Mary Karr, The Art of Memoir No. 1

Interviewed by Amanda Fortini

For a writer who has shared herself with the public in three memoirs, Mary Karr is an extraordinarily elusive interview subject. Nearly two years passed between our initial contact, in July of 2007, and our first session. There were numerous reasons for this—she was traveling; she was teaching; she lives across the country from me—but perhaps the main reason was that Karr is surprisingly diffident when it comes to talking about herself. “Are you sure I have that much to say?” she wrote in one preinterview e- mail. She was finishing her third memoir, Lit, which was published in November of 2009. She had started the book over twice, throwing away nearly a thousand pages, and had been working long hours to meet her deadline. “Who knows about the memoir,” she wrote, when I asked if I could read it, “It circles me like a gnat. I circle it like a dog staked to a pole. Years it’s gone on that way.”

Finally, this spring, I flew to meet Karr in upstate New York, where she has taught at Syracuse University since 1991. She had not yet warmed to the idea of a formal interview, so we toured her life in Syracuse instead. I observed two graduate seminars: The Perfect Poem, and Dead White Guys, in which she discussed the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Karr is an energetic, engaged, and wry teacher, and her students are fond of her. That night, she introduced a reading by the poet Charles Simic, a longtime friend. Her loud, hearty laughter at his dry wit could be heard above the ambient noise in the room. The following day, on our way to the airport, Karr drove me past the house David Foster Wallace once rented in Syracuse. Wallace and Karr were involved for a time; he proposed to her and had her name tattooed on his arm. We also viewed her old house, previously owned by Tobias Wolff. She had painted the wooden porch herself: it was purple.

Two days later in Manhattan, where Karr has lived since 2003, she was ready to take questions. She is a slim, soigné woman with an intense manner and dark, penetrating eyes. Dressed in a flower-patterned silk shirt and red pants, she slipped off her gold sandals and sat on her white leather couch with her legs tucked beneath her. Her apartment is small, but stylish and efficiently put together; a long desk rests against a wall of built-in bookshelves. Like her writing, Karr’s conversation is heavy on Texas-based idiomatic expressions: “mud bugs,” “jug butt,” “like a pair of walruses being schnuzzed on the same hot rock.” She is self-deprecating and has a bawdy sense of humor. At one point, she leaped up from the couch to retrieve her childhood journal and read a passage: “I am not very successful as a little girl. I will probably be a mess.”

Not exactly. The Liars’ Club, Karr’s 1995 memoir of her Gothic childhood in a swampy East Texas oil-refining town, won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, sold half a million copies, and made its forty-year-old author, who was then an obscure poet, a literary celebrity. (The book takes its title from the motley collection of men with whom her father, an oilman, used to drink and tell tales.) Karr has been credited with, and often blamed for, the onslaught of confessional memoirs published during the late nineties. Though many of them matched The Liars’ Club for grotesque subject matter— the young Karr is raped, molested, and made to witness her mother’s monstrous nervous breakdown— few were as unsentimental, as lyrical, or as mordantly funny.

Five years later Karr published a second memoir, Cherry, which detailed her intellectual and sexual awakenings. In Lit, Karr tackles her early adulthood and what she calls her journey “from black-belt sinner and lifelong agnostic to unlikely Catholic.” Taken together, Karr’s memoirs, written in a singular voice that combines poetic diction and Texas vernacular, form a trilogy that spans the thematic range of the genre: harrowing tale of childhood, coming-of-age story, conversion experience.

Karr has also published four celebrated volumes of poetry: Abacus (1987), The Devil’s Tour (1993), Viper Rum (1998), and Sinners Welcome (2006). “Working on poems is like cheating on your husband,” she said. “It’s what I really want to do but they won’t pay me for it.” Her poems, like her prose, are witty, astringent, and often autobiographical. She is a controversial figure in the poetry establishment for her Pushcart Prize–winning 1991 essay, “Against Decoration,” in which she lamented the shift toward neoformalism in contemporary poetry: “the highbrow doily-making that passes for art today.” Karr argued that this sort of poetry—allusive, impersonal, obscure—had “ceased to perform its primary function,” which was to “move the reader.” And she named names.

For our final session, last August, we met in a hotel room in Irvine, California. Karr had driven up from Phoenix a few days earlier with her older sister, Lecia. They had read One Hundred Years of Solitude aloud in the car. We discussed her experiences teaching poetry to prisoners in England, trucking crawfish in Texas, and hanging out in the Minneapolis punk scene. After an hour and a half, Lecia, who is tall and has hair the color of copper, appeared at the door and announced, in the no- nonsense tone that distinguishes her in the books, that it was time for them to leave. In that instant, Karr seemed to revert from assertive middle-aged author to the obedient kid sister of The Liars’ Club. To see these two characters from the memoirs come to life was an eerie reminder of the obstinate grip of the past.

INTERVIEWER

Why did you feel a need to document your life? Did you write The Liars’ Club in order to get the story off your chest?

MARY KARR

By the time I wrote The Liars’ Club, it was off my fucking chest. I’d slogged through therapy, and my family was fairly healed, in no small part due to my mother’s own hard-won sobriety. I was divorced and sober and, remarkably enough, employed as a college professor teaching poetry. My sister’s family was the picture of prosperity. My dad had died after being paralyzed for five years. My son was thriving. But our story was nonetheless standing in line to be written.

Plus I needed the cake. Like Samuel Johnson said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” I was newly divorced, a single mom feeling around for change in pocket lint. I didn’t have a car, which meant taking my kid to the grocery store in his red wagon, and two hours of bus time to pick him up after school on days I taught. In some ways I was resourceful. My students would move out of town and I’d scavenge their old furniture to sell at a garage sale. My son, Dev, and I used to sneak into the pool at the Sheraton. We’d park illegally in the snowy lot with our bathing suits on under our winter clothes. We’d call it “going to the Bahamas.” That was our vacation. I was thinking about moving Dev’s bed into my room so we could rent out the other bedroom—grasping at straws, really. Hoping to get a book advance was like saying, Maybe I’ll be an Olympic gymnast. I envisioned some small press might cough up a few thousand bucks after the book was finished. I’d been publishing poetry with small presses and when James Laughlin at New Directions paid seven hundred and fifty bucks for The Devil’s Tour, I was tickled. That exceeded my lifetime poetry income.

I’d watched some very fine fiction writers do well: Tobias Wolff and Geoffrey Wolff, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver. But till Ray got the MacArthur, he would still crash in a sleeping bag in my spare room in Somerville when he came to town to read. Being a famous writer was a little like being a famous cocktail waitress—nobody dressed in diamonds. And what did I know about writing a book of prose?

INTERVIEWER

Did you tell your family you were going to write about them?

KARR

I’d warned my mother and sister in advance that I wanted to cover the period of Mother’s psychotic break and her divorce from Daddy. She’d inherited a sum of cash that was vast by our standards, and she bought a bar and married the bartender—her sixth husband. She was an outlaw, and really didn’t give a rat’s ass what the neighbors thought. She drank hard and packed a pistol. When I tested the waters about doing a memoir of the period, she told me, Hell, go for it. She and my sister probably figured nobody’d read the book but me and whomever I was sleeping with. Also, my mother was a portrait painter. She understood point of view. My sister, who’s a very sophisticated reader, signed off too. For our people to do anything to generate income that won’t land you in prison, it’s a win.

INTERVIEWER

How long did it take you to write The Liars’ Club?

KARR

Two and a half years. I was teaching full-time, and I had Dev. I worked every other weekend, which is when Dev’s father came to visit. And every school holiday, including the whole summer vacation.

INTERVIEWER

That seems fast. Was it difficult?

KARR

Awful. The emotional stakes a memoirist bets with could not be higher, and it’s physically enervating. I nap on a daily basis like a cross-country trucker.

INTERVIEWER In the first section of The Liars’ Club, you inhabit the mind of a seven-year-old to an uncanny degree. How were you able to capture what it was like to be a child?

KARR

Childhood was terrifying for me. A kid has no control. You’re three feet tall, flat broke, unemployed, and illiterate. Terror snaps you awake. You pay keen attention. People can just pick you up and move you and put you down. One of my favorite poems, by Nicanor Parra, is called “Memories of Youth”: “All I’m sure of is that I kept going back and forth. / Sometimes I bumped into trees, / bumped into beggars. / I forced my way through a thicket of chairs and tables.”

Our little cracker box of a house could give you the adrenaline rush of fear, which means more frames of memory per second. Emotional memories are stored deep in the snake brain, which is probably why aphasics in nursing homes often cuss so much—that language doesn’t erode in a stroke.

INTERVIEWER

How do you account for your artistic sensibility? The environment you describe would seem to discourage one.

KARR

Mother—crazy as she was—had an exquisite sensibility. She read nonstop. Loads of history, Russian and Chinese particularly, and art history. There was nothing else to do in that suckhole of a town. You go outside, you run around, people throw dirt balls at you, you get your ass beat. But reading is socially accepted disassociation. You flip a switch and you’re not there anymore. It’s better than heroin. More effective and cheaper and legal.

People who didn’t live pre-Internet can’t grasp how devoid of ideas life in my hometown was. The only bookstores sold Bibles the size of coffee tables and dashboard Virgin Marys that glowed in the dark. I stopped in the middle of the SAT to memorize a poem, because I thought, This is a great work of art and I’ll never see it again.

INTERVIEWER

Was this a practice test?

KARR

No, it was the SAT itself—maybe the literature test. I just put my pencil down and started memorizing. Later I came across the poem in a library. It was “Storm Windows,” by Howard Nemerov. I wrote him a fan letter, to which he replied on Washington University stationery—it was like the Holy Grail, a note from a living poet. When I was twenty I met him at a reading he gave in the Twin Cities, and he said, You’re that little girl from Texas! In grade school I memorized Frost and Cummings and I’d skim the plays of Shakespeare to find the speeches. I’d get dressed up in a sheet and do “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears” or “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” for my hungover mother. So that language was weaving around my house like a cat through chair legs. At age twelve, I memorized Eliot’s “Prufrock.”

INTERVIEWER

If there were no real bookstores in your hometown, where did your mother get the books she gave you?

KARR

My mother went back to school for a teaching certificate, to a little college about forty-five minutes away. There was a college bookstore there. She took a class on existentialism and gave me Nausea and The Stranger and The Plague.

INTERVIEWER

How old were you?

KARR

Twelve. Who gives Nausea to a twelve-year-old? She brought home lots of things she read in class: Faulkner, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, and poetry—she knew I loved it.

INTERVIEWER

Did your mother push you to be a writer?

KARR

It wasn’t like Mozart’s daddy—she wasn’t a stage mother. She wasn’t that invested in child rearing. I was like a terrarium lizard you checked out from time to time with distracted curiosity. But anytime I called to run a poem by her, she’d deliver the full focus of her attention. She’d say, Oh, that’s great! It reminds me of the poem by so-and-so. My sister too. They were both great pom-pom shakers.

INTERVIEWER

What did you inherit from your father?

KARR

He was an unbelievably good raconteur. Spellbinding, and his idiom was pure poetry—“raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock” or “she’s got a butt like two bulldogs in a bag.” INTERVIEWER

Did he train you to tell a good story, or did you just learn through observation?

KARR

Daddy’s family told stories. Everybody was a spot-on mimic—name a politician or a public figure, and my aunt Gladys could nail every intonation. Maybe it’s a Texas thing, or maybe it’s a Southern thing, or maybe there’s more of an oral tradition among the poor. Stranded out there on the prairie, settlers had to amuse themselves. When I went to California at seventeen, I wrote back to my sister saying, These people are boring because the weather’s so good they never had to develop an inner life.

My mother couldn’t tell a story if she had a gun to her head, but she was a master of the one-liner. David Foster Wallace once called her and said, I’m going to marry your daughter. He’d been hospitalized for depression, and she said, Didn’t you just get let out of somewhere? I mean, God, Mother! Or when she was dying, one of her boyfriends showed up at the hospital and the nurse said, Your husband’s here, and she said, He must look like hell—he’s been dead twenty years. She always said the thing you wish you’d said.

INTERVIEWER

Did you feel that when you told a good story you were rewarded with attention?

KARR

Absolutely. But there wasn’t much attention to get. Not a lot of dinner-table scenes. You’ve got to understand the degree to which I’m feral. We ate dinner in bed! Off our laps or on TV trays. We never spoke. Usually we ate with books in our hands. Or I’d find black-eyed peas and rice on the stove and just stand there eating out of the pot like no one else was in the house. I bit into raw onions like they were apples.

INTERVIEWER

Growing up, did you think you were poor?

KARR

No—in fact, in my neighborhood, we were considered rich. My mother had a job as a reporter and columnist at the local paper, then later she taught at the junior high school. We also had two bathrooms and two cars—ergo, we were rich.

INTERVIEWER

In your memoirs you use a fictional name, Leechfield, for your hometown. Why didn’t you use the town’s real name? KARR

Both books had minor characters out the wazoo—the mayor, my grade-school principal, the speech teacher. Those characters deserved privacy.

INTERVIEWER

In your memoirs you barely mention your college years, or the years just following. Why?

KARR

You remember through a filter of self. The periods in your life when that self is half formed, your memories are half formed too. In Lit I wrote in passing about lurching around, getting drunk in punk bars. My best friends had a band called the Suicide Commandos who toured with the Ramones, so I hung out with them a bit. But getting drunk with the Ramones—who cares? The through-line has to be a change in your character, and being loaded seldom involves psychological advancement. No character change, no plot.

INTERVIEWER

Did you not develop as a writer at all during that time?

KARR

I wrote in a scattered, undisciplined way. But I read the way a junkie shoots dope. After college I got a poetry grant I’d applied for from the state of Minnesota. I used it to move to England, which was partly an attempt to cure my drinking. How ridiculous is that? I was drinking too much in Minneapolis, so I emigrate to one of the most alcohol-sodden islands on the planet. But it ended up being a cure for my ignorance about the history of literature. When I went to Wordsworth’s grave, I realized I’d never read him. I hadn’t studied Chaucer, though I could quote the prelude to The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. I knew a few Shakespeare speeches but not whole plays. I wasn’t a natural scholar. While I was there I met Seamus Heaney at a writers’ festival and bought him a beer. Listening to him talk, I learned about poetry that existed before Elvis. So at age twenty-two, I applied to an MFA program at Goddard College.

INTERVIEWER

You had dropped out of Macalester. How did you get into a graduate writing program?

KARR

Goddard accepted me on probation. In fact, I never picked up my high-school diploma. Why’d Macalester accept me? I wrote some philosophical essay that my best friend, who was at Rice, edited for me and probably half concocted. She was the genius “Meredith” inCherry. Maybe her edits shoehorned me into college. Goddard let me go for a year to prove I wasn’t a complete chowderhead before I could matriculate. It was a low-residency program so I lived in Minneapolis and went back and forth for two- week sessions.

INTERVIEWER

Was Goddard important to your development as a writer?

KARR

Immensely. People were having serious, into-the-night-over-cognac conversations, and they worked hard: real rigor, real commitment. The faculty gave written lectures. They weren’t just putting on red lipstick, going to bars at night with scarves on, and smoking Gauloises cigarettes. When you’re a young writer, you just want someone to look at you and say, She’s a poet. It feels like being called a mermaid or a griffin or something. But at Goddard, it was about the work. Plus a lot of world-class writers came through: the brothers Wolff, Richard Ford, Raymond Carver, Frank Conroy, Thomas Lux, Charles Simic. To be able to work with those people!

INTERVIEWER

Why haven’t you written about your time there?

KARR

It sounds name-droppy since all those writers wound up so famous. I do write about it a little bit in Lit.

INTERVIEWER

Did you have a mentor at Goddard?

KARR

Robert Hass, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Stephen Dobyns, Heather McHugh, and Louise Glück were all hugely influential. I hung out a lot with Geoffrey and Toby, and Ray Carver—I just followed them around and listened to their stories. When I first got to Goddard, my poetry was all geegawed up— Vaseline on the lens, references to Nietzsche. I called it experimental, but that just meant it made no sense. If you don’t say what you mean in a readable way, you actually risk nothing.

Before that, at Macalester, I’d worked with Etheridge Knight—a black poet who’d published his first book in prison. Etheridge encouraged my autobiographical impulse.

INTERVIEWER

What was the subject matter of your early poetry, if it wasn’t your life?

KARR What most young women write about: wanting to get laid, not having gotten laid, having gotten laid badly. Wanting someone to leave, not wanting him to leave, then he finally leaves. But characters other than me. Or I’d write unbelievably pretentious shit—some world-weary gambler at a horse race trying to make stiff, faux Mallarmé statements on the nature of chance. The autobiographical “I” everybody hates so much these days was something I hated too, yet each poem was a big arrow pointing back at some self I wanted to be. I was a John Ashbery fan then—did my thesis on Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, though later I recanted my support. He’s a pollutant of the art form by my yardstick—nice guy, great ear, but his surrealistic devices and pinballing free association are among of the most pernicious and negative influences on American poetry. Most young poets cannot reproduce the interesting rivulets made by Ashbery’s stream-of-consciousness. In my early work I tried to sound cool, like Ashbery— though I’m profoundly devoid of cool.

I remember a poem about a suicidal dog, which began, “Don’t do it, dog.” So many close friends had killed themselves, and Mother was suicidal a lot. The dog was an attempt to beat back the confessional impulse. Becoming an autobiographical writer was anathema to me. Stevens was my favorite poet—still is. Any subject that compelled me emotionally got disguised and repackaged to fit this bejeweled surface I was cultivating, very New York School.

INTERVIEWER

Did you ever write directly about your family in those days?

KARR

Sometimes they’d edge in, and I’d think, OK, I’ve done that Texas stuff.

INTERVIEWER

Did your teachers at Goddard push you to write about Texas and your family?

KARR

They responded more positively to the poems they could understand. The other work felt false. It’s difficult to accept what your psyche or history dooms you to write, what Faulkner would call your postage stamp of reality. Young writers often mistakenly choose a certain vein or style based on who they want to be, unconsciously trying to blot out who they actually are. You want to escape yourself. For almost ten years it didn’t occur to me that I should exploit Daddy’s blue-collar idiom. I was trying to pass for edge-u-kated.

INTERVIEWER

Was there a specific moment when you realized you should write about your family?

KARR I wasn’t quite thirty—Daddy was dying and Mother couldn’t care for him. She was sleeping with his male nurse, who was surely gay and addicted to drugs. He wore these awful pink velvet bell-bottoms that made him look like Willy Wonka. She wore spangled sequined shirts and they’d go out disco dancing. She called once with the music from Flashdanceplaying in the background to ask for money— we called it her Flashdance period. After Daddy died, I was working in the computer business, flying back from Silicon Valley on the red-eye, and I got shit-faced drunk and scrawled all this mournful, elegiac stuff for Daddy. My husband found my notes and said, I was wondering when you were finally going to deal with this subject matter. He’d noticed that every poem I wrote had an old man in it, fumbling with a change purse to get a penny out for a gum-ball machine or something. Those scrawlings wound up in my first collection.

INTERVIEWER

In your childhood journal you say you want to write half poetry, half autobiography. Where did you learn the word autobiography? Did you read a lot of memoirs growing up?

KARR

There’s something fascinating about a single voice telling you its life. I read writers’ autobiographical works—Neruda, Sartre, Eudora Welty, Montaigne’s Essays—the way people read Lives of the Saints. I was trying to figure out how to be a writer.

As a child, I also read a lot of books about being black: Black Like Me, Black Boy,Invisible Man, The Autobiography of Malcolm X. My mother had marched with Dr. King in Selma. Being estranged from the culture resonated with me. A big personal discovery came in the fall of 1971, when I read Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and thought, You can write about these people? They weren’t like John Cheever characters with the deck shoes and Yale degrees and pools in the yard and sprinklers going whisk-whisk—well-bred dogs and sad, martini-drinking individuals who somehow kept their clothes dry-cleaned. Those people sounded like fodder for literature in ways we weren’t. Mother subscribed to The New Yorker, so I was exposed to the literary Ivy League, even in our little armpit of the universe.

I corresponded with Toby Wolff after This Boy’s Life. Toby nudged me to read Harry Crews’s A Childhood. I also read Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Robert Graves’s Good-bye to All That, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, and Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. I read loads of biographies, too—W. J. Bate’s books on Keats and Samuel Johnson. Ian Hamilton on Lowell. Henri Troyat on Chekhov and Tolstoy. The letters of Flannery O’Connor—The Habit of Being.

INTERVIEWER

Did you know you were going to write a memoir yourself?

KARR It never occurred to me. Though I do remember Toby suggesting I try memoir, because I dined out on stories about my mother.

INTERVIEWER

How did you start writing The Liars’ Club? In Lit, you say it began as a novel.

KARR

It did, but the novel is a much more complicated art form structurally. Memoir is episodic—a looser construct than a bona fide novel. You start with an interesting voice; the rest follows. For a real novelist, the fiction provides a mask that permits honesty. For me, a novel became an excuse to make myself look better—my stand-in did volunteer work at the nursing home and knew differential calculus in the sixth grade. And my mother wasn’t my sloppy, turpentine- and vodka-redolent mother, but the complete opposite—a ballerina, very prim.

I also didn’t want to have to deal with the familial complications. My mother was still alive, my sister was a prudent Houston businesswoman. The memories were painful for them.

INTERVIEWER

So how did you make the transition from novel to memoir?

KARR

I was in this writing group that met at Harvard’s Lamont Library on Sunday nights. The critic Sven Birkerts was in it along with the poet Bill Corbett, the novelist Stratis Haviaras, and the poet and critic Robert Polito. I turned in eighty pages of fiction, and they brutalized it—nobody minced words. They said, You should try memoir. At first I thought, You just don’t know how great I am! But their message had the stench of truth.

INTERVIEWER

By the time you wrote Cherry, your approach was much broader. Its subject matter was more universal—adolescent girls everywhere, in a sense. Is that how you conceived of the book?

KARR

There really aren’t any great books about female adolescence. I taught memoir classes with great male teenage texts—nonfiction versions of The Catcher in the Rye, really. Most women’s books pole- vault over junior high and high school. They flip from childhood to college. I really wanted a girl’s point of view.

INTERVIEWER

The only great book about female adolescence I can think of is Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. KARR

But McCarthy misses on the sexual stuff—just skids past it. She goes off to visit a friend in Montana and she wakes up in the bed of a married man. Her line is incredible to me: “I grew a little tired of his kisses, which did not excite me.” It’s so delibidinized. She has no agency, no urge. One page, she’s fifteen, then all of a sudden she’s going off to college.

It may be a problem of language. When I started Cherry, I realized there were no words to describe an awakening female libido. Boys have these childlike words like chubby and woody, but the parlance for female genitalia and female desires is too porno.

Looking at an early draft of Cherry, I said to myself, Oh my God, you’re superimposing a forty-year- old woman’s libido on a twelve-year-old girl. It seemed perverse. Like it’d inspire pedophiles to think that every young girl was Lolita. Eventually I realized I’d misrepresented the experience. A twelve-year- old writing a boy’s name on her notebook over and over doesn’t want to get boffed into guacamole. She wants the boy to bring her a valentine and put it in her lunch box.

INTERVIEWER

It’s a different kind of longing.

KARR

It’s as powerful as a sexual urge but it’s not so genital. It’s somewhat about being seen—what feminist critics might call a longing for the male gaze. Being looked at in this culture invents you as a woman long before you’re getting laid. It was about love more than sex—about beauty, desire.

INTERVIEWER

How did you ultimately get to the core of the experience?

KARR

I started writing about seeing John Cleary at the couples’ skate and thinking, That’s what I want. I want him to come ask me to the couples’ skate and bring me a long-stemmed red rose, that would be so thrilling for me. And I remember saying to my editor, How could I say that? She said, You’ve got to make that as vivid, as intense as the other thing.

INTERVIEWER

The language of the sexual awakening in Cherry is some of the most lyrical language in the book. You massage John Cleary’s legs, and then go home and drift off into a reverie in your bed at night: “I don’t conjure John’s body stretched over mine, or under it, or even the long muscles of his thighs hard under my hands. The fact of that body is too carnal for this sharp luminosity in me. Instead I picture John leading me under the spangled light of this mirrored ball for a slow dance.” KARR

I didn’t want sex. There was no steamy porn scene in my head. I mostly wanted him to kiss me and hold my hand. I’d hypnotize myself writing his name over and over. I wanted a candlelit vision of myself as lovely, as a woman.

INTERVIEWER

There are also stylistic differences between the first two memoirs. Cherry is less jaunty, and a little smoother—you use fewer commas, including in places where they seem necessary. Was that intentional?

KARR

The self I was writing about was older in that book, and it would have seemed coy to use the same type of sentence structure as I did for the kid in The Liars’ Club. Also, I had a comma stutter in the first book, which I corrected in the second.

INTERVIEWER

In Cherry you describe reading books as a kind of entry into a fantasy life, an escape from Leechfield. Do you think you were depressed?

KARR

I was depressed out of my gourd from childhood onward. It’s amazing that I’m not now. Sobriety’s helped a lot—alcohol’s a depressant.

INTERVIEWER

What are your feelings about taking medicine for depression?

KARR

I don’t think you should geeze morphine in your neck with a turkey baster to adjust your mood. But I’ve taken antidepressants off and on and wouldn’t hesitate to take a prescribed drug so long as it didn’t alter consciousness. No Valium or Xanax for me—too similar to alcohol. But I’m a big fan of the mental-health profession. They kept me alive—shrinks and librarians, teachers and booksellers.

INTERVIEWER

Some writers say that taking mood stabilizers or antidepressants alters your perception. That the natural artistic self is the depressed self.

KARR Depression makes you half alive—how does that shape a better writer? People have different ideas of what natural is. Since the romantics we’ve all been big fans of the natural, as though natural equals good. Shitting in your pants is natural, wanting to boink the pizza-delivery kid is natural. Stabbing people who get in front of you at the cafeteria line—that’s probably a natural impulse. Where do you draw the line between what’s good natural and what’s bad natural?

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any writing rituals, things you have to do in order to write?

KARR

I pray. I ask God what to write. I know that sounds insane, but I do. I say: What do you want me to say? I have a sense that God wanted these books written. That doesn’t mean they’re meant to be bestsellers. Nor am I hearing voices. But a lot of times I’ll get stuck and I’ll just say, Help me. A nonbeliever might think of it as talking to my superego, or some better self. But I do have a sense of being guided.

INTERVIEWER

What does it sound like when you get stuck?

KARR

Fuck. Shit. Don’t. Fuck. You dumb bitch—who ever told you that you could write? That’s what it sounds like.

INTERVIEWER

When did you start praying?

KARR

When I got sober, in 1989—twenty years ago now. Only with prayer could I stop drinking for more than a day or two. Once I made three months clean, but it was a white-knuckled horror show. Call it self-hypnosis, prayer, whatever. To skeptics I say, Just try it. Pray every day for thirty days. See if your life gets better. If it doesn’t, tell me I’m an asshole. People tend to judge a faith’s value based on its dogma, which ignores religion in practice. It’s like believing if you watch enough porn or read enough gynecology books, you’ll know about pussy. For me, being a Catholic is a set of activities. Certain dogma seems nuts to me too. I’m not the Pope’s favorite Catholic.

INTERVIEWER

Do you pray before you write, or during?

KARR Both. I try to pray formally morning and night starting with breathing exercises or centering prayer. Then the Lord’s Prayer or the Prayer of St. Francis: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace . . .” Sometimes I listen to the daily liturgy on my iPod from Pray-As-You-Go.com, or I go online at Sacred Space—both Jesuit sites. I say thank you a lot. This morning I walked out saying, Thank you for the wind, thank you for the blue sky. Really dumb, puerile stuff. At night I do what Jesuits call an examen of conscience, plus I keep a list of people to pray for.

In times of pressure or anxiety—like when Mother was dying—I’ll do a daily rosary for everybody. Or I’ll light candles and climb in the bathtub, try to put my mind where my body is—the best prayers are completely silent. Otherwise, I do a lot of begging. I just beg, beg, beg, beg like a dog, for myself and those I love. And I do the cursory, “If it’s your will . . .” but God knows that I want everything when I want it. He knows I’m selfish and want a zillion bucks and big tits and to be five-ten. So I’m not fooling him with that “If it’s your will” shit. The real prayer happens when I’m really desperate, like when I was going through a period of illness last year. Amazing what power there is in surrender to suffering. Most of my life I dodged it, or tried to drink it away—“it” being any reality that discomfited me.

I turned down the earliest offers from publishers for Lit years ago because I had a sense that it was what God wanted me to do. In prayer, I felt steered to write a book of poems. There was all this quiet energy around the poetry, though it meant flushing down the drain this big pile of memoir money I needed to pay for my son’s private school tuition and college. That was scary, but writing’s always scary. The prospect of failure after a big success is scary—the page is very blank, and you feel conspicuous, and plenty of detractors want you to fail from sheer spite. I’m a fearful person by nature.

INTERVIEWER

What are you afraid of?

