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Jan Morris: The Art of the Essay (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 3)

Jan Morris

Jan Morris writes about place.  She's also got Style and an incredible Voice.  Her interview overshadows even Capote's.

Morris's work explores Empire and the rise and decline of cities and states.  She resists being called a "travel writer." The label "travel literature" is somewhat better, if awkward.  Her preferred word: "belletrist, an old-fashioned word."  Born in 1926 as James Humphrey Morris, Morris entered the 9th Queen's Lancers, one of Britain's best cavalry regiments and toured the Empire.  Journalism (he reported on the first conquest of Mount Everest), then books followed.  The books include: The World of Venice (1960), The Road to Hundersfield: A Journey to Five Continents (1963), the Pax Britannica trilogy, Manhattan '45 (1987), Last Letter from Hav (1985), Fisher's Face (1995), Contact! A Book of Glimpses (2009), and Conundrum ('70s) and Pleasures of a Tangled Life (1989), the last two chronicling examining the sex change she undertook in the 1960's and '70s.

In Morris's work, "place" is built out of geography, smells, foods, history, people, and herself.  Viewing her point of view as "escapist" (since she has never wanted to exhibit a moral stance, even with her work on the British Empire), she sets out to evoke, not analyze.  Speaking of the Pax Britannica trilogy, she defines what she wants to capture: "The looks and smells and sensations of it."  That is what interests her, and such details enliven the interview.  Throughout it, you witness her getting carried away (with the wish -- my wish, at least -- of being carted off by her):

Of course, there is one small distortion in my kind of history in that it aims to entertain.  So it does in effect ignore little matters like economics.  But I have a story, too.  In Pleasures, I have a piece about first enjoying food and drink.  Until I was in y mid-twenties, I didn't take much interest in them.  But when I lunched in Australia at the famous cartoonist George Molnar's house on the lawn overlooking Sydney Harbor, the meal was something quite simple but delicious: pâté, crusty rolls, a bottle of wine, an apple, this sort of thing.  There was something about the way this man presented and served the food.  He crunched the bread in sort of a lascivious way.  He spread the pâté kind of unguently.  He almost slurped the wine.  I thought it was so marvelous.  When I came to describe it, I could see it all again so clearly: the dancing sea, the clear Australian sky, the green lawn; above us were the wings of the Sydney opera house, like a benediction over this experience.  It was only when I finished the chapter that I remembered that the Sydney opera house hadn't been built yet!

As with much nonfiction,  the writing of place depends on a strong memory and grasp of details.

Morris emphasizes also the power of one's perspective.  The author must be taken into account.  Given's Morris's history, the interviewer pushes this issue of author perspective a few times, wanting to know if and how Morris's writing has changed as a result of her sex change.  Morris's answer offers a lesson that skims over gender differences and illuminates a working method :

I used to think that as Jan I tend to concentrate more on the smaller things, the details, rather than on the grand sweep of things.  But as I've got older, I've come to think that the grand sweep and the details are exactly the same; the macrocosm and the microcosm are identical.

The macrocosm and the microcosm are identical.  The power of a detail to capture the sweeping historical moment.  Let me give two examples of this from the interview.  What strikes me most about them is how rooted these details are in Morris's life experiences -- just as much as they are rooted in the larger world Morris questions and engages.  Moreover, Morris never flinches from acknowledging how innocence or experience inflects her perspective.  This is something I find in all strong writing about travel and place -- the writer's innocence and experience is part of the story, no matter how grand the story seems.

First, the decline of an empire:

I'm old enough to remember the empire when it still was the empire.  I was brought up in a world whose map was painted very largely red, and I went out into the world when I was young in a spirit of imperial arrogance.  I felt, like most British people my age, that I was born to a birthright of supremacy; out I went to exert that supremacy.  But gradually in the course of my later adolescence and youth my views about this changed.

I was living in what was then Palestine, and I had the occasion to call upon the district commissioner of Gaza.  He was an Englishman.  It was a British mandate in those days, and he was the British official in charge of that part of Palestine.  I knocked on his door and out he came.  Something about this guy's hat made me think twice about him.  It was kind of a bohemian hat.  Rather a floppy, slightly rakish or raffish hat; a very, very civilian hat -- a sort of fawn color, but because it was bleached by imperial suns and made limp by tropical rainstorms all of the empire was in that hat.  He seemed to be rather a nice man.  I admired him.  He had none of my foolish, cocky arrogance at all.  He was a gentleman in the old sense of the word.  And through him, and through meeting some of his colleagues, I began to see that my imperial cockiness was nonsense and that the empire, in its last years at least, wasn't a bit arrogant, it wasn't a bit cocky.  People like that were simply trying to withdraw from an immense historical process and hand it over honorably to its successors.  Because of this, my view of the empire changed.

