Anyone without time to read an author’s long works (most of us these days) might want to consider simply going to the top of the tree and reading their table-talk instead. Conversations with Writers, a series of books from the University of Mississippi Press, has hundreds of titles featuring collected interviews with different authors, from Sam Shepard to Graham Swift, Joan Didion to Nabokov, Edna O’Brien to Ken Kesey, nearly all of whom supply insights about writing or life itself on every page.
‘Worse things can happen than to write a novel and not have it published’
In many cases these books, with their reverence for literature and fascination with the creative process, depict a vanished world and remind you of something lost. Thirty years ago, I and the other would-be writers I hung out with were obsessed with how authors wrote their books and starry-eyed about the writer’s lifestyle (typewriters, travel, cigarettes, booze, rootlessness – and that one holy manuscript that would make your name immortal). It would have been a balm to us – and the guilt we felt about our own sloth – to have read Tropic of Cancer author Henry Miller’s instruction to writers not to exceed two or three hours at the desk each day: ‘I used to work long hours. I’d work in the morning, take a nap after lunch, get up and write again, sometimes write until midnight. In the last ten or 15 years, I’ve found that it isn’t necessary to work that much. It’s bad, in fact. You drain the reservoir.’
We’d have been equally heartened, slackers that we were, to read this from him: ‘Each man has his own way. After all, most writing is done away from the typewriter, away from the desk. I’d say it occurs in the quiet, silent moments, while you’re walking or shaving or playing a game or whatever, or even talking to someone you’re not vitally interested in. You’re working…’
Where was he when we needed him? These words of warning, from short story writer Raymond Carver, would have sobered us too: ‘It’s heartbreaking to see somebody work hard and be obsessive about their writing, their work, and nothing happens. This is often the case with plenty of writers. After a while they just give up… Almost as bad, something gets published, and the writer is bitter because it didn’t put him at the top of the bestseller list… Worse things can happen than to write a novel and not have it published – writing a novel and having it published and then turning bitter and sour and thinking that the world has passed you by.’
Pithy, memorable statements abound in these books. Writers, as Cyril Connolly pointed out, tend to be good talkers too, often to their detriment. Novelist Ian McEwan remarks that ‘literature is in a sense a higher form of gossip.’ ‘Ego,’ declares Norman Mailer, ‘is the ability to move with certainty into matters about which we know very little’ (bringing to mind a range of modern culprits). Poet Elizabeth Bishop, in words that should be painted on every bedsit wall, mutters that ‘Almost everybody has this theory that everybody else has a fascinating social life.’
Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess, interviewed in America, is waspish: ‘I hate to say this, because I try to be a good guest, but America is totally dishonest. Even Russia is more honest than America… Russian people assume they are not in a free country, but they behave as if they have a great deal of freedom. In the United States, it’s the opposite way around.’ Anyone who has spent a few months in both countries (albeit, in Russia, outside wartime) knows this to have more than a little truth.
In fact, plenty hasn’t changed since decades ago these writers gave their thoughts. Here is Elizabeth Bishop in 1966 on the college students she’s teaching: ‘Have you seen the expensive cars that some of them drive?… Most of them look quite well-fed and rather well-off. And what do they write about in their poems? Suffering, of all things!… I finally told them that they should come to Brazil and see for themselves what real suffering is like.’
Their modern counterparts dying to bring down the West might also heed the words of Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer: ‘It’s not dignified for a man to deny his home… if you have parents and a home and a language and you say: “My parents and home and language are nothing. But my neighbour – his parents are important. His home is important. His language is important.” – you have no dignity.’
On a more local note, as we’re reminded in the Times this week of Labour’s plans to lower the voting age to 16 next year, it’s bracing to read Burgess’s thoughts in 1971: ‘The Labour government lowered the vote and thought this would result in a large victory for Labour, because youth is supposed to be revolutionary… It had the opposite effect. Young people voted for the Conservative party. I don’t think it really matters what age you introduce the franchise. There are plenty of stupid, bloody stevedores and taxi drivers who are 65 who don’t vote any better than a child of 14 would vote.’
You’re also struck in these collections by how catty writers can be about each other. Here is Burgess again on his contemporary Alan Sillitoe: ‘He makes me very angry. I don’t think he’s very intelligent, for one thing… He spells Finnegans Wake with an apostrophe too… He has a hell of a chip on his shoulder.’ Henry Miller is dismissive of George Orwell, who championed his writing: ‘Though he was a wonderful chap in his way, Orwell, in the end I thought him stupid… a foolish idealist… Men of principle bore me.’
Jack Kerouac’s mother – the Beatnik On the Road writer lived with her, was devoted to her, and never held a driving licence – tells us in an aside that ‘Jack’s friends, there’s one I can’t stand. That’s right. Allen Ginsberg… there’s something about that man I just can’t stand. And I’m afraid of him.’ Elizabeth Bishop, meanwhile, gives a vivid detail from her meeting, on a very hot day, with fellow poet T.S. Eliot: ‘I think he finally asked me if I would mind if he undid his tie, which for Eliot was rather like taking off all his clothes.’
Sometimes the insights are sublime, particularly Bashevis Singer’s, who avoids talking about technique and instead explores his personal philosophy, in ways more direct and palatable than in many of his novels. ‘I’m disappointed in movements,’ he tells us. ‘Movements and mediocrity go together.’ Here he is on belief:
I have no faith in dogmas of any kind; they are only the work of men. Man is born to free choice, to believe, to doubt, or to deny. I choose to believe. I also believe in the power of personal prayer. While I shun organised prayer and religion, I would call myself a religious man. The Higher Powers, I am convinced, are always with us, at every moment, everywhere, except, perhaps, at the meetings of Marxists and other left-wingers. There is no God there; they have passed a motion to that effect.
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