Good Talk Writers At Work

By R.Z. Sheppard

The Paris Review interviews, collected and published periodically as Writers at Work, have been conducted for more than 30 years (the Paris Review recently turned out its 100th issue). It is a safe bet that 30 and even 300 years from now these conversations will be invaluable to students of 20th century literature.

The seventh book in the series offers its share of insights and delights. John Barth claims that he became a writer by "passionate default." Edna O'Brien espouses chastity "except when one can no longer resist the temptation." Philip Roth, asked for the umpteenth time to compare himself to his "vividly transforming heroes," replies, "I am like somebody who is trying vividly to transform himself out of himself and into his vividly transforming heroes. I am very much like somebody who spends all day writing." Occasionally the interviewer gets the last word. When Malcolm Cowley attributes the phrase "a lost generation" to Gertrude Stein's disgruntled auto mechanic, he is asked, "Is it possible the garageman was referring to 'a lost generator'?"

That a half-century of American literary studies could be recalled for a defective platitude is a contingency that would appeal to Playwright Eugene Ionesco. A major contributor to the theater of the absurd (he prefers the term "theater of derision"), Ionesco reviews the influence of surrealists and dadaists without missing the historical joke: "They all wanted to destroy culture . . . and now they're part of our heritage." Arthur Koestler, a leading intellectual and novelist of the '30s and '40s, sounds weary and detached. "I'm vice president of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society," says the author of Darkness at Noon. The following year, he and his wife Cynthia would carry out a joint suicide pact at their London residence.

Some of these writers are reticent, even resentful. Cowley, 88, complains about living long enough to become a resource like the free public library, "Hundreds of scholars then come into the field who are writing . dissertations, monographs, biographies -- all sorts of things -- and for each one they want to have a little reinforcement, a little supplement; they want to have a word straight from the horse's mouth. So they come to me and say, 'Well, you are the horse -- won't you please share your memories? Won't you please answer this little questionnaire of five single-spaced typed pages?' or, 'Won't you let us put your memories on tape?' There is no enrichment from this sort of thing. Not one of them thinks of filling the horse's feed-box with oats or of putting a little hay in the manger."

But when Paris Review editors send John Barth a check and additional questions to beef up a woefully brief interview, the author of the 800-page The Sot-Weed Factor returns the emolument with a curt note: "It doesn't displease me to hear that our interview will be perhaps the shortest one you've run. In fact, it's a bit shorter now than it was before (enclosed). Better not run it by me again!"

William Maxwell, novelist and former New Yorker fiction editor, is reluctant to talk about the magazine; but after saying that the "subject has been done to death," he adds "almost," and pages of anecdotes follow about Harold Ross, James Thurber, Wolcott Gibbs and Maxwell's "three wonderful writers all named John: John O'Hara, John Cheever and John Updike."

Updike contributes an introductory overview to this assembly of disparate voices and the provocative observation that the women interviewees seem to have a warmer and more inspiring relationship with literature than the men. He quotes Elizabeth Hardwick, "This passion has given me much joy, it has given me friends who care for the same things, it has given me employment, escape from boredom, everything." Edna O'Brien ranks literature as "the next best thing to God," and May Sarton notes, "I'm only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for me."

By contrast, most of the male writers in the book are grim about the demands of their craft. Poet Philip Larkin and Raymond Carver speak mutedly, as if saddled by an obsession. Koestler confesses that "if I stop working and just try to enjoy myself, I get very neurotic and guilt-ridden." Roth talks of drudgery ("I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there's a paragraph that's alive"), and when Czech Novelist Milan Kundera explains his fiction as complex musical architecture, he sounds like the damned hero of * Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus. Too much can be made of this, but these men do not talk of muses. They seem to take orders from demons.