Q. and A.

By Christopher Porterfield

WRITERS AT WORK: THE PARIS REVIEW INTERVIEWS Edited by George Plimpton Viking; 414 pages; $22.50

The case against interviews with writers is historic: they exploit personalities, expose their subjects in verbal undress, without their styles hitched up, and they traffic in anecdote and gossip. This is also the case in favor of such interviews. And why not? How else would a faithful reader learn-- as he does in Writers at Work--that Elizabeth Bishop, while a student at Vassar, ate from a bedside pot of Roquefort cheese at night to stimulate dreams for her notebooks, and once spent a night in a tree outside her dormitory? Or know about Carson McCullers' visiting Elizabeth Bowen's ancestral estate in Ireland and coming down to dinner on the first night in tennis shorts? Or get a firsthand description of the Ouija board sessions by which James Merrill and a friend have derived the material for three volumes of his poetry ("He puts his right hand lightly on the cup, I put my left, leaving the right free to transcribe, and away we go. We get, oh, 500 to 600 words an hour. Better than gasoline").

The Paris Review interviews provide a flexible medium for all this and more, and yet have evolved into a form unto themselves. They are the very model of the modern literary interview. Generally the interviewees are well chosen, the interviewers well prepared, the results well edited (a process in which the subjects nearly always collaborate, sometimes to the point of taking over the interviewer's role and inserting their own questions). They have been appearing in the quarterly Paris Review since its founding in 1953. With this new volume, the magazine's editor, George Plimpton, has assembled six collections of them between hard covers. Taken together, they add up to an intimate and engaging chronicle of contemporary literary life.

As in previous volumes, some of the writers here do not so much expose themselves as assume a role. But the masks they choose are also revealing. Rebecca West, an actress in her youth, plays her interview like Dame Edith Evans doing a scene from Oscar Wilde ("You know, I don't really appreciate the Virgin Mary. She always looks so dull"). West is mischievously iconoclastic about famous authors as only one who has rubbed elbows with them can be. Shaw's was "a poor mind, I think"; Maugham "couldn't write for toffee, bless his heart."

Tennessee Williams imitates a monologue in one of his own plays as he spins out florid, ribald fantasias on his family life. His mother, Miss Edwina, screamed whenever she had sex with his father and believed that the rattle of garbage cans in St. Louis was a signal for a black uprising. At 94 she changed her name to Edwin and imagined that a horse had moved into her room: "She'd always wanted a horse as a child. And now that she finally had one, she didn't like it one bit."

For many of the writers, their chief literary capital and favorite topic are one and the same: their younger selves. West, astonishingly, started out wanting to write like Mark Twain. Stephen Spender, looking back, decides that "a lot of my poetry was spoiled by my not knowing how to write my own kind of poem. I think that I only really grasp it now." This, at age 69. Usually such knowledge comes only after youthful powers have waned, as Mexico's Carlos Fuentes points out. Reminiscing about the publication of his first book 23 years earlier, Fuentes says, "What energy I had then: I wrote that novel "in four years while finishing law school, working at the University of Mexico, getting drunk every night, and dancing the mambo. Fantastic. No more. You lose energy and you gain technique."

Editor Plimpton apparently has aimed at topicality in two ways: by including, in a valedictory spirit, a sizable contingent of the recently dead (Bishop, West, Williams, William Goyen, John Gardner) and by gathering a small cluster of Third World writers. The extraordinary vitality of the latter's work, argues South Africa's Nadine Gordimer, comes partly from the fact that only under oppressive regimes can writers find true heroes, "people who voluntarily choose to put everything at risk." Fuentes stresses that Latin American and East European novelists have "the privilege of speech in societies where it is rare to have that privilege. We speak for others." The privilege is a burden for Colombia's Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who finds that his world-wide fame has slowed his output to a single paragraph on a good day: "This upsets and inhibits me. It's like a million eyes are looking at you and you don't really know what they think."

Many of the questions concern sources, structures, how many hours the writers work, whether they use a pencil or typewriter: all the quotidian details through which the envious and hopeful seek to catch some of the magic. The magic, of course, remains in the what, not the how. It is in the way Gardner pokes fun at modern nihilism by imagining a domestic scene: "Every night Samuel Beckett goes home to his wife, whom he's lived with all these years; he lies down in bed with her, puts his arms around her, and says, 'No meaning again today.'" It is in the characteristic pithiness with which Bernard Malamud defines what he learned, as a writer, from Charlie Chaplin: "The rhythm, the snap of comedy; the reserved comic presence--that beautiful distancing; the funny with sad; the surprise of surprise." In such remarks, which occur throughout the best of these conversations, language is "used and trusted," as Merrill puts it, "to ground the lightning of ideas.''

--By Christopher Porterfield