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Isak Dinesen: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 3)

Isak Dinesen

Isak Dinesen is now most famous for Out of Africa, which is somewhat sad because she was fiercely devoted to the "tale," whether they be myths, sagas, folklore, contes, or Shakespeare.

Isak: It came naturally to me.  My literary friends at home tell me that the heart of my work is not in the idea but in the line of the tale.  Something you can tell, like one can tell Ali Bab and the Forty Thieves but one could not tell Anna Karenina.

Interviewer: But there are some who find your tales "artificial"....

Dinesen:  Artificial?  Or course they are artificial.  They were meant to be, for such is the essence of the tale-telling art.  And I felt I acknowledged that . . . or rather, pointed it out . . . by calling my first tales "Gothic."  When I used the word Gothic, I didn't mean the real Gothic, but the imitation of the Gothic, the Romantic age of Byron, the age of Horace Walpole, who built Strawberry Hill, the age of the Gothic Revival . . . you know Walpole's Castle of Otranto, of course?

Interviewer: Yes, indeed.  In a tale, the plot is all-important, isn't it?

Dinesen: Yes, it is.  I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write.  Then come the characters, and they take, over, they make the story.  But all this ends by being a plot.  For other writers, that seems an unnatural thing.  But a proper tales has a shape and an outline.  In a painting the frame is important.  Where does the picture end?  What details should one include?  Or omit!  Where does the line go that cuts off the picture?  People always ask me, they say, In "The Deluge at Norderney," were those characters drowned or saved at the end?  (You remember they are trapped in a loft during a flood and spend the night recounting their stories while awaiting rescue.)  Well, what can I reply?  How can I tell them?  That's outside the story.  I really don't know!

Most of these tales are rooted in the 19th century, and the interviewer notes that very little of her work is set in modern times.  In this, she is different from both Ellison and Simenon who've been featured here this week.  Instead of beginning with the exploration of the moral code of our times or with Simenon's "third story" in which we live, Dinesen starts with the flavor of the tale -- and that means the era of her grandparents.  Looking backward is something she relishes:

Now, in modern life and in modern fiction there is a kind of atmosphere and above all an interior movement -- inside the characters -- which is something else again.  I feel that in life and in art people have drawn a little apart in this century.  Solitude is now the people have drawn a little apart in this century.  Solitude is now the universal theme.  But I write about characters within a design, how they act upon one another.  Relation with others is important to me, you see, friendship is precious to me, and i have been blessed with heroic friendships.  But time in my tales is flexible.... The present is always unsettled, no one has had time to contemplate it in tranquility.  I was a painter before I was a writer . . . and a painter never wants the subject right under his nose; he wants to stand back and study the landscape with half-closed eyes.

George Simenon: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 3)

George Simenon

George Simenon was a highly prolific novelist -- perhaps the most prolific of the twentieth century.  Due his iconic character Commissaire Maigret, Simenon's works have likely touched us even if we (21st-century Americans) don't recognize his name.  In addition to his Maigret novels (some based in America, many translated to film and tv), Simenon wrote several "psychological novels," including Le fils (1957).  The difference between commercial writing and literary writing formed a part of The Paris Review's interview.  "The big difference would be in the concessions.  In writing for any commercial purpose you have always to make concessions," Simenon says.  Concessions might be made, for example, to the idea of an orderly and sweet life -- but always the concessions are to "current morals":

Maybe that is the most important.  You can't write anything commercial without accepting some code.  There is always a code -- like the code in Hollywood, and in television and radio.  For example, there is now a very good program on television, it is probably the best for plays.  The first two acts are always first class.  You have the impression of something completely new and strong, and then at the end the concession comes.  Not always a happy end, but something comes to arrange everything from the point of view of a morality or philosophy -- you know.  All the characters, who were beautifully done, change completely in the last ten minutes.

Perhaps because of these codes and how they organize our twentieth century understanding of life and art, Simenon firmly believes that one cannot return to the kind of novel written in the twentieth century (a wish of mid-century critics, the interviews as a whole suggest).  It has to do with the kind of story we're in:

It is impossible, completely impossible, I think.  Because we live in a time when writers do not always have barriers around them, they can try to present characters by the most complete, the most full expression.  You may show love in a very nice story, the first ten months of two lovers, as in the literature of a long time ago.  Then you have a second kind of story: they begin to be bored; that was the literature of the end of the last century.  And then, if you are free to go further, the man is fifty and tries to have another life, the woman gets jealous, and you have children mixed in it; that is the third story.  We are the third story now.  We don't stop when they marry, we don't stop when they begin to be bored, we go to the end.

