes deepest is not between older and younger writers, or men and women

INTRODUCTION

15

writers, or French and English writers; it is the division between those who think in terms of the short story and those who are essentially novelists.

Truman Capote might stand for those who think in terms of the short story, since he tells us that his “more unswerving ambi- tions still revolve around this form.” A moment later he says, “I invariably have the illusion that the whole play of a story, its start and middle and finish, occur in my mind simultaneously — ^that I'm seeing it in one flash.” He likes to know the end of a story before writing the first word of it. Indeed, he doesn’t start writing until he has brooded over the story long enough to exhaust his emotional response to the material. ‘T seem to remember reading,” he says, “that Dickens, as he wrote, choked with laughter over his own humour and dripped tears all over the page when one of his characters died. My own theory is that the writer should have considered his wit and dried his tears long, long before setting out to evoke similar reactions in a reader.” The reactions of the reader, not of the writer, are Capote’s principal concern.

For contrast take the interview with Simenon, who is a true novelist even if his separate works, written and revised in about two weeks, are not much longer than some short stories. Each of them starts in the same fashion. “It is almost a geometrical prob- lem,” he says. “I have such a man, such a woman, in such sur- roundings. What can happen to them to oblige them to go to their limit? That’s the question. It will be sometimes a very simple incident, anything which will change their lives. 'Then I write my novel chapter by chapter.” Before setting to work Simenon has scrawled a few notes on a big manila envelope. The interviewer asks whether these are an outline of the action. “No, no,” Simenon answers. “. . . On the envelope I put only the names of the charac- ters, their ages, their families. I know nothing whatever about the events which will occur later. Otherwise” — ^and I can’t help put- ting the statement in italics — "it would not be interesting to me.”

Unlike Capote, who says that he is physically incapable of writing anything he doesn’t think will be paid for (though I take it that payment is, for him, merely a necessary token of public admiration), Simenon would “certainly,” he says, continue writing novels if they were never published. But he wouldn’t bother to write them if he knew what the end of each novel would be, for then it would not he interesting, ^e discovers his fable not in one

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flash, but chapter by chapter, as if he were telling a continued story to himself. "On the eve of the first day,” he says, "I know what will happen in the first chapter. Then day after day, chapter after chapter, I find what comes later. After I have started a novel I write a chapter each day, without ever missing a day. Because it is a strain, I have to keep pace with the novel. If, for example, I am ill for forty-eight hours I have to throw away the previous chapters. And I never return to that novel.” Like Dickens he lets himself be moved, even shattered, by what he is writing. "All the day,” he says, “I am one of my characters”— always the one who is driven to his limit. "I feel what he feels. . . . And it’s almost unbearable after five or six days. That is one of the reasons why my novels are so short; after eleven days I can’t — it’s impossible. I have to It’s physical, I am too tired.”

Nobody else writes in quite the same fashion as Simenon. He carries a certain attitude towards fiction to the further point that it can be carried by anyone who writes books to be published and read. But the attitude in itself is not unusual, and in fact it is shared to some extent by all the true novelists who explain their methods in this book. Not one of them starts by making a scene- by-scene outline, as Henry James did before writing each of his later novels. James had discovered what he called the "divine prin- ciple of the Scenario” after writing several unsuccessful plays, and in essence tlie principle, or method, seems to be dramatistic rather than novelistic. The dramatist, like the short-story writer, has to know where he is going and how he will get there, scene by scene, whereas all the novelists interviewed by The Paris Review are accustomed to making voyages of exploration with only the roughest of maps. Mauriac sa}'s, "There is a point of departure, and there are some characters. It often happens that the first characters don’t go any further and, on the other hand, vaguer, more inconsistent characters show new possibilities as the story goes on and assume a place we hadn’t foreseen.” Fran^oise Sagan says that she has to start writing to have ideas. In the beginning she has “a character, or a few characters, and perhaps an idea for a few of the scenes up to the middle of the book, but it all changes in the writing. For me writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm.” (One thinks of Simenon and his feeling that he has to keep pace with the novel.) "My work,” says Moravia, "... is not prepared beforehand in any way. I might add, too, that when Tm

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not working I don’t think of my work at alL” Forster does lay plans for his work, but they are subject to change. "The noveUsC" he says, "should, I think, always settle when he starts what is going to happen, what jps major event is to be. He may alter this event as he approaches it, indeed he probably will, indeed he probably had better, or the novel becomes tied up and tight. But die sense of a solid mass ahead, a mountain round or over whidi or through which the story must go, is most valuable and, for the novels I’ve

tried to write, essentid When I began A Passage to India I

knew that something important happened in the Malabar Caves, and that it would have a central place in the novel — but I didn’t know what it would be.’’

Most novelists, one might generalize on this evidence, are like the chiefs of exploring expeditions. They know who their com- panions are (and keep learning more about them); they know what sort of territory they will have to traverse on the following day or week; they know the general object of the expedition, the mountain they are trying to reach, the river of which they are try- ing to discover the source. But they don't know exactly what tbeir route will be, or what adventures they will meet along the way, or how their companions will act when pushed to the limit. They don’t even know whether the continent they are trying to map exists in space or only within themselves. “1 think that if a man has the urge to be an artist,’’ Simenon muses, “it is because he needs to &nd himself. Every writer tries to find himself through his characters, through all his writing.” He is speaking for ti^e novelist in particular. Short-story writers come back from tiheir briefer explorations to brood over the meaning of their discoveries; then they perfect the stories for an audience. The short story is an exposition; the novel is often and perhaps at its best an inquisition into the unknown depths of the novelist’s mind.

Apparently the hardest problem for almost any writer, whatever his medium, is getting to work in the morning (or in the afternoon, if he is a late riser like Styron, or even at night). Thornton Wilder says, "Many writers have told me that they have built up mnemonic devices to start them off on each day’s writing task. Hemingway once told me he sharpened twenty pencils; Willa Gather that she read a passage from the Bible— not from piety, she was quick to add, but to get jn touch with fine prose; she also

18 WRITEBS AT WORK

regretted diat she had formed this habit, for the prose rhythms of 1611 were not those she was in search of. My spring-board has always been long walks.*’ Those long walks alone are a fairly common device; Thomas Wolfe would sometimes roam through the streets of Brooklyn all night. Reading the Bible before writing is a much less common practice, and, in spite of Miss Gather’s dis- claimer, I suspect that it did involve a touch of piety. Dependent for success on forces partly beyond his control, an author may try to propitiate the unknown powers. I knew one novelist, an agnostic, who said he often got down on his knees and started the working day with prayer.

The usual working day is three or four hours. Whether these authors write with pencils, with a pen, or at a typewriter — and some do all three in the course of completing a manuscript — an important point seems to be that they ^1 work with their hands; the only exception is Thurber in his sixties. I have often heard it said by psychiatrists that writers belong to the “oral type.” The truth seems to be that most of them are manual types. Words are not merely sounds for them, but magical designs that their hands make on paper. “I always think of writing as a physical thing,” Nelson Algren says. “I am an artisan,” Simenon explains. “I need to work with my hands. I would like to carve my novel in a piece of wood.” Hemingway used to have the feeling that his fingers did much of his thinking for him. After an automobile accident in Montana, when the doctors said he might lose the use of his right arm, he was afraid he would have to stop writing. Thurber used to have the sense of thinking with his fingers on the keyboard of a typewriter. When they were working together on their play The Male Animal, Elliott Nugent used to say to him, “Well, Thurber, we’ve got our problem, we’ve got all these people in the living- room. What are we going to do with them?” Thurber would answer that he didn’t know and couldn’t tell him until he’d sat down at the typewriter and found out. After his vision became too weak for the typewriter, he wrote very litde for a number of years (using black crayon on yellow paper, about twenty scrawled words to the page); then painfully he taught himself to compose stories in his head and dictate them to a stenographer.

Dictation, for most authors, is a craft which, if acquired at all, is learned rather late in life— and I think with a sense of jumping over one step in the process of composition. Instead of giving die-

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tation, many writers seem to themselves to be taking it. “I listen to the voices ” Faulker once said to me, “and when Ive put down what the voices say, it's right. I don’t always like what they say, but I don’t try to change it.” Mauriac says, “During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not bo interrupted. When I cease to be carried along, when I no longer feel as though I were taking down dictation, I stop.” Listening as they do to an inner voice that speaks or falls silent as if by caprice, many writers from the beginning have personified the voice as a benign or evil spirit. For Hawthorne it was evil or at least frightening. “The Devil him- self always seems to get into my inkstand,” he said in a letter to his publisher, “and I can only exorcise him by pensful at a time.” For Kipling the Daemon that lived in his pen was tyrannical but well-meaning. “When your Daemon is in charge,” he said, “do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.”

Objects on the writing-table, which is the altar of the Daemon, are sometimes chosen with the same religious care as if they were chalices and patens. Kipling said, “For my ink I demanded the blackest, and had I been in my Father’s house, as once I was, would have kept an ink-boy to grind me Indian-ink. All 'blue- blacks’ were an abomination to my Daemon. . . . My writing- blocks were built for me to an unchanged pattern of large, off- white, blue sheets, of which I was most wasteful.” Often we hear of taboos that must be ol - erved— even by Angus Wilson, although he is as coolly rational as any fiction writer who ever set pen to paper (the pen in his case is medium and the paper is, by prefer- ence, a grammar-school exercise book). “Fiction writing is a kind of magic,” Wilson says, “and I don’t care to talk about a novel I’m doing because if I communicate the magic spell, even in an abbreviated form, it loses its force for me.” One of the interviewed authors — only one, but I suspect there are others like him — ^makes a boast of his being superstitious. “I will not tolerate the presence of yellow roses,” Capote says — ^“which is sad because they’re my favourite flower. I can’t allow three cigarette butts in the same ashtray. Won’t travel on a plane with tluee nuns. Won’t begin or end anything on a Friday. It’s endless, the things I can’t and won’t. But I derive some curious comfort from these primitive concepts.” Perhaps they are not only comforting but of practical service in helping him to weave his incantations. I can’t help thinking of the drunk who always carried a vehtilated satcheL “What’s in it?”

WRITERS AT WORK

20

said his neighbour on a bus. "Just a mongoose. To kill snakes.” The neighbour peered into the satchel and said, "There's nothing in it. That’s an imaginazy mongoose.” The drunk said, "What -about the snakes?”

At a summer conference on the novel, at Harvard, one of the invited speakers gave a rather portentous address on the Respon- sibilities of the Novelist. Frank O’Connor, on the platform, found lihnself giggling at each new solemnity. After the address he walked to the lectern and said, "All right, if there a'‘e any of my students here I’d like them to remember that writing is fun.” On that point most of these authors would agree. "I have always found writing pleasant,” Forster says, "and don’t understand what people mean by ‘throes of creation.’” “I write simply to amuse myself,” says Moravia. Angus Wilson "started writing as a hobby.” Thurber tells us that the act of writing “is either something ^e writer dreads or something he actually likes, and I actually like it. Even rewriting’s fun.” At another point he says, “When I’m not writing, as my wife knows. I’m miserable.”

The professional writers who dread writing, as many do, are usuaUy those whose critical sense is not only strong but unsleep- ing, so that it won’t allow them to do even a first draft at top speed. They are in most cases the “bleeders” who write one sen- tence at a time, and can’t write it until the sentence before has been revised. William Styron, one of the bleeders, is asked if he enjoys wriling. "I certainly don’t,” he says. “I get a fine warm feeling when I’m doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started each day. Let’s face it, writing is hell.” But a moment later he says without any sense of contradiction, “I find that I’m simply the happiest, the placidest, when I’m writing . . . it’s the only time that I feel completely self- possessed, even when the writing itself is not going too well.” Not writing is the genuine hell for Styron and others in his predica-

ment; writing is at worst a purgatory.

Whatever the original impulse that drives them to write — self- expression, self-discovery, self-aggrandizement, or the pain of not writing — ^most authors with a body of work behind them end by

developing new purposes. Simegj2B»..^^xample, would like to create the pure novel, witha^foescrip^kA exposition, or argu- ment: a book that will what a n^ikcan do. “In a pure

ff

* I I ^ 1 so II

INTRODUCTION

21

novel,” he says, "you wouldn’t take sixty pages to describe the South or Arizona or some country in Europe. Just the drama with only what is absolutely part of t^ drama . . . almost a translation of the laws of tr|igedy into the novel. I think the novel is die tragedy of our day.” Critics have always advised him to write a big novel, one with twenty or thirty characters. His answer is, "I will never write a big novel. My big novel is the mosaic of all my small novels.”

At this point he suggests still another purpose, or dream, thiit is shared by almost all the writers who were interviewed. They want to write the new book, climb the new mountain, which they hope will be the highest of all, but still they regard it as only one con- quest in a chain of mountains. The whole chain, the shelf of books, the Collected Works, is their ultimate goal. Moravia says, "In the works of every writer with any body of work to show for his effort, you will find recurrent themes. I view the novel, a single novel as well as a writer’s entire corpus, as a musical composition in which the characters are themes.” Faulkner says, "With Soldiers Pay I found out that writing was fun. But I found out afterwards t^t not only each book had to have a design, but the whole output or sum of a writer s work had to have a design.” Graham Greene says, in The Lost Childhood, "A ruling passion gives to a shelf of books the unity of a system.” Each of these novelists wants to pro- duce not a random succ -'ssion of books, like discrete events for critics to study one by one, without reference to earlier or later events, but a complete system unified by his ruling passion, a system of words on paper that is also a world of living persons created in his likeness by the author. This dream must have had a beginning quite early in the author’s life; perhaps it goes back to what Thornton Wilder calls "the Nero in the bassinet,” the child wanting to be omnipotent in a world he has made for himself; but later it is elaborated with all the wisdom and fire and patient workmanship that the grown man can bring to bear on it. Partide after particle of the living self is transferred into the creation, until at last it is an external world that corresponds to the inner world and has the power of outlasting the author’s life.

I suspect that some such dream is shared by many authors, but among those interviewed it is Faulkner who has come dosest to achieving it, and he is also the author who reveals it most can- didly. “Beginning with Sartoris". he says, "I discovered that my

22 WRITERS AT WORK

own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and that by sublimating the actual into the apocryphal 1 would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have tp its absolute top. It opened up a mine of other people, so I created a cosmos of my own. I can move these people around like God, not only in space but in time.'’ And then he says, looking back on his work as if on the seventh day, “I like to think of the world I created as being a kind of keystone in the universe; that, small as that keystone is, if it were ever taken away the universe itself would collapse. My last book will be the Doomsday Book, the Golden Book, of Yoknapa- tawpha County. Then I shall break the pencil and I’ll have to stop.”

That is a good place for me to stop too. I only have to add that thanks for this book are due to three groups of persons. First they are due to the interviewers, all amateurs in the field, who read the authors’ works, asked them the right questions, and, at a sacrifice of vanity, kept themselves in the background when writing their reports. Then they are due to the editorial staff of The Paris Review, and notably to George Plimpton and Marion Capron, for their work in putting the series together. Finally, and most of all, thanks are due to die authors who gave so much of their time, revealed so much of their working methods, and incidentally told so many good stories. It’s a shame that the book couldn’t be big enough to contain all the interviews that have so far appeared; not one is without interest; but the series is being continued in the magazine, and 1 hope the other interviews, new and old, can be included in a later volume.

Malcolm Cowley

E. M. Forster

E. M. Forster was bom on New Year’s Day, 1879. He was edu- cated at Tonbridge and at King’s College, Cambridge, where he enjoyed the stimulating company of what would later be called the Bloomsbury Group. By 1903, as a political liberal, he was an ardent contributor to the newly formed Independent Review. He travelled extensively and in 1910 made his first visit to India, which was to be the setting of his greatest novel.

In 1905, at the age of twenty-six, Forster published his first novel. Where Angels Fc- ' to Tread, which he followed with a succession of others: The Longest Journey (1907), A Room with a View (1908), and Howards End (1911). He spent the First World War in Egypt as a civilian war worker, later compiling some of his observations in a guidebook to Alexandria.

He finished his fifth and most famous work, A Passage to India. It was his last novel. But his reputation was establimed, and on the basis of his published work his stature as a novelist continued to grow. “His reputation,” it was said, "goes up with every book he doesn’t write.” Actually, Forster continued to pro- duce brilliant work, all of it non-fiction: Abinger Harvest Aspects of the Novel , Two Cheers for Democracy and The HUl of Devi he produced a libretto tor Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd.

Bombed out of his country home at Abinger during World War II, Forster has lived for the past years in Cambridge, where he is an honorary fellow of King’s College.

E. M. Forster

"That is not aU ‘Arctic Summer’ — there is almost half as much of it again — but that’s all I want to read, because now it goes off, or at least I think so, and I do not want my voice to go out into the air while my heart is sinking. It will be more interesting to con- sider what the problems before me were, and why I was unlikely to solve them. I should like to do this, though it may involve us a little in fiction-technicalities . . .”

So said E. M. Forster, addressing an audience at the Aldeburgh Festival of 1551. He had been reading part of an unfinished novel called "Arctic Summer.’’ At the end of the reading, he went on to explain why he had not finished the novel, which led him to men- tion what he called "fiction-technicalities.’’

