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Dec 18, 2010

John Updike


In 1966, when John Updike was first asked to do a Paris Review interview, he refused: “Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep. Also, I really don't have a great deal to tell interviewers; the little I learned about life and the art of fiction I try to express in my work.”
  
The following year, a second request won acceptance, but Updike's apprehension caused further delay. Should there be a meeting followed by an exchange of written questions and answers, or should this procedure be reversed? Need there be any meeting at all? (Updike fears becoming, even for a moment, “one more gassy monologuist.”) In the end, during the summer of 1967, written questions were submitted to him, and afterward, he was interviewed on Martha's Vineyard, where he and his family take their vacation.
   A first view of Updike revealed a jauntiness of manner surprising in a writer of such craft and sensibility. After barreling down Edgartown's narrow main street, the author appeared from his beat-up Corvair—a barefoot, tousle-haired young man dressed in khaki Bermudas and a sweatshirt.
   Updike is a fluent talker, but obviously not a man who expects talk to bridge the distance between others and his inner life. Therefore, the final stage of this interview was his revision of the spoken comments to bring them into line with the style of his written answers. The result is a fabricated interview—in its modest way, a work of art, and thus appropriate to a man who believes that only art can track the nuances of experience.

INTERVIEWER
You've treated your early years fictionally and have discussed them in interviews, but you haven't said much about your time at Harvard. I wonder what effect you think it had.
JOHN UPDIKE
My time at Harvard, once I got by the compression bends of the freshman year, was idyllic enough, and as they say, successful; but I felt toward those years, while they were happening, the resentment a caterpillar must feel while his somatic cells are shifting all around to make him a butterfly. I remember the glow of the Fogg Museum windows, and my wife-to-be pushing her singing bicycle through the snowy Yard, and the smell of wet old magazines that arose from the cellar of the Lampoon and hit your nostrils when you entered the narthex, and numerous pleasant revelations in classrooms—all of it haunted, though, by knowledge of the many others who had passed this way, and felt the venerable glory of it all a shade keener than I, and written sufficiently about it. All that I seem able to preserve of the Harvard experience is in one short story, “The Christian Roommates.” There was another, “Homage to Paul Klee,” that has been printed in The Liberal Context but not in a book. Foxy Whitman, in Couples, remembers some of the things I do. Like me, she feels obscurely hoodwinked, pacified, by the process of becoming nice. I distrust, perhaps, hallowed, very okay places. Harvard has enough panegyrists without me.
INTERVIEWER
Did you learn much writing for the Lampoon?
UPDIKE
The Lampoon was very kind to me. I was given, beside the snug pleasures of club solidarity, carte blanche as far as the magazine went—I began as a cartoonist, did a lot of light verse, and more and more prose. There was always lots of space to fill. Also, I do have a romantic weakness for gags—we called ourselves, the term itself a gag, gagsters. My own speciality was Chinese jokes. A little birthday party, and the children singing to the blushing center of attention, “Happy Birthday, Tu Yu.” Or coolies listening to an agitator and asking each other, “Why shouldn't we work for coolie wages?” Or—another cartoon—a fairy princess in a tower, her hair hanging to the ground and labeled Fire Exit. And I remember Bink Young, now an Episcopal priest, solemnly plotting, his tattered sneakers up on a desk, how to steal a battleship from Boston Harbor. Maybe, as an imperfectly metamorphosed caterpillar, I was grateful for the company of true butterflies.
INTERVIEWER
Have you given up drawing entirely? I noticed that your recent “Letter from Anguilla” was illustrated by you.
UPDIKE
You're nice to have noticed. For years I wanted to get a drawing into The New Yorker, and at last I did. My first ambition was to be an animator for Walt Disney. Then I wanted to be a magazine cartoonist. Newly married, I used to draw Mary and the children, and did have that year in art school, but of late I don't draw at all, don't even doodle beside the telephone. It's a loss, a sadness for me. I'm interested in concrete poetry, in some attempt to return to the manuscript page, to use the page space, and the technical possibilities. My new book, a long poem called Midpoint, tries to do something of this. Since we write for the eye, why not really write for it—give it a treat? Letters are originally little pictures, so let's combine graphic imagery, photographic imagery, with words. I mean mesh them. Saying this, I think of Pound's Chinese characters, and of course Apollinaire; and of my own poems, “Nutcracker,” with the word nut in boldface, seems to me as good as George Herbert's angel-wings.
INTERVIEWER
After graduating from Harvard, you served as a New Yorker staff writer for two years. What sort of work did you do?
UPDIKE
I was a Talk of the Town writer, which means that I both did the legwork and the finished product. An exalted position! It was playful work that opened the city to me. I was the man who went to boating or electronic exhibits in the Coliseum and tried to make impressionist poems of the objects and overheard conversations.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you quit?
UPDIKE
After two years I doubted that I was expanding the genre. When my wife and I had a second child and needed a larger apartment, the best course abruptly seemed to leave the city, and with it the job. They still keep my name on the staff sheet, and I still contribute Notes and Comments, and I take much comfort from having a kind of professional home where they consider me somehow competent. America in general doesn't expect competence from writers. Other things, yes; competence, no.
INTERVIEWER
How do you feel about being associated with that magazine for so many years?
UPDIKE
Very happy. From the age of twelve when my aunt gave us a subscription for Christmas, The New Yorker has seemed to me the best of possible magazines, and their acceptance of a poem and a story by me in June of 1954 remains the ecstatic breakthrough of my literary life. Their editorial care and their gratitude for a piece of work they like are incomparable. And I love the format—the signature at the end, everybody the same size, and the battered title type, evocative of the twenties and Persia and the future all at once.
INTERVIEWER
You seem to shun literary society. Why?
UPDIKE
I don't, do I? Here I am, talking to you. In leaving New York in 1957, I did leave without regret the literary demimonde of agents and would-be's and with-it nonparticipants; this world seemed unnutritious and interfering. Hemingway described literary New York as a bottle full of tapeworms trying to feed on each other. When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenaged boy finding them, and having them speak to him. The reviews, the stacks in Brentano's, are just hurdles to get over, to place the books on that shelf. Anyway, in 1957, I was full of a Pennsylvania thing I wanted to say, and Ipswich gave me the space in which to say it, and in which to live modestly, raise my children, and have friends on the basis of what I did in person rather than what I did in print.
INTERVIEWER
Do your neighbors—present in Ipswich, past in Shillington—get upset when they fancy they've found themselves in your pages?
UPDIKE
I would say not. I count on people to know the difference between flesh and paper, and generally they do. In Shillington I was long away from the town, and there is a greater element of distortion or suppression than may appear; there are rather few characters in those Olinger stories that could even remotely take offense. Ipswich I've not written too much about. Somewhat of the marsh geography peeps through in Couples, but the couples themselves are more or less adults who could be encountered anywhere in the East. The town, although it was a little startled at first by the book, was reassured, I think, by reading it. The week after its publication, when the Boston papers were whooping it up in high tabloid style, and the Atlantic ran a banshee cry of indignation from Diana Trilling, people like the gas-station attendant and a strange woman on the golf course would stop me and say something soothing, complimentary. I work downtown, above a restaurant, and can be seen plodding up to my office most mornings, and I think Ipswich pretty much feels sorry for me, trying to make a living at such a plainly unprofitable chore. Also, I do participate in local affairs—I'm on the Congregational church building committee and the Democratic town committee, and while the Couples fuss was in progress, capped by that snaggle-toothed cover on Time, I was writing a pageant for our Seventeenth-century Day. Both towns in my mind are not so much themselves as places I've happened to be in when I was a child and then an adult. The difference between Olinger and Tarbox is much more the difference between childhood and adulthood than the difference between two geographical locations. They are stages on my pilgrim's progress, not spots on the map.
INTERVIEWER
What about your parents? They seem to appear often in your work. Have their reactions to earlier versions had an effect on later ones?
UPDIKE
My parents should not be held to the letter of any of the fictional fathers and mothers. But I don't mind admitting that George Caldwell was assembled from certain vivid gestures and plights characteristic of Wesley Updike; once, returning to Plowville after The Centaur came out, I was upbraided by a Sunday-school pupil of my father's for my outrageous portrait, and my father, with typical sanctity, interceded, saying, “No, it's the truth. The kid got me right.” My mother, a different style of saint, is an ideal reader, and an ideally permissive writer's mother. They both have a rather un-middle-class appetite for the jubilant horrible truth, and after filling my childhood with warmth and color, they have let me make my adult way without interference and been never other than encouraging, even when old wounds were my topic, and a child's vision of things has been lent the undue authority of print. I have written free from any fear of forfeiting their love.
INTERVIEWER
Most of your work takes place in a common locale: Olinger. So it was interesting to see you say farewell to that world in your preface to the Olinger Stories. Yet in the following year you published Of the Farm. Why do you feel so drawn to this material?
UPDIKE
But Of the Farm was about Firetown; they only visit the Olinger supermarket. I am drawn to southeastern Pennsylvania because I know how things happen there, or at least how they used to happen. Once you have in your bones the fundamental feasibilities of a place, you can imagine there freely.
INTERVIEWER
That's not what I mean. What I meant to ask is not why you keep writing about Olinger per se, but why you write so much about what most people take to be your own adolescence and family. Numerous critics, for example, have pointed to similarities between Of the Farm, The Centaur, and stories like “My Grandmother's Thimble.” “Flight,” for example, seems an earlier version of Of the Farm.
UPDIKE
 I suppose there's no avoiding it—my adolescence seemed interesting to me. In a sense my mother and father, considerable actors both, were dramatizing my youth as I was having it so that I arrived as an adult with some burden of material already half formed. There is, true, a submerged thread connecting certain of the fictions, and I guess the submerged thread is the autobiography. That is, in Of the Farm, although the last name is not the name of the people in The Centaur, the geography is not appreciably changed, and the man in each case is called George. Of the Farm was in part a look at the world of The Centaur after the centaur had indeed died. By the way, I must repeat that I didn't mean Caldwell to die in The Centaur; he dies in the sense of living, of going back to work, of being a shelter for his son. But by the time Joey Robinson is thirty-five, his father is dead. Also, there's the curious touch of the Running Horse River in Rabbit, Run which returns in the Alton of The Centaur. And somehow that Running Horse bridges both the books, connects them. When I was little, I used to draw disparate objects on a piece of paper—toasters, baseballs, flowers, whatnot—and connect them with lines. But every story, really, is a fresh start for me, and these little connections—recurrences of names, or the way, say, that Piet Hanema's insomnia takes him back into the same high school that John Nordholm, and David Kern, and Allen Dow sat in—are in there as a kind of running, oblique coherence. Once I've coined a name, by the way, I feel utterly hidden behind that mask, and what I remember and what I imagine become indistinguishable. I feel no obligation to the remembered past; what I create on paper must, and for me does, soar free of whatever the facts were. Do I make any sense?
INTERVIEWER
Some.
UPDIKE
In others words, I disavow any essential connection between my life and whatever I write. I think it's a morbid and inappropriate area of concern, though natural enough—a lot of morbid concerns are natural. But the work, the words on the paper, must stand apart from our living presences; we sit down at the desk and become nothing but the excuse for these husks we cast off. But apart from the somewhat teasing little connections, there is in these three novels and the short stories of Pigeon Feathers a central image of flight or escape or loss, the way we flee from the past, a sense of guilt which I tried to express in the story, the triptych with the long title, “The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother's Thimble, and Fanning Island,” wherein the narrator becomes a Polynesian pushing off into a void. The sense that in time as well as space we leave people as if by volition and thereby incur guilt and thereby owe them, the dead, the forsaken, at least the homage of rendering them. The trauma or message that I acquired in Olinger had to do with suppressed pain, with the amount of sacrifice I suppose that middle-class life demands, and by that I guess I mean civilized life. The father, whatever his name, is sacrificing freedom of motion, and the mother is sacrificing in a way—oh, sexual richness, I guess; they're all stuck, and when I think back over these stories (and you know, they are dear to me and if I had to give anybody one book of me it would be the Vintage Olinger Stories), I think especially of that moment in “Flight” when the boy, chafing to escape, fresh from his encounter with Molly Bingaman and a bit more of a man but not enough quite, finds the mother lying there buried in her own peculiar messages from far away, the New Orleans jazz, and then the grandfather's voice comes tumbling down the stairs singing, “There is a happy land far far away.” This is the way it was, is. There has never been anything in my life quite as compressed, simultaneously as communicative to me of my own power and worth and of the irremediable grief in just living, in just going on.
I really don't think I'm alone among writers in caring about what they experienced in the first eighteen years of their life. Hemingway cherished the Michigan stories out of proportion, I would think, to their merit. Look at Twain. Look at Joyce. Nothing that happens to us after twenty is as free from self-consciousness because by then we have the vocation to write. Writers' lives break into two halves. At the point where you get your writerly vocation you diminish your receptivity to experience. Being able to write becomes a kind of shield, a way of hiding, a way of too instantly transforming pain into honey—whereas when you're young, you're so impotent you cannot help but strive and observe and feel.
INTERVIEWER
How does Mrs. Updike react to your work? Time quotes you as having said she never entirely approves of your novels.
UPDIKE
Mary is a pricelessly sensitive reader. She is really always right, and if I sometimes, notably in the novels, persevere without her unqualified blessing, it is because somebody in me—the gagster, the fanatic, the boor—must be allowed to have his say. I usually don't show her anything until I am finished, or stuck. I never disregard her remarks, and she is tactful in advancing them.
INTERVIEWER
In your review of James Agee's Letters to Father Flye, you defend professionalism. Even so, are you bothered by having to write for a living?
UPDIKE
No, I always wanted to draw or write for a living. Teaching, the customary alternative, seemed truly depleting and corrupting. I have been able to support myself by and large with the more respectable forms—poetry, short stories, novels—but what journalism I have done has been useful. I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles if I had to. The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me; the technical aspects of bookmaking, from type font to binding glue, interest me. The distinction between a thing well done and a thing done ill obtains everywhere—in all circles of Paradise and Inferno.
INTERVIEWER
You write a fair amount of literary criticism. Why?
UPDIKE
I do it (a) when some author, like Spark or Borges, excites me and I want to share the good news, (b) when I want to write an essay, as on romantic love, or Barth's theology, (c) when I feel ignorant of something, like modern French fiction, and accepting a review assignment will compel me to read and learn.
INTERVIEWER
Do you find it helpful in your fiction?
UPDIKE
I think it good for an author, baffled by obtuse reviews of himself, to discover what a recalcitrant art reviewing is, how hard it is to keep the plot straight in summary, let alone to sort out one's honest responses. But reviewing should not become a habit. It encourages a writer to think of himself as a pundit, of fiction as a collective enterprise and species of expertise, and of the imagination as a cerebral and social activity—all pernicious illusions.
INTERVIEWER
I'd like to ask a bit about your work habits if I may. What sort of schedule do you follow?
UPDIKE
I write every weekday morning. I try to vary what I am doing, and my verse, or poetry, is a help here. Embarked on a long project, I try to stay with it even on dull days. For every novel, however, that I have published, there has been one unfinished or scrapped. Some short stories—I think offhand of “Lifeguard,” “The Taste of Metal,” “My Grandmother's Thimble”—are fragments salvaged and reshaped. Most came right the first time—rode on their own melting, as Frost said of his poems. If there is no melting, if the story keeps sticking, better stop and look around. In the execution there has to be a “happiness” that can't be willed or foreordained. It has to sing, click, something. I try instantly to set in motion a certain forward tilt of suspense or curiosity, and at the end of the story or novel to rectify the tilt, to complete the motion.