Second, the decline of a city (that had already declined from a city-state):

I fall in and out of love with Venice very frequently as a matter of fact.  I've known Venice since the end of the Second World War.  For most of that time, Venice has been trying to find a role for itself, to be a creative, living city, or to be a kind of museum city that we all go and look at.  At one time it was intended to be a dormitory town for the big industrial complex around the lagoon and Mestre.  That fell through because of pollution, so Venice was out on a limb again.  The attempt to bring it into the modern world had failed.  Then one day I saw that the golden horses of Saint Mark's were no longer on the facade of the basilica.  They'd taken the statues down and put them inside.  Outside they'd placed some dummies . . . good replicas, but without the sheen and the scratches, the age and the magic of the old ones.  I thought, This is the moment when Venice has decided.  It won't be a great diplomatic, mercantile, or political city, nor will it be a great seaport of the East.  Instead it will be a museum that we can all visit.  Maybe that's the right thing for it, anyway.  Age has crept up on it.  It can't do it anymore.  Perhaps that's the answer.  For a time I went along with that, but in the last five or ten years mass tourism has taken such a turn, especially in Europe and particularly in Venice.  It seems to me that the poor old place is too swamped with tourism to survive as even a viable museum unless it takes really drastic steps to keep people out.

It is the mark of a person very intimate with place to notice the restoration and preservation that most awe over for a few seconds before progressing to the next artifact.  I want Morris as my next tour guide.

Eudora Welty: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 2)

Eudora Welty, One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression: A Snapshot Album (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996).

"Out front was a clean dirt yard with every vestige of grass patiently uprooted and the ground scarred in deep whorls from the strike of Livvie's broom. Rose bushes with tiny blood-red roses blooming every month grew in threes on either side of the steps. On one side was a peach tree, on the other a pomegranate. Then coming around up the path from the deep cut of the Natchez Trace below was a line of bare crape-myrtle trees with every branch of them ending in a colored bottle, green or blue. There was no word that fell from Solomon's lips to say what they were for, but Livvie knew that there could be a spell put in trees, and she was familiar from the time she was born with the way bottle trees kept evil spirits from coming into the house--by luring them inside the colored bottles, where they cannot get out again. Solomon had made the bottle trees with his own hands over the nine years, in labor amounting to about a tree a year, and without a sign that he had any uneasiness in his heart, for he took as much pride in his precautions against spirits coming in the house as he took in the house, and sometimes in the sun the bottle trees looked prettier than the house did." --- Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty called her photographs "snapshots."  It was a private passion and did not receive widespread attention until much later in life and after her death.  In the 1930's, just as her writing career began to take off, she considered both as a possible profession.  While she let photography drop out of her life (she left her Rolleiflex in the Paris metro and obstinately never replaced it), she believed in the connection between the two arts.  She wrote in the memoir One Writer's Beginnings:

Making pictures of people in all sorts of situations, I learned that every feeling waits upon its gesture, and I had to be prepared to recognize this moment when I saw it.  These were things a story writer needed to know.

The 1972 Paris Review interview does not touch upon her photography or its connection to her writing.  This is not surprising; The Paris Review was interested in her fiction and her photography did not reach a large audience until 1978 (One Time, One Place).  The bulk of the interview explores the qualities of Southern dialogue, of Southern places, and of a Southern propensity to stay close to home and talk.  Place and talk -- that's the core of the interview, and given Welty's life long connection to the place and people of Mississippi, it seems fitting.  She is an artist (writer) who has followed her subjects thoroughly.

Eudora Welty, Home By Dark

Despite the absence of talk about photography, I tried to catch its echo somewhere within all the other remarks.  It happened in Welty's discussion of dialogue.  I picture her moving through the city, her ears her camera as she collected the snapshots of the day.  Rather than "street photography," she gives us "street expressions."  I quote it at length because the opening offers an excellent description of how dialogue can and should function in a dramatic scene:

Welty: In its beginning, dialogue's the easiest thing in the world to write when you have a good ear, which I think I have.  But as it gones on, it's the most difficult, because it has so many ways to function.  Sometimes I needed to make a speech do three or four or five things at once -- reveal what the character said but also what he thought he said, what he hid, what others were going to think he meant, and what they misunderstood, and so forth -- all in his single speech.  And the speech would have to keep the essence of this one character, his whole particular outlook, in concentrated form.  This isn't to say I succeeded.  But I guess it explains why dialogue gives me my greatest pleasure in writing.  I used to laugh out loud sometimes when I wrote it -- the way P.G. Wodehouse is said to do.  I'd think of some things my characters would say, and even if I couldn't use it, I would write the scene out just ot let them loose on something -- my private show.

