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T. S. Eliot: The Art of Poetry (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)

T. S. Eliot

"I think it's awfully dangerous to give general advice.  I think the best one can do for a young poet it to criticize in detail a particular poem of his.  Argue it with him if necessary; give him your opinion, and if there are any generalizations to be made, let him do them himself.  I've found that different people have different ways of working and things come to them in different ways.  You're never sure when you're uttering a statement that's generally valid for all poets or when it's something that only applies to yourself.  I think nothing is worse that to try to form people in your own image."

--T. S. Eliot

It's not surprising that the interviewer, hearing this from T. S. Eliot, asks about teaching.   "Do you think there's any possible generalization to be made about the fact that all the better poets now, younger than you, seem to be teachers?"   This topic of writer-teachers is a common one in The Paris Review interviews.

A few writers in the Interviews do not believe that writing can be taught.  A few declare something along the line that teaching is dangerous because dealing with student writing can affect one's personal efforts.

Most authors, however, address the question in very practical terms.  How else are writers to make a living wage?  They turn the question of teaching into a discussion of the writing life -- and this writing life is often undertaken in harsh economic circumstances.  Here is Eliot's response:

I don't know.  I think the only generalization that can be made of any value will be one which will be made a generation later.  All you can say at this point is that at different times there are different possibilities of making a living, or different limitations on making a living.  Obviously a poet has got to find a way of making a living apart from his poetry.  After all, artists do a great deal of teaching, and musicians too.

Does this mean that the ideal is no job?  For Eliot, no.

I feel quite sure that if I'd started by having independent means, if I hadn't had to bother about earning a living and could have given all my time to poetry, it would have had a deadening effect on me.

This, too, is a favorite question in the Interviews.  Isn't it best for creativity to devote oneself full-time to writing?  Of all the responses to this question -- and they are almost always no, life experience is good -- Kurt Vonnegut's is most specific:

That's romance -- that work of that sort damages a writer's soul.  At Iowa, Dick Yates and I used to give a lecture each year of the writer and the free-enterprise system.  The students hated it.  We would talk about all the hack jobs writers could take in case they found themselves starving to death, or in case they wanted to accumulate enough capital to finance the writing of a book.  Since publishers aren't putting money into first novels anymore, and since the magazines have died, and since television isn't buying from young freelancers anymore, and since the foundations give grants only to old poops like me, young writers are going to have to support themselves as shameless hacks.  Otherwise, we are soon going to find ourselves without a contemporary literature.  There is only one genuinely ghastly thing hack jobs do to writers, and that is to waste their precious time.

Vonnegut cuts through the pretty illusions.  Making it as a writer means, in addition to getting published, finding out how to eat and bathe while banging out pages no one wants to read.

Rebecca West: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)

Rebecca West

Rebecca West began her writing career in the 1910s as a writer for the suffragist weekly The Freewoman.  Over the decades, she has published numerous volumes of fiction, nonfiction, journalism, and literary criticism.  Her novels include: The Return of the Soldier (1918), The Judge (1922), Harriet Hume (1929), The Fountain Overflows (1956), and The Birds Fall Down (1966).

The interview with Marina Warner was published in 1981.  It's an awkward interview to pull quotes from.  I'm uncertain why the interview is subtitled as "The Art of Fiction," rather than "The Art of Nonfiction" or "The Art of Criticism" since the interview privileges West's experiences as a female writer in the early 20th century and her critical take on past and current, male and female writers.  This does have the advantage of foregrounding West's voice and humor.

Interviewer: You have written that there is a great difference between a male sensibility and a female sensibility, and you have a marvelous phrase for it in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon [1940].

