Their Way With Words - WSJ.com

Their Way With Words - WSJ.com: நேர்காணல்கள் மீது எனக்கு ரொம்பவே பிரியம் உண்டு. சுபமங்களாவில் வந்த பேட்டிகளில் ஆரம்பித்து வண்ணத்திரை நடிகைகளின் துணுக்குப் பேட்டி வரை எல்லாமே மிகவும் பிடித்தம். இந்தத் தொகுப்பை நூலகத்தில் தேடிப் பிடிக்க வேண்டும்.

முழுவதும் வாசிக்க:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122878243643389863.html

வாசிப்புரை:
"To ask the hard question is simple," declares the poet W.H. Auden, implying that it is much harder to answer than to ask. Writing is a form of show business, however, and answering questions -- talking -- is something writers surely love to do as much as movie stars.

Over the years, the writer-interviews in the Paris Review have become literary landmarks -- a mix of gossip, humor, personal reflection, vanity, confession, advice, annoyance and odd detail. "I write with a pencil," Toni Morrison commented when asked: "What is the physical act of writing like for you?" In such ways we are supposed to get to the heart of how writers work.

"Paris Review Interviews: Vol. III" -- the third in a series -- is commendably wide-ranging, offering conversations with writers from the 1950s (Ralph Ellison, Georges Simenon, Isak Dinesen) and the 1960s (Evelyn Waugh, William Carlos Williams) as well as from the 1990s (Chinua Achebe, Ted Hughes, Jan Morris) and from the past few years (Norman Mailer, Salman Rushdie). Along the way we hear from people as diverse as Raymond Carver, Harold Pinter, John Cheever, Martin Amis and Joyce Carol Oates.

* Who would not be fascinated to learn that Isak Dinesen loved jazz, smoked liked a train and craved the taste of strawberries?

* That the thrice-married Jean Rhys hated rooms ("A room is, after all, a place where you hide from the wolves") and lamented that "nobody says a thing is splendid anymore"?

* That Ted Hughes and his wife, Sylvia Plath, once dined with T.S. Eliot ("He had big hands") and that Hughes destroyed Plath's last journal, which "covered maybe two or three months, the last months" before her suicide? ("It was just sad. I just didn't want her children to see it, no. Particularly her last days.")

* That travel-writer Jan Morris only travels alone, believes that Chicago "comes nearest to the ideal of a perfect city" and remains fully convinced that one of her books ("Pleasures of a Tangled Life"), written as a woman, would have been different if it had been written by the man she used to be?

* That Evelyn Waugh loathed William Faulkner's books, thought cigarettes to be "rather squalid in the bedroom" and would have much preferred living in either the 13th century or the 17th?

* That Norman Mailer delighted in doodling on oyster shells and, when young, counseled the actress Shelley Winters on how best to interpret her role (jilted girlfriend) in "A Place in the Sun"?

* That Harold Pinter back in the 1960s sipped Scotch all day and was fined for refusing military service?

* That Martin Amis rolls his own cigarettes, writes in longhand and believes that the most interesting things happen to you when you are alone?

All manner of questions are here. Are writers story-tellers primarily or mainly users of language? Is the best writing done in the morning or at night?

* Raymond Carver, when asked who is major influences are, lists about 30, from James Joyce to Bobbie Ann Mason.

* Waugh is spare, laconic and gruff, as one might expect.

* Long-winded Ted Hughes answers his questions in full pages.

* Rhys is tentative, wistful and nervous.

* Salman Rushdie, who discusses the infamous fatwa at interminable length. cites the importance in his fiction of going to the movies. Somehow one is not surprised.

Mailer, who first spoke to the Paris Review in 1964, is still cheerful 40 years later, still expansive and ready to pontificate on any subject. He dismisses the idea that a baroque style is easy and recalls thinking, when writing .

The Executioner's Song" (an example of the non-baroque): "You guys [critics] keep talking about the virtues of simplicity -- I'll show you. There's absolutely nothing to simplicity, and I'm going to prove it with this book." A co-religionist in this department agreed. "Artificial?" Dinesen said of her tales. "Of course they are artificial. They were meant to be, for such is the essence of the tale-telling art."

Simenon abhorred what Waugh referred to as "gluttonous writing," though Waugh admitted that his very own "Brideshead Revisited," a novel rich in evocative description, was a good example of the type, "a direct result of the privations and austerity of the times."

The prolific Simenon -- who gave one day to a chapter, wrote six novels a year and cranked out books like bags of bagels -- abhorred a "literary" style. "Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. . . . You know, you have a beautiful sentence -- cut it," he said. "I use concrete words. I try to avoid abstract words, or poetical words, you know, like crepuscule, for example. It is very nice, but it gives nothing."

What's curious is that many never wanted to be writers. "I was a painter before I was a writer," said Isak Dinesen.

Waugh also set out to be a painter, though he failed: "I had neither the talent nor the application -- I didn't have the moral qualities."

Rhys confesses that she wanted to become an actress. "I don't think writing is a profession," says Simenon. "I think that everyone who does not need to be a writer, who thinks he can do something else, ought to do something else." Rhys agrees: "When I was excited about life, I didn't want to write at all. I've never written when I was happy."

Chinua Achebe is asked whether he has ever taught creative writing. "No," he answers. "I don't know how it's done. I mean it. I really don't know. The only thing I can say for it is that it provides for writers. Don't laugh!"

Ralph Ellison, talking about "Invisible Man" in 1955, says: "I feel that with my decision to devote myself to the novel I took on one of the responsibilities inherited by those who practice the craft in the United States: that of describing for all that fragment of the huge diverse American experience which I know best. . . . The American novel is in this sense a conquest of the frontier; as it describes our experience, it creates it."

It is true. The hard questions are simple. The answers rarely are.