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Do You Mind Me Just Asking?

There are some questions that you should never ask a writer – they are instant death to any hoped-for conversation. But at every literary party or book launch I’ve ever attended, the worst of them invariably pops out like a cork from a champagne bottle, straight into the writer’s eye: Do you write by hand or use a computer?

The Paris Review has been boldly posing such questions to writers since 1953, when this seminal literary magazine was founded in Paris by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton, often travelling to the writers’ homes to accept their hospitality before plunging in with all those hoary old favourites. Do you use a notebook? Do you write in the mornings or at night? Have you had run-ins with friends or writers whose books you’ve reviewed?

It’s not surprising then that some of the writers, often the most interesting, have a slightly grumpy tone as they strive to maintain dignity, purpose and patience. In a conversation that took place in New York in 1956, William Faulkner (pencil–paper–whisky) appears almost as a parody of himself, like a famous Shakespearean actor gamely taking part in Coronation Street.

Interviewer: What techniques do you use to arrive at your standard?

Faulkner: Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique.

There is now a splendid new volume that brings together sixteen of these intriguing conversations with the Great Men of literature (apparently there are very few Great Women, only three included in this volume).

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There are some questions that you should never ask a writer – they are instant death to any hoped-for conversation. But at every literary party or book launch I’ve ever attended, the worst of them invariably pops out like a cork from a champagne bottle, straight into the writer’s eye: Do you write by hand or use a computer?

The Paris Review has been boldly posing such questions to writers since 1953, when this seminal literary magazine was founded in Paris by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen and George Plimpton, often travelling to the writers’ homes to accept their hospitality before plunging in with all those hoary old favourites. Do you use a notebook? Do you write in the mornings or at night? Have you had run-ins with friends or writers whose books you’ve reviewed?

It’s not surprising then that some of the writers, often the most interesting, have a slightly grumpy tone as they strive to maintain dignity, purpose and patience. In a conversation that took place in New York in 1956, William Faulkner (pencil–paper–whisky) appears almost as a parody of himself, like a famous Shakespearean actor gamely taking part in Coronation Street.

Interviewer: What techniques do you use to arrive at your standard?

Faulkner: Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique.