West: Idiots and lunatics.  It's a perfectly good division.  [The Greek root of idiot means "private person"; men "see the world as if by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature."]  It seems to me in any assembly where you get people, who are male and female, in a crisis, the women are apt to get up and, with a big wave of the hand, say, It's all very well talking about the defenses of the country, but there are thirty-six thousand houses in whatever (wherever they're living) that have no bathrooms.  Surely it's more important to have clean children for the future.  Silly stuff, when the enemy's at the gate.  But men are just as silly.  Even when there are no enemies at the gate, they won't attend to the bathrooms, because they say defense is more important.  It's mental deficiency in both cases.

Still, despite this focus on female and male sensibilities and writers, discussion of writing itself appears from time to time.  For example (continuing that interest of mine), writing about sex.  Frankly, West finds other things far more engaging to write about:

Interviewer: Some critics think that sex is still written about with great awkwardness.  Why is this?

West: I would have thought that was completely true of Kafka, who couldn't write about sex or value its place in life.  I think there's an awful lot of nonsense in Lawrence when he writes about Mexican sacrifices and sexual violence.  Their only relevance was to the Mexican's lack of protein, as in the South Sea Islands.  Funny, that's a wonderful thing.  I don't know why more people don't write about it -- how the whole of life must have been different when four-footed animals came in.  They had just a few deer before, but not enough to go round, and so they prevented the deer from becoming extinct by making them sacred to the king.  It's much more interesting to write about that than about sex, which most of your audience knows about.

That strikes me as a strong reason to not write about sex.  If you're giving readers just something they know about sex (rather than something they don't know yet about, say, characters), maybe the sex is a bore.

Overall, the interview offers a perspective on a range of writers from the 20th century, including contemporary ones like Ian McEwan.  For West, writing book reviews was an important part of her writing life, as they kept her in the mix.  Spoiler alert: A lot of the greats get taken down a notch.  Who, then, does she admire? A. L. Barker, Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, and Ivy Compton-Burnett.

James M. Cain: The “Love Rack” (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)

James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice

First, a story: how a man with no writing samples landed a job The New York World in 1924 as the guy who just sits around "thinking up articles, ideas":

I said I knew articles didn't grow on trees.  Surely it was practically a full-time job, thinking up articles for a newspaper.  I went on like this, with Lippmann staring at me while I tried to talk myself into a job.  I knew I was getting somewhere in a direction altogether different, that he was listening to what I had to say, and though disregarding it, he was meditating.  I thought, What the hell is with this guy?  He interrupted to ask if I had any specimens of my writing.  Writing, I thought, what has writing got to do with it?  I was still talking about thinking up articles.  Later, when we got to be easy friends, I asked him about this first interview and he said, I began to realize as I listened to you talk, that none of your infinitives were split, all of your pronouns were correct, and that none of your participles dangled.

Evidence: the power of grammar.

Rather than for perfect English, however, James M. Cain is known for his "hard-boiled" manner of writing -- the writing that made him a bestselling author with The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and others.

I tried to write as people talk.  That was one of the first arguments I ever had with my father -- my father was all hell for people talking as they should talk.  I, the incipient novelist, even as a boy, was fascinated by the way people do talk.

Many of his novels were made into films.  In contrast to Parker's categorical dismissal of Hollywood people, Cain identifies what Hollywood people have to teach a writer.

Enter: The "Love Rack"

Cain: The big influence in how I wrote The Postman Always Rings Twice was this strange guy, Vincent Lawrence, who had more effect on my writing than anyone else.  He had a device which he thought was so important -- the "love rack" he called it.  I have never yet, as I sit here, figured out how this goddamn rack was spelled . . . whether it was wrack, or rack, or what dictionary connection could be found between the world and his concept.  What he meant by the "love rack" was the poetic situation whereby the audience felt the love between the characters.  He called this the "one, two, and the three."  Someone, I think it was Paul Goodman, the producer and another great influence, who once reminded him that this one, two, and three were nothing more than Aristotle's beginning, middle, and end.  OK, Goody, Lawrence said, who the hell was Aristotle, and who did he lick?  I always thought that was the perfect philistinism.

Interviewer: How did it work?

