Issyvoo

Someone said that Edith Wharton’s novels are what Henry James would have written if he had been a man! She is Henry James without the duality of innocence versus experience.

I don’t like categories like religious and not religious. As soon as religion draws a line around itself it becomes falsified. It seems to me that anything that is written compassionately and perceptively probably satisfies every definition of religious whether a writer intends it to be religious or not.

But Welty is not a regional writer—her purview is much smaller than that. Her writing is bound up in the romance of everyday objects, in the vagaries of memory and how they become tied to a place, a room, a piece of furniture, or a trinket. Proust had his madeleine, but Welty had pralines.

Dundy’s sentences are rhythmically subtle and easily devoured. It is not a bad thing to be reminded that your postcollege years can be infinitely ill-considered without doing too much damage.

More and more, I think of novel writing as a kind of deliberate dreaming.

…some people think I should be writing with my cudgel. They think that I don’t have the temerity to express these opinions. That’s just the exact reverse of what’s going on. I’m trying to lay this thing out for the reader. Not to take the reader and rub his nose in it, and say, This is how you should think. I want the reader to do his own thinking.

And when you’re up there, the most impressive thing is the cycles of that world. There aren’t any people up there in that Salmon River valley, not even Eskimos. Cycles of one year, five years, a thousand years: all these different cycles spinning around. The cycles of the wildlife, the different species and how they come and go.

I’ve always thought that the thing I bring to my subjects—one thing—is a fresh eye. And the fresh eye is important, because you’re learning… The fresh eye is a distinct asset.

I rarely read fiction. I’m mostly interested in history or natural history or science. I’m tied to earthly concerns.

Fiction is just a constant torment, and an embarrassment. I loathe my fiction.

The author, Dan Brown, is a character from Foucault’s Pendulum! I invented him. He shares my characters' fascinations—the world conspiracy of Rosicrucians, Masons, and Jesuits. The role of the Knights Templar. The hermetic secret. The principle that everything is connected. I suspect Dan Brown might not even exist.

An idea you have might not be original—Aristotle will always have thought of it before you. But by creating
a novel out of that idea you can make it original. Men love women. It’s not an original idea. But if you somehow write a terrific novel about it, then by a literary sleight of hand it becomes absolutely original.

I’m not just interested in the results of writing, but in the process, the act of putting words on a page. Don’t ask me why. It might have something to do with an early confusion on my part, an ignorance about the nature of fiction.

So many strange things have happened to me in my life, so many unexpected and improbable events, I’m no longer certain that I know what reality is anymore. All I can do is talk about the mechanics of reality, to gather evidence about what goes on in the world and try to record it as faithfully as I can.

The American novel seemed so vibrant compared to its English counterpart at the time. Such ambition and power and barely concealed craziness. I tried to respond to this crazed quality in my own small way, and write against what I saw as the prevailing grayness of English style and subject matter. I looked for extreme situations, deranged narrators, obscenity, and shock—and to set these elements within a careful or disciplined prose.

One afternoon as I was at my desk, these four children, with their distinct identities, suddenly rose before my imagination. I didn’t have to build them up—they appeared ready-made. I wrote some quick notes, then fell into a deep sleep. When I woke, I knew that at last I had the novel I wanted to write. I worked obsessively for a year, paring the material back all the time because I wanted the novel to be brief and intense.

People can live very simple lives, can’t they? Tucked away, without thinking. I think the world is what you enter when you think—when you become educated, when you question—because you can be in the big world and be utterly provincial.

Why make jokes about food blenders or TV or the perils of dating after the age of thirty? It’s not an interesting way to spend your life. You’d much rather write pornography, and it would be better for everybody. When I am funny, I hope to be funny about Republicans, not about Pakistani taxi drivers.

But everything that he wrote was gorgeous. He was the most elegant American writer ever, very sweet, and a funny man.

You can say Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock is a crime novel, but it contains no mystery. It is the relationship between Pinkie and his mistress and the theological aspect that matter.

It has always been quite apparent to me that no important story can fail to tell us something of value to us. But at the same time I know that an important message is not a novel. To say that we should all be kind to our neighbors is an important statement; it’s not a novel.