INTERVIEWER
When your workday is through, are you able to leave it behind or does your writing haunt your afternoons and echo your experience?
UPDIKE
Well, I think the subconscious picks at it, and occasionally a worrisome sentence or image will straighten itself out, and then you make a note of it. If I'm stuck, I try to get myself unstuck before I sit down again because moving through the day surrounded by people and music and air it is easier to make major motions in your mind than it is sitting at the typewriter in a slightly claustrophobic room. It's hard to hold a manuscript in your mind, of course. You get down to the desk and discover that the solution you had arrived at while having insomnia doesn't really fit. I guess I'm never unconscious of myself as a writer and of my present project. A few places are specially conducive to inspiration—automobiles, church—private places. I plotted Couples almost entirely in church—little shivers and urgencies I would note down on the program and carry down to the office Monday.
INTERVIEWER
Well, you're not only a writer but a famous one. Are you experiencing any disadvantages in being famous?
UPDIKE
I'm interviewed too much. I fight them off, but even one is too many. However hard you try to be honest or full, they are intrinsically phony. There is something terribly wrong about committing myself to this machine and to your version of what you get out of the machine—you may be deaf for all I know, and the machine may be faulty. All the stuff comes out attached to my name, and it's not really me at all. My relationship to you and my linear way of coping out loud are distortive. In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean. You leave the proper ground of your strength and become one more gassy monologuist. Unlike Mailer and Bellow, I don't have much itch to pronounce on great matters, to reform the country, to get elected Mayor of New York, or minister to the world with laughter like the hero of The Last Analysis. My life is, in a sense, trash, my life is only that of which the residue is my writing. The person who appears on the cover of Time or whose monologue will be printed in The Paris Review is neither the me who exists physically and socially or the me who signs the fiction and poetry. That is, everything is infinitely fine, and any opinion is somehow coarser than the texture of the real thing.
I find it hard to have opinions. Theologically, I favor Karl Barth; politically, I favor the Democrats. But I treasure a remark John Cage made, that not judgingness but openness and curiosity are our proper business. To speak on matters where you're ignorant dulls the voice for speaking on matters where you do know something.
INTERVIEWER
One of the things I've always thought would be difficult for famous writers is being constantly sent manuscripts by aspiring amateurs. Do you experience this, and if so, how do you treat them?
UPDIKE
I tend to lose them. The manuscripts. I remember myself as an aspiring writer, and you know, I never did this. I assumed that published writers had worked at it until they became worth publishing, and I assumed that that's the only way to do it, and I'm a little puzzled by young men who write me charming letters suggesting that I conduct an impromptu writing course. Evidently, I've become part of the Establishment that's expected to serve youth—like college presidents and the police. I'm still trying to educate myself. I want to read only what will help me unpack my own bag.
INTERVIEWER
While we're on the subject of your public role, I wonder how you react to the growing use of your fiction in college courses.
UPDIKE
Oh, is it? Do they use it?
INTERVIEWER
I use it a great deal. What do you think about it, as a writer? Do you think that it's going to interfere with the reader's comprehension or feeling for your work. I mean, do you go along with Trilling's idea, for example, that modern literature is somehow diluted by appearing in the social context of the classroom, or are you not concerned about this?
UPDIKE
No. Looking back on my own college experience, the college course is just a way of delivering you to the books, and once you're delivered, the writer-reader relationship is there. I read Dostoyevsky for a college course and wept.
If what you say is true, I'm delighted. I do think it difficult to teach, as is done so much now, courses in truly contemporary writing. (At Oxford, they used to stop with Tennyson.) Of course, maybe I'm not so contemporary anymore; maybe I'm sort of like Eisenhower or—
INTERVIEWER
You're over thirty—you're over the hill.
UPDIKE
Don't laugh—most American writers are over the hill by thirty. Maybe I'm like Sherman Adams and Fats Domino and other, you know, semi-remote figures who have acquired a certain historical interest. We're anxious in America to package our things quickly, and the writer can become a package before he's ready to have the coffin lid nailed down.
INTERVIEWER
Well, let's think of another package now—not the package by time but by country. Are you conscious of belonging to a definable American literary tradition? Would you describe yourself as part of an American tradition?
UPDIKE
I must be. I've hardly ever been out of the country.
INTERVIEWER
Specifically, do you feel that you've learned important things or felt spiritual affinities with classic American writers such as Hawthorne, Melville, James, people of this sort?
UPDIKE
I love Melville and like James, but I tend to learn more from Europeans because I think they have strengths that reach back past Puritanism, that don't equate truth with intuition—
INTERVIEWER
In other words, you want to be nourished by the thing that you don't feel is inherently your tradition.
UPDIKE
Right. I'm not saying I can write like Melville or James, but that the kind of passion and bias that they show is already in my bones. I don't think you need to keep rehearsing your instincts. Far better to seek out models of what you can't do. American fiction is notoriously thin on women, and I have attempted a number of portraits of women, and we may have reached that point of civilization, or decadence, where we can look at women. I'm not sure Mark Twain was able to.
INTERVIEWER
Let's get into your work now. In an interview you gave Life you expressed some regret at the “yes, but” attitude critics have taken toward it. Did the common complaint that you had ducked large subjects lead to the writing of Couples?
UPDIKE
No, I meant my work says, “Yes, but.” Yes, in Rabbit, Run, to our inner urgent whispers, but—the social fabric collapses murderously. Yes, in The Centaur, to self-sacrifice and duty, but—what of a man's private agony and dwindling? No, in The Poorhouse Fair, to social homogenization and loss of faith, but—listen to the voices, the joy of persistent existence. No, in Couples, to a religious community founded on physical and psychical interpenetration, but—what else shall we do, as God destroys our churches? I cannot greatly care what critics say of my work; if it is good, it will come to the surface in a generation or two and float, and if not, it will sink, having in the meantime provided me with a living, the opportunities of leisure, and a craftsman's intimate satisfactions. I wrote Couples because the rhythm of my life and my oeuvre demanded it, not to placate hallucinatory critical voices.
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean by attributing the setting up of religious communities in Couples to God's destruction of our churches?
UPDIKE
I guess the noun “God” reappears in two totally different senses, the god in the first instance being the god worshiped within this nice white church, the more or less watered-down Puritan god; and then god in the second sense means ultimate power. I've never really understood theologies which would absolve God of earthquakes and typhoons, of children starving. A god who is not God the Creator is not very real to me, so that, yes, it certainly is God who throws the lightning bolt, and this God is above the nice god, above the god we can worship and empathize with. I guess I'm saying there's a fierce God above the kind God, and he's the one Piet believes in. At any rate, when the church is burned, Piet is relieved of morality and can choose Foxy—or can accept the choice made for him by Foxy and Angela operating in unison—can move out of the paralysis of guilt into what after all is a kind of freedom. He divorces the supernatural to marry the natural. I wanted the loss of Angela to be felt as a real loss—Angela is nicer than Foxy—nevertheless it is Foxy that he most deeply wants, it is Foxy who in some obscure way was turned on the lathe for him. So that the book does have a happy ending. There's also a way, though, I should say (speaking of “yes, but”) in which, with the destruction of the church, with the removal of his guilt, he becomes insignificant. He becomes merely a name in the last paragraph: he becomes a satisfied person and in a sense dies. In other words, a person who has what he wants, a satisfied person, a content person, ceases to be a person. Unfallen Adam is an ape. Yes, I guess I do feel that. I feel that to be a person is to be in a situation of tension, is to be in a dialectical situation. A truly adjusted person is not a person at all—just an animal with clothes on or a statistic. So that it's a happy ending, with this “but” at the end.
INTERVIEWER
I was impressed by the contrast between the presentation of oral-genital contacts in Couples and its single appearance in Rabbit, Run. Rabbit's insistence that Ruth perform the act is the cause of their breakup.
UPDIKE
No. Janice's having the baby is.
INTERVIEWER
If you say so; but I'd still like to know why an act that is treated so neutrally in the later book is so significant in the earlier one.
UPDIKE
Well, Couples, in part, is about the change in sexual deportment that has occurred since the publication of Rabbit, Run, which came out late in ’59; shortly thereafter, we had Lady Chatterley and the first Henry Miller books, and now you can't walk into a grocery store without seeing pornography on the rack. Remember Piet lying in Freddy's bed admiring Freddy's collection of Grove Press books? In Rabbit, Run what is demanded, in Couples is freely given. What else? It's a way of eating, eating the apple, of knowing. It's nostalgic for them, for Piet of Annabelle Vojt and for Foxy of the Jew. In De Rougement's book on Tristan and Iseult he speaks of the sterility of the lovers and Piet and Foxy are sterile vis-à-vis each other. Lastly, I was struck, talking to a biochemist friend of mine, how he emphasized not only the chemical composition of enzymes but their structure; it matters, among my humans, not only what they're made of but exactly how they attach to each other. So much for oral-genital contacts.
About sex in general, by all means let's have it in fiction, as detailed as needs be, but real, real in its social and psychological connections. Let's take coitus out of the closet and off the altar and put it on the continuum of human behavior. There are episodes in Henry Miller that have their human resonance; the sex in Lolita, behind the madman's cuteness, rings true; and I find the sex in D. H. Lawrence done from the woman's point of view convincing enough. In the microcosm of the individual consciousness, sexual events are huge but not all-eclipsing; let's try to give them their size.
INTERVIEWER
I'd like to move on to The Centaur now. If I'm right in regarding it as formally uncharacteristic, I wonder why you prefer it to your other novels?
UPDIKE
Well, it seems in memory my gayest and truest book; I pick it up, and read a few pages, in which Caldwell is insisting on flattering a moth-eaten bum, who is really the god Dionysus, and I begin laughing.
INTERVIEWER
What made you decide to employ a mythic parallel?
UPDIKE
I was moved, first, by the Chiron variant of the Hercules myth—one of the few classic instances of self-sacrifice, and the name oddly close to Christ. The book began as an attempt to publicize this myth. The mythology operated in a number of ways: a correlative of the enlarging effect of Peter's nostalgia, a dramatization of Caldwell's sense of exclusion and mysteriousness around him, a counterpoint of ideality to the drab real level, an excuse for a number of jokes, a serious expression of my sensation that the people we meet are guises, do conceal something mythic, perhaps prototypes or longings in our minds. We love some women more than others by predetermination, it seems to me.
INTERVIEWER
Why haven't you done more work in this mode?
UPDIKE
But I have worked elsewhere in a mythic mode. Apart from my short story about Tristan and Iseult, there is the St. Stephen story underlying The Poorhouse Fair, and Peter Rabbit under Rabbit, Run. Sometimes it is semiconscious; for example, only lately do I see that Brewer, the city of brick painted the color of flowerpots, is the flowerpot that Mr. McGregor slips over Peter Rabbit. And in Couples, Piet is not only Hanema/anima/Life, he is Lot, the man with two virgin daughters, who flees Sodom and leaves his wife behind.
INTERVIEWER
Yes, of course, the Tristan story is like The Centaur, but even if your other novels have underlying mythological or scriptural subjects, they don't obtrude as they do in The Centaur. So let me rephrase my question. Why didn't you make the parallels more obvious in the other books?
UPDIKE
Oh—I don't think basically that such parallels should be obvious. I think books should have secrets, like people do. I think they should be there as a bonus for the sensitive reader or there as a kind of subliminal quavering. I don't think that the duty of the twentieth-century fiction writer is to retell old stories only. I've often wondered what Eliot meant in his famous essay on Ulysses. Does he mean that we are ourselves so depleted of psychic energy, of spiritual and primitive force, that we can do little but retell old stories? Does he mean that human events, love, death, wandering, certain challenges overcome or certain challenges which sweep us under, have already attained classic narrative form? I don't quite know what Eliot meant. I do know that there is certainly for all of us some attraction in old stories. Mine is a generation not raised on the Bible. The Greek stories seem to be more universal coin, and they certainly have served to finance more modern creations than the Hebrew stories. (Although do read sometime Kierkegaard's splendid retelling of Abraham and Isaac in Fear and Trembling.) Freud, for one, named a number of states of mind after them.
I have read old sagas—Beowulf, the Mabinogion—trying to find the story in its most rudimentary form, searching for what a story is—Why did these people enjoy hearing them? Are they a kind of disguised history? Or, more likely I guess, are they ways of relieving anxiety, of transferring it outwards upon an invented tale and purging it through catharsis? In any case, I feel the need for this kind of recourse to the springs of narrative, and maybe my little buried allusions are admissions of it. It's funny, the things you don't know you're doing; I was aware of Piet as Lot and I was aware of Piet and Foxy as being somehow Tristan and Iseult, but I was not very aware of him as Don Juan. The other day I got a long, brilliant letter from a man at Wesleyan describing the book in terms of the Don Juan legend, pointing out numerous illuminating analogies. He thinks that Don Juans, historically, appear in the imperialist countries just as the tide turns: the classic Don Juan appears in Spain just as Spain has lost the Netherlands, and so Piet's activity somehow coincides with our frustration in Vietnam. All this is news to me, but, once said, it sounds right. I'll have to read the letter again. It elicited for me certain basic harmonies, certain congruences with prototypes in the Western consciousness that I'm happy to accept.
INTERVIEWER
Let's turn from myth to history. You have indicated a desire to write about President Buchanan. Yet, so far as I can see, American history is normally absent from your work.
UPDIKE
Not so; quite the contrary. In each of my novels, a precise year is given and a president reigns; The Centaur is distinctly a Truman book, and Rabbit, Run an Eisenhower one. Couples could have taken place only under Kennedy; the social currents it traces are as specific to those years as flowers in a meadow are to their moment of summer. Even The Poorhouse Fair has a president, President Lowenstein, and if one is not named in Of the Farm, it may be because that book, in an odd way, also takes place in the future, though a future only a year or so in advance of the writing—a future now in the past. Hook, Caldwell, the Applesmiths, all talk about history, and the quotidian is littered with newspaper headlines, striking the consciousness of the characters obliquely and subliminally but firmly enough: Piet's first step at seducing Foxy is clearly in part motivated by the death of the Kennedy infant. And the atmosphere of fright permeating The Centaur is to an indicated extent early cold-war nerves. My fiction about the daily doings of ordinary people has more history in it than history books, just as there is more breathing history in archaeology than in a list of declared wars and changes of government.
INTERVIEWER
What about violence? Many critics complain that this is absent from your work—reprehensibly, because it is so present in the world. Why is there so little in your pages?
UPDIKE
There has been so little in my life. I have fought in no wars and engaged in few fistfights. I do not think a man pacifist in his life should pretend to violence in fiction; Nabokov's bloody deeds, for example, seem more literary than lived to me. Muriel Spark's have the quality of the assassinations we commit in our minds. Mailer's recent violence is trumpery, just like Leslie Fiedler's cry for more, more. I feel a tenderness toward my characters that forbids making violent use of them. In general, the North American continent in this century has been a place where catastrophe has held off, and likewise the lives I have witnessed have staved off real death. All my novels end with a false death, partial death. If, as may be, the holocausts at the rim of possibility do soon visit us, I am confident my capacities for expression can rise, if I live, to the occasion. In the meantime let's all of us with some access to a printing press not abuse our privilege with fashionable fantasies.
INTERVIEWER
Well, one thing I'm sure must impress everyone about your fiction: the factual accuracy. The way, for example, you can provide data for Ken Whitman's talk on photosynthesis as well as Piet's on architectural restoration. Do you actively research such material, or do you rely on what you already know?