Following up on Mr. Forster’s Aldeburgh remarks, we have tried to record his views n such matters as he gave them in an interview at King’s College, Cambridge, on the evening of June 2XHh, 1552.

A spacious and high-ceUinged room, furnished in the Edwardian taste. One’s attention is caught by a massive carved wooden mantelpiece of elaborate structure holding blue china m its niches. Large gUt-framed portrait-drawings on the walls (his Thornton ancestors and others), a "Turner” by his great-uncle, and some modem pictures. Books of aU sorts, handsome and otherwise, in English and French; armchairs decked in little shawls; a piano, a solitaire-board, and the box of a Tae-trope; profusion of opened letters; slippers neatly arranged in waste-paper basket.

In reading what follows the reader must imagine Mr. Forste/s manner, which though of extreme amenity is a firm one: precise, yet none the less elusive, administering a series of tiny surprises.

• 25-

WRITERS AT WORK

26

He makes a perpetual slight displacement of the repeated empha- sis. His habit was to answer our questions by brief statements, followed by decorative asides, often of great interest, but very difficult to reproduce.

Interviewers: To begin with, may we ask you again, why did you never finish "Arctic Summer”?

Forster: I have really answered this question in the foreword I wrote for the reading. The crucial passage was this:

", . . whether these problems are solved or not, there remains a still graver one. What is going to happen? I had got my antithesis all right, the antithesis between the civilized man, who hopes for an Arctic Summer in which there is time to get things done, and the heroic man. But I had not settled what is going to happen, and that is why the novel remains a fragment. The novelist should, I think, always settle when he starts what is going to happen, what his major event is to be. He may alter this event as he approaches it, indeed he probably will, indeed he probably had beUer, or the novel becomes tied up and tight. But the sense of a solid mass ahead, a mountain round or over or through which {he interposed, "in this case it would be through") the story must somehow go, is most valuable and, for the novels I’ve tried to write, essential.”

Interviewers: How much is involved in this "solid mass”? Does it mean that all the important steps in the plot must also be present in the original conception?

Forster: Certainly not all the steps. But there must be some- thing, some major object towards which one is to approach. When I began A Passage to India I knew that something important happened in the Malabar Caves, and that it would have a central place in the novel — but I didn’t know what it would be.

Interviewers: But if you didn’t know what was going to hap- pen to the characters in either instance, why was the case of A Passage to India so different from that of "Arctic Summer”? . . . In both cases you had your antithesis.

Forster: TTie atmosphere of “Arctic Summer” did not approach the density of what I had in A Passage to India. Let me see how to explain. The Malabar Caves represented an area in which con- centration can take place. A cavity. {We noticed that he always spoke of the caves quite literally — as for instance when he interrupted himself earlier to say that the characters had to pass "through” them.) They were something to focus everything up:

E. M. FORSTBE 27

they were tp engender an event like an egg. What I had in “Arctic Sununer” was thinner, a background and colour only.

iNTERViEvrERS: You spoke of antitheses in your novels. Do you regard these as essential to any novel you might write?

Forster: Let me think. . . . There was one in Howards End. Perhaps a rather subtler one in The Longest Journey.

Interviewers: Would you agree that all your novels not only deal with some dilemma but are intended to be both true and useful in regard to it — ^so that if you felt a certain dilemma was too extreme, its incompatibles too impossible to reconcile, you wouldn’t write about it?

Forster: True and lovable would be my antithesis. I don’t think useful comes into it. I’m not sure that 1 would be put oS simply because a dilemma that I wanted to treat was insoluble; at least, I don’t think I should be.

Interviewers: While we are on the subject of the planning of novels, has a novel ever taken an unexpected direction?

Forster: Of course, that wonderful thing, a character running away with you — ^which happens to everyone — that’s happened to me. I’m afraid.

Interviewers: Can you describe any technical problem that especially bothered you in one of the published novels?

Forster: I had trouble with the junction of Rickie and Stephen. [The hero of The Longest Journey and his half-brother.] How to make them intimate, I mr "ti. I fumbled about a good deal. It is all right once they are together. ... I didn’t know how to get Helen to Howards End. That part is all contrived. There are too many letters. And again, it is all right once she is there. But ends always give me trouble.

Interviewers: Why is that?

Forster: It is parUy what I was talking about a moment ago. Characters run away with you, and so won’t fit on to what is coming.

iNTERviEvirERS: Another question of detail. What was the e^act function of the long description of the Hindu festival in A Passaefi to India?

Forster: It was architecturally necessary. I needed a lump, or a Hindu temple if you Iik& — a mountain standing up. It is well placed; and it gathers up some strings. But there ought to be more after it. The lump sticks out a little too much.

WRITEBS AT WORK

28

Interviewers: To leave technical questions for a moment, have you ever described any type of situation of which you have had no personal knowledge?

Forster: The home-life of Leonard and Jacky in Howards End is one case, I knew nothing about that, I believe I brought it off.

Interviewers: How far removed in time do you have to be from an experience to describe it?

Forster: Place is more important than time in this matter. Let me tell you a little more about A Passage to India. I had a great deal of difficulty with the novel, and thought I would never finish it, I began it in 1812, and then came the war, I took it with me when I returned to India in 1821, but found what I had written wasn’t India at all. It was like sticking a photograph on a picture. However, I couldn’t write it when I was in India. When I got away, I could get on with it.

Interviewers: Some critics have objected to your way of hand- ling incidents of violence. Do you agree with their objections?

Forster: I think I solved the problem satisfactorily in Where Angels Fear to Tread. In other cases, I don’t know. The scene in the Malabar Caves is a good substitute for violence. Which were the incidents you didn’t like?

Interviewers: I have always been worried by the suddenness of Gerald’s death in The Longest Journey.^ Why did you treat it in that way?

Forster: It had to be passed by. But perhaps it was passed by in the wrong way.

Interviewers: I have also never felt comfortable about Leonard Bast’s seduction of Helen in Howards End. It is such a sudden affair. It seems as though we are not told enough about it for it to be convincing. One might say that it came off allegorically but not realistically.

Forster: I think you might be right. I did it like that out of a wish to have surprises. It has to be a surprise for Margaret, and this was best done by making it a surprise for the reader too. Too much may have been sacrificed to this.

Interview'Ers: A more general question. Would you admit to there being any symbolism in your novels? Lionel Trilling rather

*The famous fifth chapter in The Longest Journey begins "Gerald died that afternoon."

E. M. FORSTEE

29

seems to imply that there is, in his books on you — ^symbolism, that is, as distinct from allegory or parable. “Mrs. Moore,” he says, "will act with a bad temper to Adela, but her actions will some- how have a good echo; and her children will be her further echo ”

Forster: No, I didn’t think of that. But mightn’t there be some of it elsewhere? Can you try me with some more examples?

Interviewers: The tree at Howards End? [A wych-elm, fre- quently referred to in the novel.]

Forster: Yes, that was symbolical; it was the genius of the house.

Interviewers: What was the significance of Mrs. Wilcox’s in- fluence on the other characters after her death?

Forster: I was interested in the imaginative effect of someone alive, but in a different way from other characters — ^living in other lives.

Interviewers: Were you influenced by Samuel Butler in this? I mean, by his theories of vicarious immortality?

Forster: No. (Pause.) 1 think I have a more poetical mind than Butler’s.

Interviewers: Now can we ask you a few questions about the immediate business of writing? Do you keep a notebook?

Forster: No, I should feel it improper.

Interviewers: But you would refer to diaries and letters?

Forster: Yes, that’s different.

Interviewers: When you go, say, to the circus, would you ever feel, "how nice it would be to put that in a novel”?

Forster: No, I should feel it improper. I never say “that might be useful.” I don’t think it is right for an author to do so. (He spoke firmly.) However I have been Inspired on the. spot. “The Story of a Panic” is the simplest example; "The Road from Colonus” is another. Sense of a place also inspired me to write a short story called "The Rock,” but the inspiration was poor in quality, and the editors wouldn’t take the story. But I have talked about this in the introduction to my short stories.

Interviewers: Do you pre-figure a shape to your novels?

Forster: No, I am too unvisual to do so. (W c found this sur- prising in view of his explanation of the Hindu festival scene, above.)

Interviewers: Does this come .out in any other way?

WRITERS AT WORl

90

Forster: I find it difficult to recognize people when I meet them, though I remember about them. I remember their voices.

Interviewers: Do you have any Wagnerian leitmotiv system to help you keep so many themes going at the s^me time?

Forster: Yes, in a way, and I’m certainly interested in music and musical methods. Though I shouldn’t call it a system.

Interviewers: Do you write every day, or only under inspira- tion?

Forster: The latter. But the act of writing inspires me. It is a nice feeling . . . (indulgently). Of course, I had a very literary childhood. I was the author of a number of works between the ages of six and ten. There were “Ear-rings through the Keyhole” and "Scuffles in a Wardrobe.”

INTERVIE^VERS: Which of your novels came first to your mind?

Forster: Half of A Room with a View. I got that far, and then there must have been a hitch.

Interviewers: Did you ever attempt a novel of an entirely dif- ferent sort from the ones you have published?

Forster: For some time 1 had the idea of an historical novel. The setting was to have been a Renaissance one. Reading Thais (by Anatole France) finally decided me to try it. But nothing came of it in the end.

Interviewers: How do you name your characters?

Forster: I usually find the name at the start, but not always. Rickie’s brother had several names. (He .showed us some early manuscript portions of The Longest Journey in which Stephen Wonham appeared as Siegfried; also an omitted chapter, which he described as “extremely romantic.") Wonham is a country name and so is Quested. (We looked at an early draft of A Passage to India in which to his surprise the heroine was found going under the name of Edith. This was later changed to Janet, before be- coming Adela.) Herriton I made up. Munt was the name of my first governess in the house in Hertfordshire. There really was a family caUed Howard who once owned the real Howard.s End. Where Angels Fear to Tread should have been called “Mon- teriano,” but the publisher thought this wouldn’t sell. It was Dent (Professor E. J. Dent] who gave me the present title.

Interviewers: How much do you admit to modelling your characters on real people?

Forster: We all like to pretend we don’t use real people, but

E. M. FOESTEB

31

one does actually. I used some of my family. Miss Bartlett was my Aunt Emily — ^they all read the book but they none of them saw it Uncle Willie turned into Mrs. Failing. He was a bluff and simple character (correcting himself) — ^bluff without being simple. Miss Lavish was actually a Miss Spender. Mrs. Honeychurch was my grandmother. The three Miss Dickinsons condensed into two Miss Schlegels. Philip Herriton 1 modelled on Professor Dent He knew this, and took an interest in his own progress. I have used several tourists.

Interviewers: Do all your characters have real life models?

Forster: In no book have I got down more than the people I like, the person I think I am, and the people who irritate me. This puts me among the large body of authors who are not really novelists, and have to get on as best they can with these three categories. We have not the power of observing the variety of life and describing it dispassionately. There are a few who have done this. Tolstoi was one, wasn’t he?

Interviewers: Can you say anything about the process of turn- ing a real person into a fictional one?

Forster: A useful trick is to look back upon such a person with half -closed eyes, fully describing certain characteristics. I am left with about two-thirds of a human being and can get to work. A likeness isn’t aimed at and couldn’t be obtained, because a man’s only himself amidst the '^articular circumstances of his life and not amid other circumstances. So that to refer back to Dent when Philip was in difficulties with Cino, or to ask one and one-half Miss Dickinsons how Helen should comport herself with an ille- gitimate baby would liave ruined the atmosphere and the book. When all goes well, the original material soon disappears, and a character who belongs to the book and nowhere else emerges.

Interviewers: Do any of your characters represent yourself at aU?

Forster: Rickie more than any. Also Philip. And Cecil [in A Room with a View] has got something of Philip in him.

Interviewers: What degree of reality do your characters have for you after you have finished writing about them?

Forster: Very variable. There are some I like thinking about. Rickie and Stephen, and Margaret Schlegel-— they are characters whose fortunes I have been interested to follow. It doesn’t matter if they died in the novel or not.

WRITERS AT WORK

32

Interviewers: We have got a few more questions about your woiic as a whole. First, to what degree is each novel an entirely fresh experiment?

Forster: To quite a large extent. But I wonder if experiment is the word?

Interviewers: Is there a hidden pattern behind the whole of an author’s work, what Henry James called “a figure in the car- pet”? (He looked dubious.) Well, do you like having secrets from the reader?

Forster (brightening: Ah now, that’s a different question. . . . I was pleased when Peter Burra* noticed that the wasp upon which Codbole meditates during the festival in A Passage to India had already appeared earlier in the novel.

Interviewers: Had the wasps any esoteric meaning?

Forster: Only in the sense that there is something esoteric in India about all animals. I was just putting it in; and afterwards I saw it was something that might return non-logically in the story later.

Interviewers: How far aware are you of your own technical cleverness in general?

Forster: We keep coming back to that. People will not realize how little conscious one is of these things; how one flounders about. They want us to be so much better informed than we are. If critics could only have a coiu’se on writers’ not thinking things out — a course of lectures . . . (He smiled).

Interviewers: You have said elsewhere that the authors you have learned most from were Jane Austen and Proust. What did you learn from Jane Austen technically?

Forster: I learned the possibilities of domestic humour. I was more ambitious than she was, of course; I tried to hitch it on to other things.

Interviewers: And from Proust?

Forster: I learned ways of looking at character from him. The modem sub-conscious way. He gave me as much of the modem way as I could take. I couldn’t read Freud or Jung myself; it had to be filtered to me.

Interviewers: Did any other novelists influence you techni- cally? What about Meredith?

’ Burra was the author of the preface to the “Everyman” Edition of A Passage to India.

E. M. FORSTER

33

Forster; I admired him — The Egoist and the better constructed bits of the other novels; but then that's not the same as his in- fluencing me. I don’t know if he did that. He did things 1 couldn’t do. What I admirsd was the sense of one thing opening into another. You go into a room with him, and then that opens into another room, and that into a further one.

Interviewers: What led you to make the remark quoted by Lionel Trilling, that the older you got the less it seemed to you to matter that an artist should “develop.”

Forster; I am more interested in achievement than in advance on it and decline from it. And I am more interested in works than in authors. The paternal wish of critics to show how a writer dropped off or picked up as he went along seems to me misplaced. I am only interested in myself as a producer. What was it Mahler said? — "anyone will sufficiently understand me who will trace my development through my nine symphonies.” This seems odd to me; I couldn’t imagine myself making such a remark; it seems too uncasual. Other authors find themselves much more an object of study. I am conceited, but not interested in myself in this particu- lar way. Of course I like reading my own work, and often do it. I go gently over the bits that I think are bad.

Interviewers: But you think highly of your own work?

Forster: That was implicit, yes. My regret is that I haven’t written a bit more — that t) body, the corpus, isn’t bigger. I think I am different from other writers; they profess much more worry (I don’t know if it is genuine). I have always found writing pleasant, and don’t understand what people mean by “throes of creation.” I’ve enjoyed it, but believe that in some ways it is good. Whether it will last, I have no idea.

P. N.Furbank F. J. H. Haskell

Francois Mauriac

Franfois Mauriac has defined himself as a writer in these words: "I am a metaphysician working on the concrete, I try to make the Catholic universe of evil perceptible, tangible, odorous. The theo- logians give us an abstract idea of the sinner. I give him flesh and blood.”

The author was bom of a middle-class family in Bordeaux in 1885 and began his education at a school run by Jesuits. Afterwards he attended a lycSe, the University of Bordeaux, and, very briefly, the University of Paris. In 1909 he published a book of poems, the first of a large body of work preoccupied with themes of conflict between human emotions . .id religious principle and obligation.

In a dozen years, starting in , he wrote the ten novels which established his reputation as France’s leading Catholic novelist. Notable among them were: Le Baiser au ISpreux (A Kiss for the Leper) , Ginitrix (Genetrix) ■, Th^rdse Desqueyroux

(Therese) , and Le Noeud de vipdres (Knot of Vipers)

he was elected to the French Academy. Shortly afterwards, he commenced publication of his Journals, volumes of personal reflection and frequently controversial comment on the contem- porary French scene. Mauriac has also written lives of Racine and Jesus he is the author of four plays, and of many books of stories, literary criticism, and essays, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

For the last three years he has contributed to the weekly TExpress which continues the outspoken style of the Journals. Mauriac now divides his time between Paris and his estate called Malagar in the Guyenne country near Bordeaux, die setting of many of his novels.

Francois Mauriac

“Every novelist ought to invent his own technique, that is the fact of the matter. Every novel worthy of the name is like another planet, whether large or small, which has its own laws just as it has its own flora and fauna. Thus, Faulkners technique is cer- tainly the best one with which to paint Faulkner’s world, and Kafka’s nightmare has produced its own myths that make it com- municable. Benjamin Constant, Stendhal, Eugene Fromentin, Jacques RiviSre, Radiguet, all used different techniques, took dif- ferent liberties, and set themselves different tasks. The work of art itself, whether its title is Adolphe, Lucien Leuwen, Dominique, Le Diable au corps or A la Recherche du temps perdu, is the solution to the problem of technique.”