KARR

Failure. I keep Beckett’s motto above my desk: Fail better. A priest once asked me a very smart question, which I’ve yet to answer, or have only answered in small increments: What would you write if you weren’t afraid? Prayer lessens fear. It reduces self-consciousness, so I attend to the work and kind of forget myself. It’s strange, though—I know praying a steady hour a day would make me a happier human unit, but I don’t do it. Do you know why?

INTERVIEWER

No.

KARR

Me neither. It’s like, Why not floss every day? I think it’s because my big smart mind likes the idea that it’s running the show, and any conscious contact with God plugs me into my own radical powerlessness. INTERVIEWER

What do you feel when you pray?

KARR

When I feel God, it’s quiet. I can’t hear anything—it’s like balancing in air in some vast, windless space. If I’m trying to discern God’s will, I’ll feel a leaning sensation toward what I’m supposed to do. Like a dowser’s wand. It’s a solid tug. Even if that direction is scary for me—like refusing the first offers for Lit, or like the writing of it was. There’ll be quiet around it. This takes days, sometimes weeks. The trick is not to act until you have a solid leaning, and not to obsess until you get that—really give the problem up, in a way. You might say you leave it to your intuition. I say I leave it to the Holy Spirit. The God-centered choices tend to stay solidly quiet. I never regret or recant.

I prayed when I threw out most of the manuscript of Lit—both times. The first time, four years ago, I tossed almost five hundred pages, leaving just eighty—the early chapters. Then, in August of 2008, I threw out another five hundred pages, and I was left with only about a hundred and twenty. I was nearing my deadline, and my tit was in a wringer, timewise. A sane person might’ve bargained with my publisher for more time, but I didn’t. It was as if God were saying, You’re in this now: do it. Which, by the way, my publisher said too.

Yet the book felt impossible. I had to surrender the outcome. But surrender is hard for me. I’m a willful little beast.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have any methods other than prayer for getting through a block?

KARR

An endless New York walk. Music helps—Bach and Beethoven played by Awadagin Pratt. Opera. Tangos. Nothing with language in it. Also, I call and whine.

INTERVIEWER

Whom do you call?

KARR

I have a couple of writers, but I don’t do it frequently. I call the way the president would push the red button for nuclear armament. I’ve called Don DeLillo more than once. He sent me a postcard after one such call. It read: Write or die. I sent one back saying: Write and die. I also give big chunks to my editor, Courtney Hodell, who reminds me that I always wrestle with this demon. Shovel up and throw away—over and over. She makes encouraging noises but doesn’t hesitate to say, This is not it. For the second batch of pages I threw out, I’d been encouraged to write a how-to book about prayer. They wanted another “Eat, Pray, Make Money.” But the pages were duller than a rubber knife. Writing about spiritual stuff for a secular audience is like doing card tricks on the radio. It nearly broke me to start over again.

INTERVIEWER

Was it easier to throw out the manuscript the second time?

KARR

No. The second time devastated me. I felt so scooped out and lost. I moped around for three days in scuzzy clothes, ordering Indian food and giving God the finger and getting phone calls from my publishing house and agent saying, When will it be done? When they give you money up front, this interests them a lot. About midnight of day three, I was sobbing, listening to Beethoven really loud. So I called my old teacher Robert Hass in Berkeley to tell him, I’m afraid that no matter what I do, this is going to be a bad book. And Bob said, That doesn’t worry me one bit. I said, What the fuck? Is that some Zen California shit? I got really irritated. I said, I’m here crying at midnight. And he said, If you write a bad book, it’ll be a bad book with some good sentences in it. Then he said an interesting thing. He said, Will a bad book rob you of power and money and status? And I said, Absolutely. I would like to say I couldn’t care less, but yeah, I want more money and fancier shoes and more trips to Corsica in the sunshine. But that’s not even the scariest thing. The scariest thing for me is that I won’t get to have the conversation, this marvelous conversation about literature I’ve been having for thirty years now.

INTERVIEWER

The conversation with other writers?

KARR

With other writers and with the work. You’re in this big stadium with these amazing pitchers and hitters, and then you’re back in the farm-club dugout.

INTERVIEWER

When you abandoned all of those hundreds of pages, did you save them somewhere?

KARR

No, I literally threw them all out. Because I thought, What am I saving these for?

INTERVIEWER

Posterity?

KARR

Yeah, right. I live in an eleven-hundred-square-foot apartment. INTERVIEWER

Did you save your drafts for The Liars’ Club and Cherry?

KARR

Yes, but I have no idea where they are. In storage, or at my sister’s maybe.

INTERVIEWER

You wrote at length about your ex-husband in Lit. Was that difficult?

KARR

What a quandary, to write about adoring this guy enough to bear his child, then how we imploded to such a point that I wanted to run him over while he moved the garbage cans. In the first draft he was perfect, and I was horrible—worse than I actually was. I guess I felt guilty writing it at all. He’s a discreet person, and I didn’t want to drag him into the public eye.

INTERVIEWER

What does your son think of your books?

KARR

He’s made a conscious decision not to read them, and I respect that. I am the source of waffles and Sunday dinner, not literature. When Cherry came out, he confessed he was consciously avoiding it. Last year, he read the opening to The Liars’ Club—he’s twenty-three now. He knows I wrote about being sexually assaulted. He knows all about my nervous breakdown in Lit from being there and talking to me over the years. He knows I was suicidal, but that as long as he was on the planet, I couldn’t afford to kill myself. He knows the books’ events in outline—I wouldn’t want him hearing about something we hadn’t discussed. He did read the prologue directed at him in Lit.

INTERVIEWER

When you finish a book, do you ever hear from people that you’ve gotten things wrong?

KARR

Strangely, that hasn’t happened very much. Minor points of fact from time to time. One reason I do so many drafts is that I poke and prod and question.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have an unusually good memory? KARR

When I was young I did, yes. I can only compare my early memories with my sister Lecia’s. She’d admit that mine are keener than hers. She’ll say, Oh my God, that’s right, that did happen. She doesn’t remember many details until I write them—which seems, by the way, like a much better way to be. She just moves forward through the world. If I could do it her way, I would. It’s much more functional. Time never passes for me.

It’s scary how my memory became the family memory. My mother, before she died, and my sister both remember events as I rendered them. They’re carved in stone, in a way. That’s a lonely feeling. It’s too much power. I’m sure I misremember a lot.

INTERVIEWER

There are a few moments in Lit where you write that Lecia remembers things in a different way.

KARR

Sure—I didn’t remember my mother’s paramour Wilbur Fred Bailey being particularly good-looking. Lecia said, Oh yes, he had steely white hair, blue eyes, and he was muscular. Things like that.

More important than remembering the facts, I have to poke at my own innards: what were your hopes? I remember going to work in business, for instance. At first, wearing a suit and toting a briefcase, I felt promoted to being an actual citizen. Robert Hass has a poem about Wallace Stevens walking equably to work each morning, smelling faintly of shaving lotion, that “pure exclusive music / in his mind.” I wanted to be this businessperson who scribbled poems like Stevens.

INTERVIEWER

Do you do any kind of hypnotic regression in order to return, in your mind, to the place where you were, the person you were?

KARR

There’s no magic in it. Just one moment at a time, one detail at a time. I’m just asking myself as I go along: What was it like when I came home for Christmas? I remember Daddy came to fetch me at the bus station—a greasy bus station if ever there was one. He passed me a pint bottle of whiskey, which surprised me. If you had asked me whether my father had ever given me whiskey, I’d have said no. But once I revisited that instant, I could see him offer me a bottle across the truck cab. What a strange thing to offer your seventeen-year-old, whiskey. It’s what worked for him. Many memories are dead ends. That’s why I throw away a thousand pages. If you haven’t thrown away a thousand, then you don’t have four hundred that are worth a shit. You have to edit ruthlessly.

INTERVIEWER In Lit you wrote about an affair you had with David Foster Wallace, whom you met while living in Cambridge in 1989, but who came to live near you when you were teaching in Syracuse. Why did you decide not to use a pseudonym for him? Did his death have anything to do with this choice?

KARR

I had a pseudonym going in, but anybody who’d give a rat’s ass knew the uglier details. We were in touch before he died, and I’d intended to show him the pages.

He first came to Syracuse looking for someplace cheap to live on his book advance forInfinite Jest— which I saw a chunk of early on, just as he saw the first chapters of The Liars’ Club. David rented this weensy room less than a block from me. Guys you get sober with are like guys you were in ’Nam with. You plodded through the flames together. The past few years, I thought he’d been snatched from the flames. Which was how I felt, and still feel.

Ultimately, I showed my manuscript to a former drug counselor of his. Plus I had his best friend from college, the novelist Mark Costello, go through the relevant pages. Mark knew both of us extremely well during the period I chronicled. He judged the rendering fair, insofar as he could judge events he didn’t often witness.

INTERVIEWER

It seemed to me that Lit is a conversion memoir—about your conversion to Catholicism in 1996.

KARR

It’s about all the ways I got lit—by language, booze, etcetera, till I got lit by baby Jesus. I was a natural skeptic, and it’s about that journey from black cynicism into awe.

INTERVIEWER

Why did you convert to Catholicism?

KARR

My son was in second grade and he announced he wanted to go to church “to see if God’s there.” I started calling friends to take us to various citadels of worship. Catholics came dead last. We went to Jewish temples and to a Zendo. God-o-rama, we called it. It was solely for my son. I usually took along a paperback to read like I did when he played soccer. I was prayerful at the time, but cynical about religious hierarchies. Jesus is a trick on poor people, my daddy used to say.

INTERVIEWER

You acknowledged earlier that when you’re drinking, it’s harder to remember conversations and events. But in Lit you write about a time in which you drank heavily. KARR

Hence the book’s strange blank spaces—the conversation my husband and I had about separating the first time, for instance. I don’t remember it. Certain events stay Technicolor, though. Like the time he said, You smell like a bum. I’d been out smoking and drinking, I’m sure. It was memorable partly because he never spoke to me that way. He was a very controlled speaker, but I’m sure if he were writing about this period, I’d be reeling drunkenly through the house, raising hell.

Certain moments are vividly conceived during adrenaline rushes—falling in love, thinking you’re about to get hit by a bus. But the brain isn’t a file cabinet. As I age, my memory fades. Maybe it’s all the LSD I took as a kid or there’s just less blood in my head.

INTERVIEWER

In your books you readily admit to forgetting certain scenes or details, sometimes important ones. Why do that?

KARR

Memoirists can make the mistake of treating readers as an enemies and trying to dupe them. I feel like the reader has given up twenty-plus dollars, and I owe her a vivid experience without lying. But certain events she expects aren’t there. You have to collude with her if your head is blank. Plus sometimes what you forget says as much psychologically as what you remember.

I don’t try to reconstruct empty spots. I’ve been vigorously encouraged by various editors to fictionalize. They would say, It must have been a very dramatic scene, saying goodbye to your mother. And I remember reading that Vivian Gornick said to her students, “Just make it up and see if it’s true.” Bullshit. In fiction, you manufacture events to fit a concept or an idea. With memoir, you have the events and manufacture or hopefully deduce the concept. You don’t remember something? Write fiction.

It pissed me off when I saw James Frey on Larry King saying, You know, there’s a lot of argument about the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. You know what? There isn’t. If it didn’t happen, it’s fiction. If it did happen, it’s nonfiction. If you see the memoir as constructing a false self to sell to some chump audience, then you’ll never know the truth, because the truth is derived from what actually happened. Using novelistic devices, like reconstructed dialogue or telescoping time, isn’t the same as ginning up fake episodes.

INTERVIEWER

But memory is faulty, of course. What if you get something wrong?

KARR

I think of Mary McCarthy in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood saying, I changed some of these names, or, I thought that we all had the flu that one time but my uncle has corrected me. None of her corrections were relevant or betrayed a reader’s confidence. In the forties, memoir was akin to history, which was absolute. One reason for a surge in memoir is the gradual erosion of objective notions of truth, which makes stuff like assembled dialogue seem more acceptable. We mistrust the old forms of authority—the church and politicians, even science. The subjective has power now. You read how Robert McNamara fabricated body counts in Vietnam, how Nixon lied, then suddenly Full Metal Jacket or Apocalypse Now or Michael Herr’s psychedelic experience in Dispatches has new authority. Not because it’s not corrupt, but because it admits its corruption.

For me, internal landscapes are where I’ve spent much of my time. If I’d lived with a video camera strapped to my head, it might represent events in clearer external detail, but it wouldn’t reveal my inner life. I know better than anybody else how I felt at fifteen or at forty. You might remember something I did that I don’t remember, but I know how I felt. The moral danger that I’m in every time I write a sentence is that I’ve interpreted somebody’s motivation incorrectly. I like the story—maybe apocryphal —about Melville devouring an entire bag of oranges in front of his daughter without sharing. How could such a person not be an asshole? Well, say he had scurvy. The trauma of my mother losing her first children doesn’t mean it’s no big deal that she tried to stab my sister and me with a butcher knife, but it in some way clarifies the action. Books offer what TV and film often skip over—the internal and historical truths.

INTERVIEWER

How important is the content of the memoir to its success?

KARR

People mistakenly believe the best memoir is the one in which the grossest stuff happens. If that were true then everybody who was at Auschwitz would have written a best seller. People had way worse childhoods than I did and they didn’t sell as many books. How it’s written counts for something.

INTERVIEWER

Do you do much research before beginning to write a memoir?

KARR

None before. When people say they’re doing research, I say, You’re just postponing writing. I prepare by notifying people, talking to people who are still alive, and seeing if they would be offended if I wrote about them. Once I have a draft, I may visit places and check stuff out, to clarify details.

INTERVIEWER

You don’t go through old letters, or archives, or newspaper accounts from the time about which you’re writing?

KARR I do some of that, but only after the first draft is written. You want to capture your own memories, not someone else’s. After the first draft of The Liars’ Club, I called my mother for factual details: what year she married a certain husband, his profession. During Cherry, I called my friend Doonie and we talked about our roommate Forsythe going crazy in California—dramatic events I could’ve brought up if external drama were all I was trolling for. He threw a paint can through a drug dealer’s window, then he tried to kill himself. He hitchhiked naked with a cardboard box around him. At one point he scrawled the walls with toothpaste and sprinkled a pound of pot on a sleeping infant and set his father’s photo on the turntable so it spun round and round. The relevant info? He went crazy and killed himself. You don’t put in whatever you can dredge up.

INTERVIEWER

Have you always kept journals?

KARR

Off and on, sloppily. Most were lost. Mine was an itinerant life for many years. My mother didn’t even keep many photos of us.

INTERVIEWER

Yet you’ve never had someone tell you that you’ve gotten something seriously wrong?

KARR

You love this question. One guy corrected the year that Hurricane Carla hit Texas. Which doesn’t feel like a betrayal of the reader. You can ask me that another eight hundred and seventy-five times. I know I’m supposed to say, All the time. I must get a million things wrong, but I’ve not had people come up and say, I was there and that didn’t happen. Never. Not one time, not once.

I remember an interviewer asking me, You expect me to believe you opened a trunk in your attic, and your grandmother’s prosthetic leg was in it? I said, Why don’t you check it out—I bet it’s still there. You think I have that good an imagination? If I did, I’d be writing novels.

INTERVIEWER

When do you write?

KARR

Mostly mornings at home. I made a habit in grad school of getting up at five in the morning to work. When my son was born, in ’86, I had to get up really early, like four. I was teaching six sections of comp at three different schools, and that was the only time I had. For ten years there, I didn’t have time to shave both legs the same day. If I had even an hour, I could work anywhere. I was very unpersnickety. But I usually can’t write big prose while teaching. I can write journalism or lectures. And I’m always scribbling poems. INTERVIEWER

So you can’t work on a book while you’re teaching?

KARR

It would be hard. I figured out early on that I’d resent the students. If the students don’t seem human to you, then it’s an adversarial relationship.

INTERVIEWER

Do your poetry and your memoirs influence each other?

KARR

Autobiography is mostly contingent on voice. If the voice is strong enough, the reader will go anywhere with you. And who’s better at syntax and diction than a poet?

INTERVIEWER

What are the major differences between the two forms for you?

KARR

I always say that a poet loves the world, and the prose writer needs to create an alternative world. Poetry relates more closely to my present experience, and it’s aesthetically harder, because you’re trying to create a form that embodies the content. With prose, you spend so much time evoking a place that it’s emotionally more catastrophic. It’s like someone’s holding the back of your head and putting your nose right in it. When you do prose, you are deep in another element for months or years. I’m sure that private intensity is no different for novelists.

INTERVIEWER

Has your writing method changed over the years?

KARR

I wrote The Liars’ Club longhand in notebooks. Then I’d type them up. I rewrite a lot, even as I go along. I’m a compulsive rewriter. I have a poet’s sense of perfection. Prose always seems inadequate to me because every line isn’t a jewel. But it can’t be. Prose favors information; poetry favors music and form.

INTERVIEWER

Do you revise in the notebooks? KARR

I cross stuff out, and then I type it up, and I print it, then I longhand that, and then I write again. Often I rewrite the same thing over and over, longhand. I did Cherry that way, but I developed a repetitive- stress disorder—not exactly carpal tunnel, but a shoulder thing. The sports-medicine dude said watchmakers and surgeons, people who do very fine work with their hands, build up a little knot there. So I had to teach myself to touch-type, which was traumatic for me. In longhand, if it really sucked, I didn’t feel too grisly about it. Then when I typed it up it looked like someone else had written it, which gave me some distance.

But with Lit, I faced such time pressure, I had to write lying down. If I sat up and typed with this injury, I’d last maybe six or seven hours. Lying down with my laptop on my knees, I could go from seven in the morning until eight or nine at night. I did that seven days a week. I felt like a Turkish pasha. I’d lie around in silk pajamas. And eat pistachios all day.

INTERVIEWER

Actual silk pajamas?

KARR

Yes. Fancy lingerie matters to me. I’ve always spent money on it, even when I was poor. And my mother and sister always gave me nice lingerie for Christmas or birthdays. So I’d lie around feeling vaguely fancy, thinking, You know, life doesn’t suck. I’m not failing at my art, twelve hours a day. Eventually, the book got traction. I found what it was about.

INTERVIEWER

And what was that?

KARR

A book is never about what I think going in. At first I thought it was about romances I’d had, and it just wasn’t. I kept being drawn to material that focused on my separating from my mother and reconnecting with her—the psychological implications of that. But I couldn’t imagine writing a therapy book. It just felt so Pat Conroy, very Prince of Tides.

It was about being Odysseus—having to leave home to find home. It’s about making peace with Mother to become a mother. Everywhere I go, people ask, How’d you get out of there? They notice I’m not angry and bitter, which I’m not. Not anymore. But I was. I didn’t sashay out with my fishing pole over my shoulder and a cardboard sign saying poetry or bust. Some of the readers of my first two memoirs deduced—wrongly—that there had been no ardent suffering or confusion or psychic trial. I felt like I owed it to them to connect the dots between disease and healing. From fury and doubt to faith. A hard slog. My nervous breakthrough.

INTERVIEWER What are you working on now?

KARR

I’m working on a textbook about memoir. I’m also writing poems about Jesus that involve New York street life. The poems feel less autobiographical.

INTERVIEWER

Have you been criticized for writing autobiographical poems?

KARR

Yes. People say that it’s small-minded and stupid. Writing about oneself is thought to be very low- rent.

I just read a Gabriel García Márquez biography, and also his memoir. What’s truest and most resonant in his work is the surreal stuff, and that has its roots in autobiography. The characters, the milieu, even the magic grows from experience. I wish I had Chekhov’s ear, that cool objectivity. But the truth is, that’s not my nature. I’m very self-involved.

INTERVIEWER

What do you think are the biggest problems with memoirs today?

KARR

They’re not reflective enough. They lack self-awareness. I always tell my students that if the reader knows something about your psychology that you do not admit, you’re in trouble. The reader will notice that you’re an asshole because instead of going to your mother’s deathbed you’re out buying really nice designer boots. If you don’t acknowledge the assholery of that choice, then there’s a rift, a disjunction between narrator and reader. And in autobiography, that intimacy is part of what readers want. They have to trust your judgment.

The memoir’s antagonist has to be some part of the self, and the self has to be different at the end of the book than it was at the beginning. Otherwise you have what I call the sound-bite memoir or the ass- whipping memoir. Year one: ass-whipping. Year two: ass-whipping. Then they slap “Mommy Dearest” on it and shove it into the bookstores. Those memoirs cover a single aspect: so-and-so’s a drunk, or a sex slave, or has been hit on the head with a brick by her mother every day of her life—and that’s it. The character of the writer is a dull steady state till he gets old enough to get car keys and leave. That’s not a literary memoir any more than a Harlequin romance is a great novel.

INTERVIEWER

What was your own conflict? KARR

My own bitterness and cynicism had to be pried away for the light to get in. The fury that I thought protected me from harm actually sealed me off from joy. Also, I sensed I’d betrayed my father and our redneck background by living at Harvard with my ex-husband and his polo-playing family. That my mother had given me a great love of art, truth, books, conversation, and beauty, and I was too angry at her to feel gratitude. I had to start living with some modicum of wonder, a state of praise rather than blame. It’s a journey from complaint to praise.

INTERVIEWER

Is one of the ways in which the novel differs from the memoir that the characters in a novel are not obligated to disclose their motives?

KARR

In most crap memoirs, motives are skipped over too. They are very surface-oriented. In a novel, characters can be two-dimensional as long as they’re interesting or there’s a good plot—think of Dickens. In memoir, the only through-line is character represented by voice. So you better make a reader damn curious about who’s talking. If thin, shallow characters were interesting, we’d all be watching Jerry Springer. You watch Springer because you don’t identify with those people. There’s no depth of connection to their narratives—they’re grotesques.

Memoirists shouldn’t exaggerate the most gruesome aspects of their lives. Otherwise, a reader can’t enter the experience. She can only gawk from afar. You have to normalize the incredible. Primo Levi in Survival in Auschwitz writes more vividly about his own faults than the Nazis’, whose evils are common knowledge. That is what’s powerful about the book.

You have to correct for your own selfish motives. I want to look like a nice person, so I paint my ex- husband as a saint. But in truth, I wanted to hit him over the head with a mallet. Once I render that, I don’t come out seeming so nice, which is more accurate.

INTERVIEWER

So when you’re writing a memoir, you can’t allow yourself to be an unreliable narrator?

KARR

You have constantly to question, Is this fair? No life is all bleak. Even in Primo Levi’s camp, there were small sources of hope: you got on the good work detail, or you got on the right soup line. That’s what’s so gorgeous about humanity. It doesn’t matter how bleak our daily lives are, we still fight for the light. I think that’s our divinity. We lean into love, even in the most hideous circumstances. We manage to hope.

INTERVIEWER But we remember the bleakness.

KARR

That’s mostly what we remember.

Author photograph by Marion Ettlinger.

Jorge Semprún, The Art of Fiction No. 192 Interviewed by Lila Azam Zanganeh

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In Paris, in the winter of 1943, Jorge Semprún, a twenty-year-old Spanish-born philosophy student and a member of the Communist Party, was arrested by the Nazi occupiers, tortured, and sent to Buchenwald. Although he survived to lead an extraordinarily eventful life, to this day Semprún describes his deportation as “the only thing that truly defines me.” Yet unlike other survivor-writers—Robert Antelme, say, or Primo Levi—it took Semprún nearly two decades to write about his experience of the camps. “I had to forget,” he has said. “Otherwise life would have been impossible.”

Following his liberation at the end of the war, Semprún returned to Paris, where he worked for UNESCO as an interpreter, a cover he used to coordinate the clandestine activities of the Spanish Communist Party. In 1957 he began traveling secretly to Franco’s Spain, working on and off for five years as an underground Communist agent under the pseudonym Federico Sánchez. It was there, after nearly twenty years of voluntary amnesia, that Semprún felt the undercurrents of memory pulling him back to the camps, prompting him, as it were, to write his first book, The Long Voyage (1963), a fictionalized account of his experiences as a deportee. The book, written in French, traces the narrator’s thoughts during his seemingly endless train ride to Buchenwald, as his mind moves back and forth through time, reaching from the years before his arrest to his life after liberation.

As he explored his own experience with totalitarian repression, Semprún became an outspoken critic of Stalin’s terror, and a year after his literary debut he was expelled from the Spanish Communist Party. For the next two decades he lived in France, writing novels, memoirs, and screenplays (for Constantin Costa-Gavras, Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais, among others). Then, in 1988, eager to participate in Spain’s new democratic government, he accepted an appointment as Minister of Culture under Prime Minister Felipe González. He held office for three years before returning to Paris and writing his best- known and most important work, Literature or Life (1994). Semprún published the book as a memoir, but in it he declares that “the essential truth of the concentration camp experience is not transmissible.” His literary solution is to introduce fictional scenes and details whenever his own memory is too faint, too incoherent, or when it simply fails to evoke what he feels to be the truth of his experience. Semprún’s decision to meld fiction with memory in recounting his concentration camp experience sparked heated debate in France, where critics accused him of calling allmemory and eyewitness accounts into question. Semprún’s fiercest critic was Claude Lanzmann, the director of the epic documentary film Shoah, who argues that his own approach to recording the experience of survivors— through direct testimony—is the only legitimate method, and that art and imagination can have no part in such an endeavor. Others complained that it was impossible to distinguish between what Semprún experienced and what he invented. For instance, did Maurice Halbwachs, a well-known French sociologist, really die as the book recounts, in Semprún’s arms? Is Semprún’s literary technique self- aggrandizing? And how does it serve history?

Semprún allows that testimony is vital to historians, but he notes that testimony, too, is not always precisely reliable, and that historians, alas, are never quite as effective as novelists at conveying the essence of experience. “Horror is so repetitive,” he says, “and without literary elaboration, one simply cannot be heard or understood.” Hence he argues, “The only way to make horror palpable is to construct a fictional body of work.”

I met Semprún at his home in Paris, where in 2004 he wrote his third book in Spanish,Veinte años y un día. (The novel’s title, which translates to “twenty years and a day,” refers to the sentence given to political prisoners in Franco’s Spain.) Semprún lives in an elegant two-story apartment in the heart of Saint-Germain, the city’s elite literary district. His French, although perfect in syntax and pronunciation, still possesses a faintly Spanish cadence. As for the camps, he hastened to tell me that he would never be done “writing all this death.” Yet he remains, at the age of eighty-three, a dashing man, and very much alive.

INTERVIEWER

Why did you begin to write at the age of forty, after devoting your life to political action?

JORGE SEMPRÚN

Two reasons. The first is that fifteen years had passed since my release from Buchenwald, and I felt that I finally had sufficient distance from my experience of the camp to talk about it without slipping back into an obsession with death. I had become a different person. So it was almost as if I were telling someone else’s story.

The second reason was something concrete, and rather extraordinary. In 1960 I was sharing an apartment with a Communist militant named Manolo, who did not know that I was also a member of the underground Communist movement. He had fought in the Spanish Republican Army and had been a refugee in France before being taken prisoner by the Germans in 1940 and sent, like many other captured Spaniards, to Mauthausen, which was a very harsh Austrian camp. In the evenings, he told me about his experience at Mauthausen. But I did not think that he was able to convey the experience as I had understood it at Buchenwald, a similar sort of camp. Of course there was no way I could say, Hey Manolo, excuse me, that’s not how it was—because I couldn’t give up my cover. This frustration gave me the impulse to look back on the past. I began writing my first book, The Long Voyage, in that apartment. It was as though I suddenly needed to say what Manolo could not. So I talked about my camp, and this book, which I was morally incapable of writing in 1946, unspooled all by itself in a matter of days in 1961.

INTERVIEWER

It wasn’t published until 1963. Why did it take two years?

SEMPRÚN

I couldn’t publish it as long as I was a member of the underground Central Committee. I couldn’t risk having my photo in the newspaper while I was crossing the border illegally.

INTERVIEWER

So you owe it to Manolo that you became a writer.

SEMPRÚN

Yes. To him, and to countless others. I remember one time in Paris when I was eighteen, I saw a woman on the street, just a regular woman in wooden-soled shoes, and she’d turn around every time someone passed her, looking carefully at each person as though she were expecting someone. I figured she needed to ask a favor but wanted first to determine whether she could trust the person she was going to ask. And I thought to myself, I must be that person, she must trust me. And when I passed her, she asked me the most ordinary question: Where is the Montparnasse train station? We exchanged a few cryptic words, and I sensed that she was Jewish and was on her way to a house near the station where she could be hidden, that this was her last hope of escaping the raids. I walked with her to the station and left her there. So it was for her, too, that I began writing.

Many years later, in The Long Voyage, I imagined I saw that woman again, after the liberation of France. I imagined she was alive but did not recognize me, and that we continued the conversation we had started that day. In my mind, this imagined scene embraces the historical truth and allows me to deepen my reflection on the Jewish experience in France during the war. In fact, I often feel that fiction is necessary in my writing—even in my historical memoirs—within appropriate moral limits, because it enables me to explore the full dimension of an event or a moment. But I don’t believe I have ever invented anything that was not historically true.

INTERVIEWER

“Historically true” seems a slippery phrase. How do you define it? One could argue that your imagined conversation with the woman is historically false, since it never happened.

