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Stephen Sondheim: The Art of the Musical (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)

Stephen Sondheim

The Hammerstein curriculum: 4 exercises

Interviewer:

[One] afternoon, as I recall, Hammerstein also outlined for you a curriculum and told you he wanted you to write four things.  It sounds like a wonderful fairy tale.  What were they?

Stephen Sondheim:

First, he said, take a play that you like, that you think is good, and musicalize it.  It musicalizing it, you'll be forced to analyze it.  Next, take a play that you think is good but flawed, that you think could be improved, and musicalize that, seeing if you can improve it.  Then take a nonplay, a narrative someone else has written -- it could be a novel, a short story -- but not a play, not something that has been structured dramatically for the stage, and musicalize that.  Then try an original.  The first one I did was a play by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, Beggar on Horseback, which lends itself easily to musicalization because it's essentially a long fantasy.  We performed that at college when I was an undergraduate at Williams.  I got permission from Kaufman to do it and we had three performances.  It was a valuable experience, indeed.  The second one, which I couldn't get permission for, was a play by Maxwell Anderson called High Tor, which I liked but thought was sort of clumsy.  Then I tried to adapt Mary Poppins.  I didn't finish that one because I couldn't figure out how to take a series of disparate short stories, even though the same characters existed throughout, and make an evening, make an arc.  After that I wrote an original musical about a guy who wanted to become an actor and became a producer.  He had a sort of Sammy Glick streak in him -- he was something of an opportunist.  So I wrote my idea of a sophisticated, cynical musical.  It was called "Climb High."  There was a motto on a flight of stone steps at Williams, "Climb high, climb far, you skim the sky, your goal the star."  I thought, Gee, that's very Hammersteinish.  I sent him the whole thing.  The first act was ninety-nine pages long.  Now, the entire script of South Pacific, which lasted almost three hours on stage, was only ninety-two pages.  Oscar sent my script back, circled the ninety-nine, and just wrote, Wow!

Sondheim has been described as "the greatest and perhaps best-known artist in the American musical theatre."  His works include A Funny thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, and the lyrics for West Side Story.  His Paris Review interview was published in 1997.

Maya Angelou: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)

Maya Angelou (copyright John Loengard)

Over the course of reading the four volumes of The Paris Review interviews, I've waded through a lot of discussion about work habits.  In general, I agree with Philip Roth: "I really don't care.  Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they're actually trying to find, Is he as crazy as I am?  I don't need that question answered."

Maya Angelou's words changed my mind.

It's not what she describes that arrests me, but the specificity.  Down to the elbows and taking showers.

I have kept a hotel room in every town I've ever lived in.  I rent a hotel room for a few months, leave my home as six, and try to be at work by six-thirty.  To write, I lie across the bed, so that this elbow is absolutely encrusted at the end, just so rough with callouses.  I never allow the hotel people to change the bed, because I never sleep there.  I stay until twelve-thirty or one-thirty in the afternoon, and then I go home and try to breathe; I look at the work around five; I have an orderly, lovely dinner; and then I go back to work the next morning.  Sometimes in hotels I'll go into the room and there'll be a note on the floor which says, Dear Miss Angelou, let us change the sheets.  We think they are moldy.  But I only allow them to come in and empty wastebaskets.  I insist that all the things are taken off the walls. I don't want anything in there.  I go into the room and I feel as if all my beliefs are suspended.  Nothing holds me to anything.  No milkmaids, no flowers, nothing.  I just want to feel and then when I start to work I'll remember.  I'll read something, maybe the Psalms, maybe, again, something from Mr. Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson.  And I'll remember how beautiful, how pliable the language is, how it will lend itself.  If you pull it, it says, OK, I remember that and I start to write.  Nathaniel Hawthorne says, "Easy reading is damn hard writing."  I try to pull the language into such a sharpness that it jumps off the page.  It must look easy, but it takes me forever to get it to look so easy.  Of course, there are those critics -- New York critics as a rule -- who say, Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it's good but then she's a natural writer.  Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing.  I work the language.  On an evening like this, looking out at the auditorium, if I had to write this evening from my point of view, I'd see the rust-red used worn velvet seats and the lightness where people's backs have rubbed against the back of the seat so that it's a light orange, then the beautiful colors of the people's faces, the white, pink-white, beige-white, light beige, and brown and tan -- I would have to look at all that, at all those faces and the way they sit on top of their necks.  When I would end up writing after four hours or five hours in my room, it might sound like, It was a rat that sat on a mat.  That's that.  Not a cat.  But I would continue to play with it and pull at it and say, I love you.  Come to me.  I love you.  It might take me two or three weeks just to describe what I'm seeing now.