Cain: Lawrence would explain what he meant with an illustration, say a picture like Susan Lenox, where Garbo was an ill-abused Swedish farm girl who jumped into a wagon and brought the whip down over the horses and went galloping away and ended up in front of this farmhouse that Clark Gable, who was an engineer, had rented.  And he takes her in.  He's very honorable with her, doesn't do anything, gives her a place to sleep, put her horses away and feed them . . . He didn't have any horses himself, but he did have two dozen ears of corn to feed hers.  Well, the next day he takes the day off and the two of them go fishing.  He's still very honorable, and she's very self-conscious and standoffish.  She reels in a fish (they used a live fish -- must have had it in a bucket).  She says, I'll cook him for your supper.  And with that she gave herself away; his arms went around her.  This fish, this live fish, was what Lawrence meant by a "love rack"; the audience suddenly felt what the characters felt.  Before Lawrence got to Hollywood, they had simpler effects, created by what was called the mixmaster system.  You know, he'd look at her through the forest window, looking over the lilies, and this was thought to be the way to do it; then they'd go down to the amusement park together and go through the what do you call it?  Shoot de chute?

Interviewer: Tunnel of love.

Cain: The tunnel of love, and all the rest of it.  It was what was called the montage, and at the end of the montage they were supposed to be in love.  Lawrence just wouldn't have this.  He said this love rack had to be honest, it had to be real poetry.  He revolutionized picture-writing in Hollywood; he hadn't been out there long before they all accepted his goddamn love rack.

So, after reading this tidbit, I tried to put the theory to test.  I watched A&E/BBC's Victoria & Albert.  Yep, there's a love rack -- two, even -- when Albert hands her a book of Byron at the start of his second visit and when they play the piano together soon after.  What about something more contemporary and not about forever and monogamy, like Closer?  I think the birthday balloon functions as a lovely love rack after Clive Owens takes Julia Roberts for a nymphomaniac.  Hmm.  I think Cain's got something here.

Cain isn't a believer in the teaching of writing, particularly the teaching that happens in workshops in the universities.  He does believe that devices can be passed down.  So it doesn't feel out of place to use this chance to say "love rack" one more time.

If someone (an agent, an editor, your workshop peers, your mother, her dog) has made the comment they can't feel the critical relationship of your book yet, that the prose is telling them there's love or sexual longing or the diminishment of either, but they aren't feeling it -- have you built your love rack?

Kurt Vonnegut: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)

Kurt Vonnegut, from Backwards City Review Vol. 1, No. 1 (Fall 2004)

Word: Twerp

Setting: High School

Kurt Vonnegut: And one time, while I was writing, I happened to sniff my armpits absentmindedly.  Several people saw me do it, and thought it was funny -- and ever after that I was given the name "Snarf."  In the annual for my graduating class, the class of 1940, I'm listed as "Kurt Snarfield Vonnegut, Jr."  Technically, I wasn't really a snarf.  A snarf was a person who went around sniffing girls' bicycle saddles.  I didn't do that.  Twerp also had a very specific meaning, which few people know now.  Through careless usage, twerp is a pretty formless insult now.

Interviewer: What is twerp in the strictest sense, in the original sense?

Vonnegut: It's a person who inserts a set of false teeth between the cheeks of his ass.

Interviewer: I see.

Vonnegut: I beg your pardon; between the cheeks of his or her ass.  I'm always offending feminists that way.

Interviewer: I don't quite understand why someone would do that with false teeth.

Vonnegut: In order to bite the buttons off the backseats of taxicabs.  That's the only reason twerps do it.  It's all that turns them on.

Trust Vonnegut to tell us the idiosyncratic thrills at the base of words.  He's a fellow advocate for pleasure.  Some might say (and have) for vulgarity.  Even the following might be cast as vulgar, but Vonnegut liked writing for all those "slick" journals and magazines.  He found value in having been a public relations man and an advertising man too.

Interviewer: Not many writers talk about the mechanics of stories.

