It’s dangerous not to let things age, and if something is really good, you should put it away for a month.
I find the most difficult part of writing is to get it down initially because what you have written is usually so terrible that it’s disheartening, you don’t want to go on. That’s what I think is hard—the discouragement that comes from seeing what you have done. This is all you could manage?
Although I’ve made notes for things and even written synopses sitting in trains or on park benches, for the complete composition of things I need absolute solitude, preferably an empty house.
We know that most great novels and stories come not from things that are entirely invented, but from perfect knowledge and close observation. To say they are made up is an injustice in describing them. I sometimes say that I don’t make up anything—obviously, that’s not true. But I am usually uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination.
...every writer I know and admire has essentially drawn either from his own life or his knowledge of things in life. Great dialogue, for instance, is very difficult to invent. Almost all great books have actual people in them.
[Writing] was an impulse I had from the beginning. I didn’t know what made me write at the beginning, but later I understood. It’s simple: the one who writes it keeps it. I suppose I felt that, though I wouldn’t have been able to say it.
If you can believe this book [Light Years], and it is true, there is a dense world built on matrimony, a life enclosed, as it says, in ancient walls. It is about the sweetness of those unending days.
[With Light Years] I wanted to compose a book of those things that one remembers in life. That was the notion. I suppose that the plot of the book is the passage of time and what it does to people and things.
[At one point Viri, a character in Light Years, says, “There are really two kinds of life. There is the one people believe you’re living and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, that other we long to see.”] Isn’t this like that very small book that Poe said could never be written, “My Heart Laid Bare.” There is a socially acceptable, let us say, conventional life that we live and discuss and pretty much adhere to, and there is the other life, which is the life of thought, fantasy, and desire that is not openly discussed. I’m sure, the times being what they are, there are people who do talk about it and probably on television, but in general, in most lives, these two things are completely distinct. I am conscious of them and attempted to write a little about it.
I sometimes write thinking of a certain painter, and I wrote Light Years thinking of Bonnard from the very beginning.
Above all, [a short story] must be compelling. You’re sitting around the campfire of literature, so to speak, and various voices speak up out of the dark and begin talking. With some, your mind wanders or you doze off, but with others you are held by every word. The first line, the first sentence, the first paragraph, all have to compel you.
Further, I think, it should be memorable. It must have significance. Merely because something has been written is not adequate justification for it.... What it must do is somehow astonish you, and what it must be is somehow complete.
I would say Isaac Babel [is my favorite short-story writer]. He has the three essentials of greatness: style, structure, and authority. There are other writers who have that, of course—Hemingway, in fact, had those three things. But Babel particularly appeals to me because of the added element of his life, which seems to me to give his work an additional poignancy. He lived in difficult times; he was murdered in the end by the state. He disappeared in the camps. We don’t know what happened to him. He was the one who said, “I wasn’t given time to finish.”
My idea of writing is of unflinching and continual effort, somehow trying to find the right words until you reach a point where you can make no further progress and you either have something or you don’t.
I’ve never had a story in The New Yorker; everything has been rejected. At one point I came close. I had written a story called “Via Negativa,” and I had a note from Roger Angell who said, please come in to talk about it. I sat in a little gray office with him, and he told me that he liked the story very much. He said, This is really quite good, but I’m afraid we can’t take it. I was stunned. I said, Why is that? He said, At The New Yorker we have two rules we never violate. The first is that we never publish anything with obscenity in it. Second, we never publish any stories about writers or writing. I hardly knew what to say. What about the Bech stories by Updike? I asked. He said, Well, that’s another matter. A year or two later I was talking to Saul Bellow about this, and he said, I tried to get them to publish a section of The Victim, but they didn’t accept it. They said they had two rules that they never violated. One, they never published anything that had obscenity in it. Two, they never published anything about death or dying.