UPDIKE
Well, a bit of both, and I'm glad you do find it convincing. I'm never sure it is. A man whose life is spent in biochemistry or in building houses, his brain is tipped in a certain way. It's terribly hard, I think, for specialists to convey to me, as I ask them more or less intelligent questions, the right nuance—it's hard for me to reconstruct in my own mind the mind of a man who has spent twenty years with his field. I think the attempt should be made, however. There is a thinness in contemporary fiction about the way the world operates, except the academic world. I do try, especially in this novel, to give characters professions. Shaw's plays have a wonderful wealth of professional types. Shaw's sense of economic process, I guess, helped him (a) to care and (b) to convey, to plunge into the mystery of being a chimney sweep or a minister. One of the minimal obligations a book has to a reader is to be factually right, as to be typographically pleasant and more or less correctly proofread. Elementary author ethics dictate that you do at least attempt to imagine technical detail as well as emotions and dialogue.
INTERVIEWER
I'd like to ask a question about The Poorhouse Fair. Many people have been bothered in that book by Conner's foolishness. He seems a bit easy as the butt of satire. Do you think there is much justification in that charge?
UPDIKE
I'd have to reread the book to know. It could be that I was too little in sympathy with what I imagine him to be standing for. Of course a writer is in no position to alter a reader's reaction. Performance is all, and if I didn't really give you flesh and blood, then nothing I can say now will substitute. But it occurs to me that Conner was a preliminary study for Caldwell in The Centaur: the bulging upper lip and a certain Irishness, a certain tenacity, a certain—they're both poor disciplinarians, I notice in thinking about them. I wasn't satirical in my purpose. I may have been negative, but satire, no. I'm not conscious of any piece of fiction of mine which has even the slightest taint of satirical attempt. You can't be satirical at the expense of fictional characters, because they're your creatures. You must only love them, and I think that once I'd set Conner in motion I did to the best of my ability try to love him and let his mind and heart beat.
INTERVIEWER
Isn't “The Doctor's Wife” an exception to your statement that you never satirize one of your characters?
UPDIKE
You think I'm satirizing the doctor's wife? I'm criticizing the doctor's wife. Yes, I do feel that in some way she is a racist, but I'm not trying, I don't think I'm trying, to make her funny because she's a racist.
INTERVIEWER
There's some satire in your poetry, isn't there? But I wonder why, with few exceptions, you only write light verse.
UPDIKE
I began with light verse, a kind of cartooning in print, and except for one stretch of a few years, in which I wrote most of the serious poems in Telephone Poles, I feel uncertain away from rhyme to which something comic adheres. Bergson's mechanical encrusted upon the organic. But the light verse poems putting into rhyme and jaunty metrics some scientific discovery have a serious point—the universe science discloses to us is farcically unrelated to what our primitive senses report—and I have, when such poems go well, a pleasure and satisfaction not lower than in any other form of literary activity.
INTERVIEWER
You've published work in all the literary forms except drama. Why haven't you worked in this form?
UPDIKE
I've never much enjoyed going to plays myself; they always seem one act too long, and I often can't hear. The last play I went to, I remember, was A Delicate Balance; I sat next to the wall, and trucks kept shifting gears on the other side of it, and I missed most of the dialogue. The unreality of painted people standing on a platform saying things they've said to each other for months is more than I can overlook. Also, I think the theater is a quicksand of money and people with push. Harold Brodkey, a splendid writer my age, disappeared for five years into a play that was never produced. From Twain and James to Faulkner and Bellow, the history of novelists as playwrights is a sad one. A novelist is no more prepared to write for the stage than a good distance runner is equipped for ballet. A play is verbal ballet, and I mean to include in that equation some strong reservations about ballet. Less than perfectly done, it's very tiresome. A play's capacity for mimesis is a fraction of a novel's. Shakespeare, and to a lesser extent Shaw, wrote their plays as “turns” and exercises for actors they knew—without Will Kempe, no Falstaff. Without this kind of intimacy, the chances of life creeping into a play are slight. On both sides of the footlights, I think the present American theater mainly an excuse for being sociable.
INTERVIEWER
But if I'm not mistaken, you once expressed a desire to write for the films and I think Rabbit, Run, in particular, is quite a cinematic novel. Do you have any such plans now?
UPDIKE
Rabbit, Run was subtitled originally, “A Movie.” The present tense was in part meant to be an equivalent of the cinematic mode of narration. The opening bit of the boys playing basketball was visualized to be taking place under the titles and credits. This doesn't mean, though, that I really wanted to write for the movies. It meant I wanted to make a movie. I could come closer by writing it in my own book than by attempting to get through to Hollywood.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think the film has much to teach the novelist?
UPDIKE
I'm not sure. I think that we live in an eye-oriented era and that both the movies and the graphic arts, the painterly arts, haunt us, haunt word people quite a lot. I've written about our jealousy in my review of Robbe-Grillet and his theories. In brief, we're jealous because the visual arts have captured all the glamorous people—the rich and the young.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think there is a possibility of the novelist feeling at a disadvantage, that the instantaneousness and completeness of the image is making him somehow have to run to catch up? Have you ever felt that?
UPDIKE
Oh, sure. I think we are covetous of the success, the breadth of appeal. A movie does not really require much work. It pours into us, it fills us like milk being poured into a glass, whereas there is some cerebral effort needed to turn a bunch of mechanical marks on a page into moving living images. So that, yes, the power of the cinema, the awful power of it, the way from moron to genius it captivates us, it hypnotizes us . . . What I don't know is how relevant attempts to imitate this instantaneity, this shuffle of images, are to the novelist's art. I think that the novel is descended from two sources, historical accounts and letters. The personal letters, the epistolary novel, the novel of Richardson, which is revived now only as a tour de force, does have this cinematic instantaneity; the time is occurring on the page. But this is a minority current in the contemporary novel; we are held captive to the novel as history, as an account of things once done. The account of things done minus the presiding, talkative, confiding, and pedagogic author may be a somewhat dead convention; that is, like anybody who takes any writing courses, I was told how stale and awful it is when authors begin to signal, as Dickens did, over the heads of the characters to the reader. Yet I feel that something has been lost with this authority, with this sense of an author as God, as a speaking God, as a chatty God, filling the universe of the book. Now we have the past tense, a kind of a noncommittal deadness: God paring his fingernails. We may be getting the worst of both worlds.
Couples was in some ways an old-fashioned novel; I found the last thirty pages—the rounding up, the administering of fortunes—curiously satisfying, pleasant. Going from character to character, I had myself the sensation of flying, of conquering space. In Rabbit, Run I liked writing in the present tense. You can move between minds, between thoughts and objects and events with a curious ease not available to the past tense. I'm not sure it's as clear to the reader as it is to the person writing, but there are kinds of poetry, kinds of music you can strike off in the present tense. I don't know why I've not done a full-length novel in it again. I began tentatively, but one page deep into the book, it seemed very natural and congenial, so much so that while doing The Centaur I was haunted by the present tense and finally wrote a whole chapter in it.
INTERVIEWER
You speak with some regret about the present authorial disinclination to signal above the heads of the characters. I am interested in your evaluation of the success of three contemporary writers who seem to me to have maintained this willingness to signal to the reader directly. The first one I'd like to mention and get your reaction to is Robert Penn Warren.
UPDIKE
I'm sorry. I don't know Penn Warren's prose well enough to comment.
INTERVIEWER
How about Barth?
UPDIKE
Barth I know imperfectly, but I have read the first two novels and parts of the last two and some of the short stories. I also know Barth personally and find him a most likable and engaging and modest man. He and I are near the same age and born not too far from each other, he in Maryland and I in southeastern Pennsylvania. His work is partly familiar and partly repellent; I feel he hit the floor of nihilism hard and returns to us covered with coal dust. We are very close to an abyss as we traverse Barth's rolling periods and curiously elevated point of view. I guess my favorite book of his is The Floating Opera, which is like The Poorhouse Fair in ending with a kind of carnival, a brainless celebration of the fact of existence. As it stands now, Barth seems to me a very strong-minded and inventive and powerful voice from another planet; there is something otherworldly about his fiction that makes it both fascinating and barren, at least for me. I'd rather visit Uranus than read through Giles Goat-Boy.
INTERVIEWER
What about Bellow?
UPDIKE
There is in Bellow a kind of little professor, a professor-elf, who keeps fluttering around the characters, and I'm not sure he's my favorite Bellow character, this voice. He's almost always there, putting exclamatory marks after sentences, making little utterances and in general inviting us to participate in moral decisions. This person—whom I take to be the author—contributes to the soft focus of Bellow's endings. The middles are so rich with detail, with charm and love of life; I think how in Henderson the Rain King he remembers rubbing oil into his pregnant wife's stomach to ease the stretch marks. It's this professor, this earnest sociological man who somehow wants us to be better than we are, who muddles the endings, not exactly happy endings, but they are endings which would point the way. He cares so—the way Bellow can conjure up a minor character and set him tumbling across the paragraph.
But the general question of authorial presence—I find it irksome when an author is there as a celebrity. In Salinger's later works and most of Mailer's work the author appears as somebody who counts, somebody who has an audience of teenagers out there waiting to hear from him. This kind of return to before Chekhov I don't find useful, although authorial invisibility is also a pose. The proper pose may be the Homeric bard's one—he is there, but unimportantly there, there by sufferance of the king.
INTERVIEWER
What about the cultivation of pretense—playing around with it. I mean, what do you think of a writer like Barthelme?
UPDIKE
He was an art director of some sort and, just as Kerouac's work was a kind of action writing to answer action painting, so Barthelme's short stories and the one novelette seem to me to be an attempt to bring over into prose something Pop. I think, you know, on the one hand of Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup cans and on the other of the Chinese baby food that the Seven Dwarfs in Snow White are making. Then again you do get a hard-edge writing in a way. In one of his short stories he says that the hard nut-brown word has enough aesthetic satisfaction for anybody but a fool. I also think his stories are important for what they don't say, for the things that don't happen in them, that stand revealed as clichés.
Yes—I think he's interesting, but more interesting as an operator within a cultural scene than as a—oh, as a singer to my spirit. A quaint phrase that possibly betrays me.
INTERVIEWER
What of writers who've influenced you? Salinger? Nabokov?
UPDIKE
I learned a lot from Salinger's short stories; he did remove the short narrative from the wise-guy, slice-of-life stories of the thirties and forties. Like most innovative artists, he made new room for shapelessness, for life as it is lived. I'm thinking of a story like “Just Before the War with the Eskimos” not “For Esmé,” which already shows signs of emotional overkill. Nabokov, I admire but would emulate only his high dedication to the business of making books that are not sloppy, that can be reread. I think his aesthetic models, chess puzzles and protective colorations in lepidoptera, are rather special.
INTERVIEWER
Henry Green? O’Hara?
UPDIKE
Green's tone, his touch of truth, his air of peddling nothing and knowing everything, I would gladly attain to, if I could. For sheer transparence of eye and ear he seems to me unmatched among living writers. Alas, for a decade he has refused to write, showing I suppose his ultimate allegiance to life itself. Some of O’Hara's short stories also show a very rare transparence, freshness, and unexpectedness. Good works of art direct us back outward to reality again; they illustrate, rather than ask, imitation.
INTERVIEWER
You mentioned Kerouac a moment ago. How do you feel about his work?
UPDIKE
Somebody like Kerouac who writes on teletype paper as rapidly as he can once slightly alarmed me. Now I can look upon this more kindly. There may be some reason to question the whole idea of fineness and care in writing. Maybe something can get into sloppy writing that would elude careful writing. I'm not terribly careful myself, actually. I write fairly rapidly if I get going, and don't change much, and have never been one for making outlines or taking out whole paragraphs or agonizing much. If a thing goes, it goes for me, and if it doesn't go, I eventually stop and get off.
INTERVIEWER
What is it that you think gets into sloppy writing that eludes more careful prose?
UPDIKE
It comes down to what is language? Up to now, until this age of mass literacy, language has been something spoken. In utterance there's a minimum of slowness. In trying to treat words as chisel strokes, you run the risk of losing the quality of utterance, the rhythm of utterance, the happiness. A phrase out of Mark Twain—he describes a raft hitting a bridge and says that it “went all to smash and scatteration like a box of matches struck by lightning.” The beauty of “scatteration” could only have occurred to a talkative man, a man who had been brought up among people who were talking and who loved to talk himself. I'm aware myself of a certain dryness of this reservoir, this backlog of spoken talk. A Romanian once said to me that Americans are always telling stories. I'm not sure this is as true as it once was. Where we once used to spin yarns, now we sit in front of the tv and receive pictures. I'm not sure the younger generation even knows how to gossip. But, as for a writer, if he has something to tell, he should perhaps type it almost as fast as he could talk it. We must look to the organic world, not the inorganic world, for metaphors; and just as the organic world has periods of repose and periods of great speed and exercise, so I think the writer's process should be organically varied. But there's a kind of tautness that you should feel within yourself no matter how slow or fast you're spinning out the reel.
INTERVIEWER
In “The Sea's Green Sameness” you deny that characterization and psychology are primary goals of fiction. What do you think is more important?
UPDIKE
I wrote “The Sea's Green Sameness” years ago and meant, I believe, that narratives should not be primarily packages for psychological insights, though they can contain them, like raisins in buns. But the substance is the dough, which feeds the storytelling appetite, the appetite for motion, for suspense, for resolution. The author's deepest pride, as I have experienced it, is not in his incidental wisdom but in his ability to keep an organized mass of images moving forward, to feel life engendering itself under his hands. But no doubt, fiction is also a mode of spying; we read it as we look in windows or listen to gossip, to learn what other people do. Insights of all kinds are welcome; but no wisdom will substitute for an instinct for action and pattern, and a perhaps savage wish to hold, through your voice, another soul in thrall.
INTERVIEWER
In view of this and your delight in the “noncommittal luminosity of fact,” do you think you're much like the “nouvelle vague” novelists?
UPDIKE
I used to. I wrote The Poorhouse Fair as an anti-novel, and have found Nathalie Sarraute's description of the modern novelistic predicament a helpful guide. I am attracted to the cool surface of some contemporary French novels, and, like them, do want to give inanimate or vegetable presences some kind of vote in the democracy of narrative. Basically, though, I describe things not because their muteness mocks our subjectivity but because they seem to be masks for God. And I should add that there is, in fiction, an image-making function, above image-retailing. To create a coarse universal figure like Tarzan is in some ways more of an accomplishment than the novels of Henry James.
INTERVIEWER
As a technician, how unconventional would you say you were?
UPDIKE
As unconventional as I need to be. An absolute freedom exists on the blank page, so let's use it. I have from the start been wary of the fake, the automatic. I tried not to force my sense of life as many-layered and ambiguous, while keeping in mind some sense of transaction, of a bargain struck, between me and the ideal reader. Domestic fierceness within the middle class, sex and death as riddles for the thinking animal, social existence as sacrifice, unexpected pleasures and rewards, corruption as a kind of evolution—these are some of the themes. I have tried to achieve objectivity in the form of narrative. My work is meditation, not pontification, so that interviews like this one feel like a forcing of the growth, a posing. I think of my books not as sermons or directives in a war of ideas but as objects, with different shapes and textures and the mysteriousness of anything that exists. My first thought about art, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.

