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Very much so. My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives. My early stories represent already an attempt to think about my central question. I think The Portage of San Cristobel of AH is more than that. That book may have a certain life. Proofs is another parable, an intellectual parable; but the speeches in AH, the parts of the novel that have really perhaps moved people, are also essays. I know that. They are statements of doctrine, of belief, of conviction, of questioning. The mystery whereby a creative artist somehow—we don't have an answer—generates a voice, a three-dimensional, ten-dimensional character who takes on independent life, has very little to do with pure intelligence or systematic, analytic powers. There are immensely intelligent novelists, God knows, and maybe Proust's was the most powerful mind of the century in some ways, cerebrally; but many are not that way at all. They can give no account of the spontaneous coming together within themselves and language of that genesis of the living, of that thing which walks in front of you so you forget the name of the author. That is genius, that is creativity, and I certainly don't have it. Two pages of Chekhov create for you a whole world and you never forget the voices. There they are. That is something very different, I think, from what somebody like myself can do.
in response to
You once referred to the “patience of apprehension” and “open-endedness of asking” which fiction can enact, and yet you have described your fictions as “allegories of argument, stagings of ideas.” Do you still consider them to be “stagings of ideas”?
Eastern Europe and Latin America, I think, almost without doubt. Great writing, great thinking, flourishes under pressure. Thinking is a lonely, cancerous, autistic, mad business: to be able to concentrate deeply, innerly. Very few people know how to think; real focused thinking is about the most difficult thing there is, and it profits enormously from pressure. Asked about Catholic censorship, Joyce said, “Thank God for it. I'm an olive; squeeze me.” Asked why he didn't leave the dangerous Buenos Aires at the time of the Peronistas to take up a position at Harvard, the smiling, blind Borges said, “Censorship is the mother of metaphor.” It isn't I who say these things, though I've been much attacked for them; it's the lions, it's the people who know about thinking and first-class writing.
in response to, Where is the best writing in the world being done now?
Let me put it another way. From western Portugal to St. Petersburg, you have cafés, places where you can come in the morning, order a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, spend the day reading the world's newspapers, playing chess and writing. The bibliography of magnificent books written in cafés is enormous. There are people who have always worked that way and preferred to. You don't have them in Moscow, which is an Asian frontier city. The line can be sharply drawn: Odessa is about the limit of the café. I'm a café creature, not a pub creature. The English pub is a very different animal, and the American bar is a profoundly different animal again. I'm at home everywhere in Europe because I go to a café the moment I arrive, either have a chess game, challenge somebody, or have them bring the papers for me on those wooden sticks, the old-fashioned ones where you roll them up, and it's the most egalitarian society in the world because the price of one cup of coffee or glass of wine buys you the day at the table, and you can write, you can do anything. After my lectures in Geneva, my students always knew at which café I would have my second coffee of the morning, or a glass of white wine, and they could come and chat. That's where the intellectual life really blazes.
In the famous troubles of 1968 and 1969, I was in some of the roughest spots — Harvard, Frankfurt — but the students absolutely respected an unreconstructed Platonist like myself. I had no trouble. They detested, they disagreed, but they knew that I felt passionately. They came to feel only contempt for those who wanted to howl with the wolves. Students can see through hypocrisy as through a glass not darkly. They know who is merely trying to please and flatter them. You cannot have it both ways. A person for whom Plato and Bach and Shakespeare and Wittgenstein are the stuff of his dreams, of his love, of his exasperations, of his daily life, of his communication, cannot pretend that he is a populist creature. It is that which nauseates me. If I come up against someone like Camille Paglia, who said Jimi Hendrix is more important than Sophocles, or if I meet someone who is really living that style of life, with all its dangers, then hats off. I may disagree with them. I happen to believe, for instance, that heavy metal and rock are the deconstruction of all human silence and of all hopes for human quietness and inwardness. But if somebody tells me that they're the voice of the future, and they are living that, and not pretending to do it from a white clapboard house with a large lawn and tenure, then there's absolute mutual respect, no difficulty. It's the cant of our profession, the cant, the bloody hypocrisy which gets me: wanting to have it both ways, running with the PC wolves in order to be loved.
Yes, I'm fascinated by the actual material techne of writing. I'm a morning creature. All my best work tends to be done in the morning, especially the early morning, when somehow my mind and sensibility operate much more efficiently. I read and take notes in the afternoon, then sketch the writing I want to do the next morning. The afternoon is the time for charging the battery. I write on very old-fashioned typewriters. The Paris Review has the largest collection of insight into this of any publication. It's utterly irrational, but I love foolscap; in America it's called “legal” size. It used to be available in any stationery shop, but you now have to order it in advance. I tend to type single-space on those huge sheets, badly typed without any attention, often even to paragraphing. This is the first naively typed, brute output. The second one will be double-spaced, and begin to be on normal-size typing paper, but still with a lot of hand insertions and corrections. So in a funny way, my rough draft is a single-spaced, typed scribble on foolscap. I don't know when it began, but I've been doing this for many, many years and I walk up and down the room like a deprived mother hen when I do not have that odd size of paper which somehow corresponds to the way I see a problem.
it's just fun to get insight into different writers' writing processes
he says later that revision goes like:
On the back of the draft, or in the margin. Then the next, still very rough, draft is double-spaced, so that there I revise between the spaces.