SEMPRÚN

Sure, my conversation with this woman, in a sense, is historically “false,” since it never happened. But the conversation is entirely plausible. I would put it this way: the conversation is at once a literary invention and a possible historical truth. Perhaps she survived, perhaps she wasn’t deported. So as far as I’m concerned, to imagine her later, and to imagine my conversation with her, is necessary in order to bear witness to what is historically true: that Jews had this experience of utter loneliness and abandonment, as opposed to members of the Resistance like myself, who functioned in networks and were constantly helped. This is why in the book I feel compelled to tell her, years later, that now and again I’ve desired to be Jewish myself, in order to have gone to the end of this experience with her.

I will always defend the legitimacy of literary fiction in expounding historical truth. In the case of deportation, both Jewish and non-Jewish, it is simply not possible to tell, or write, the truth. The truth we experienced is not credible, and this is a fact the Nazis relied upon in terms of their own legacy, for future generations. If we tell the raw, naked truth, no one will believe us. This is why I mentioned Manolo in that Madrid apartment. He was telling the raw truth, which was incomprehensible because it was bereft of verisimilitude. It needed to acquire a human shape, an actual form. This is where literature begins: narration, artifice, art—what Primo Levi calls a “filtered truth.” And I believe ardently that real memory, not historical and documentary memory but living memory, will be perpetuated only through literature. Because literature alone is capable of reinventing and regenerating truth. It is an extraordinary weapon, and you’ll see that in ten or fifteen years, the reference material on the destruction of the Jews of Europe will include a collection of literary testimonies—ours, possibly, but also those of younger generations, who have not witnessed but will be able to imagine.

INTERVIEWER

What were the roots of your political activism?

SEMPRÚN

I was born in Spain in 1923, so I was twelve when the Spanish Civil War broke out. When the war ended, I was fifteen and living in exile. Two years later I had started my philosophy degree, and I joined the anti-Nazi Resistance in France. These historical facts determined my entire life, of course. Had I been born a few years earlier or later, my life would have been completely different. This doesn’t mean that I didn’t make any choices. I did, but within a specific historical context, to which the Spanish Civil War was as vital as my work in the anti-Nazi Resistance.

It all began, in fact, with my father, a liberal Catholic who in 1931 chose the Republicans over the Franquistas. The Republic assigned him a post in the Spanish Embassy in the Netherlands in 1937. As an adolescent there, the first thing I did every morning before riding my bicycle to school was buy the papers to find out the latest news of the war in Spain. It was always bad. The Republic was being crushed, day after day. In 1939, when we finally lost the war, my parents and I moved to Paris. I wanted to be a philosopher, and I was preparing for the entrance exam to the École Normale Supérieure when I decided to join the Resistance and abandon my studies.

INTERVIEWER

What was your goal as a member of the Resistance?

SEMPRÚN When I signed up to fight Nazism, I was not fully aware of who I was, and I didn’t have a clear idea of the society that would emerge afterward. We knew that the invasions of Western European countries had to stop. The question of what might happen afterward—would there be a revolution? a peaceful return to democracy?—was more or less secondary and only became urgent many years later, after the war. At that moment, when I joined, I considered the Resistance to be the natural prolongation of the Spanish war against fascism. But my dream ended abruptly in September 1943, when I was arrested by the Gestapo. I was deported to a camp in Compiègne, then sent directly to Germany, to Buchenwald.

INTERVIEWER

How long were you there?

SEMPRÚN

A lifetime. I was imprisoned for sixteen months. I was not allowed to speak my native tongue. Buchenwald was a peculiar camp, an acute catalyzer of moral conflicts. It was built by the Nazis in 1937 to house their political opponents, mostly Communists and Social Democrats, with a small minority of Christian Democrats. There were more than fifty thousand prisoners at Buchenwald—it was a veritable city, with its own works department, infirmary, kitchens, storerooms—and very quickly the internal administration of the camp was taken over and run by the inmates themselves, with an SS officer in charge of each production unit. It was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz, which was built entirely around the gas chambers and the crematoria. Buchenwald was a work camp. We were integrated into the German war industry and fed enough to sustain us for a few months—in a state beyond exhaustion, but alive. A dead person can’t work, you see.

It was, along with the Spanish Civil War, the most powerful upheaval that I have ever gone through. The experience of the camps was absolute. Once, long after the war, a man asked me what I was— French or Spanish, a novelist or a politician? I said, spontaneously, that I was a deportee of Buchenwald. I was only twenty when I got there, you understand. It was a turning point in my life. There was no going back.

INTERVIEWER

But you couldn’t talk about the experience afterward?

SEMPRÚN

No, not for many years. Though when I got back from Buchenwald in 1945, I did want to write. I longed for it, to be honest, but strangely enough I found it impossible. I realized that in order to do so I would have to delve deep inside the memory of the camp, which was the memory, and the womb, of our deaths. And I just knew I could neither relive that experience nor survive it if I worked on the memoir at that time. It is a contradiction I realize—and although saying it today feels almost indecent, I will say it anyway because it is the truth—but for me, remembering would have meant death with absolute certainty, suicide that is, and I was very much aware of it. If one sets out to describe the experience of the camps, if one must speak about it, it can never stop. It will never be “done.” It is not essential to speak of the horror in all its detail, or about our hunger, our lack of sleep, how we clung together, our fraternity. It is however essential to speak of freedom, of our experience of good and evil. You might object, and you would be right, that there is no need to actually experience a concentration camp in order to ascertain the existence of good and evil. You can ascertain it in other ways, of course, in the most banal portions of our everyday lives, but the camp, because it focuses all experience around the constant risk of death, renders visible what is ordinarily more faint— that a human being is free by definition, that he has the freedom to be good or evil in every circumstance.

INTERVIEWER

What did you do to survive after the war?

SEMPRÚN

My distraction was to go into politics, to join the Spanish anti-Franco movement, the antidictatorial militants screaming, Tomorrow! Tomorrow we will win! Tomorrow, general strike! It was always “tomorrow.” Without giving it much thought, I went to work for the Spanish Communist Party to fight against the Franco regime. I had read Marx in my youth and was impressed by his clear, rigorous thinking. He dared to ask the great impassioned questions that one is consumed by at eighteen. The philosophers have interpreted the world, now it is up to us to change it, as Marx wrote. And right after reading him, thanks to some Austrians who were hiding us in the early stages of the war, I discovered the 1923 edition of a book by Georg Lukács called History and Class Consciousness, which for me opened entirely new vistas.

INTERVIEWER

What exactly did you do for the Communist Party in Spain?

SEMPRÚN

I split my time between Madrid, where I was illegal, and Paris. In France I was officially a translator for the UN and UNESCO. So when I disappeared to work underground in Madrid, my wife would say, Oh, he’s off translating at an international conference, he’ll be back in a month. I was leading a double life.

My mission for the Communists was to reorganize the underground anti-Franco cells, mostly those made up of intellectuals and academics. When I first got to Madrid in 1953, there were almost no cells left, Franco’s repression had been so brutal. But there was deep discontent, and one felt that culturally and politically there was a growing thirst for freedom, for democracy. I spoke to the generation of people who had not lived through the Spanish Civil War, and I found hundreds of them eager to build another future for their country. My underground alias was Federico Sánchez. So while Jorge Semprún remained unknown, Federico Sánchez became a notorious instigator of the anti-Franco movement. Later I wrote books about that anonymous time in Spain: The Autobiography of Federico Sánchez and Federico Sánchez se despide de ustedes. INTERVIEWER

Is that why there are so many doubles, alter egos, and narrators who stand in for you in your literary work?

SEMPRÚN

I lived twenty years of my life underground, and to live underground is, by definition, to be a double. In Spain I never introduced myself as Jorge Semprún. I was always someone else, and I got quite used to it. Later I found that when I referred to myself as you, as in The Long Voyage, I was able to convey a more objective sense of my experience. I observed myself as my own double—not as the actor, but as the witness of my own life.

INTERVIEWER

You constructed a dialogue with yourself?

SEMPRÚN

Yes, I did, but I also found instinctively that it was easier to speak of oneself from the outside than to be God proclaiming, On the first day this happened, and on the second day . . . This is why I find it more artificial to tell things in chronological order than randomly, following the vagaries of memory. And while I have often used the second person in order to achieve greater narrative freedom, in the novel I am writing now I’m trying to find a different approach. There will be different kinds of narrators—one will be an invented writer-narrator who says, he did this, she moved. The characters in the book will be people who worked with me in the Communist underground, French men and women who drove the cars and shuttled the illegals across the border. They meet again years later and speak of me, this man they knew. So the gaze of others will cause me, Jorge Semprún, to appear.

INTERVIEWER

In your books on the camps, The Long Voyage, Le Mort qu’il faut, and Literature or Life, you do use the first person.

SEMPRÚN

In those books, there is indeed a narrative I, which is there all the time but is sometimes doubled. Then the I becomes a you, and now, in this latest work, even a he.

INTERVIEWER

Given that most of your work is unmistakably autobiographical, do you consider yourself a novelist in the traditional sense?

SEMPRÚN I have often said I am not a “real” novelist, because for me the true novelist can use elements of reality to create a world that is more true to reality than reality itself, precisely because it is completely imaginary. I love that line by Boris Vian, “In this novel everything is true because I made it all up.” That, in my view, is a novel. And I will never be able to do that because I feel pulled inexorably toward the autobiographical material. I have written four books about the camps, but I could write countless others. There are still a thousand stories to tell. And I have more to say, to write, in the fourth book than on the day I began writingThe Long Voyage. When I first undertook this work of remembering, a flood of memories long hidden and nearly obliterated suddenly came bubbling to the surface.

INTERVIEWER

What kind of stories interest you?

SEMPRÚN

Stories of survival, whether heroic or tragic. Stories of confrontation between man and the historical period in which he lives. I am especially fascinated by the tenacity of the human will.

INTERVIEWER

Does writing these stories down come easily to you? Do you write quickly?

SEMPRÚN

I am often sidetracked by other stories I want to tell, so I find it difficult to get to the end of a novel. There is a strong narrative tension in the books, including the last one, Veinte años y un día, which I decided to write in Spanish. And now I give in, I realize I don’t have enough time to tell myself that I am writing a novel in which everything is true because it is all made up. I am too haunted by my own life to be able to speak about anything else.

INTERVIEWER

Adieu, vive clarté, published in 1998, is not about the camps.

SEMPRÚN

Adieu, vive clarté was written with one goal in mind—to avoid mentioning the camps. In order to do that I had to write about a time before the camps. So this book is a mélange of fiction and reality going back to certain events of my adolescence, from the time of my arrival in France in 1939. The summer of 1939 was way too brief. It marked the end of the Spanish Civil War, the war of my adolescence, and the beginning of World War II, the war of the young man I’d become. It was a summer between two wars. And I wrote this memoir because I desperately needed to get away from the curse of Buchenwald. It had infiltrated all of my writing, even La Montagne blanche, which had nothing to do with the war. Yet one of the characters in Adieu, vive clarté is suddenly overwhelmed by his memory of the camps. I couldn’t help it! So I had to push most of my story back to 1939, when, in my own eyes, the very notion of deportation as a possible future was unthinkable. But then there’s this moment when the narrator says that in his books he systematically condemns the characters with false names to die, like a sacrifice, a ritual to get on with life.

INTERVIEWER

And you have done that in several of your books.

SEMPRÚN

In L’ Algarabie, Artigas—one of the aliases I used in Madrid—dies. And the narrator ofAdieu, vive clarté says at one point, “Now I have no more aliases who will die in my place. It is finally my turn. Now I am naked, destitute.” In short, he is afraid.

I knew so many men and women who were forced to assume false names and false identities, and in doing so experienced all kinds of fantastic adventures. Any one of their lives could be the stuff of a great novel. Ultimately, however, I came to believe that Communist rule was the most tragic event of the twentieth century. Perhaps this is the reason I seem so difficult to understand in the United States, because for most Americans today, Communism seems like something almost alien, unfathomably distant. Whereas, quite blatantly, it was the beating pulse of my life. In the stories I tell, there are always two specific ideas—deportation and Communism. Two things Americans do not understand.

INTERVIEWER

Have you ever been influenced by American literature?

SEMPRÚN

Yes, the way I’ve approached these themes in my books was heavily influenced by my reading of American novels. I admire Hemingway, for instance. When Hemingway is at the top of his form, in his short stories and in some of his novels, his work has the nearly divine ability to conjure up the present: she stands up, she is sad, she is in love. But stylistically, I can’t do that. I am incapable of writing in the present tense like he does. In terms of pure craft, I have always been drawn to the Faulknerian style of writing, where an old lady starts off telling a story and then that story segues into another story, which sends us back to the distant past and then loops around to the present. It’s a specific way of perceiving time, and this is why Faulkner has always been one of my most significant literary influences.

INTERVIEWER

Which book by Faulkner did you discover first?

SEMPRÚN

I read Sartoris when I was finishing my philosophy degree at the Sorbonne, in 1942. Later I found Absalom, Absalom! in the Buchenwald library, in a German translation. There were people who were amazed when I would talk about this library. They would say, Well, if they had a library over there, it couldn’t have been that bad. They didn’t get it. Only a few of the camps had libraries, and they were created by the SS themselves, since a priori, they were meant to be reeducation camps, Umschulungslager. At Buchenwald there were several hundred Nazi books, like Mein Kampf and The Myth of the Twentieth Century by Alfred Rosenberg. But for most deportees the library was useless, because you had to know German to read the books. More to the point, you had to have the time and the desire to read, and most deportees, obviously, did not. You had to be in a slightly privileged situation. I was lucky enough to be on night duty every three or four weeks, where I was able to read because there wasn’t much work. So I managed to read Faulkner.

I remember it well, because I wanted to be a writer but I was in the camp and had just turned twenty- one, so I didn’t know when I’d be able to begin writing. But there I said to myself, that’s how you should write, like Absalom, Absalom! That is why, I suspect, my writing style can seem at times a little complicated—some might say overwrought—compared to traditional, linear French writing. It’s Faulkner’s influence.

INTERVIEWER

In Literature or Life, you say you read Schelling, Hegel, and Nietzsche at Buchenwald as well.

SEMPRÚN

I was given a volume from the collected works of Schelling, about human liberty, by a German Jehovah’s witness. It affected me, because I had already read it in French, in a Marxist translation. It is written in an idealistic, metaphysical language, but there are words about freedom, about good and evil that are deep and troubling. And also about the individual’s efforts to survive the tyranny of the crowd.

INTERVIEWER

Do you spend a lot of time reading now?

SEMPRÚN

Not enough. I prefer to read history books, essays, books about economy or philosophy rather than novels. It is so much easier to chance upon a great essay than a great novel. When I read essays, I’m hoping to find something that will reveal certain elemental particles to me, unveil things as yet unseen. I seek out novels that will keep the world alive for me, but I have less and less faith in finding such novels. I am appalled in particular by French novels: petty, pathetically subjective, navel-gazing, egotistical stories written around an insignificant adolescent or senescent experience but never, or rarely, in touch with reality. In the Anglo-Saxon novel there is much more contact with the political, the concreteness of the world, so to speak. When a novel accomplishes that, it is worth more than a philosophical treatise or a historical essay, because the form of the novel is infinitely supple and flexible and can express more variegated aspects of reality, using characters, speech, and style.

INTERVIEWER In the past you described yourself as a “stateless bilingual” writer. You have written most of your books in French, and three books in Spanish. What is it that prompted you to write your latest book in Spanish again?

SEMPRÚN

I wrote the first two Spanish books, the Federico Sánchez books, for historical, practical reasons. I wrote them about the Spanish political experience, primarily for my Spanish readers, since the subject would interest other readers only episodically. The French translation of The Autobiography of Federico Sánchez sold fifteen thousand copies, whereas in Spain hundreds of thousands of copies have now been sold. As for Veinte años y un día, it’s apples and oranges: I had already published many books in French and was thus in a rather bizarre situation in Spain, where I am considered a Spanish writer who writes in French! The whole thing is either comic, tragic, or just plain silly, depending on your point of view, since technically I am a Spanish writer whose works are translated into Spanish.

INTERVIEWER

Do you check the translations for accuracy?

SEMPRÚN

I read them, but it’s difficult. The Spanish translation of Literature or Life is very good. But I know I would not have written it like that in Spanish. I proofread them, I make sure there are no heinous mistakes or mistranslations, but I can’t correct for style, and the translations are not in my style. I do not write in Spanish the way I do in French. I would use other words. So it’s always painful to look at translations. Once I was talking with the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, after The Long Voyage was published in French. He asked me if I had done the Spanish translation myself, and I explained that I hadn’t because it would have felt strained, and quite insane in a sense, like writing the same book twice. He immediately replied, Listen, you are wrong. You write The Long Voyage, and when you translate it into Spanish it will be a different book. Then you translate it back into French, and it’s an entirely different book all over again. You’ll spend your entire life on the same book—that’s the ideal life for a writer! One book lasting a lifetime, yet different each and every time. He was right, in a way.

INTERVIEWER

Does one language affect the other?

SEMPRÚN

I think so. It isn’t for me to judge, but I think there is a cross-pollination, a contamination, an enrichment, not necessarily of the lexicon but of the linguistic form. This is because Spanish is a richer, more flexible, and less systematic language than French. And I suppose my French is a touch more baroque than contemporary French.

INTERVIEWER And conversely, does French at times influence your Spanish?

SEMPRÚN

Yes, because Spanish is an ornate, splendid language with extraordinary variety, but it is also a dangerous language. If you don’t master it, Spanish quickly becomes a crazy, quixotic language, it gets ahead of itself, sounds shamelessly grandiloquent, turns into a divine voice, the very voice of God. It is ideal for orating, defining good and evil, dividing worlds. All you have to do is compare French and Spanish political speeches to see what I’m talking about. So I feel that my French reins in my Spanish.

INTERVIEWER

Your work contains frequent digressions, and you often rewrite certain sentences to remind the reader that you are reformulating a previous thought or abandoning it in order to say something else. Why do you do this?

SEMPRÚN

I cannot write any other way. It would feel false to write my memoirs in chronological order. You know: I was born in Madrid in December of 1923, on Alberto Lista Street, which is now called José Ortega y Gasset. That is a reconstruction of an event at which I was not present—a completely artificial action. It would be more natural to speak of my birth in the middle of a passage that has nothing to do with it, to insert it as a digression and tell the story within the story. If I am telling a story to a group of friends at the Café de Flore, where every Sunday morning we meet for breakfast, that is how I would do it. I would try to speak succinctly, I guess, but in the end I cannot tell the story any other way.

INTERVIEWER

Do you ever worry that this technique might excessively complicate, even obscure, your writing?

SEMPRÚN

When I write, I try on the one hand to be as complicated as possible, insofar as I perceive life as complication, and on the other hand, to be as limpid as possible, since clearly I will have no readers if I am not understood.

INTERVIEWER

And yet in Veinte años y un día, which tells the story of a country under Francoist fascism still suffering from the legacy of the Spanish Civil War, you don’t use any of these techniques.

SEMPRÚN

There is a limit: there are novels whose structure is so arbitrary that they seem to be sneering at the reader. The reader needs a master’s degree in narratology to be able to read them. In my case, there is the risk that, since my storytelling style is “natural,” it could also become a tic, which worries me a great deal. But I am unable to use a different narrative style because then I would feel I was no longer myself. At the same time, I am constantly adjusting, with glimpses of clarity and straightforward narration, so that we are not completely lost. In my upcoming books I am trying to blend passages of reflection with events of personal significance, adventures, and memories, framed for once in a linear chronology.

INTERVIEWER

What themes dominate your writing, and your imagination, these days?

SEMPRÚN

What was the Resistance’s ethic in the camps? Should we have used to our political advantage the responsibilities the SS delegated to the deportees when they allowed us to administer the camp at Buchenwald? This is a fundamental moral question. The chief of the SS work unit orders the Kapo of the prisoner command, The day after tomorrow, Thursday, at six o’clock, I need three thousand men assembled in the yard to be sent to Dora. The Kapo consults with me, and I know that Dora is a harsher camp, where these men will likely die—so what do I do? Should I answer, No, I do not want to select three thousand men, they are all my comrades, I cannot choose? The idiot who says this is shot on the spot, and there will still be three thousand men chosen the following morning at six o’clock. The choice is not between three thousand prisoners and no prisoners at all. The choice is as follows: either the SS will make the selection or we will do it in their place, thereby using the process to save some prisoners. We will make up a list of three thousand men who are already dying, who are quarantined, or who have not yet been assigned to jobs. And we will confer secretly with the national organizations in the camp, asking them if there is anyone on this list we should save. But years later I got these hate letters saying, You collaborated, you are a war criminal!

INTERVIEWER

In France you have been publicly accused of having spared the lives of your Communist Party comrades over the lives of others.

SEMPRÚN

Do we have the right to make a choice in those circumstances? Can we apply an ethic to the Resistance that we don’t apply to everyday ethics? What is considered moral in this context? What is moral is that we were required to save those who were closest to the ethic of the Resistance, meaning the heads of the networks, the ones working in transport, and so on.

You ask what haunts my writing. Well, after the camp, there was the moral question of being a Communist. Trying to explain the folly and the necessity of that choice. Trying to show how it came to be my raison d’être, and why this dead star hovered for so long above the previous century. Here are my obsessions, in no particular order: torture, the camps, the Jewish experience during the Holocaust, the singularity of that experience in the larger context of deportation. It is not easy to reflect on these issues today. Historically, the most significant pitfall has been the most dangerous—silence, the refusal to talk about what happened. INTERVIEWER

The Resistance was a vast movement, made up of many factions. Is it possible to talk about a shared experience among those who took part in it?

SEMPRÚN

Yes, and that experience is torture. Sometimes I find myself at a dinner with old men wearing their military decorations—not that they’re much older than I am, but I still think of them as old men, decorated, noble—and in the middle of the conversation, we find out that of the five of us, three were in the Resistance! One was a leftist and one was more from the right, the third was a teacher or the head of some administrative council, but what all three of us had in common was the experience of being tortured. The shared experience of the Jewish and the Gypsy communities was selection. They were not tortured, they were arrested en masse and sent directly to the death camps. So the experience of selection for the crime of merely being born, that belongs to the Jews and to the Gypsies—and also the experience of being deported collectively, entire families, entire Eastern European villages, entire neighborhoods from Paris. These people arrived at the camps in Poland already knowing each other, and to their left and to their right stood the henchmen of the SS, the angels of death, who would say, You— this way. You—that way. And who is being sent to die? It is not simply a friend, a comrade, it is a mother, a brother, a child. Only the Jews and Gypsies experienced that. The members of the Resistance were arrested separately and their experiences were essentially solitary.

INTERVIEWER

You were expelled from the Communist Party in 1964. Would you now call yourself an anticommunist?

SEMPRÚN

No, I wouldn’t go that far. I would say I have become a stranger to communism. I suppose I am anticommunist in the theoretical criticizing of communism as a solution to socioeconomic issues, but not militantly anticommunist.

Clearly the fight against dictatorship was justified, in spite of whatever tactical errors we in the Resistance may have committed. But what—and who—would take over in its place? This is where I began to engage in the discussion, examining the gaps between the monolithic, seamless visions we had built for ourselves and the reality of our situation—the fading, tarnished image of a Spain that was not at all as we had imagined it. Then there were all the events taking place in the USSR, the Twentieth Congress, the so-called secret report by Khrushchev, a whole series of things that undermined our fiercest hopes. So the day came when that contradiction became intolerable, when I refused to perform self-censorship and was thus definitively expelled from the Communist Party.

I would put it this way: I didn’t choose to become a writer, but I did choose to quit being a man of action. And that opened up the possibility of becoming a writer.

INTERVIEWER Do you think you would have managed to survive being expelled had you not begun writing?

SEMPRÚN

No, not at all. I am sure I would have disintegrated emotionally.

INTERVIEWER

The book you’re working on now, “Exercice de survie,” is made up of memoir as well as reflections on memory. Is this a response to your critics who objected to your adding fiction to your memoirs of the camps? Claude Lanzmann went so far as to argue that the use of fictional detail renders the narrative of the deportee entirely counterfeit.

SEMPRÚN

I think it is very difficult to enter into a discussion with Claude Lanzmann. Once he said, All Semprún does is literature! Shoah is indeed a remarkable film, but he would like us to believe that it is not a film composed partly of fiction? The disturbing truth, the great paradox of the gas chambers, is that it left no surviving witnesses. And that changes everything. All the other massacres of history have left a few survivors who could serve as witnesses. But no one survived the gas chamber. We have never been inside the gas chamber, because had we been there, we would be dead. There are a few cases where someone was pulled out at the last minute, but then that person did not experience the gas chamber, just the entrance into the chamber. We only have the testimony of those who ran the gas chambers and dragged out the bodies of the dead. So in a sense, Lanzmann’s film is also fictional. It takes place years later, and people are telling their stories with the measure of artifice it necessarily entails. I find this approximation both artistic and fascinating, but it is a strict reconstruction of the truth.

INTERVIEWER

But that poses the problem of genre, obviously. Literature or Life is a memoir that detours occasionally into novelistic territory. Do you consider it an authentic memoir?

SEMPRÚN

Yes.

INTERVIEWER

Was the question of genre—of fact versus fiction and how it should be labeled—relevant in your mind at the time you were writing the book?

SEMPRÚN

Of course, and I would say I tried even harder with Literature or Life to step away from the traditional genres—my books are generally both memoirs and novels, both fiction and first-hand testimony. My aim was to create a synthesis of the two genres. This is what speaks to me, this synthesis that cannot be defined according to the rules of traditional literary criticism. But in Literature or Life I pushed the hybrid form much farther. When I was working on the most painful parts of the autobiographical narrative, the ones I had postponed for so long, I forced myself to be as stringent as possible, to be absolutely faithful to the historical truth. I did not want to romanticize any of the details, or to distract the reader with dramatic turns of event or artificial moments of narrative tension. So I decided to use my imagination only when it felt necessary in order to produce a more lucid image of my overall experience of the camp.

INTERVIEWER

In your books you discuss the paradoxical nature of pleasure as something that might have reconnected you to life after the camp but which in fact drew you back to the memory of death.

SEMPRÚN

Yes, pleasure was, in reality, the complete opposite of oblivion. I could see the shadow of Buchenwald in the gaze of the girls who looked at me after I’d left the camp. And so to me pleasure became, to put it bluntly, a reminder of the life I had stolen from others. The sheer guilt of being in the world, of having survived the collective hell of the camp.

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel more at peace today, more than fifty years and fifteen books later?

SEMPRÚN

Literature has played a dual and contradictory role in my life. The act of writing appeases one’s memories and eases the act of forgetting. When I write, I make my memories tangible, and in this way I can get rid of them. On the other hand, writing is but a ploy to convulse memory back into life. And the more I write, the more my memories return to inhabit me.

For a long time I only dreamt strange, penetrating nightmares, whereas now I no longer have nightmares at all. Literature has appeased my anxieties. The memories are there, but they remain quiescent. Some of them, the difficult moments, the freezing cold, the hunger, the horror of death—I am going to say something rather brutal here—have become nearly fictional in my eyes, as if I had invented them in order to write about them, as if they had never actually happened to me. But then I’ve come to realize that this process of dredging up old memories never ends. Here’s an idea that presents itself, clearly and concretely, in my book Quel beau dimanche! when I tell the story of a dog stew we made and ate in the camp. But I could write a whole book about just that one memory, about people’s reaction to the stew, the Czech who says, No, I will not touch it, and another man who says, No, it is just theidea of the dog that revolts you, and so on. There are so many episodes like that, which remain so vivid in my mind. Hence literature, in the end, has caused me new anxieties as well, because the idea that I may still have things to say and not have the time in which to say them is terribly unsettling. But that’s how it is.

INTERVIEWER In Le Mort qu’il faut, there is an extraordinary instant when all of a sudden this other voice comes echoing out of you, spouting poetry. Is that something that really happened to you in the camp?

SEMPRÚN

Absolutely. That is not fiction. In a concentration camp you’re not really afraid of looking crazy by talking to yourself, since everyone there has something or other affecting them. Whispering poetry to yourself or reciting it out loud lends you a sort of solitude, allows you to imagine for an instant that you belong to yourself again. It’s like therapy. In fact, the richer and more complex the poetry, the more effective. You’re in the middle of the communal bathroom, being shoved by people trying to get to the water basin. That’s a discipline you must keep up, because if you don’t wash, you let go of yourself and begin looking like a tramp. So everyone is pushing to get to the giant sinks where the water is running, and in the middle of that formidable stench, those inhumanly foul odors, you are saying, “Calm, calm, stay calm! Feel the weight of a palm”—you are reciting Paul Valéry and suddenly you are alone, autonomous, private. Of course thirty seconds later somebody knees you in the leg and you’re right back in that roiling mass of people, but for that one second you’ve managed to escape. You went deep inside yourself to find strength, and you alone know that it took incredible resourcefulness to be anything but yourself.

INTERVIEWER

Did you learn a lot of poetry by heart in your youth?

SEMPRÚN

I am from the time when students were taught to do that. Reciting poetry is a pedagogical instrument. It certainly had its wretched aspects—it is mechanical, repetitive. But on the other hand, you do have permanent access to your own private anthology.

