Quotation(s) of the Day

From the Paris Review, Conrad Aiken on "The Art of Poetry, No. 9" (1968):
INTERVIEWER
You’ve spoken a couple of times—in Ushant and more guardedly or more subtly in the poetry—of your faith in consciousness. You speak of the “teleology of consciousness” at one point. This sounds almost as if you’re looking for a new spiritual attitude toward life, a new religion not based on religious dogma or revelation or a conventional God. Is there anything to this?

AIKEN
Possibly. I don’t know whether I’d put it quite like that. Of course I do believe in this evolution of consciousness as the only thing which we can embark on, or in fact, willy-nilly, are embarked on; and along with that will go the spiritual discoveries and, I feel, the inexhaustible wonder that one feels, that opens more and more the more you know. It’s simply that this increasing knowledge constantly enlarges your kingdom and the capacity for admiring and loving the universe. So in that sense I think what you say is correct. Ushant says this.

INTERVIEWER
One statement that’s always impressed me is the preface you recreated for The House of Dust in 1948 in which you wrote that “implicit in this poem was the theory that was to underlie much of the later work—namely, that in the evolution of man’s consciousness, ever widening and deepening and subtilizing his awareness, and in his dedication of himself to this supreme task, man possesses all that he could possibly require in the way of a religious credo: when the half-gods go, the gods arrive; he can, if he only will, become divine.” Is that too extreme a statement, do you feel, now?

AIKEN
No, I would stand by that. Which is really, in sum, more or less what my Grandfather Potter preached in New Bedford.

[. . .]
INTERVIEWER
You once wrote, speaking of the great writers of the American nineteenth century—Whitman, Melville, Hawthorne, James, Poe: “We isolate, we exile our great men, whether by ignoring them or praising them stupidly. And perhaps this isolation we offer them is our greatest gift.”* It seems to me you didn’t receive much attention from the time of your Pulitzer Prize in 1930 until, at best, fairly recently—that you were ignored in the way you speak of for almost thirty years. “This isolation we offer” as “our greatest gift”—would this be true of yourself also?

AIKEN
I think so. I think it’s very useful to be insulated from your surrounds, and this gives it to you because it gives you your inviolate privacy, without pressures, so that you can just be yourself. I think that what’s happening today, with all the young poets rushing from one college to another, lecturing at the drop of a hat and so on, is not too good; I think it might have a bad effect on a great many of the young poets. They—to quote Mark Twain—“swap juices” a little too much, so that they are in danger of losing their own identity and don’t give themselves time enough in which to work out what’s really of importance to them—they’re too busy. I think Wordsworth and Coleridge had the right idea, too—they deliberately sequestered themselves.
______________________________________
* London Mercury, vol. 4, no. 23, Sept. 1921. [link to New Republic, Oct. 12, 1921: 174, quoting this line]

"A window on the more encompassing horizons of our age"

It's not the business of a qualified and valid critic to gush about what he "likes" or cavil about what "displeases" him; people's arthritic perspectives and petty appetites are the whole reason why criticism (and religion, and philosophy, and culture and politics) is needed in the first place, to dilate and enrich prevailing concepts of what the cosmos of humanity and culture is capable of, lest it shrivel down to a microcosm of masturbatory trivia ("virtualia"). It's definitely not part of a critic's function to flog commodities and serve as an adjunct to a book's promotional apparatus; above all else, as corporatist methods and techniques of marketing grow more and more coordinated and perfected, it is more imperative than ever to discriminate between commodities that have no higher reason for existing than serving as a trigger for the release of cash, and bona fide organisms of culture, conscience, and the concentration of value-intelligence. If at all possible, intelligent criticism should act as a window on the more encompassing horizons of our age, whether much of anyone cares for such dilation or Olympian vistas or not.

-Kenneth R. Smith, Comics Journal 301, p. 179

Quotation(s) of the Day

From the Paris Review, James Salter on "The Art of Fiction, No. 133" (1993):
I hate the first inexact, inadequate expression of things. The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another.