There is now a splendid new volume that brings together sixteen of these intriguing conversations with the Great Men of literature (apparently there are very few Great Women, only three included in this volume). The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 2 is edited by Philip Gourevitch and contains an introduction by the Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk. While the names of the interviewers – often well-known writers themselves – are given after an introductory paragraph, they are withheld during the interview and, because they almost always venture into the lion’s den in pairs, perhaps wisely, considering the sheer nerve of some of the questions, readers find themselves witnessing an odd three-cornered dialogue in which the interviewers have acquired a strange anonymity. This gives the volume a staged, reverential tone that engineers a particular thrill.
Interviewer: Can writing for the movies hurt your work? William Faulkner: Nothing can injure a man’s writing if he’s a first rate writer. If a man is not first rate, there’s not anything can help it much. The problem does not apply if he is not first rate because he has already sold his soul for a swimming pool.
There are three main pleasures to be found in this book, one respectable, two guilty. I’m afraid the guilty ones came first for me, the chance to catch a glimpse of what was previously guarded and private, and the opportunity to assume the interviewer’s identity and ask those outrageous questions in the safety of my own armchair. The third pleasure is, of course, the writers’ wisdom and insight, the apparent openness, the inspiring facts laid bare about lives dedicated to writing. But first that insider glimpse into the Great Writers’ private world. Here is Graham Greene (longhand – 500 words a day – corrected in type) in 1953 at home in his London flat above St James’s Street, delightfully at bay before the interview has even begun: ‘Brown-suited, brown-shoed, browned face, he opened the door when we rang and ushered us up above the oyster bar to the large room. It was cold for April and a large number of electric fires were burning in various corners of the room. A many-lamped standard of Scandinavian design stood by the window; a couple of bulbs were lit, they made as much difference to the watery April light as a pair of after-burners to a flagging jet engine.’
Interviewer: We have come to try and find out as far as you will let us, the unknown things about you. Greene: Very frank. What will you have to drink?
The interview, or interviews, because often what appears in the book as a single session actually took place over several days, is sometimes conducted in a hotel. Eudora Welty (typewriter–unnumbered pages–paperclips) is first shown peering anxiously out of her door at the Algonquin in New York, after having given the interviewer the wrong room number. James Thurber (black crayon–yellow paper) is installed with his wife in the Hotel Continental in Paris. ‘We like it because the service is first-rate without being snobbish.’ Thurber, who suffered five eye operations and was ‘legally blind’, wrote in large letters. A specimen page is given, considerably reduced, showing a total of only eighteen shaky handwritten words. The American John Gardner (three to four books simultaneously–typewriter) appears ‘looking haggard and just wakened. Dressed in a purple sateen, bell-sleeved, turtleneck shirt, and jeans’, opening a door that leads into the Breadloaf Writers’ Colony in Vermont. A hotel is also the choice of Alice Munro (manual typewriter) who prefers ‘to keep the business out of the house’. After flying from New York, the interviewers then drive for three hours in a rented car from Toronto, down increasingly rural roads, to her home in Clinton, Ontario, where they find her in the kitchen chopping herbs for their lunch. The dining-room, lined floor to ceiling with books, is where she works and there, on a small side table, sits her typewriter. It’s only later, when she talks to them at their hotel, that she allows the tape-recorder to be switched on.
Munro: I had a lot of ageing spinsters in my stories. Interviewer: And you married young. It’s not as though you were anticipating a life as an ageing spinster. Munro: I think I knew that at heart I was an ageing spinster . . . Sometimes now when I look back at those early years I think, This was a hard-hearted young woman. Interviewer: Doesn’t any young artist, on some level, have to be hard-hearted?
James Baldwin (pen–arthritis in writing hand–left) talks at his Paris home and then in his Mediterranean villa at St Paul de Vence, where an electrical storm keeps interrupting the tape machine. During blackouts, he sits sipping drinks with his interviewers, discussing subjects at random or waiting in silence for the storm to pass. Isaac Bashevis Singer (lined notebooks–longhand–Yiddish) talks at home in an apartment in Upper Broadway. He works at a small cluttered desk in the living-room, surrounded by heavy Victorian-style furniture, typical of Brooklyn or Bronx homes in the 1930s, and a pair of parakeets who fly about his apartment uncaged. It would seem that even the most famous and distinguished writers do not always have a room of their own, though some use an office at their place of work, like Toni Morrison (first drafts–pencil–coffee), interviewed at Princeton University. Her office is decorated with a series of architect’s pen-and-ink drawings of all the houses that appear in her work. She also keeps a blue glass teacup ‘emblazoned with the likeness of Shirley Temple’ filled with her preferred pencils (No. 2). The interview with Stephen King (longhand and computer–no drugs now) takes place in 2001, two years after he was struck down by a minivan while walking near his house in Maine. Six pounds of metal, implanted in his body during the initial surgery, were removed shortly before the meeting. He is still in a great deal of pain and living at a temporary residence in Boston where he can watch his favourite baseball team, the Red Sox, make its pennant run. A second interview is conducted at his Florida home, within easy driving distance of the Red Sox’s spring training compound. On the dreaded longhand-or-computer question, King says: ‘You can only drive your hand along at a certain speed. It felt like the difference between, say, rolling along in a powered scooter and actually hiking the countryside.’ Halfway through the interview, he serves lunch: roast chicken which he proceeds to hack at with a frighteningly sharp knife. This doesn’t deter his interviewers.
Interviewer: Do you still smoke cigarettes? King: Three a day and never when I write. Interviewer: Do you still go to AA? King: Yes, I try to go on a regular basis. Interviewer: How do you feel about the religious aspect of it? King: I don’t have any problem with that at all. It says in the program if you don’t believe, pretend that you do. Fake it till you make it, they say.
The very nice surprise about the interview with King is not the stuff about booze, Valium, assorted painkillers and cocaine, but that it is here at all. King has not only survived addiction and the accident, but he has been admitted into the Serious Writers’ club, the Paris Review interview a real benchmark. ‘As a writer,’ he says, ‘I’ve always been extremely conscious of my place. I’ve never tried to be highfalutin’ or to put myself on a level with my betters. I’m serious about what I do but I never wanted to indicate to anybody that I was better than what I was.’ In stark contrast to King’s relaxed approach, the famously reclusive Philip Larkin (pencil–notebooks) stipulated that the interview should be conducted entirely by post. The first set of questions was sent to his home in Hull and it was five months before all the answers came back.
Interviewer: Why do you write, and for whom? Larkin: You’ve been reading Auden: ‘To ask the hard question is simple.’ The short answer is that you write because you have to . . . As for whom you write for, well, you write for everybody. Or anybody who will listen. Interviewer: Do you think economic security an advantage to the writer? Larkin: The whole of British post-war society is based on the assumption that economic security is an advantage to everyone.
Larkin is very good on money and the lack of it. He’s good on work, his five days a week as librarian of the University of Hull’s Brynmor Jones Library and his two hours every day writing poetry (in the evenings after work, after washing up). He is scathing about performance poetry and public readings, revealing about shyness, his stammer and his relationship with other poets, Dylan Thomas, Auden, and a chance meeting with Eliot at the Faber offices – ‘the old ones, 24 Russell Square, that magic address!’ And here is another pleasure I forgot to mention – the gossip. But to give that away would be like giving away the name of the murderer in a whodunit. Suffice it to say that this book brims over with gossip and self-deprecating anecdotes. Like Peter Carey (computer–thin paper–wide margins for notes) gleefully pulling out of his kitchen drawer a fistful of comment slips from his Geelong Grammar School days. ‘He needs to have his leg pulled and learn to laugh at himself. It may be better to concentrate on the Pure Maths next term.’ Here are stories, regrets, triumphs and trivia galore in a book that will satisfy the literary gossip-seeker as well as the serious scholar, demonstrating in these vivid self-portraits the art of the interview, the art of conversation.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 20 © Linda Leatherbarrow 2008


About the contributor

Linda Leatherbarrow was once interviewed by journalists at a British Council bash who sadly mistook her for Margaret Atwood. Her short stories, not Margaret Atwood’s, are published in the collection Essential Kit.

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