 It's amazing what you find out about yourself when you write in the first person about someone very different from you.
Doris Lessing, The Art of Fiction No. 102, 1988 interviewed by Thomas Frick, in Women At Work Vol. II, Interviews from the Paris Review  While the tape recorder was being prepared, she said, "This is a noisy place here, when you think we're in a garden* behind a row of houses." She points across the way at the townhouse where Katharine Hepburn lives; the talk is about cities for a while. She has lived in London for almost forty years, and still finds that "everything all the time in a city is extraordinary!" More speculatively, as she has remarked elsewhere, "I would not be at all surprised to find out...that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess."
*at a home in Manhattan's east forties From the Introduction to Doris Lessing, The Art of Fiction No. 102, 1988 interviewed by Thomas Frick, in Women At Work Vol. II, Interviews from the Paris Review  Sarton: In the case of metaphor, it has everything to teach you about what you have felt, experienced. I write in order to find out what has happened to me in the area of feeling, and the metaphor helps. A poem, when it is finished, is always a little ahead of where I am. "My poem shows me where I have to go." That's from Roethke. His line actually reads, "I learn by going where I have to go."
May Sarton, The Art of Poetry No. 32, 1983 interviewed by Karen Saum, in Women At Work Vol. II, Interviews from the Paris Review  Interviewer: But now you are talking about an individual, and yet you say you are not interested in individuals.
Young: ...I say that I am not interested in people, but I am interested in the bizarre and in people at an edge. I am interested in extreme statements about people because that is where the drama is most apparent. Being a Scot and economical about my working so hard, I begin with what I know is easy—with something strange and beautiful that then starts to activate itself. Marguerite Young, The Art of Fiction No. 66, 1977 interviewed by Charles E. Ruas, in Women At Work Vol. II, Interviews from the Paris Review  Interviewer: That's a very classical view of the work of art—that it must end in resolution.
Porter: Any true work of art has got to give you the feeling of reconciliation—what the Greeks would call catharsis, the purification of your mind and imagination—through an ending that is endurable because it is right and true. Oh, not in any pawky individual idea of morality or some parochial idea of right and wrong. Sometimes the end is very tragic, because it needs to be. One of the most perfect and marvelous endings in literature—it raises my hair now—is the little boy at the end of Wuthering Heights, crying that he's afraid to go across the moor because there's a man and woman walking there. Katherine Anne Porter, The Art of Fiction No. 29, 1963 interviewed by Barbara Thompson Davis, in Women At Work Vol. II, Interviews from the Paris Review |
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