Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews ed. by George Plimpton (review)

116Rocky Mountain Review GEORGE PLIMPTON, ed. Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series. New York: Viking, 1988. 445 p. Comes now—again—the Paris Review's Writers at Work. The book at hand is the Eighth Series ofinterviews culled from that estimable publication, this volume introduced by Joyce Carol Oates and edited (like the previous six) by George Plimpton. The book is a box of safe virtues: it is various; it is by turn serious and witty; it is hefty and solid. Any aroma of faint praise arises out ofthe reviewer's frustration in trying to say anything which is both summary and meaningful. A book which includes interviews with E.B. White and Elie Wiesel, Cynthia Ozick and Anita Brookner, among others, is a book with a wishful center at best. For the record, the interviewees are White, Leon Edel, Robert Fitzgerald, John Hersey, James Laughlin, Ozick, Wiesel, Derek Walcott, E.L. Doctorow, Brookner, Robert Stone, Joseph Brodsky, and John Irving. The interviewers are deft and adept. The Eighth Series includes for the first time writers who are not strictly "creative," viz., White, Edel, Fitzgerald, and Laughlin. Perhaps the most interesting case among these four is James Laughlin, recognized as a serious poet but recognized even more readily and widely as the founder (at Ezra Pound's behest) of New Directions. At least a third of the interview consists of Pound's valuable advice, Pound's exuberant behavior, Pound's stubborn genius; for the rest, we get a lot of good gossip on friendships and working relationships with—and among—William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Lowell, Tennessee Williams, and many others, with Gertrude Stein as lagniappe That is one thing a reader does go to a book like Writers at Work for, and there is no better source than one of the century's most adventurous and committed publishers. It will be interesting to see if any purists among the readership are peeved about this sensible departure. White and Edel, at the top of the content list, are a good shake-down for what is to come. I mean that although they share attractive traits as conversationalists—both men are affable, relaxed, and open—the interviews are wholly different experiences. The White that we hear is chatty and anecdotal, qualities which only highlight what infrequently ambushes us, as in "[being] a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly or unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost" (21). Edel's five-volume Life ofHenry James is such an achievement as to make even the obligatory "magisterial" seem inadequate, and we might expect the writer himself to sound monumental. He doesn't, but his interview, twice the length ofWhite's, is a very thorough and focused account ofhis work and his passion. This life's preoccupation is "a little like falling in love; at any rate that's the way it usually begins. You never know how long the affair or the infatuation will last. ... In the writing of the life changes occur, discoveries are made. Realities emerge" (28). The work, one senses, has defined the man and the man has come to equable terms with it: a gargantuan commitment has become, for him, almost matter-of-fact. Another interesting contrast is that between Anita Brookner and Cynthia Book Reviews117 Ozick, the only two women interviewed. I exaggerate when I say that all these interviews have nothing in common. The answers may vary widely, but there is, of course, a common question which can be summed up as "What does it mean to be a writer?" The contrast between these two women's answers is startling and almost comic. Brookner first tried her hand at the novel because she "wondered how it was done and the only way to find out seemed to be to try and do it" (327). This respected art scholar and teacher at the Courtauld Institute writes her novels during the summer recess, one per summer, and but for sometimes tinkering with the last chapter always submits her firstdraft manuscript (337...