Selections from The Paris Review
Then there is the business of surprise. I never know what is coming next. The phrase that sounds in the head changes when it appears on the page. Then I start probing it with a pen, finding new meanings. Sometimes I burst out laughing at what is happening as I twist and turn sentences. Strange business, all in all. One never gets to the end of it. That’s why I go on, I suppose. To see what the next sentences I write will be.
— Gore Vidal, on the pleasure of writing: (Autumn 1974)
Another thing I need to do, when I’m near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it. That’s one reason I go home to Sacramento to finish things. Somehow the book doesn’t leave you when you’re asleep right next to it. In Sacramento nobody cares if I appear or not. I can just get up and start typing.
— Joan Didion, on the rituals of writing: (Fall/Winter 1978)
Productivity is a relative matter. And it’s really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer’s strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones—just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.
— Joyce Carol Oates, on productivity: (Fall/Winter 1978)
I type out beginnings and they’re awful, more of an unconscious parody of my previous book than the breakaway from it that I want. I often have to write a hundred pages or more before there’s a paragraph that’s alive. Okay, I say to myself, that’s your beginning, start there; that’s the first paragraph of the book.
— Philip Roth, on beginning a new novel: (Fall, 1984)
Born in 1927, in Germany, I was twelve years old when the war started and seventeen years old when it was over. I am overloaded with this German past. I’m not the only one; there are other authors who feel this. If I had been a Swedish or a Swiss author I might have played around much more, told a few jokes and all that. That hasn’t been possible; given my background, I have had no other choice.
— Guenter Grass, on the role of literature in Germany’s coming to terms with its past: (Summer 1991)
Philip Roth, on beginning a new novel
Joan Didion, on the rituals of writing
With Love, From Julian Barnes
Through the Window, Julian Barnes’s sparkling new collection of essays, is a veritable treasure house of letters on novels and their authors. His subjects span the Anglo and French traditions within which Barnes work is rooted – Flaubert’s Parrot and England, England highlight in his own fictional oeuvre the interplay between the two – from Orwell and Kipling on the one hand to Mérimée and Houellebecq on the other.
This is not to say that the American pantheon is neglected. Far from it. Barnes is not immune, for example, to the work of John Updike. “Any historian wanting to understand the texture, smell, feel and meaning of bluey-white collar life in ordinary America between the 1950s and 1990s will need little more than the Rabbit Quartet,” Barnes concludes, labelling Updike’s Angstrom sequence “the greatest postwar American novel”.
…In the main, however, Barnes appears drawn towards a certain type of trans-Channel writer. His take on Rudyard Kipling is at once jarring and refreshing in the way in which it seeks to highlight the bond between Kipling and France. “He seems to us such an English writer, such a British imperialist, such a pungent purveyor of the lore and language of his tribe,” Barnes writes, “that it comes as a surprise to find how well known and widely read he was in France.”
Read more: http://www.themillions.com/2012/11/with-love-from-julian-barnes.html
Joyce Carol Oates, on productivity
This “vertical loft” was part of a historical restoration project in Rotterdam, designed by Dutch architectural firm, Shift. A three-story bookcase replaced one of the main structural walls in the home, stretching to every floor. The adjacent staircase provides easy access to the large collection. It’s a good thing we don’t live here, since we’d probably never leave the house.
Ian McEwan, on the novella
Martin Amis: State of Decline
by James Wolcott, The New Republic, October 19, 2012
Amis was never the sort of cozy writer who could settle into a plummy mellow maturity—as in Time’s Arrow and The Information, his mature voice bears the mortal freight of history’s horrors and of personal extinction—and as he keeps sharp watch on the chipping away of body and mind by aging’s cruel elves, going full curmudgeon isn’t really an option. His father beat him to it with his fussing about language and his reactionary effusions, and the son is too adventurous to revive that crusty vaudeville act. Another model offers itself: his hero and mentor Saul Bellow, who managed to maintain up to the end a sly, clued-in voice that had an octopus reach of everything around it—a confidential monologue at the service of Bellow’s wraparound curiosity and cagey parsing of others’ motives, which became so embracing that his later novellas turned into conversational suites. But dialogue in Amis’s novels, which certainly is plentiful, stays stuck on the platform, since he is less interested in the intimacies of characters than in the ideas or the conceits that they envelop, and there is no dialectic between his cut-out dolls, no Shavian jousting. Lionel Asbo ends with a domestic note of renewal, of new life coming into the world, but it is an unconvincing, hackneyed exit, because Amis is not really engaged in new life coming in but in old life going out, the twilight shimmer before the curtain drop. He hasn’t found a way to voyage into it yet, as Bellow did and Philip Roth ragingly has. He’s got time, but the hour is late.
The Amis Obsession
by James Parker, The Atlantic, November 2012
Unfresh usage upsets Amis. (That sounds like a crossword clue.) “Herd writing, herd thinking.” Be vigilant, young word-slinger. Be moral. The journo-clunker, the stale mandarinism—root them out! In this regard, I have to say, I think he has improved me. He’s the reason I won’t write woefully inadequate or use any form of the verb limn; why I will never describe a person as drug-addled, a biography as magisterial, or a piece of high-tempo music as hyperkinetic.
Here’s the thing, though. The refusal to use drug-addled brings with it—entrains, as Amis would say—an obligation to come up with something else, something better. Drug-demented? Drug-bespattered? Burning heretically on his/her pyre of drugs? For me, a non-genius, this obligation is something of a strain. I tend to think in lumps, not in language. I have to translate my thoughts. And this word isn’t good enough, and that word isn’t good enough, and round and round we go … In this state, it can be hazardous to read Martin Amis—to suffer the thrills of envy (I want it!), larceny (Can I steal it?), resentment (Bastard!), all leading where? Ah, you know where: into a writer’s dark night, the meat-locker chill of professional despair. The ego, inverted. I might as well give up. Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton, watching Jimi Hendrix at The Scotch of St James in London, were (according to Townshend) so harrowed with fear and wonder that they found themselves meekly holding hands. The apprentice writer reads Martin Amis, and whose hand can he hold but his own? A circuit, a misery loop—down you go, in sobbing spirals. You’ll never be able to write “As the horses now nobly loomed …”
In New York, Razia Iqbal talks to the prolific writer and academic Joyce Carol Oates, about how she finds so much work rewarding. Oates attributes her enormous output to a love of writing and a Protestant work ethic. She has turned her pen to numerous subjects including professional boxing, Marilyn Monroe, Detroit and a memoir of life after the death of her first husband. All while still working as a full time academic. Razia Iqbal asks after so much work is it still as rewarding as it has always been?
