Inkslinger On writing, on books, and on book arts

Joyce Carol Oates: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 3)

Joyce Carol Oates

I laughed!   I love spunk.

Interviewer: What are the advantages of being a woman writer?

Oates: Advantages!  Too many to enumerate, probably.  Since, being a woman, I can't be taken altogether seriously by the sort of male critics who rank writers one, two, three in the public press, I am free, I suppose, to do as I like.  I haven't much sense of, or interest in, competition; I can't even grasp what Hemingway and the epigonic Mailer mean by battling it out with the other talent in the ring.  A work of art has never, to my knowledge, displaced another work of art.  The living are no more in competition with the dead than they are with the living . . . . Being a woman allows me a certain invisibility.

Joyce Carol Oates won the National Book Award for them (1969) and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000).  The interview took place in 1976, and was then published in 1978.

Harold Pinter: The Art of Theater (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 3)

Harold Pinter

In St. Paul, we have two friends who are such fans and experts on Pinter, I wish I could substitute in the brilliant discussions going late into the night about Pinter's The Birthday Party or The Caretaker or The Homecoming.  Should you wish to run into them -- or their ilk -- there will be a Pinter Festival this August in Pittsburgh.  I wish I would go -- it will surely be a special occasion.

Throughout his Paris Review interview, Pinter talks a great deal about characters and their formation.  Still, it's Pinter's success at crafting everyday moments of violence that stands out as part of his expertise.  The interview hones in on this.  Pinter announces a boredom with politics, a distrust of ideological statements of any kind, but an interest in cultural affairs and a caring attention to even bastard characters like Goldberg in The Birthday Party.  On violence, art, and the world, he states this:

The world is a pretty violent place, it's as simple as that, so any violence in the plays comes out quite naturally.  It seems to me an essential and inevitable factor.

I think what you're talking about began in The Dumb Waiter, which from my point of view is a relatively simple piece of work.  The violence is really only an expression of the question of dominance and subservience, which is possibly a repeated theme in my plays.  I wrote a short story a long time ago called "The Examination," and my ideas of violence carried on from there.  That short story dealt very explicitly with two people in one room having a battle of an unspecified nature, in which the question was one of who was dominant at what point and how they were going to be dominant and what tools they would use to achieve dominance and how they would try to undermine the other person's dominance.  A threat is constantly there: it's got to do with this question of being in the uppermost position, or attempting to be.  That's something of what attracted me to do the screenplay of The Servant, which was someone else's story, you know.  I wouldn't call this violence so much as a battle for positions; it's a very common, everyday thing.

William Carlos Williams: The Art of Poetry (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 3)

William Carlos Williams

Accuracy and specificity of language cannot be emphasized enough in the education and the development of a writer:

Interviewer: Do you think your medical training -- your discipline in science -- has had any effect on your poetry?

Williams: The scientists is very important to the poet, because his language is important to him.

Interviewer: To the scientist?

Williams: Well, and the poet.  I don't pretend to go too far.  But I have been taught to be accurate in my speech.

Williams was awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1963 for Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems.  The interview with Williams and his wife happened in 1962, which was then published in 1964.

Evelyn Waugh: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 3)

Evelyn Waugh

Before I pursued photography, I pursued art history and criticism.  I understood then, just as I do now, that critics and artists can have a hard time playing in the same sandbox.  Around here in the Cathedral Hill District of St. Paul, nights at Frost and Costello's are filled with artist, writer, and reader diatribes against critics or anything that smacks of going around the artist/author to get at something.

It can get pretty funny.

Evelyn Waugh is a bit cagey in his interview, or maybe he doesn't like interviews or anything that hints of criticism -- or the putting him in a role like critic or interpreter.  Don't ask him about Brideshead Revisited, for example.  And don't ask him about critics:

Interviewer: Have you found any professional criticism of your work illuminating or helpful?  Edmund Wilson, for example?

Waugh: Is he an American?

Interviewer: Yes.

Waugh: I don't think what they say is of much interest, do you?  I think the general state of reviewing in England is contemptible -- both slovenly and ostentatious.  I used to have a rule when I reviewed books as a young man never to give an unfavorable notice to a book I hadn't read.  I find even this simple rule is flagrantly broken now.  Naturally I abhor the Cambridge movement of criticism, with its horror of elegance and its member mutually encouraging uncouth writing.  Otherwise, I am pleased if my friends like my books.

I dare say, my writer, artist, and reader companions will toast Waugh tonight!  More fuel for the grumbling.

Waugh had a few other lines in the interview that caught my ear.  Because they focus on what he does, rather than what he wishes to ignore (or what he abhors), they may better present his artistic philosophy and what he seeks to accomplish as a writer.  Here is my favorite:

Interviewer:  Do you think it just to describe you as a reactionary?

Waugh: An artist must be reactionary.  He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along; he must offer some little opposition.  Even the great Victorian artists were all anti-Victorian, despite the pressures to conform.

I would like writers to copy that quote and tape it to the laptop.

Evelyn Waugh was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, and travel writing.  Some of his best known works include: Brideshead Revisited (1945), Sword of Honour trilogy, and A Little Learning (1960).  The interview took place in 1963.