John Steinbeck


[John Steinbeck had agreed to a Paris Review interview late in his life. He had earlier been coy about it but then wanted the interview very much. He was, unfortunately, too sick to work on the project, though it was at the end often in his thoughts. With this interest of his in mind, the editors of this magazine compiled a number of comments on the art of fiction that John Steinbeck made over the years. Some come from the East of Eden diaries, published in December 1969 by Viking Press under the title Journal of a Novel. Others are excerpted from letters, some of which have been collected under the title Steinbeck: A Life in Letters and published in October 1975 by Viking. The quotes have been organized under various topic headings rather than chronologically, as they are in the diaries and letters. Nathaniel Benchley, a close friend of the author, has provided the introduction.]


Boris Pasternak

Fragment of a letter from Boris Pasternak to a fellow poet:
“The melodic authenticity of most of your work is very dear to me, as is your faithfulness to the principle of melody and to “ascent” in the supreme sense that Alexander Blok gave that word.
"You will understand from a reading of my most recent works that I, too, am under the power of the same influence, but we must try to make sure that, as in Alexander Blok, this note works, reveals, incarnates, and expresses thoughts to their ultimate clarity, instead of being only a reminder of sounds which originally charmed us, an inconsequential echo dying in the air.”


Ezra Pound

Since his return to Italy, Ezra Pound has spent most of his time in the Tirol, staying at Castle Brunnenburg with his wife, his daughter Mary, his son-in-law Prince Boris de Rachewiltz, and his grandchildren. However, the mountains in this resort country near Merano are cold in the winter, and Mr. Pound likes the sun. The interviewer was about to leave England for Merano, at the end of February, when a telegram stopped him at the door: “Merano icebound. Come to Rome.”

Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov lives with his wife Véra in the Montreux Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland, a resort city on Lake Geneva which was a favorite of Russian aristocrats of the last century. They dwell in a connected series of hotel rooms that, like their houses and apartments in the United States, seem impermanent, places of exile. Their rooms include one used for visits by their son Dmitri, and another, the chambre de debarras, where various items are deposited—Turkish and Japanese editions of Lolita, other books, sporting equipment, an American flag.

Henry MILLER

In 1934, Henry Miller, then aged forty-two and living in Paris, published his first book. In 1961 the book was finally published in his native land, where it promptly became a best-seller and a cause célèbre. By now the waters have been so muddied by controversy about censorship, pornography, and obscenity that one is likely to talk about anything but the book itself.