With these words Fra, ;ois Mauriac, discussing the novel in the French literary magazine La Table ronde of August 1749, described his own position. In March 1753, he was interviewed on the same subject for The Paris Review by Jean le Marchand, Secretaire CenSrale of La Table ronde. M. le Marchand began by asking him about his earlier statement.

Maumac: My opinion hasn’t changed. I believe that my younger fellow novelists are greatly preoccupied with technique. They seem to think a good novel ought to follow certain rules imposed from outside. In fact, however, this preoccupation ham- pers them and embarrasses them in their creation. The great novelist doesn’t depend on anyone but himself. Proust resembled none of his predecessors and he did not have, he could not have, any successors. The gicat novelist breaks his mould; he alone can use it. Balzac created the "Balzacian” novel; its style was suitable only for Balzac.

'There is a close tie between a 'novelist’s originality in general

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and the personal quality of his style. A borrowed style is a bad style. American novelists from Faulkner to Hemingway invented a style to express what they wanted to say — ^and it is a style that can’t be passed on to their followers.

Interviewer: You have said that every novelist should invent his style for himself — how would you describe your own?

Mauriac: In all the time I have been writing novels I have very seldom asked myself about the technique I was using. When I begin to write I don’t stop and wonder if I am interfering too directly in the story, or if I know too much about my characters, or whether or not I ought to judge them. I write with complete naiveti, spontaneously. I’ve never had any preconceived notion of what I could or could not do.

If today I sometimes ask myself these questions it’s because they are asked of me — ^because they are asked all around me.

Really there is no problem of this type whose solution is not found in the completed work, whether good or bad. The preoccu- pation with these questions is a stumbling block for the French novel. The crisis in French novel writing that people talk about so much will be solved as soon as our young writers succeed in get- ting rid of the naive idea that Joyce, Kafka, and Faulkner hold the Tables of the Law of fictional technique. I’m convinced that a man with the real novelist’s temperament would transcend these taboos, these imaginary rules.

Interviewer: All the same, haven’t you ever deliberately made use of definite techniques in novel writing?

Mauriac: A novelist spontaneously works out the techniques that fit his own nature. Thus in ThSrdse Desqueyroux I used some devices that came from the silent films: lack of preparation, the sudden opening, flashbacks. They were methods that were new and surprising at that time. I simply resorted to the techniques that my instinct suggested to me. My novel Destins [Lines of Life] was likewise composed with an eye to film techniques.

Interviewer: When you begin to write, are all the important points of the plot already established?

Mauruc: That depends on the novel. In general they aren’t. There is a point of departure, and there are some characters. It often happens that the first characters don’t go any further and, on the other hand, vaguer, more inconsistent characters show new possibilities as the story goes on and assume a place we hadn't

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foreseen. To take an example from one of my plays, Asmodie, I had no idea at the outset how M. Coutilre was going to develop, and how important he was going to become in the play.

Interviewer: Ii» writing your novels, has any one problem given you particular trouble?

Mauriac: Not yet. Today, however, I cannot remain unaware of the comments made on my work from the standpoint of tech- nique. That’s why the novel I just finished won’t be published this year. I want to look over it again in that light.

Interviewer: Have you ever described a situation of which you had no personal experience?

Mauriac: That goes without saying — ^for example. I’ve never poisoned anyonel Certainly a novelist more or less comprehends all his characters; but I have also described situations of which I had no direct experience.

Interviewer: How distant in time do you have to be before you can describe your own experiences, or &ings you have seen?

Mauruc: One cannot be a true novelist before one has attained a certain age, and that is why a young author has almost no chance of writing successfully about any other period of his life than his childhood or adolescence. A certain distance in time is absolutely necessary for a novelist, unless he is writing a journal.

All my novels take place in the period contemporary with my adolescence and my youth. * hey are all a “remembrance of things past.” But if Proust’s case helped me to understand my own, it was without any conscious imitation on my part.

Interviewer: Do you make notes for future use? When you see something of interest in the course of life do you think, “That will be something I can use”?

Mauriac: Never; for the reason I have just given. I don’t observe and I don’t describe; I rediscover. I rediscover the narrow Jan- senist world of my devout, unhappy, and introverted childhood. It is as though when I was twenty a door within me had closed for ever on that which was going to become the material of my work.

Interviewer: To what extent is your writing dominated by sense-perceptions — ^hearing, sound, and sight?

Mauriac: Very largely — ^the critics have all commented on the importance of the sense of smell in my novels. Before beginning a novel I recreate inside myself its places, its mUieu, its colours

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and smells. I revive within myself the atmosphere of my childhood and my youth — am my characters and their world.

Interviewer: Do you write every day, or only when you feel inspired?

Mauruc: I write whenever it suits me. During a creative period I write every day; a novel should not be interrupted. When I cease to be carried along, when I no longer feel as though I were taking down dictation, I stop.

Interviewer: Have you ever tried to write a novel entirely different from those you have written?

Mauriac: Sometimes I’ve thought of writing a detective story, but I’ve never done it.

Interviewer: How do you hit on the names of your characters?

Mauruc: I have been unwise enough to use names that are very well known in my part of the country, around Bordeaux. So far, I have been able to avoid the great embarrassments that this system could have caused me.

Interviewer; To what extent are your characters based on real people?

Mauruc: There is almost always a real person in the beginning, but then he changes so that sometimes he no longer bears the slightest resemblance to the original. In general it is only the secondary characters who are taken directly from life.

Interviewer: Have you a special system for changing a real person into an imaginary one?

Mauruc: There is no system ... it is simply the art of the novel. What takes place is a sort of crystallization around the person. It is quite indescribable. For a true novelist this transformation is a part of one’s inner life. If I used some trick of prefabrication the result would not be a living character.

Interviewer; Do you describe yourself in any of your charac- ters?

Mauruc: To some degree in all of them. I particularly de- scribed myself in VEnfant charge de chaines and in La Robe pritexte. Ives Frontenac in Le Mysidh Frontenac is both me and not me: there are strong resemblances, very strong, but at the same time a considerable deformation.

Interviewer: From the standpoint of technique, what writers influenced you most?

Mauruc; I can’t tell. As far as technique goes I have been in-

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fluenced by nobody, or again by all the authors I have read. One is always the product of a culture. We are sometimes influenced by humble writers whom we have forgotten — ^perhaps I was in- fluenced only by those books I was steeped in for so long, the books I read in childhood. I don’t think I have been influenced by any other novelist. I am a novelist of atmosphere, and poets have been very important for me: Racine, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Maurice de Gu4rin, and Francois Jammes, for example.

Intervieweh: Do you think a novelist should “renew himself”?

Mauriac: I feel that a writer’s first duty is to be himself, to accept his limitations. The effort of self-expression should affect the manner of expression.

1 have never begun a novel without hoping that it would be the one that would make it unnecessary for me to write another. I have had to start again from scratch with each one. What had gone before didn’t count. ... I was not adding to a fresco. Like a man who has decided to start his life over again, 1 have told myself that I had so far accomplished nothing: for I have always believed that my chef doeucre would be the novel I was working on at the time.

Interviewer: Once a novel is finished do you remain attached to your characters? Do you maintain contact with them?

Maitriac: My characters exist for me only when someone talks to me about them, or writes an article about them. I wrote a sequel to ThSrdse Dest 'eyroux because I was induced to do so from outside. Once a book is written and has left me it exists only through others. Night before last I listened on the radio to an adaptation of DSsert de t Amour. Distorted as it was, I recognized Dr. Courr^ges, his son Raymond, Marie Cross, the kept woman. This little world was speaking, suffering before me, this world that had left me thirty years before. I recognized it, slightly dis- torted by the mirror that reflected it.

We put the most of ourselves into certain novels, which perhaps are not the best. For example in Le Mystdre Frontenac I sought to record my adolescence, to bring to life my mother and my father’s brother, who was our tutor. Quite apart from any merits or defects it might possess, this book has for me a heart-rending tone. Actually I don’t leread it any more than the others: I only reread my books when I have to in correcting proofs. The publica- tion of my complete works condemned me to this: it is as painful

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as rereading old letters. It is thus that death emerges from abstrac- tion, thus we touch it like a thing: a handful of ashes, of dust

Interviewer: Do you still read novels?

MAinuAC: I read very few. Eveiy day I find that age asphyxiates the characters inside of me. I was once a passionate reader, I might say insatiable, but now . . . When I was young, my own future assured to the Madame Bovarys, the Anna Kareninas, the characters from Balzac, the atmosphere that made them, for me, living creatures. They spread out before me all that I dreamed of for myself. My destiny was prefigured by theirs. Then, as 1 lived longer, they closed around me l^e rivals. A kind of competition obliged me to measure myself against them, above all against the characters of Balzac. Now, however, they have become part of that which has been completed.

On the other hand, I can still reread a novel by Bemanos, or even Huysmans, because it has a metaphysical extension. As for my younger contemporaries, it is their technique, more than any- thing else, that interests me.

It is because novels no longer have any hold on me that I am given over more to history, to history in the making.

Interviewer: Do you believe this attitude is peculiar to your- self? Don’t you find, rather, that at a time when the impact of events such as those in Algeria is very heavy, the world has de- tached itself somewhat from fiction? Perhaps the distance is no longer there that is necessary for the reception of the novel.

Mauriac: Every period in history has been more or less tragic. The events we are living through would not suffice to explain what is loosely called the crisis of the novel, which is not, I might add, a crisis of readership, inasmuch as the public does read novels today, and printings are much larger today than they were in my youth.

No, the crisis of the novel, in my opinion, is of a metaphysical nature, and is connected with a certain conception of man. The argument against the psychological novel derives essentially from the conception of man held by the present generation: a concep- tion that is totally negative. This altered view of the individual began a long time ago. The works of Proust show it Between Stoanns Way (the perfect novel) and The Past Recaptured we watch the characters dissolve. As the novel advances, the charac- ters decay.

Today, along with nonrepresentational art we have the non-

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representational novel — ^the characters simply have no distinguish- ing features.

I believe that the crisis of the novel, if it exists, is right there, essentially, in th<} domain of technique. The novel has lost its purpose. That is the most serious difficulty, and it is from there that we must begin. The younger generation believes, after Joyce and Proust, that it has discovered die “purpose” of the old novel to have been prefabricated and unrelated to reality.

Interviewer: Doesn’t talking about the characters’ dissolving put too much emphasis on the experimental novel? After all, there are still characters in the novels of Proust and Kafka. 'They have changed, of course, as compared to those of Balzac, but you remember them, you know them by name, they exist for the reader.

Mauruc: I am going to shock you. I scarcely know the names of Kafka’s characters, and yet at the same time I know him well, because he himself fascinates me. I have read his diary, his letters, everything about him. But as for his novels, I cannot read them.

In Proust, I have mentioned that one is struck by the slow decay of each character. After The Captive the novel turns into a long meditation on jealousy; Albertine no longer exists in the flesh; characters who seem to exist, at the beginning of the novel, such as Charlus, become confused with the vice which devours them.

The crisis of the novel, then, is metaphysical. The generation that preceded ours was no longer Christian, but it believed in the individual, which comes to the same thing as believing in die soul. What each of us understands by the word “soul” is different; but in any case it is the fixed point around which the individual is constructed.

Faith in Cod was lost for many, but not the values this faith postulates. The good was not bad, and the bad was not good. The collapse of the novel is due to the destruction of this fundamental concept: the awareness of good and evil. The language itself has been devalued and emptied of its meaning by this attack on conscience.

Observe that for the novelist who has remained Christian, like myself, man is someone creating himself or destroying himself. He is not an immobile being, fixed, cast in a mould once and for all. This is what 'makes the traditional psychological novel so different from what 1 did or thought I was doing. The human being as 1

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conceive him in the novel is a being caught up in the drama of salvation, even if he doesn’t know it.

And yet, I admire in the young novelists their "search for the absolute,” their hatred of false appearances and illusions. They made me think of what Alain and Simone Weil said of a "purify- ing atheism.” . . . But let’s not go into that — I’m no philosopher.

Interviewer: That’s what everyone says you are. Besides, why deny it?

Mauruc: Each time literary talent decreases, the philosophers gain. I am not saying that’s against them, but little by little they have taken over. The present generation is terribly intelligent. In the old days one could have talent and still be a little stupid; today, no Insofar as the young are philosophers, they prob-

ably have much less need of fiction than we did.

It is very important, all the same, that the master who has most influenced our period in literature should be a philosopher. Jean- Paul Sartre has, moreover, great talent, without which he would not have taken the position he has now occupied. Compare his influence to that of Bergson, who stayed in the domain of ideas and only affected literature indirectly, through his influence on the literary men themselves.

Interviewer: Do you believe that literature has been turned over to the philosophers by accident?

Mauriac: There is a historical reason for it: the tragedy of France. Sartre expressed the despair of this generation. He did not create it, but he gave it a justification and a style.

Interviewer: You said that you were more interested in the man Kafka than in his work. In the Figaro littiraire, you wrote that throughout Wuthering Heights it is the figure of Emily Bronte which attracted you. In a word, when the characters dis- appear, the author steps into the foreground and little by little takes over the scene.

Mauriac: Almost all the works die while the men remain. We seldom read any more of Rousseau than his Confessions, or of Chateaubriand than his Mimoires doutre-tombe. They alone interest us. I have always been and still remain a great admirer of Gide. It already appears, however, that only his journal and Si le grain ne meurt, the story of his childhood, have any chance of lasting. 'The rarest thing in literature, and the only success, is when the author disappears and his work remains. We don’t know

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who Shakespeare was, or Homer. People have worn themselves out writing about the life of Racine without being able to establish anything. He is lost in the radiance of his creation. That is quite rare.

There are almost no writers who disappear into their work. The opposite almost always comes about. Even the great characters that have survived in novels are found now more in handbooks and histories, as though in a museum. As living creatures they get worn out, and they grow feeble. Sometimes we even see them die. Madame Bovary seems to me to be in poorer health than she used to be. . . .

Intebvieweb: You think so?

Maubuc: Yes, and even Anna Karenina, even the Karamazovs. First, because they need readers in order to live and the new generations are less and less capable of providing them with the air they need to breathe.

Intebvieweb: In one place you speak of the greatness of the novel as the perfect literary form, the king of arts.

Maubuc: I was praising my merchandise ... no art is more royal than another. It is the artist who counts. Tolstoi and Dickens and Balzac are great, not the literary form they demonstrated.

Interviewer: Has Christianity lived so intensely as yours created problems for you as a novelist?

Maubuc: All the time. It seems comical today, but I was re- garded in Catholic cir* ’^s almost as a pornographic writer. That held me down somewhat.

If I were asked, "Do you believe your faith has hampered or enriched your literary life?” I would answer yes to both parts of the question. My Christian faith has enriched me. It has also ham- pered me, in that my books are not what they might have been had I let myself go. Today I know that God pays no attention to what we write; He uses it.

I am a Christian, though, and I would like to end my life not in violence and anger, but in peace. For the greatest temptation at the dose of a Christian’s life is retreat, silence. Even to the music I love most I now prefer silence, because there is no silence with God.

My enemies believe I want to remain on stage at any price — that I make use of politics in order to survive. They would be astounded indeed if they knew that my greatest happiness is to

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alone on my terrace, trying to guess the direction of the wind from the odours it carries. What I fear is not being forgotten after my death, but, rather, not being enough forgotten. As we were saying, it is not our books that survive, but oar poor lives that linger in the histories.

TRANSLATED RT JOHN TrAIN

AND Lydia Moffat

Joyce Cary

Joyce Cary’s success as a novelist came after years of seeming faflure. He was bom in 1888 in County Donegal, Ireland, m Anglo-Irish parentage. He studied painting at Edinburgh and Paris and then took degree at Oxford, before setting off to the Balkan War in 1712 to serve with the British Red Cross. In the First World War he fought in the Cameroons, where he was wounded. After the war lie served in a long series of remote colonial posts in the West African bush country. He returned to England in 1720 to write novels. He was forty-four when the first was published {Aissa Saved, 1732). His first critical success came with Mister Johnson (1739), and financial success with the best-selling The Horse's Mouth (1744), published in Cary’s fifty- sixth year.

Cary is best-known for the novels of his two trilogies: Herself Surprised , To Be a Pilgrim ', The Horse's Mouth and A Prisoner of Grace , Except the Lord and Not Honour More , The large scope of the trilogy per- fectly suited Cary’s talent. V. S. Pritchett described him as "the chameleon among contemporary novelists. Put him down in any environment or any dass, rich, middling, or poor, English, Irish, or foreign, and he changes colour and becomes whatever his subject is from an English cook to an African delinquent.”

Never in good health, Cary kept on writing at his home in Oxford even after he learned in 1755 that he was the victim of incurable progressive paralysis. Besides articles and short stories, he had completed a book of critical lectures, Art and Reality, before he died in March 1757.

Joyce Cary

Joyce Cary, a sprightly man with an impish crown of grey hair set at a jaunty angle on the back of his head, lives in a high and rather gloomy house in North Oxford. Extremely animated, Mr. Cary’s movements are decisive, uncompromising and retain some of the brisk alertness of his military career. His speech is over- whelming: voluminous and without hesitation or effort. His rather high voice commands attention, but is expressive and emphatic enough to be a little hard to follow. He is a compactly built, angular man with a keen, determined face, sharp, humorous eyes, and well-defined features. His quick and energetic expressions and bearing create the feeling that it is easier for him to move about than to sit still, and easier to talk than to be silent, even though, like most good talkers, he is a creative and intelligent listener.