Revision:

I write in the morning and then go home about midday and take a shower, because writing, as you know, is very hard work, so you have to do a double ablution.  Then I go out and shop -- I'm a serious cook -- and pretend to be normal.  I play sane -- Good morning!  Fine, thank you.  And you?  And I go home.  I prepare dinner for myself and if I have house guests, I do the candles and the pretty music and all that.  Then after all the dishes are moved away I read what I wrote that morning.  And more often than not if I've done nine pages I may be able to save two and a half or three.  That's the cruelest time, you know, to really admit that it doesn't work.  And to blue pencil it.  When I finish maybe fifty pages and read them -- fifty acceptable pages -- it's not too bad.

I've had the same editor sine 1967.  Many times he has said to me over the years or asked me, Why would you use a semicolon instead of a colon?  And many times over the years I have said to him things like: I will never speak to you again.  Forever.  Goodbye.  That is it.  Thank you very much.  And I leave.  Then I read the piece and I think of his suggestions.  I send him a telegram that says, OK, so you're right.  So what?  Don't ever mention this to me again.  If you do, I will never speak to you again.  About two years ago I was visiting him and his wife in the Hamptons.  I was at the end of a dining room table with a sit-down dinner of about fourteen people.  Way at the end I said to someone, I sent him telegrams over the years.  From the other end of the table he said, And I've kept every one!  Brute!  But the editing, one's own editing, before the editor sees it, is the most important.

In 1998, Maya Angelou was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.  In 2000, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.  Her interview with the Paris Review was published in 1990.

Philip Roth: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)

Philip Roth in 1964, two years after the publication of "Letting Go." (Sam Falk/The New York Time)

I am like somebody who is trying vividly to transform himself out of himself and into his vividly transforming heroes.  I am very much like somebody who spends all day writing.

-- Philip Roth

On Life:

Interviewer:

Do you have painful feelings on looking back?

Roth:

Looking back I see these as fascinating years -- as people of fifty often do contemplating the youthful adventure for which they paid with a decade of their lives a comfortingly long time ago.  I was more aggressive then than I am today, some people were even said to be intimidated by me, but I was an easy target all the same.  We're easy targets at twenty-five, if only someone discovers the enormous bull's-eye.

Interviewer:

And where was it?

Roth:

Oh, where it can usually be found in self-confessed budding literary geniuses.  My idealism.  My romanticism.  My passion to capitalize the L in Life.  I wanted something difficult and dangerous to happen to me.  I wanted a hard time.  Well, I got it.  I'd come from a small, safe, relatively happy provincial background -- my Newark neighborhood in the thirties and forties was just a Jewish Terre Haute -- and I'd absorbed, along with the ambition and drive, the fears and phobias of my generation of American Jewish children.  In my early twenties, I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn't afraid of all those things.  It wasn't a mistake to want to prove that, even though after the ball was over I was virtually unable to write for three or four years.  From 1962 to 1967 is the longest I've gone, since becoming a writer, without publishing a book.  Alimony and recurring court costs had bled me of every penny I could earn by teaching and writing and, hardly into my thirties, I was thousands of dollars in debt to my friend and editor Joe Fox.  The loan was to help pay for my analysis, which I needed primarily to prevent me from going out and committing murder because of the alimony and court costs incurred for having served two years in a childless marriage.  The image that teased me during those years was of a train that had been shunted onto the wrong track.  In my early twenties, I had been zipping right along there, you know -- on schedule, express stops only, final destination clearly in mind; and then suddenly I was on the wrong track, speeding off into the wilds.  I'd ask myself, How the hell do you get this thing back on the right track?  Well, you can't.  I've continued to be surprised, over the years, whenever I discover myself, late at night, pulling into the wrong station.