If I discard a sentence I like, it’s almost as satisfying as keeping a sentence I like.

I wanted to be a reader. I thought everything that needed to be written had already been written or would be. I only wrote the first book because I thought it wasn’t there, and I wanted to read it when I got through.

Mark Twain talked about racial ideology in the most powerful, eloquent, and instructive way I have ever read.

I feel suspicious about writers who claim to tell the whole truth about themselves, about life, or about the world. I prefer to stay with the truths I find in writers who present themselves as the most bold-faced liars.

I started a novel when I was twelve years old. It was about the Kashubians, who turned up many years later in The Tin Drum […] But I made a mistake in writing my first novel: all the characters I had introduced were dead at the end of the first chapter. I couldn’t go on! This was my first lesson in writing: be careful with your characters.

In an open letter to Milan Kundera, Norman Podhoretz claimed that Kundera was being claimed by the left, whereas he really belongs with the neoconservatives. There is a lot of truth in this.

… of course, we all came out of Mark Twain’s vest pocket.

[…] I was so desperate to write something, I was facing the wall of my study in my house in New Rochelle and so I started to write about the wall. […] It was built in 1906, you see, so I thought about the era and what Broadview Avenue looked like then: trolley cars ran along the avenue down at the bottom of the hill; people wore white clothes in the summer to stay cool. Teddy Roosevelt was President.

He applied the same strategies to every book, strategies as it happens that he came upon and invented quite early on in his career. They were his triumph in the early days. But by the last decade or two of his working life they trapped him, restricted him, and defeated him.

I am very struck by the revisions of Henry James. They seem to me always interesting, but in the end quite minor—changes in a few words, shiftings. The powers of concentration the great writers show are extraordinarily moving.

My imagination evidently delights in complexity for its own sake. Much of life, after all, and much of what we admire is essentially complex.

Politically committed artists like Gabriel García Márquez give honest voice to their political passion at no great cost to the quality control of their art. But do they really change the world? I doubt it…

You remember the old story of how Hemingway would always record the number of words he wrote each day. When I learned that detail about Hemingway I understood why the poor chap went bonkers and did himself in at the end.

My Baltimore neighbor Anne Tyler and I are maybe the only two writers left who actually write with a fountain pen. She made the remark that there’s something about the muscular movement of putting down script on the paper that gets her imagination back in the track where it was.

The art novel notwithstanding, I think most of us novelists have a sneaking wish that we could have it both ways, as Charles Dickens did and as Gabriel García Márquez sort of does—to write novels that are both shatteringly beautiful and at the same time popular.

…I prefer Henry James’s remark that the first obligation of the writer—which I would also regard as his last obligation—is to be interesting, to be interesting. To be interesting in one beautiful sentence after another. To be interesting; not to change the world.

If I hadn’t been analyzed I wouldn’t have written Portnoy’s Complaint as I wrote it, or My Life as a Man as I wrote it, nor would The Breast resemble itself. Nor would I resemble myself. The experience of psychoanalysis was probably more useful to me as a writer than as a neurotic, although there may be a false distinction there.

It’s the unity of the themes and their variations that gives coherence to the whole. Is it a novel? Yes. A novel is a meditation on existence, seen through imaginary characters.

Throughout its history, the novel has never known how to take advantage of its endless possibilities. It missed its chance.

It’s nice to think of Updike’s idealized reader. But except for the early stories, I don’t think it’s a young boy in a small Midwestern town who’s reading Updike […] I think Updike is writing for the audience that John Cheever said he was writing for, “intelligent, adult men and women,” wherever they live.

I guess I came to the hard realization that art doesn’t make anything happen. No. I don’t believe for a minute in that absurd Shelleyan nonsense having to do with poets as the “unacknowledged legislators” of this world. What an idea! Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. I like that.

There were technical maneuvers in Autumn of the Patriarch—the business of the point of view changing within a given sentence, for instance—that I thought very effective, almost one hundred percent effective. It was his genius to stress the sorrows of the dictator, the angst of the monster.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude I used the insomnia plague as something of a literary trick, since it’s the opposite of the sleeping plague. Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry.

Henderson the Rain King is a fantasia on the theme of Hemingway in Africa.