Interviewer: Where does the dialogue come from?

Welty:  Familiarity.  Memory of the way things get said.  Once you have heard certain expressions, sentences, you almost never forget them.  It's like sending a bucket down the well and it always comes up full.  You don't know you've remembered, but you have.  And you listen for the right word, in the present, and you hear it.  Once you're into a story everything seems to apply -- what you overhear on a city bus is exactly what your character would say on the page you're writing.  Wherever you go, you meet part of your story.

Eudora Welty, Window Shopping

Aside from a discussion of dialogue, something else resonates in the background.  Welty was emphatic about calling her images "snapshots" in order to privilege the sense of a Southern family album unfolding before the viewer.  She was not interested in creating social documents, in pointed contrast with what she saw Walker Evans and others doing during the Depression.  She was interested in seeing what was before her and recording it, something she could do well because she was a part of that world.  A similar insider/outsider, recorder/social documentator comparison appears in discussion of a particular event in her hometown: the Medgar Evans assassination.  The murder became the subject of her only topical story:

I'm certain it is.  It pushed up through something else I was working on.  I had been having a feeling of uneasiness over the things being written about the South at that time because most of them were done in other parts of the country, and I thought most were synthetic.  They were perfectly well-intentioned stories but generalities written from a distance to illustrate generalities.  When that murder was committed, it suddenly crossed my consciousness that I knew what was in that man's mind because I'd lived all my life where it happened.  It was the strangest feeling of horror and compulsion all in one.  I tried to write from the interior of my own South, and that's why I dared to put it in the first person.

The editor of Eudora Welty as Photographer puts the connection between the two arts as simple and direct as possible before the reader/viewer: The snapshots "illustrate both the formal and narrative skills of framing the world as only a great short story writer could."  In the Paris Review interview, Welty explains the short story as the domain of mood and of the ephemeral:  "Characters , setting, time, events, are all subject to the mood.  And you can try more empheral, more fleeting things in a story -- you can work more by suggestion -- than in a novel.  Less is resolved, more is suggested, perhaps."

This is exactly what we find in her images.

Where Characters Come From: Morrison, Munro, & Carey (The Paris Review Interviews)

Peter Carey

Being around writers is a lot like being around photographers.  While I'm more interested in photographing gardens and architecture, I'll direct my camera at friends whenever its at hand.  It's my prerogative.  Right?

Similarly, I know I'm possibly (no, I know I am) being recorded for a writer's use down the road.  I talk directly about it -- I don't want misunderstandings.  What I don't want to happen. What I'll allow (cue laughter).  This is the risk we take in having writers (or photographers) as our intimates or our enemies.  At any moment, we become the object of someone else's vision.

How a writer approaches this issue is a reoccurring topic in The Paris Review Interviews.  I am sure to come back to this subject as I proceed through the volumes, but I open it up with these three writers.

Toni Morrison's response is the most categorical and it sets the stakes:

Morrison:  I never use anyone I know.  In The Bluest Eye, I think I used some gestures and dialogue of my mother in certain places, and a little geography.  I've never done that since.  I really am very conscientious about that.  It's never based on anyone.  I don't do what many writers do.

Interviewer: Why is that?

Morrison: There is this feeling that artists have -- photographers, more than other people, and writers -- that they are acting like a succubus . . . this process of taking from something that's alive and using it for one's own purposes.  You can do it with trees, butterflies, or human beings. Making a little life for oneself by scavenging other people's lives is a big question, and it does have moral and ethical implications.

In fiction, I feel the most intelligent, and the most free, and the most excited, when my characters are fully invented people.  That's part of the excitement.  If they're based on somebody else, in a funny way it's an infringement of a copyright.  That person owns his life, has a patent on it.  It shouldn't be available for fiction.