INTERVIEWER

You use a line by André Malraux as an epigraph to Literature or Life: “The crucial region of the soul where absolute Evil and fraternity clash.” This clash seems to be a recurring idea in your work.

SEMPRÚN

Yes, perhaps. The only problem is that we would need our own Dostoyevsky to shed light on that matter, absolute evil. The force that shaped the twentieth century.

INTERVIEWER

Do you fear that you have not succeeded in depicting absolute evil in your work?

SEMPRÚN I think I have helped people see that it is a fundamental theme of our era. But I have not been able to articulate it in my novels. At least not yet, and I don’t know that I ever will. Perhaps in bursts, in the corners of some of my anecdotes, my adventures, my tales. Man’s liberty resides in his freedom to do good as well as evil. In the camps, which quite literally collected and concentrated souls, it was all the more striking. I saw men who would turn a comrade in to the SS just to obtain a few supplementary morsels of bread and live a few days longer. But I also saw men who shared their bread with a comrade, even though that meant they would lose days of their own lives. I prefer speaking of the man who shares his bread, but we can also speak of the others. And we can speak about how men of higher social rank were capable of committing horrendous acts in order to survive, while at times men of modest origins were capable of heroic acts of self-sacrifice. The privileges of class and education were thoroughly shattered in the face of the conditions at the camps. And humanity lay revealed, completely bare, terrifying, eerily beautiful.

INTERVIEWER

At eighty-three years of age, you seem astonishingly young. Have you any idea why?

SEMPRÚN

I am not blasé, that much I know. I find something or someone new every day, or perhaps at my age every week. One must revel in the effort, of course— keep making choices, lust after life.

INTERVIEWER

Are there any literary forms you haven’t yet tried that you wish to pursue?

SEMPRÚN

I once thought of writing futuristic books, science fiction that would be based on the anticipation of political events in the distant future. But I’m not sure I can do it. I always tiptoe back to memory.

—Translated from French by Sara Sugihara

Bernard Malamud, The Art of Fiction No. 52 Interviewed by Daniel Stern

Bernard Malamud lives in a white clapboard house in Bennington, Vermont. Spacious and comfortable, it sits on a gentle downward slope, behind it the rise of the Green Mountains. To this house on April 26, 1974, came friends, family, colleagues, and the children of friends to celebrate Malamud’s sixtieth birthday. It was a sunny weekend, the weather and ambience benign, friendly.

There were about a half-dozen young people taking their rest in sleeping bags in various bedrooms and in a home volunteered by a friend and neighbor. Three of them, from nearby universities, were children of friends who were on the faculty of Oregon State University more than a dozen years ago. On Saturday night there was a birthday party, with champagne, birthday cake, and dancing. At the end of the evening the young people drummed up a show of slides: scenes of past travels; in particular, scenes of Corvallis, Oregon, where Malamud had lived and taught for twelve years before returning East.

Bernard Malamud is a slender man with a graying mustache and inquisitive brown eyes that search and hide a little at the same time. He is a quiet man who listens a lot and responds freely. His wife, Ann, an attractive, articulate woman of Italian descent, had planned the party, assisted by the young people from Oregon and the Malamuds’ son, Paul, and daughter, Janna.

The taping of the interview began late Friday morning, on the back porch, which overlooks a long, descending sweep of lawn and, in the distance, the encircling mountains. It was continued later in the book-filled study where Malamud writes. (He also writes in his office at Bennington College.) At first he was conscious of the tape recorder, but grew less so as the session—and the weekend—continued. He has a quick laugh and found it easy to discourse on the questions asked. An ironic humor would seem to be his mother tongue.

INTERVIEWER

Why sixty? I understand that when the Paris Review asked you to do an interview after the publication of The Fixer, you suggested doing it when you hit sixty?

BERNARD MALAMUD

Right. It’s a respectable round number, and when it becomes your age you look at it with both eyes. It’s a good time to see from. In the past I sometimes resisted interviews because I had no desire to talk about myself in relation to my fiction. There are people who always want to make you a character in your stories and want you to confirm it. Of course there’s some truth to it: Every character you invent takes his essence from you; therefore you’re in them as Flaubert was in Emma—but, peace to him, you are not those you imagine. They are your fictions. And I don’t like questions of explication: What did I mean by this or that? I want the books to speak for themselves. You can read? All right, tell me what my books mean. Astonish me.

INTERVIEWER

What about a little personal history? There’s been little written about your life.

MALAMUD

That’s how I wanted it—I like privacy, and as much as possible to stay out of my books. I know that’s disadvantageous to certain legitimate kinds of criticism of literature, but my needs come first. Still, I have here and there talked a little about my life: My father was a grocer; my mother, who helped him, after a long illness, died young. I had a younger brother who lived a hard and lonely life and died in his fifties. My mother and father were gentle, honest, kindly people, and who they were and their affection for me to some degree made up for the cultural deprivation I felt as a child. They weren’t educated, but their values were stable. Though my father always managed to make a living, they were comparatively poor, especially in the Depression, and yet I never heard a word in praise of the buck. On the other hand, there were no books that I remember in the house, no records, music, pictures on the wall. On Sundays I listened to somebody’s piano through the window. At nine I caught pneumonia, and when I was convalescing my father bought me The Book of Knowledge, twenty volumes where there had been none. That was, considering the circumstances, an act of great generosity. When I was in high school he bought a radio. As a kid, for entertainment I turned to the movies and dime novels. Maybe The Natural derives from Frank Merriwell as well as the adventures of the Brooklyn Dodgers in Ebbets Field. Anyway, my parents stayed close to the store. Once in a while, on Jewish holidays, we went visiting, or saw a Jewish play—Sholem Aleichem, Peretz, and others. My mother’s brother, Charles Fidelman, and their cousin, Isidore Cashier, were in the Yiddish theatre.

Around the neighborhood the kids played Chase the White Horse, Ringolevio, Buck-Buck, punchball, and one o’cat. Occasionally we stole tomatoes from the Italian dirt farmers, gypped the El to ride to Coney Island, smoked in cellars, and played blackjack. I wore sneakers every summer. My education at home derived mostly from the presence and example of good, feelingful, hard-working people. They were worriers, with other faults I wasn’t much conscious of until I recognized them in myself. I learned from books, in the public schools. I had some fine teachers in grammar school, Erasmus Hall High School, and later at City College, in New York. I took to literature and early wanted to be a writer.

INTERVIEWER

How early?

MALAMUD

At eight or nine I was writing little stories in school and feeling the glow. To anyone of my friends who’d listen I’d recapitulate at tedious length the story of the last movie I’d seen. The movies tickled my imagination. As a writer I learned from Charlie Chaplin.

INTERVIEWER

What in particular?

MALAMUD

Let’s say the rhythm, the snap of comedy; the reserved comic presence—that beautiful distancing; the funny with sad; the surprise of surprise.

INTERVIEWER

Please go on about your life.

MALAMUD Schools meant a lot to me, those I went to and taught at. You learn what you teach and you learn from those you teach. In 1942 I met my wife, and we were married in 1945. We have two children and have lived in Oregon, Rome, Bennington, Cambridge, London, New York, and have traveled a fair amount. In sum, once I was twenty and not so young, now I’m sixty inclined on the young side.

INTERVIEWER

Which means?

MALAMUD

Largely, the life of imagination, and doing pretty much what I set out to do. I made my mistakes, took my lumps, learned. I resisted my ignorance, limitations, obsessions. I’m freer than I was. I’d rather write it than talk. I love the privileges of form.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve taught during the time you were a professional writer?

MALAMUD

Thirty-five years—

INTERVIEWER

There are some who say teaching doesn’t do the writer much good; in fact it restricts life and homogenizes experience. Isn’t a writer better off on the staff of The New Yorker, or working for the BBC? Faulkner fed a furnace and wrote for the movies.

MALAMUD

Doesn’t it depend on the writer? People experience similar things differently. Sometimes I’ve regretted the time I’ve given to teaching, but not teaching itself. And a community of serious readers is a miraculous thing. Some of the most extraordinary people I’ve met were students of mine, or colleagues. Still, I ought to say I teach only a single class of prose fiction, one term a year. I’ve taught since I was twenty-five, and though I need more time for reading and writing, I also want to keep on doing what I can do well and enjoy doing.

INTERVIEWER

Do you teach literature?

MALAMUD If you teach prose fiction, you are teaching literature. You teach those who want to write to read fiction, even their own work, with greater understanding. Sometimes they’re surprised to find out how much they’ve said or not said that they didn’t know they had.

INTERVIEWER

Can one, indeed, teach writing?

MALAMUD

You teach writers—assuming a talent. At the beginning young writers pour it out without much knowing the nature of their talent. What you try to do is hold a mirror up to their fiction so, in a sense, they can see what they’re showing. Not all who come forth are fully armed. Some are gifted in narrative, some shun it. Some show a richness of metaphor, some have to dig for it. Some writers think language is all they need; they mistake it for subject matter. Some rely on whimsy. Some on gut feeling. Some of them don’t make the effort to create a significant form. They do automatic writing and think they’re probing themselves. The odd thing is, most young writers write traditional narrative until you introduce them to the experimental writers—not for experiment’s sake, but to try something for size. Let the writer attempt whatever he can. There’s no telling where he will come out stronger than before. Art is in life, but the realm is endless.

INTERVIEWER

Experiment at the beginning?

MALAMUD

Sometimes a new technique excites a flood of fictional ideas. Some, after experimenting, realize their strength is in traditional modes. Some, after trying several things, may give up the thought of writing fiction—not a bad thing. Writing—the problems, the commitment, the effort, scares them. Some may decide to try poetry or criticism. Some turn to painting—why not? I have no kick against those who use writing, or another art, to test themselves, to find themselves. Sometimes I have to tell them their talents are thin—not to waste their lives writing third-rate fiction.

INTERVIEWER

Fidelman as a painter? The doubtful talent?

MALAMUD

Yes. Among other things, it is a book about finding a vocation. Forgive the soft impeachment.

INTERVIEWER

In Pictures of Fidelman and The Tenants you deal with artists who can’t produce, or produce badly. Why does the subject interest you so much? Have you ever been blocked? MALAMUD

Never. Even in anxiety I’ve written, though anxiety, because it is monochromatic, may limit effects. I like the drama of nonproductivity, especially where there may be talent. It’s an interesting ambiguity: the force of the creative versus the paralysis caused by the insults, the confusions of life.

INTERVIEWER

What about work habits? Some writers, especially at the beginning, have problems settling how to do it.

MALAMUD

There’s no one way—there’s so much drivel about this subject. You’re who you are, not Fitzgerald or Thomas Wolfe. You write by sitting down and writing. There’s no particular time or place—you suit yourself, your nature. How one works, assuming he’s disciplined, doesn’t matter. If he or she is not disciplined, no sympathetic magic will help. The trick is to make time—not steal it—and produce the fiction. If the stories come, you get them written, you’re on the right track. Eventually everyone learns his or her own best way. The real mystery to crack is you.

INTERVIEWER

What about the number of drafts? Some writers write only one.

MALAMUD

They’re cheating themselves. First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it. D. H. Lawrence, for instance, did seven or eight drafts of The Rainbow. The first draft of a book is the most uncertain— where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better. Revision is one of the true pleasures of writing. “The men and things of today are wont to lie fairer and truer in tomorrow’s memory,” Thoreau said.

INTERVIEWER

Do you teach your own writing?

MALAMUD

No, I teach what I know about writing.

INTERVIEWER

What specific piece of advice would you give to young writers?

MALAMUD Write your heart out.

INTERVIEWER

Anything else?

MALAMUD

Watch out for self-deceit in fiction. Write truthfully but with cunning.

INTERVIEWER

Anything special to more experienced types?

MALAMUD

To any writer: Teach yourself to work in uncertainty. Many writers are anxious when they begin, or try something new. Even Matisse painted some of his Fauvist pictures in anxiety. Maybe that helped him to simplify. Character, discipline, negative capability count. Write, complete, revise. If it doesn’t work, begin something else.

INTERVIEWER

And if it doesn’t work twenty or thirty times?

MALAMUD

You live your life as best you can.

INTERVIEWER

I’ve heard you talk about the importance of subject matter?

MALAMUD

It’s always a problem. Very young writers who don’t know themselves obviously often don’t know what they have to say. Sometimes by staying with it they write themselves into a fairly rich vein. Some, by the time they find what they’re capable of writing about, no longer want to write. Some go through psychoanalysis or a job in a paint factory and begin to write again. One hopes they then have something worth saying. Nothing is guaranteed. Some writers have problems with subject matter not in their first book, which may mine childhood experience, or an obsession, or fantasy, or the story they’ve carried in their minds and imagination to this point, but after that—after this first yield—often they run into trouble with their next few books. Especially if the first book is unfortunately a best seller. And some writers run into difficulties at the end, particularly if they exclude important areas of personal experience from their writing. Hemingway would not touch his family beyond glimpses in short stories, mostly the Nick Adams pieces. He once wrote his brother that their mother was a bitch and father a suicide—who’d want to read about them? Obviously not all his experience is available to a writer for purposes of fiction, but I feel that if Hemingway had tried during his last five years, let’s say, to write about his father rather than the bulls once more, or the big fish, he mightn’t have committed suicide. Mailer, after The Naked and the Dead, ran into trouble he couldn’t resolve until he invented his mirror image: Aquarius, prisoner of Sex, doppelgänger, without whom he can’t write. After he had invented “Norman Mailer” he produced The Armies of the Night, a beautiful feat of prestidigitation, if not fiction. He has still to write, Richard Poirier says, his Moby Dick. To write a good big novel he will have to invent other selves, richly felt selves. Roth, since Portnoy, has been hunting for a fruitful subject. He’s tried various strategies to defeat the obsession of the hated wife he almost never ceases to write about. He’ll have at last to bury her to come up with a new comedy.

INTERVIEWER

What about yourself?

MALAMUD

I say the same thing in different worlds.

INTERVIEWER

Anything else to say to writers—basic stuff?

MALAMUD

Take chances. “Dare to do,” Eudora Welty says. She’s right. One drags around a bag of fears he has to throw to the winds every so often if he expects to take off in his writing. I’m glad Virginia Woolf did Orlando, though it isn’t my favorite of her books, and in essence she was avoiding a subject. Still, you don’t have to tell everything you know. I like Updike’s Centaur, Bellow’s Henderson. Genius, after it has got itself together, may give out with a Ulysses or Remembrance of Things Past. One doesn’t have to imitate the devices of Joyce or Proust, but if you’re not a genius, imitate the daring. If you are a genius, assert yourself, in art and humanity.

INTERVIEWER

Humanity? Are you suggesting art is moral?

MALAMUD

It tends toward morality. It values life. Even when it doesn’t, it tends to. My former colleague, Stanley Edgar Hyman, used to say that even the act of creating a form is a moral act. That leaves out something, but I understand and like what he was driving at. It’s close to Frost’s definition of a poem as “a momentary stay against confusion.” Morality begins with an awareness of the sanctity of one’s life, hence the lives of others—even Hitler’s, to begin with—the sheer privilege of being, in this miraculous cosmos, and trying to figure out why. Art, in essence, celebrates life and gives us our measure. INTERVIEWER

It changes the world?

MALAMUD

It changes me. It affirms me.

INTERVIEWER

Really?

MALAMUD

(laughs) It helps.

INTERVIEWER

Let’s get to your books. In The Natural, why the baseball-mythology combination?

MALAMUD

Baseball flat is baseball flat. I had to do something else to enrich the subject. I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish. The mythological analogy is a system of metaphor. It enriches the vision without resorting to montage. This guy gets up with his baseball bat and all at once he is, through the ages, a knight—somewhat battered— with a lance; not to mention a guy with a blackjack, or someone attempting murder with a flower. You relate to the past and predict the future. I’m not talented as a conceptual thinker but I am in the uses of metaphor. The mythological and symbolic excite my imagination. Incidentally, Keats said, “I am not a conceptual thinker, I am a man of ideas.”

INTERVIEWER

Is The Assistant mythological?

MALAMUD

Some, I understand, find it so.

INTERVIEWER

Did you set it up as a mythology?

MALAMUD No. If it’s mythological to some readers I have no objection. You read the book and write your ticket. I can’t tell you how the words fall, though I know what I mean. Your interpretation—pace S. Sontag— may enrich the book or denude it. All I ask is that it be consistent and make sense.

INTERVIEWER

Is it a moral allegory?

MALAMUD

You have to squeeze your brain to come up with that. The spirit is more than moral, and by the same token there’s more than morality in a good man. One must make room in those he creates. So far as range is concerned, ultimately a writer’s mind and heart, if any, are revealed in his fiction.

INTERVIEWER

What is the source of The Assistant?

MALAMUD

Source questions are piddling but you’re my friend, so I’ll tell you. Mostly my father’s life as a grocer, though not necessarily my father. Plus three short stories, sort of annealed in a single narrative: “The Cost of Living” and “The First Seven Years”—both in The Magic Barrel. And a story I wrote in the forties, “The Place is Different Now,” which I’ve not included in my story collections.

INTERVIEWER

Is The Fixer also related to your father’s life?

MALAMUD

Indirectly. My father told me the Mendel Beilis story when I was a kid. I carried it around almost forty years and decided to use it after I gave up the idea of a Sacco and Vanzetti novel. When I began to read for the Sacco and Vanzetti it had all the quality of a structured fiction, all the necessary elements of theme and narrative. I couldn’t see any way of re-forming it. I was very much interested in the idea of prison as a source of the self’s freedom and thought of Dreyfus next, but he was a dullish man, and though he endured well he did not suffer well. Neither did Beilis, for that matter, but his drama was more interesting—his experiences; so I invented Yakov Bok, with perhaps the thought of him as a potential Vanzetti. Beilis, incidentally, died a bitter man, in New York—after leaving Palestine, because he thought he hadn’t been adequately reimbursed for his suffering.

INTERVIEWER

Some critics have commented on this prison motif in your work.

MALAMUD Perhaps I use it as a metaphor for the dilemma of all men: necessity, whose bars we look through and try not to see. Social injustice, apathy, ignorance. The personal prison of entrapment in past experience, guilt, obsession—the somewhat blind or blinded self, in other words. A man has to construct, invent, his freedom. Imagination helps. A truly great man or woman extends it for others in the process of creating his or her own.

INTERVIEWER

Does this idea or theme, as you call it, come out of your experience as a Jew?

MALAMUD

That’s probably in it—a heightened sense of prisoner of history, but there’s more to it than that. I conceive this as the major battle in life, to transcend the self—extend one’s realm of freedom.

INTERVIEWER

Not all your characters do.

MALAMUD

Obviously. But they’re all more or less engaged in the enterprise.

INTERVIEWER

Humor is so much a part of your work. Is this an easy quality to deal with? Is one problem that the response to humor is so much a question of individual taste?

MALAMUD

The funny bone is universal. I doubt humorists think of individual taste when they’re enticing the laugh. With me humor comes unexpectedly, usually in defense of a character, sometimes because I need cheering up. When something starts funny I can feel my imagination eating and running. I love the distancing—the guise of invention—that humor gives fiction. Comedy, I imagine, is harder to do consistently than tragedy, but I like it spiced in the wine of sadness.

INTERVIEWER

What about suffering? It’s a subject much in your early work.

MALAMUD

I’m against it, but when it occurs, why waste the experience?

INTERVIEWER Are you a Jewish writer?

MALAMUD

What is the question asking?

INTERVIEWER

One hears various definitions and insistences, for instance, that one is primarily a writer and any subject matter is secondary; or that one is an American-Jewish writer. There are qualifications, by Bellow, Roth, others.

MALAMUD

I’m an American, I’m a Jew, and I write for all men. A novelist has to, or he’s built himself a cage. I write about Jews, when I write about Jews, because they set my imagination going. I know something about their history, the quality of their experience and belief, and of their literature, though not as much as I would like. Like many writers I’m influenced especially by the Bible, both Testaments. I respond in particular to the East European immigrants of my father’s and mother’s generation; many of them were Jews of the Pale as described by the classic Yiddish writers. And of course I’ve been deeply moved by the Jews of the concentration camps, and the refugees wandering from nowhere to nowhere. I’m concerned about Israel. Nevertheless, Jews like rabbis Kahane and Korff set my teeth on edge. Sometimes I make characters Jewish because I think I will understand them better as people, not because I am out to prove anything. That’s a qualification. Still another is that I know that, as a writer, I’ve been influenced by Hawthorne, James, Mark Twain, Hemingway, more than I have been by Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz, whom I read with pleasure. Of course I admire and have been moved by other writers, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, for instance, but the point I’m making is that I was born in America and respond, in American life, to more than Jewish experience. I wrote for those who read.

INTERVIEWER

Thus S. Levin is Jewish and not much is made of it?

MALAMUD

He was a gent who interested me in a place that interested me. He was out to be educated.

INTERVIEWER

Occasionally I see a remark to the effect that he has more than a spoonful of you in him.

MALAMUD So have Roy Hobbs, Helen Bober, Willie Spearmint, and Talking Horse. More to the point—I prefer autobiographical essence to autobiographical history. Events from life may creep into the narrative, but it isn’t necessarily my life history.

INTERVIEWER

How much of a book is set in your mind when you begin? Do you begin at the beginning? Does its course ever change markedly from what you had in the original concept?

MALAMUD

When I start I have a pretty well-developed idea what the book is about and how it ought to go, because generally I’ve been thinking about it and making notes for months, if not years. Generally I have the ending in mind, usually the last paragraph almost verbatim. I begin at the beginning and stay close to the track, if it is a track and not a whale path. If it turns out I’m in the open sea, my compass is my narrative instinct, with an assist by that astrolabe, theme. The destination, wherever it is, is, as I said, already defined. If I go astray it’s not a long excursis, good for getting to know the ocean, if not the world. The original idea, altered but recognizable, on the whole remains.

INTERVIEWER

Do characters ever run away from you and take on identities you hadn’t expected?

MALAMUD

My characters run away, but not far. Their guise is surprises.

INTERVIEWER

Let’s go to Fidelman. You seem to like to write about painters.

MALAMUD

I know a few. I love painting.

INTERVIEWER

Rembrandt and who else?

MALAMUD

Too many to name, but Cézanne, Monet, and Matisse, very much, among modernists.

INTERVIEWER

Chagall? MALAMUD

Not that much. He rides his nostalgic nag to death.

INTERVIEWER

Some have called you a Chagallean writer.

MALAMUD

Their problem. I used Chagallean imagery intentionally in one story, “The Magic Barrel,” and that’s it. My quality is not much like his.

INTERVIEWER

Fidelman first appears in “Last Mohican,” a short story. Did you already have in mind that there would be an extended work on him?

MALAMUD

After I wrote the story in Rome I jotted down ideas for several incidents in the form of a picaresque novel. I was out to loosen up—experiment a little—with narrative structure. And I wanted to see, if I wrote it at intervals—as I did from 1957 to 1968—whether the passing of time and mores would influence his life. I did not think of the narrative as merely a series of related stories, because almost at once I had the structure of a novel in mind and each part had to fit that form. Robert Scholes in The Saturday Review has best explained what I was up to in Fidelman.

INTERVIEWER

Did you use all the incidents you jotted down?

MALAMUD

No.

INTERVIEWER

Can you give me an example of one you left out?

MALAMUD

Yes, Fidelman administering to the dying Keats in Rome—doing Severn’s job, one of the few times in his life our boy is engaged in a purely unselfish act, or acts. But I felt I had no need to predict a change in him, especially in a sort of dream sequence, so I dropped the idea. The painting element was to come in via some feverish watercolors of John Keats, dying. INTERVIEWER

Fidelman is characterized by some critics as a schlemiel.

MALAMUD

Not accurately. Peter Schlemiel lost his shadow and suffered the consequences for all time. Not Fidelman. He does better. He escapes his worst fate. I dislike the schlemiel characterization as a taxonomical device. I said somewhere that it reduces to stereotypes people of complex motivations and fates. One can often behave like a schlemiel without being one.

INTERVIEWER

Do you read criticism of your work?

MALAMUD

When it hits me in the eye; even some reviews.

INTERVIEWER

Does it affect you?

MALAMUD

Some of it must. Not the crap, the self-serving pieces, but an occasional insightful criticism, favorable or unfavorable, that confirms my judgment of my work. While I’m on the subject, I dislike particularly those critics who preach their aesthetic or ideological doctrines at you. What’s important to them is not what the writer has done but how it fits, or doesn’t fit, the thesis they want to develop. Nobody can tell a writer what can or ought to be done, or not done, in his fiction. A living death if you fall for it.

INTERVIEWER

That narration, for instance, is dead or dying?

MALAMUD

It’ll be dead when the penis is.

INTERVIEWER

What about the death of the novel?

MALAMUD The novel could disappear, but it won’t die.

INTERVIEWER

How does that go?

MALAMUD

I’m not saying it will disappear, just entertaining the idea. Assume it does; then someday a talented writer writes himself a long, heartfelt letter, and the form reappears. The human race needs the novel. We need all the experience we can get. Those who say the novel is dead can’t write them.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve done two short stories and a novel about blacks. Where do you get your material?

MALAMUD

Experience and books. I lived on the edge of a black neighborhood in Brooklyn when I was a boy. I played with blacks in the Flatbush Boys Club. I had a friend—Buster; we used to go to his house every so often. I swiped dimes so we could go to the movies together on a couple of Saturday afternoons. After I was married I taught for a year in a black evening high school in Harlem. The short stories derive from that period. I also read black fiction and history.

INTERVIEWER

What set off The Tenants?

MALAMUD

Jews and blacks, the period of the troubles in New York City; the teachers strike, the rise of black activism, the mix-up of cause and effect. I thought I’d say a word.

INTERVIEWER

Why the three endings?

MALAMUD

Because one wouldn’t do.

INTERVIEWER

Will you predict how it will be between blacks and Jews in the future?

MALAMUD How can one? All I know is that American blacks have been badly treated. We, as a society, have to redress the balance. Those who want for others must expect to give up something. What we get in return is the affirmation of what we believe in.

INTERVIEWER

You give a sense in your fiction that you try not to repeat yourself.

MALAMUD

Good. In my books I go along the same paths in different worlds.

INTERVIEWER

What’s the path—theme?

MALAMUD

Derived from one’s sense of values, it’s a vision of life, a feeling for people—real qualities in imaginary worlds.

INTERVIEWER

Do you like writing short stories more than you do novels?

MALAMUD

Just as much, though the short story has its own pleasures. I like packing a self or two into a few pages, predicating lifetimes. The drama is terse, happens faster, and is often outlandish. A short story is a way of indicating the complexity of life in a few pages, producing the surprise and effect of a profound knowledge in a short time. There’s, among other things, a drama, a resonance, of the reconciliation of opposites: much to say, little time to say it, something like the effect of a poem.

INTERVIEWER

You write them between novels?

MALAMUD

Yes, to breathe, and give myself time to think what’s in the next book. Sometimes I’ll try out a character or situation similar to that in a new novel.

INTERVIEWER

How many drafts do you usually do of a novel? MALAMUD

Many more than I call three. Usually the last of the first puts it in place. The second focuses, develops, subtilizes. By the third most of the dross is gone. I work with language. I love the flowers of afterthought.

INTERVIEWER

Your style has always seemed so individual, so recognizable. Is this a natural gift, or is it contrived and honed?

MALAMUD

My style flows from the fingers. The eye and ear approve or amend.

INTERVIEWER

Let’s wind up. Are you optimistic about the future?

MALAMUD

My nature is optimistic but not the evidence—population misery, famine, politics of desperation, the proliferation of the atom bomb. My Lai, one minute after Hiroshima in history, was ordained. We’re going through long, involved transformations of world society, ongoing upheavals of colonialism, old modes of distribution, mores, overthrowing the slave mentality. With luck we may end up in a society with a larger share of the world’s goods, opportunities for education, freedom going to the presently underprivileged. Without luck there may be a vast economic redistribution without political freedom. In the Soviet Union, as it is presently constituted, that’s meant the kiss of death to freedom in art and literature. I worry that democracy, which has protected us from this indignity, especially in the United States, suffers from a terrifying inadequacy of leadership, and the apathy, unimaginativeness, and hard- core selfishness of too many of us. I worry about technology rampant. I fear those who are by nature beastly.

INTERVIEWER

What does one write novels about nowadays?

MALAMUD

Whatever wants to be written.

INTERVIEWER

Is there something I haven’t asked you that you might want to comment on? MALAMUD

No.

INTERVIEWER

For instance, what writing has meant to you?

MALAMUD

I’d be too moved to say.

Author photograph by Nancy Crampton

Octavio Paz, The Art of Poetry No. 42 Interviewed by Alfred Mac Adam

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Though small in stature and well into his seventies, Octavio Paz, with his piercing eyes, gives the impression of being a much younger man. In his poetry and his prose works, which are both erudite and intensely political, he recurrently takes up such themes as the experience of Mexican history, especially as seen through its Indian past, and the overcoming of profound human loneliness through erotic love. Paz has long been considered, along with César Vallejo and Pablo Neruda, to be one of the great South American poets of the twentieth century; three days after this interview, which was conducted on Columbus Day 1990, he joined Neruda among the ranks of Nobel laureates in literature.