Vonnegut: I am such a barbarous technocrat that I believe they can be tinkered with like Model T Fords.

Interviewer: To what end?

Vonnegut: To give the reader pleasure.

For Vonnegut, writing is playing "practical jokes."  That's a theory shared with Paul Engle, the founder of The Iowa Writers' Workshop.  The interviewer is nonplussed by this.  Vonnegut explains, "All the great story lines are great practical jokes that people fall for over and over again."

The interviewer wants examples.  Vonnegut throws out one, a Gothic novel written by a friend: "A young woman takes a job in an old house and gets the pants scared off her."  The interviewer isn't buying this; he wants more:

Vonnegut: The others aren't that much fun to describe: somebody gets into trouble, and then gets out again; somebody loses something and gets it back; somebody is wronged and gets revenge; Cinderella; somebody hits the skids and just goes down, down, down; people fall in love with each other, and a lot of other people get in the way; a virtuous person is falsely accused of sin; a sinful person is believed to be virtuous; a person faces a challenge bravely, and succeeds or fails; a person lies, a person steals, a person kills, a person commits fornication.

Interviewer: If you will pardon my saying so, these are very old-fashioned plots.

Vonnegut: I guarantee you that no modern story scheme, even plotlessness, will give a reader genuine satisfaction, unless on of those old-fashioned plots is smuggled in somewhere. I don't praise plots as accurate representations of life, but as ways to keep reader reading.  When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away -- even if it's only a glass of water.  Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.  One of my students wrote a story about a nun who got a piece of dental floss stuck between her lower left molars, and who couldn't get it out all day long.  I thought that was wonderful.  The story dealt with issues a lot more important than dental floss, but what kept readers going was anxiety about when the dental floss would finally be removed.  Nobody could read that story without fishing around in his mouth with a finger.  Now there's an admirable practical joke for you.  When you exclude plot, when you exclude anyone's wanting anything, ou exclude the reader, which is a mean-spirited thing to do.  You can also exclude the reader by not telling him immediately where the story is taking place, and who the people are--

Interviewer: And what they want.

Vonnegut: Yes.  And you can put him to sleep by never having characters confront each other.  Students like to say that they stage no confrontations because people avoid confrontations in modern life.  Modern life is so lonely, they say.  This is laziness.  It is the writer's job to stage confrontations, so the characters will say surprising and revealing things, and educate and entertain us all.  If a writer can't or won't do that, he should withdraw from the trade.

So, to sum up, what to tinker with as you ply your trade as a writer: 1) smuggle in one of those old-fashioned plots, 2) establish place immediately, 3) establish who we're supposed to care for immediately, 4) make those characters want something, and 5) stage conflict, conflict, conflict.

What's so funny is that the interviewer finds this . . . traditional?  Mechanical?  "Surely talent is required?" the interviewer asks.  Vonnegut, bless him, points out that selling Saabs requires talent too.

Vonnegut's interview overflows with further mechanical tidbits.

Every successful creative person creates with an audience of one in mind.  That's the secret of artistic unity.  Anybody can achieve it, if he or she will make something with only one person in mind.  I didn't realize that she [his sister] was the person I wrote for until after she died.

And here is useful observation, taken from a conversation with the graphic artist Saul Steinberg:

He said that in almost all arts, there were some people who responded strongly to art history, to triumphs and fiascoes and experiments of the part, and others who did not.  I fell into the second group, and had to.  I couldn't play games with my literary ancestors, since I had never studied them systematically.  My education was as a chemist at Cornell and then an anthropologist at the University of Chicago.  Christ -- I was thirty-five before I went crazy about Blake, forty before I read Madame Bovary, forty-five before I'd even heard of Céline.

If only 2 out of 20 workshop students ultimately publish, why those two?

They will have something other than literature itself on their minds.  They will probably be hustlers, too.  I mean that they won't want to wait passively for somebody to discover them.

Four interviews were worked over by Vonnegut into the document published in 1977.