Mary McCARTHY

The interview took place in the living room of the apartment in Paris where Miss McCarthy was staying during the winter of 1961. It was a sunny, pleasant room, not too large, with long windows facing south toward the new buildings going up along the avenue Montaigne. A dining-cum-writing table stood in an alcove at one end; on it were a lamp, some books and papers, and a rather well-worn portable typewriter. At the other end of the room were several armchairs and a low sofa where Miss McCarthy sat while the interview was recorded. On this early-spring afternoon, the windows were open wide, letting in a warm breeze and the noise of construction work nearby. An enormous pink azalea plant bloomed on the balcony, and roses graced a small desk in one corner.

McCarthy settled down on the sofa and served coffee. She was wearing a simple beige dress with little jewelry—a large and rather ornate ring was her one elaborate ornament. She is a woman of medium height, dark, with straight hair combed back from a center part into a knot at the nape of her neck; this simple coiffure sets off a profile of beautiful, almost classic regularity. Her smile is a generous one, flashing suddenly across her face, crinkling up her wide-set eyes. She speaks not quickly, but with great animation and energy, gesturing seldom; it is typical of her that she matches the tremendously elegant carriage of her arms and neck and handsomely poised head with a deliberate, almost jerky motion in taking a step.

While McCarthy’s conversation was remarkably fluent and articulate, she nevertheless often interrupted herself in order to reword or qualify a phrase, sometimes even impatiently destroying it and starting again in the effort to express herself as exactly as possible. Several times during the interview she seized upon a question in such a way that one felt she had decided upon certain things she wanted to say about herself and would willy-nilly create the opportunity to do so. At other moments, some of them hilarious—her pitiless wit is justifiably celebrated—she would indulge in unpremeditated extravagances of description or speculation that she would then laughingly censor as soon as the words were out of her mouth. She was extremely generous in the matter of silly or badly worded questions, turning them into manageable ones by the nature of her response. In all, her conversation was marked by a scrupulous effort to be absolutely fair and honest, and by a kind of natural and exuberant enjoyment of her own intellectual powers.