[...] This goes very much against the present collaborative trend. I think a page that sings, that lives in us, is a wildly autistic act; it's mad to do it at all. It's mad to think you might have something new to say, for God's sake, about the Old Testament. How many books are there on it already? Hundreds of thousands? I can't even guess: libraries full. So how can you be so crazy? How can you, after Proust and Joyce and Kafka and Faulkner, sit down and write a novel? I've never quite understood. Answer: you have to. And the you have to is a private cancer, a private tumor of the soul. It is not a collective act, as it can be in the sciences.
when asked, Do you seek advice from anybody when you're in the middle of a writing project?
So first of all I find myself in front of a terra incognita from the point of view of creative process. Secondly, I don't know what music does to me. I know it does everything to me. In my books I've often spoken of the opening of Edith Piaf's “Non, je ne regrette rien.” I go cold, I go hot, I'd vote for Monsieur Le Pen, I'd join the Foreign Legion. All sorts of magnificently irrational things follow on those opening bars for me. We know what music does to temperament. Plato suspected it of being too dangerously powerful. We know its uses in medicine, in therapy. What does music do inside us? What is it that responds?
But I've had other masters. Mr. Whittaker, of the original New Yorker, whose nickname was Mr. Frimbo, was my editor for the first twenty years there. Mr. Whittaker regarded an imprecision, of syntax or punctuation, as being dirty in an almost moral sense. If a sentence wasn't absolutely precise, if it waffled, if you put a colon where there should have been a semicolon, you were doing dirt: on your reader, on the language and ultimately on yourself. This could lead to transatlantic calls which you simply wouldn't believe. He would say, “Mr. Steiner” — always Mr., of course — “I think what you really meant was . . .” And you'd say, “Well that's what it says,” and he'd say, “No, no, not quite. Will you listen to it again?” And he'd read it again, and gradually you would realize that he was right, that it wasn't exactly what it said. Now that kind of love for the resources of the English language, for the inexhaustible nuance of English punctuation, is extraordinary. Mr. Whittaker was a superb teacher, and so was Mr. Shawn, whose care over detail became a legend in his lifetime. Those were true teachers to work with in harness.
I'm also wild about mountains, hence my joy living for twenty years in Switzerland and my keeping a base there now: to walk among the hills, just to walk, to look. Another difference perhaps from the democratic instincts of the United States is that I'm not a marine creature, a lover of the democracy of beaches. Mountains are harsh selectors. The higher you pant your way, the fewer you will meet. Solitude is, surely, the test. Is one worth living with (oneself)? In a way I am unable to formulate, even the final depths of love, of intercourse, find one alone. As will death. Consumer societies and egalitarian utopias have tried to efface this fact. To me, it has always seemed obvious. Death will, I sense, be interesting. It is not, I suspect, an interest to be shared.
I used to write stories that had lakes, that had deep blue waters shelled by the sky; water mucky and full of disease; I wrote stories where people used to break down and cry unbidden, unprovoked, just because of the way a stone looked when it was wet, or the way the wind ruffled the grass; the people in those stories might jump to violence unprovoked; they wore teal windbreakers and rolled packs of cigarettes into their T-shirts; some swore up and down to God Almighty and drank slugs from tail-boy beer cans (those were the same ones who might kick a mutt unprovoked, even kill it, the sharp snap of a dog’s jaw breaking, the sound of a wooden chopstick being pried apart). I had characters who walked alone in dust-moted houses, plains pressing like gaping mouths against the windows, while they considered how to cope with abuses; furnaces popped on in basements, and there was always the sickly smell of fuel oil that saturated everything. I used to produce characters, American loners, who kicked walls and acted in deranged ways. I used to write with a raw, tight-lipped wonder at the way some folks stood their isolation on end and made long lazy afternoons into festivals of despair and desperation. And I never wondered where a story was going because it was always going to the same place, that little plot of land on the lake, lifting high with yellow weeds, and the smell of lighter fluid starting a barbecue next door where things were better and people partied with the kind of gusto that stunned, destroyed, obliterated; boats crashed on the lake in the dark, folks lost arms and limbs, yet in the morning light rising over the flat dead water there was always some solace; a flank of geese wedging south, the end of summer, some russet colors to the leaves, the seasons making headway; for in my stories there was always that much, at least, to go on. In some of these stories the smell of pine sap prevailed and there were stony backgrounds; nights were long and cold and characters rolled in discomfort; some of these cold folks wore double socks and rubbed their hands together frantically trying to generate enough friction, as if they hoped to start a fire of their own flesh. Others felt the cold steel of a snub-nosed gun against their inside waistband, or the fine edge of a carbon blade as it came out of leather, knowing damn well I’d make use of that later because no matter what, they bowed to me and to me only when it came down to endings and resolutions and those swooping lines that plots are supposed to draw. And if the grace of God came into things it was stupid luck, blind luck, a car pulling to the shoulder in time.