It happened that one of the first pieces of journalism I did was an interview with Nabokov. They said, First of all, he only gives written interviews. You must send in your questions in advance. So I sat down and wrote ten we assume penetrating questions, which I wouldn’t like to see again, and sent them to him. No response, of course. But it was arranged that if I went to Europe I would be able to meet and talk to him. I reached Europe and was in Paris, it was in the winter, and I was in one of those hotels where they still had telephones with a separate piece you held to your ear, the old French phones. I got hold of the Time man in Geneva who had arranged the meeting with Nabokov, and he gave me the distressing news that the interview was called off. Nabokov had changed his mind. I said, How can he do that? I’ve come to Europe. Well, he’s called it off. I didn’t know what to do. He said, Why don’t you call him? The idea was unthinkable. It was like somebody saying why don’t you call the Pope? There seemed to be no alternative, so I called. A voice said, Montreux Palace Hotel, and I said, Mr. Nabokov, please. The phone was ringing and, of course, I didn’t know what I was going to say. A woman answered. It was Vera Nabokov. I explained who I was and what had happened. She said, Oh no, my husband can’t do an interview. He’s not well. You must submit your questions in writing. I told her I had done that but there had been no response, and she repeated that he answered only in writing. I must tell you, she said, my husband does not ad-lib. Nevertheless, I asked if she would not, since I had come to Europe, be good enough to see if he wouldn’t give me a few moments, merely so I had a physical impression, some description to add to the answers. She put the phone down, and I pictured her just looking out the window for a moment and then picking it up again and saying, “I’m sorry, he can’t.” But she surprised me by coming back and saying, My husband will meet you at five o’clock on Sunday afternoon in the Green Bar of the Montreux Palace. She repeated he date and time to be sure it was understood.
At five o’clock on Sunday, the elevator door opened, and out stepped a tall, blazered, gray-trousered man whom I instantly recognized, and a white-haired woman in a handsome Rodier suit. It was the Nabokovs. They came to the table. I was a little nervous. I was not an accomplished journalist; I knew Nabokov did not ad-lib; I was unable to bring a tape recorder because of that, and I would be unable to take notes, I knew, for the same reason. I had as my only source of strength the—I am certain—fabrication of Truman Capote that he had spent a night drinking and talking with Marlon Brando in Tokyo and the next day had written down the entire conversation exactly. It appeared in The New Yorker. I thought if Capote could do it for an entire night while drinking I could certainly do thirty abstemious minutes with Nabokov. I summoned all my powers and said, I’m going to concentrate on everything he says, listen, and not think of being clever or what I should say; I simply want to listen to him. It turned out to be about forty-five minutes. We were getting along quite well, and finally he said, Shall we have another julep? He was referring whimsically to scotch and soda. But I was afraid that one more drink might begin to obliterate the text. So I excused myself. I had the distinct impression we could have gone on and had dinner, but I was afraid to. I apologized for having taken up so much time and immediately went to the railroad station where I wrote down everything I remembered. It wasn’t in order, of course, but it was four or five pages, and from it I constructed an interview. It was all fairly exact, I must say. I missed the train, but I cherish the memory.
[Graham Greene] wanted to know if the book [I sent him, Light Years,] had been published in England. I said that no, it had been turned down by publishers there. He said, Has it been submitted to The Bodley Head? He had a close connection to them. I believe his brother was one of the directors of the house. Yes, I said, but The Bodley had turned it down. He said, What reason did they give? I said that they felt it would not make any money if they published it. He said, That’s no reason not to publish a book. Let me inquire. He arranged for them to publish it, which they did, and they had been right—but, of course, he was also.
A movie is a single performance, and it’s remembered as a performance. Movies are never reperformed. They are not alive. They are sometimes remade years later, but everything in them is absolutely fixed and will always be fixed. They are not like great prose, which, as one critic pointed out, seems to catch fire first in one place and then in another. I tend to talk about them disrespectfully, but no matter what is said they have assumed the paramount position in American culture. They are unquestionably the enemy of writing, and this is something that is unresolvable.
[What is the ultimate impulse] to write? Because all this is going to vanish. The only thing left will be the prose and poems, the books, what is written down. Man was very fortunate to have invented the book. Without it the past would completely vanish, and we would be left with nothing, we would be naked on earth.
No comments:
Post a Comment