I’m fated to deal in mixtures, slumgullions, which preclude tragedy, which require a pure line. It’s a habit of mind, a perversity. Tom Hess used to tell a story, maybe from Lewis Carroll, I don’t remember, about an enraged mob storming the palace shouting “More taxes! Less bread!” As soon as I hear a proposition I immediately consider its opposite. A double-minded man—makes for mixtures.

I don’t think I’ve ever had much to say about God except as a locus of complaint, a convention, someone to rail against. The Dead Father suggests that the process of becoming has bound up in it the experience of many other consciousnesses, the most important of which are in a law-giving relation to the self. The characters complain about this in what I hope is an interesting fashion.

I don’t offer enough emotion. That’s one of the things people come to fiction for, and they’re not wrong. I mean emotion of the better class, hard to come by. Also, I can’t resist making jokes, although that’s much more under control than it used to be.

The Autumn of the Patriarch is a completely historical book. To find probabilities out of real facts is the work of the journalist and the novelist, and it is also the work of the prophet.

I’ve always thought that MacNeice had limitations of temperament. He sometimes seems to be writing a jazzy, crazy kind of poetry, but when you look closer you realize that it’s always perfectly controlled. Inside MacNeice there was always an academic scholar pulling in the rein. He was actually a very reticent man. In his autobiography, he reveals that his mother went mad when he was very young, and I think that the effect of this was to repress his emotional life and to make him avoid at all costs the confessional.

…you must never make one character laugh at what another says or does.

I don’t say that the drunk man is the real man, and the sober man merely a shell. But you find out something different about people when they’re drunk. Of course, you sometimes find that they’re not different at all—that you merely get more of the same, perhaps said rather more loudly and incoherently, but basically the same. Other people change.

We were both products of the anthropology department of the University of Chicago. So far as I know, he never went on any anthropological expeditions, and neither did I. We invented preindustrial peoples instead—I in Cat’s Cradle and he in Henderson the Rain King.

Through dumb luck, I read Look Homeward, Angel exactly when I was supposed to.

I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.

Slapstick may be a very bad book. I am perfectly willing to believe that. Everybody else writes lousy books, so why shouldn’t I? What was unusual about the reviews was that they wanted people to admit now that I had never been any good.

… a published work of high quality could be substituted for a dissertation, so I was entitled to an M.A. [The dean] had shown Cat’s Cradle to the anthropology department, and they had said it was halfway decent anthropology, so they were mailing me my degree.

[McCullers] had no mind and she could make no philosophical statements about anything; she didn’t need to. She said far-out, wonderfully mad things that were totally disarming, and for a while people would say, “I’ll go wherever you go.” She’d knock them straight out the window.

A good writer always works at the impossible. There is another kind who pulls in his horizons, drops his mind as one lowers rifle sights. And giving up the impossible he gives up writing. Whether fortunate or unfortunate, this has not happened to me. The same blind effort, the straining and puffing go on in me. And always I hope that a little trickles through. This urge dies hard.

…on the rare occasions when I do pick up Vidal, whose early books I enjoyed before he was as celebrated as he is now, he seems to me to suffer from American cleverness: the fear of being thought stupid, or dull, or behind the times.

There’s one spot in The Ginger Man that I’ve never been able to solve to this day. It isn’t perfect. I always treat it as a life and death matter when words go in their finality on a page. They must be right. In some ways, I was relieved to know, coming back to that passage ten years later and deliberating over it again, that it couldn’t be solved even now till this day with what one assumes is one’s accumulated masterliness.

But Hemingway did put together an hypnotic style whose rhythm haunted other writers. I liked some of the travel things—Green Hills of Africa. But he never wrote a good novel.

I was walking with Mr. Isherwood on a Sunday walk—this was in Surrey—and Christopher said, “I think God must have been tired when He made this country.” That’s the first time I heard a remark that I thought was witty.

For a long time I’d wanted to write a confrontation story where the representative of something meets the representative of something else, and quite suddenly it came to me that this was the way to do it.

Of the American writers—well, I read Saul Bellow with admiration. He never quite pulls off a book for me, but he’s interesting—which is more than you can say for so many of the other Jewish Giants, carving their endless Mount Rushmores out of halvah.