Paz was born in 1914 in Mexico City, the son of a lawyer and the grandson of a novelist. Both figures were important to the development of the young poet: he learned the value of social causes from his father, who served as counsel for the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, and was introduced to the world of letters by his grandfather. As a boy, Paz was allowed to roam freely through his grandfather’s expansive library, an experience that afforded him invaluable exposure to Spanish and Latin American literature. He studied literature at the University of Mexico, but moved on before earning a degree.

At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Paz sided immediately with the Republican cause and, in 1937, left for Spain. After his return to Mexicao, he helped found the literary reviews Taller (“Workshop”) and El Hijo Pródigo (“The Child Prodigy”) out of which a new generation of Mexican writers emerged. In 1943 Paz traveled extensively in the United States on a Guggenheim Fellowship before entering into the Mexican diplomatic service in 1945. From 1946 until 1951, Paz lived in Paris. The writings of Sartre, Breton, Camus, and other French thinkers whom he met at that same time were to be an important influence on his own work. In the early 1950s Paz’s diplomatic duties took him to Japan and India, where he first came into contact with the Buddhist and Taoist classics. He has said, “More than two thousand years away, Western poetry is essential to Buddhist teaching: that the self is an illusion, a sum of sensations, thoughts, and desire. In October 1968 Paz resigned his diplomatic post to protest the bloody repression of student demonstrations in Mexico City by the government.

His first book of poems, Savage Moon, appeared in 1933 when Paz was nineteen years old. Among his most highly acclaimed works are The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950), a prose study of the Mexican national character, and the book-length poem Sun Stone (1957), called by J. M. Cohen “one of the last important poems to be published in the Western world.” The poem has five hundred and eighty-four lines, representing the five hundred and eighty-four day cycle of the planet Venus. Other works include Eagle or Sun? (1950), Alternating Current (1956), The Bow and the Lyre (1956), Blanco (1967), The Monkey Grammarian(1971), A Draft of Shadows (1975), and A Tree Within (1957).

Paz lives in Mexico City with his wife Marie-José, who is an artist. He has been he recipient of numerous international prizes for poetry, including the International Grand Prix, the Jerusalem Prize (1977), the Neustadt Prize (1982), the Cervantes Prize (1981), and the Novel Prize.

During this interview, which took place in front of an overflow audience at the 92nd Street YM- YWHA in New York, under the auspices of the Poetry Center, Paz displayed the energy and power typical of him and of his poetry, which draws upon an eclectic sexual mysticism to bridge the gap between the individual and society. Appropriately, Paz seemed to welcome this opportunity to communicate with his audience.

INTERVIEWER

Octavio, you were born in 1914, as you probably remember . . .

OCTAVIO PAZ

Not very well!

INTERVIEWER

. . . virtually in the middle of the Mexican Revolution and right on the eve of World War I. The century you've lived through has been one of almost perpetual war. Do you have anything good to say about the twentieth century?

PAZ

Well, I have survived, and I think that's enough. History, you know, is one thing and our lives are something else. Our century has been terrible—one of the saddest in universal history—but our lives have always been more or less the same. Private lives are not historical. During the French or American revolutions, or during the wars between the Persians and the Greeks—during any great, universal event —history changes continually. But people live, work, fall in love, die, get sick, have friends, moments of illumination or sadness, and that has nothing to do with history. Or very little to do with it.

INTERVIEWER

So we are both in and out of history?

PAZ

Yes, history is our landscape or setting and we live through it. But the real drama, the real comedy also, is within us, and I think we can say the same for someone of the fifth century or for someone of a future century. Life is not historical, but something more like nature.

INTERVIEWER

In The Privileges of Sight, a book about your relationship with the visual arts, you say: “Neither I nor any of my friends had ever seen a Titian, a Velázquez, or a Cézanne. . . . Nevertheless, we were surrounded by many works of art.” You talk there about Mixoac, where you lived as a boy, and the art of early twentieth-century Mexico.

PAZ

Mixoac is now a rather ugly suburb of Mexico City, but when I was a child it was a small village. A very old village, from pre-Columbian times. The name Mixoac comes from the god Mixcoatl, the Nahuatl name for the Milky Way. It also means “cloud serpent,” as if the Milky Way were a serpent of clouds. We had a small pyramid, a diminutive pyramid, but a pyramid nevertheless. We also had a seventeenth-century convent. My neighborhood was called San Juan, and the parish church dated from the sixteenth century, one of the oldest in the area. There were also many eighteenth- and nineteenth- century houses, some with extensive gardens, because at the end of the nineteenth century Mixoac was a summer resort for the Mexican bourgeoisie. My family in fact had a summer house there. So when the revolution came, we were obliged, happily I think, to have to move there. We were surrounded by small memories of two pasts that remained very much alive, the pre-Columbian and the colonial.

INTERVIEWER

You talk in The Privileges of Sight about Mixoac's fireworks.

PAZ

I am very fond of fireworks. They were a part of my childhood. There was a part of the town where the artisans were all masters of the great art of fireworks. They were famous all over Mexico. To celebrate the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, other religious festivals, and at New Year's, they made the fireworks for the town. I remember how they made the church façade look like a fiery waterfall. It was marvelous. Mixoac was alive with a kind of life that doesn't exist anymore in big cities.

INTERVIEWER You seem nostalgic for Mixoac, yet you are one of the few Mexican writers who live right in the center of Mexico City. Soon it will be the largest city in the world, a dynamic city, but in terms of pollution, congestion, and poverty, a nightmare. Is living there an inspiration or a hindrance?

PAZ

Living in the heart of Mexico City is neither an inspiration nor an obstacle. It's a challenge. And the only way to deal with challenges is to face up to them. I've lived in other towns and cities in Mexico, but no matter how agreeable they are, they seem somehow unreal. At a certain point, my wife and I decided to move into the apartment where we live now. If you live in Mexico, you've got to live in Mexico City.

INTERVIEWER

Could you tell us something about the Paz family?

PAZ

My father was Mexican, my mother Spanish. An aunt lived with us—rather eccentric, as aunts are supposed to be, and poetic in her own absurd way. My grandfather was a lawyer and a writer, a popular novelist. As a matter of fact, during one period we lived off the sales of one of his books, a best-seller. The Mixoac house was his.

INTERVIEWER

What about books? I suppose I'm thinking about how Borges claimed he never actually left his father's library.

PAZ

It's a curious parallel. My grandfather had a beautiful library, which was the great thing about the Mixoac house. It had about six or seven thousand books, and I had a great deal of freedom to read. I was a voracious reader when I was a child and even read “forbidden” books because no one paid attention to what I was reading. When I was very young, I read Voltaire. Perhaps that led me to lose my religious faith. I also read novels that were more or less libertine, not really pornographic, just racy.

INTERVIEWER

Did you read any children's books?

PAZ

Of course. I read a lot of books by Salgari, an Italian author very popular in Mexico. And Jules Verne. One of my great heroes was an American, Buffalo Bill. My friends and I would pass from Alexandre Dumas's Three Musketeers to the cowboys without the slightest remorse or sense that we were warping history. INTERVIEWER

You said once that the first time you saw a surrealist painting—a picture where vines were twisting through the walls of a house—you took it for realism.

PAZ

That's true. The Mixoac house gradually crumbled around us. We had to abandon one room after another because the roofs and walls kept falling down.

INTERVIEWER

When you were about sixteen in 1930, you entered the National Preparatory School. What did you study, and what was the school like?

PAZ

The school was beautiful. It was built at the end of the seventeenth century, the high point of the baroque in Mexican architecture. The school was big, and there was nobility in the stones, the columns, the corridors. And there was another aesthetic attaction. During the twenties, the government had murals painted in it by Orozco and Rivera—the first mural Rivera painted was in my school.

INTERVIEWER

So you felt attracted to the work of the muralists then?

PAZ

Yes, all of us felt a rapport with the muralists' expressionist style. But there was a contradiction between the architecture and the painting. Later on, I came to think that it was a pity the murals were painted in buildings that didn't belong to our century.

INTERVIEWER

What about the curriculum?

PAZ

It was a mélange of the French tradition mixed with American educational theories. John Dewey, the American philosopher, was a big influence. Also the “progressive school” of education.

INTERVIEWER

So the foreign language you studied was French?

PAZ And English. My father was a political exile during the revolution. He had to leave Mexico and take refuge in the United States. He went ahead and then we joined him in California, in Los Angeles, where we stayed for almost two years. On the first day of school, I had a fight with my American schoolmates. I couldn't speak a word of English, and they laughed because I couldn't say spoon—during lunch hour. But when I came back to Mexico on my first day of school I had another fight. This time with my Mexican classmates and for the same reason—because I was a foreigner! I discovered I could be a foreigner in both countries.

INTERVIEWER

Were you influenced by any of your teachers in the National Preparatory School?

PAZ

Certainly. I had the chance to study with the Mexican poet Carlos Pellicer. Through him I met other poets of his generation. They opened my eyes to modern poetry. I should point out that my grandfather's library ended at the beginning of the twentieth century, so it wasn't until I was in the National Preparatory School that I learned books were published after 1910. Proust was a revelation for me. I thought no more novels had been written after Zola.

INTERVIEWER

What about poetry in Spanish?

PAZ

I found out about the Spanish poets of the Generation of 1927: García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, and Jorge Guillén. I also read Antonio Machado and Juan Ramón Jiménez, who was a patriarch of poetry then. I also read Borges at that time, but remember Borges was not yet a short-story writer. During the early thirties he was a poet and an essayist. Naturally, the greatest revelation during that first period of my literary life was the poetry of Pablo Neruda.

INTERVIEWER

You went on to university, but in 1937 you made a momentous decision.

PAZ

Well, I made several. First I went to Yucatán. I finished my university work, but I left before graduating. I refused to become a lawyer. My family, like all Mexican middle-class families at that time, wanted their son to be a doctor or a lawyer. I only wanted to be a poet and also in some way a revolutionary. An opportunity came for me to go to Yucatán to work with some friends in a school for the children of workers and peasants. It was a great experience—it made me realize I was a city boy and that my experience of Mexico was that of central Mexico, the uplands.

INTERVIEWER So you discovered geography?

PAZ

People who live in cities like New York or Paris are usually provincials with regard to the rest of the country. I discovered Yucatán, a very peculiar province of southern Mexico. It's Mexico, but it's also something very different thanks to the influence of the Mayas. I found out that Mexico has another tradition besides that of central Mexico, another set of roots—the Maya tradition. Yucatán was strangely cosmopolitan. It had links with Cuba and New Orleans. As a matter of fact, during the nineteenth century, people from the Yucatán traveled more often to the United States or Europe than they did to Mexico City. I began to see just how complex Mexico is.

INTERVIEWER

So then you returned to Mexico City and decided to go to the Spanish Civil War?

PAZ

I was invited to a congress, and since I was a great partisan of the Spanish Republic I immediately accepted. I left the Yucatán school and went to Spain, where I stayed for some months. I wanted to enroll in the Spanish Loyalist Army—I was twenty-three—but I couldn't because as a volunteer I would have needed the recommendation of a political party. I wasn't a member of the Communist Party or any other party, so there was no one to recommend me. I was rejected, but they told me that was not so important because I was a young writer—I was the youngest at the congress—and that I should go back to Mexico and write for the Spanish Republic. And that is what I did.

INTERVIEWER

What did that trip to Spain mean to you, above and beyond politics and the defense of the Spanish Republic?

PAZ

I discovered another part of my heritage. I was familiar, of course, with the Spanish literary tradition. I have always viewed Spanish literature as my own, but it's one thing to know books and another thing to see the people, the monuments, and the landscape with your own eyes.

INTERVIEWER

So it was a geographical discovery again?

PAZ

Yes, but there was also the political, or to be more precise, the moral aspect. My political and intellectual beliefs were kindled by the idea of fraternity. We all talked a lot about it. For instance, the novels of André Malraux, which we all read, depicted the search for fraternity through revolutionary action. My Spanish experience did not strengthen my political beliefs, but it did give an unexpected twist to my idea of fraternity. One day—Stephen Spender was with me and might remember this episode—we went to the front in Madrid, which was in the university city. It was a battlefield. Sometimes in the same building the Loyalists would only be separated from the Fascists by a single wall. We could hear the soldiers on the other side talking. It was a strange feeling: those people facing me—I couldn't see them but only hear their voices—were my enemies. But they had human voices, like my own. They were like me.

INTERVIEWER

Did this affect your ability to hate your enemy?

PAZ

Yes. I began to think that perhaps all this fighting was an absurdity, but of course I couldn't say that to anyone. They would have thought I was a traitor, which I wasn't. I understood then, or later, when I could think seriously about that disquieting experience, I understood that real fraternity implies that you must accept the fact that your enemy is also human. I don't mean that you must be a friend to your enemy. No, differences will subsist, but your enemy is also human, and the moment you understand that you can no longer accept violence. For me it was a terrible experience. It shattered many of my deepest convictions.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think that part of the horror of the situation resulted from the fact that the Fascist soldiers were speaking your language?

PAZ

Yes. The soldiers on the other side of the wall were laughing and saying, Give me a cigarette, and things like that. I said to myself, Well, they are the same as we on this side of the wall.

INTERVIEWER

You didn't go straight back to Mexico, however.

PAZ

Of course not. It was my first trip to Europe. I had to go to Paris. Paris was a museum; it was history; it was the present. Walter Benjamin said Paris was the capital of the nineteenth century, and he was right, but I think Paris was also the capital of the twentieth century, the first part at least. Not that it was the political or economic or philosophic capital, but the artistic capital. For painting and the plastic arts in general, but also for literature. Not because the best artists and writers lived in Paris but because of the great movements, right down to surrealism.

INTERVIEWER What did you see that moved you?

PAZ

I went to the Universal Exposition and saw Guernica, which Picasso had just painted. I was twenty- three and had this tremendous opportunity to see the Picassos and Mirós in the Spanish pavilion. I didn't know many people in Paris, and by pure chance I went to an exhibition where I saw a painting by Max Ernst, Europe after the Rain, which made a deep impression on me.

INTERVIEWER

What about people?

PAZ

I met a Cuban writer who became very famous later, Alejo Carpentier. He invited me to a party at the house of the surrealist poet Robert Desnos. There was a huge crowd, many of them quite well known— but I didn't know a soul and felt lost. I was very young. Looking around the house, I found some strange objects. I asked the pretty lady of the house what they were. She smiled and told me they were Japanese erotic objects, godemiches, and everyone laughed at my innocence. I realized just how provincial I was.

INTERVIEWER

You were back in Mexico in 1938. So were André Breton and Trotsky: did their presence mean anything to you?

PAZ

Of course. Politically, I was against Breton and Trotsky. I thought our great enemy was fascism, that Stalin was right, that we had to be united against fascism. Even though Breton and Trotsky were not agents of the Nazis, I was against them. On the other hand, I was fascinated by Trotsky. I secretly read his books, so inside myself I was a heterodox. And I admired Breton. I had read L'Amour fou, a book that really impressed me.

INTERVIEWER

So in addition to Spanish and Spanish American poetry you plunged into European modernism.

PAZ

Yes, I would say there were three texts that made a mark on me during this period: the first was Eliot's The Waste Land, which I read in Mexico in 1931. I was seventeen or so, and the poem baffled me. I couldn't understand a word. Since then I've read it countless times and still think it one of the great poems of the century. The second text was Saint-John Perse's Anabase, and the third was Breton's small book, which exalted free love, poetry and rebellion. INTERVIEWER

But despite your admiration you wouldn't approach Breton?

PAZ

Once a mutual friend invited me to see him, telling me I was wrong about Breton's politics. I refused. Many years later, I met him and we became good friends. It was then—in spite of being criticized by many of my friends—I read with enthusiasm the Manifesto for a Revolutionary Independent Art written by Breton and Trotsky and signed by Diego Rivera. In it Trotsky renounces political control of literature. The only policy the revolutionary state can have with regard to artists and writers is to give them total freedom.

INTERVIEWER

It would seem as though your internal paradox was turning into a crisis.

PAZ

I was against socialist realism, and that was the beginning of my conflicts with the Communists. I was not a member of the Communist Party, but I was friendly with them. Where we fought first was about the problem of art.

INTERVIEWER

So the exposition of surrealism in Mexico City in 1940 would have been a problem for you.

PAZ

I was the editor of a magazine, Taller. In it one of my friends published an article saying the surrealists had opened new vistas, but that they had become the academy of their own revolution. It was a mistake, especially during those years. But we published the article.

INTERVIEWER

Publish or perish.

PAZ

We must accept our mistakes. If we don't, we're lost, don't you think? This interview is in some ways an exercise in public confession—of which I am very much afraid.

INTERVIEWER Octavio, despite the fact that you are a poet and an essayist, it seems that you have had novelistic temptations. I'm thinking of that “Diary of a Dreamer” you published in 1938 in your magazine Taller and The Monkey Grammarian of 1970.

PAZ

I wouldn't call that diary novelistic. It was a kind of notebook made up of meditations. I was probably under the spell of Rilke and his Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. The truth is that the novel has always been a temptation for me. But perhaps I am not suited to it. The art of the novel unites two different things. It is like epic poetry, a world peopled by characters whose actions are the essence of the work. But unlike the epic, the novel is analytical. It tells the deeds of the characters, and at the same time, criticizes them. Tom Jones, Odette de Crécy, Ivan Karamazov, or Don Quixote are characters devoured by criticism. You don't find that in Homer or Virgil. Not even in Dante. The epic exalts or condemns; the novel analyzes and criticizes. The epic heroes are one-piece, solid characters; novelistic characters are ambiguous. These two poles, criticism and epic, combine in the novel.

INTERVIEWER

What about The Monkey Grammarian?

PAZ

I wouldn't call that a novel. It's on the frontier of the novel. If it's anything, that book is an anti-novel. Whenever I'm tempted to write a novel, I say to myself, Poets are not novelists. Some poets, like Goethe, have written novels—rather boring ones. I think the poetic genius is synthetic. A poet creates syntheses while the novelist analyzes.

INTERVIEWER

If we could return to Mexico during the war years, I would like to ask you about your relationship with Pablo Neruda, who was sent to Mexico as Consul General of Chile in 1940.

PAZ

As I said earlier, Neruda's poetry was a revelation for me when I started to read modern poetry in the thirties. When I published my first book, I sent a copy to Neruda. He never answered me, but it was he who invited me to the congress in Spain. When I reached Paris in 1937, I knew no one. But just as I was getting off the train, a tall man ran up to me shouting, Octavio Paz! Octavio Paz! It was Neruda. Then he said, Oh, you are so young! and we embraced. He found me a hotel, and we became great friends. He was one of the first to take notice of my poetry and to read it sympathetically.

INTERVIEWER

So what went wrong?

PAZ When he came to Mexico, I saw him very often, but there were difficulties. First, there was a personal problem. Neruda was very generous, but also very domineering. Perhaps I was too rebellious and jealous of my own independence. He loved to be surrounded by a kind of court made up of people who loved him—sometimes these would be intelligent people, but often they were mediocre. The second problem was politics. He became more and more Stalinist, while I became less and less enchanted with Stalin. Finally we fought—almost physically—and stopped speaking to each other. He wrote some not terribly nice things about me, including one nasty poem. I wrote some awful things about him. And that was that.

INTERVIEWER

Was there a reconciliation?

PAZ

For twenty years we didn't speak. We'd sometimes be at the same place at the same time, and I knew he would tell our mutual friends to stop seeing me because I was a “traitor.” But then the Khrushchev report about the Stalinist terrors was made public and shattered his beliefs. We happened to be in London at the same poetry festival. I had just remarried, as had Pablo. I was with Marie-José, my wife, when we met Matilde Urrutia, his wife. She said, If I'm not mistaken, you are Octavio Paz. To which I answered, Yes, and you are Matilde. Then she said, Do you want to see Pablo? I think he would love to see you again. We went to Pablo's room, where he was being interviewed by a journalist. As soon as the journalist left, Pablo said, My son, and embraced me. The expression is very Chilean—mijito—and he said it with emotion. I was very moved, almost crying. We talked briefly, because he was on his way back to Chile. He sent me a book, I sent him one. And then a few years later, he died. It was sad, but it was one of the best things that has ever happened to me—the possibility to be friends again with a man I liked and admired so very much.

INTERVIEWER

The early forties were clearly difficult times for you, and yet they seem to have forced you to define your own intellectual position.

PAZ

That's true. I was having tremendous political problems, breaking with former friends—Neruda among them. I did make some new friends, like Victor Serge, a Franco-Russian writer, an old revolutionary. But I reached the conclusion that I had to leave my country, exile myself. I was fortunate because I received a Guggenheim Fellowship to go to the United States. On this second visit, I went first to Berkeley and then to New York. I didn't know anyone, had no money, and was actually destitute. But I was really happy. It was one of the best periods of my life.

INTERVIEWER

Why? PAZ

Well, I discovered the American people, and I was thrilled. It was like breathing deeply and freely while facing a vast space—a feeling of elation, lightness, and confidence. I feel the same way every time I come to your country, but not with the same intensity. It was vivifying just to be in the States in those days, and at the same time, I could step back from politics and plunge into poetry. I discovered American poetry in Conrad Aiken's Anthology of Modern American Poetry. I had already read Eliot, but I knew nothing about William Carlos Williams or Pound or Marianne Moore. I was slightly acquainted with Hart Crane's poetry—he lived his last years in Mexico, but he was more a legend than a body of poetry. While I was in Berkeley, I met Muriel Rukeyser who very generously translated some of my poems. That was a great moment for me. A few years later, she sent them to Horizon, which Spender and Cyril Connolly were editing in London, where they were published. For me it was a kind of . . .

INTERVIEWER

Small apotheosis?

PAZ

A very small apotheosis. After New York, where I became a great reader of Partisan Review, I went on to Paris and caught up with some friends I'd met in Mexico. Benjamin Péret, for example. Through him, I finally met Breton. We became friends. Surrealism was in decline, but surrealism for French literary life was something healthy, something vital and rebellious.

INTERVIEWER

What do you mean?

PAZ

The surrealists embodied something the French had forgotten: the other side of reason, love, freedom, poetry. The French have a tendency to be too rationalistic, to reduce everything to ideas and then to fight over them. When I reached Paris, Jean-Paul Sartre was the dominant figure.

INTERVIEWER

But for you existentialism would have been old hat.

PAZ

That's right. In Madrid, the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset—and later his disciples in Mexico City and Buenos Aires—had published all the main texts of phenomenology and existentialism, from Husserl to Heidegger, so Sartre represented more a clever variation than an innovation. Also, I was against Sartre's politics. The one person connected to French existentialism with whom I was friendly and who was very generous to me was Albert Camus. But I must say I was nearer to the surrealist poets. INTERVIEWER

By the end of the forties you had published two major books, the poems collected inFreedom on Parole and The Labyrinth of Solitude. I've always been curious about the title of Freedom on Parole. Does it have anything to do with the futurist poet Marinetti's “words on leave”?

PAZ

I'm afraid not. Marinetti wanted to free words from the chains of syntax and grammar, a kind of aesthetic nihilism. Freedom on Parole has more to do with morals than aesthetics. I simply wanted to say that human freedom is conditional. In English, when you are let out of jail you're “on parole,” and parole means “speech,” “word,” “word of honor.” But the condition under which you are free is language, human awareness.

INTERVIEWER

So for you freedom of speech is more than the right to speak your mind?

PAZ

Absolutely. Ever since I was an adolescent I've been intrigued by the mystery of freedom. Because it is a mystery. Freedom depends on the very thing that limits or denies it, fate, God, biological, or social determinism, whatever. To carry out its mission, fate counts on the complicity of our freedom, and to be free, we must overcome fate. The dialectics of freedom and fate is the theme of Greek tragedy and Shakespeare, although in Shakespeare fate appears as passion (love, jealousy, ambition, envy) and as chance. In Spanish theater—especially in Calderón and Tirso de Molina—the mystery of freedom expresses itself in the language of Christian theology: divine providence and free will. The idea of conditional freedom implies the notion of personal responsibility. Each of us, literally, either creates or destroys his own freedom. A freedom that is always precarious. And that brings up the title's poetic or aesthetic meaning: the poem, freedom, stands above an order, language.

INTERVIEWER

You wrote Freedom on Parole between 1935 and 1957, more than twenty years. . . .

PAZ

I wrote and rewrote the book many times.

INTERVIEWER

Is it an autobiography?

PAZ Yes and no. It expresses my aesthetic and personal experiences, from my earliest youth until the beginning of my maturity. I wrote the first poems when I was twenty-one, and I finished the last when I turned forty-three. But the real protagonist of those poems is not Octavio Paz but a half-real, half- mythical figure: the poet. Although that poet was my age, spoke my language, and his vital statistics were identical with my own, he was someone else. A figure, an image derived from tradition. Every poet is the momentary incarnation of that figure.

INTERVIEWER

Doesn't The Labyrinth of Solitude also have an autobiographical dimension?

PAZ

Again, yes and no. I wrote The Labyrinth of Solitude in Paris. The idea came to me in the United States when I tried to analyze the situation of the Mexicans living in Los Angeles, thepachucos, or Chicanos as they're called now. I suppose they were a kind of mirror for me—the autobiographical dimension you like to see. That on one side. But there is also the relationship between Mexico and the United States. If there are two countries in the world that are different, they are the United States and Mexico. But we are condemned to live together forever. So we should try to understand each other and also to know ourselves. That was how The Labyrinth of Solitude began.

INTERVIEWER

That book deals with ideas such as difference, resentment, the hermetic nature of Mexican man, but it doesn't touch on the life of the poet.

PAZ

True. I tried to deal with that subject in a short essay called “Poetry of Solitude and Poetry of Communion.” That article in some ways is the poetic equivalent to The Labyrinth of Solitude because it presents my vision of man, which is very simple. There are two situations for every human being. The first is the solitude we feel when we are born. Our first situation is that of orphanhood, and it is only later that we discover the opposite, filial attachment. The second is that because we are thrown, as Heidegger says, into this world, we feel we must find what the Buddhists call “the other share.” This is the thirst for community. I think philosophy and religion derive from this original situation or predicament. Every country and every individual tries to resolve it in different ways. Poetry is a bridge between solitude and communion. Communion, even for a mystic like Saint John of the Cross, can never be absolute.

INTERVIEWER

Is this why the language of mysticism is so erotic?

PAZ Yes, because lovers, which is what the mystics are, constitute the greatest image of communion. But even between lovers solitude is never completely abolished. Conversely, solitude is never absolute. We are always with someone, even if it is only our shadow. We are never one—we are always we. These extremes are the poles of human life.

INTERVIEWER

All in all, you spent some eight years abroad, first in the United States, then in Paris, and then in the Mexican diplomatic service. How do you view those years in the context of your career as a poet?

PAZ

Actually, I spent nine years abroad. If you count each of those years as a month, you'll find that those nine years were nine months that I lived in the womb of time. The years I lived in San Francisco, New York, and Paris were a period of gestation. I was reborn, and the man who came back to Mexico at the end of 1952 was a different poet, a different writer. If I had stayed in Mexico, I probably would have drowned in journalism, bureaucracy, or alcohol. I ran away from that world and also, perhaps, from myself.

INTERVIEWER

But you were hardly greeted as the prodigal son when you reappeared . . .

PAZ

I wasn't accepted at all, except by a few young people. I had broken with the predominant aesthetic, moral, and political ideas and was instantly attacked by many people who were all too sure of their dogmas and prejudices. It was the beginning of a disagreement that has still not come to an end. It isn't simply an ideological difference of opinion. Certainly those polemics have been bitter and hard-fought, but even that does not explain the malevolence of some people, the pettiness of others, and the reticence of the majority. I've experienced despair and rage, but I've just had to shrug my shoulders and move forward. Now I see those quarrels as a blessing: if a writer is accepted, he'll soon be rejected or forgotten. I didn't set out to be a troublesome writer, but if that's what I've been, I am totally unrepentant.

INTERVIEWER

You left Mexico again in 1959.

PAZ

And I didn't come back until 1971. An absence of twelve years—another symbolic number. I returned because Mexico has always been a magnet I can't resist, a real passion, alternately happy and wretched like all passions.

INTERVIEWER Tell me about those twelve years. First you went back to Paris, then to India as the Mexican ambassador, and later to England and the United States.

PAZ

When I'd finished the definitive version of Freedom on Parole, I felt I could start over. I explored new poetic worlds, knew other countries, lived other sentiments, had other ideas. The first and greatest of my new experiences was India. Another geography, another humanity, other gods—a different kind of civilization. I lived there for just over six years. I traveled around the subcontinent quite a bit and lived for periods in Ceylon and Afghanistan—two more geographical and cultural extremes. If I had to express my vision of India in a single image, I would say that I see an immense plain: in the distance, white, ruinous architecture, a powerful river, a huge tree, and in its shade a shape (a beggar, a Buddha, a pile of stones?). Out from among the knots and forks of the tree, a woman arises . . . I fell in love and got married in India.

