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WALCOTT: There is a duty in every son to become his own man. The son severs himself from the father. The Caribbean very often refuses to cut that umbilical cord to confront its own stature. So a lot of people exploit an idea of Africa out of both the wrong kind of pride and the wrong kind of heroic idealism. At great cost and a lot of criticism, what I used to try to point out was that there is a great danger in historical sentimentality. We are most prone to this because of suffering, of slavery. There’s a sense of skipping the part about slavery, and going straight back to a kind of Eden-like grandeur, hunting lions, that sort of thing. Whereas what I’m saying is to take in the fact of slavery, if you’re capable of it, without bitterness, because bitterness is going to lead to the fatality of thinking in terms of revenge.A lot of the apathy in the Caribbean is based on this historical sullenness. It is based on the feeling of ‘‘Look what you did to me.”” Well, “Look what you did to me,” is juvenile, right? And also, “Look what I’m going to do to you,” is wrong. Think about illegitimacy in the Caribbean! Few people can claim to find their ancestry in the linear way. The whole situation in the Caribbean is an illegitimate situation. If we admit that from the beginning that there is no shame in that historical bastardy, then we can be men. But if we continue to sulk and say, “Look at what the slave-owner did,” and so forth, we will never mature. While we sit moping or writing morose poems and novels that glorify a nonexistent past, then time passes us by. We continue in one mood,which is in too much of Caribbean writing: that sort of chafing and rubbing of an old sore. It is not because one wishes to forget; on the contrary, you accept it as much as anybody accepts a wound as being a part of his body. But this doesn’t mean that you nurse it all your life.
INTERVIEWER: Do you have any idea how a project is going to end?
DOCTOROW:Not at that point, no. It’s not a terribly rational way to work.It’s hard to explain. I have found one explanation that seems to satisfy people. I tell them it’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
[...] I subscribe to what Henry James tries to indicate when he gives that wonderful example of a young woman who has led a sheltered life walking along beside an army barracks and hearing a snatch of soldier’s conversation coming through the window. On the basis of that, said James, if she’s a novelist she’s capable of going home and writing a perfectly accurate novel about army life. I’ve always subscribed to that idea. We're supposed to be able to get into other skins. We're supposed to be able to render experiences not our own and warrant times and places we haven’t seen. That’s one justification for art, isn’t it—to distribute the suffering? Writing teachers invariably tell students, Write about what you know. That’s, of course, what you have to do, but on the other hand, how do you know what you know until you’ve written it? Writing is knowing. What did Kafka know? The insurance business? So that kind of advice is foolish, because it presumes that you have to go out to a war to be able to do war. Well, some do and some don’t. I’ve had very little experience in my life. In fact, I try to avoid experience if I can. Most experience is bad.
DOCTOROW: A writer’s life is so hazardous that anything he does is bad for him. Anything that happens to him is bad: failure’s bad, success is bad; impoverishment is bad, money is very, very bad. Nothing good can happen.
INTERVIEWER: Except the act of writing itself.
DOCTOROW: Except the act of writing. So if he shoots birds and animals and anything else he can find, you’ve got to give him that. And if he/she drinks, you give him/her that too, unless the work is affected. For all of us, there’s an intimate connection between the struggle to write and the ability to survive on a daily basis as a human being. So we have a high rate of self-destruction. Do we mean to punish ourselves for writing? For the transgression? I don’t know.
[...] To remain pure a novel has to cast a moral puzzle. Anything else is mere negotiation.
INTERVIEWER: You've been accorded from the beginning a handsome ration of prizes, awards, literary recognition of that kind. Has that had an effect on your work—given you an image you had to live in terms of?
STONE: I’ve kept my edge, stayed hungry, I think. I never sold so many copies that I got overfed. It’s less things like prizes than the simple fact of your first publication that changes everything forever. The minute you appear in print you lose some freedom and innocence and accept a degree of responsibility.
IRVING: Well, yes, they’re all fathers of my work, in a way. The polite world calls them extremists, but I think they are very truthful, very accurate. I am not attracted to writers by style. What style do Dickens, Grass, and Vonnegut have in common? How silly! I am attracted to what makes them angry, what makes them passionate, what outrages them, what they applaud and find sympathetic in human beings and what they detest about human beings, too. They are writers of great emotional range. They are all disturbed—both comically and tragically—by who the victims of a society (or of each other) are. You can’t copy that; you can only agree with it.
It is great not required of the writer in these interviews that he be and wise. We all know, we readers of contemporary literature, that our novelists and poets do not live better than we do. What is required is that the writer be gifted, which ever since the Romantic period has meant vividness, a heightened degree of involvement with himself, a sense of his particular gift or daemon. When we interview a gifted, vivid, intense, highly charged modern writer, we are really saying: What does it feel like to be this gifted? What's it like, day after day, living with a gift like yours? [...]
The fascination of these contemporary interviews, for me, is that each brings vividly before us, as a person seemingly different, gifted with a more instinctive sense of freedom, a writer who can never be sure that his emotions, his habits, his childhood, his loves and enmities, are not crucial to his work. The modern writer is likely to feel that his life and his work speak for each other; when an interviewer gently presses him to tell more, he will gladly try, for in the writer's own mind clarity about a seemingly personal matter seems to advance that moral clarity which is tantamount to literary power. Power, technical and intellectual power, the power to shape words that open up new realities in the mind, is what writers live for. And since, in modern times, writers feel that this power is in themselves alone, one can see why the gifted writer is enthralled by his own experiences, is gripped by himself in ways that are of technical interest to the rest of us. There is always something professional and impersonal in a writer's concern with his own experience. Even his eloquence about it shows gratitude for what he can make of himself.
A writer should never install himself before a panorama, however grandiose it may be. Like Saint Jerome, a writer should work in his cell. Turn the back. Writing is a view of the spirit. "The world is my representation." Humanity lives in its fiction. This is why a conqueror always wants to transform the face of the world into his image. Today, I even veil the mirrors.
blaise cendrars