I envy writers like Graham Greene who, year in and year out, do the same kind of novel to the delight of the same kind of reader. I couldn’t begin to do that sort of thing. I have thrown away a number of successful careers out of boredom.

Myra began with a first sentence. I was so intrigued by that sentence that I had to go on. Who was she? What did she have to say? A lot, as it turned out. The unconscious mind certainly shaped that book.

I think part of the bewilderment American book-chat writers have with me is that they realize that there’s something strange going on that ought not to be going on—that Myra Breckinridge might just possibly be a work of the imagination.

I always admire Isherwood. I am not given to mysticism—to understate wildly, but he makes me see something of what he would see.

Rereading Williwaw, I was struck by the coolness of the prose. There is nothing in excess. I am still impressed by that young writer’s control of his very small material.

You know, I almost hate that book. I hate her, and her pathos, and her heart disease…

It’s instinctive for a writer to show acute feeling or intense states of emotion by translating it into something visible—red hair, if nothing else.

He had a bad heredity. His father was very overbearing apparently. His mother was a very odd woman. I remember once when we were in Key West Ernest received a large unwieldy package from her. It had a big, rather crushed cake in it. She had put in a number of things with it, including the pistol with which his father had killed himself. Ernest was terribly upset.

In the biographies, in the newsreels, and even the narrative, I aimed at total objectivity by giving conflicting views—using the camera eye as a safety valve for my own subjective feelings. It made objectivity in the rest of the book much easier.

I think he’s interesting, but more interesting as an operator within a cultural scene than as a—oh, as a singer to my spirit. A quaint phrase that possibly betrays me.

I thoroughly dislike Tom Sawyer. I think that Tom Sawyer spoils the last chapters of Huckleberry Finn. All those silly jokes. They are all pointless jokes; but I suppose Mark Twain thought it was his duty to be funny even when he wasn’t in the mood.

Years ago, I studied African ethnography with the late Professor Herskovits. Later he scolded me for writing a book like Henderson. He said the subject was much too serious for such fooling. I felt that my fooling was fairly serious. Literalism, factualism, will smother the imagination altogether.

The magic of Huck Finn seems to have passed me by, I don’t know quite why. Tom Sawyer was the book of Twain’s I always preferred. I remember when I got to college I was startled to find that Huckleberry Finn was the classic.

No writer before the middle of the nineteenth century wrote about the working classes other than as grotesques or as pastoral decorations. Then when they were given the vote certain writers started to suck up to them.

It was conceived as a kind of mock-chronicle novel. It’s a novel about the idea of progress, really. The idea of progress seen in the female sphere, the feminine sphere […] It’s supposed to be the history of the loss of faith in progress, in the idea of progress, during that twenty-year period.

If Thurber can talk as well as he writes he must be one of the greatest and least boring talkers.

Call it precious and go to hell, but I believe a story can be wrecked by a faulty rhythm in a sentence—especially if it occurs toward the end—or a mistake in paragraphing, even punctuation.

I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance—but it must be acceptance on his own terms.

Well, someone once wrote a definition of the difference between English and American humor. I wish I could remember his name. I thought his definition very good. He said that the English treat the commonplace as if it were remarkable and the Americans treat the remarkable as if it were commonplace.

Wolfe once told me at a cocktail party that I didn’t know what it was to be a writer. My wife, standing next to me, complained about that. “But my husband is a writer,” she said. Wolfe was genuinely surprised. “He is?”

The very center of Twain’s book revolves finally around the boy’s relations with Nigger Jim and the question of what Huck should do about getting Jim free after the two scoundrels had sold him.

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.

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.

James is like—well, I had a bulldog once who used to drag rails around, enormous ones—six-, 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.

… for a writer to spend much of his time in the company of authors is, you know, a form of masturbation.

I had to write a pot-boiler, a modern adventure story, and I suddenly discovered that I liked the form, that the writing came easily, that I was beginning to find my world. In England Made Me I let myself go in it for the first time.

I write about situations that are common, universal might be more correct, in which my characters are involved and from which only faith can redeem them, though often the actual manner of the redemption is not immediately clear.