Dorothy Parker: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)

"Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words."

--Dorothy Parker, 1956

Dorothy Parker

I started at the beginning when starting The Paris Review Interviews.  Dorothy Parker's was the first.  I had to let it ferment.  Her remarks, for some, will be welcomed and paraded.  For others, they might appear . . . patronizing.  Even sixty-plus years ago, channeling the divide between literary and genre writing was an effective way of defining one's identity as a writer -- even for someone who once worked at Vogue, Vanity Fair, and Life to pay the bills like Parker.  I subtitle the following: "What would she say about Sex & The City? Or Sue Grafton?  Or even Harry Potter?"

Parker: The purpose of the writer is to say what he feels and sees.  To those who write fantasies -- the Misses Baldwin, Ferber, Norris -- I am not at home.

Interviewer: That's not showing much respect for your fellow women, at least not the writers.

Parker: As artists they're not, but as providers they're oil wells; they gush.  Norris said she never wrote a story unless it was fun to do.  I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter.  And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right word.  I'm a feminist, and God knows I'm loyal to my sex, and you must remember that from my very early days, when this city was scarcely safe from buffaloes, I was in the struggle for equal rights for women.  But when we paraded through the catcalls of men and when we chained ourselves to lampposts to try to get our equality -- dear child, we didn't foresee those female writers.  Or Clare Boothe Luce, or Perle Mesta, or Oveta Culp Hobby.

Or what about this on Hollywood:

Parker: I think nobody on earth writes down.  Garbage though they turn out, Hollywood writers aren't writing down.  That is their best.  If you're going to write, don't pretend to write down.  It's going to be the best you can do, and it's the fact that its the best you can do that kills you.  I want so much to write well, though I know I don't, and that I didn't make it.  But during and at the end of my life, I will adore those who have.

Interviewer: Then what is it that's the evil in Hollywood?

Parker: It's the people.

Today, I repeatedly find myself in the middle of some debate over why anyone should waste a precious three hours of his or her life reading a genre or commercial (read: women's fiction) book that isn't at least a classic in the genre.  Since literature is not the field on which I built my "identity" (art and art history are), I have much less at stake as I debate the various pleasures of reading.  I try to understand the stakes involved for the other, literary-invested person -- largely by acknowledging how elitist and vocal I am about art.  Still, I struggle with categorical denouncements.  A variety of pleasures offer themselves to us in bookstores.  Am I a slut for wanting different kinds?  The brutal, repeated delays of Blue Eyes, Black Hair by Duras.  The philosophical and psychoanalytic teases in Fragments: A Lover's Discourse.  The winsome grinning kid eating candy and fighting bad guys in Harry Potter.  The Frenchie connundrum of Le Divorce.  The pulsing stillness of Venus in Furs.  Or just the frank acknowledge that some of us don't want children that made that bestseller Eat, Pray, Love worth every moment of reading -- I thought that acknowledgement still taboo, much too hot for Oprah.  The rush of fear of swooping vampires.  Or swooping Nazguls.  I am not defending -- nor do I care to -- every book.  I'm not declaring a mantra.  I'm just saying pleasure has its vicissitudes.  In bed and in books.

Ernest Hemingway: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)

"I rewrote the ending to Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied."

"Wearing down seven number-two pencils is a good day's work."

--Ernest Hemingway, 1958

Ernest Hemingway

I've put off Hemingway's interview for far too long.  I didn't mean to.  It's just that the best thing about the interview doesn't translate well into brief summary or quotes.  I'm talking about his readiness to call the interviewer--or his questions--stupid.  When what he considers a good question is asked, he answers at length.  When a "not interesting" or "old, tired" question is asked, he replies with rhetorical questions, jabs, and frank boredom.  The interviewer asks him if he thinks teaching compromises a writer.  Hemingway retorts: "Is the usage that of a woman who has been compromised?  Or is it the compromise of the statesman?  Or the compromise made with your grocer or your tailor that you will pay a little more but will pay it later?"  The interviewer asks him if it's good for a writer to take a newspaper job like Hemingway once did.  Hemingway throws back a cliché: "Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time."  And when the interviewer starts up about symbolism in his work, Hemingway brushes the whole thing aside: "It's hard enough to write books and stories without being asked to explain them as well.  Also it deprives the explainers of work."  Not to be cowed, the interviewer fires off similar questions.  Hemingway parries.

