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Marilynne Robinson: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)

Marilynne Robinson

This Monday, we post snippets of the last Paris Review Interview from Volume 4 -- indeed, from the whole book series.  I hope you enjoyed the anecdotes, words of advice, and reflections about the life of the writer captured in this series.

Here, then, is Marilynne Robinson on beauty:

Interviewer:

[Your character] Ames [from Gilead] says that in our everyday world there is "more beauty than our eyes can bear."  He's living in America in the late 1950s.  Would he say that today?

Robinson:

You have to have a certain detachment in order to see beauty for yourself rather than something that has been put in quotation marks to be understood as "beauty."  Think about Dutch painting, where sunlight is falling on a basin of water and a woman is standing there in the clothes that she would wear when she wakes up in the morning -- that beauty is a casual glimpse of something very ordinary.  Or a painting like Rembrandt's Carcass of Beef, where a simple piece of meat caught his eye because there was something mysterious about it.  You also get that in Edward Hopper: Look at the sunlight! or Look at the human being!  These are instances of genius.  Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that.  And it's not Versailles.  It's a brick wall with a ray of sunlight falling on it.

At the same time, there has always been a basic human tendency toward a dubious notion of beauty.  Think about cultures that rarify themselves into courts in which people paint themselves with lead paint and get dumber by the day, or women have ribs removed to have their waists cinched tighter.  There's no question that we have our versions of that now.  The most destructive thing we can do is act as thought this is some sign of cultural, spiritual decay rather than humans just acting human, which is what we're doing most of the time.

Marilynne Robinson is the author of Housekeeping (1980), Gilead (2004), The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (1998), and Home (2008).  Her interview with The Paris Review was published in 2008.

David Grossman: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)

David Grossman

Where Stories Come From:

Interviewer:

Do your story ideas usually come about in this kind of way -- seemingly out of nowhere?

Grossman:

I often feel that my subjects find me.  When I start writing about a character, a young lady, for instance, I don't understand why she is so important to me.  She is totally alien and comes from another milieu.  Yet gradually I see how choosing her was inevitable, and how she evokes in me things that without her, I never would have been able to explore.  Then sometimes I'll have a character and not know what to do with him.  Take the novella "Frenzy," which I was writing, on and off, for eleven years, between books.  I began with the character of this obsessive, jealous husband, but I couldn't find him a partner for his voyage through the night.  I tried putting him with his brother, with his friend, there were three or four other attempts, and each time I felt I could not write it, because I didn't have someone capable of balancing all his craziness.  And then one day a character named Esti just jumped to the page.  I wasn't sure if I liked her.  She was foreign to me, but she forced her way in, and suddenly the book was completed.  I was so relieved.  Having Esti allowed me to explore this rut of feelings, this monster, jealousy....

Interviewer:

Do you have any strategies you employ when you get stuck?

Grossman:

Sometimes I write a letter to my protagonist, as if he were a real human being.  I ask, What's the difficulty?  Why can't you make it?  What is preventing me from understanding you?  It's always helpful.

Grossman's books include See Under: Love (1986), Be My Knife (1998), and Someone to Run With (2000).  The Paris Review Interview with Grossman was published in 2007.

Orhan Pamuk: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)

Orhan Pamuk

Interviewer:

When you're experimenting with ideas, how do you chose the form of your novels?  Do you start with an image, with a first sentence?

Pamuk:

There is no constant formula.  But I make it my business not to write two novels in the same mode.  I try to change everything.   This is why so many of my readers tell me, I liked this novel of yours, it's a shame you didn't write other novels like that, or, I never enjoyed one of your novels until you wrote that one -- I've heard that especially about The Black Book.  In fact I hate to hear this.  It's fun, and a challenge, to experiment with form and style, and language and mood and persona, and to think about each book differently.

The subject matter of a book may come to me from various sources.  With My Name Is Red, I wanted to write about my ambition to become a painter.  I had a false start; I began to write a monographic book focused on one painter.  Then I turned the painter into various painters working together in an atelier.  The point of view changed because now there were other painters talking.  At first I was thinking of writing about a contemporary painter, but then I thought this Turkish painter might be too derivative, too influenced by the West, so I went back in time to write about miniaturists.  That was how I found my subject.