His house, a Victorian } jilding with pointed Gothic windows and dark prominent gables, stands opposite the University cricket ground, and just by Keble College. It is a characteristically North Oxford house, contriving to form part of a row without any ap- pearance of being aware of its neighbours. It lies only a little back from the road, behind a small overgrown garden, thick with bushes. The house and garden have all the air of being obstinately ’property,’ self-contained and a little severe. So we weren’t really surprised at having to wait on the porch and ring away at the bell three or four times; or to learn, when Mr. Cary himself even- tually opened the door, that his housekeeper was deaf. A very large grand piano half fills the comfortable room into which we were led. It has one lamp for the treble, another for the bass. The standard of comfort is that of a successful member of the profes- sional class; the atmosphere a little Edwardian, solid, comforkAle,

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unpretentious, with no obtrusive brtc-d-brac. Along one wall is a group of representational paintings done by Cary himself in the past. He has, he says, no time for painting now. He is the kind of man who knows exactly what he has time for. we got down to the questions right away.

Interviewers: Have you by any chance been shown a copy of Barbara Haidy s essay on your novels in the latest number of Essays in Criticism?

Cary: On "Form.” Yes I saw it. Quite good, I thought. Interviewers: Well, setting the matter of form aside for the moment, we were interested in her attempt to relate you to the tradition of the family chronicle. Is it in fact your conscious in- tention to re-create what she calls the pseudo-saga?

Cary: Did she say that? Must have skipped that bit. Interviewers: Well, she didn’t say “consciously,” but we were interested to know whether this was your intention.

Cary: You mean, did I intend to follow up Galsworthy and Walpole? Oh, no, no, no. Family life, no. Family life just goes on. Toughest thing in the world. But of course it is also the microcosm of a world. You get everything there — birth, life, death, love and jealousy, conflict of wills, of authority and freedom, the new and the old. And I always choose the biggest stage possible for my theme.

Interviewers: What about the eighteenth-century novelists? Someone vaguely suggested that you recaptured their spirit, or something of that kind.

Cary: Vaguely is the word. I don’t know who I’m like. I’ve been called a metaphysical novelist, and if that means I have a fairly dear and comprehensive idea of the world I’m writing about, I suppose that’s true.

Interviewers: You mean an idea about the nature of the world which guides the actions of the characters you are creating?

Cary: Not so much the ideas as their background. 1 don’t care for philosophers in books. They are always bores. A novel should be an experience and convey an emotional truth rather than argu- ments.

Interviewers: Background — ^you said background.

Cary: The whole set-up — character — of the world as we know it. Roughly, for me, the principal fact of life is the free mind. For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very

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queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and there- fore continuous change and insecurity. A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice. A world in everlastiifg conflict between die new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old estab- lishment.

Interviewers: ML>s Hardy complains that the form shows too clearly in your novels.

Cary: Others complain that I don’t make the fundamental idea plain enough. This is every writers dilemma. Your form is your meaning, and your meaning dictates the form. But what you try to convey is reality — ^the fact plus the feeling a total complex ex- perience of a real world. If you make your scheme too explicit, die framework shows and the book dies. If you hide it too thoroughly, the book has no meaning and therefore no form. It is a mess.

Interviewers: How does this problem apply in The Moon- light?

Cary: I was dealing there with the contrast between conven- tional systems in different centuries — systems created by man’s imagination to secure their lives and give them what they seek from life.

Interviewers: Didn’t the critics call Rose a tyrant?

Cary: Oh, they were completely wrong about Rose. She was a Victorian accepting the religion and the conventions of her time and sacrificing her own happiness to carry them out. A fine woman. And no more of a tyrant than any parent who tries to guide a child in the right paA. That religion, that system, has gone, but it was thoroughly good and eifident in its own time. I mean, it gave people good lives and probably all the happiness that can be achieved for anybody in this world.

Interviewers: Are the political aspects of your work controlled by the same ideas?

Caby: Religion is organized to satisfy and guide the soul — politics does the same thing for the body. Of course they overlap — ^this is a very rough description. But the politician is responsible for law, for physical security, and in a world of tumult, of per- petual conflict, he has the alternatives, roughly again, of persuad- ing people or shooting them. In the democracies, we persuade. And this gives great power to the spellbinder, the artist in words, the preacher, the demagogue, whatever you call him. Rousseau,

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Marx, Tolstoi, these were great spellbinders — as well as Lacor- daire. My Nimmo is a typical spellbinder. Bonser was a spell- binder in business, the man of imagination. He was also a crook, but so are many spellbinders. Poets have starts most of the revo- lutions, especially nationalist revolutions. On the other hand, life would die without poets, and democracy must have its spell- binders.

Interviewers: Roosevelt?

Cary; Yes, look what he did — ^aud compare him with Wilson. Wilson was a good man, but he hadn't the genius of the spell- binder— the art of getting at people and moving the crowd.

Interviewers: Is Nimmo based on Roosevelt?

Cary: No, he belongs to the type of all of them — ^Juarez, Lloyd George, Bevan, Sankey and Moody, Billy Graham.

Interviewers: Do you base your characters on people you know?

Cary: Never, you can’t. You may get s'ngle hints. But real people are too complex and too disorganized for books. They aren't simple enough. Look at all the great heroes and heroines, Tom Jones, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Baron Charlus, Catherine Linton: they are essentially characters from fable, and so they must be to take their place in a formal construction which is to have a meaning. A musician does not write music by trying to fit chords into his whole. The chords arise from the develop- ment of his motives.

Interviewers: In one of your prefaces you said, didn’t you, that Jimson’s father came from life?

Cary; I met an old man, an artist who had been in the Academy and a success, and was then ruined by the change of taste when the impressionists created their new symbolic school. But I didn’t use him in my book, I don’t know anything about his character, only his tragedy. A very common one in this world. (Suddenly) 'The French seem to take me for an existentialist in Sartre’s sense of the word. But I’m not. I am influenced by the solitude of men’s minds, but equally by the unity of their fundamental character and feelings, their sympathies which bring them together. I be- lieve that there is such a thing as unselfish love and beauty. I am obliged to believe in God as a person. I don’t suppose any church would accept me, but I believe in God and His grace with an absolute confidence. It is by His grace that we know beauty and

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love, that we have all that makes life worth living in a tough, dangerous, and unjust world. Without that belief 1 could not m^e sense of the world and I could not write. Of course, if you say I am an existentialist in the school of Kierkegaard, that is more reasonable. But existentialism without a god is nonsense — ^it atomizes a world which is plainly a unity. It produces merely frustration and defeat. How can one explain the existence of per- sonal feelings, love and beauty, in nature, unless a person, God, is there? He’s there as much as hydrogen gas. He is a fact of experience. And one must not run away from experience. I don’t believe in miracles. I’m not talking here of faith cures — but some breach in the fundamental consistency of the world character which is absolutely impossible. I mean absolutely. (With empha- sis) God is a character, a real and consistent being, or He is nothing. If God did a miracle He would deny His own nature and the universe would simply blow up, vanish, become nothing. And we can’t even conceive nothingness. The world is a definite character. It is, and therefore it is something. And it can’t be any other thing. Aquinas tells you all the things that God can’t do without contradicting himself.

Interviewers: But about existentialism.

Cary: Kierkegaard states the uniqueness of the individual and I stand by that.

Interviewers: That’s what you meant, then, when you said that what makes men tick should be the main concern of the novelist? The character’s pnaciple of unity?

Cary: And action, their beliefs. You’ve got to find out what

people believe, what is pushing them on And of course it’s a

matter of the simpler emotional drives — ^like ambition and love. These are the real stufiF of the novel, and you can’t have any sort of real form unless you’ve got an ordered attitude towards them.

Interviewers: But the fundamental beliefs are not always the most apparent, or, it seems to us, the most successful of the achievements in the novel. We were expecting, for instance, a much closer analysis of the religious beliefs of Brown in To Be a Pilgrim. But we felt, in fact, that what came across most success- fully were the emotional responses of people to people — compel- ling, for instance, Lucy to follow Brown.

Cary: 'The details were there once. That is. Brown’s arguments were there, and Lucy’s response. But Lucy was only one character.

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one motive in the symphony. And also I was up against the prob- lem of explicit statement. I may have cut too much, but the book is long and packed already. The essence of Lucy was her deep faith. She wasn’t the kind of person who can float along from day to day like a piece of newspaper or a banana skin in the gutter. And in the book, I had her feelings expressed. But I cut them somewhere in the rewriting. I rewrite a great deal and I work over the whole book and cut out anything that does not belong to the emotional development, the texture of feeling. I left too much of the religious argument in Except the Lord and people criticize it as too explicit or dull.

Interviewers: Do you find in those later stages that you’re primarily concerned with the more technical side of “form”? With, for example, managing the flashback? And do you think, incidentally, that you owe that particular trick to the films? I believe that you worked on a film in Africa.

Cary: No, I don’t really think it has anything to do with films. The flashback in my novels is not just a trick. In, for example, The Moonlight, I used it in order to make my theme possible. It was essential to compare two generations. You can’t do that without a flashback contrast; the chronological run-through by itself is no good.

Interviewers: In the preface to Herself Surprised you men- tioned a technical difficulty you found yourself in. You wanted to show everything through the eyes of Sara, but found that to make her see everything diluted her character. This was the soliloquy as flashback. This struck us as the same dilemma that James found himself in when writing What Maisie Knew. Is this a just parallel? Do you read James?

Cary: Yes, but James is not very remarkable technically. He’s one of our very greatest novelists, but you will not learn much by studying his technique. What Matsie Knew, that was one of the packed ones, wasn’t it? Almost too packed. I enjoyed its in- tense appreciation of the child’s nature, and the cruel imbecility of the world in which she was thrown about. But on the whole I perfer the beautifully clear atmosphere of a book like The Euro- peans or Daisy Miller — all James is in Daisy Miller.

Interviewers: Have you read The Bostonians? There was the spellbinder.

Cary: No, I haven’t read that.

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Interviewers: The Princess Casamassima?

Cary: I’m afraid I haven’t read that either. Cecil is always telling me to read her and I must. But I read James a good de^. There are times you need James, just as there are times when you must have Proust — in his very Cerent world of change. The essential thing about James is that he came into a different, a highly organized, a hieratic society, and for him it was not only a very good and highly civilized society, but static. It was the best the world could do. But it was already subject to corruption. This was the centre of James’ moral idea — that everytliing good was, for that reason, specially liable to corruption. Any kind of good- ness, integrity of character, exposed that person to ruin. And the whole civilization, because it was a real civilization, cultivated and sensitive, was fearfully exposed to frauds and go-getters, brutes and grabbers. This was his tragic theme. But my world is quite different — it is intensely dynamic, a world in creation. In this world, politics is like navigation in a sea without charts and wise men live the lives of pilgrims.

Interviewers: Have you sympathy with those who most un- compromisingly pursue their own free idea whatever the opposi- tion?

Cary: I don’t put a premium on aggression. Oh, no, no, no. I’m no life-force man. Critics write about my vitality. What is vitality? As a principle it is a lot of balls. The life force is rubbish, an abstraction, an idea without character. Shaw’s tale of life force is either senseless rubbish or he really means Shaw — Shaw as God’s mind. The life force doesn’t exist. Show me some in a bottle. The life of the world is the nature of God, and God is as real as the trees.

Interviewers: Which novelists do you think have most in- fluenced you?

Cary: Influenced? Oh, lots. Hundreds. Conrad had a great deal at one point. I’ve got a novel upstairs I wrote forty years ago in Africa, under his influence. But I read very few novels nowa^ys.

I read memoirs and history. And the classics. I’ve got tliem at my fingertips and I can turn up the points I want. I don’t read many modem novels, I haven’t time, but those I do read are often very good. There is plenty of good work being done, and in Britain the public for good work has enormously increased in my lifetime — especially in the last thirty years.

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Interviewers: Do you find, then, that conversation with the novelists of today helps?

Cary: Conversation?

Interviewers: I mean apart from the person^ stimulus, do you find that what they have to say helps to resolve technical prob- lems?

Cary: Oh, no. Not particularly. We chatter. But you have to work problems out for yourself, on paper. Put the stuff down and read it — to see if it works. Construction is a complicated job- later I’ll show you my apparatus.

Interviewers: Is there only one way to get a thing right? How close is form?

Cary: That’s a difficult question. Often you have very little room for manoeuvre. See Proust’s letter to Mme Schiff about Swann, saying he had to make Swann ridiculous. A novelist is often in Proust’s jam.

Interviewers: You are a determinist — ^you think even novelists are pushed by circumstances?

Cary: Everyone but a lunatic has reason for what he does. Yes, in that sense I am a determinist. But I believe, with Kant, that the mind is self-determined. That is, I believe intensely in the creative freedom of the mind. That is indeed absolutely essential to man’s security in a chaotic world of change. He is faced all the time with unique complex problems. To sum them up for action is an act of creative imagination. lie fits the different elements together in a coherent whole and invents a rational act to deal with it. He requires to be free, he requires his independence and solitude of mind, he requires his freedom of mind and imagina- tion. Free will is another matter — it is a term, or rather a contra- diction in terms, which leads to continual trouble. The will is never free — it is always attached to an object, a purpose. It is simply the engine in the car — it can’t steer. It is the mind, the reason, the imagination that steers.

Of course, anyone can deny the freedom of the mind. He can argue that our ideas are conditioned. But anyone who argues so must not stop there. He must deny all freedom and say that the world is simply an elaborate kind of clock. He must be a be- haviourist. There is no alternative, in logic, between behaviour- ism, mechanism, and the personal God who is the soul of beauty, love, and truth. And if you believe in behaviourism, none of these

JOYCE CABY 57

things has any real existence. They are cogwheels in the clock, and you yourself do not exist as a person. You are a delusion. So take your choice. Either it is personal or it is a delusion — a delusion rather difiSkcult to explain.

Interviewers: How do you fit poetry into this? I once heard you describe it as “prose cut up into lines.” Would you stick to that?

Cary: Did I say that? I must have been annoying someone. No, I wouldn’t stick to it.

iNTERviEWERSi Anyway, at what stage of your career did you decide to write novels rather than anything else?

Cary: What stage? Oh, I’ve been telling stories ever since I was very small. I’m telling stories now to the children of a friend of mine. I always tell stories. And I’ve been writing them from childhood. I told them to other children when I was a child. I told them at school. I told them to my own children and I tell them now to the children of a friend.

Interviewers: Aissa Saved was the first one you published?

Cary: Yes, and that was not until I was forty. I’d written many before, but I was never satisfied with them. They raised political and religious questions I found I could not answer. I have three or four of them up there in the attic, still in manuscript.

Interviewers: Was this what made you feel that you needed a “new education”?

Cary: At twenty-six I’d knocked about the world a good bit and I thought I knew the answers, but I didn’t know. I couldn’t finish the novels. The best novel I ever wrote — at least it contained some of my best stuff — there’s about a million words of it upstairs, I couldn’t finish it. I found that I was faking things all the time, dodging issues and letting my characters dodge them.

Interviewers: Could you tell us something about your working methods?

Cary: Well — I write the big scenes first, that is, the scenes that carry the meaning of the book, the emotional experience. The first scene in Prisoner of Grace was that at the railway station, when Nimmo stops his wife from running away by purely moral pres- sure. That is, she became the prisoner of grace. When I have the big scenes sketched I have to devise a plot into which they’ll fit Of course often they don’t quite fit. Sometimes I have to throw them out. But they have defined my meaning, given form to the book. Lastly I work over the whole surface.

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Interviewers: When does the process, the book, start?

Cary: Possibly years ago — in a note, a piece of dialogue. Often I don’t know the real origin. I had an odd experience lately whidi gave me a glimpse of the process, something ^ hadn’t suspected. I was going round Manhattan— do you know it? •

Interviewers: Not yet.

Cary: It’s an island and I went round on a steamer with an American friend, Elizabeth Lawrence, of Harper’s. And I noticed a girl sitting all by herself on the other side of the deck — a girl of about thirty, wearing a shabby skirt. She was enjoying herself. A nice expression, with a wrinkled forehead, a good many wrinkles. I said to my friend, “I could write about that girl — ^what do you think she is?” Elizabeth said that she might be a schoolteacher taking a holiday, and asked me why I wanted to write about her. I said I didn’t really know — I imagined her as sensitive and intel- ligent, and up against it. Having a hard life but making something of it, too. In such a case I often make a note. But I didn’t — and I forgot the whole episode. Then, about three weeks later, in San Francisco, I woke up one night at four — I am not so much a bad sleeper as a short sleeper — I woke up, I say, with a story in my head. I sketched the story at once — it was about an English girl in England, a purely English tale. Next day an appointment fell through and I had a whole day on my hands. I found my notes and wrote the story — that is, the chief scenes and some connecting tissue. Some days later, in a plane — ideal for writing — I began to work it over, clean it up, and I thought. Why all these wrinkles? that’s the third time they come in. And I suddenly realized that my English heroine was the girl on the Manhattan boat. Some- how she had gone down into my subconscious, and came up again with a full-sized story. And I imagine that has happened before. I notice some person because he or she exemplifies some part of my feeling about things. The Manhattan girl was a motive. And she brought up a little piece of counterpoint. But the wrinkles were the first crude impression — a note, but one that counted too much in the final writing.

