Journalism:This is the second in a set of four volumes of collected interviews with writers carried out by a series of contributors to the Paris Review from 1953 (Graham Greene) to 2006 (Stephen King). In between, they cover the ilk of Gabriel García Márquez, Harold Bloom, Alice Munro and Robert Lowell.
The book is poorly served by the hyperbolic blurb that surrounds it. The writer Gary Shteyngart proclaims on the cover that its publication is "a colossal literary event". The problem is not just that a claim so exaggerated cannot but diminish one's sense of the book's actual successes, but, worse, it obscures what the book's modest but considerable achievement is: an understanding of what an interview with a writer can and can't do. Talk of "colossal events" or (according to the cover of the previous volume) "the DNA of literature", is out of keeping with the spirit of the interviews themselves. William Gaddis, in his interview in the volume, talks about his general reluctance to be interviewed. He usually avoids interviews because of a mistaken tendency he has observed of "putting the man in the place of his work", and because of his own "conviction that the work has got to stand on its own". He fears "talk-show pap, five-minute celebrity, turning the creative artist into a performing one". However, he has agreed to do an interview for the Paris Review precisely because this "does not seem to be the case [ with them]".
Proust's narrator comes into his vocation when he realises that being a writer is more analogous to being a cook or a dressmaker than a priest or a prophet. What is great about the Paris Review interviews is that they investigate the writer as worker, not the writer as celebrity. The creation of literature is regarded in these conversations not as a miracle or lifestyle, but as labour. Writing is mental work, the labour of the imagination, not the body, yet interviews with writers often choose to focus on the physical circumstances of writing - the time, the setting, the equipment (what Gaddis dismisses as up with "on what side of the page do you write?"). Though there is some of this in almost all of the Paris Review interviews collected here (most of them write in the early morning, everyone rewrites everything many times, lots of them write on yellow paper, none of them booze while they work, Toni Morrison uses a number two pencil), these material details are overshadowed by the often extraordinary accounts we get of the long, lonely, imaginative graft of making literature happen. After sedate discussions of influences, ambitions and coffee habits, the interviews suddenly take off into a discussion of the actual work itself, the complex inner struggle with the mind, the wrestling in the darkness from which writing is produced.
The writers strain to describe this process, and over the course of the interviews, they struggle with metaphors and images to convey what is going on while they are working. Eudora Welty talks of "sending a bucket down a well", Stephen King says his books feel like either "innies" or "outies". Morrison vividly describes a dramatic battle for control of Song of Solomon with one of the book's characters - "[ Pilate] was going to overwhelm everybody . . . I had to take it back. It's my book; it's not called Pilate".
The interviews in the book, almost without exception, suddenly get going when the conversation turns to these specific, intimate moments of work. The answers get longer and more impassioned, the pace quickens. There are general reflections on literature in many of the interviews, but all the really exciting material is generated in the movement from the particular to the general, when the conversation passes, almost accidentally, from reflections on the individual writer's experience of sitting down to hammer out a story or a poem, to wider considerations (Alice Munro's quiet feminism, for example, is expressed in a discussion of her working day).
When the writers become conscious of posterity listening in on the interview and duly issue oracular pronouncements, the result is rarely interesting. These statements tend to be oddly time-sensitive, perhaps because they are produced with an eye to impressing a contemporary audience, and so designed according to a set of contemporary tastes and prejudices (whether to conform to or refute them). The reader has a depressing sense of the wasted urgency of forgotten disputes, and longs for the interview to get back to the discussion of the factory floor.
In fact, it is the passage of time that one feels most strongly and movingly from reading this volume, indifferent as it is to whether the writers are alive or dead. The interviews are placed in chronological order, rather than alphabetically or according to some other geographic or thematic criterion, but each volume covers the range of the half century, a fact which suggests that this temporal axis was part of the intention behind the publication.
One lesson that comes from reading the interviews all at once is that what dates worst - and almost immediately - is disgust at the decline of culture in one's time. Reading these interviews makes it embarrassingly clear that railing against contemporary life, dire predictions of imminent cultural collapse, or the conviction that a new generation of artists are morons, that no-one does it like they used to, are in every single case not only boring to read but also strangely irrelevant, the most parochial, local and mistaken of concerns. With just a few years' hindsight all these predictions and pronouncements seem an inexplicable waste of energy. It is one of the things that we ask most eagerly of our writers: "tell us about now, what is happening in our culture, what is it going to become, will the novel live? will our culture die?".
But reading the answers given after great thought by these great writers, across the half century that the Paris Review volume spans, all of that energy, all that conviction and anxiety, seem futile. Not only does none of it come true - Faulkner, in 1956, is afraid that "the pictorial magazines and comic strips [ will] atrophy man's capacity to read" - but usually the pronouncer is barking up the wrong tree entirely. In a way, these interviews are for this reason a good, reassuring answer to our own fears about the internet, text-messaging or the death of the novel.
The individual voices of the writers come to us off these pages with an amazing, almost uncanny clarity. But what is exciting about the volume as a whole is the sense you have on closing the book, not of 16 writers from different places and eras, but of a single, composite writer speaking to us across the decades, a person at times cantankerous, pretentious or paranoid, but more often generous, impassioned and a little bit uncertain, for whom the battle to work, to write, is a battle for vitality, for life itself. It's this portrait of a generic writer at work, emerging from the collectivity of the interviews that, most of all, makes this book worthwhile reading; an antidote, in the end, to both the cult of the individual celebrity, and to fears or predictions of the demise of literature.
Barry McCrea is assistant professor of comparative literature at Yale University. His novel, The First Verse, published in the US by Carroll & Graf in 2005, will be published in Ireland by Brandon Books in May
The Paris Review Interviews: Vol 2 Edited by Philip Gourevitch Canongate, 448pp. £12.99