INTERVIEWER

When did you become seriously interested in Asian thought?

PAZ

Starting with my first trip to the East in 1952—I spent almost a year in India and Japan—I made small incursions into the philosophic and artistic traditions of those countries. I visited many places and read some of the classics of Indian thought. Most important to me were the poets and philosophers of China and Japan. During my second stay in India, between 1962 and 1968, I read many of the great philosophic and religious texts. Buddhism impressed me profoundly.

INTERVIEWER

Did you think of converting?

PAZ

No, but studying Buddhism was a mental and spiritual exercise that helped me begin to doubt the ego and its mirages. Ego worship is the greatest idolatry of modern man. Buddhism for me is a criticism of the ego and of reality. A radical criticism that does not end in negation but in acceptance. All the great Buddhist sanctuaries in India (the Hindu sanctuaries as well, but those, perhaps because they're later, are more baroque and elaborate) contain highly sensual sculptures and reliefs. A powerful but peaceful sexuality. I was shocked to find that exaltation of the body and of natural powers in a religious and philosophic tradition that disparages the world and preaches negation and emptiness. That became the central theme of a short book I wrote during those years, Conjunctions and Disjunctions.

INTERVIEWER

Was it hard to balance being Mexican ambassador to India with your explorations of India? PAZ

My ambassadorial work was not arduous. I had time, I could travel and write. And not only about India. The student movements of 1968 fascinated me. In a certain way I felt the hopes and aspirations of my own youth were being reborn. I never thought it would lead to a revolutionary transformation of society, but I did realize that I was witnessing the appearance of a new sensibility that in some fashion rhymed with what I had felt and thought before.

INTERVIEWER

You felt that history was repeating itself?

PAZ

In a way. The similarity between some of the attitudes of the 1968 students and the surrealist poets, for example, was clear to see. I thought William Blake would have been sympathetic to both the words and the actions of those young people. The student movement in Mexico was more ideological than in France or the United States, but it too had legitimate aspirations. The Mexican political system, born out of the revolution, had survived but was suffering a kind of historical arteriosclerosis. On October 2, 1968, the Mexican government decided to use violence to suppress the student movement. It was a brutal action. I felt I could not go on serving the government, so I left the diplomatic corps.

INTERVIEWER

You went to Paris and then to the United States before spending that year at Cambridge.

PAZ

Yes, and during those months I reflected on the recent history of Mexico. The revolution began in 1910 with great democratic ambitions. More than half a century later, the nation was controlled by a paternalistic, authoritarian party. So in 1969 I wrote a postscript to The Labyrinth of Solitude, a “critique of the pyramid,” which I took to be the symbolic form of Mexican authoritarianism. I stated that the only way of getting beyond the political and historical crisis we were living through—the paralysis of the institutions created by the revolution—was to begin democratic reform.

INTERVIEWER

But that was not necessarily what the student movement was seeking.

PAZ

No. The student leaders and the left-wing political groups favored violent social revolution. They were under the influence of the Cuban Revolution—and there are still some who defend Fidel Castro even today. My point of view put me in opposition, simultaneously, to the government and the left. The “progressive” intellectuals, almost all of whom wanted to establish a totalitarian socialist regime, attacked me vehemently. I fought back. Rather, we fought back—a small group of younger writers agreed with some of my opinions. We all believed in a peaceful, gradual move toward democracy. We foundedPlural, a magazine that would combine literature, art, and political criticism. There was a crisis, so we founded another, Vuelta (“return”), which is still going strong and has a faithful, demanding readership. Mexico has changed, and now most of our old enemies say they are democratic. We are living through a transition to democracy, one that will have its setbacks and will seem too slow for some.

INTERVIEWER

Do you see yourself as part of a long line of Latin American statesmen-writers, one that could include Argentina's Sarmiento in the nineteenth and Neruda in the twentieth century?

PAZ

I don't think of myself as a statesman-poet, and I'm not really comparable to Sarmiento or Neruda. Sarmiento was a real statesman and a great political figure in addition to being a great writer. Neruda was a poet, a great poet. He joined the Communist Party, but for generous, semi-religious reasons. It was a real conversion. So his political militance was not that of an intellectual but of a believer. Within the party, he seems to have been a political pragmatist, but, again, he was more like one of the faithful than a critical intellectual. As for me, well, I've never been a member of any political party, and I've never run for public office. I have been a political and social critic, but always from the marginal position of an independent writer. I'm not a joiner, although of course I've had and have my personal preferences. I'm different from Mario Vargas Llosa, who did decide to intervene directly in his country's politics. Vargas Llosa is like Havel in Czechoslovakia or Malraux in France after World War II.

INTERVIEWER

But it is almost impossible to separate politics from literature or any aspect of culture.

PAZ

Since the Enlightenment, there has been a constant confluence of literature, philosophy, and politics. In the English-speaking world you have Milton as an antecedent as well as the great romantics in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, there are many examples. Eliot, for instance, was never an active participant in politics, but his writing is an impassioned defense of traditional values, values that have a political dimension. I mention Eliot, whose beliefs are totally different from my own, simply because he too was an independent writer who joined no party. I consider myself a private person, although I reserve the right to have opinions and to write about matters that affect my country and my contemporaries. When I was young, I fought against Nazi totalitarianism and, later on, against the Soviet dictatorship. I don't regret either struggle in the slightest.

INTERVIEWER

Thinking about your time in India now and its effect on your poetry, what would you say about the influence of India? PAZ

If I hadn't lived in India, I could not have written Blanco or most of the poems in Eastern Slope. The time I spent in Asia was a huge pause, as if time had slowed down and space had become larger. In a few rare moments, I experienced those states of being in which we are at one with the world around us, when the doors of time seem to open, if only slightly. We all live those instants in our childhood, but modern life rarely allows us to reexperience them when we're adults. As regards my poetry, that period begins with Salamander, culminates inEastern Slope, and ends with The Monkey Grammarian.

INTERVIEWER

But didn't you write The Monkey Grammarian in 1970, the year you spent at Cambridge University?

PAZ

I did. It was my farewell to India. That year in England also changed me. Especially because of what we must necessarily refer to as English “civility,” which includes the cultivation of eccentricity. That taught me not only to respect my fellow man but trees, plants, and birds as well. I also read certain poets. Thanks to Charles Tomlinson, I discovered Wordsworth. The Prelude became one of my favorite books. There may be echoes of it in A Draft of Shadows.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have a schedule for writing?

PAZ

I've never been able to maintain a fixed schedule. For years, I wrote in my few free hours. I was quite poor and from an early age had to hold down several jobs to eke out a living. I was a minor employee in the National Archive; I worked in a bank; I was a journalist; I finally found a comfortable but busy post in the diplomatic service, but none of those jobs had any real effect on my work as a poet.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have to be in any specific place in order to write?

PAZ

A novelist needs his typewriter, but you can write poetry any time, anywhere. Sometimes I mentally compose a poem on a bus or walking down the street. The rhythm of walking helps me fix the verses. Then when I get home, I write it all down. For a long time when I was younger, I wrote at night. It's quieter, more tranquil. But writing at night also magnifies the writer's solitude. Nowadays I write during the late morning and into the afternoon. It's a pleasure to finish a page when night falls.

INTERVIEWER Your work never distracted you from your writing?

PAZ

No, but let me give you an example. Once I had a totally infernal job in the National Banking Commission (how I got it, I can't guess), which consisted in counting packets of old banknotes already sealed and ready to be burned. I had to make sure each packet contained the requisite three thousand pesos. I almost always had one banknote too many or too few—they were always fives—so I decided to give up counting them and to use those long hours to compose a series of sonnets in my head. Rhyme helped me retain the verses in my memory, but not having paper and pencil made my task much more difficult. I've always admired Milton for dictating long passages from Paradise Lost to his daughters. Unrhymed passages at that!

INTERVIEWER

Is it the same when you write prose?

PAZ

Prose is another matter. You have to write it in a quiet, isolated place, even if that happens to be the bathroom. But above all to write it's essential to have one or two dictionaries at hand. The telephone is the writer's devil, the dictionary his guardian angel. I used to type, but now I write everything in longhand. If it's prose, I write it out one, two, or three times, and then dictate it into a tape recorder. My secretary types it out, and I correct it. Poetry I write and rewrite constantly.

INTERVIEWER

What is the inspiration or starting point for a poem? Can you give an example of how the process works?

PAZ

Each poem is different. Often the first line is a gift, I don't know if from the gods or from that mysterious faculty called inspiration. Let me use Sun Stone as an example: I wrote the first thirty verses as if someone were silently dictating them to me. I was surprised at the fluidity with which those hendecasyllabic lines appeared one after another. They came from far off and from nearby, from within my own chest. Suddenly the current stopped flowing. I read what I'd written—I didn't have to change a thing. But it was only a beginning, and I had no idea where those lines were going. A few days later, I tried to get started again, not in a passive way but trying to orient and direct the flow of verses. I wrote another thirty or forty lines. I stopped. I went back to it a few days later, and little by little, I began to discover the theme of the poem and where it was all heading.

INTERVIEWER

A figure began to appear in the carpet? PAZ

It was a kind of review of my life, a resurrection of my experiences, my concerns, my failures, my obsessions. I realized I was living the end of my youth and that the poem was simultaneously an end and a new beginning. When I reached a certain point, the verbal current stopped, and all I could do was repeat the first verses. That is the source of the poem's circular form. There was nothing arbitrary about it. Sun Stone is the last poem in the book that gathers together the first period of my poetry: Freedom on Parole. Even though I didn't know what I would write after that, I was sure that one period of my life and my poetry had ended, and another was beginning.

INTERVIEWER

But the title seems to allude to the cyclical Aztec concept of time.

PAZ

While I was writing the poem, I was reading an archeological essay about the Aztec calendar, and it occurred to me to call the poem Sun Stone. I added or cut—I don't remember which—three or four lines so that the poem would coincide with the five hundred and eighty-four days of the conjunction of Venus with the Sun. But the time of my poem is not the ritual time of Aztec cosmogony but human, biographical time, which is linear.

INTERVIEWER

But you thought seriously enough about the numerical symbolism of 584 to limit the number of verses in the poem to that number.

PAZ

I confess that I have been and am still fond of numerological combinations. Other poems of mine are also built around certain numerical proportions. It isn't an eccentricity, but a part of the Western tradition. Dante is the best example. Blanco, however, was completely different from Sun Stone. First I had the idea for the poem. I made notes and even drew some diagrams that were inspired, more or less, by Tibetan mandalas. I conceived it as a spatial poem that would correspond to the four points on the compass, the four primary colors, etcetera. It was difficult because poetry is a temporal art. As if to prove it, the words themselves wouldn't come. I had to call them and, even though it may seem I'm exaggerating, invoke them. One day, I wrote the first lines. As was to be expected they were about words, how they appear and disappear. After those first ten lines, the poem began to flow with relative ease. Of course, there were, as usual, anguishing periods of sterility followed by others of fluidity. The architecture of Blanco is more sharply defined than that of Sun Stone, more complex, richer.

INTERVIEWER

So you defy Edgar Allan Poe's injunction against the long poem?

PAZ With great relish. I've written other long poems, like A Draft of Shadows and Carta de creencia, which means “letter of faith.” The first is the monologue of memory and its inventions—memory changes and recreates the past as it revives it. In that way, it transforms the past into the present, into presence. Carta de creencia is a cantata where different voices converge. But, like Sun Stone, it's still a linear composition.

INTERVIEWER

When you write a long poem, do you see yourself as part of an ancient tradition?

PAZ

The long poem in modern times is very different from what it was in antiquity. Ancient poems, epics or allegories, contain a good deal of stuffing. The genre allowed and even demanded it. But the modern long poem tolerates neither stuffing nor transitions, for several reasons. First, with inevitable exceptions like Pound's Cantos, because our long poems are simply not as long as those of the ancients. Second, because our long poems contain two antithetical qualities: the development of the long poem and the intensity of the short poem. It's very difficult to manage. Actually, it's a new genre. And that's why I admire Eliot: his long poems have the same intensity and concentration as short poems.

INTERVIEWER

Is the process of writing enjoyable or frustrating?

PAZ

Writing is a painful process that requires huge effort and sleepless nights. In addition to the threat of writer's block, there is always the sensation that failure is inevitable. Nothing we write is what we wish we could write. Writing is a curse. The worst part of it is the anguish that precedes the act of writing— the hours, days, or months when we search in vain for the phrase that turns the spigot that makes the water flow. Once that first phrase is written, everything changes—the process is enthralling, vital, and enriching, no matter what the final result is. Writing is a blessing!

INTERVIEWER

How and why does an idea seize you? How do you decide if it is prose or poetry?

PAZ

I don't have any hard-and-fast rules for this. For prose, it would seem that the idea comes first, followed by a desire to develop the idea. Often, of course, the original idea changes, but even so the essential fact remains the same: prose is a means, an instrument. But in the case of poetry, the poet becomes the instrument. Whose? It's hard to say. Perhaps language. I don't mean automatic writing. For me, the poem is a premeditated act. But poetry flows from a psychic well related to language, that is, related to the culture and memory of a people. An ancient, impersonal spring intimately linked to verbal rhythm. INTERVIEWER

But doesn't prose have a rhythm as well?

PAZ

Prose does have a rhythm, but that rhythm is not its constitutive element as it is in poetry. Let's not confuse metrics with rhythm: meter may be a manifestation of rhythm, but it is different because it has become mechanical. Which is why, as Eliot suggests, from time to time meter has to return to spoken, everyday language, which is to say, to the original rhythms every language has.

INTERVIEWER

Verse and prose are, therefore, separate entities?

PAZ

Rhythm links verse to prose: one enriches the other. The reason why Whitman was so seductive was precisely because of his surprising fusion of prose and poetry. A fusion produced by rhythm. The prose poem is another example, although its powers are more limited. Of course, being prosaic in poetry can be disastrous, as we see in so many inept poems in “free verse” every day. As to the influence of poetry on prose—just think about Chateaubriand, Nerval, or Proust. In Joyce, the boundary between prose and poetry sometimes completely disappears.

INTERVIEWER

Can you always keep that boundary sharp?

PAZ

I try to keep them separate, but it doesn't always work. A prose piece, without my having to think about it, can become a poem. But I've never had a poem turn into an essay or a story. In some books— Eagle or Sun? and The Monkey Grammarian—I've tried to bring the prose right up to the border with poetry, I don't know with how much success.

INTERVIEWER

We've talked about premeditation and revision: how does inspiration relate to them?

PAZ

Inspiration and premeditation are two phases in the same process. Premeditation needs inspiration and vice-versa. It's like a river: the water can only flow between the two banks that contain it. Without premeditation, inspiration just scatters. But the role of premeditation—even in a reflexive genre like the essay—is limited. As you write, the text becomes autonomous, changes, and somehow forces you to follow it. The text always separates itself from the author. INTERVIEWER

Then why revise?

PAZ

Insecurity. No doubt about it. Also a senseless desire for perfection. I said that all texts have their own life, independent of the author. The poem doesn't express the poet. It expresses poetry. That's why it is legitimate to revise and correct a poem. Yes, and at the same time respect the poet who wrote it. I mean the poet, not the man we were then. I was that poet, but I was also someone else—that figure we talked about earlier. The poet is at the service of his poems.

INTERVIEWER

But just how much revising do you do? Do you ever feel a work is complete, or is it abandoned?

PAZ

I revise incessantly. Some critics say too much, and they may be right. But if there's a danger in revising, there is much more danger in not revising. I believe in inspiration, but I also believe that we've got to help inspiration, restrain it, and even contradict it.

INTERVIEWER

Thinking again on the relationship between inspiration and revision, did you ever attempt the kind of automatic writing the surrealists recommended in the first surrealist manifesto?

PAZ

I did experiment with “automatic writing.” It's very hard to do. Actually, it's impossible. No one can write with his mind blank, not thinking about what he's writing. Only God could write a real automatic poem because only for God are speaking, thinking, and acting the same thing. If God says, “A horse!” a horse immediately appears. But a poet has to reinventhis horse, that is, his poem. He has to think it, and he has to make it. All the automatic poems I wrote during the time of my friendship with the surrealists were thought and written with a certain deliberation. I wrote those poems with my eyes open.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think Breton was serious when he advocated automatic writing?

PAZ

Perhaps he was. I was extremely fond of André Breton, really admired him. It's no exaggeration to say he was a solar figure because his friendship emitted light and heat. Shortly after I met him, he asked me for a poem for a surrealist magazine. I gave him a prose poem, “Mariposa de obsidiana”—it alludes to a pre-Columbian goddess. He read it over several times, liked it, and decided to publish it. But he pointed out one line that seemed weak. I reread the poem, discovered he was right, and removed the phrase. He was charmed, but I was confused. So I asked him, What about automatic writing? He raised his leonine head and answered without changing expression: That line was a journalistic intromission . . .

INTERVIEWER

It's curious, Octavio, how often a tension allows you to find your own special place—the United States and Mexico, the pachuco and Anglo-American society, solitude and communion, poetry and prose. Do you yourself see a tension between your essays and your poetry?

PAZ

If I start to write, the thing I love to write most, the thing I love most to create, is poetry. I would much rather be remembered for two or three short poems in some anthology than as an essayist. However, since I am a modern and live in a century that believes in reason and explanation, I find I am in a tradition of poets who in one way or another have written defenses of poetry. Just think of the Renaissance and then again of the romantics—Shelley, Wordsworth in the preface to Lyrical Ballads. Well, now that I'm at the end of my career, I want to do two things: to keep on writing poetry and to write another defense of poetry.

INTERVIEWER

What will it say?

PAZ

I've just written a book, The Other Voice, about the situation of poetry in the twentieth century. When I was young, my great idols were poets and not novelists—even though I admired novelists like Proust or Lawrence. Eliot was one of my idols, but so were Valéry and Apollinaire. But poetry today is like a secret cult whose rites are celebrated in the catacombs, on the fringes of society. Consumer society and commercial publishers pay little attention to poetry. I think this is one of society's diseases. I don't think we can have a good society if we don't also have good poetry. I'm sure of it.

INTERVIEWER

Television is being criticized as the ruination of twentieth-century life, but you have the unique opinion that television will be good for poetry as a return to the oral tradition.

PAZ

Poetry existed before writing. Essentially, it is a verbal art, that enters us not only through our eyes and understanding but through our ears as well. Poetry is something spoken and heard. It's also something we see and write. In that we see the importance in the Oriental and Asian traditions of calligraphy. In the West, in modern times, typography has also been important—the maximum example in this would be Mallarmé. In television, the aural aspect of poetry can join with the visual and with the idea of movement—something books don't have. Let me explain: this is a barely explored possibility. So I'm not saying television will mean poetry's return to an oral tradition but that it could be the beginning of a tradition in which writing, sound, and images will unite. Poetry always uses all the means of communication the age offers it: musical instruments, printing, radio, records. Why shouldn't it try television? We've got to take a chance.

INTERVIEWER

Will the poet always be the permanent dissident?

PAZ

Yes. We have all won a great battle in the defeat of the communist bureaucracies by themselves—and that's the important thing: they were defeated by themselves and not by the West. But that's not enough. We need more social justice. Free-market societies produce unjust and very stupid societies. I don't believe that the production and consumption of things can be the meaning of human life. All great religions and philosophies say that human beings are more than producers and consumers. We cannot reduce our lives to economics. If a society without social justice is not a good society, a society without poetry is a society without dreams, without words, and most importantly, without that bridge between one person and another that poetry is. We are different from the other animals because we can talk, and the supreme form of language is poetry. If society abolishes poetry it commits spiritual suicide.

INTERVIEWER

Is your extensive critical study of the seventeenth-century Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz a kind of projection of the present onto the past?

PAZ

In part, but I also wanted to recover a figure I consider essential not only for Mexicans but for all of the Americas. At first, Sor Juana was buried and forgotten; then she was disinterred and mummified. I wanted to bring her back into the light of day, free her from the wax museum. She's alive and has a great deal to tell us. She was a great poet, the first in a long line of great Latin American women poets—let's not forget that Gabriela Mistral from Chile was the first Latin American writer to win the Nobel Prize. Sor Juana was also an intellectual of the first rank (which we can't say for Emily Dickinson) and a defender of women's rights. She was put on a pedestal and praised, then persecuted and humiliated. I just had to write about her.

INTERVIEWER

Finally, whither Octavio Paz? Where do you go from here?

PAZ Where? I asked myself that question when I was twenty, again when I was thirty, again when I was forty, fifty . . . I could never answer it. Now I know something: I have to persist. That means live, write, and face, like everyone else, the other side of every life—the unknown.

John Irving, The Art of Fiction No. 93 Interviewed by Ron Hansen

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John Irving was interviewed in the cramped back room of his otherwise large and luxurious apartment in Manhattan. A jump rope hangs on the door, a heavy set of weights “is always in the way” on the floor, and by one window is a stationary bike that Irving uses on days he doesn’t go to his private athletic club or jog in Central Park. He writes at a blue IBM typewriter beneath color photographs of his sons wrestling in prep-school competitions and black-and-white photographs of himself in prep-school and college matches. Among a great many books in the high bookcases are foreign editions of his novels in fifteen languages.

On the day of this interview, he wore a tweed coat, a green plaid flannel shirt, blue jeans, and running shoes. Irving is a vigorous, brawny man with brown hair that is increasingly gray. His height is probably five-feet-eight and he weighs only twenty-five pounds more than the 136 1/2 pounds he wrestled at years ago. He’s a storyteller and a generous teacher; when asked a question, Irving pauses for so long a time it nearly seems his inner works have stopped, but once his reply has been fully considered, he replies at length in a gentlemanly, New England voice.

INTERVIEWER

You’re only forty-four and yet you’ve already published six big and important novels as well as a great many uncollected essays, stories, and reviews. How do you get so much work done?

JOHN IRVING

I don’t give myself time off or make myself work; I have no work routine. I am compulsive about writing, I need to do it the way I need sleep and exercise and food and sex; I can go without it for a while, but then I need it. A novel is such a long involvement; when I’m beginning a book, I can’t work more than two or three hours a day. I don’t know more than two or three hours a day about a new novel. Then there’s the middle of a book. I can work eight, nine, twelve hours then, seven days a week—if my children let me; they usually don’t. One luxury of making enough money to support myself as a writer is that I can afford to have those eight-, nine-, and twelve-hour days. I resented having to teach and coach, not because I disliked teaching or coaching or wrestling but because I had no time to write. Ask a doctor to be a doctor two hours a day. An eight-hour day at the typewriter is easy; and two hours of reading over material in the evening, too. That’s routine. Then when the time to finish the book comes, it’s back to those two- and three-hour days. Finishing, like beginning, is more careful work. I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft. I can write more quickly than I can read.

INTERVIEWER

How do you begin a book?

IRVING

Not until I know as much as I can stand to know without putting anything down on paper. Henry Robbins, my late editor at E. P. Dutton, called this my enema theory: keep from writing the book as long as you can, make yourself not begin, store it up. This is an advantage in historical novels. Setting Free the Bears and The Cider House Rules, for example. I had to learn so much before I could begin those books; I had to gather so much information, take so many notes, see, witness, observe, study—whatever —that when I finally was able to begin writing, I knew everything that was going to happen, in advance. That never hurts. I want to know how a book feels after the main events are over. The authority of the storyteller’s voice—of mine, anyway—comes from knowing how it all comes out before you begin. It’s very plodding work, really.

INTERVIEWER

Have any of your novels changed drastically as you created them?

IRVING

Along the way accidents happen, detours get taken—the accidents turn out to be some of the best things. But these are not “divine” accidents; I don’t believe in those. I believe you have constructive accidents en route through a novel only because you have mapped a clear way. If you have confidence that you have a clear direction to take, you always have confidence to explore other ways; if they prove to be mere digressions, you’ll recognize that and make the necessary revisions. The more you know about a book, the freer you can be to fool around. The less you know, the tighter you get.

INTERVIEWER

Could you give an example of one of those accidents?

IRVING

One such accident was Melony. I knew she was the force in The Cider House Rules that would get Homer Wells back to St. Cloud’s; at first, of course, the reader is supposed to think that if Melony ever finds Homer, she’ll kill him. And in a way, she does; she has the power to bring him up short. But what she kills is his illusion that he’s living a good life. She’s a moral force, not a lethal one; she’s just as devastating to him as she would be if she were trying to kill him, really. She’s the one who tells him his life is shabby and ordinary. She has the power to do that. I didn’t know exactly what she would do, I mean physically, when she found him; then I thought of her frustrated rage in his bathroom, her very particular handling and dismantling of his things. I thought of that ugly, frightening weapon she constructs out of a toothbrush and a razor blade; she melts the toothbrush handle until it’s soft enough to stick a blade in it; when the plastic hardens, she’s got a lethal weapon. That’s a frightening moment, but she just leaves it in his bathroom medicine cabinet; he cuts himself on it, by accident. “By accident,” but it’s no accident; it’s a reminder to him of her potential for violence. That was a lucky discovery; it just fit perfectly.

INTERVIEWER

Except for The Water-Method Man, which you’ve said was called Fucking Up as you wrote it, you seem to know your novel’s title very early in your conception of it. Is it crucial to you to have a working title before you begin a project?

IRVING

Titles are important; I have them before I have books that belong to them. I have last chapters in my mind before I see first chapters, too. I usually begin with endings, with a sense of aftermath, of dust settling, of epilogue. I love plot, and how can you plot a novel if you don’t know the ending first? How do you know how to introduce a character if you don’t know how he ends up? You might say I back into a novel. All the important discoveries—at the end of a book—those are the things I have to know before I know where to begin. I knew that Garp’s mother would be killed by a stupid man who blindly hates women; I knew Garp would be killed by a stupid woman who blindly hates men. I didn’t even know which of them would be killed first; I had to wait to see which of them was the main character. At first I thought Jenny was the main character; but she was too much of a saint for a main character—in the way that Wilbur Larch is too much of a saint to be the main character of The Cider House Rules. Garp and Homer Wells are flawed; by comparison to Jenny and Dr. Larch, they’re weak. They’re main characters. Actors know how they end up—I mean how theircharacters end up— before they speak the opening lines. Shouldn’t writers know at least as much about their characters as actors know? I think so. But I’m a dinosaur.

INTERVIEWER

How do you mean?

IRVING

I’m not a twentieth-century novelist, I’m not modern, and certainly not postmodern. I follow the form of the nineteenth-century novel; that was the century that produced the models of the form. I’m old- fashioned, a storyteller. I’m not an analyst and I’m not an intellectual.

INTERVIEWER

How about the analysts and intellectuals? Have you ever learned anything from reading criticism about your work? Do reviews please or annoy you, or do you pay too little attention to them for that?

IRVING Reviews are only important when no one knows who you are. In a perfect world all writers would be well-enough known to not need reviewers. As Thomas Mann has written: “Our receptivity to praise stands in no relationship to our vulnerability to mean disdain and spiteful abuse. No matter how stupid such abuse is, no matter how plainly impelled by private rancors, as an expression of hostility it occupies us far more deeply and lastingly than praise. Which is very foolish, since enemies are, of course, the necessary concomitant of any robust life, the very proof of its strength.” I have a friend who says that reviewers are the tickbirds of the literary rhinoceros—but he is being kind. Tickbirds perform a valuable service to the rhino and the rhino hardly notices the birds. Reviewers perform no service to the writer and are noticed too much. I like what Cocteau said about them. “Listen very carefully to the first criticisms of your work. Note just what it is about your work that the reviewers don’t like; it may be the only thing in your work that is original and worthwhile.”

INTERVIEWER

And yet you review books yourself.

IRVING

I write only favorable reviews. A writer of fiction whose own fiction comes first is just too subjective a reader to allow himself to write a negative review. And there are already plenty of professional reviewers eager to be negative. If I get a book to review and I don’t like it, I return it; I only review the book if I love it. Hence I’ve written very few reviews, and those are really just songs of praise or rather long, retrospective reviews of all the writer’s works: of John Cheever, Kurt Vonnegut, and Günter Grass, for example. And then there is the occasional “younger” writer whom I introduce to readers, such as Jayne Anne Phillips and Craig Nova. Another thing about not writing negative reviews: grown-ups shouldn’t finish books they’re not enjoying. When you’re no longer a child, and you no longer live at home, you don’t have to finish everything on your plate. One reward of leaving school is that you don’t have to finish books you don’t like. You know, if I were a critic, I’d be angry and vicious, too; it makes poor critics angry and vicious—to have to finish all those books they’re not enjoying. What a silly job criticism is! What unnatural work it is! It is certainly not work for a grown-up.

INTERVIEWER

And what about fiction?

IRVING

Of course. What I do, telling stories, is childish work, too. I’ve never been able to keep a diary, to write a memoir. I’ve tried; I begin by telling the truth, by remembering real people, relatives, and friends. The landscape detail is pretty good, but the people aren’t quite interesting enough—they don’t have quite enough to do with one another; of course, what unsettles me and bores me is the absence of plot. There’s no story to my life! And so I find a little something that I exaggerate, a little; gradually, I have an autobiography on its way to becoming a lie. The lie, of course, is more interesting. I become much more interested in the part of the story I’m making up, in the “relative” I never had. And then I begin to think of a novel; that’s the end of the diary. I promise I’ll start another one as soon as I finish the novel. Then the same thing happens; the lies become much more interesting—always. INTERVIEWER

Especially in your younger work, but even now, one gets the sense of a grown-up at play, of a very natural writer enjoying himself. Are you having as much fun writing now as when you began writing stories at Exeter?