Interviewers: A note

Cary: I was thinking in terms of music. My short stores are written with the same kind of economy — and no one would pub- lish them. Some of them, now being published, are twenty years old. Because each note has to count and it must not be super-

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iBuous. A son of mine, a composer, MTote some music for the BBC lately. The orchestra was smtdl, and the Musicians’ Union wouldn’t let him conduct. He heard one of the players ask the conductor what the stuff was Kke. The conductor, no doubt intending to warn the player, answered, “It’s good, but the trouble is that every note counts.’’ 1 suppose the editors who rejected me felt like that. They wanted a litde more fluff.

Interviewebs: You can depend around here on practically everyone’s having read The Horse’s Mouth. Do you think that’s because it’s less philosophical? Or just because it’s a Penguin?

Caby: The Horse’s Mouth is a very heavy piece of metaphysical writing. No, they like it because it’s furmy. The French have de- tected the metaphysics and are fussing about the title. I want Le Tuyau increoable — ^the unbustable tip. They say this is unworthy of a philosophical work and too like a roman policier. I say tant mieux. But they are unconvinced.

Interviewers: A metaphysical work

Cary: A study of the creative imagination working in symbols. And symbols are highly uncertain — they also die.

Interviewers: Gully’s picture on the wall then, which is de- molished, is in its turn a symbol of the instability of the symbol?

Cary: That’s what Mrs. Hardy seems to think. But that would be allegory. 1 hate allegory. The trouble is that if your books mean anything, the critic is apt to work allegory in. The last scene of Gully is a real conflict, not au allegorical one. And it was necessary to cap the development. It was the catastrophe in a Greek sense.

Ikitoviewebs: The Horse’s Mouth was part of a trilogy. You’re doing this again now, aren’t you, in A Prisoner of Grace, Except the Lord, and the third yet to come?

Cary: I was dissatisfied with the first trilogy. I’ve set out this time with the intention of doing better. I think I am doing better. The contrasts between the (Merent worlds are much sharper. When I’d finished A Prisoner of Grace I planned a second book on political religion, but contemporary religion. And 1 found my- self bored with the prospect. I nearly threw in the whole plan. ’Then one of my children urged me to go on. And I had the idea of writing Nimmo’s religion as a young man. This appeared to me as opening a new world of explanation, and also giving a strong contrast to the last book. So I got to work. And tried to get at the roots of left-wing English politics in evangelical religion.

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Interviewers: And the third?

Cary: It’s going to be called Not Honour More. In it, I deal with Jim — the lover in A Prisoner of Grace. He is the man of honour, of duty, of service, reacting against ths politician. But I’ll show it to you in its present state. Upstairs.

We followed Mr. Cary upstairs two stories to his workshop. It was a room with a low ceiling. A window at the far end looked out onto trees. Where the walls downstairs had been covered with pictures, up here it was all bookcases, containing, it seemed, more files than books. Mr. Cary went straight to his desk, putting out sheaves of paper from the shelves over it. They were, one instantly observed, meticulously organized. The sheaves were numbered and titled, each chapter in its own envelope. Mr. Cary explained that these were the “big scenes.” Clipped on the front of each envelope was a sheet of memoranda indicating what still re- mained to be done within the chapter, what would be required to give the finished scene a more convincing build-up. These were the chapters of the embryonic “Not Honour More.”

Mr. Cary explained that he was now “plotting” the book. There was research yet to be done. Research, he explained, was some- times a bore; but it was necessary for getting the political and social background of his work right. He had a secretary who did useful work for him in the Bodleian, the University library. He was at the moment, for example, wanting facts on the General Strike, and had given his secretary a list of questions to work on.

We asked him if what we had heard was true — that often, as he worked, his writing would generate another unrelated idea and he would thus be led to write out a block of about twenty thou- sand words before returning to the work at hand. Mr. Cary con- firmed this account; and it was confirmed too by the large book- case containing nothing but files and boxes of unfinished work. It was an impressive proliferation of novels and short stories, with the titles on the spines, unfamiliar titles like The Facts of Life. One file contained “recent short stories.”

The over-all impression of the room in which he worked, as of the novelist himself, was of a man who, much as he himself might eschew the word, radiated “vitality.” He rose, he said, early, and was always at his desk by nine. We had ourselves already had more than the period of time he had agreed to give us. As we went

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downstairs and made again for the sitting-room, he looked anxiously at his watch; but we were there only to dig quickly tumng the deep cushions for the behn^ngs that had spilled from our pockets as we Uhir^ed.

John Burrows Alex Hamilton

Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker was bom Dorothy Rothschild in West End, New Jersey, in 1893, and was educated partly in a convent school.

she worked for Vogue at ten dollars a week; then she became drama critic for Vanity Fair. Her first collection of verse, Erumeh Rope, appeared in 1727. That same year she accepted a book- reviewing stint for The New Yorker, her columns appearing over the signature "Constant Reader.” She was becoming famous as a wit among the group that met at the Round Table in the Hotel Algonquin. There was a time when everything bright or malicious said in New York was ascribed to Dorothy Pareer.

In 1729 she won the O. Hemy Prize for “Big Blonde,” a story which was included in her first collection, Laments for the Living . A second collection of stories was After Such Pleasures . Here Lies included all her fiction published to that time. She has written three plays; Close Harmony (with Elmer Rice ), The Coast of Illyria . and The Ladies of the Corridor (with Amaud d’Usseau ). Although she prefers the dramatic form, her plays have never achieved the popularity of her verse and her short stories. Her collections of verse were all best-sellers, a rare occurrence in American publishing. They in- clude Sunset Gun Death and Taxes , and Not So Deep as a Well, her collected poems Tne Portable Dorothy Parker , including both verse and fiction complete, has been one of the most popular volumes in a famous series. Alexander Woollcott said of her work that it was “so potent a distillation of nectar and wormwood, of ambrosia and deadly night-shade, as might suggest to the rest of us that we write far too much.”

Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker lives in a midtown New York hotel. She shares her small apartment with a youthful poodle which has run of the place and has caused it to look, as Miss Parker says apologetically, somewhat “Hogarthian’: newspapers spread about the floor, picked lamb chops here and there, and a rubber doU — its throat tom from ear to ear — which Mrs. Parker lobs left-handed from her chair into comers of the room for the poodle to retrieve — as it does, never tiring of the opportunity. The room is sparsely deco- rated, its one overpowering fixture being a large dog portrait, not of the poodle, but of a sheepdog owned by the author Philip Wylie and painted by his wife. The portrait indicates a dog of such size that in real life it must dwarf Mrs. Parker. She is a small woman, her voice gentle, her tone often apologetic, but occa- sionally, given the opportunity to comment on matters she feels strongly about, her voice rises almost harshly, and her sentences are punctuated with observations phrased with lethal force. Hers is still the wit which made her a legend as a member of the Round Table of the Algonquin — a humour whose particular quality seems a coupling of a brilliant social commentary with a mind of devastating inventiveness. She seems able to produce the weU-tumed phrase for any occasion. A friend remembers sitting next to her at the theatre when the news was announced of the death of the stolid Calvin Coolidge, "How do they know?” whis- pered Mrs. Parker.

Readers of this interview, however, will find that Mrs. Parker has only contempt for the eager reception accorded her wit. “Why, it got so bad," she has said bitterly, “that they began to laugh before I opened my mouth.” And she has a similar attitude to- wards her value as a serious writer. ,

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But Mrs. Parker is her own worst critic. Her three books of poetry may have established her reputation as a master of light verse, but her short stories are essentially serious in tone — serious in that they reflect her own life, which has beln in many ways an unhappy one — and also serious in their intention. Franklin P. Adams has described them in an introduction to her work; “No- body can write such ironic things unless he has a deep sense of injustice — injustice to those members of the race who are the victims of the stupid, the pretentious arid the hypocritical.”

Interviewer: Your first job was on Vogue, wasn't it? How did you go about getting hired, and why Vogue?

Parker: After my father died there wasn’t any money, I had to work, you see, and Mr. Crowninshield, God rest his soul, paid twelve dollars for a small verse of mine and gave me a job at ten dollars a week. Well, I thought I was Edith Sitwell. I lived in a boarding house at 103rd and Broadway, paying eight dollars a week for my room and two meals, breakfast and dinner. Thome Smith was there, and another man. We used to sit around in the evening and talk. There was no money, but Jesus we had fun.

Interviewer: What kind of work did you do at Vogue?

Parker: I wrote captions. “This little pink dress will win you a beau,” that sort of thing. Funny, they were plain women working at Vogue, not chic. They were decent, nice women — the nicest women I ever met — but they had no business on such a magazine. They wore funny little bonnets and in the pages of their magazine they virginized the models from tough babes into exquisite little loves. Now the editors are what they should be: all chic and worldly; most of the models are out of the mind of a Bram Stoker, and as for the caption writers — my old job — they’re recommend- ing mink covers at seventy-five dollars apiece for the wooden ends of golf clubs “ — ^for the friend who has everything.” Civilization is coming to an end, you understand.

Interviewer; Why did you change to Vanity Fair?

Parker: Mr. Crowninshield wanted me to. Mr. Sherwood and Mr. Benchley — ^we always called each other by our last names — were there. Our office was across from the Hippodrome. The midgets would come out and frighten Mr. Sherwood. He was about seven feet tall and they were always sneaking up behind him and asking him how the weather was up there. "Walk down the street with me,” he'd ask, and Mr. Benchley and I would

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leave our jobs and guide him down the street. I can’t tell you, we had more fun. Both Mr. Benchley and I subscribed to two under- taking magazines: The Casket and Sunnyside. Steel yourself: Sunnyside had a joKe column called “From Grave to Gay.” I cut a picture out of one of them, in colour, of how and where to inject embalming fluid, and had it hung over my desk until Mr. Crown- inshield asked me if I could possibly take it down. Mr. Crownin- shield was a lovely man, but puzded. I must say we behaved extremely badly. Albert Lee, one of the editors, had a map over his desk with little flags on it to show where our troops were fight- ing during the First World War. Every day he would get the news and move the flags around. I was married, my husband was overseas, and since I didn’t have anything better to do I’d get up half an hour early and go down and change his flags. Later on, Lee would come in, look at his map, and he’d get very serious about spies — ^shout, and spend his morning moving his little pins back into position,

Interviewer: How long did you stay at Vanity Fair?

Parker: Four years. I’d taken over the drama criticism from P. G. Wodehouse. Then I fixed three plays — one of them Caesars Wife, with Billie Burke in it — and as a result I was fired.

Interviewer: You fixed three plays?

Parker: Well, panned. The plays closed and the producers, who were the big boys — Dillinghei.i, Ziegfeld, and Belasco — didn’t like it, you know. Vanity Fair was a magazine of no opinion, but I had opinions. So I was fired. And Mr. Sherwood and Mr. Benchley resigned their jobs. It was all right for Mr. Sherwood, but Mr. Benchley had a family — two children. It was the greatest act of friendship I’d known. Mr. Benchley did a sign, “Contributions for Miss Billie Burke,” and on our way out we left it in the hall of Vanity Fair. We behaved very badly. We uiade ourselves dis- charge chevrons and wore them.

Interviewer: Where did you all go after Vanity Fair?

Parker: Mr. Sherwood became the motion-picture critic for the old Life. Mr. Benchley did the drama reviews. He and I had an oifice so tiny that an inch smaller and it would have been adultery. We had Parkbench for a cable address, but no one ever sent us one. It was so long ago— before you were a gleam in someone’s eyes — ^that I doubt there was a cable.

Interviewer: It’s a popular supposition that there was much

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more communication between writers in the twenties. The Round Table discussions in the Algonquin, for example.

Parker: I wasn’t there very often — it cost too much. Others went. Kaufman was there. I guess he was '"sort of funny. Mr. Benchley and Mr. Sherwood went when they had a nickel. Frank- lin P. Adams, whose column was widely read by people who wanted to write, would sit in occasionally. And Harold Ross, The New Yorker editor. He was a professional lunatic, but I don’t know if he was a great man. He had a profound ignorance. On one of Mr. Benchley’s manuscripts he wrote in the margin oppo- site “Andromache,” “Who he?” Mr. Benchley wrote back, “You keep out of this.” The only one with stature who came to the Round Table was Heywood Broun.

Interviewer; What was it about the twenties that inspired people like yourself and Broun?

Parker: Gertrude Stein did us the most harm when she said, “You're all a lost generation.” That got around to certain people and we all said, “Wheel We’re lost.” Perhaps it suddenly brought to us the sense of change. Or irresponsibility. But don’t forget that, though the people in the twenties seemed like flops, they weren’t. Fitzgerald, the rest of them, reckless as they were, drinkers as they were, they worked damn hard and all the time.

Interviewer: Did the “lost generation” attitude you speak of have a detrimental effect on your own work?

Parker: Silly of me to blame it on dates, but so it happened to be. Dammit, it was the twenties and we had to be smarty. I wanted to be cute. That’s the terrible thing. I should have had more sense.

Interviewer: And during this time you were writing poems?

Parker: My verses. I cai»not say poems. Like everybody was then, I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers. My verses are no damn good. Let’s face it, honey, my verse is terribly dated — as anything once fashionable is dreadful now. I gave it up, knowing it wasn’t getting any better, but nobody seemed to notice my magnificent gesture.

Interviewer: Do you think your verse writing has been of any benefit to your pro.se?

Parker: Franklin P. Adams once gave me a book of French verse forms and told me to copy their design, that by copying

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them I would get precision in prose. The men you imitate in verse influence your prose, and what I got out of it was precision, all I realize I’ve ever had in prose writing.

iNTERViEWEn: Hoiv did you get started in writing?

Parker: I fell into writing, I suppose, being one of those awful children who wrote verses. I went to a convent in New York — The Blessed Sacrament. Convents do the same things progressive schools do, only they don’t know it. They don’t teach you how to read; you have to find out for yourself. At my convent we did have a textbook, one that devoted a page and a half to Adelaide Ann Proctor; but we couldn’t read Dickens; he was vulgar, you know. But 1 read him and Thackeray, and I’m the one woman youll ever know who’s read every word of Charles Reade, the author of The Cloister and the Hearth. But as for helping me' in the outside world, the convent taught me only that if you spit on a pencil eraser it will erase ink. And I remember the smell of oilcloth, the smell of nuns’ garb. I was fired from there, finally, for a lot of things, among them my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion.

Interviewer: Have you ever drawn from those years for story material?

Parker: All those writers who write about their childhoodi Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn’t sit in the same room with me.

Interviewer: What, then, would you say is the source of most of your work?

Pari:er: Need of money, dear.

Interviewer: And besides that?

Parker: It’s easier to write about those you hate— just as it’s easier to criticize a bad play or a bad book.

Intervdetwer: What about ’’Big Blonde”? Where did the idea for that come from?

Parker: I knew a lady — a friend of mine who went through holy hell. Just say I knew a woman once. The purpose of the writer is to say what he feels and sees. To those who write fan- tasies— ^the Misses Baldwin, Ferber, Norris — I am not at home.

Interviewer: 'That's not showing much respect for your fellow women, at least not the writers.

Parker: As artists they’re rot, but as providers they’re oil wells; they gush. Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to

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do. I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter. And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word. I’m a feminist, and God knows I’m loyal to my sex, and you must remembeii that from my very early days, when this city was scarcely safe from buffaloes, I was in the struggle for equal rights for women. But when we paraded through the catcalls of men and when we chained ourselves to lamp posts to try to get our equality — dear child, we didn’t foresee those female writers. Or Clare Boothe Luce, or Perle Mesta, or Oveta Culp Hobby.

Interviewer: You have an extensive reputation as a wit. Has this interfered, do you think, with your acceptance as a serious writer?

Parker: I don't want to be classed as a humorist. It makes me feel guilty. I’ve never read a good tough quotable female humor- ist, and I never was one myself. I couldn’t do it. A “smartcracker” they called me, and that makes me sick and unhappy. There’s a helluva distance between wisecracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words. I didn’t mind so much when they were good, but for a long time anything that was called a crack was attributed to me — and then they got the shaggy dogs

Interviewer: How about satire?

Parker: Ah, satire. That’s another matter. They’re the big boys. If I’d been called a satirist there’d be no living with me. But by satirist I mean those boys in the other centuries. The people we call satirists now are those who make cracks at topical topics and consider themselves satirists — creatures like George S. Kaufman and such who don’t even know what satire is. Lord knows, a writer should show his times, but not show them in wisecracks. Their stuff is not satire; it’s as dull as yesterday’s newspaper. Successful satire has got to be pretty good the day after tomorrow.

Interviewer: And how about contemporary humorists? Do you feel about them as you do about satirists?