Some subjects also necessitate certain formal innovations or storytelling strategies.  Sometimes, for example, you've just seen something, or read something, or been to a movie, or read a newspaper article, and then you think, I'll make a potato speak, or a dog, or a tree.  Once you get the idea you start thinking about symmetry and continuity in the novel.  And you feel, Wonderful, no one's done this before.

Finally, I think of things for years.  I may have ideas and then I tell them to my close friends.  I keep lots of notebooks for possible novels I may write.  Sometimes I don't write them, but if I open a notebook and begin taking notes for it, it is likely that I will write that novel.  So when I'm finishing one novel my heart may be set on one of these projects; and two months after finishing one I start writing the other.

Panuk's books include The White Castle (1990), My Name is Red (2001), The Museum of Innocence (2009).  His interview with The Paris Review was published in 2005

Haruki Murakami: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)

Haruki Maurakami

Are you one of the thousands of writers struggling to get an agent and a publishing house behind you?  Well, perhaps it's time to take a page from Haruki Murakami's book.

While a self-styled surrealist writer, Murakami deliberately wrote Norweigen Wood in the realist style so to break into mainstream publishing.  Otherwise, he would have remained a "cult writer," as he calls it.

Still, surrealist and magical realism techniques are what capture his imagination.  Here are some of his thoughts on magical realism -- and how he subverts it for his own purpose:

Interviewer:

One of the cardinal rules of magical realism is not to call attention to the fantastic elements of the story.  You, however, disregard this rule: your characters often comment on the strangness of the story line, even call the reader's attention to it.  What purpose does this serve?  Why?

Murakami:

That's a very interesting question.  I'd like to think about it . . . Well, I think it's my honest observation of how strange the world is.  My protagonists are experiencing what I experience as I write, which is also what the readers experience as they read.  Kafka or García Marquez, what they are writing is more literature, in the classical sense.  My stories are more actual, more contemporary, more the postmodern experience.  Think of it like a movie set, where everything -- all the props, the books on the wall, the shelves -- is fake.  The walls are made of paper.  In the classical kind of magic realism, the walls and the books are real.  If something is fake in my fiction, I like to say it's fake.  I don't want to act as if it's real.

Interviewer:

To continue the metaphor of the movie set, might the pulling back of the camera intend to show the workings of the studio?

Murakami:

I don't want to persuade the reader that it's a real thing; I want to show it as it is.  In a sense, I'm telling those readers that it's just a story -- it's fake.  But when you experience the fake as real, it can be real.  It's not easy to explain.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers offered the real thing; that was their task.  In War and Peace Tolstoy describes the battleground so closely that the readers believe it's the real thing.  But I don't.  I'm not pretending it's the real thing.  We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news.  We are fighting a fake war.  Our government is fake.  But we find reality in this fake world.  So our stories are the same; we are walking through the fake scenes, but ourselves, as we walk through these scenes, are real.  The situation is real, in the sense that it's a commitment, it's a true relationship.  That's what I want to write about.

Murahami's work includes Norwegian Wood (2000), Sputnik Sweetheart (2001), and the upcoming 1Q84 (2011).  His interview with The Paris Review was published in 2004.

V. S. Naipaul: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 4)

V.S. Naipaul (copyright Getty)

As Naipul and his work shows us, the author's perspective or voice is not just about style.  It's also about place and history.  And while Naipul is right that an English -- or American -- writer is born into a great knowledge of origins and culture, I'd venture to suggest that many new and emerging American writers would benefit from revisiting that history/culture.  If you're a writer having trouble with "voice," I suggest bringing that historical and cultural knowledge to bear on it:

Interviewer:

Do you think it is crucial to your function and material as a writer to know where you came from and what made you what you are?

Naipaul:

When you're like me -- born in a place where you don't know the history, and no one tells you the history, and the history, in fact, doesn't exist, or in fact exists only in documents -- when you are born like that, you have to learn about where you came from.  It takes a lot of time.  You can't simply write about the world as thought it is all there, all granted to you.  If you are French or an English writer, you are born to a great knowledge of your origins and your culture.  When you are born like me, in an agricultural colony far away, you have to learn everything.  The writing has been a process of inquiry and learning for me.

Naipul's work includes A House of Mr. Biswas (1961), India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990), and Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the Converted Peoples (1998).  His interview with The Paris Review was published in 1998.

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.