IRVING

I can’t say I have fun writing. My stories are sad to me, and comic too, but largely unhappy. I feel badly for the characters—that is, if the story’s any good. Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.

INTERVIEWER

Some people say you write disaster fiction.

IRVING

Such things don’t happen? Is that what they mean? You bet I write disaster fiction. We have compiled a disastrous record on this planet, a record of stupidity and absurdity and self-abuse and self- aggrandizement and self-deception and pompousness and self-righteousness and cruelty and indifference beyond what any other species has demonstrated the capacity for, which is the capacity for all the above. I am sick of secure and smugly conventional people telling me that my work is bizarre simply because they’ve found a safe little place to live out the chaos of the world—and who then deny that this chaos happens to other, less fortunate people. If you’re rich, are you permitted to say there’s no poverty, no starvation? If you’re a calm, gentle soul, do you say there’s no violence except in bad movies and bad books? I don’t make much up. I mean that. I am not the inventor I’ve been given credit for being. I just witness a different news—it’s still news, it still is just what happens, but more isolated and well-described so you might notice it a little more clearly. George Santayana wrote: “When people say that Dickens exaggerates, it seems to me that they can have no eyes or no ears. They probably have only notions of what things and people are; they accept them conventionally, at their diplomatic value.”

INTERVIEWER

Your literary debts to Charles Dickens, Günter Grass, and Kurt Vonnegut are pretty clear in your work, at least to some readers. How do you see their books contributing to your own?

IRVING

Well, yes, they’re all fathers of my work, in a way. The polite world calls them extremists, but I think they are very truthful, very accurate. I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range. They are all disturbed—both comically and tragically—by who the victims of a society (or of each other) are. You can’t copy that; you can only agree with it. INTERVIEWER

How did your stay in Vienna contribute to your growth as a writer?

IRVING

Living with Vienna’s history helped me look for history in my own work, make history for my characters, respect the passage of time as a finite kind of truth. I never really learned much about Vienna but I was taught to think about the past there—about my past, New England’s past, and my characters’ pasts.

INTERVIEWER

Have you studied the psychology of Sigmund Freud? Do you feel any kinship with his theories?

IRVING

I think Freud was a great novelist. Period.

INTERVIEWER

Period.

IRVING

Well, all right—a little more about that. Sigmund Freud was a novelist with a scientific background. He just didn’t know he was a novelist. All those damn psychiatrists after him, they didn’t know he was a novelist, either. They made simply awful sense out of his intuitions. People say Carl Jung is better, but Jung can’t write! Freud was a wonderful writer! And what a storyteller! I don’t think about his theories very much; sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t fit at all, but when people say Freud was “wrong” about this or that, I have to laugh. Was Charles Dickens “wrong” about Fagin in Oliver Twist? I don’t mean Fagin’s Jewishness either—I mean, how could he have been “wrong” about Fagin as a character? What a great character! So I love reading Freud: the detail, the observations, the characters, the histories. The hell with the rest of it.

INTERVIEWER

You say your work is becoming increasingly political.

IRVING

You’re right: I said I was becoming more political. I know I said that. I’m not, though. I am becoming more social; I care that the social abuses, the social evils and ills of this and every other time be exposed, vividly. I am interested in exposing wrongdoing, good and evil, injustice. That I am active in political causes has been well observed. I’m active, okay. But as a writer I am not interested so much in taking a political side as I am interested in exposing a corruption or an abuse (usually of an individual or group, but also by a law, or by a general indifference). Like Charles Dickens, I believe that society is a conditioning force, and often an evil force, but I also believe in absolutely good men and women, too. I read a critic of my work who found it ludicrous that I still wrote about “good” and “bad” people. Where has this man been? What has he seen? And I don’t mean what literature has he read. I mean, what has he seen of the world? There are bad people in the world; and good ones, too. Society is responsible for much that is evil; but no one thing is responsible for everything. President Reagan would like the American people to believe that the liberals in this country, and the Communists outside this country, have made the world as bad as it is. He seems to be meeting with fair success with this lunatic proposition, too. A Marxist view of literature is offensive to me. Also, a feminist view of abortion: it is as offensive as a Catholic view, if you’re not a Catholic.

INTERVIEWER

Do you think political considerations should be more important to American writers?

IRVING

Günter Grass and I were having dinner not long ago. He’s a great hero of mine. And he said he wanted to keep his fiction pure, that is, free of politics; but when he was not writing fiction, he wanted to be as politically active as possible. A good way to live, but perhaps it is a more successful way for a West German novelist than for an American. Chancellor Willy Brandt had the wisdom to let Grass write for him. What American political figure would dareto have an American novelist write for him—write real details, real arguments, real right and wrong? I tell you, Kurt Vonnegut would be a better president than any president we’ve had since I’ve been voting. E. L. Doctorow would be pretty good too. And what would happen if Philip Roth volunteered to write campaign speeches for a presidential candidate? I doubt that the promise that the speeches would be more concrete and literate and wise and humane would much influence the people making the self-canceling political “statements” that pass for speeches today. I doubt that any politician would hire Philip Roth or William Styron or Arthur Miller or any good writer you could name.

INTERVIEWER

How do you explain the comparative indifference of American novelists to national politics?

IRVING

I told Grass that there was no way for American writers to be politically active in this country. What we do, mainly, is join a general protest movement. We speak for causes; we speak to our friends; we speak to audiences already predisposed to agree with us. We havezero effect, in my opinion. We do a lot of political good deeds that make us feel self-righteous and not a part of the awful mainstream when yet another completely stupid and dangerous thing happens in this country. We say, complacently, “Well, I’m not part of that”; or, “As I said in The Nation”; or, “As I told the students at Stanford”; or, “When I was on theToday Show” (for two minutes)—and on and on. I think if we’re going to be politically active, it has to start creeping into our novels. Günter Grass may feel he has an effect as a political activist in Germany, and maybe he does. He certainly has uncounted effect as a wonderful novelist. But what effect do we political activists have here? I’m impatient with what I see; more and more impatient. So I look for novels that will make people feel more and more uncomfortable about what’s taken for granted in our society. Writers must describe the terrible. And one way to describe the terrible is to write comically, of course. George Bernard Shaw, who admitted to getting most of his satiric methods from Dickens, said that the thing to do is to find one true thing and exaggerate it, with levity, until it’s obvious. I know it is not very postmodernist to be obvious, but politically one has to become more and more that way.

INTERVIEWER

Politically?

IRVING

Maybe I should stop using the word “political” and just claim that social observation is a writer’s business; just to observe the society truthfully is, of course, being “political.” I think New Englanders and Southerners have this in common, in their social observations, as writers: we recognize that America is a class society. People who differ from one another or draw lines between each other on matters of “taste” are a part of the class society, just as surely as wealth and power are parts of it. These are more than manners, in a society; these things politicize us. By demonstrating how Americans discriminate we are also being political, as writers. And as long as we have presidents who lie to us— who use language as irresponsibly as President Reagan uses it—we’ll be political just by using language clearly. But I’m getting tired of blaming Reagan for being Reagan; the American people have to take responsibility for this man—they wanted him; they wanted him twice. He is never held accountable. His first reaction to Marcos’s “victory” in the Philippines was to advise Mrs. Aquino to “respect the democratic process,” to accept her defeat gracefully, in other words. And in the face of so much alarming evidence, to say, as he did, that there had been manipulations of the vote by both sides—it was ridiculous. Well, in one sense, he didn’t get away with it; Marcos is out. But five minutes later we hear the Reagan Administration taking credit for “the democratic process” in the Philippines; do Americans simply forget what the man’s first, terrible instincts were? They do appear to forget what he, literally, said. This is very troubling to writers; we couldn’t have a president as irresponsible as this if the American people paid attention to language. The news is: language doesn’t matter. But writers make language matter; we describe exactly. You see? Even caring about language becomes “political.”

INTERVIEWER

Could you describe your involvement in the 1984 presidential campaign?

IRVING

I spoke for Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro and for the good guys running against the bad guys in North Carolina, Texas, Iowa, and Michigan. Campaigning was especially depressing on college campuses. I cared more about abortion rights than my audience of students who were fucking each other day and night and taking for granted that they would never have any trouble getting an abortion. I cared more about whether their generation was going to suffer another Vietnam in Central America— although, as I told them, I wouldn’t be one of the Americans sent to die there, those Americans would come from theirgeneration. A lot of well-fed, well-dressed, career-oriented young people smiled back at me with a kind of what’s-he-worried-about? look on their faces. At the New School once some wit in the audience hollered out to me when I was talking about The Cider House Rules. The subject was migrant workers and the period in the late 1950s when I worked in the orchards with black apple pickers from the South, and I was saying that not much had changed for the migrants since then and that I felt great sympathy for poor people as a kid and I always wanted to write about them as truthfully as I could. And this jerk in the audience pipes up: “Will the migrants read it?” And there’s a small chant from about two or three of his pals saying “Yeah!” And raised fists; shouts. I don’t know exactly what their point was but they seemed to think they had made one—possibly, the migrants won’t read it, therefore so what? Of course, if you know the book, you know that’s one of my points about the migrants: They can’t read! Anyway, I thought it was funny, and bewildering, and typical.

INTERVIEWER

How?

IRVING

People are angry—politically—and the last people they see as helping a political or just plain social situation are the artists and writers and intellectuals. And as a group we have been of next to no help in this country. Every administration thinks we’re silly, not to be counted, and in the popular media, intellectuals and artists are always cast as totally unreliable and selfish people, as flakes and phonies and wimps altogether out of touch with the common man. Some problem, wouldn’t you agree? I have an instinct for victims; that’s all I can tell you. I see who gets hurt and I describe it. Do people like to see themselves as victims, or to hear about victims? In my experience, no.

INTERVIEWER

Probably no male writer has given as much serious attention as you have to the issues of adultery, rape, and now, with The Cider House Rules, abortion. Could you comment on that?

IRVING

I’ve been writing about one form or another of violence to women for years. And illegal abortion is simply a most sanctimonious form of violence against women. It is the most accepted form of violence in this country: violence against women. Rape is still funny, a wife is still the easiest person to beat up and get away with it, and the old line is still true: If men could get pregnant, don’t imagine for a moment that anyone would be complaining about legalized abortion. Some conventionally smug people, eyes tightly closed, say that all this violence to women in my books—as if it happened only there!—is exploitative. Others, who think violence to women is perfectly okay, think I am just a man of quaint concerns, or one writing feminist tracts. The same idiot who called The World According to Garp a feminist tract, by the way, also called The Cider House Rules sadistic to women. Does he mean I’ve changed? Does he even know what he means?

INTERVIEWER You worked on a screenplay of Setting Free the Bears and on the acknowledgments page of The Water-Method Man you thanked that project’s director, Irvin Kershner, “for a valuable and exciting film experience”; and yet since then you’ve rejected every opportunity to become involved in screen adaptations of your novels. Why?

IRVING

Well, movies, movies, movies—they are our enemy, of course. Movies are the enemy of the novel because they are replacing novels. Novelists shouldn’t write for the movies, unless, of course, they discover they’re no good at writing novels. I learned a lot from Kershner, who’s a dear friend of mine to this day, but I hated writing the script. I like people who make movies, and I’m glad some of them, who are terribly smart, are not writing novels. There are enough people writing novels, God knows. Anyway, the main thing I learned by writing a screenplay of Setting Free the Bears for Kershner was that screenwriting isn’t really writing; it’s carpentry. There’s no language in it, and the writer is not in control of the pace of the story, or of the tone of the narration, and what else is there to be in control of? Tony Richardson told me that there are no screenwriters, so there is at least one director who agrees with me. It could be that it was the most valuable thing I ever did—to have my shot at writing a movie when I was so young, right after my first novel was published—because I was never tempted to do it again.

INTERVIEWER

Have you generally liked the films made of The World According to Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire?

IRVING

I helped George Roy Hill with The World According to Garp; that is, I commented to him on the Steve Tesich screenplay, and looked at some of the shooting and the rushes, and I even played a small part as a wrestling referee—that wasn’t acting, by the way; for years I used to be a wrestling referee. My kids got in the movie, too; they had a ball. And George is one of my best friends now. He did a good job with The World According to Garp; he took it to the suburbs and gave all the characters haircuts and made them much nicer than they were in the book, but he was true to the domestic line, to the main, linear narrative. He’s a good storyteller, George; witness what a good job he did with Slaughterhouse- Five, and look at The Sting. Good narrative. He was the right director for The World According to Garp. What’s missing from that film is, of course, nine-tenths of the book, but George was faithful to what he could do. And that’s another reason I’m not interested in writing for the movies, personally: the main job in making a movie out of a novel by me is to throw away nine-tenths of the novel. Why would that be any fun for me? Tony Richardson took a more difficult route with The Hotel New Hampshire. He was not as literal as George, and the storytelling is jumpier, but he tried to make it a proper fairy tale, which it is—people in Europe seemed to understand that better than they understood it here (in both the book and the movie). I thought Tony took great risks with that movie and I thought the film was sweet, charming. It has a better beginning and ending than a middle. It was originally going to be in two parts but Tony couldn’t solve the two-part screenplay—isn’t it hysterical how movie people talk about “solving” scripts?—and he couldn’t get anyone to finance a movie in two parts either. Then he truncated what he had into one film, and that hurt; that kind of cartooned the characters, made it too speeded-up, at least for people who didn’t know the book. But he made every frame of it with love and zest; there’s nothing cynical about Tony.

INTERVIEWER

As far as I know, the stories in The World According to Garp are the last you’ve done. Do you intend to work with short fiction again?

IRVING

No. I can’t write a good story. The closest thing to a good story I ever wrote was “The Pension Grillparzer,” and the reason I worked as hard as I did on that story was that I was writing it for T. S. Garp—I had to establish that my character was the real thing, that he could really write. I would never have worked on a story of my own that hard. I just don’t care for the short story form. The summations, the closed doors, the focus; not for me. I won’t ever write another story— except perhaps a story entirely meant to be read or spoken aloud. Something exactly forty-five minutes to an hour in length, and never to be published, just to be said. Once I publish something I usually don’t enjoy reading aloud from it anymore, but I read “The Pension Grillparzer” aloud, to public audiences, seventy-three times. Once a young woman spoke to me after a reading. “I’ve heard you read a dozen times,” she said. She’d traveled from New York to California, to Vermont, to Missouri, to Iowa, to South Carolina. And all she ever got to hear was “The Pension Grillparzer.” She looked a trifle disturbed. “I keep thinking you’ll read something different,” she said peevishly. I never read the story again. But now I feel like trying it again; the story is simply a length that is perfect, and it’s self-contained. I don’t have anything else like it. I like public readings, but the chapters of all my novels, lately, are one and a half or two hours of reading; and cutting them down doesn’t improve them; and all the necessary things one has to say to introduce chapters, or parts of chapters, from a novel-in-progress . . . it’s frustrating.

INTERVIEWER

How about the books of your contemporaries? Are you a good reader?

IRVING

My contemporaries; of course, I read them. Or I begin them. Among my favorites: Kurt Vonnegut, of course—he’s the most original American writer since Mark Twain and the most humanitarian writer in English since Charles Dickens. And Günter Grass, of course. I loved John Cheever; I knew his territory and I liked his sense of mischief and fair play—always at war with each other. And I really value my friendships with any number of writers I admire: Joseph Heller, Gail Godwin, John Hawkes, Stanley Elkin, Peter Matthiessen, Robertson Davies . . . well, there isn’t a “complete” list. I generally like other writers; I try to meet every writer I can—and read any book that anyone tells me about.

INTERVIEWER

How do you think this period in American literature measures up against earlier ones?

IRVING As for my view of the contemporary novel . . . well, as I’ve said so many times: I’m old-fashioned. I believe in plot, of all things; in narrative, all the time; in storytelling; in character. Very traditional forms interest me. This nonsense about the novel being about “the word” . . . what can that mean? Are we novelists going to become like so many modern poets, writing only for and to each other, not comprehensible to anyone who isn’t another writer? I have only a prep-school education in the poems of John Milton. Yet I can read Milton; I really understand him. All that time has passed, and yet he’s still clear. But when I read the poems of someone my own age and can’t understand a single thing, is that supposed to be a failure of my education, or of the poetry?

INTERVIEWER

Setting Free the Bears, The Water-Method Man, and The 158-Pound Marriage were innovative, or at least postmodernist, in their designs, in their mixing of points of view or first- and third-person narrative, in their great concern for language. Your novels after them have been less concerned with experiments in storytelling and more concerned with the story itself. How do you account for that?

IRVING

The novel is a popular art form, an accessible form. I don’t enjoy novels that are boring exercises in show-off writing with no narrative, no characters, no information—novels that are just an intellectually discursive text with lots of style. Is their object to make me feel stupid? These are not novels. These are the works of people who want to call themselves writers but haven’t a recognizable form to work in. Their subject is their technique. And their vision? They have no vision, no private version of the world; there is only a private version of style, of technique. I just completed an introduction to Great Expectations in which I pointed out that Dickens was never so vain as to imagine that his love or his use of language was particularly special. He could write very prettily when he wanted to, but he never had so little to say that he thought the object of writing was pretty language. The broadest novelists never cared for that kind of original language. Dickens, Hardy, Tolstoy, Hawthorne, Melville: to such novelists, originality with language is mere fashion; it will pass. The larger, plainer things they are preoccupied with, their obsessions—these will last: the story, the characters, the laughter, and the tears.

INTERVIEWER

How helpful were your years spent at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop?

IRVING

I was not necessarily “taught” anything there as a student, although I was certainly encouraged and helped—and the advice of Vance Bourjaily, Kurt Vonnegut, and José Donoso clearly saved me some valuable time; that is, they told me things about my writing and about writing in general that I would probably have figured out for myself, but time is precious for a young writer. I always say that this is what I can “teach” a young writer: something he’ll know for himself in a little while longer; but why wait to know these things? I am talking about technical things, the only things you can presume to teach, anyway.

INTERVIEWER What are some of the more important “technical” things?

IRVING

“Voice” is a technical thing; the choice to be close to this character, distant from that character—to be in this or that point of view. You can learn these things; you can learn to recognize your own good and bad habits, what you do well in the first-person narrative voice, and what you do to excess, for example; and what the dangers and advantages are of a third-person narrative that presumes historical distance (the voice of a biographer, for example). There are so many stances involved, so many postures you can assume while telling a story; they can be much more deliberate, much more in a writer’s control, than an amateur knows. The reader, of course, shouldn’t be aware of much of this. It’s brilliant, for example, how Grass calls Oskar Matzerath “he” or “Oskar” at one moment, and then—sometimes in the same sentence—he refers to little Oskar as “I”; he’s a first-person narratorand a third-person narrator in the same sentence. But it’s done so seamlessly, it doesn’t call attention to itself; I hate those forms and styles that call great attention to themselves.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve also said you made some valuable friendships as a teacher at Iowa.

IRVING

Yes. Especially with Gail Godwin, Stanley Elkin, and John Cheever.

INTERVIEWER

And you met J. P. Donleavy at Iowa.

IRVING

I like meeting other writers, and Iowa City is a good place to meet them, but I didn’t enjoy Donleavy. John Cheever and I, who were in a particularly ritualized habit of watching Monday Night Football together, while eating homemade pasta, were happy to hear that Donleavy was coming. We’d both admired The Ginger Man and we wanted to meet the author. I went to the airport to meet him; I’d written three novels—but not yet The World According to Garp; I wasn’t famous. I didn’t expect Donleavy to have read anything of mine, but I was surprised when he announced that he read no one living; then he asked if we were in Kansas. I told him a little about the Workshop, but he was one of those writers with no knowledge about writing programs and many prejudices about them: to be a student of writing was a waste of time; better to go out and suffer. He was wearing a very expensive three-piece suit, very handsome shoes, and handling a very posh walking stick at the time, and I began to get irritated. In a meeting with Workshop students, he told them that any writer who was lowering himself by teaching writing wasn’t capable of teaching them anything. And so I was quite cross by the time I had to pick up the great man and drive him to his reading. I said we would be taking Mr. Cheever with us to the reading, and that both Mr. Cheever and I were great admirers, and that although I knew Mr. Donleavy did not read anyone living, he should know that Mr. Cheever was a wonderful writer. His short stories were models of the form, I said. But when I introduced Cheever to Donleavy, Donleavy wouldn’t even look at him; he went on talking to his wife, about aspirin, as if Cheever wasn’t there. I tried to say a few things about why so many American writers turned to teaching—as a way of supporting themselves without having to place the burden of making money upon their writing; and as a way of giving themselves enough time to practice their writing, too. But Donleavy wasn’t interested and he said so. The whole trip he was taking was tiresome; the people he met, the people everywhere, were tiresome, too. And so Cheever and I sat up front in the car, excluded from the conversation about the evils of aspirin, and driving the Donleavys about as if they were unhappy royalty in a hick town. I will say that Mrs. Donleavy appeared to suffer her husband’s rudeness, or perhaps she was just suffering her headache. Cheever tried a few times to engage Donleavy in some conversation, and as Cheever was as gifted in conversation as any man I have ever met, I grew more and more furious at Donleavy’s coldness and unresponsiveness and total discourtesy. I was thinking, frankly, that I should throw the lout in a puddle, if there was one handy, when Cheever spoke up. “Do you know, Mr. Donleavy,” Cheever said, “that no major writer of fiction was ever a shit to another writer of fiction, except Hemingway—and he was crazy?” That was all. Donleavy had no answer. Perhaps he thought Hemingway was still a living writer and therefore hadn’t read him, either. Cheever and I deposited the Donleavys at the reading, which we spontaneously decided to skip. It was many years later that I met and became friends with George Roy Hill, who told me that he’d been a roommate of “Mike” Donleavy at Trinity College, Dublin, and that “Mike” was just a touch eccentric and surely not a bad sort. But I remembered my evening with Cheever and told George that, in my opinion, Donleavy was a minor writer, a shit, or crazy —or all three. I should add that drinking wasn’t the issue of this unpleasant evening; Cheever was not drinking; Donleavy wasn’t drunk—he was simply righteous and acting the prima donna. I feel a little like I’m tattling on a fellow schoolboy to tell this story, but I felt so awful—not for myself but for Cheever. It was such an outrage; that Donleavy—this large, silly man with his walking stick— was snubbing John Cheever. I suppose it’s silly that I should still be angry, but George Plimpton told me that Donleavy has a subscription to The Paris Review;* this presents an apparent contradiction to Donleavy’s claim that he doesn’t read anyone living, but it gives me hope that he might read this. If the story embarrasses him, or makes him angry, I would say we’re even; the evening embarrassed Cheever and me, and made us angry, too.

INTERVIEWER

John Cheever’s fiction was frequently informed by a Christian sensibility. How about your own? Are you a religious man?

IRVING

I am now. I had the usual, fainthearted church experiences of an average New England Protestant. I was a Congregationalist; then I became an Episcopalian because more of my friends went to that Sunday school than to the Sunday school in the Congo, as we used to call it. And if I have a preference now it’s Congregational again, although I’m still cross with them for consolidating—you know, they kind of unionized, like all the other churches, and I liked them better the old way, when they were independent from all the other churches, even all the other so-called Congregational churches; that was more Yankee, that was very New England. I’m actually writing a religious novel now. What I mean by that is that I’m writing a novel that begs the reader to believe in a miracle. It’s a small enough miracle to be fairly universally believed, I hope; and it’s a questionable enough “religious experience” to be exactly that, to a religious reader, and acceptable on other terms to my readers who are not believers. I’m a believer, by the way. Haven’t always been. And there’s a day every now and then when I’m frankly worried, or just your average doubter. Well, for the sake of the new novel, I am bolstering up what belief I have. I’m a very conventionally religious person—you know, I find it easier to “believe” when I’m physically in a church, and I kind of lose touch with the feeling of how to pray when I slip away from the church for very long.

INTERVIEWER

Are you willing to say anything more about the novel you’re working on?

IRVING

It will be called A Prayer for Owen Meany. It’s about this little guy—both a hero and a victim—who believes that he’s been appointed by God, that he’s been specially chosen; and that the rather terrible “fate” he encounters is all part of his divine assignment. And it’s the writer’s job, isn’t it, to make the readers wonder if maybe this isn’t entirely true? Even the doubters. I have to convince them of little Owen Meany’s special appointment in the universe, too. In that sense, maybe, writing a novel is always a religious act, in that we have to believe that our characters are appointed—even if only by us—and that their acts are not accidents, their responses not random. I don’t believe in accidents. That’s another aspect of how old-fashioned I am, I guess.

INTERVIEWER

You’re a public figure now. Does that interfere with your goals as a writer?

IRVING

No.

INTERVIEWER

You don’t have a drinking problem. In fact, your capacity for serious exercise is well-known; you’re in good shape. But so many writers drink to excess. I’ve heard you lay the blame on what’s wrong with this or that book on the author’s drinking problem. You’ve said, for example, that the reason both Hemingway and Fitzgerald wrote their best books in their twenties (they were twenty-seven when they wrote The Sun Also Rises and The Great Gatsby) is that they “pickled their brains.” Do you really believe that?

IRVING

Yes, I really believe that. They should have gotten better as they got older; I’ve gotten better. We’re not professional athletes; it’s reasonable to assume that we’ll get better as we mature—at least, until we start getting senile. Of course, some writers who write their best books early simply lose interest in writing; or they lose their concentration—probably because they want to do other things. But Hemingway and Fitzgerald really lived to write; their bodies and their brains betrayed them. I’m such an incapable drinker, I’m lucky. If I drink half a bottle of red wine with my dinner, I forget who I had dinner with—not to mention everything that I or anybody else said. If I drink more than half a bottle, I fall instantly asleep. But just think of what novelists do; fiction writing requires a kind of memory, a vigorous, invented memory. If I can forget who I had dinner with, what might I forget about my novel- in-progress? The irony is that drinking is especially dangerous to novelists; memory is vital to us. I’m not so down on drinking for writers from a moral point of view; but booze is clearly not good for writing or for driving cars. You know what Lawrence said: “The novel is the highest example of subtle interrelatedness that man has discovered.” I agree! And just consider for one second what drinking does to “subtle interrelatedness.” Forget the “subtle”; “interrelatedness” is what makes novels work—without it, you have no narrative momentum; you have incoherent rambling. Drunks ramble; so do books by drunks.

INTERVIEWER

How big is your ego?

IRVING

It grows a little smaller all the time. Being an ex-athlete is good for losing ego. And writing, in my opinion, is the opposite of having ego. Confidence as a writer should not be confused with personal, egotistical confidence. A writer is a vehicle. I feel the story I am writing existed before I existed; I’m just the slob who finds it, and rather clumsily tries to do it, and the characters, justice. I think of writing fiction as doing justice to the people in the story, and doing justice to their story—it’s not my story. It’s entirely ghostly work; I’m just the medium. As a writer, I do more listening than talking. W. H. Auden called the first act of writing “noticing.” He meant the vision—not so much what we make up but what we witness. Oh, sure, writers “make up” the language, the voice, the transitions, all the clunking bridges that span the story’s parts—that stuff, it’s true, is invented. I am still old-fashioned enough to maintain that what happens in a novel is what distinguishes it, and what happens is what wesee. In that sense, we’re all just reporters. Didn’t Faulkner say something like it was necessary only to write about “the human heart in conflict with itself” in order to write well? Well, I think that’s all we do: We find more than we create, we simply see and expose more than we fabulate and invent. At least I do. Of course, it’s necessary to make the atmosphere of a novel more real than real, as we say. Whatever its place is, it’s got to feel, concretely, like a place with richer detail than any place we can actually remember. I think what a reader likes best is memories, the more vivid the better. That’s the role of atmosphere in fiction: it provides details that feel as good, or as terrifying, as memories. Vienna, in my books, is more Vienna than Vienna; St. Cloud’s is more Maine than Maine.

INTERVIEWER

One of the predominant characteristics of your protagonists is that they gain success in their occupations without any formal training—T. S. Garp skips college altogether, Lilly Berry publishes a novel while still a teenager, Homer Wells practices obstetrics without a medical degree—and yet you earned a graduate degree and you’ve worked as a professor at a number of colleges. How do you account for this disparity between your own experience and that of your characters? Are you implying that higher education is unnecessary?

IRVING I needed prep school; I needed the experience of going to school, or having to struggle in school, and I needed that much education. And I got quite a lot of education at Exeter, by the way; at least I learned how to learn, how to find things out. There’s another key to education: you learn how to pay enough attention, even though you’re bored. A very important trick for a writer to pick up. But college was a waste of time for me. I stopped paying attention after I left Exeter—I stopped paying attention in school, I mean. By then I already wanted to write; I was already a reader. I wanted more time—to read more and more novels, and to practice my own writing. That’s all I wanted to do, and all that really benefited me: reading lots of other novels, and practicing my own writing. Of course, you do get to read some novels in college, but you also have to waste all that time talking about them and writing about them, when you could be reading more novels.