Parker: You get to a certain age and only the tried writers are funny. I read my verses now and I ain't funny. I haven’t been funny for twenty years. But anyway there aren’t any humorists any more, except for Perelman. There’s no need for ^em. Perel- man must be very lonely.

Interviewer: Why is there no need for the humorist?

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Parker: It’s a question of supply and demand. If we needed them, we’d have them. The new crop of would-be humorists doesn’t count. They’re like the would-be satirists. They write about topical topics. Not Mke Thurber and Mr. Benchley. Those two were damn well read and, though I hate the word, they were cultured. What sets them apart is that they both had a point of view to express. That is important to all good writing. It’s the difference between Paddy Chayefsky, who just puts down lines, and Clifford Odets, who in his early plays not only sees but has a point of view. The writer must be aware of life around him, Carson McCullers is good, or she used to be, but now she’s withdrawn from life and writes about freaks. Her characters are grotesques.

Interviewer: Speaking of Chayefsky and McCullers, do you read much of your own, or the present generation of writers?

Parker: I will say of the writers of today that some of them, thank God, have the sense to adapt to their times. Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead is a great book. And I thought William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness an extraordinary thing. The start of it took your heart and flung it over there. He writes like a god. But for most of my reading I go back to the old ones — ^for comfort. As you get older you go much further back. I read Vanity Fair about a dozen times a year. I was a woman of eleven when I first read it — the thrill of that line “George Osborne lay dead with a bullet through his head." Sometimes I read, as an elegant friend of mine calls them, “who-did-its.” I love Sherlock Holmes. My life is so untidy and he’s so neat. But as for living novelists, I sup- pose E. M. Forster is the best, not knowing what that is, but at least he’s a semi-finalist, wouldn’t you think? Somerset Maugham once said to me, “We have a novelist over here, E. M. Forster, though I don’t suppose he’s familiar to you.” Well, I could have kicked him. Did he think I carried a papoose on my back? Why, I’d go .on my hands and knees to get to Forster. He once wrote something I’ve always remembered: “It has never happened to me that I’ve had to choose between betraying a friend and betray- ing my country, but if it ever does so happen I hope I have die guts to betray my country.” Now doesn’t that make the Fifth Amendment look like a bum?

Interviewer: Could I ask you some technical questions? How do you actually write out a story? Do you write out a draft and then go over it or what?

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Parker: It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence — ^no first draft. I can’t write five words but that I change seven.

Interviewer: How do you name your characters?

Parker: The telephone book and from the obituary columns.

Interviewer: Do you keep a notebook?

Parker: I tried to keep one, but I never could remember where I put the damn thing. I always say I'm going to keep one to- morrow.

Interview'eb: How do you get the story down on paper?

Parker: I wrote in longhand at first, but I’ve lost it. I use two fingers on the typewriter. I think it’s unkind of you to ask. I know so little about the typewriter that once I bought a new one be- cause I couldn’t change the ribbon on the one I had.

Interviewer: You’re working on a play now, aren’t you?

Parker: Yes, collaborating with Arnaud D’Usseau. I’d like to do a play more than anything. First night is the most exciting thing in the world. It’s wonderful to hear your words spoken. Unhappily, our first play, The Ladies of the Corridor, was not a success, but writing that play was the best time I ever had, both for the privilege and the stimulation of working with Mr. D’Usseau and because that play was the only thing I have ever done in which I had great pride.

Interviewer: How about the novel? Have you ever tried that form?

Parker: I wish to God I could do one, but I haven’t got the nerve.

Interviewer: And short stories? Are you still doing them?

Parker: I’m trying now to do a story that’s purely narrative. I think narrative stories are the best, though my past stories make themselves stories by telling themselves through what people say. I haven’t got a visual mind. I hear things. But I’m not going to do those he-said she-said things any more, they’re over, honey, they’re over. I want to do the story that can only be told in the narrative form, and though they’re going to scream about the rent. I’m going to do it.

Interviewer: Do you think economic security an advantage to the writer?

Parker: Yes. Being in a garret doesn’t do you any good unless you’re some sort of a Keats. The people who lived and wrote well

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in the twenties were comfortable and easy-living. They were able to find stories and novels, and good ones, in conflicts that came out of two million dollars a year, not a garret. As for me. I’d like to have money. Andll’d like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that’s too adorable. I’d rather have money. I hate almost all rich people, but I think I’d be darling at it. At the moment, however, I like to think of Maurice Baring’s remark; ‘Tf you would know what the Lord God thinks of money, you have only to look at those to whom He gives it.” I realize that’s not much help when the wolf comes scratching at die door, but it’s a comfort.

Interviewer: What do you think about the artist being sup- ported by the state?

Parker; Naturally, when penniless, I think it’s superb. I think that the art of the country so immeasurably adds to its prestige that if you want the country to have writers and artists — ^persons who live precariously in our country — the state must help. I do not think that any kind of artist thrives under charity, by which I mean one person or organization giving him money. Here and there, this and that — that’s no good. The difference between the state giving and the individual patron is that one is charity and the other isn’t. Charity is murder and you know it. But I do think that if the government supports its artists, they need have no feel- ing of gratitude — the meanest and most snivelling attribute in the world — or baskets being brought to them, or apple-polishing. Working for the state — ^for Christ’s sake, are you grateful to your employers? Let the state see what its artists are trying to do — ^like France with the Academic Fran9aise. The artists are a part of their country and their country should recognize this, so both it and the artists can take pride in their efforts. Now I mean that, my dear.

Interviewer: How about Hollywood as provider for the artist?

Parker: Hollywood money isn’t money. It's congealed snow, melts in your hand, and there you are. I can’t talk about Holly- wood. It was a horror to me when I was there and it’s a horror to look back on. I can’t imagine how I did it. When 1 got away from it I couldn’t even refer to the place by name. “Out there,” I called it. You want to know what “out there’’ means to me? Once I was coming down a street in Beverly Hills and I saw a Cadillac about a block long, and out of the side' window was a wonderfully slinky

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mink, and an arm, and at the end of the arm a hand in a white sufede glove wrinkled around the wrist, and in the hand was a bagel with a bite out of it.

Interviewer: Do you think Hollywood d^troys the artist’s talent?

Parker: No, no, no. I think nobody on earth writes down. Gar- bage though they turn out, Hollywood writers aren’t writing down. That is their best. If you’re going to write, don’t pretend to write down. It's going to be the best you can do, and it’s the fact that it’s the best you can do that kills you. I want so much to write well, though I know I don’t, and that I didn’t make it. But during and at the end of my life, I will adore those who have.

Interviewer: Then what is it that’s the evil in Hollywood?

Parker: It’s the people. Like the director who put his finger in Scott Fitzgerald’s face and complained, “Pay you. Why, you ought to pay us.” It was terrible about Scott; if yoi/d seen him you’d have been sick. When he died no one went to the funeral, not a single soul came, or even sent a flower. I said, “Poor son of a bitch,” a quote right out of The Great Gatsby, and everyone thought it was another wisecrack. But it was said in dead serious- ness. Sickening about Scott. And it wasn’t only the people, but also the indignity to which your ability was put. There was a pic- ture in which Mr. Bcnchley had a part. In it Monty Woolley had a scene in which he had to enter a room through a door on which was balanced a bucket of water. He came into the room covered with water and muttered to Mr. Benchley, who had a part in the scene, “Benchley? Benchley of Harvard?" “Yes,” mumbled Mr. Benchley and he asked, “Woolley? Woolley of Yale?"

Interviewer: How about your political views? Have they made any difference to you professionally?

Parker: Oh, certainly. Though I don’t think this “blacklist” business extends to the theatre or certain of the magazines, in Hollywood it exists because several gentlemen felt it best to drop names like marbles which bounced back like rubber balls about people they’d seen in the company of what they charmingly called “commies.” You can’t go back thirty years to Sacco and Vanzetti. I won’t do it. Well, well, well, that’s the way it is. If all this means something to the good of the movies, I don’t know what it is. Sam Goldwyn said, “How’m I gonna do decent pictures when all my good writers are in jail?” Then he added, the infallible Goldwyn,

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“Don’t misunderstand me, they all ought to be hung.” Mr. Gold- wyn didn’t know about “hanged.” That’s all there is to say. It’s not the tragedies that^ill us, it’s the messes. 1 can’t stand messes. I’m not being a smartcracker. You know I’m not when you meet me— don’t you, honey?

Marion Capron

James Thurber

The second son of a local Republican politician, James Thurber was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1895. He attended Ohio State University, where he edited the campus humour magazine and was elected to the senior honour society. Unable to enlist in the Army because of a childhood eye injury, he served out World War II as a code clerk in the United States Embassy in Paris.

Back in Ohio, Thurber covered City Hall for the Columbus Dis- patch, then returned to Europe, where he started an abortive novel in a Normandy farmhouse. He took a job at twelve dollars a week on the European edition of the Chicago Tribune. After returning to New York in 1726 he worked on the Evening Post, in his spare time writing sketches for The New Yorker, which re- jected him twenty times before accepting a short piece on a man caught in a revolving d- ar. Since then it is in The New Yorker that the bulk of his work has appeared.

Of the twenty-odd volumes of collected prose and pictures, T. S. Eliot has written; “It is a form of humour which is also a way of saying something serious. Unlike so much humour it is not merely a criticism of manners — that is, of the superficial aspects of society at a given moment — but something more pro- found. His writing and also his illustrations are capable of sur- viving the immediate environment and time out of which they spring. To some extent they will be a document of the age they belong to.”

Perhaps the best known of Thurber’s works are: the fantasies. The White Deer , The Thirteen Clocks The Wonder- ful O ; his play The Male Animal , which he* wrote with Elliott Nugent; his cartoon book Men, Women, and Dogs; the collections. The Thurber Carnival and Thurber Country

and his autobiographical sketches My Life and Hard Times ' and The Thurber Album

James Thurber

The Hdtel Continental, just down from the Place Venddme on the Rue Castiglione. It is from here that Janet Planner (Genit) sends her Paris letter to The New Yorker, and it is here that the Thurbers usually stay while in Paris. "We like it because the service is first-rate without being snobbish.”

Thurber was standing to greet us in a small salon whose cold European formality had been somewhat softened and warmed by well-placed vases of flowers, by stacks and portable shelves of American novels in bright dust jackets, and by pads of yellow paper and bouquets of yellow pencils on the desk. Thurber im- presses one immediately by his physical size. After years of delighting in the shy, trapped little man in the Thurber cartoons and the confused and bewildered man who has fumbled in and out of some of the funniest books written in this century, we, perhaps like many readers, were expecting to find the frightened little man in person. Not at all. Thurber by his firm handgrasp and confident voice and by the way he lowered himself into his chair gave the impression of outward calmness and assurance. Though his eyesight has almost failed him, it is not a disability which one is aware of for more than the opening minute, and if Thurber seems to be the most nervous person in the room, it is because he has learned to put his visitors so completely at ease.

He talks in a surprisingly boyish voice, which is flat with the accents of the Midwest where he was raised and, though slow in tempo, never dull. He is not an easy man to pin down with ques- tions. He prefers to sidestep them and, rather than instructing, he entertains with a vivid series of anecdotes and reminiscences.

Opening the interview with a long history of the bloodhound, Thurber was only with some difficulty persuaded to shift to a

*79

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discussion of his craft. Here again his manner was typical — the anecdotes^ the reminiscences punctuated with direct quotes and factual data. His powers of memory are astounding. In quoting anyone — perhaps a conversation of a dozen ye.vrs before — Thur- her pauses slightly, his voice changes in tone, and you know what you’re hearing is exactly as it was said.

Thurber: Well, you know it’s a nuisance — to have a memory like mine — as well as an advantage. Its . . . well . . . like a whore’s top drawer. There’s so much else in there that’s junk— costume jewellery, unnecessary telephone numbers whose exchanges no longer exist. For instance, I can remember the birthday of any- body who’s ever told me his birthday. Dorothy Parker — ^August ^ Lewis Gannett — October 3, Andy White — ^July 9, Mrs. White — September 17. I can go on with about two hundred. So can my mother. She can tell you the birthday of the girl I was in love with in the third grade, in 1903. Offhand, just like that. I got my powers of memory from her. Sometimes it helps out in the most extraordi- nary way. You remember Robert M. Coates? Bob Coates? He is the author of The Eater of Darkness, which Ford Madox Ford, called the first true Dadaist novel. Well, the week after Stephen Vincent Ben4t died — Coates and I had both known him — ^we were talking about Ben^t. Coates was trying to remember an argument he had had with Benet some fifteen years before. He couldn’t remember. I said, “I can.” Coates told me that was impossible since I hadn’t been there. “Well,” I said, “you happened to mention it in passing about twelve years ago. You were arguing about a play called Swords.” I was right, and Coates was able to take it up from there. But it’s strange to reach a position where your friends have to be supplied with their own memories. It’s bad enough dealing with your own.

Interviewers: Still, it must be a great advantage for the writer. I don’t suppose you have to take notes.

Thurber: No. I don’t have to do the sort of thing Fitzgerald did with The Last Tycoon — the voluminous, the tiny and meticulous notes, the long descriptions of character. I can keep all these things in my mind. I wouldn’t have to write down “three roses in a vase” or something, or a man’s middle name. Henry James dictated notes just the way that I write. His note writing was part of the creative act, which is why his prefaces are so good. He dictated notes to see what it was they might come to.

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Interviewers: Then you don’t spend much time prefiguring your work?

Thurber: No. I don’t bother with charts and so forth. Elliott Nugent, on the otfier hand, is a careful constructor. When we were working on The Male Animal together, he was constantly concerned with plotting the play. He could plot the thing from back to front — ^what was going to happen here, what sort of situa- tion would end the first-act curtain, and so forth. I can’t work that way. Nugent would say, "Well, Thurber, we’ve got our problem, we’ve got all these people in the living-room. Now what are we going to do with them?” I’d say that I didn’t know and couldn’t tell him until I’d sat down at the typewriter and found out. I don’t believe the writer should know too much where he’s going. If he does, he runs into old man blueprint — old man propaganda.

Interviewers: Is the act of writing easy for you?

Thurber: For me it's mostly a question of rewriting. It’s part of a constant attempt on my part to make the finished version smooth, to make it seem effortless. A story I’ve been working on — ^“The Train on Track Six,” it’s called — was rewritten fifteen complete times. There must have been close to 240,000 words in all the manuscripts put together, and I must have spent two thou- sand hours working at it. Yet the finished version can’t be more than twenty thousand words.

Interviewers: Then it’s rare that your work comes out right the first time?

Thurber: Well, my wife took a look at the first version of some- thing I was doing not long ago and said, “Goddamn it, Thurber, that’s high-school stuff.” I have to tell her to wait until the seventh draft, it’ll work out all right. I don’t know why that should be so, that the first or second draft of everything I write reads as if it was turned out by a charwoman. I’ve only written one piece quickly. I wrote a thing called "File and Forget” in one afternoon — ^but only because it was a series of letters just as one would ordinarily dictate. And I’d have to admit that the last letter of the series, after doing all the others that one afternoon, took me a week. It was the end of the piece and I had to fuss over it.

Interviewers: Does the fact that you’re dealing with humour slow down the production?

Thurber: It’s possible. With hiimour you have to look out for

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traps. You’re likely to be very gleeful with what you’ve first put down, and you think it’s fine, very funny. One reason you go over and over it is to make the piece sound less as if you were having a lot of fun with it yourself. You try to play‘4t down. In fact, if there’s such a thing as a New Yorker style, that would be it — playing it down.

Interviewers: Do you envy those who write at high speed, as against your method of constant revision?

Thurber: Oh, no, I don’t, though I do admire their luck, Hervey Allen, you know, the author of the big best-seller Anthony Adverse, seriously told a friend of mine who was working on a biographical piece on Allen that he could close his eyes, lie down on a bed, and hear the voices of his ancestors. Furthermore there was some sort of angel-like creature that danced along his pen while he was writing. He wasn’t balmy by any means. He just felt he was in communication with some sort of metaphysical recorder. So you see the novelists have all the luck. I never knew a humorist who got any help from his ancestors. Still, the act of writing is either something the writer dreads or actually likes, and I actually like it. Even rewriting’s fun. You’re getting somewhere, whether it' seems to move or not. I remember Elliot Paul and I used to argue about rewriting back in 1925 when we both worked for the Chicago Tribune in Paris. It was his conviction you should leave the story as it came out of the typewriter, no changes. Naturally, he worked fast. Three novels he could turn out, each written in three weeks’ time. I remember once he came into the office and said that a sixty-thousand-word manuscript had been stolen. No carbons existed, no notes. We were all horrified. But it didn’t bother him at all. He’d just get back to the typewriter and bat away again. But for me — writing as fast as that would seem too facile. Like my drawings, which I do very quickly, sometimes so quickly that the result is an accident, something I hadn’t intended at all. People in the arts I’ve run into in France are constantly indignant when I say I’m a writer and not an artist. They tell me I mustn’t run down my drawings. I try to explain that I do them for relaxation, and that I do them too fast for them to be called art.

Interviewers: You say that your drawings often don’t come out the way you intended?