Simenon is speaking of the mid-1950s.  I wonder if we've gone on to another story by the 21st century, or if we continue explore this one -- if finally from a woman's perspective.

Simenon's interview contains a number of interesting tidbits and anecdotes sure to thrill a writer.  For instance, Simenon, famous for producing his novels in two-week spans, shares his writing regiment (with doctor's visit), which is surely not for the faint of heart (literally).  But my favorite is this piece of advice on prose.  It remains applicable today.

Writers, take note:

Simenon: Just one piece of general advice from a writer has been very useful to me.  It was from Colette.  I was writing short stories for Le Matin, and Colette was literary editor at that time.  I remember I gave her two short stories and she returned them and I tried again and tried again.  Finally she said, Look, it is too literary.  So I followed her advice.  It's what I do when I write, the main job when I rewriting.

Interviewer: What do you mean by "too literary"?  What do you cut out, certain kinds of word?

Simenon: Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect.  Every sentence which is there just for the sentence.  You know, you have a beautiful sentence--cut it.

Ralph Ellison: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 3)

Ralph Ellison

The next set of interviews -- with Ralph Ellison, Georges Simenon, and Isak Dinesen -- takes place in the mid-1950s.  The timing is something each writer considers.  The 19th century still resonates -- as Isak Dinesen says, it is the time of "our" (her) grandparents, and so the time of "us."  In the 1950s, a debate seems to have raged about whether to pull sharply away from the 19th century or not.

For Ralph Ellison, author of The Invisible Man, questions raised in the 19th century remain relevant .  He speaks of course of the status and symbolic importance of the African American.  The change he sees in 1950s is the role of literature in general, and he fights for art that wrestles with the deepest moral issues of our time.  This fight is not new -- or old.  Ellison's ambition finds echoes and reiterations throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.  We have seen this in Salman Rushdie's interview, among others.  My everyday conversations about writing and literature delve into this all the time.  What is the purpose of literature?

Ellison:

You know, I'm still thinking of your question about the use of Negro experience as material for fiction.  One function of serious literature is to deal with the moral core of a given society.  Well, in the United States the Negro and his status have always stood for that moral concern.  He symbolizes among other things the human and social possibility of equality.  This is the moral question raised in our two great nineteenth-century novels, Moby-Dick and Huckleberry Finn.  The very center of Twain's book revolves finally around the boy's relations with Nigger Jim and the question of what Huck should do about getting Jim free after the two scoundrels had sold him.  There is a magic here worth conjuring, and that reaches to the very nerve of the American consciousness -- so why should I abandon it?  Our so-called race problem has now lined up with the world problem of colonialism and the struggle of the West to gain the allegiance of the remaining non-white people who have thus far remained outside the communist sphere; thus its possibilities for art have increased rather than lessened.  Looking at the novelist as manipulator and depictor of moral problems, I ask myself how much of the achievement of democratic ideals in the United States has been affected by the steady pressure of Negroes and those whites who were sensitive to the implications of our condition, and I know that without that pressure the position of our country before the world would be much more serious than it is even now.  Here is part of the social dynamics of a great society.  Perhaps the discomfort about protest in books by Negro authors comes because, since the nineteenth century, American literature has avoided moral searching.  It was too painful and besides there were specific problems of language and form to which the writers could address themselves.  They did wonderful things, but perhaps they left the real problems untouched.  There are exceptions, of course, like Faulkner who has been working the great moral theme all along, taking it up where Mark Twain put it down.

Dealing with the moral code of America and depicting the status of the African American are no small ambitions.  Ellison discusses the importance of African American folklore to his literary aims and his writing process.  For him, "rites, manners, customs, and so forth" are the key for understanding and rendering not only African Americans, but any group's character.

It took me a long time to learn how to adapt such examples of myth into my work -- also ritual.  The use of ritual is equally a vital part of the creative process.  I learned a few things from Eliot, Joyce, and Hemingway, but not how to adapt them.  When I started writing, I knew that in both The Waste Land and Ulysses, ancient myth and ritual were used to give form and significance to the material; but it took me a few years to realize that the myths and rites which we find functioning in our everyday lives could be used in the same way.... People rationalize what they shun or are incapable of dealing with; these superstitions and their rationalizations become ritual as they govern behavior.  The rituals become social forms, and it is one of the functions of the artist to recognize them and raise them to the level of art.

The Paris Review interview with Ralph Ellison took place in 1955.