Interviewer: Could you say something about the process of turning a real-life character into a fictional one?

Hemingway: If I explained how that is sometimes done, it would be a handbook for libel lawyers.

In deciding what to present from the interview, then, I let Hemingway decide.  He said a line twice, almost verbatim.  The first time was in response to one of those "uninteresting" questions, but the subject -- violence -- could have struck home.

Interviewer: Well, could we go back to that list [of people who influenced him--the discussion of which Hemingway described scathingly as "postmortems"] and take one of the painters -- Hieronymus Bosch, for instance?  The nightmare symbolic quality of his work seems so far removed from your own.

Hemingway: I have the nightmares and know about the ones other people have.  But you do not have to write them down.  Anything you can omit that you know you still have in the writing and its quality will show.  When a writer omits things he does not know, they show like holes in his writing.

Here, Hemingway talks about Authority.  The interviewer didn't it, instead going after more "postmortems" and more potential "symbolism" in his novels.  Hemingway, patient, generous, banters on.  He gets his chance later, after a dull question about titles that he answers twice.  Now he presents his writing-as-iceberg principle:

If a writer stops observing he is finished.  But he does not have to observe consciously nor think how it will be useful.  Perhaps that would be true at the beginning.  But later everything he sees goes into the great reserve of things he knows or has seen.  If it is any use to know it, I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg.  There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.  Anything you know you can eliminate an it only strengthens you iceberg.  It is the part that doesn't show.  If a writer omits something because he does not know it then there is a hole in the story.

The Old Man and the Sea could have been over a thousand pages long and had every character in the village in it and all the processes of how they made their living, were born, educated, bore children, et cetera.  That is done excellently and well by other writers.  In writing you are limited by what has already been done satisfactorily.  So I have tried to learn to do something else.  First I have tried to eliminate everything unnecessary to conveying experience to the reader so that after he or she has read something it will become a part of his or her experience and seem actually to have happened.  This is very hard to do and I've worked at it very hard.

Anyway, to skip how it is done, I had unbelievable luck this time and could convey the experience completely and have it be one that no one had ever conveyed.  The luck was that I had a good man and good boy and lately writers have forgotten there still are such things.  Then the ocean is worth writing about just as man is.  So I was lucky there.  I've seen the marlin mate and know about that.  So I leave that out.  I've seen a school (or pod) of more than fifty sperm whales in that same stretch of water and once harpooned one nearly sixty feet in length and lost him.  So I left that out.  All the stories i know from the fishing village I leave out.  But the knowledge is what makes the underwater part of the iceberg.

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Martin Amis: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 3)

Martin Amis

Martin Amis is son of author Kingsley Amis.  Normally I don't trouble myself with such details -- I figure you'll discover them, if you don't know them, easily enough when reading the interviews yourself.  Still, his father's presence haunts the dialogue as much as the fatwa haunts Salman Rushdie's interview, so much so that the father begin to function like place in a story.  The all important stage.

Somehow, then, it makes sense that the homey particulars of the writing life fill the interview--so different from Rushdie's discussion of conflicting worlds, colonialism, and politics:

Interviewer: Do you have any superstitions about writing?

Amis: It's amazing -- I do sometimes feel tempted by computers until I realize what an amazing pleasure a new Biro is.

Interviewer: A new Biro?

Amis: A Biro, you know -- a ballpoint.  The pleasure you get from a new Biro that works.  So you have that childish pleasure of paper and pen.

Interviewer: New supplies.