Thurber: Well, once I did a drawing for The New Yorker of a

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naked woman on all fours up on top of a bookcase — a big book- case. She’s up there near the ceiling, and in the room are her husband and two other women. The husband is saying to one of the women, obvioilsly a guest, "This is the present Mrs. Harris. That’s my first wife up there.” Well, when I did the cartoon originally I meant the naked woman to be at the top of a flight of stairs, but I lost the sense of perspective and instead of getthig in the stairs when I drew my line down, there she was stuck up there, naked on a bookcase.

Incidentally, that cartoon really threw The New Yorker editor, Harold Ross. He approached any humorous piece of writing, or more particularly a drawing, not only grimly but realistically. He called me on the phone and asked if the woman up on the book- case was supposed to be alive, stuffed, or dead. I said, “I don’t know, but I’ll let you know in a couple of hours.” After a while I called him back and told him I’d just talked to my taxidermist, who said you can’t stuff a woman, that my doctor had told me a dead woman couldn’t support herself on all fours. “So, Ross,” I said, “she must be alive.” “Well, then,” he said, “what’s she doing up there naked in the home of her husband’s second wife?” I told him he had me there.

Interviewers: But he published it.

Thurber: Yes, he published it, growling a bit. He had a fine understanding of huni ur, Ross, though he couldn’t have told you about it. When I introduced Ross to the work of Peter de Vries, he first said, “He won’t be good; he won’t be funny; he won’t know English.” (He was the only successful editor I’ve known who approached everything like a ship going on the rocks.) But when Ross had looked at the work he said, “How can you get this guy on the phone?” He couldn’t have said why, but he had that bloodhound instinct. The same with editing. He was a won- derful man at detecting something wrong with a story without knowing why.

Interviewers: Could he develop a writer?

Thurber: Not really. It wasn’t true what they often said of him — ^that he broke up writers like matches — ^but still he wasn’t the man to develop a writer. He was an unread man. Well, he’d read Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi and several other books he told me about — medical books — and he took the Encyclopaedia Britannica to the bathroom with him. I think he was about up to

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H when he died. But still his effect on writers was considerable. When you first met him you couldn’t believe he was the editor of The New Yorker and afterwards you couldn’t believe that anyone else could have been. The main thing he wall interested in was clarity. Someone once said of The New Yorker that it never con- tained a sentence that would puzzle an intelligent fourteen-year- old or in any way affect her morals badly. Ross didn’t like that, but nevertheless he was a purist and perfectionist and it had a tremendous effect on all of us: it kept us from being sloppy. When I first met him he asked me if I knew English. I thought he meant French or a foreign language. But he repeated, “Do you know English?’’ When I said I did he replied, “Goddamn it, nobody knows English.” As Andy White mentioned in his obituary, Ross approached the English sentence as though it was an enemy, something that was going to throw him. lie used to fuss for an hour over a comma. He’d call me in for lengthy discii.ssions about the Thurber colon. And as for poetic licence, he’d say, “Damn any licence to get things wrong.’’ In fact, Ross read so carefully that often he didn’t get the sense of your story. I once said: “I wish you’d read my stories for pleasure, Ross.” He replied he hadn’t time for that.

Interviewehs: It’s strange that one of ^he main ingredients of humour — low comedy — has never been accepted for The Netv Yorker.

Thurber: Ross had a neighbour w<jman’s attitude about it. He never got over his Midwestern provincialism. His idea was that se.x is an incident. “If you can prove it,” I said, “v\c can get it in a box on tlie front page of The New York Times.” Now I don’t want to say that in private life Ro.ss was a prude. But as regards the theatre or the printed page he certainly was. For example, he once sent an office memorandum to us in a sealed envelope. It was an order: “When you send me a memorandum with four- letter words in it, seal it. There are women in this office.” I said, “Yah, Ross, and they know a lot more of these words than you do.” When women were around he was very conscious of tliem. Once my wife and I were in his office and Ross was discu.s.sing a man and woman he knew much better than we did. Ross told us, “I have every reason to believe that they’re s-l-e-e-p-i-n-g together.” My wife replied, “Why, Harold Ross, what words you do spell out.” But honest to goodness, that was genuine. Women are either

JAMES THUHBER 85

good or bad, he once told me, and the good ones must not hear these things.

Incidentally, rn| telling these things to refresh my memory. I’m doing a short book on him called “Ross in Charcoal.” I’m putting a lot of this stuff in. People may object, but after all it’s a portrait of the man and I see no reason for not putting it in.

Interviewers: Did he have much direct influence on your own work?

Thuhber: After the seven years I spent in newspaper writing, it was more E. B. White who taught me about writing, how to clear up sloppy journalese. He was a strong influence, and for a long time in the beginning I thought he might be too much of one. But at least he got me away from a rather curious style I was starting to perfect — ^tight journalese laced with heavy doses of Henry James.

Interviewers: Henry James was a strong influence, then?

Thurber: I have the reputation for having read all of Henry James. Which would argue a misspent youth and middle age.

Lnterviewers: But there were things to be learned from him?

Thurber: Yes, but again he was an influence you had to get over. Especially if you wrote for The New Yorker. Harold Ross wouldn’t have understood it. I once wrote a piece called “The Beast in the Dingle” which everybody took as a parody. Actually it was a conscious attempt to write the story as James would have written it. Ross looked at it and said: “Goddamn it, this is too literary; I got only fifteen per cent of the allusions.” My wife and I often tried to figure out which were the fifteen per cent he could have got.

You know. I’ve occasionally wondered what James would have done with our world. I’ve just written a piece — ^“Preface to Old Friends,” it’s called — in which James at the age of a hundred and four writes a preface to a novel about our age in which he sum- marizes the trends and complications, but at the end is so com- pletely lost he doesn’t really care enough to read it over to find his way out again.

That’s the trouble with James. You get bored with him finally. He lived in the time of four-wheelers, and no bombs, and the problems then seemed a bit special and separate. That’s one reason you feel restless reading him. James is like — well, I had a bulldog once who used to drag rails around, enormous ones, six-.

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eight-, twelve-foot rails. He loved to get them in the middle and you’d hear him growling out there, trying to bring the thing home. Once he brought home a chest of drawers — ^without the drawers in it. Found it on an ash-heap. Well, he’d start to get these things in the garden gate, everything finely balanced, you see, and then crash, he’d come up against the gate posts. He’d get it through finally, but I had that feeling in some of the James novels: that he was trying to get that rail through a gate not wide enough for it.

Interviewers: How about Mark Twain? Pretty much every- body believes him to have been the major influence on American humorists.

Thurber: Everybody wants to know if I’ve learned from Mark Twain. Actually I’ve never read much of him. I did buy Tom Sawyer, but dammit. I’m sorry, I’ve not got around to reading it all the way through. I told H. L. Mencken that, and he was shocked. He said America had produced only two fine novels: Huck Finn and Babbitt. Of course it’s always a matter of per- sonal opinion — these lists of the great novels. I can remember calling on Frank Harris — ^he was about seventy then — when I was on the Chicago Tribune’s edition in Nice. In his house he had three portraits on the wall — Mark Twain, Frank Harris, and I think it was Hawthorne. Harris was in the middle. Harris would point up to them and say, “Those three are the best American writers. The one in the middle is the best.’’ Harris really thought he was wonderful. Once he told me he was going to live to be a hundred. When I asked him what the formula was, he told me it was very simple. He said, “I’ve bought myself a stpmach pump and one half-hour after dinner I pump myself out.’’ Can you imagine that? Well, it didn’t work. It’s a wonder it didn’t kill him sooner.

Interviewers: Could we ask you why you’ve never attempted a long work?

Thurber: I’ve never wanted to write a long work. Many writers feel a sense of frustration or something if they haven’t, but I don’t.

Interviewers: Perhaps the fact that you’re writing humour imposes a limit on the length of a work.

Thurber: Possibly. But brevity in any case — whether the work is supposed to be humorous or not — would seem to me to be desirable. Most of the books I like are short books: The Red

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Badge of Courage, The Turn of the Screw, Conrad’s short stories, A Lost Lady, Joseph Hergesheimer’s Wild Oranges, Victoria Lincoln’s February ^Ul, The Great Gatsby. . . . You know Fitz- gerald once wrote Thomas Wolfe: “You’re a putter-inner and I’m a taker-outer.’’ I stick with Fitzgerald. I don’t believe, as Wolfe did, that you have to turn out a massive work before being judged a writer. Wolfe once told me at a cocktail party I didn’t know what it was to be a writer. My wife, standing next to me, com- plained about that. “But my husband is a writer,” she said. Wolfe was genuinely surprised. “He is?” he asked. “Why, all I ever see is that stuff of his in The New Yorker" In other words, he felt that prose under five thousand words was certainly not the work of a writer ... it was some kind of doodling in words. If you said you were a writer, he wanted to know where the books were, the great big long books. He was really genuine about that.

I was interested to see William Faulkner’s list not so long ago of the five most important American authors of this century. According to him Wolfe was first, Faulkner second — diet’s see, now that Wolfe’s dead that puts Faulkner up there in the lead, doesn’t it? — Dos Passos third, then Hemingway, and finally Steinbeck. It’s interesting that the first three are putter-inners. They write expansive novels.

Interviewers: Wasn’t . lulkner’s criterion whether or not the author dared to go out on a limb?

Thurber: It seems to me you’re going out on a limb these days to keep a book short.

Interviewers: Though you’ve never done a long serious work you have written stories — ^“The Cane in the Corridor” and “The Whippoorwill" in particular — ^in which the mood is far from humorous.

Thurber: In anything funny you write that isn’t close to serious you’ve missed something along the line. But in those stories of which you speak there ^was an element of anger — ^something I wanted to get off my chest. I wrote “The Whippoorwill” after five eye operations. It came somewhere out of a grim fear in the back of my mind. I’ve never been able to trace it.

Interviewers: Some critics think that much of your work can be traced to the depicting of trivia as a basis for humour. In fact, there’s been some criticism

Thurber: Which is trivia — ^the diamond or the elephant? Any

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humorist must be interested in trivia, in every little thing that occurs in a household. It’s what Robert Benchley did so well — ^in fact so well that one of the greatest fears of ^he humorous writer is that he has spent three weeks writing something done faster and better by Benchley in 1919. Incidentally, you never got very far talking to Benchley about humour. He’d do a take-off of Max Eastman’s Enjoyment of Laughter. “We must understand,” he’d say, “that all sentences which begin with W are funny.”

Interviewers: Would you care to define humour in terms of your own work?

Thurber: Well, someone once wrote a definition of the differ- ence between English and American humour. I wish I could re- member his name. I thought his definition very good. He said that the English treat the commonplace as if it were remarkable and the Amercans treat the remarkable as if it were common- place. I believe that’s true of humorous writing. Years ago we did a parody of Punch in which Benchley did a short piece depicting a wife bursting into a room and shouting “The primroses are in bloom!” — treating the commonplace as remarkable, you see. In “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” I tried to treat the remarkable as commonplace.

Interviewers: Does it bother you to talk about the stories on which you’re working? It bothers many writers, though it would seem that particularly the humorous story is polished through retelling.

Thurber: Oh, yes. I often tell them at parties and places. And I write them there too.

Interviewers: You write them?

Thurber: I never quite know when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, “Dammit, Thurber, stop writing.” She usually catches me in the middle of a para- graph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, “Is he sick?” “No,” my wife says, “he’s writing something.” I have to do it that way on account of my eyes. I still write occa- sionally— in the proper sense of the word — using black crayon on yellow paper and getting perhaps twenty words to the page. My usual method, though, is to spend the mornings turning over the text in my mind. Then in the afternoon, between two and five, I call in a secretary and dictate to her. I can do about two thousand words. It took me about ten years to learn.

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Interviewers: How about the new crop of writers? Do you note any good humorists coming along with them?

Thurber: There ^on’t seem to be many coming up. I once had a psychoanalyst tell me that the depression had a considerable effect — ^much worse than Hitler and the war. It’s a tradition for a child to see his father in uniform as something glamorous — ^not his father coming home from Wall Street in a three-button sadc suit saying, “We’re ruined,” and the mother bursting into tears — a catastrophe that to a child’s mind is unexplainable. There’s been a great change since the thirties. In those days students used to ask me what Peter Arno did at night. And about Dorothy Parker. Now they want to know what my artistic credo is. An element of interest seems to have gone out of them.

Interviewers: Has the shift in the mood of the times had any effect on your own work?

Thurber: Well, The Thurber Album was written at a time when in America there was a feeling of fear and suspicion. It’s quite different from My Life and Hard Times, which was written earlier, and is a funnier and better book. The Album was kind of an escape — going back to the Middle West of the last century and the beginning of this, when there wasn’t this fear and hysteria. I wanted to write the story of some solid American characters, more or less as an exai nle of how Americans started out and what they should go back to — to sanity and soundness and away from this jumpiness. It’s hard to write humour in the mental weather we’ve had, and that’s likely to take you into reminis- cence. Your heart isn't in it to write anything funny. In the years 1850 to 1853 I did very few things, nor did they appear in The New Yorker. Now, actually, I think the situation is beginning to change for the better.

Interviewers: No matter what the “mental climate,” though, you would continue writing?

Thurber: Well, the characteristic fear of the American writer is not so much that as it is the process of ageing. The writer looks in the mirror and examines his hair and teeth to see if they’re still with him. “Oh my Gn.l," he says, “I wonder how my writing is. I bet I can’t write today.” The only time I met Faulkner he told me he wanted to live long enough to do three more novels. He was fifty-three then, and I think he has done them. Then Hemingway says, you know, that he doesn’t expect to be alive after sixty. But

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he doesn’t look forward not to being. When I met Hemingway with John O’Hara in Costello’s Bar five or six years ago we sat around and talked about how old we were getting. You see it’s constantly on the minds of American writers. I’ve never known a woman who could weep about her age the way the men I know can.

Coupled with this fear of ageing is the curious idea that the writer’s inventiveness and ability will end in his fifties. And of course it often does. Carl Van Vechten stopped writing. The prolific Joseph Hergesheimer suddenly couldn’t write any more. Over here in Europe that’s never been the case— Hardy, for in- stance, who started late and kept going. Of course Keats had good reason to write, “When I have fears that I may cease to be Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain.” That’s the great classic statement. But in America the writer is more likely to fear that his brain may cease to teem. I once did a drawing of a man at his typewriter, you see, and all this crumpled paper is on the floor, and he’s staring down in discouragement. “What’s the matter,” his wife is saying, “has your pen gleaned your teeming brain?”

Interviewers: In your case there wouldn’t be much chance of this?

Thurber: No. I write basically because it’s so much fun— even though I can’t see. When I’m not writing, as my wife knows, I’m miserable. I don’t have that fear that suddenly it will all stop. I have enough outlined to last me as long as I live.

George Plimpton Max Steele

Thornton Wilder

Born in 1897, in Madison, Wisconsin, Thornton Niven Wilder spent his early years in Hong Kong and Shanghai, where his father was the consul-general. He had an extensive and far-flung education. He attended schools in Ojai and Berkeley, California, and Chefoo, China, spent his undergraduate years at Oberlin and Yale, and took graduate 'vork at both the American Academy in Rome and Princeton.

Wilder taught French at Lawrenceville Academy. Writing in his spare time, he finished Cabala .

In 1827 he won critical recognition and a Pulitzer Prize with his second novel. The Bridge of San Luis Bey. Other novels followed: The \yoman of Andros , Heavens My Destination , and The Ides of March ..

As a playwright Wilder has matched his success as a novelist. He received Pulitzer Prizes for Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth . More recently, he rewrote and turned one of his few failures, The Merchant of Yonkers t into the long-run Broadway success, The Matchmaker . He has written a number of one-act plays which have been collected in two volumes, The Angel That Troubled the Waters and The Long Christmas Dinner.

Many universities, including Harvard, Yale, and Kenyon, have awarded Wilder honorary degrees. His home is in Hamden, Con- necticut, but he travels widely and has taught or lectured at cul- tural centres throughout the world.

Thornton Wilder

A national newsmagazine not very long ago in its weekly cover story depicted Thornton Wilder as an amiable, eccentric itinerant schoolmaster who wrote occasional novels and plays which won prizes and enjoyed enormous but somewhat unaccountable suc- cess. Wilder himself has said, “Ym almost sixty and look it. Tm the kind of man whom timid old ladies stop on the street to ask about the nearest subway station. Newsvendors in university towns call me "professor’ and hotel clerks, "doctor.’ ”

Many of those who have viewed him in the classroom, on the speaker’s rostrum, on shipboard, or at gatherings have been re- minded of Theodore Roosevelt, who was at the top of his form when Wilder was an adolescent, and whom Wilder resembles in his driving energy, his eiv.husiasms, and his unbounded gregari- ousness.

It is unlikely that more than a few of his countless friends have seen Wilder in repose. Only then does one realize that he wears a mask. The mask is no figure of speech. It is his eyeglasses. As do most glasses, they partially conceal his eyes. They also distort his eyes so that they appear larger: friendly, benevolent, alive with curiosity and interest. Deliberately or not, he rarely removes his glasses in the presence of others. When he does remove them, unmasks himself, so to speak, the sight of his eyes is a shock. Unobscured, the eyes — cold light blue — reveal an intense severity and an almost forbidding intelligence. They do not call out a cheerful "Kinder! Kinder!”; rather, they specify: ""I am listening to what you are saying. Be serious. Be precise.”