INTERVIEWER

How about writing classes?

IRVING

Writing classes bought me time, and they gave me a little audience. And Thomas Williams and John Yount at the University of New Hampshire were very important to me; they encouraged me and they criticized me, and that saved me time, too. I would have learned what they taught me somewhere, sometime, eventually, but it was wonderful for me to learn it then, and from them. And Kurt Vonnegut was important to me at Iowa, as you already know. But I’m talking about three other writers who patted me on the head and passed a pencil over my sentences—I didn’t need the college part of the education. I suppose I did need those silly degrees, because I wouldn’t have gotten a teaching job without those degrees, and teaching was an honorable and not-too-time-consuming way to support myself (which I needed to do) in those years I was writing the first four books. So that’s always been true of an education, isn’t it? You get one, you get a better job—right? But if I was a good teacher—and I was—it was because I had read a lot of novels and I had written and written and written; that provided me with the substance, with what I actually taught. I didn’t need college to be a writer; I needed what a lot of people need from so-called higher education: the credentials! And let’s tell the truth: I wouldn’t have been given those college teaching positions simply because I had a B.A. and an M.F.A. I got those jobs because I published. School didn’t help me get published.

INTERVIEWER

How did you first get published?

IRVING

I was lucky from the start. Tom Williams sent a couple of my undergraduate short stories to his agent, Mavis McIntosh. She sold one, “A Winter Branch,” to Redbook for $1,000, and so I had an agent. She retired less than a year later and passed me along to Peter Matson, who’s been my agent ever since. That’s my longest literary-business relationship, and he’s also one of my dearest friends. Now that’s lucky, that Peter and I were right for each other; that’s good luck. And Peter found me Joe Fox at Random House, and Fox was very good for me, too—a good editor, a good man with a pencil, which I needed. And when Random House wasn’t exactly promising to change their ways and pull out all the stops forThe World According to Garp, it was Fox who gave me the right advice: to leave him. That’s class. And Henry Robbins published Garp at Dutton, and that was a success. The first unlucky thing that happened to me in publishing was that Henry died. He was a lovely man and it crushed me. But the Dutton people did their best—a very young editor named Jane Rosenman did a good job with me and The Hotel New Hampshire. And then I met Harvey Ginsberg, who was actually an old friend of Henry’s—a classmate at Harvard—and just when I’m writing The Cider House Rules, where does it turn out that Harvey is from? Bangor, Maine. You think that’s not lucky? And so now Harvey and I are together at William Morrow, and I’m so happy I don’t have plans to change publishing houses. How many writers do you know who’ll say that? Hear many happy publishing stories? I’ve been verylucky, and I know it, and I’m grateful. So much bitterness exists between writers and their publishers and representatives, but I’ve been spared it, and that means I can think about my writing instead of worrying about how I’m published—which provides many writers I know with an absolutely crippling distraction. You have to eliminate the distractions. You’ve got to keep focused.

* A complimentary subscription—Ed.

Author photograph by Nancy Crampton.

Julio Cortazar, The Art of Fiction No. 83 Interviewed by Jason Weiss

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When Julio Cortázar died of cancer in February 1984 at the age of sixty-nine, the Madrid newspaper El Pais hailed him as one of Latin America’s greatest writers and over two days carried eleven full pages of tributes, reminiscences, and farewells.

Though Cortázar had lived in Paris since 1951, he visited his native Argentina regularly until he was officially exiled in the early 1970s by the Argentine junta, who had taken exception to several of his short stories. With the victory, last fall, of the democratically elected Alfonsín government, Cortázar was able to make one last visit to his home country. Alfonsín’s cultural minister chose to give him no official welcome, afraid that his political views were too far to the left, but the writer was nonetheless greeted as a returning hero. One night in Buenos Aires, coming out of a cinema after seeing the new film based on Osvaldo Soriano’s novel, No habra ni mas pena ni olvido, Cortázar and his friends ran into a student demonstration coming towards them, which instantly broke file on glimpsing the writer and crowded around him. The bookstores on the boulevards still being open, the students hurriedly bought up copies of Cortázar’s books so that he could sign them. A kiosk salesman, apologizing that he had no more of Cortázar’s books, held out a Carlos Fuentes novel for him to sign.

Cortázar was born in Brussels in 1914. When his family returned to Argentina after the war, he grew up in Banfield, not far from Buenos Aires. He took a degree as a schoolteacher and went to work in a town in the province of Buenos Aires until the early 1940s, writing for himself on the side. One of his first published stories, “House Taken Over,” which came to him in a dream, appeared in 1946 in a magazine edited by Jorge Luis Borges. It wasn’t until after Cortázar moved to Paris in 1951, however, that he began publishing in earnest. In Paris, he worked as a translator and interpreter for UNESCO and other organizations. Writers he translated included Poe, Defoe, and Marguerite Yourcenar. In 1963, his second novel Hopscotch—about an Argentine’s existential and metaphysical searches through the nightlife of Paris and Buenos Aires—really established Cortázar’s name.

Though he is known above all as a modern master of the short story, Cortázar’s four novels have demonstrated a ready innovation of form while, at the same time, exploring basic questions about man in society. These include The Winners (1960), 62: A Model Kit(1968), based in part on his experience as an interpreter, and A Manual for Manuel (1973), about the kidnapping of a Latin American diplomat. But it was Cortázar’s stories that most directly claimed his fascination with the fantastic. His most well- known story was the basis of Antonioni’s film by the same name, Blow-Up. Five collections of his stories have appeared in English to date, the most recent being We Love Glenda So Much. Just before he died, a travel journal was published, Los autonautas de la cosmopista, on which he collaborated with his wife, Carol Dunlop, during a voyage from Paris to Marseilles in a camping van. Published simultaneously in Spanish and French, Cortázar signed all author’s rights and royalties over to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua; the book has since become a best-seller. Two posthumous collections of his political articles on Nicaragua and on Argentina have also been published.

Throughout his expatriate years in Paris, Cortázar had lived in various neighborhoods. In the last decade, royalties from his books enabled him to buy his own apartment. The apartment, atop a building in a district of wholesalers and chinaware shops, might have been the setting for one of his stories: spacious, though crowded with books, its walls lined with paintings by friends.

Cortázar was a tall man, 6'4", though thinner than his photographs revealed. The last months before this interview had been particularly difficult for him, since his last wife, Carol, thirty years his junior, had recently died of cancer. In addition, his extensive travels, especially to Latin America, had obviously exhausted him. He had been home barely a week and was finally relaxing in his favorite chair, smoking a pipe as we talked.

INTERVIEWER

In some of the stories in your most recent book, Deshoras, the fantastic seems to encroach on the real world more than ever. Have you yourself felt as if the fantastic and the commonplace are becoming one?

JULIO CORTÁZAR

Yes, in these recent stories I have the feeling that there is less distance between what we call the fantastic and what we call the real. In my older stories, the distance was greater because the fantastic really was fantastic, and sometimes it touched on the supernatural. Of course, the fantastic takes on metamorphoses; it changes. The notion of the fantastic we had in the epoch of the gothic novels in England, for example, has absolutely nothing to do with our concept of it today. Now we laugh when we read Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto—the ghosts dressed in white, the skeletons that walk around making noises with their chains. These days, my notion of the fantastic is closer to what we call reality. Perhaps because reality approaches the fantastic more and more.

INTERVIEWER

Much more of your time in recent years has been spent in support of various liberation struggles in Latin America. Hasn’t that also helped bring the real and the fantastic closer for you, and made you more serious?

CORTÁZAR

Well, I don’t like the idea of “serious,” because I don’t think I am serious, at least not in the sense where one speaks of a serious man or a serious woman. But in these last few years, my efforts concerning certain Latin American regimes—Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and now above all Nicaragua —have absorbed me to such a point that I have used the fantastic in certain stories to deal with this subject—in a way that’s very close to reality, in my opinion. So, I feel less free than before. That is, thirty years ago I was writing things that came into my head and I judged them only by aesthetic criteria. Now, though I continue to judge them by aesthetic criteria, first of all because I’m a writer—I’m now a writer who’s tormented, very preoccupied by the situation in Latin America; consequently that often slips into my writing, in a conscious or in an unconscious way. But despite the stories with very precise references to ideological and political questions, my stories, in essence, haven’t changed. They’re still stories of the fantastic.

The problem for an engagé writer, as they call them now, is to continue being a writer. If what he writes becomes simply literature with a political content, it can be very mediocre. That’s what has happened to a number of writers. So, the problem is one of balance. For me, what I do must always be literature, the highest I can do . . . to go beyond the possible. But, at the same time, to try to put in a mix of contemporary reality. And that’s a very difficult balance. In the story in Deshoras about the rats, “Satarsa”—which is an episode based on the struggle against the Argentine guerrillas—the temptation was to stick to the political level alone.

INTERVIEWER

What has been the response to such stories? Was there much difference in the response you got from literary people and that which you got from political ones?

CORTÁZAR

Of course. The bourgeois readers in Latin America who are indifferent to politics, or those who align themselves with the right wing, well, they don’t worry about the problems that worry me—the problems of exploitation, of oppression, and so on. Those people regret that my stories often take a political turn. Other readers, above all the young—who share my sentiments, my need to struggle, and who love literature—love these stories. The Cubans relish “Meeting.” “Apocalypse at Solentiname” is a story that Nicaraguans read and reread with great pleasure.

INTERVIEWER What has determined your increased political involvement?

CORTÁZAR

The military in Latin America—they’re the ones who make me work harder. If they were removed, if there were a change, then I could rest a little and work on poems and stories that would be exclusively literary. But it’s they who give me work to do.

INTERVIEWER

You have said at various times that, for you, literature is like a game. In what ways?

CORTÁZAR

For me, literature is a form of play. But I’ve always added that there are two forms of play: football, for example, which is basically a game, and then games that are very profound and serious. When children play, though they’re amusing themselves, they take it very seriously. It’s important. It’s just as serious for them now as love will be ten years from now. I remember when I was little and my parents used to say, “Okay, you’ve played enough, come take a bath now.” I found that completely idiotic, because, for me, the bath was a silly matter. It had no importance whatsoever, while playing with my friends was something serious. Literature is like that—it’s a game, but it’s a game one can put one’s life into. One can do everything for that game.

INTERVIEWER

When did you become interested in the fantastic? Were you very young?

CORTÁZAR

It began in my childhood. Most of my young classmates had no sense of the fantastic. They took things as they were . . . this is a plant, that is an armchair. But for me, things were not that well defined. My mother, who’s still alive and is a very imaginative woman, encouraged me. Instead of saying, “No, no, you should be serious,” she was pleased that I was imaginative; when I turned towards the world of the fantastic, she helped by giving me books to read. I read Edgar Allan Poe for the first time when I was only nine. I stole the book to read because my mother didn’t want me to read it; she thought I was too young and she was right. The book scared me and I was ill for three months, because I believed in it . . . dur comme fer as the French say. For me, the fantastic was perfectly natural; I had no doubts at all. That’s the way things were. When I gave those kinds of books to my friends, they’d say, “But no, we prefer to read cowboy stories.” Cowboys were especially popular at the time. I didn’t understand that. I preferred the world of the supernatural, of the fantastic.

INTERVIEWER

When you translated Poe’s complete works many years later, did you discover new things for yourself from so close a reading? CORTÁZAR

Many, many things. I explored his language, which is criticized by both the English and the Americans because they find it too baroque. Since I’m neither English nor American, I see it with another perspective. I know there are aspects which have aged a lot, that are exaggerated, but that doesn’t mean anything compared to his genius. To write, in those times, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” or “Ligeia,” or “Berenice,” or “The Black Cat,” any of them, shows a true genius for the fantastic and for the supernatural. Yesterday, I visited a friend on the rue Edgar Allan Poe. There is a plaque on the street which reads, “Edgar Poe, English Writer.” He wasn’t English at all! We should have it changed—we’ll both protest!

INTERVIEWER

In your writing, in addition to the fantastic, there is a real warmth and affection for your characters.

CORTÁZAR

When my characters are children and adolescents, I have a lot of tenderness for them. I think they are very alive in my novels and in my stories; I treat them with a lot of love. When I write a story where the character is an adolescent, I am the adolescent while I am writing it. With the adult characters, it’s something else.

INTERVIEWER

Are many of your characters based on people that you’ve known?

CORTÁZAR

I wouldn’t say many, but there are a few. Very often there are characters who are a mixture of two or three people. I have put together a female character, for example, from two women I have known. That gives the character in the story or the book a personality that’s more complex, more difficult.

INTERVIEWER

Do you mean that when you feel the need to thicken a character, you combine two together?

CORTÁZAR

Things don’t work like that. It’s the characters who direct me. That is, I see a character, he’s there, and I recognize someone I knew, or occasionally two who are a bit mixed together, but then that stops. Afterwards, the character acts on his own account. He says things . . . I never know what any of them are going to say when I’m writing dialogue. Really, it’s up to them. Me, I’m just typing out what they’re saying. Sometimes I burst out laughing, or I throw out a page and say, “There, there you’ve said silly things. Out!” And I put in another page and start over again with their dialogue.

INTERVIEWER So it’s not the characters you’ve known that impel you to write?

CORTÁZAR

No, not at all. Often, I have an idea for a story, but there aren’t any characters yet. I’ll have a strange idea: something’s going to happen in a house in the country, I see . . . I’m very visual when I write, I see it all, I see everything. So, I see this house in the country and then, abruptly, I begin to situate the characters. At that point, one of the characters might be someone I knew. But it’s not for sure. In the end, most of my characters are invented. Now, of course, there’s myself. In Hopscotch, there are many autobiographical references in the character of Oliveira. It’s not me, but there’s a lot that derives from my early bohemian days in Paris. Yet readers who read Oliveira as Cortázar in Paris would be mistaken. No, no, I was very different.

INTERVIEWER

Is this because you don’t wish your writing to be autobiographical?

CORTÁZAR

I don’t like autobiography. I will never write my memoirs. Autobiographies of others interest me, of course, but not my own. If I wrote my autobiography, I would have to be truthful and honest. I couldn’t tell an imaginary autobiography. And so, I would be doing a historian’s job, being a self-historian, and that bores me. Because I prefer to invent, to imagine. Of course, very often when I have ideas for a novel or a story, situations and moments of my life naturally place themselves in that context. In my story “Deshoras,” the idea of the boy being in love with his pal’s older sister is, in fact, based on an autobiographical situation. So there is a small part of it that’s autobiographical, but from there on, it’s the fantastic or the imaginary which dominates.

INTERVIEWER

How do you start with your stories? By any particular entry, an image?

CORTÁZAR

With me stories and novels can start anywhere. As for the writing itself, when I begin to write, the story has been turning around in me a long time, sometimes for weeks. But not in any way that’s clear; it’s a sort of general idea of the story. Perhaps that house where there’s a red plant in one corner, and I know there’s an old man who walks around in this house. That’s all I know. It happens like that. And then there are the dreams. During this gestation period my dreams are full of references and allusions to what is going to be in the story. Sometimes the whole story is in a dream. One of my first and most popular stories, “House Taken Over,” is a nightmare I had. I got up immediately and wrote it. But in general, what comes out of the dreams are fragments of references. That is, my subconscious is in the process of working through a story—when I am dreaming, it’s being written inside there. So when I say that I begin anywhere, it’s because I don’t know what, at that point, is to be the beginning or the end. When I start to write, that’s the beginning. I haven’t decided that the story has to start like that; it simply starts there and it continues, and very often I have no clear idea about the ending—I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s only gradually, as the story goes on, that things become clearer and abruptly I see the ending.

INTERVIEWER

So you are discovering the story while you are writing it?

CORTÁZAR

That’s right. It’s like improvising in jazz. You don’t ask a jazz musician, “But what are you going to play?” He’ll laugh at you. He has a theme, a series of chords he has to respect, and then he takes up his trumpet or his saxophone and he begins. It’s not a question of idea. He performs through a series of different internal pulsations. Sometimes it comes out well, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s the same with me. I’m a bit embarrassed to sign my stories sometimes. The novels, no, because the novels I work on a lot; there’s a whole architecture. But my stories, it’s as if they were dictated to me by something that is in me, but it’s not me who’s responsible. Well, since it does appear they are mine even so, I guess I should accept them!

INTERVIEWER

Are there certain aspects of writing a story that always pose a problem for you?

CORTÁZAR

In general, no, because as I was explaining, the story is already made somewhere inside me. So, it has its dimension, its structure; if it’s going to be a very short story or a fairly long story, all that is as if decided in advance. But in recent years I’ve started to sense some problems. I reflect more in front of the page. I write more slowly. And I write in a way that’s more spare. Certain critics have reproached me for that, they’ve told me that little by little I’m losing that suppleness in my stories. I seem to be saying what I want to with a greater economy of means. I don’t know if it’s for better or for worse—in any case, it’s my way of writing now.

INTERVIEWER

You were saying that with the novels there is a whole architecture. Does that mean that you work very differently?

CORTÁZAR

The first thing I wrote in Hopscotch was a chapter that is now in the middle. It’s the chapter where the characters put out a plank to cross from one window of an apartment house to another. I wrote that without knowing why I was writing it. I saw the characters, I saw the situation—it was in Buenos Aires. It was very hot, I remember, and I was next to the window with my typewriter. I saw this situation of a guy who’s trying to make his wife go across the plank—because he won’t go himself—to get some silly thing, some nails. I wrote all that, which was long, some forty pages, and when I’d finished I said to myself, “All right, but what have I done? Because that’s not a story. What is it?” Then I understood that I was launched on a novel, but that I couldn’t continue from that point. I had to stop there and go back and write the whole section in Paris which comes before, which is the whole background of Oliveira, and when I finally arrived at this chapter about walking the plank, then I went on from there.

INTERVIEWER

Do you revise much when you write?

CORTÁZAR

Very little. That comes from the fact that the thing has already been at work inside me. When I see the rough drafts of certain of my writer friends, where everything is revised, everything’s changed, moved around, and there are arrows all over the place . . . no no no. My manuscripts are very clean.

INTERVIEWER

José Lezama Lima in Paradiso has Cemí saying that “the baroque . . . is what has real interest in Spain and Hispanic America.” Why do you think that is so?

CORTÁZAR

I cannot reply as an expert. True, the baroque is greatly important in Latin America, both in the arts and in the literature as well. The baroque can offer a great richness; it lets the imagination soar in all its many spiraling directions, as in a baroque church with its decorative angels and all that, or in baroque music. But I distrust the baroque. The baroque writers, very often, let themselves go too easily in their writing. They write in five pages what one could very well write in one. I too must have fallen into the baroque because I am Latin American, but I have always had a mistrust of it. I don’t like turgid, voluminous sentences, full of adjectives and descriptions, purring and purring into the reader’s ear. I know it’s very charming, of course. It’s very beautiful but it’s not me. I’m more on the side of Jorge Luis Borges. He has always been an enemy of the baroque; he tightened his writing, as if with pliers. Well, I write in a very different way than Borges, but the great lesson he taught me is one of economy. He taught me when I began to read him, being very young, that one had to try to say what one wanted to with economy, but with a beautiful economy. It’s the difference, perhaps, between a plant, which would be considered baroque, with its multiplication of leaves, often very beautiful, and a precious stone, a crystal—that for me is more beautiful still.

INTERVIEWER

What are your writing habits? Have certain things changed?

CORTÁZAR

The one thing that hasn’t changed, and never will, is the total anarchy and the disorder. I have absolutely no method. When I feel like writing a story I let everything drop; I write the story. And sometimes when I write a story, in the month or two that follows I will write two or three more. In general, the stories come in series. Writing one leaves me in a receptive state, and then I “catch” another. You see the sort of image I use, but it’s like that; the story drops inside of me. But then a year can go by where I write nothing . . . nothing. Of course, these last few years I have spent a good deal of my time at the typewriter writing political articles. The texts I’ve written about Nicaragua, everything I’ve written about Argentina, have nothing to do with literature—they’re militant things.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve often said that it was the Cuban revolution that awakened you to questions of Latin America and its problems.

CORTÁZAR

And I say it again.

INTERVIEWER

Do you have preferred places for writing?

CORTÁZAR

In fact, no. In the beginning, when I was younger and physically more resistant, here in Paris for example, I wrote a large part of Hopscotch in cafés. Because the noise didn’t bother me and, on the contrary, it was a very congenial place. I worked a lot there—I read or I wrote. But with age I’ve become more complicated. I write when I’m sure of having some silence. I can’t write if there’s music, that’s absolutely out. Music is one thing and writing is another. I need a certain calm; but, having said this, a hotel, an airplane sometimes, a friend’s house, or here at home are places where I can write.

INTERVIEWER

What about Paris? What gave you the courage to pick up and move off to Paris when you did, more than thirty years ago?

CORTÁZAR

Courage? No, it didn’t take much courage. I simply had to accept the idea that coming to Paris, and cutting the bridges with Argentina at that time meant being very poor and having problems making a living. But that didn’t worry me. I knew in one way or another I was going to manage. I came to Paris primarily because Paris, French culture on the whole, held a strong attraction for me. I had read French literature with a passion in Argentina, so I wanted to be here and get to know the streets and the places one finds in the books, in the novels. To go through the streets of Balzac or of Baudelaire . . . it was a very romantic voyage. I was, I am, very romantic. In fact, I have to be rather careful when I write, because very often I could let myself fall into . . . I wouldn’t say bad taste, perhaps not, but a bit in the direction of an exaggerated romanticism. In my private life, I don’t need to control myself. I really am very sentimental, very romantic. I’m a tender person; I have a lot of tenderness to give. What I give now to Nicaragua, it’s tenderness. It is also the political conviction that the Sandinistas are right in what they’re doing and that they’re leading an admirable struggle; but it’s not only the political impetus, it’s that there’s an enormous tenderness because it’s a people I love, as I love the Cubans, and I love the Argentines. Well, all that makes up part of my character. In my writing I have had to watch myself, above all when I was young. I wrote things then that were tearjerkers. That was really romanticism, the roman rose. My mother would read them and cry.

INTERVIEWER

Nearly all your writing that people know dates from your arrival in Paris. But you were writing a lot before, weren’t you? A few things had already been published.

CORTÁZAR

I’ve been writing since the age of nine, right up through my whole adolescence and early youth. In my early youth I was already capable of writing stories and novels, which showed me that I was on the right path. But I wasn’t eager to publish. I was very severe with myself, and I continue to be. I remember that my peers, when they had written some poems or a small novel, searched for a publisher right away. I would tell myself, “No, you’re not publishing, you hang on to that.” I kept certain things, and others I threw out. When I did publish for the first time I was over thirty years old; it was just before my departure for France. That was my first book of stories, Bestiario, which came out in ’51, the same month that I took the boat to come here. Before that, I had published a little text called Los reyes, which is a dialogue. A friend who had a lot of money, who did small editions for himself and his friends, had done a private edition. And that’s all. No, there’s another thing—a sin of youth—a book of sonnets. I published it myself, but with a pseudonym.

INTERVIEWER

You are the lyricist of a recent album of tangos, Trottoirs de Buenos Aires. What got you started writing tangos?

CORTÁZAR

Well, I am a good Argentine and above all a porteño—that is, a resident of Buenos Aires, because it’s the port. The tango was our music, and I grew up in an atmosphere of tangos. We listened to them on the radio, because the radio started when I was little, and right away it was tango after tango. There were people in my family, my mother and an aunt, who played tangos on the piano and sang them. Through the radio, we began to listen to Carlos Gardel and the great singers of the time. The tango became like a part of my consciousness and it’s the music that sends me back to my youth again and to Buenos Aires. So, I’m quite caught up in the tango, all while being very critical, because I’m not one of those Argentines who believes that the tango is the wonder of wonders. I think that the tango on the whole, especially next to jazz, is a very poor music. It is poor but it is beautiful. It’s like those plants that are very simple, that one can’t compare to an orchid or a rosebush, but which have an extraordinary beauty in themselves. In recent years, friends of mine have played tangos here; the Cuarteto Cedrón are great friends, and a fine bandoneón player named Juan José Mosalini—so we’ve listened to tangos, talked about tangos. Then one day a poem came to me like that, which I thought perhaps could be set to music, I didn’t really know. And then, looking among unpublished poems (most of my poems are unpublished), I found some short poems which those fellows could set to music, and they did. Also, we’ve done the opposite as well. Cedrón gave me a musical theme to which I wrote the words. So I’ve done it both ways.

INTERVIEWER

In the biographical notes in your books, it says you are also an amateur trumpet player. Have you ever played with any groups?

CORTÁZAR

No. That’s a bit of a legend that was invented by my very dear friend Paul Blackburn, who died quite young unfortunately. He knew that I played the trumpet a little, mainly for myself at home. So he would always tell me, “But you should meet some musicians to play with.” I’d say, “No, as the Americans say, ‘I haven’t got what it takes.’” I didn’t have the talent; I was just playing for myself. I would put on a Jelly Roll Morton record, or Armstrong, or early Ellington—where the melody is easier to follow, especially the blues which has a given scheme. And I would have fun hearing them play and adding my trumpet. I played along with them . . . but it certainly wasn’t with them! I never dared approach jazz musicians; now my trumpet is lost somewhere in the other room there. Blackburn put that in one of the blurbs. And because there is a photo of me playing the trumpet, people thought I really could play well. As I never wanted to publish before being sure, it was the same with the trumpet—I never wanted to play before being sure. And that day has never arrived.

INTERVIEWER

Have you worked on any novels since A Manual for Manuel?

CORTÁZAR

Alas no, for reasons that are very clear. It’s due to political work. For me, a novel requires a concentration and a quantity of time, at least a year, to work tranquilly and not to abandon it. And now, I cannot. A week ago I didn’t know I would be leaving for Nicaragua in three days. When I return I won’t know what’s going to happen next. But this novel is already written. It’s there, it’s in my dreams. I dream all the time of this novel. I don’t know what happens in the novel, but I have an idea. As in the stories, I know it will be something fairly long, with some elements of the fantastic, but not too many. It will be in the genre of A Manual for Manuel, where the fantastic elements are mixed in; but it won’t be a political book. It will be a book of pure literature. I hope that life will give me a sort of desert island, even if the desert island is this room . . . and a year, I ask for a year. But when these bastards—the Hondurans, the Somocistas and Reagan—are in the act of destroying Nicaragua, I don’t have my island. I couldn’t begin to write, because I would be obsessed constantly by that problem. It demands top priority.

INTERVIEWER

And it can be difficult enough as it is balancing life and literature.

CORTÁZAR Yes and no. It depends on the kind of priorities. If the priorities are, like those I just mentioned, touching on the moral responsibility of an individual, I would agree. But I know many people who are always complaining, “Oh, I’d like to write my novel, but I have to sell the house, and then there are the taxes, what am I going to do?” Reasons like, “I work in the office all day, how do you expect me to write?” Me, I worked all day at UNESCO and then I came home and wrote Hopscotch. When one wants to write, one writes. If one is condemned to write, one writes.

INTERVIEWER

Do you work anymore as a translator or interpreter?

CORTÁZAR

No, that’s over. I lead a very simple life. I don’t need much money to buy the things I like: records, books, tobacco. So now I can live from my royalties. They’ve translated me into so many languages that I receive enough money to live on. I have to be a little careful; I can’t go out and buy myself a yacht, but since I have absolutely no intention of buying a yacht . . .

INTERVIEWER

Have fame and success been pleasurable?

CORTÁZAR

Ah, listen, I’ll say something I shouldn’t say because no one will believe it, but success isn’t a pleasure for me. I’m glad to be able to live from what I write, so I have to put up with the popular and critical side of success. But I was happier as a man when I was unknown. Much happier. Now I can’t go to Latin America or to Spain without being recognized every ten yards, and the autographs, the embraces . . . It’s very moving, because they’re readers who are frequently quite young. I’m happy that they like what I do, but it’s terribly distressing for me on the level of privacy. I can’t go to a beach in Europe; in five minutes there’s a photographer. I have a physical appearance that I can’t disguise; if I were small I could shave and put on sunglasses, but with my height, my long arms and all that, they discover me from afar. On the other hand, there are very beautiful things: I was in Barcelona a month ago, walking around the Gothic Quarter one evening, and there was an American girl, very pretty, playing the guitar very well and singing. She was seated on the ground singing to earn her living. She sang a bit like Joan Baez, a very pure, clear voice. There was a group of young people from Barcelona listening. I stopped to listen to her, but I stayed in the shadows. At one point, one of these young men who was about twenty, very young, very handsome, approached me. He had a cake in his hand. He said, “Julio, take a piece.” So I took a piece and I ate it, and I told him, “Thanks a lot for coming up and giving that to me.” He said to me, “But, listen, I give you so little next to what you’ve given me.” I said, “Don’t say that, don’t say that,” and we embraced and he went away. Well, things like that, that’s the best recompense for my work as a writer. That a boy or a girl comes up to speak to you and to offer you a piece of cake, it’s wonderful. It’s worth the trouble of having written.

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