I MAKE IT fifty American authors so far and thirteen British though there are borderline instances, like Auden, Eliot and P.G. Wodehouse, where adoptive nationality tells us nothing. Literature, as the Paris Review (an American publication) sees it, is international (five French, one Italian, one Irishman, one Russian, two South Americans, etc.). It is more; it is a kind of Church Militant, according to Joyce Carol Oates, who finds Lawrence not quite English: ‘I take seriously Flaubert’s statement that writers must love one another in our art as the mystics love one another in God. By honouring one another’s creation we honour something that deeply connects us all, and goes beyond us.’

But everything has to be measured, it seems, in terms of the American achievement, and it is mostly Americans who do the interviewing. This is not so much writers at work as writers not at work, writers being pumped by earnest American academics and made to yield everything of their essences except how they work. In the last series, to the loudly expressed disgust of Mr Auberon Waugh, son of the writer, I was made to give the recipe for Lancashire hotpot. He was disgusted by the dish and by myself for liking it, not by the mode of the interview. What we learn about the work of writing is mostly such trifles as Gore Vidal getting down to it after coffee and a bowel movement, and Kingsley Amis starting off unshaven and in a dressing gown, but getting dressed later, when the pubs are open.

It is, however, the non-writing aspects of these writers’ revelations which fascinate. Wodehouse was caught by the Nazis because he was fond of his dogs and Britain has draconian quarantine laws. The late Henry Green revelled in his deafness. INTERVIEWER: ‘And how about ‘subtle’?’ GREEN: ‘I don’t follow. Suttee, as I understand it, is the suicide – now forbidden – of a Hindu wife on her husband’s flaming bier. I don’t want my wife to do that when my time comes – and with great respect, as I know her, she won’t.’ Isaac Bashevis Singer thinks very highly of Thomas Hardy. The whole collection is among other things an anthology of opinions on Robert Frost. Archibald MacLeish says: ‘… He worked very hard at his own reputation even when he had no need to… This was damaging only to him.’ James Dickey – well, we need a new paragraph for his views on Frost:

He says a good thing now and then, but with a strange way of averting his eyes while saying it which may be profound and may be poppycock. If it were thought that anything I wrote was influenced by Robert Frost, I would take that particular work of mine, shred it, and flush it down the toilet, hoping not to clog the pipes.

Dickey also calls Sylvia Plath the Judy Garland of American poetry and finds her and Anne Sexton equally embarrassing. He talks of ‘poor’ Dylan Thomas. Gore Vidal talks of ‘poor’ Anthony Burgess. Vidal is witty while Dickey is self-consciously redneck. INTERVIEWER: ‘Have you ever thought of acting, as Norman Mailer does?’ VIDAL: ‘Is that what he does? I have always been curious.’ He finds Bellow ‘interesting – which is more than you can say for so many of the other Jewish Giants, carving their endless Mount Rushmores out of halvah. Calder Willingham I’ve always liked – that frantic heterosexuality.’ Tennessee Williams, he tells us, did not go to lunch with E. M. Forster because – oh, let’s have the whole anecdote

As usual with Tennessee, we missed the first train. The second train would arrive in half an hour. Tennessee refused to wait. ‘But we have to go,’ I said. ‘He’s sitting on one of the lions in front of his college, waiting for us.’ Tennessee was not moved by this poignant tableau. ‘I can’t,’ he said, gulping and clutching his heart – when Tennessee does not spit blood he has heart spasms. ‘Besides,’ said Tennessee primly, wandering off in the wrong direction for the exit, ‘I cannot abide old men with urine stains on their trousers.’

Very funny, but he should not have said ‘poor Anthony Burgess’. I am glad now I arranged for him not to get into the current Encyclopaedia Britannica. The intensest interviews are with Archibald MacLeish and William Gass. MacLeish talks in thick paragraphs like porridge about the old Paris days, old enough to have known everybody: Scott, Jack Bate, Dos, the Murphys. Ms Dickinson is ‘Emily’: surely he’s not that old. Gass talks of writing out of hate: he’s a Distinguished Professor at Washington University and can afford to take his art seriously. More seriously, I mean, than everybody else, though there’s nobody here who doesn’t talk with awe about his or her vocation, except 91-year-old Plum, who’s always liked writing and had a jolly good time with it.

Pablo Neruda, like nearly everyone, says something about Robert Frost, who sticks up like a withered flower in all this talk about Soviet writers being proud of the socialist structure and the people’s role in the revolution. ‘I have never,’ he says, ‘seen less disagreement between a state and the writers than in the socialist countries.’ May he, in the land of the Shades, have all this out with Vladimir Nabokov.

The most impressive interview is with Jerzy Kosiński. This man suffered from the socialists as much as the Nazis and taught himself to write English with a speed that would have astounded his compatriot Conrad. He can also speak it like a natal Anglophone, which Conrad never could. There’s urgency in his interview, as there is in his writing. INTERVIEWER: ‘You always expect the worst?’ KOSINSKI: ‘No: the unexpected. I look forward to it.’ INTERVIEWER: ‘But all the preparations for the future…’ KOSINSKI: ‘The future? So far all my plans have turned out to be for yesterday.’

This collection is a heartening read. One gets the feeling that, for all the socialist talk of its being a minority sub-culture, literature is going to be able to survive.

 

Observer, 16 August 1981
Review of Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Fifth Series, ed. George Plimpton
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981)