Seeing Wilder unmasked is a sobering and tonic experience. For his eyes dissipate the atmosphere of indiscriminate amiability and humbug that collects around celebrated and gifted men; the

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eyes remind you that you are confronted by one of the toughest and most complicated mincb in contemporary America.

An apartment overlooking the Hudson River in New York City. During the conversations, which took place on the evening of December 14, and the following afternoon, Mr. Wilder could watch the river lights or the river barges as he meditated his replies.

Interviewer: Sir, do you mind if we begin with a few irrelevant- — and possibly impertinent — questions, just for a warm-up?

Wilder: Perfectly all right. Ask whatever comes into your head.

Interviewer: One of our really eminent critics, in writing about you recently, suggested that among the critics you had made no enemies. Is that a healthy situation for a serious writer?

Wilder (After laughing somewhat ironically): The important thing is that you make sure that neither the favourable nor the unfavourable critics move into your head and take part in the composition of your next work.

Interviewer: One of your most celebrated colleagues said re- cently that about all a writer really needs is a place to work, to- bacco, some food, and good whisky. Could you explain to the non- drinkers among us how liquor helps things along?

Wilder: Many writers have told me that they have built up mnemonic devices to start them off on each day’s writing task. Hemingway once told me he sharpened twenty pencils; Willa Gather that she read a passage from the Bible (not from piety, she was quick to add, but to get in touch with fine prose; she also regretted that she had formed this habit, for the prose rhythms of 1611 were not those she was in search of). My spring-board has always been long walks. I drink a great deal, but I do not associ- ate it with writing.

Interviewer: Although military service is a proud tradition among contemporary American writers, I wonder if you would care to comment on the circumstance that you volunteered in despite the fact that you were a veteran of the First World War. That is to say, do you believe that a seasoned and mature artist is justified in abandoning what he is particularly fitted to do for patriotic motives?

Wilder: I guess everyone speaks for himself in such things. I

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felt very strongly about it. I was already a rather old man, was fit only for staffwork, but 1 certainly did it with conviction. I have always felt that both enlistments were valuable for a number of reasons.

One of the dangers of the American artist is that he finds him- self almost exclusively thrown in with persons more or less in die arts. He lives among them, eats among them, quarrels with them, marries them. I have long felt that portraits of the non-artist in American literature reflect a pattern, because the artist doesn't really frequent. He portrays the man in the street as he remem- bers him from childhood, or as he copies him out of other books. So one of the benefits of military service, one of them, is being thrown into daily contact with non-artists, something a young American writer should consciously seek — ^his acquaintance should include also those who have read only Treasure Island and have forgotten that. Since 1800 many central figures in narra- tives have been, like their authors, artists or quasi-artists. Can you name three heroes in earlier literature who partook of the artistic temperament?

Interviewer: Did the young Thornton Wilder resemble George Brush, and in what ways? .

Wilder: Very much so. I came from a very strict Calvinistic father, was brought up partly among the missionaries of China, and went to that splendid • -ollcge at Oberlin at a time when the classrooms and student life carried a good deal of the pious didac- ticism which would now be called narrow Protestantism. And that book [Heavens my Destination] is, as it were, an effort to come to terms with those influences.

The comic spirit is given to us in order that we may analyse, weigh, and clarify things in us which nettle us, or which we are, outgrowing, or trying to reshape. That is a very autobiographical book.

Interviewer: Why have you generally avoided contemporary settings in your work?

Wilder: I think you would find that the work is a gradual draw- ing near to the America I know. I began with the purely fantastic twentieth-century Rome (I did not frequent such circles there); then Peru, then Hellenistic Greece. I began, first with Heaven’s My Destination, to approach the American scene. Already, in the one-act plays, 1 had become aware of how difiScult it is to invest

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one’s contemporary world with the same kind of imaginative life one has extended to those removed in time and place. But I always feel that the progression is there and ■>. isible; I can be seen collecting the practice, Ae experience and courage, to present my own times.

Interviewer: What is your feeling about “authenticity”? For example, you had never been in Peru when you wrote The Bridge of San Luis Bey.

Wilder: The chief answer to that is that the journey of the imagination to a remote place is child’s play compared to a jour- ney into another time. I’ve been often in New York, but it’s just as preposterous to write about the New York of 1812 as to write about the Incas.

Interviewer: You have often been cited as a “stylist.” As a writer who is obviously concerned with tone and exactness of expression, do you find that the writing of fiction is a painful and exhausting process, or do you write easily, quickly and joyously?

Wilder: Once you catch the idea for an extended narration — drama or novel — and if that idea is' firmly within you, then the writing brings you perhaps not so much pleasure as a deep absorp- tion {He reflected here for a moment and then continued.) You

see, my waste-paper basket is filled with works that went a quar- ter through and which turned out to be among those things that failed to engross the whole of me. And then, for a while, there’s a very agonizing period of time in which I try to explore whether the work I’ve rejected cannot be reoriented in such a way as to absorb me. The decision to abandon it is hard.

Interviewer: Do you do much rewriting?

Wilder: I forget which of the great sonneteers said: “One line in the fourteen comes from the ceiling; the others have to be adjusted around it.” Well, likewise there are passages in every novel whose first writing is pretty much the last. But it’s the joint and cement, between those spontaneous passages, that take a great deal of rewriting.

Interviewer: I don’t know exactly how to put the next ques- tion, because I realize you have a lot of theories about narration, about how a thing should be told — theories all related to the de- cline of the novel, and so on. But I wonder if you would say some- thing about the problem of giving a “history” or a summary of your life in relation to your development as a writer.

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Wilder: Let’s try. The problem of telling you about my past life as a writer is like that of imaginative narration itself; it lies in the e£Fort to employ the past tense in such a way that it does not rob those events of their character of having occurred in free- dom. A great deal of writing and talking about the past is un- acceptable. It freezes the historical in a determinism. Today’s writer smugly passes his last judgment and confers on existing attitudes the lifeless aspect of plaster-cast statues in a museum. He recounts the past as though the characters knew what was going to happen next.

Interviewer: Well, to begin— do you feel that you were bom in a place and at a time, and to a family all of which combined favourably to shape you for what you were to do?

Wilder: Comparisons of one’s lot with others teaches us nothing and enfeebles the will. Many bora in an environment of poverty, disease, and stupidity, in an age of chaos, have put us in their debt. By the standards of many people, and by my own, these dispositions were favourable — ^but what are our judgments in such matters? Everyone is bom with an array of handicaps — even Mozart, even Sophocles — and acquires new ones. In a famous passage, Shakespeare ruefully complains that he was not endowed with another writer’s “scope”! We are all equally distant from the sun, but we all have a share in it. The most valuable thing I in- herited was a temperamer*’- that does not revolt against Necessity and that is constantly renewed in Hope. (I am alluding to Goethe’s great poem about the problem of each man’s “lot” — the Orphische Worte.)

Interviewer: Did you have a happy childhood?

Wilder: I think I did, but I also think that that’s a thing about which people tend to deceive themselves. Gertrude Stein once said, “Communists are people who fancied that they had an un- happy childhood.” (I think she meant that the kind of person who can persuade himself that the world would be completely happy if everyone denied himself a vast number of free decisions, is the same kind of person who could persuade himself that in early life he had been thwarted and denied all free decision.) I think of myself as having been — aright up to and through my college years — a sort of sleepwalker. I was not a dreamer, but a muser and a self-amuser. I have never been without a whole repertory of absorb- ing hobbies, curiosities, inquiries,* interests. Hence, my head has

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alwa3rs seemed to me to be like a brightly lighted room, full of the most delightful objects, or perhaps 1 should say, filled with tables on which are set up the most engrossing games. 1 have never been a collector, but the resource that I am describing must be much like that of a collector busying himself with his coins or minerals. Yet collectors are apt to be "avid” and competitive, while I have no ambition and no competitive sense. Gertrude also said, with her wonderful yes-saying laugh, “Oh, I wish I were a miser; being a miser must be so occupying.” I have never been unoccupied. That’s as near as 1 can get to a statement about the happiness or unhappiness of my childhood. Yet 1 am convinced that except in a few extraordinary cases, one form or another of an unhappy childhood is essential to the formation of exceptional gifts. Perhaps I should have been a better man if I had had an unequivocally unhappy childhood.

Interviewer: Can you see— or analyse, perhaps — ^tendencies in your early years which led you into writing?

Wilder; I thought we were supposed to talk about the art of the novel. Is it all right to go on talking about myself this way?

Interviewer: I feel that it’s all to the point.

Wilder: We often hear the phrase, "a winning child.” Winning children (who appear so guileless) are children who have dis- covered how effective charm and modesty and a delicately calcu- lated spontaneity are in winning what they want. All children, emerging from the egocentric monsterhood of infancy — ^“Gimmel Gimme!” cries the Nero in the bassinet — are out to win their way — ^from their parents, playmates, from “life,” from all that is bewildering and inexplicable in themselves. They are also out to win some expression of themselves as individuals. Some are early marked to attempt it by assertion, by slam-bang methods; others by a watchful docility; others by guile. The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way. This does not necessarily mean that he is highly articu- late in persuading or cajoling or outsmarting his parents and com- panions, for this type of child is not usually of the “community” type — ^he is at one remove from the persons around him. (The future scientist is at eight removes.) Language for him is the in- strument for digesting experience, for explaining himself to him- self. Many great writers have been extraordinarily awkward in

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daily exchange, but the greatest give the impression that their style was nursed by the closest attention to colloquial speech.

Let me digress for a moment: probably you won't want to use it For a long time I tried to explain to myself the spell of Madame de S6vign6j she is not devastatingly witty nor wise. She is simply at one with French syntax. Pbrase, sentence, and paragraph breathe this e£Fortless at-homeness with how one sees, feels, and says a thing in the French language. What attentive ears little Marie de Rabutin-Chantal must have hadi Greater writers than she had such an adjustment to colloquial speech — Montaigne, La Fontaine, Voltaire — ^but they had things to say: didactic matter; she had merely to exhibit the genius in the language. I have learned to watcli the relation to language on the part of young ones — ^those community-directed towards persuasion, edification, instruction; and those engaged (“merely” engaged) in fixing some image of experience; and those others for whom language is nothing more than a practical convenience — “Oh, Mr. Wilder, tell me how I can get a wider vocabulary.”

Interviewer: Well now, inasmuch as you have gone from story-telling to playwriting, would you say the same tendencies which produced the novelist produced the dramatist?

Wilder; I think so, but in stating them I find myself involved in a paradox. A dramatist is one who believes that the pure event, an action involving hun)i;n beings, is more arresting than any comment that can be made upon it. On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that razor-edge, between the past and the future, which is the essential character of conscious being; the words are rising to their lips in immediate spontaneity. A novel is what took place; no self-effacement on the part of the narrator can hide the fact that we hear his voice recounting, recall- ing events that are past and over, and which he has selected — from uncountable others — ^to lay before us from his presiding in- telligence. Even the most objective novels are cradled in the authors’ emotions and the authors’ assumptions about life and mind and the passions. Now the paradox lies not so much in the fact that you and I know that the dramatist equally has selected what he exhibits and what the characters will say — ^such an opera- tion is inherent in any work of art — ^but that all the greatest dramatists, except the very greatest one, have precisely employed the stage to convey a moral or rdigious point of view concerning

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the action. The theatre is supremely fitted to say: “Behold! These things are.” Yet most dramatists employ it to say: “This moral truth can be learned from beholding this actiosi.”

The Greek tragic poets wrote for edification, admonition, and even for our political education. The comic tradition in the theatre carries the intention of exposing folly and curbing excess. Only in Shakespeare are we free of hearing axes ground.

Interviewer: How do you get around this difficulty?

Wilder: By what may be an impertinence on my part. By be- lieving that the moralizing intention resided in the authors as a convention of their times — usually, a social convention so deeply buried in the author’s mode of thinking that it seemed to him to be inseparable from creation. I reverse a popular judgment: we say that Shaw wrote diverting plays to sugar-coat the pill of a social message. Of these other dramatists, I say they injected a didactic intention in order to justify to themselves and to their audiences the exhibition of pure experience.

Interviewer: Is your implication, then, that drama should be art for art’s sake?

Wilder: Experience for experience’s sake — rather than for moral improvement’s sake. When we say that Vermeer’s “Girl Making Lace” is a work of art for art’s sake, we are not saying anything contemptuous about it. I regard the theatre as the greatest of aU art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being. This supremacy of the theatre derives from the fact that it is always “now” on the stage. It is enough that genera- tions have been riveted by the sight of Clytemnt'stra luring Aga- memnon to the fatal bath, and Oedipus searching out the truth which will ruin him; those circumambient tags about “Don’t get prideful” and “Don’t call anybody happy until he’s dead” are incidental concomitants.

Interviewer: Is it your contention that there is no place in the theatre for didactic intentions?

Wilder: The theatre is so vast and fascinating a realm that there is room in it for preachers and moralists and pamphleteers. As to the highest function of the theatre, I rest my case with Shakespeare — Twelfth Night as well as Macbeth.

Interviewer: If you will forgive me. I’m afraid I’ve lost track of something we were talking about a while back — ^we were talk-

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ing about the tendencies in your childhood which went into the formation of a dramatist.

Wilder: The poipt I’ve been leading up to is that a dramatist is one who from his earliest years has found that sheer gazing at the shocks «and countershocks among people is quite sufiBciendy engrossing without having to encase it in comment. It's a form of tact. It’s a lack of presumption. That’s why so many earnest people have been so exasperated by Shakespeare: they cannot isolate the passages wherein we hear him speaking in his own voice. Some- where Shaw says that one page of Bunyan, “who plants his stan- dard on the forefront of — ^I-forget-what — ^is worth a hundred by such shifting opalescent men,”

Interviewer: Are we to infer from what you say that the drama ought to have no social function?

Wilder: Oh, yes — ^there are at least two. First, the presentation of what is, under the direction of those great hands, is important enough. We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theatre strengthens our faculty to face it.

Secondly, to be present at any work of man-made order and harmony and intellectual power — ^Vermeer’s “Lace Maker” or a Haydn quartet or Twelfth Night — is to be confirmed and strengthened in our potentialities as man.

Interviewer: I wonder if you don’t hammer your point pretty hard because actually you have a considerable element of the didactic in you.

Wilder: Yes, of course. I’ve spent a large part of my life trying to sit on it, to keep it down. The pages and pages I’ve had to tear up! I think the struggle with it may have brought a certain kind of objectivity into my work. I’ve become accustomed to readers’ taking widely different views of the intentions in my books and plays, A good example is George Brush, whom we were talking about before, George, the hero of a novel of mine which I wrote when I was nearly forty, is an earnest, humourless, moralizing, preachifying, interfering product of Bible-belt evangelism. I re- ceived many letters from writers of the George Brush mentality angrily denouncing me for making fun of sacred things, and a letter from the Mother Superior of a convent in Ohio saying that she regarded the book as an allegory of the stages in the spiritual life.

Many thank me for the “comfort” they found in the last act of

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Our Town; others tell me that it is a desolating picture of our limitation to “realize” life — almost too sad to endure.

Many assured me that The Bridge of San Lutis Rey was a satis- fying demonstration that all the accidents of life were overseen and harmonized in providence; and a society of atheists in New York wrote me that it was the most artful exposure of shallow optimisms since Candide and asked me to address them.

A very intelligent woman to whom I offered the dedication of The Skin of Our Teeth refused it, saying that the play was so defeatist. (“Man goes stumbling, bumbling down the ages.”) The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden received its first perfor- mance, an admirable one, at the University of Chicago. Edna St. Vincent Millay happened to be in the audience. At the close of the play she congratulated me at having so well pictured that “detestable bossy kind of mother.”

Most writers firmly guide their readers to "what they should think” about the characters and events. If an author refrains from intruding his point of view, readers will be nettled, but will pro- ject into the text their own assumptions and turns of mind. If the work has vitality, it will, however slightly, alter those assumptions.

Interviewer: So that you have not eliminated all didactic inten- tions from your work after all?

Wilder: I suspect that all writers have some didactic intention. That starts the motor. Or let us say: many of the things we eat are c*ooked over a gas stove, but there is no taste of gas in the food.

Interviewer: In one of your Harvard lectures you spoke of — I don’t remember the exact words — a prevailing hiatus between the highbrow and lowbrow reader. Do you think a word could appear at this time which would satisfy both the discriminating reader and the larger public?

Wilder: What we call a great age in literature is an age in which that is completely possible: the whole Athenian audience took part in the flowering of Greek tragedy and Greek comedy. And so in the age of the great Spaniards. So in the age of Eliza- beth. We certainly are not, in any sense, in the flowering of a golden age now; and one of the unfortunate things about the situ- ation is this great gulf. It would be a very wonderful thing if we see more and more works which close that gulf between high- brows and lowbrows.

Interviewer: Someone has said — one of your dramatist col-

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leagues, I believe, I can’t remember which one — ^that a writer deals with only one or two ideas throughout his work. Would you say your work refletts those one or two ideas?

Wilder: Yes, I think so. I have become aware of it