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.

Quotation(s) of the Day

From the Paris Review, J. G. Ballard on "The Art of Fiction, No. 85" (1984):
...I quite consciously rely on my obsessions in all my work ... I deliberately set up an obsessional frame of mind. In a paradoxical way, this leaves one free of the subject of the obsession. It’s like picking up an ashtray and staring so hard at it that one becomes obsessed by its contours, angles, texture, et cetera, and forgets that it is an ashtray—a glass dish for stubbing out cigarettes.

Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one’s conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping-stones.

...for the imaginative writer, the exercise of the imagination is part of the basic process of coping with reality...

...if I don’t write, say on holiday, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream.

I’m never happier than when I can write about drained swimming pools and abandoned hotels. But I’m not sure if that’s decadence or simply an attempt to invert and reverse the commonplace, to turn the sock inside out. I’ve always been intrigued by inversions of that kind, or any kind.

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements. By the eighteenth book, one has a sense of having bricked oneself into a niche, a roosting place for other people’s pigeons. I wouldn’t recommend it.

With short stories I do a brief synopsis of about a page, and only if I feel the story works as a story, as a dramatic narrative with the right shape and balance to grip the reader’s imagination, do I begin to write it.... In the case of the novels, the synopsis is much longer. For High-Rise, it was about twenty-five thousand words, written in the form of a social worker’s report on the strange events that had taken place in this apartment block, an extended case history. I wish I’d kept it; I think it was better than the novel. In the case of The Unlimited Dream Company, I spent a full year writing a synopsis that was eventually about seventy thousand words long, longer than the eventual novel. In fact, I was cutting down and pruning the synopsis as I wrote the novel. By synopsis I don’t mean a rough draft, but a running narrative in the perfect tense with the dialogue in reported speech, and with an absence of reflective passages and editorializing.

...I haven’t taken any drugs since one terrifying LSD trip in 1967. A nightmarish mistake. It opened a vent of hell that took years to close and left me wary even of aspirin.... It convinced me that a powerful and obsessive enough imagination can reach, unaided, the very deepest layers of the mind. (I take it that beyond LSD there lies nothing.) Imagination is the shortest route between any two conceivable points, and more than equal to any physical rearrangement of the brain’s functions.

The sixties were a time of endlessly multiplying possibilities, of real selflessness in many ways, a huge network of connections between Vietnam and the space race, psychedelia and pop music, linked together in every conceivable way by the media landscape. We were all living inside an enormous novel, an electronic novel, governed by instantaneity. In many ways, time didn’t exist in the sixties, just a set of endlessly proliferating presents. Time returned in the seventies, but not a sense of the future. The hands of the clock now go nowhere.

Quotation(s) of the Day

From the Paris Review, Margaret Atwood on "The Art of Fiction, No. 121" (1990):
In the center of an empire, you can think of your experience as universal. Outside the empire or on the fringes of the empire, you cannot.

We have fallen very much into the habit of judging books by their covers. “Authenticity” has become a concern. I tend to side with creative freedom. Everyone should write as she or he feels impelled. Then let’s judge the results, not the picture of the author on the back flap.

The unique thing about writers is that they write. Therefore they are pickier about words, at least on paper. But everyone “writes” in a way; that is, each person has a “story”—a personal narrative—which is constantly being replayed, revised, taken apart, and put together again. The significant points in this narrative change as a person ages—what may have been tragedy at twenty is seen as comedy or nostalgia at forty. All children “write.” (And paint, and sing.) I suppose the real question is why do so many people give it up. Intimidation, I suppose. Fear of not being good. Lack of time.

All writers feel struck by the limitations of language. All serious writers.

The novel is not merely a vehicle for self-expression or for the rendition of one’s own personal life. I’m quite conservative in that way. I do see the novel as a vehicle for looking at society—an interface between language and what we choose to call reality, although even that is a very malleable substance. When I create characters in novels, those characters aren’t necessarily expressing something that is merely personal.

