Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (Modern Library)
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Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (Modern Library) description
"What is it about interviews that attracts us?" Margaret Atwood asks in her introduction to this collection of 16 interviews from The Paris Review. "Specifically, what is it about interviews with writers?" Women Writers at Work may not answer that question, but it raises many, many more--and allows the writers included in this volume to speak for themselves. For decades the Paris Review has been interviewing authors of both genders and every literary stripe, and many of these interviews have been collected together in volumes like this one. This, however, is the first time the Writers at Work series has dedicated itself to one gender only. In this volume readers will find insightful interviews with Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, Rebecca West, Dorothy Parker, P.L. Travers, Simone de Beauvoir, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bishop, Mary McCarthy, Nadine Gordimer, Maya Angelou, Anne Sexton, Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates. The Paris Review is famous for getting authors to open up. The subjects here offer honest, often provocative opinions about themselves (Dorothy Parker on her humorous verses: "I read my verses now and I ain't funny. I haven't been funny for twenty years"); each other (Mary McCarthy on "women writers": "Katherine Anne Porter? Don't think she really is--I mean her writing is certainly very feminine, but I would say that there wasn't the 'WW' business in Katherine Anne Porter"); and writing itself (Toni Morrison: "What makes me feel I belong here, out in this world, is not the teacher, not the mother, not the lover but what goes on in my mind when I'm writing"). The end result is a fascinating glimpse into these writers' minds and works. --Margaret Prior |
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Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (Modern Library) Customer Reviews
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Nectar and Wormwood
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Most readers will first of all be most drawn to the photographs of the sixteen women writers interviewed in The Paris Review's Women Writers at Work. But there are other visual clues to the personalities of the women whose words we are about to read, including a swift evocation of the writer in her lair--her view, her books, her style, her looks--along with a page from a work-in-progress, often heavily annotated.
Rebecca West's page is decorated with line after line of a script so microscopic it looks like miniature embroidery while Anne Sexton's poem is uncorrected and drifts definitely eastward. The manuscript page submitted by P.L. Travers has a drawing of a snail posed against a beach of text while Elizabeth Bishop's page looks untidy and musical. Mary McCarthy's page, on the other hand, has been typewritten, and of its five corrections, three have been typed in, with the consequence that we are given very little sense of how she works when she's alone and feeling spontaneous. And yet the interview with McCarthy is marvellously opinionated and candid; she also gives an intriguing answer to the interviewer who asks her what she thinks of the category "woman writer" by first defining a certain kind of "woman writer" (WW, as she puts it): "I think they become interested in decor. You notice the change in Elizabeth Bowen. Her early work in much more masculine. Her later work has much more drapery in it."
And so it's with apologies to Mary McCarthy that this reviewer is going to do what the WW's do and describe--in the present tense although many of the writers are now dead--some of the living arrangement of several of the writers in Women Writers at Work: P.L. Travers' front door is pink, the same pink as the cover of Mary Poppins at Cherry Tree Lane, and in her hallway there's an antique rocking horse. In Rebecca West's hallway there a drawing of her by Wyndham Lewis, done in the thirties. ("Before the ruin.") Toni Morrison's office at Princeton is decorated with a large Helen Frankenthaler print, pen-and-ink drawings that an architect did of all the houses that appear in Morrison's work, a few framed book-jacket covers and a note of apology from Hemingway, a forgery meant as a joke. Susan Sontag lives in a nearly unfurnished apartment in Manhattan, but she is the owner of over 15,000 books. Eudora Welty will not discuss her private life and is, in any case, interviewed in a hotel room. And Maya Angelou can only work in hotel rooms; she insists that the staff take down all the pictures and she will not permit the maids to come in to change the pillow cases and sheets.
Are any of these writers poor? They don't seem to be. With the possible exception of Dorothy Parker who says, "I hate almost all rich people, but I think I would be darling at it." Parker also shares a small New York City apartment with a youthful poodle that has the run of the place and has caused it to look, as she apologetically says, "somewhat Hogarthian."
