Interviews with Contemporary Novelists

304 Pages·1986·80.39 MB·English

by  Diana Cooper-Clark (auth.)

NOVELISTS
INTERVIEWS WITH CONTEMPORARY NOVELISTS

INTERVIEWS WITH
CONTEMPORARY
NOVELISTS
Diana Cooper-Clark
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-08111-0 ISBN 978-1-349-08109-7 (eBook)
DOl 10.1007/978-1-349-08109-7
©Diana Cooper-Clark 1986
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1986 978-0-333-39532-5
All rights reserved. For information, write:
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Published in the United Kingdom by The Macmillan Press Ltd.
First published in the United States of America in 1986
ISBN 978-0-312-42534-0
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Cooper-Clark, Diana.
Interviews with contemporary novelists.
Includes index.
1. Novelists-20th century-Interviews. I. Title.
PN452.C66 1986 809.3'04 [B) 85-14520
ISBN 978-0-312-42534-0
To Trevor, with love

Contents
Introduction 1
1 Carlos Fuentes 27
2 Margaret Drabble 47
3 Nadine Gordimer 74
4 Robertson Davies 89
5 Erica Jong 115
6 Isaac Bashevis Singer 144
7 Vasily Aksyonov 158
8 Elie Wiesel 176
9 Toni Morrison 190
10 Colin Wilson 212
11 Mary Gordon 239
12 Julio Cortazar 256
Index 291
Introduction
Interviews have been both damned and praised. Saul Bellow
dislikes interviews because he says they are like thumbprints on
his windpipe. V. S. Naipaul agrees and feels that some people
are wounded by interviews and lose a part of themselves. Hans
Habe recalled in his autobiography that in the thirties and
forties, the successful writer was snatched up by a tornado of
interviews, often to the detriment of the writer. Fortunately, for
me, all writers do not feel this way. James Dickey has said that
the interview is one of the great art forms of our time. I concede
to those who might find my insertion of Dickey's statement
self-serving; perhaps there is a middle ground. Julio Cortazar
believed that an interview is like a sonata for two instruments,
and it must be played equally well by both instruments if the
sonata is to be beautiful. If one instrument is good and the other
is not, then the sonata is a failure.
I do know I am grateful that I had not read a recent interview
with Carlos Fuentes, entitled 'No More Interviews' before I
invited him to participate in this book. There are those who
might see interviewers in the same light as biographers. In 1946,
Richard EHmann visited Edith Sitwell to discuss W. B. Yeats
for his book, Yeats: The Man and the Masks. Sitwell later
explained to John Lehmann that EHmann's thesis was the effect
on his poetry of Yeats' relationship with Maud Gonne and
others. 'Oh, oh, oh', she cried, 'is it not awful that every great
man has got to be exhumed and nailed down at the crossroads
with a stake through his heart?' That is something to consider!
However, the writers in this book participated in its creation and
hopefully the interviews are not stakes through their hearts or
their novels.* Rightly or wrongly, when a writer excites and
* Sadly, after the book was completed, Julio Cortazar died. This was his last
major interview and he was very pleased with it. My thanks to him and to all of
the other writers.
D. Cooper-Clark, Interviews with Contemporary Novelists
© Diana Cooper-Clark 1986
2 Introduction
enchants me, I want to breathe the same air, ascend the heights
in conversation, and in some small measure follow the creative
river to its source; it is one way to enter the secret garden of
literature. It was in the spirit of St Augustine's lovely notion in
his Confessions, that I began this book: 'Conversations and
jokes together, mutual rendering of good services, the reading
together of sweetly phrased books, the sharing of nonsense and
mutual attentions.' These interviews are not the result of
star-mania. In accounting for this not so new phenomenon,
Hans Habe wrote:
The . . . lack of imagination, . . . makes it necessary to see an
author whose work one has read; otherwise one cannot
picture him. Like so many other things, one must be able to
touch him. It is the same attitude that makes Americans take
their beautifully constructed motor-cars to pieces as soon as
they have bought them; they are not satisfied until they have
personally convinced themselves what makes them tick.
Similarly they must look into the author's head. 1
Obviously, this is not an exclusively American phenomenon. It
wasn't necessary to meet these writers in order to enter their
literary worlds and I wasn't 'symbol-sniffing'. But I did want to
talk to the writers about contemporary literature in general, and
their work in particular, and give them an opportunity to
respond to critical interpretations of their work. The interviews
also taught me a great deal about my own failings as both a
reader and a critic. It was sometimes humorous in my un
intentional parody of myself. In my interview with Margaret
Drabble, I pontificated about the connections between
Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy and her novel The Ice
Age, pridefully secure in my own flight. She reduced my
bombast to embarrassing simplicity.
To read a book is one of the most intimate ways of sharing
someone's mind and heart. Writer and reader travel together. It
is a personal journey for both. The writer begins as the
cartographer, drawing the map, marking the lines and charting
new territory. And in the best writers it is a new land because
no-one has quite seen it that way before. The Indians had
already seen the Pacific before Balboa first gazed from the
heights of Darien at its wonder. Yet that infinite expanse of