I think the focus [of my work] has become wider, but surely that happens with every writer. What you do first is learn your craft. That can take years. In order to do that, you have to pick subjects that are small enough for you to handle. You learn how to do a good job with that. Of course, in the larger sense, every novel is—at the beginning—the same opening of a door onto a completely unknown space. I mean, it’s just as terrifying every time. But nevertheless, having made the journey a few times, you have little guideposts, little signposts in the back of your mind.

I still get a few young folks who want to make their reputations by shooting me down. Any writer who has been around for a while gets a certain amount of that. I was very intolerant as a youthful person. It’s almost necessary, that intolerance; young people need it in order to establish credentials for themselves.

Quotation(s) of the Day

From the Paris Review, Anthony Burgess on "The Art of Fiction, No. 48" (1973):
[The afternoon is] a quiet time. It’s a time when one’s body is not at its sharpest, not at its most receptive—the body is quiescent, somnolent; but the brain can be quite sharp. I think, also, at the same time that the unconscious mind has a habit of asserting itself in the afternoon. The morning is the conscious time, but the afternoon is a time in which we should deal much more with the hinterland of the consciousness.

I think every author wants to make his audience. But it’s in his own image, and his primary audience is a mirror.

I do feel that the author has to know best about what he’s writing—from the viewpoint of structure, intention, and so on. The critic has the job of explaining deep-level elements which the author couldn’t know about. As for saying where—technically, in matters of taste and so on—a writer is going wrong, the critic rarely says what the author doesn’t know already.

I start at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop.... I chart a little first—list of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But one daren’t overplan; so many things are generated by the sheer act of writing.

I despise whatever is obviously ephemeral and yet is shown as possessing some kind of ultimate value. The Beatles, for instance. Most youth culture, especially music, is based on so little knowledge of tradition, and it often elevates ignorance into a virtue. Think of the musically illiterate who set themselves up as “arrangers.” And youth is so conformist, so little concerned with maverick values, so proud of being rather than making, so bloody sure that it and it alone knows.

[Y]ou can’t be a genius and sexually impotent. I still think that inspiration comes out of the act of making an artifact, a work of craft.

I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.

One has to wait, I’m afraid—a long time sometimes—for the experience one’s had to present itself in workable form, as a form that can be shaped into something like a work of art.

I think there’s more artistic pleasure to be gained from the ingenious circumvention of a taboo than from what is called total permissiveness.

Literature ... thrives on taboos, just as all art thrives on technical difficulties.

I don’t ... think that the job of literature is to teach us how to behave, but I think it can make clearer the whole business of moral choice by showing what the nature of life’s problems is.

Comedy is concerned with truth quite as much as tragedy; and the two, as Plato recognized, have something fundamental in common. They’re both stripping processes; they both tear off externals and show man as a poor forked animal. Satire is a particular kind of comedy, limiting itself to particular areas of behavior, not to the general human condition.

I think, if I had enough money, I’d give up writing tomorrow.

Quotation(s) of the Day

From the Paris Review, John Fowles on "The Art of Fiction, No. 109" (1989):
...it’s often through personal diaries — however embarrassing they are to read now — that the novelist discovers his true bent — that he can narrate real events and distort them to please himself, describe character, observe other human beings, hypothesize, invent, all the rest.

Students nowadays seem to want to “place” precisely, to locate precisely, everything about a writer’s work: what he is, what has made him or her what they are, and so on. It seems to me that to imprison it is to deny something very essential about writing.... [I]t is very important we stay free.

This relation, between man and nature, is far more important and real to me than that between man and God, even between man and other men. I also find it intensely pleasurable, endlessly rich. Men often bore, books often bore, all things human can bore; nature, never.

That ours is in general a heroic age seems to me ridiculous. We are near stifling and exterminating our planet. What scientific and technological advances we have made are flagrantly not paralleled by any moral or ethical ones. By and large men are never moral; they always let themselves be pressured into the amoral or the immoral. In terms of history men have failed; it is time we tried Eve.