Listening to writers

Press, 28 May 1983, Page 16

Listening to writers

Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (4th Series). Edited by George Plimpton. Introduced by Wilfrid Sheed. Penguin, 1982. 459 pp. (Reviewed by A. K. Grant)

For 20 years now “The Paris Review” has been interviewing distinguished writers on their working habits and attitudes to writing. The interviews have been collected and issued in book form, and Penguin is performing a valuable service by making them available in paperback form. The volume under review contains interviews with writers as various as W. H. Auden, John Steinbeck, Anne Sexton, Christopher Isherwood and Jack Kerouac. Introducing the present volume the critic Wilfrid Sheed makes the point that part of the fascination of the interviews is that they offer us the writers not necessarily as they actually are, but as they would wish to be seen. The flavour of personality which we are offered may have been artfully concocted by the writer interviewed in the furtherance of his reputation. But knowing how a writer wants himself to be seen is itself knowledge of importance about a good writer.

We learn a good deal about how the writers actually go about writing, and this is not matter of very much importance, since what is important is what goes on in the writer’s head, not whether his fingers are gripping a pen or pecking at a typewriter. Nevertheless these minutiae are interesting, confirming for us the fact that great writing is done by real people who inhabit the same Earth as the rest of us. The conversation is superb, and to read one of these books at a gulp is like attending a splendid dinner party at which one never has to worry about spilling the soup on one’s shirt front, nor about contributing to the conversation oneself. This despite the fact that the present volume contains grim reminders that success as a writer does not heal wounds in the writer’s soul, as witness the interviews With John Berryman and Anne Sexton, both of whom subsequently took their own lives. I cannot recommend this book highly enough to anyone interested in truths about the art of writing and in gossip about writers. At the moment the fifth series is also in the shops and is just as good.