INTERVIEWER
Do you like writing in Europe?
MARY McCARTHY
I don’t really find much difference. I think if you stayed here very long, you’d begin to notice a little difficulty about language.
INTERVIEWER
Did you write about Europe when you first came here after the war?
McCARTHY
Only in that short story, “The Cicerone.” That was in the summer of 1946. We were just about the only tourists because you weren’t allowed to travel unless you had an official reason for it. I got a magazine to give me some sort of carnet.
INTERVIEWER
Did the old problem, the American in Europe, interest you as a novelist?
McCARTHY
I suppose at that time, at least in that story somewhat, it did. But no, not further. For one thing, I don’t know whether I cease to feel so much like an American or what; New York is, after all, so Europeanized, and so many of one’s friends are European, that the distinction between you as an American and the European blurs. Also Europe has become so much more Americanized. No, I no longer see that Jamesian distinction. I mean, I see it in James, and I could see it even in 1946, but I don’t see it anymore. I don’t feel anymore this antithesis of Young America, Old Europe. I think that’s really gone. For better or worse, I’m not sure. Maybe for worse.
INTERVIEWER
What about the novel you’re writing while you’re here—have you been working on it a long time?
McCARTHY
Oh, years! Let me think, I began it around the time of the first Stevenson campaign. Then I abandoned it and wrote the books on Italy, and A Charmed Life, and Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. When did I begin this thing again? A year ago last spring, I guess. Part of it came out in Partisan Review. The one called “Dottie Makes an Honest Woman of Herself.”
INTERVIEWER
Is it unfair to ask you what it will be about?
McCARTHY
No, it’s very easy. It’s called The Group, and it’s about eight Vassar girls. It starts with the inauguration of Roosevelt, and—well, at first it was going to carry them up to the present time, but then I decided to stop at the inauguration of Eisenhower. It was conceived as a kind of mock-chronicle novel. It’s a novel about the idea of progress, really. The idea of progress seen in the female sphere, the feminine sphere. You know, home economics, architecture, domestic technology, contraception, childbearing; the study of technology in the home, in the playpen, in the bed. It’s supposed to be the history of the loss of faith in progress, in the idea of progress, during that twenty-year period.
INTERVIEWER
Are these eight Vassar girls patterned more or less after ones you knew when you were there in college?
McCARTHY
Some of them are drawn pretty much from life, and some of them are rather composite. I’ve tried to keep myself out of this book. Oh, and all their mothers are in it. That’s the part I almost like the best.
INTERVIEWER
Just the mothers, not the fathers?
McCARTHY
Not the fathers. The fathers vaguely figure, offstage and so on, but the mothers are really monumentally present!
INTERVIEWER
Does it matter to you at all where you write?
McCARTHY
Oh, a nice peaceful place with some good light.
INTERVIEWER
Do you work regularly, every morning, say?
McCARTHY
Normally; right now I haven’t been. Normally I work from about nine to two, and sometimes much longer—if it’s going well, sometimes from nine to seven.
INTERVIEWER
Typewriter?
McCARTHY
Typewriter, yes. This always has to get into a Paris Review interview! I very rarely go out to lunch. That’s a rule. I’ve been accepting lunch dates recently—why didn’t I remember that? My excuse—the excuse I’ve been forgetting—is simply that I don’t go out to lunch! And in general, I don’t. That was the best rule I ever made.
INTERVIEWER
Once you’ve published part of a novel separately, in a magazine or short-story collection, do you do much work on it afterwards, before it is published in the novel itself?
McCARTHY
It depends. With this novel, I have.
INTERVIEWER
Speaking not of a novel, but of your autobiography, I remember that you published parts of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood as one section in Cast a Cold Eye. You changed the story about your nickname a great deal, reducing it to just a small incident in Catholic Girlhood.
McCARTHY
I couldn’t bear that one! It had appeared years ago in Mademoiselle, and when I put it in Cast a Cold Eye, I didn’t realize how much I disliked it. When I came to put Catholic Girlhood together, I simply couldn’t stand it, and when I was reading the book in proof, I decided to tear it out, to reduce it to a tiny, tiny incident. As it stood, it was just impossible, much too rhetorical.
INTERVIEWER
When you publish chapters of a book separately on their own, do you think of them as chapters, or as independent short stories?
McCARTHY
As chapters, but if somebody, a magazine editor, thought they were what Partisan Review calls a “self-contained chapter,” all right, but I’ve never tried to make them into separate units. If one happens to be, all right—if they want to publish it as such. The New Yorker has given me surprises: they’ve printed things that I would never have thought could stand by themselves. But they thought so.
INTERVIEWER
Did you, when you saw them in print?
McCARTHY
Surprisingly, yes.
INTERVIEWER
What about in your first novel, The Company She Keeps?
McCARTHY
Those chapters were written originally as short stories. About halfway through, I began to think of them as a kind of unified story. The same character kept reappearing, and so on. I decided finally to call it a novel, in that it does in a sense tell a story, one story. But the first chapters were written without any idea of there being a novel. It was when I was doing the one about the Yale man that I decided to put the heroine of the earlier stories in that story too. The story of the Yale man is not a bit autobiographical, but the heroine appears anyway, in order to make a unity for the book.
INTERVIEWER
Were you also interested simply in the problem of writing one story from various different points of view, in experimenting with the different voices?
McCARTHY
There were no voices in that. I don’t think I was really very much interested in the technical side of it. It was the first piece of fiction I had ever written, I mean I’d never made any experiments before. I was too inexperienced to worry about technical problems.
INTERVIEWER
You hadn’t written any fiction before then?
McCARTHY
No. Well, in college I had written the tiniest amount of fiction: very bad short stories, very unrealized short stories, for courses, and that was all. I once started a detective story to make money—but I couldn’t get the murder to take place! At the end of three chapters I was still describing the characters and the milieu, so I thought, this is not going to work. No corpse! And that was all. Then I simply did The Company She Keeps, and was only interested in the technical side from the point of view of establishing the truth, of trying to re-create what happened. For instance, the art-gallery story was written in the first person because that’s the way you write that kind of story—a study of a curious individual.
INTERVIEWER
You imply that most of the stories were distinctly autobiographical.
McCARTHY
They all are, more or less, except the one about the Yale man.
INTERVIEWER
Is this distinction between autobiography and fiction clear in your mind before you begin writing a story, or does it become so as you write? Or is there no such distinction?
McCARTHY
Well, I think it depends on what you’re doing. Let’s be frank. Take “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt”; in that case it was an attempt to describe something that really happened—though naturally you have to do a bit of name-changing and city-changing. And the first story, the one about the divorce: that was a stylization—there were no proper names in it or anything—but still, it was an attempt to be as exact as possible about something that had happened. The Yale man was based on a real person. John Chamberlain, actually, whom I didn’t know very well. But there it was an attempt to make this real man a broad type. You know, to use John Chamberlain’s boyish looks and a few of the features of his career, and then draw all sorts of other Yale men into it. Then the heroine was put in, in an imaginary love affair, which had to be because she had to be in the story. I always thought that was all very hard on John Chamberlain, who was married. But of course he knew it wasn’t true, and he knew that I didn’t know him very well, and that therefore in the story he was just a kind of good-looking clothes hanger. Anything else that I’ve written later—I may make a mistake—has been, on the whole, a fiction. Though it may have autobiographical elements in it that I’m conscious of, it has been conceived as a fiction, even a thing like The Oasis, that’s supposed to have all these real people in it. The whole story is a complete fiction. Nothing of the kind ever happened; after all, it happens in the future. But in general, with characters, I do try at least to be as exact as possible about the essence of a person, to find the key that works the person both in real life and in the fiction.
INTERVIEWER
Do you object to people playing the roman à clef game with your novels?
McCARTHY
I suppose I really ask for it, in a way. I do rather object to it at the same time, insofar as it deflects attention from what I’m trying to do in the novel. What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake. If you’re interested in the cake, you get rather annoyed with people saying what species the real plum was. In The Groves of Academe, for instance. I had taught at Bard College and at Sarah Lawrence, but I didn’t want to make a composite of those two places: I really wanted to make a weird imaginary college of my own. I even took a trip to the Mennonite country in Pennsylvania to try to find a perfect location for it, which I found—now, where was it? Somewhere near Ephrata—yes, it was Lititz, Pennsylvania, the home of the pretzel. There’s a very charming old-fashioned sort of academy, a girls’ college there—I’d never heard of it before and can’t remember the name. It had the perfect setting, I thought, for this imaginary college of mine. Anyway, I would get terribly annoyed if people said it had to do with Sarah Lawrence, which it had almost no resemblance to. It was quite a bit like Bard. Sarah Lawrence is a much more borné and dull place than Bard, or than my college. And of course I was even more annoyed if they said it was Bennington. There was not supposed to be anything there of Bennington at all!
INTERVIEWER
When were you at Bard?
McCARTHY
‘45 to ‘46.
INTERVIEWER
And at Sarah Lawrence?
McCARTHY
I was there just for one term, the winter of ‘48.
INTERVIEWER
Did you enjoy teaching?
McCARTHY
I adored teaching at Bard, yes. But the students were so poor at Sarah Lawrence that I didn’t much enjoy it there. I don’t think anyone I knew who was teaching there then did. But at Bard it was very exciting. It was all quite mad, crazy. I had never taught before, and I was staying up till two in the morning every night trying to keep a little bit behind my class. Joke.
INTERVIEWER
Did they ask you to teach “creative writing”?
McCARTHY
I’ve always refused to teach creative writing. Oh, I had in addition to two courses, about seven or eight tutorials, and some of those tutees wanted to study creative writing. I think I finally weakened and let one boy who was utterly ungifted for it study creative writing because he was so incapable of studying anything else.
INTERVIEWER
But mostly it was these two courses.
McCARTHY
Yes, and then you had to keep up with all these students. I had one boy doing all the works of James T. Farrell and a girl who was studying Marcus Aurelius and Dante. That was fun. That one I did the work for. And one girl was doing a thesis on Richardson; that was just hopeless. I mean, I couldn’t even try to keep up with teaching Russian novels, and, say, Jane Austen—who in my course came under the head of Modern Novel—and all the works of Richardson. So I could never tell, you know, whether she had read what she was supposed to have read, because I couldn’t remember it! Everything was reversed! The student was in a position to see whether the professor was cheating, or had done her homework. Anyway, everybody ended up ill after this year—you know, various physical ailments. But it was exciting, it was fun. The students were fun. The bright ones were bright, and there wasn’t much of a middle layer. They were either bright or they were just cretins. I must say, there are times when you welcome a B student.
I liked teaching because I loved this business of studying. I found it quite impossible to give a course unless I’d read the material the night before. I absolutely couldn’t handle the material unless it was fresh in my mind. Unless you give canned lectures, it really has to be—though that leads, I think, to all sorts of very whimsical, perhaps, and capricious interpretations; that is, you see the whole book, say Anna Karenina, in terms that are perhaps dictated by the moment. One wonders afterwards whether one’s interpretation of Anna Karenina that one had rammed down the throats of those poor students was really as true as it seemed to one at the time.
INTERVIEWER
Which books did you teach in the Modern Novel?
McCARTHY
Well, you had to call everything at Bard either modern or contemporary, or the students wouldn’t register for it. Everyone thinks this a joke, but it was true. I originally was going to teach a whole course on critical theory, from Aristotle to T. S. Eliot or something, and only three students registered for it, but if it had been called Contemporary Criticism, then I think we would have had a regular class. So we called this course the Modern Novel, and it began with Jane Austen, I think, and went up, well, certainly to Henry James. That was when I taught novels in pairs. I taught Emma and Madame Bovary together. Then The Princess Casamassima, with the anarchist plot in it and everything, with The Possessed. The Red and the Black with Great Expectations. And Fontamara with something. I only taught novels I liked.
INTERVIEWER
Would it be roughly the same list, were you teaching the course now? Or do you have new favorites?
McCARTHY
Oh I don’t know, I might even add something like Doctor Zhivago at the end. I would probably do some different Dickens. I’ve read an awful lot of Dickens over again since then. Now I think I’d teach Our Mutual Friend or Little Dorrit.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you start reading Dickens over again?
McCARTHY
I don’t know, I got interested in Dickens at Bard, and then at Sarah Lawrence. Another stimulus was a book done by a man called Edgar Johnson, a biographer of Dickens. Anthony West had attacked it in The New Yorker, and this made me so angry that I reviewed the book, and that set off another kind of chain reaction. I really passionately admire Dickens.
INTERVIEWER
Could I go back for a moment to what you said about your early writing at college? I think you said that The Company She Keeps was the first fiction you ever wrote, but that was some years after you left Vassar, wasn’t it?
McCARTHY
Oh, yes. You know, I had been terribly discouraged when I was at Vassar, and later, by being told that I was really a critical mind, and that I had no creative talent. Who knows? They may have been right. This was done in a generous spirit, I don’t mean that it was harsh. Anyway, I hadn’t found any way at all, when I was in college, of expressing anything in the form of short stories. We had a rebel literary magazine that Elizabeth Bishop and Eleanor Clark were on, and Muriel Rukeyser and I. I wrote, not fiction, but sort of strange things for this publication.
INTERVIEWER
A rebel magazine?
McCARTHY
There was an official literary magazine, which we were all against. Our magazine was anonymous. It was called Con Spirito. It caused a great sort of scandal. I don’t know why—it was one of these perfectly innocent undertakings. But people said, “How awful, it’s anonymous.” The idea of anonymity was of course to keep the judgment clear, especially the editorial board’s judgment—to make people read these things absolutely on their merits. Well, anyway, Con Spirito lasted for only a few numbers. Elizabeth Bishop wrote a wonderful story for it which I still remember, called “Then Came the Poor.” It was about a revolution, a fantasy that took place in modern bourgeois society, when the poor invade, and take over a house.
INTERVIEWER
When you left Vassar, what then?
McCARTHY
Well, I went to New York, and I began reviewing for The New Republic and The Nation—right away. I wrote these little book reviews. Then there was a series about the critics. The Nation wanted a large-scale attack on critics and book reviewers, chiefly those in the Herald Tribune, the Times, and the Saturday Review and so on. I had been doing some rather harsh reviews, so they chose me as the person to do this. But I was so young—I think I was twenty-two—that they didn’t trust me. So they got Margaret Marshall, who was the assistant literary editor then, to do it with me: actually we divided the work up and did separate pieces. But she was older and was supposed to be—I don’t know—a restraining influence on me; anyway, someone more responsible. That series was a great sensation at the time, and it made people very mad. I continued just to do book reviews, maybe one other piece about the theater, something like the one on the literary critics. And then nothing more until Partisan Review started. That was when I tried to write the detective story—before Partisan Review. To be exact, Partisan Review had existed as a Stalinist magazine, and then it had died, gone to limbo. But after the Moscow trials, the PR boys, Rahv and Phillips, revived it, got a backer, merged with some other people—Dwight Macdonald and others—and started it again. As an anti-Stalinist magazine. I had been married to an actor, and was supposed to know something about the theater, so I began writing a theater column for them. I didn’t have any other ambitions at all. Then I married Edmund Wilson, and after we’d been married about a week, he said, “I think you have a talent for writing fiction.” And he put me in a little room. He didn’t literally lock the door, but he said, “Stay in there!” And I did. I just sat down, and it just came. It was the first story I had ever written, really: the first story in The Company She Keeps. Robert Penn Warren published it in the Southern Review. And I found myself writing fiction, to my great surprise.
INTERVIEWER
This was when you became involved in politics, wasn’t it?
McCARTHY
