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[...] That, in fact, was one reason Ezra became interested in Mussolini. He knew that Mussolini was an intelligent, rather cultivated man. He’d been a Socialist journalist. Ezra hoped that Mussolini would throttle the banks and could be converted into a patron of arts and letters. You remember the Renaissance princes, such as Sigismondo Malatesta. Ezra admired Sigismondo not because he went out and beat up other princes’ hired armies, but because he brought the best Greek scholars, such as Gemistus Plethon, and Italian artists such as Alberti and Duccio di Buoninsegna and Piero della Francesca, to his court and he built the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini for his girlfriend Isotta.
i mean yeah makes sense
INTERVIEWER: Whatsustained you without publication during that period?
OZICK: Belief. Not precisely self-belief, because that faltered profoundly again and again. Belief in Art, in Literature: I was a worshipper of Literature. I had a youthful arrogance about my“powers,” and at the same time a terrible feeling of humiliation, of total shame and defeat. When I think about that time—and I’ve spent each decade as it comes regretting the decade before, it seems—l wish I had done what I see the current generation doing: I wish I had scurried around for reviews to do, for articles to write. I wish I had written short stories. I wish I had not been sunk in an immense dream of immense achievement. For most of this time, I was living at home in my parents’ house, already married. But my outer life was unchanged from childhood. And my inner life was also unchanged. I was fixed, transfixed. It was Literature every breathing moment. I had no “ordinary” life. I despised ordinary life; I had contempt for it. What a meshuggas!
INTERVIEWER: Can you describe the feeling of first publication?
ozick: I was thirty-seven years old. I had the baby and the galleys together, and I sat at my desk—the same desk I use now, the same desk I inherited from my brother when I was eight years old—correcting the galleys with my right hand, and rocking the baby carriage with my left. I felt stung when the review in Time, which had a big feature on first novels that season, got my age wrong and added a year. I hated being so old; beginning when I thought I’d be so far along. I’ve had age-sorrow all my life. I had it on publication, but for the next ten years or so the child was so distracting that I hardly noticed what publication “felt’’ like.
ozick: [Resumes typing] The Modernist Dream. I recently did a review of William Gaddis and talked about his ambition—his coming on the scene whenit was alreadytoo late to be ambitious in that huge way with a vast modernist novel. But I was ambitious that way too. I no longer believe in Literature, capital-L, with the samefervor I used to. I’ve learned to respect living, perhaps. I think I have gotten over my fear of largeness as well, because I have gotten over my awe—my idolatrous awe. Literature is not all there is in the world, I now recognize. It is, | admit, still my All, but it isn’t the All. And that is a difference I can finally see.
OZICK: Quentin Bell’s biography told the story of his aunt, who happened to be the famous writer Virginia Woolf. But it was a family story really, about a woman with psychotic episodes, her husband’s coping with this, her sister’s distress. It had, as I said, the smell of a household. It was not about the sentences in Virginia Woolf’s books. The Wharton biography, though more a “literary” biography, dealt with status, not with the writer’s private heart. What do I mean by“private heart’? It’s probably impossible to define, but it’s not what the writer does—breakfast, schedule, social outings—but what the writer is. The secret contemplative self. An inner recess wherein insights occur. This writer’s self is perhaps coextensive with one of the writer’s sentences. It seems to me that more can be found abouta writer in any single sentencein a workoffiction, say, than in five or ten full-scale biographies. Or interviews!
ozick: Ah! When I’ve taught those classes, I always say, “Forget about “Write about what you know.’ Write about what you don’t know.” The point is that the self is limiting. The self—subjectivity—is narrow and bound to be repetitive. We are,after all, a species. When you write about what you don’t know, this means you begin to think about the world at large. You begin to think beyond the home-thoughts. You enter dream and imagination.
WIESEL: What is good for me is not necessarily good for someone else. Writing is so personal, so profoundly and terribly personal. Your entire personality goes into every word. The hesitation between one word and another is filled with many centuries, much space. And you deal with it one way, because of what you are, and somebody else deals with it another way. There are no rules. Even technically, some writers need all kinds of idiosyncrasies. One took a wetcloth to his forehead; another had to get drunk; a third had to take drugs; Hemingway stood, another was sitting, another was lying. Would you say there are precepts that you have to sit or lie?
INTERVIEWER: Why not journalism?
WIESEL:It’s a different kind of recording. Journalism is too immediate, too monotonous and superficial. A chronicler is alone in his room and writes. A journalist is rarely alone. He writes about other people, and the essential is always missed. I was a journalist long enough to know. You write only of the fleeting moment—the most dramatic, the most visible, not the underlying reasons.
INTERVIEWER: Are you waiting for the Messiah?
WIESEL: Not for a personal one. But I am waiting for something. It may be forever, but I would not want to stop waiting.
INTERVIEWER: Why?
WIESEL: Life would be empty. If everything were concentrated in the present, there would be no possibility of transcending the present. We are suspended between the absolute past and the absolute future over which we have no control. It’s a creeping flame. Sometimes it bends one way, sometimes the other way. Sometimes it brings light and sometimes fire—life or destruction. Take away the waiting, what remains? I think the Messianic concept, which is the Jewish offering to mankind, is a great victory. What does it mean? It means that history has a sense, a meaning, a direction; it goes somewhere, and necessarily in a good direction—the Messiah. At least we would like to think that history is going in that direction. But I think it’s going in the wrong direction. We are heading towards catastrophe. I think the world is going to pieces. I am very pessimistic. Why? Because the world hasn’t been punished yet, and the only punishment that could be adequate is the nuclear destruction of the world.
i just like the way he talks
WALCOTT: [...] Individual writers have different postures, different stances, even different physical attitudes as they stand or sit over their blank paper, and in a sense, without doing it, they are crossing themselves; I mean,it’s like the habit of Catholics going into water: you cross yourself before you go in. Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic. I haven’t noticed what my own devices are. But I do know that if one thinks a poem — is coming on—in spite of the noise of the typewriter, or the traffic outside the window, or whatever—you do make a retreat, a withdrawal into some kind of silence that cuts out everything around you. What you’re taking on is really not a renewal of your identity but actually a renewal of your anonymity, so that what’s in front of you becomes more important than what you are. Equally—and it may be little pretentious sounding to say it—sometimes if I feel that I have done good work I do pray, I do say thanks. It isn’t often, of course. I don’t do it every day. I’m not a monk,but if something does happen I say thanks because I feel that it is really a piece of luck, a kind of fleeting grace that has happened to one. Between the beginning and the ending and the actual composition that goes on, there is a kind of trance that you hope to enter where every aspect of your intellect is functioning simultaneously for the progress of the composition. But there is no way you can induce that trance.