Amis: New supplies.  Superstitions . . . I think someone must have told me at some point that I write a lot better if I'm smoking.  I'm sure if I stopped smoking, I would start writing sentences like, It was bitterly cold.  Or, it was bakingly hot.

He has an office away from home.  He goes there all day long, but finds two focused hours a good day's work, particularly at the beginning of a project.

As I said earlier, it never feels remotely like a full day's work, although it can be.  A lot of the time seems to be spent making coffee or trolling around, or throwing darts, or playing pinball, or picking your nose, trimming your fingernails, or staring at the ceiling.

You know that foreign correspondent's ruse: in the days when you had your profession on the passport, you put writer; and then when you were in some trouble spot, in order to conceal your identity you simply changed the r in writer to an a and became a waiter.  I always thought there was a great truth there.  Writing is waiting, for me certainly.  It wouldn't bother me a bit if I didn't write one word in morning.  I'd just think, you know, not yet.  The job seems to be one of making yourself receptive to whatever's on the rise that day.

Amis is also good at conveying what that receptivity is, physically -- and making fun at how writers and writing are written about in the process:

The common conception of how novels get written seems to me to be an exact description of writer's block.  In the common view, the writer is at this stage so desperate that he's sitting around with a list of characters, a list of themes, and a framework for his plot, and ostensibly trying to mesh the three elements.  In fact, it's never like this.  What happens is what Nabokov described as a throb.  A throb or a shimmer, an act of recognition on the writer's part.  At this stage the writer thinks, Here is something I can write a novel about.... The idea can be incredibly thin -- a situation, a character in a certain place at a certain time.  With Money, for example, I had an idea of a big fat guy in New York, trying to make a film.  That was all.  Sometimes a novel can come pretty consecutively and it's rather like a journey in that you get going and the plot, such as it is, unfolds and you follow your nose.  You have to decide between identical-seeming dirt roads, both of which look completely hopeless, but you nevertheless have to choose which one to follow.

And what about those roads that look completely hopeless -- what if you seem to have taken one?

[W]hat sometimes happens is that you get stuck, and it's really not what you're about to do that's stumping you, it's something you've already done that isn't right.  You have to go back and fix that.  My father described a process in which, as it were, he had to take himself gently but firmly by the hand and say, Now all right, calm down.  What is it that's worrying you?  The dialogue will go: Well, it's the first page, actually.  What is it about the first page?  He might say, The first sentence.  And he realized that it was only a little thing that was holding him up.

Given such a fatherly lesson, it does not surprise to learn that Amis values prose over all other aspects of the writing craft:

I would say that the writers I like and trust have at the base of their prose something called the English sentence [. . . . ] Most modern prose is praised for its terseness, its scrupulous avoidance of curlicue, et cetera.  But I don't feel the deeper rhythm there.  I don't think these writers are being terse out of choice.  I think they are being terse because it's the only way they can write.

Interviewer: Out of limitation.

Amis: Out of limitation.  So if the prose isn't there, then you're reduced to what are merely secondary interests, like story, plot, characterization, psychological insight, and form.  I get less and less interested in form, although I have the English writer's addiction to it.  Form seems to me like decor in a restaurant.  Form is easy.  You can make shapely novels, everything working like a well-made watch.  You can do all these little balancing acts and color schemes -- like an American campus novel, meaning a novel written on campus, rather than about campus.  A creative-writing novel.  What is important is to write freely and passionately and with all the resources that the language provides.  I'm not interested in limiting the language to the capabilities -- or the accepted, obvious capabilities -- of my narrators.  I'm not interested in writing the realistically stupid novel.  Some of my characters have been semi-literate, but I fix it in one way or the other so that I can write absolutely flat out in their voice.  Nabokov said something like, I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished man of letter, I talk like an idiot.  The first and third propositions are true of everyone.