No. Earlier. In 1936, at the time of the Moscow trials. That changed absolutely everything. I got swept into the whole Trotskyite movement. But by accident. I was at a party. I knew Jim Farrell—I’d reviewed one of his books, I think it was Studs Lonigan—in any case, I knew Jim Farrell, and I was asked to a party given by his publisher for Art Young, the old Masses cartoonist. There were a lot of communists at this party. Anyway, Farrell went around asking people whether they thought Trotsky was entitled to a hearing and to the right of asylum. I said yes, and that was all. The next thing I discovered I was on the letterhead of something calling itself the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky. I was furious, of course, at this use of my name. Not that my name had any consequence, but still, it was mine. Just as I was about to make some sort of protest, I began to get all sorts of calls from Stalinists, telling me to get off the committee. I began to see that other people were falling off the committee, like Freda Kirchwey—she was the first to go, I think—and this cowardice impressed me so unfavorably that naturally I didn’t say anything about my name having got on there by accident, or at least without my realizing. So I stayed.
I began to know all the people on the committee. We’d attend meetings. It was a completely different world. Serious, you know. Anyway, that’s how I got to know the PR boys. They hadn’t yet revived the Partisan Review, but they were both on the Trotsky committee, at least Philip was. We—the committee, that is—used to meet in Farrell’s apartment. I remember once when we met on St. Valentine’s Day and I thought, Oh, this is so strange, because I’m the only person in this room who realizes that it’s Valentine’s Day. It was true! I had a lot of rather rich Stalinist friends, and I was always on the defensive with them, about the Moscow trial question, Trotsky and so on. So I had to inform myself, really, in order to conduct the argument. I found that I was reading more and more, getting more and more involved in this business. At the same time I got a job at Covici-Friede, a rather left-wing publishing house now out of business, also full of Stalinists. I began to see Philip Rahv again because Covici Friede needed some readers’ opinions on Russian books, and I remembered that he read Russian, so he came around to the office, and we began to see each other. When Partisan Review was revived I appeared as a sort of fifth wheel—there may have been more than that—but in any case as a kind of appendage of Partisan Review.
INTERVIEWER
Then you hadn’t really been interested in politics before the Moscow trials?
McCARTHY
No, not really. My first husband had worked at the Theater Union, which was a radical group downtown that put on proletarian plays, and there were lots of communists in that. Very few socialists. And so I knew all these people; I knew that kind of person. But I wasn’t very sympathetic to them. We used to see each other, and there were a lot of jokes. I even marched in May Day parades. Things like that. But it was all . . . fun. It was all done in that spirit. And I remained, as the Partisan Review boys said, absolutely bourgeois throughout. They always said to me very sternly, “You’re really a throwback. You’re really a twenties figure.”
INTERVIEWER
How did you react to that?
McCARTHY
Well, I suppose I was wounded. I was a sort of gay, good-time girl, from their point of view. And they were men of the thirties. Very serious. That’s why my position was so insecure on Partisan Review; it wasn’t exactly insecure, but . . . lowly. I mean, in fact. And that was why they let me write about the theater, because they thought the theater was of absolutely no consequence.
INTERVIEWER
How did the outbreak of the war affect your political opinion? The Partisan Review group split apart, didn’t it?
McCARTHY
At the beginning of the war we were all isolationists, the whole group. Then I think the summer after the fall of France—certainly before Pearl Harbor—Philip Rahv wrote an article in which he said in a measured sentence, “In a certain sense, this is our war.” The rest of us were deeply shocked by this, because we regarded it as a useless imperialist war. You couldn’t beat Fascism that way: “Fight the enemy at home,” and so on. In other words, we reacted to the war rather in the manner as if it had been World War I. This was after Munich, after the so-called phony war. There was some reason for having certain doubts about the war, at least about the efficacy of the war. So when Philip wrote this article, a long controversy began on Partisan Review. It split between those who supported the war, and those who didn’t. I was among those who didn’t—Edmund Wilson also, though for slightly different reasons. Dwight Macdonald and Clement Greenberg split off, and Dwight founded his own magazine, Politics, which started out as a Trotskyite magazine, and then became a libertarian, semi-anarchist one. Meyer Shapiro was in this group, and I forget who else. Edmund was really an unreconstructed isolationist. The others were either Marxist or libertarian. Of course there was a split in the Trotskyite movement at that period.
Toward the end of the war I began to realize that there was something hypocritical about my position—that I was really supporting the war. I’d go to a movie—there was a marvelous documentary called Desert Victory about the British victory over Rommel’s Afrika Korps—and I’d find myself weeping madly when Montgomery’s bagpipers went through to El Alamein. In other words, cheering the war, and on the other hand, being absolutely against Bundles for Britain, against Lend-Lease—this was after Lend-Lease, of course—against every practical thing. And suddenly, I remember—it must have been the summer of ‘45 that I first said this aloud—I remember it was on the Cape, at Truro. There were a lot of friends, Chiaromonte, Lionel Abel, Dwight, et cetera, at my house—by this time I was divorced from Edmund, or separated, anyway. And I said, “You know, I think I, and all of us, are really for the war.” This was the first time this had been said aloud by me. Dwight indignantly denied it. “I’m not for the war!” he said. But he was. Then I decided I wanted to give a blood transfusion. And I practically had to get cleared! Now no one was making me do this, but I felt I had to go and get cleared by my friends first. Was it wrong of me to support the war effort by giving blood? It was agreed that it was all right. All this fuss! So I gave blood, just once. Some other people were doing it too, I believe, independently, at the same time, people of more or less this tendency. That is the end of that story.
Years later, I realized I really thought that Philip had been right, and that the rest of us had been wrong. Of course we didn’t know about the concentration camps: the death camps hadn’t started at the beginning. All that news came in fairly late. But once this news was in, it became clear—at least to me, and I still believe it—that the only way to have stopped it was in a military way. That only the military defeat of Hitler could stop this, and it had to be stopped. But it took a long, long time to come to this view. You’re always afraid of making the same mistake over again. But the trouble is you can always correct an earlier mistake like our taking the attitude to World War II as if it were World War I, but if you ever try to project the correction of a mistake into the future, you may make a different one. That is, many people now are talking about World War III as if it were World War II.
INTERVIEWER
What I don’t see, though, is how all this left you once the war was over.
McCARTHY
Actually, as I remember, after the war was the very best period, politically, that I’ve been through. At that time, it seemed to me there was a lot of hope around. The war was over! Certain—perhaps—mistakes had been recognized. The bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, and there was a kind of general repentance of this fact. This was before the hydrogen bomb; and we never even dreamed that the Russians were going to get the atomic bomb. The political scene looked free. This was not only true for us—it seemed a good moment. At least there was still the hope of small libertarian movements. People like Dwight and Chiaromonte and I used to talk about it a great deal, and even Koestler was writing at that period about the possibility of founding oases—that’s where I took the title of that book from. It seemed possible still, utopian but possible, to change the world on a small scale. Everyone was trying to live in a very principled way, but with quite a lot of energy, the energy that peace had brought, really. This was the period of the Marshall Plan, too. It was a good period. Then of course the Russians got the atom bomb, and the hydrogen bomb came. That was the end of any hope, or at least any hope that I can see of anything being done except in a massive way.
INTERVIEWER
How do you characterize your political opinion now?
McCARTHY
Dissident!
INTERVIEWER
All the way round?
McCARTHY
Yes! No, I still believe in what I believed in then—I still believe in a kind of libertarian socialism, a decentralized socialism. But I don’t see any possibility of achieving it. That is, within the span that I can see, which would be, say, to the end of my son’s generation, your generation. It really seems to me sometimes that the only hope is space. That is to say, perhaps the most energetic—in a bad sense—elements will move on to a new world in space. The problems of mass society will be transported into space, leaving behind this world as a kind of Europe, which then eventually tourists will visit. The Old World. I’m only half joking. I don’t think that the problem of social equality has ever been solved. As soon as it looks as if it were going to be solved, or even as if it were going to be confronted—say, as at the end of the eighteenth century—there’s a mass move to a new continent which defers this solution. After ‘48, after the failure of the ‘48 revolutions in Europe, hope for an egalitarian Europe really died, and the forty-eighters, many of them, went to California in the Gold Rush as forty-niners. My great-grandfather, from central Europe, was one of them. The Gold Rush, the Frontier was a substitute sort of equality. Think of Chaplin’s film. And yet once the concept of equality had entered the world, life becomes intolerable without it; yet life continues without its being realized. So it may be that there will be another displacement, another migration. The problem, the solution, or the confrontation, will again be postponed.
INTERVIEWER
Do you find that your critical work, whether it’s political or literary, creates any problems in relation to your work as a novelist?
McCARTHY
No, except that you have the perpetual problem, if somebody asks you to do a review, whether to interrupt what you’re writing—if you’re writing a novel—to do the review. You have to weigh whether the subject interests you enough, or whether you’re tired at that moment, emotionally played out by the fiction you’re writing. Whether it would be a good thing to stop and concentrate on something else. I just agreed to and did a review of Camus’s collected fiction and journalism. That was in some way connected with my own work, with the question of the novel in general. I thought, yes, I will do this because I want to read all of Camus and decide what I think about him finally. (Actually, I ended up almost as baffled as when I started.) But in general, I don’t take a review unless it’s something like that. Or unless Anthony West attacks Dickens. You know. Either it has to be some sort of thing that I want very much to take sides on, or something I’d like to study a bit, that I want to find out about anyway. Or where there may, in the case of study, be some reference—very indirect—back to my own work.
INTERVIEWER
This is quite a change from the time when you wrote criticism and never even thought of writing fiction. But now you consider yourself a novelist? Or don’t you bother with these distinctions?
McCARTHY
Well, I suppose I consider myself a novelist. Yes. Still, whatever way I write was really, I suppose, formed critically. That is, I learned to write reviews and criticism and then write novels, so that however I wrote, it was formed that way. George Eliot, you know, began by translating Strauss, began by writing about German philosophy—though her philosophic passages are not at all good in Middlemarch. Nevertheless, I think that this kind of training really makes one more interested in the subject than in the style. Her work certainly doesn’t suffer from any kind of stylistic frippery. There’s certainly no voluminous drapery around. There is a kind of concision in it, at her best—that passage where she’s describing the character of Lydgate—which shows, I think, the critical and philosophic training. I’ve never liked the conventional conception of “style.” What’s confusing is that style usually means some form of fancy writing—when people say, oh yes, so and so’s such a “wonderful stylist.” But if one means by style the voice, the irreducible and always recognizable and alive thing, then of course style is really everything. It’s what you find in Stendhal, it’s what you find in Pasternak. The same thing you find in a poet—the sound of, say, Donne’s voice. In a sense, you can’t go further in an analysis of Donne than to be able to place this voice, in the sense that you recognize Don Giovanni by the voice of Don Giovanni.
INTERVIEWER
In speaking of your own writing, anyway, you attribute its “style” to your earlier critical work—then you don’t feel the influence of other writers of fiction?
McCARTHY
I don’t think I have any influences. I think my first story, the first one in The Company She Keeps, definitely shows the Jamesian influence—James is so terribly catching. But beyond that, I can’t find any influence. That is, I can’t as a detached person—as detached as I can be—look at my work and see where it came from, from the point of view of literary sources.
INTERVIEWER
There must be certain writers, though, that you are drawn to more than others.
McCARTHY
Oh, yes! But I don’t think I write like them. The writer I really like best is Tolstoy, and I know I don’t write like Tolstoy. I wish I did! Perhaps the best English prose is Thomas Nash. I don’t write at all like Thomas Nash.
INTERVIEWER
It would seem also, from hints you give us in your books, that you like Roman writers as well.
McCARTHY
I did when I was young, very much. At least, I adored Catullus, and Juvenal; those were the two I really passionately loved. And Caesar, when I was a girl. But you couldn’t say that I had been influenced by Catullus! No! And Stendhal I like very, very much. Again, I would be happy to write like Stendhal, but I don’t. There are certain sentences in Stendhal that come to mind as how to do it if one could. I can’t. A certain kind of clarity and brevity—the author’s attitude summed up in a sentence, and done so simply, done without patronizing. Some sort of joy.
INTERVIEWER
It’s a dangerous game to play, the influence one.
McCARTHY
Well, in some cases it’s easy to see, and people themselves acknowledge it, and are interested in it, as people are interested in their genealogy. I simply can’t find my ancestors. I was talking to somebody about John Updike, and he’s another one I would say I can’t find any sources for.
INTERVIEWER
Do you like his writing?
McCARTHY
Yes. I’ve not quite finished Rabbit, Run—I must get it back from the person I lent it to and finish it. I thought it was very good, and so stupidly reviewed. I’d read The Poorhouse Fair, which I thought was really remarkable. Perhaps it suffered from the point-of-view problem, the whole virtuosity of doing it through the eyes of this old man sitting on the veranda of the poorhouse, through his eyes with their refraction, very old eyes, and so on. I think, in a way, this trick prevents him saying a good deal in the book. Nevertheless, it’s quite a remarkable book. But anyway, I nearly didn’t read Rabbit, Run because I thought, Oh my God! from reading those reviews. The reviewers seemed to be under the impression that the hero was a terrible character. It’s incredible! No, I think it’s the most interesting American novel I’ve read in quite a long time.
INTERVIEWER
What about others? Did you like Henderson the Rain King?
McCARTHY
Well, yes, the first part of Henderson I think is marvelous. The vitality! I still think it’s an amusing novel right through the lions, almost like a French eighteenth-century novel, or conte, very charming. But it doesn’t have this tremendous blast of vitality that the first part has, and it doesn’t have the density.
INTERVIEWER
What other recent American novels have you been interested by?
McCARTHY
Well, name one. There really aren’t any! I mean, are there? I can’t think of any. I don’t like Salinger, not at all. That last thing isn’t a novel anyway, whatever it is. I don’t like it. Not at all. It suffers from this terrible sort of metropolitan sentimentality and it’s so narcissistic. And to me, also, it seemed so false, so calculated. Combining the plain man with an absolutely megalomaniac egoism. I simply can’t stand it.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think of women writers, or do you think the category “woman writer” should not be made?
McCARTHY
Some women writers make it. I mean, there’s a certain kind of woman writer who’s a capital W, capital W. Virginia Woolf certainly was one, and Katherine Mansfield was one, and Elizabeth Bowen is one. 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 this “WW” business in Katherine Anne Porter. Who else? There’s Eudora Welty, who’s certainly not a “Woman Writer.” Though she’s become one lately.
INTERVIEWER
What is it that happens to make this change?
McCARTHY
I think they become interested in décor. You notice the change in Elizabeth Bowen. Her early work is much more masculine. Her later work has much more drapery in it. Who else? Jane Austen was never a “woman writer,” I don’t think. The cult of Jane Austen pretends that she was, but I don’t think she was. George Eliot certainly wasn’t, and George Eliot is the kind of woman writer I admire. I was going to write a piece at some point about this called “Sense and Sensibility,” dividing women writers into these two. I am for the ones who represent sense, and so was Jane Austen.
INTERVIEWER
Getting away from novels for a moment, I’d like to ask you about Memories of a Catholic Girlhood if I might. Will you write any more autobiography?
McCARTHY
I was just reading—oh God, actually I was just starting to read Simone de Beauvoir’s second volume, La Force de l’âge, and she announces in the preface that she can’t write about her later self with the same candor that she wrote about her girlhood.
INTERVIEWER
You feel that too?
McCARTHY
On this one point I agree with her. One has to be really old, I think, really quite an old person—and by that time I don’t know what sort of shape one’s memory would be in.
INTERVIEWER
You don’t agree with her on other points?
McCARTHY
I had an interview with L’Express the other day, and I gave Simone de Beauvoir the works. Let’s not do it twice. I think she’s pathetic, that’s all. This book is supposed to be better, more interesting anyway, than the first one because it’s about the thirties, and everyone wants to read about the thirties. And her love affair with Sartre, which is just about the whole substance of this book, is supposed to be very touching. The book is more interesting than the first one. But I think she’s odious. A mind totally bourgeois turned inside out.