Philip Roth's novels have won two National Book Awards, two National Book Critics Circle awards, three PEN/Faulkner Awards, and a Pulitzer Prize (American Pastoral, 1997).  His Paris Review interview was published in 1984.

John Ashbery: The Art of Poetry (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)

John Ashbery (photo Giovanni Giovannetti / Effigie)

Where is poetry to be found?

Interviewer:

Three Poems is largely prose, prose poetry, rather than verse.  Some readers would object rather strenuously to calling it poetry. Within this kind of form, I am wondering where, for you, the poetry specifically is to be found?  What is the indispensable element that makes poetry?

Ashbery:

That is one of those good but unanswerable questions.  For a long time a very prosaic language, a language of ordinary speech, has been in my poetry.  It seems to me that we are most ourselves when we are talking, and we talk in a very irregular and antiliterary way.  In Three Poems, I wanted to see how poetic the most prosaic language could be.  And I don't mean just the journalese, but also the inflated rhetoric that is trying very hard to sound poetic but not making it.  One of my aims has been to put together as many different kinds of language and tone as possible, and to shift them abruptly, to overlap them all.  There is a very naive, romantic tone at times, all kinds of clichés, as well as a more deliberate poetic voice.  I also was reacting to the minimalism of some of the poems in The Tennis Court Oath, such as "Europe," which is sometimes just a few scattered words.  I suppose I eventually thought of covering page after page with words, with not even any break for paragraphs in many cases -- could I do this and still feel that I was getting the satisfaction that poetry gives me?  I dont' quite understand why some people are so against prose poetry, which is certainly a respectable and pedigreed form of poetry.  In fact, too much so for my taste.  I had written almost none before Three Poems because there always seemed to be a kind of rhetorical falseness in much that had been done in the past -- Baudelaire's, for instance.  I wanted to see if prose poetry could be written without that self-conscious drama that seems so much a part of ti.  So if it is poetic, it is probably because it tries to stay close to the way we talk and think without expecting what we say to be recorded or remembered.  The pathos and liveliness of ordinary human communication is poetry to me.

John Ashbery's work comprises volumes upon volumes of poetry.  Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won the Pulitizer Prise in 1975, A Wave won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1984, and Girls on the Run (1999) was inspired by the work of artist/novelist Henry Darger.  His Paris Review interview was published in 1983.

P.G. Wodehouse: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)

P.G. Wodehouse

Interviewer:

If you were asked to give advice to somebody who wanted to write humorous fiction, what would you tell him?

Wodehouse:

I'd give him practical advice, and that is always get to the dialogue as soon as possible.  I always feel the thing to go for is speed.  Nothing puts the reader off more than a great slab of prose at the start.  I think the success of every novel -- if it's a novel of action -- depends on the high spots.  The thing to do is to say to yourself, Which are my big scenes? and then get every drop of juice out of them.  The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of the characters in terms of actors in a play.  I say to myself, if a big name were playing this part, and if he found that after a strong first act he had practically nothing to do in the second act, he would walk out.  Now, then, can I twist the story so as to give him plenty to do all the way through?  I believe the only way a writer can keep himself up to the mark is by examining each story coldly before he starts writing it and asking himself if it is all right as a story.  I mean, once you go saying to yourself, This is a pretty weak plot as it stands, but I'm such a hell of a writer that my magic touch will make it okay -- you're sunk.  If they aren't in interesting situations, characters can't be major characters, not even if you have the rest of the troop talk their heads off about them.

P.G. Wodehouse is the author of 96 books that span a seventy-three year career.  His Paris Review interview was published in 1975.