As indicated in Morrison's quote (but perhaps obscured) is that she avoids using even  geography that she intimately knows.  We know from the quotes in Monday's post that Peter Carey does draw from the geography of his past, although he emphasizes the pasted-up, artistic transformation of life a-la Robert Rauschenberg's throw it on the canvas.  About drawing directly from people he knows, he discusses the time when he published a memoir piece on his first wife's abortion:

Carey: I'd had that story in my head for twenty-five years.  In retrospect I think I shouldn't have written it.  The thing I didn't think about was that it would also be published in Australia, and my first wife had a life there and I couldn't protect her privacy.  She was terrifically generous about it, but I think I had presumed a right that I didn't really have.  That's a sort of arrogance and self-involvement of writers that's not very attractive.

Interviewer: What was the reaction to it here?

Carey: When it appeared, I couldn't walk five yards in my neighborhood without someone coming up to me and saying, God that must have been so painful to write.  Well, the curious thing about it was that it was easy to write.  It was easy to write because I didn't need to make it up -- it had been in my head all that time.  I can think of things that were way more painful to write that I've made up.

Alice Munro, 1993

Alice Munro, the Canadian short story writer and novelist (Open Secrets and Lives of Girls and Women), discusses freely that the people and places of her childhood and adulthood are transformed into her narratives.  Indeed, being part of a story can be a prize at auction:

The nurse [of "Friend of My Youth"] I invented, but I was given the name.  We had a fundraising event at the Blyth Theater, about ten miles away from here.  Everybody contributed something to be auctioned off to raise money, and somebody came up with the idea that I could auction off the right to have the successful bidder's name used for a character in my next story.  A woman from Toronto paid four hundred dollars to be a character.  Her name was Audrey Atkinson.  I suddenly thought, That's the nurse!  I never heard from her.  I hope she didn't mind.

Munro regularly returns to her mother to enter "character," but friends and acquaintances are equally fertile ground.  First, the origin of "Friend of My Youth":

There is a young man I know who works in the library in Goderich and researches things for me.  He was at our house one night and he began to talk about neighbors of his family, neighbors who lived on the next farm.  They belonged to  religion that forbade them to play card games, and so they played Cronkinole, which is a board game.  He just told me about that, and then I asked him about the family, their religion, what they were like.  He described these people and then told me about the marriage scandal: the young man who comes along who is a member of their church and gets engaged to the other daughter.  Then, low and behold, the younger sister was pregnant so the marriage has to be switched.  And they go on all living together in the same house.  The stuff about fixing the house, painting it over is all true too.  The couple painted their half, and the older sister didn't -- half the house got painted.

Then, the origin of "Thanks for the Ride":

Interviewer: In "Thanks for the Ride," you write from the point of view of a rather callous city boy who picks up a poor town girl for the night and sleeps with her and is alternately attracted to and revolted by the poverty of her life.  It seems striking that this story came from a time when your life was so settled and proper.

A friend of my husband's came to visit us the summer when I was pregnant with my eldest daughter.  He stayed for a month or so.  He worked for the National Film Board, and he was doing a film up there.  He told us a lot of stuff -- we just talked the way you do, anecdotally about our lives.  He told the story about beign in a small town on Georgian Bay and going out with a local girl.  It was the encounter of a middle-class boy with something that was familiar to me but not familiar to him.  So I immediately identified strongly with the girl and her family and her situation, and I guess I wrote the story fairly soon afterward because my baby was looking at me from the crib.

The interview contains similar anecdotes, but the underlying point is that Munro, in contrast with Morrison and perhaps going further than Carey's art/life collage metaphor, sees the people and places of her life as legitimate fodder for narrative.  This philosophy comes through here -- although with a catch:

I'm doing less personal writing now [1994] than I used to for a very simple obvious reason.  You use up your childhood, unless you're able, like William Maxwell, to keep going back and finding wonderful new levels in it.  The deep, personal material of the latter half of your life is your children.  You can write about your parents when they're gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you're going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.  Maybe it's advisable to move on to writing those stories that are more observation.

Peter Carey: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 2)

Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled, 1963.