INTERVIEWER
I have something else to ask, apropos of Memories of a Catholic Girlhood. There are certain points, important points and moments in your novels, where you deepen or enlarge the description of the predicament in which a character may be by reference to a liturgical or ecclesiastical or theological parallel or equivalence. What I want to know is, is this simply a strict use of analogy, a technical literary device, or does it indicate any conviction that these are valid and important ways of judging a human being?
McCARTHY
I suppose it’s a reference to a way of thinking about a human being. But I think at their worst they’re rather just literary references. That is, slightly show-off literary references. I have a terrible compulsion to make them—really a dreadful compulsion. The first sentence of The Stones of Florence begins, “How can you stand it? This is the first thing, and the last thing, the eschatological question that the visitor leaves echoing in the air behind him.” Something of that sort. Well, everybody was after me to take out that word. I left it out when I published that chapter in The New Yorker, but I put it back in the book. No, I do have this great compulsion to make those references. I think I do it as a sort of secret signal, a sort of looking over the heads of the readers who don’t recognize them to the readers who do understand them.
INTERVIEWER
If these references are only literary ones, secret signals, then they are blasphemous.
McCARTHY
Yes, I see what you mean. I suppose they are. Yes, they are secret jokes, they are blasphemies. But—I think I said something of this in the introduction of Catholic Girlhood—I think that religion offers to Americans (I mean the Roman Catholic religion) very often the only history and philosophy they ever get. A reference to it somehow opens up that historical vista. In that sense it is a device for deepening the passage.
INTERVIEWER
Could we go back to your novels for a moment? I’d like to ask you about how you begin on them. Do you start with the characters, the situation, the plot? What comes first? Perhaps that’s too hard a question, too general.
McCARTHY
Very hard, and I’m awfully specific. I can really only think in specific terms, at least about myself. The Groves of Academe started with the plot. The plot and this figure: there can’t be the plot without this figure of the impossible individual, the unemployable professor and his campaign for justice. Justice, both in quotes, you know, and serious in a way. What is justice for the unemployable person? That was conceived from the beginning as a plot: the whole idea of the reversal at the end, when Mulcahy is triumphant and the president is about to lose his job or quit, when the worm turns and is triumphant. I didn’t see exactly what would happen in between; the more minute details weren’t worked out. But I did see that there would be his campaign for reinstatement and then his secret would be discovered. In this case that he had not been a communist. A Charmed Life began with a short story; the first chapter was written as a short story. When I conceived the idea of its being a novel, I think about all I knew was that the heroine would have to die in the end. Everybody objected to that ending, and said that it was terrible to have her killed in an automobile accident in the last paragraph—utterly unprepared for, and so on. But the one thing I knew absolutely certainly was that the heroine had to die in the end. At first I was going to have her have an abortion, and have her die in the abortion. But that seemed to me so trite. Then I conceived the idea of having her drive on the correct side of the road and get killed, because in this weird place everyone is always on the wrong side of the road. But all that is really implicit in the first chapter.
INTERVIEWER
So the charge that readers are unprepared for the last paragraph you feel is unfair?
McCARTHY
There may be something wrong with the novel, I don’t know. But it was always supposed to have a fairy-tale element in it. New Leeds is haunted! Therefore nobody should be surprised if something unexpected happens, or something catastrophic, for the place is also pregnant with catastrophe. But it may be that the treatment in between was too realistic, so that the reader was led to expect a realistic continuation of everything going on in a rather moderate way. It was, to some extent, a symbolic story. The novel is supposed to be about doubt. All the characters in different ways represent doubt, whether it is philosophical or ontological doubt as in the case of the strange painter who questions everything—“Why don’t I murder my grandmother?” and so on. Or the girl’s rather nineteenth-century self-doubt, doubt of the truth, of what she perceives. In any case, everyone is supposed to represent one or another form of doubt. When the girl finally admits to herself that she’s pregnant, and also recognizes that she must do something about it, in other words, that she has to put up a real stake—and she does put up a real stake—at that moment she becomes mortal. All the other characters are immortal. They have dozens of terrible accidents, and they’re all crippled in one way or another, and yet they have this marvelous power of survival. All those drunks and human odds and ends. Anyway, the girl makes the decision—which from the point of view of conventional morality is a wicked decision—to have an abortion, to kill life. Once she makes this decision, she becomes mortal, and doesn’t belong to the charmed circle anymore. As soon as she makes it, she gets killed—to get killed is simply a symbol of the fact that she’s mortal.
INTERVIEWER
You say that her decision makes her mortal. But her decision has also included someone else, the painter.
McCARTHY
Yes, yes. I see what you mean. I hadn’t thought of that, that when she asks somebody to help her it implies some sort of social bond, some sort of mutual bond between people in society, while the rest of these people are still a community of isolates.
INTERVIEWER
His joining her in this mortal, social bond, that doesn’t make him mortal as well? He is still a part of the charmed circle?
McCARTHY
He’s too sweet to be mortal! Well, he’s a comic figure, and I have this belief that all comic characters are immortal. They’re eternal. I believe this is Bergson’s theory too. He has something, I’m told, about comic characters being figé. Like Mr. and Mrs. Micawber: they all have to go on forever and be invulnerable. Almost all Dickens’s characters have this peculiar existence of eternity, except the heroes, except Pip, or Nicholas Nickleby, or David Copperfield.
INTERVIEWER
What other characters in your novels do you consider—
McCARTHY
The comic ones? Who knows whether they’re immortal! As far as I’m concerned, they’re immortal!
INTERVIEWER
Then you haven’t thought of this distinction between “mortal” and “immortal” in relation to characters in other of your novels besides A Charmed Life?
McCARTHY
I didn’t think of this distinction until just recently, and not in connection with myself. It’s just at this very moment—now talking with you—that I’m thinking of it in connection with myself. I would say that it is a law that applies to all novels: that the comic characters are figé, are immortal, and that the hero or heroine exists in time, because the hero or heroine is always in some sense equipped with purpose.
The man in The Groves of Academe. Well, he’s immortal, yes. He is a comic villain, and villains too always—I think—partake in this comic immortality. I think so. I’m not sure that you couldn’t find an example, though, of a villain it wasn’t true of. In Dickens again. In the late novels, somebody like Bradley Headstone, the schoolmaster, he’s a mixed case. He’s certainly not a villain in the sense of, say, the villain in Little Dorrit, who belongs to the old-fashioned melodramatic immortal type of villain. Headstone is really half a hero, Steerforth is half a hero, and therefore they don’t conform to this. This all came to me last year, this distinction, when I was thinking about the novel. Not my novel: The Novel.
But maybe that’s really part of the trouble I’m having with my novel! These girls are all essentially comic figures, and it’s awfully hard to make anything happen to them. Maybe this is really the trouble! Maybe I’m going to find out something in this interview! That the whole problem is time! I mean for me, in this novel. The passage of time, to show development. I think maybe my trouble is that these girls are comic figures, and that therefore they really can’t develop! You see what I mean? They’re not all so terribly comic, but most of them are. How’re they ever going to progress through the twenty years between the inauguration of Roosevelt and the inauguration of Eisenhower? This has been the great problem, and here I haven’t had a form for it. I mean, all I know is that they’re supposed to be middle-aged at the end.
Yes, I think maybe that is the trouble. One possibility would be . . . I’ve been introducing them one by one, chapter by chapter. They all appear at the beginning, you know, like the beginning of an opera, or a musical comedy. And then I take them one by one, chapter by chapter. I have been bringing each one on a little later on in time. But perhaps I can make bigger and bigger jumps so that you could meet, say, the last one when she is already middle-aged. You see what I mean. Maybe this would solve the problem. One five years later, another eight years later, and so on. I could manage the time problem that way. This has been very fruitful! Thank you!
INTERVIEWER
I want to ask you about the problem of time in the novel. You have written that a novel’s action cannot take place in the future. But you have said that the action described in The Oasis all takes place in the future.
McCARTHY
The Oasis is not a novel. I don’t classify it as such. It was terribly criticized, you know, on that ground; people objected, said it wasn’t a novel. But I never meant it to be. It’s a conte, a conte philosophique.
INTERVIEWER
And A Charmed Life you say has fairy-tale elements.
McCARTHY
I’m not sure any of my books are novels. Maybe none of them are. Something happens in my writing—I don’t mean it to—a sort of distortion, a sort of writing on the bias, seeing things with a sort of swerve and swoop. A Charmed Life, for instance. You know, at the beginning I make a sort of inventory of all the town characters, just telling who they are. Now I did this with the intention of describing, well, this nice, ordinary, old-fashioned New England town. But it ended up differently. Something is distorted, the description takes on a sort of extravagance—I don’t know exactly how it happens. I know I don’t mean it to happen.
INTERVIEWER
You say in one of your articles that perhaps the fault lies simply in the material which the modern world affords, that it itself lacks—
McCARTHY
Credibility? Yes. It’s a difficulty I think all modern writers have.
INTERVIEWER
Other than the problem of arrangement of time, are there other specific technical difficulties about the novel you find yourself particularly concerned with?
McCARTHY
Well, the whole question of the point of view, which tortures everybody. It’s the problem that everybody’s been up against since Joyce, if not before. Of course James really began it, and Flaubert even. You find it as early as Madame Bovary. The problem of the point of view, and the voice: style indirect libre—the author’s voice, by a kind of ventriloquism, disappearing in and completely limited by the voices of his characters. What it has meant is the complete banishment of the author. I would like to restore the author! I haven’t tried yet, but I’d like to try after this book, which is as far as I can go in ventriloquism. I would like to try to restore the author. Because you find that if you obey this Jamesian injunction of “Dramatize, dramatize,” and especially if you deal with comic characters, as in my case, there is so much you can’t say because you’re limited by these mentalities. It’s just that a certain kind of intelligence—I’m not only speaking of myself, but of anybody, Saul Bellow, for example—is more or less absent from the novel, and has to be, in accordance with these laws which the novel has made for itself. I think one reason that everyone—at least I—welcomed Doctor Zhivago was that you had the author in the form of the hero. And this beautiful tenor voice, the hero’s voice and the author’s—this marvelous voice, and this clear sound of intelligence. The Russians have never gone through the whole development of the novel you find in Joyce, Faulkner, et cetera, so that Pasternak was slightly unaware of the problem! But I think this technical development has become absolutely killing to the novel.
INTERVIEWER
You say that after this novel about the Vassar girls, you—
McCARTHY
I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I want to try something that will introduce, at least back into my work, my own voice. And not in the disguise of a heroine. I’m awfully sick of my heroine. I don’t mean in this novel: my heroine of the past. Because the sensibility in each novel got more and more localized with this heroine, who became an agent of perception, et cetera.
Let me make a jump now. The reason that I enjoyed doing those books on Italy, the Venice and Florence books, was that I was writing in my own voice. One book was in the first person, and one was completely objective, but it doesn’t make any difference. I felt, you know, now I can talk freely! The books were written very fast, the Venice one faster. Even the Florence book, with masses of research in it, was written very fast, with a great deal of energy, with a kind of liberated energy. And without the peculiar kind of painstakingness that’s involved in the dramatization that one does in a novel—that is, when nothing can come in that hasn’t been perceived through a character. The technical difficulties are so great, in projecting yourself, in feigning an alien consciousness, that too much energy gets lost, I think, in the masquerade. And I think this is not only true of me.
INTERVIEWER
How did you come to write those books about Florence and Venice?
McCARTHY
By chance. I was in Paris, just about to go home to America, and somebody called up and asked if I would come and have a drink at the Ritz before lunch, that he wanted to ask me something. It was an intermediary from the Berniers, who edit L’Oeil. They were in Lausanne, and this man wanted to know whether I would write a book on Venice for them. I had been in Venice once for ten days, years ago, but it seemed somehow adventurous. And there were other reasons too. So I said yes. I went out to meet the Berniers in Lausanne. I had absolutely no money left, about twenty dollars, and I thought, what if all this is a terrible practical joke? You know. I’ll get to Lausanne and there won’t be any of these people! There’ll be nobody! I ran into Jay Laughlin that night, and he said that his aunt was in Lausanne at the moment, so that if anything happened to me, I could call on her! But in any case, I went to Lausanne, and they were real, they were there. And we drove to Venice together.
I knew nothing about the subject—maybe I exaggerate my ignorance now—but I was appalled. I was afraid to ask any questions—whenever I’d ask a question Georges Bernier would shudder because it revealed such absolutely terrifying depths of ignorance. So I tried to be silent. I’d never heard before that there was more than one Tiepolo, or more than one Tintoretto, that there was a son. I vaguely knew Bellini, but didn’t have any idea there were three Bellinis. Things like that. I couldn’t have been expected to know Venetian history, but actually Venetian history is very easy to bone up on, and there isn’t much. But the art history! And I considered myself a reasonably cultivated person! My art history was of the most fragmentary nature!
But it was fun, and then that led me into doing the Florence book. I didn’t want to, at first. But everything in Venice—in Italy, for that matter—really points to Florence, everything in the Renaissance anyway, like signposts on a road. Whenever you’re near discovery, you’re near Florence. So I felt that this was all incomplete; I thought I had to go to Florence. It was far from my mind to write a book. Then various events happened, and slowly I decided, All right, I would do the book on Florence. After that I went back to Venice and studied the Florentines in Venice, just for a few days. It was so strange to come back to Venice after being immersed in Florence. It looked so terrible! From an architectural point of view, so scrappy and nondescript, if you’d been living with the Florentine substance and monumentality, and intellectuality of architecture. At first coming back was a real shock. Oh, and I discovered I liked history! And I thought, my God, maybe I’ve made a mistake. Maybe I should have been a historian.
INTERVIEWER
It would also appear that you discovered you loved Brunelleschi.
McCARTHY
Oh, yes! Yes! Also, I felt a great, great congeniality—I don’t mean with Brunelleschi personally, I would flatter myself if I said that—but with the history of Florence, the Florentine temperament. I felt that through the medium of writing about this city I could set forth what I believed in, what I was for; that through this city, its history, its architects and painters—more its sculptors than its painters—it was possible for me to say what I believed in. And say it very affirmatively, even though this all ended in 1529, you know, long before the birth of Shakespeare.
INTERVIEWER
In reading the Florence book, I remember being very moved by the passage where you talk of Brunelleschi, about his “absolute integrity and essence,” that solidity of his, both real and ideal. When you write about Brunelleschi, you write about this sureness, this “being-itself,” and yet as a novelist—in The Company She Keeps for instance—you speak of something so very different, and you take almost as a theme this fragmented unplaceability of the human personality.
McCARTHY
But I was very young then. I think I’m really not interested in the quest for the self anymore. Oh, I suppose everyone continues to be interested in the quest for the self, but what you feel when you’re older, I think, is that—how to express this—that you really must make the self. It’s absolutely useless to look for it, you won’t find it, but it’s possible in some sense to make it. I don’t mean in the sense of making a mask, a Yeatsian mask. But you finally begin in some sense to make and to choose the self you want.
INTERVIEWER
Can you write novels about that?
McCARTHY
I never have. I never have, I’ve never even thought of it. That is, I’ve never thought of writing a developmental novel in which a self of some kind is discovered or is made, is forged, as they say. No. I suppose in a sense I don’t know any more today than I did in 1941 about what my identity is. But I’ve stopped looking for it. I must say, I believe much more in truth now than I did. I do believe in the solidity of truth much more. Yes. I believe there is a truth, and that it’s knowable.

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