E.B. White: The Art of the Essay (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)

E.B. White

How do you get yourself to write?  E.B. White has some words of advice (personally, I second the suggestion of an occasional drink):

Delay is natural to a writer.  He is like a surfer -- he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in.  Delay is instinctive with him.  He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along.  I have no warm-up exercises, other than to take an occasional drink.  I am apt to let something simmer for a while in my mind before trying to put it into words.  I walk around, straightening pictures on the wall, rugs on the floor -- as though not until everything in the world was lined up and perfectly true could anybody reasonably expect me to set a word down on paper . . . .

There are two faces to discipline.  If a man (who writes) feels like going to a zoo, he should by all means go to a zoo.  He might even be lucky, as I once was when I paid a call at the Bronx Zoo and found myself attending the birth of twin fawns.  It was a fine sight, and I lost no time writing a piece about it.  The other face of discipline is that, zoo or no zoo, diversion or no diversion, in the end a man must sit down and get the words on paper, and against great odds.  This takes stamina and resolution.  Having got them on paper, he must still have the discipline to discard them if they fail to measure up -- he must view them with a jaundiced eye and do the whole thing over as many times as is necessary to achieve excellence, or as close to excellence as he can get.  This varies from one time to maybe twenty.

E.B. White is perhaps most widely known for his and William Strunk's The Elements of Style and his novel Charlotte's Web (1952).  His other works include Is Sex Necessary? Or, Why You Feel the Way You Do (1929), Here Is New York (1949), and The Trumpet of the Swan (1970)  His Paris Review interview was published in 1969.

Jack Kerouac: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)

Jack Kerouac (Photo by Wilbur T. Pippin)

The effects of notoriety (from introductory remarks describing the interview by Ted Berrigan):

The Kerouacs have no telephone.  Ted Berrigan had contacted Jack Kerouac some months earlier and had persuaded him to do the interview.  When he felt the time had come for their meeting to take place Berrigan simply showed up at the Kerouacs' house.  Two friends, the poets Aram Saroyan and Duncan McNaughton, accompanied him.  Kerouac answered the door, and Berrigan quickly told him his name and the visit's purpose.  Kerouac welcomed the poets, but before he could show them in, his wife, a very determined woman, seized him from behind and told the group to leave at once.

"Jack and I began talking simultaneously, saying 'Paris Review!,' 'Interview!,' etcetera," Berrigan recalls, "while Duncan and Aram began to slink back toward the car.  All seemed lost, but I kept talking in what I hoped was a civilized, reasonable, calming, and friendly tone of voice, and soon Mrs. Kerouac agreed to let us in for twenty minutes, on the condition that there be no drinking.

"Once inside, as it became evident that we actually were in pursuit of a serious purpose, Mrs. Kerouac became more friendly, and we were able to commence the interview.  It seems that people still show up constantly at the Kerouacs' looking for the author of On the Road and stay for days, drinking all the liquor and diverting Jack from his serious occupations.  As the evening progressed the atmosphere changed considerably, and Mrs. Kerouac, Stella, proved a gracious and charming hostess."

The interview with Kerouac ripples through discussions of writers, the writing process (Kerouac believes editing and revision damage the integrity of the writing process itself), and the writing life.  Most humorous, particularly in comparison with Berrigan's introductory remarks, is Kerouac's discussion of the travails of the well-known author.  In an era of publishing where contacts and references seem the only way to publish one's first story or novel, perhaps his words will give struggling writers something to laugh about before diving back into query letters:

Work destroyers . . . work destroyers.  Time killers?  I'd say mainly the attentions which are tendered to a writer of "notoriety" (notice I don't say "fame") by secretly ambitious would-be writers who come around, or write, or call, for the sake of the services that are properly the services of a bloody literary agent.  When I was an unknown struggling young writer, as the saying goes, I did my own footwork, I hot-footed up and down Madison Avenue for years, publisher to publisher, agent to agent, and never once in my life wrote a letter to a published famous author asking for advice, or help, or, in Heaven above, had the nerve to actually mail my manuscripts to some poor author who then has to hustle to mail it back before he's accused of stealing my ideas.  My advice to young writers is to get themselves an agent on their own, maybe through their college professors (as I got my first publishers through my prof Mark Van Dorent), and do their own footwork, or "thing" as the slang goes . . . So the work destroyers are nothing but certain people.

