Questions & Authors

WRITERS AT WORK: THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEWS, introduced by Van Wyck Brooks. 368 pages. Viking. $6.50.

Tired of listening to critics argue with each other in the pages of the little magazines, five young Americans founded the Paris Review ten years ago on the proposition that they would let the authors speak for themselves. This selection, the second to be issued in book form, contains detailed interviews with 14 major writers, six of them poets. Armed with tape recorders and probing questions the interviewers ranged the U.S. and Europe, talking to Lawrence Durrell in a French cottage, T. S. Eliot in a Manhattan apartment, and the late Boris Pasternak amid the fir trees of Peredelkino.

Living or Dead? It is hard to imagine the top people of any other profession being so profoundly and articulately dissatisfied with their own work. Poet Marianne Moore laments that she "never knew anyone who had a passion for words who had as much difficulty in saying things as I do." Boris Pasternak (described as looking "at the same time like an Arab and his horse") believes it is "no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated." Venerable Ezra Pound, 77, "stuck" and unable to finish his epic Cantos, says, "The question is. am I dead?" Katherine Anne Porter gloomily concludes, "Misunderstanding and separation are the natural conditions of man."

The enemy of these writers is the passage of days; their passionately sought goal is the finding of their own, true voice. "The further you go in writing the more alone you are," says Ernest Hemingway. "The time to work is shorter all the time, and if you waste it, you feel you have committed a sin." Anarchic Henry Miller notes that "the point I discovered is that the best technique is none at all," and argues, "A writer shouldn't think much." T. S. Eliot is in agreement about technique but cautions, "It's not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them."

Particular Father. Readers baffled by the complexities of such poems as the Cantos and The Waste Land may find consolation in the fact that the authors are as unhappy as their audience. To Ezra Pound obscurity is not so much in "the language but in the other person's not being able to make out why you are saying a thing." Robert Frost recalls his own difficulty in understanding Philosopher George Santayana: "I found years afterward somewhere in his words that all was illusion, of two kinds, true and false." Owlishly, Frost goes on: "And I decided false illusion would be the truth: two negatives make an affirmative." It all comes down to "hinting," Frost continues. "With people you can trust you can talk in hints and suggestiveness. Families break up when people take hints you don't intend and miss hints you do intend."

Some writers reply to specific charges. Cheerfully admitting to obscenity, Henry Miller asks, "Words, words--what is there to fear in them? Or in ideas? Supposing they are revolting, are we cowards? Haven't we been on the edge of destruction time and again through war, disease, pestilence, famine? What are we threatened with by the exaggerated use of obscenity? Where's the danger?" Accused of disloyalty to the U.S. because of his wartime broadcasts from Italy, Ezra Pound says broodingly, "T thought I was fighting for a constitutional point. I mean to say, T may have been completely nuts, but I certainly felt that it wasn't committing treason." Robert Frost, amused at being charged with conservatism, defines U.S. political parties in terms of sex: "The father is always a Republican toward his son, and his mother's always a Democrat."

At almost every turn, the writers have something provocative to say. Katherine Anne Porter sees human life as almost pure chaos, but says: "The work of the artist--the only thing he's good for--is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning. Even if it's only his view of a meaning." The book's burden is probably best expressed by Lawrence Durrell. Though he suffers acute physical nausea over his work, Durrell nevertheless declares: "I find art easy. I find life difficult."

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