And as for the second proposition:

What makes you a writer?  You develop an extra sense that partly excludes you from experience.  When writers experience things, they're not really experiencing them anything like a hundred percent.  They're always holding back and wondering what the significance of it is, or wondering how they'd do it on the page.  Always this disinterestedness . . . as if it really isn't to do with you, a certain cold impartiality.  That faculty, I think, was pretty dully developed in me quite early on.  One day, when I was still living at home, my father came into my room and I placed my hands protectively over the piece of paper in my typewriter.  I didn't wan him to see it.  He said, later, that was his first suspicion.  But then I did announce that I was writing a novel; I left home, and a year later the novel was done.  I left the proofs of it on his desk and went off on holiday.  When I came back, he'd gone on holiday.  But he left a brief, charming note saying he thought it was enjoyable and fun and all that.  I think that was the last novel of mine he read all the way through.

The interview is almost a birth story.  No, it is.

Martin Amis is the author of Money (1986), London Fields (1989), Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (2003), and The Second Plane: September 11: Terror and Boredom (2008).  Being released this year, 2010, is The Pregnant Widow, out this February.

Salman Rushdie: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 3)

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie's subject: "worlds in collision."

In his novels, Rushdie articulates this collision not simply through the juxtaposition of different places, times, and characters in his novels.  His very notion of "character" derives from it.  No longer are we able to be Jane Austin, who doesn't mention the Napoleonic Wars.  "The function of the British army in the novels of Jane Austin is to look cute at parties," Rushdie says.  "It's not because she's ducking something, it's that she can fully and profoundly explain the lives of her characters without a reference to the public sphere.  That's no longer possible."

The interview goes into the different worlds of his personal life and the colliding worlds in his books.  I find myself most interested in how he sees characters forming out of these impacts and blows.  His view of character is not the classical take:

It's because the events of the world have great bearing on our daily lives.  Do we have a job or not?  How much is our money worth?  This is all determined by things outside of our control.  It challenges Heraclitus's idea that character is destiny.  Sometimes your character is not your destiny.  Sometimes a plane flying into a building is your destiny.  The larger world gets into the story not because I want to write about politics, but because I want to write about people.

Rushdie acknowledges this is a position outside the norm in America, where he now lives.  Fiction is politically irrelevant in the United States.  He (like Peter Carey) instead occupies the tenuous space of a relatively newly born country and a multitude of chosen, international homes.  In America, character is largely still considered destiny.  He explains:

At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power.  It's extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers.  Maybe there's an echo of that now, when America is the global superpower.  Outside the country, America means power.  That's not true in the United States itself.  There are still writers here who take on politics -- Don DeLillo, Robert Stone, Joan Didion, and so on.  But I think many American writers are relatively uninterested in the way American is perceived abroad.  As a result there's relatively little written about the power of America.

This dialogue stopped me in my tracks.  If we think too much through the typical concept of characters (character is destiny), can we writers powerfully and convincingly portray colliding worlds or explore the power structures of our worlds?  Another question: Would the hope of doing so even fit within the American political, personal, and publishing landscape?

It is at this moment that the Paris Review Interviews stymie me.  They present the greats of our century.  This also means profiling writers of a different generation than myself by and large.  I wonder how writers closer to my age would respond.  Because the third-to-last interview in this volume doesn't help me process this question (not that it is supposed to).  It seems to make the situation, the dichotomy, rigid.  Martin Amis, born in 1949 in Oxford, states crisply:

I think character is destiny within the novel as well as outside the novel . . . that characters you invent will contribute vitally to the kind of novel you're going to write.  I feel that if they are alive in your mind, they're going to have ideas of their own and take you places wouldn't perhaps have gone.

Rushdie acknowledges -- he doesn't have a patch of earth he knows intimately and can excavate all his life.  Not like Faulkner or Welty.  It doesn't come up, so I don't know if Amis feels he has that.  When he talks of writing and the writing life, it seems that house in which his father worked on his books echoes like that patch of land.  Perhaps.  Perhaps not.

Which comes first: character or place?