The work preservers are the solitudes of night, "when the whole wide world is fast asleep."

Jack Kerouac's Paris Review interview was published in 1968.

Erza Pound: The Art of Poetry (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)

Ezra Pound, Poet, Rutherford, New Jersey, at the home of William Carlos Williams, June 30, 1958. ©Richard Avedon.

Good language, bad language:

Interviewer: One point of connection between literature and politics which you make in your writing interests me particularly.  In the ABC of Reading you say that good writers are those who keep the language efficient, and that this is their function.  You disassociate this function from party.  Can a man of the wrong party use language efficiently?

Pound: Yes.  That's the whole trouble!  A gun is just as good, no matter who shoots it.

Interviewer: Can an instrument which is orderly be used to create disorder?  Suppose good language is used to forward bad government?  Doesn't bad government make bad language?

Pound: Yes, but bad language is bound to make in addition bad government, whereas good language is not bound to make bad government.  That again is clear Confucius: if the orders aren't clear they can't be carried out.  Lloyd George's laws were such a mess, the lawyers never knew what they meant.  And Talleyrand proclaimed that they changed the meaning of words between one conference and another.  The means of communication breaks down, and that of course is what we are suffering now.  We are enduring the drive to work on the subconscious without appealing to the reason.  They repeat a trade name with the music a few times, and then repeat the music without it so that the music will give you the name.  I think of the assault.  We suffer from the use of language to conceal thought and to withhold all vital and direct answers There is the definite use of propaganda, forensic language, merely to conceal and mislead.

Interview: Where do ignorance and innocence end and the chicanery begin?

Pound: There is natural ignorance and there is artificial ignorance.  I should say at the present moment the artificial ignorance is about eighty-five percent.

Interviewer: What kind of action can you hope to take?

Pound: The only chance for victory over the brainwash is the right of every man to have his ideas judged one at a time.  You never get clarity as long as you have these package words, as long as a word is used by twenty-five people in twenty-five different ways.  That seems to me to be the first right, if there is going to be any intellect left.

His Paris Review interview was published in 1962.

Marianne Moore: The Art of Poetry (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)

Marianne Moore (Marianne Moore tossing out the first ball, opening day at Yankee Stadium. Photo: Bob Olen, 1968. Marianne Moore Collection, Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia.)

Weighing the "profession" of writing:

Interviewer:

I was intrigued when you wrote that "American has in Wallace Stevens at least one artist whom professionalism will not demolish."  What sort of literary professionalism did you have in mind?  And do you find this a feature of America still?

Marianne Moore:

Yes.  I think that writers sometimes lose verve and pugnacity, and he never would say "frame of reference" or "I wouldn't know."  A question I am often asked is: What work can I find that will enable me to spend my whole time writing?  Charles Ives, the composer, says, "You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.  The fabric weaves itself whole.  My work in music helped my business and my work in business helped my music."  I am like Charles Ives.  I guess Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller would not agree with me.

Interviewer:

But how does professionalism make a writer lose his verve and pugnacity?

Moore:

Money may have something to do with it, and being regarded as a pundit.  Wallace Stevens was really very much annoyed at being cataloged, categorized, and compelled to be scientific about what he was doing --- to give satisfaction, to answer the teachers.  He wouldn't do that.  I think the same of William Carlos Williams.  I think he wouldn't make so much of the great American language if he were plausible and tractable.  That's the beauty of it -- he is willing to be reckless.  If you can't be that, what's the point of the whole thing?

Poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972) published numerous collections of poetry and essays, including Predilections: Literary Essays, 1955, O To Be a Dragon, 1959, and the edited anthology Homage to Henry James, 1971.  The interview with The Paris Review was published in 1961.