Quiet, Please, Writers Talking

By R.Z. Sheppard

CONVERSATIONS WITH AMERICAN WRITERS by Charles Ruas; Knopf; 416 pages; $17.95

Charles Ruas speaks in his introduction of personae, archetypes, universal dialogues and seminal experiences. The idea of the Great American Novel hovers feebly over the graves of Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Majestic imaginations recede, literary vision narrows, culture breaks into fragments, and the public slinks off to attend the marriage of arts and leisure.

The 14 writers whose distinctive voices fill the pages of Ruas' book with shoptalk and gossip have learned to work against this unpromising backdrop. From Eudora Welty, 75, to Scott Spencer, the 39-year-old author of Endless Love, these eloquent veterans also know how to plug along through praise, criticism and indifference. Some careers grow slowly, like redwoods. Each Welty story added a ring to her reputation until today she is treated with the reverence accorded endangered species. Joseph Heller works hard just to keep the standing won nearly 25 years ago with Catch-22. William Burroughs, whose satiric fantasies once thrilled the critics, is hardly reviewed today.

It is a lonely and exacting business. Paul Theroux (The Mosquito Coast, The Great Railway Bazaar) is succinct: "Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves." Robert Stone (Dog Soldiers, A Flag for Sunrise) is windy and funny: "I'm not much crazier than anybody else, but I'm not much saner. So, I thought, I'm really feeling crazy today, I think I'll go see a shrink ... He was everything that a psychiatrist should be: ... Jewish ... very together, very humane. I went to him, and I talked to him, and he said, 'What you need is religion. What you should do is to go to Uttar Pradesh in India--the ground is so holy that the vibes coming up from the ground will clear up your head.' "

But sometimes the riled imagination can yield convincing ghosts. Says Marguerite Young, poet and author of the dreamlike novel Miss Macintosh, My Darling: "I see Emily Dickinson quite often, Virginia Woolf, and Dickens. Poe ... oh, all the time, I see him on misty nights at Sheridan Square when the raindrops are falling." Young admits her visions are irrational, yet they are real and useful to her. Even as balanced a writer as Susan Sontag summons up persuasive phantoms, those subtle abstractions that take shape in her essays but scarcely survive outside their contexts.

By contrast, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and the late Truman Capote thrust their work and themselves into the world of commerce, celebrity, hostility and jealousy. "Envy, envy, envy!" cries Capote. "The people simply cannot endure success over too long a period of time. It has to be destroyed." Not since Benvenuto Cellini has there been a major talent with such a courtier's view of his art. His social timing and instinct for wounding gossip were displayed in published sections of his controversial work in progress, Answered Prayers. He refers to it as his "big ace up my sleeve," though since his death neither his publisher nor his friends have been able to find a finished manuscript.

Vidal and Mailer deliver. Says the sage of Brooklyn Heights: "If you're talking to three people, you will affect history as much as if you talk to 3 million or 30 million people. By the time you're talking to 30 million people, you will say things like 'We've got to balance the budget.' " Vidal is superb in his role as Prince of the Lost Republic. He is proud of his influential forebears (notably his grandfather Senator Thomas Gore) and justly pleased that since the age of 20, the lifelong bachelor has supported himself solely by writing: "I did not marry money, as some of my wise confreres have done."

Ruas, Princeton and Sorbonne educated and until 1979 the arts director of New York City radio station WBAI, has selected and edited wisely. He thumps for no school of thought or critical trend. Indeed, literary culture as a major moral or aesthetic influence has slipped to the sidelines. What remains is not agreed-upon styles but individual voices: Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon) trying to evoke black history with the techniques of magic realism; E.L. Doctorow intoning the nation's hidden past with lyric inventiveness; Spencer's ironic dramas of youth; the late Tennessee Williams, America's best modern playwright, signing off with the pathetic statement, "People associate my name with successes. I've had a succession of failures."

So have all the other writers in this book. The number of false starts and full wastepaper baskets alluded to is impressive. What these authors share is failures that eventually lead to triumphs. Sontag speaks for all when she quotes Nietzsche: "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger." --By R.Z.Sheppard