Peter Carey is one of only two novelists to have been awarded the Booker Price twice (for Oscar and Lucinda and The History of the Kelly Gang).  An Australian, Carey spends a significant portion of the interview discussing colonialism and his approach to it within his work.  I encourage reading this section yourself, if only for the insight it gives into thinking and writing with history in mind.  It's not that Carey wants his writing called "historical fiction"--not at all, he feels it "addresses contemporary life."  By attending to his colonial roots, however, Carey focuses on the new angles this gives his work:

Well, I'm a bloody colonial, aren't I?  London is not my place and Britian is not my country.  How was I going to have the authority to invent London in 1837?  First I had to know something thats different from what anybody ever thought about the period.  I couldn't steal from literature even if I wanted to -- for the most part metropolitan literature takes the place for granted.  So I spent a lot of time reading about people visiting London from abroad.  They're going to see things that would not occur to the Englishman.  There was a German visitor to London, for instance, who spends all this time describing this weird English breakfast that turns out to the toast.  That was terrific -- the familiar defamiliarized.  I was trying to imagine -- what was it really like?  We generally think of London in that period as gloomy and sooty and filthy, but in the New York Public Library I found an account by an American visitor who described London as ablaze with light.  That's not how anyone thinks of that period, but if you came from Australia or America at that time it was bright.  I thought, that's it -- this story [Jack Maggs] will start at night, and it will be blazing bright.  That's the first way in which I can colonize London for myself, take imaginative possession of the territory.

Carey's interview is filled with observations of this kind.  Carey's humor, too, fills the pages, such as when he describes the moment he thought he caught his big break:

The second novel was accepted by Geoffrey Dutton, who had a publishing house, Sun Books, in Australia.  He wrote me a letter saying, This is fantastic, we love the character, we'd love to publish it.  Imagine, I was twenty-four years old.  I was about to leave Australia for the first time, so on my passport application, in the space where they ask your profession, I wrote author.  Then I went to a meeting in Melbourne with Dutton and his partner.  The partner spent all of the meeting looking for a spelling mistake he'd discovered on page three or four. And I slowly realized that they weren't going to publish it.  They told me that the English publisher André Deutsch was in Australia looking for Australian novels, and that they'd given my novel to him.

I went to Europe, traveling for three months, arrived in London, found out where André Deutsch's offices were, presented myself at reception.  Can I see Mr. Deutsch, please -- he brought my manuscript back from Australia, I believe.  The receptionist said, Wait a second.  She came back in fifteen minutes and gave me my manuscript and said, Thank you very much.

John Baldessari, "Art History," from Ingres and Other Parables, 1972.

As engaging as these issues and thoughts are, what most interested me about Carey's interview were the tactile images of his creative/writing process.  There were times I felt I was reading about a visual artist at work, rather than about a writer -- and that shouldn't be surprising given the deep knowledge of the art world shown in Carey's Theft: A Love Story (2006).  I would like to share these moments with you because they show the "sketchbook" moments of a writer's art.  In a world taken over by word processing programs, it seems that the physical creation -- a messy process, indeed -- becomes invisible too often.  I feel as if the interviewer, Radhika Jones, understands that this is special, for she makes special note of Carey's notebooks and describes them for the reader before the interview begins:

For his last few novels, he has had drafts bound into what he calls "working notebooks."  The first one, made for The Kelly Gang, was "huge, heavy, and annoying to carry through the bush"; the more recent ones use lighter paper with wide margins for notes.  The pages are rough ("I type so badly, it's appalling," he said), with passages highlighted to indicate where further research is necessary; the margins hold chapter plans and plot points, calendars and timelines, and occasionally pasted-in postcards -- anything relevant to the story in progress.  Thought the notebooks speak to Carey's talents for weaving history and legend into his own richly invented words, they also illustrate his editorial rigor.  "For a writer," he says, "the greatest thing is to be able to pare away."

Notably, his pasted-in/layered quality is an image that Carey creates in his discussion of writing in general.  The interviewer asks about the line between fiction and nonfiction, mentioning that the characters from Theft are from Carey's hometown:

Yes.  And then they go to Bellingen in northern New South Wales, where I also lived.  But I'd warn against reading it in any autobiographical way.  Think of it like Robert Rauschenberg picking up a sock from the floor and using it in a painting.  It's still a sock, but it's no longer a sock.  When I write I look at what's lying on the floor of my life.  So I can pick up that river and that land and rip them up and glue them down to serve a whole new purpose.

Duane Michaels, Certain Words Must Be Said

And last, his answer to "how do you prepare for a book before you begin writing it" brings to my mind a range of images from Cornell's boxes to Haacke's and Baldessari's type-written cards next to images or even to how Duane Michael's images seem to run off in the spirit of the words scrawled around them....

I recently found a photograph that was taken in the seventies when I was working on some failed movie script that gives an idea of what I do.  In the pictures I'm using index cards and dividing up chapters and asking myself, What will happen in that chapter?  I'll often look at those chapters as little boxes or rooms, and I'll start to ask myself what happens within each room.  But I'll also be faking it by making notes and just wandering off into sentences to see where I end up.