In their opinions of other writers they are both scathing and generous; Dorothy Parker says she so much wants to write well, "though I know I don't. But during and at the end of my life I will adore those who have." Marianne Moore says of William Carlos Williams, "He is willing to be reckless; if you can't be that, what's the point of the whole thing?" Susan Sontag responds to being asked if she minds being called an intellectual by saying "Well, one never likes to be called anything. And I suppose there will always be a presumption of graceless oddity--especially if one is a woman." Nadine Gordimer feels that the solitude of writing is "quite frightening. It's quite close, sometimes, to madness.. the ordinary action of taking a dress down to the dry cleaner's.. is a very sane and good thing to do." Elizabeth Bishop tells us that when she was a student at Vassar she believed that if she ate a lot of cheese before going to bed she would have fascinating dreams; this conviction led to her keeping a huge hunk of Roquefort cheese in the bottom of her bookcase. Anne Sexton, speaking of Robert Lowell's gifts as a teacher, says that he "worked with a cold chisel, with no more mercy than a dentist. He got out the decay, but if he was never kind to a poem, he was kind to the poet."
Marianne Moore talks of her longing to write plays. "To me the theatre is the most pleasant, in fact my favourite, form of recreation."
INTERVIEWER: Do you go often?
MOORE: No, never.
Rebecca West, at the time of her interview, is in her late eighties. She wears a bright caftan; her eyes are penetrating; she wears two pairs of spectacles on chains like necklaces; she wears beautiful rings. She is also too old to monitor herself, and so she's a particular delight to read. She thinks T. S. Eliot a poseur and says of Somerset Maugham, "He couldn't write for toffee, bless his heart." But when the conversation moves on to Arnold Bennett and the interviewer tells West that her reviews of Bennett's work were absolutely sparkling--"I love the essay you wrote about The Uncles"--West says, "Oh, Bennett was horrible about it. He was a horrible, mean-spirited, hateful man. I hated Arnold Bennett."
INTERVIEWER: But you were very nice about him.
WEST: Well, I thought so, and I think he was sometimes a very good writer. And I do think The Old Wives' Tale was very good, don't you? He was a horrible man.
INTERVIEWER: Was he in a position to make things difficult for you then?
WEST: Yes, he was not nice....
And so it goes. Katherine Anne Porter is scathing about the nineteen-twenties: "A horrible time: shallow and trivial and silly. The remarkable thing is that anybody survived in such an atmosphere--in a place where they could call F. Scott Fitzgerald a great writer!"
INTERVIEWER: You don't agree?
PORTER: Of course I don't agree. I couldn't read him then, and I can't read him now.
Mary McCarthy is brutal about Simone de Beauvoir, calling her "pathetic" and "odious"; Susan Sontag who was, early in her career, compared to Mccarthy says she has no desire to write like Mary McCarthy, "a writer who has never mattered to me." Nary McCarthy admires Tolstoy, but Rebecca West considers Tolstoy overrated. Alexander Woollcott says of Dorothy Parker's work that it's a "potent distillation of nectar and wormwood, of ambrosia and deadly nightshade", but Dorothy Parker is mainly charitable towards the writers of the twenties and thirties and says that they might have seemed like flops, but they weren't. "Fitzgerald, the rest of them, reckless as they were, drinkers as they were, they worked damn hard and all the time."
Two very different writers--Anne Sexton and Nadine Gordimer--both quote Kafka, and not only do they quote Kafka, they quote the same words from Kafka: "A book ought to be an axe, to break up the frozen sea within us~" And Katharine Anne Porter gives us a brief but fine lecture on the pleasure (and esthetic necessity) of using simple words, while Joyce Carol Oates speaks bracingly about the writer's life: One must be pitiless about this matter of "mood". In a sense, the writing will create the mood. If art is, as I believe it to be, a genuinely transcendental function--a means by which we rise out of limited, parochial states of mind--then it should not matter very much what states of mind or emotion we are in. Generally, I have found this to be true; I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes...and somehow the act of writing changes everything." These consoling words about the writing process are just one of about four hundred reasons for buying this spirited collection of credos and opinions.
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