Katy's Blog

François Mauriac was a Nobel Prize winning French writer. I had trouble getting a sense of his work from my brief searches online. I gather both from the biographical information I was able to find and from the interview itself that he was a devout Catholic and struggled with the challenge of writing fiction that represented his beliefs. His novels, it seems, while they reflected religious themes, were often dark and dealt with baser themes, which irritated some Catholic readers. In addition to winning the Nobel, he was admitted into the Académie Française and was made a Grand Officer of the Legión d’Honneur.

The interview begins with a quote from another literary magazine: La Table Ronde. The interview is framed as a continuation of the discussion from that magazine. In that quote, he says:

Every novel worthy of the name is like another planet, whether large or small, which has its own laws just as it has its own flora and fauna.

He spends quite a bit of the interview talking about this notion, this idea that there is no “standard” technique, no rules for now novels should be written. It’s all about the expression of the world of the novelist, the expression of his or her perspective, his or her truth.

Many other things are discussed, but I’m going to stay with this point for now. It’s something I’ve been teetering on the edge of dealing with for some time. There is a lot of preoccupation with “finding your voice” in writing circles these days (and has been for some time) and I think “voice,” in a way, is being substituted for perspective. I also think that the only answer to the challenge of finding your voice or your perspective is the ancient Greek maxim: “know thyself.”

In fact, at one point in the interview, Mauriac says as much: “I feel that a writer’s first duty is to be himself, to accept his limitations. The effort of self-expression should affect the manner of expression.” The effort of self-expression should affect the manner of expression. I have to admit, I’m struggling a little to unpack that sentence. “The effort of self-expression,” so the work we do in trying to express our ideas about the world, or the work it takes to do so, the things we feel we must do to get these ideas across. “The manner of expression,” so the method or means or forum or medium of expression.

And this is where I’m going back to the phrase “the effort of self-expression.” I may be thinking about it too concretely. But maybe not. Maybe he isn’t talking about the work we do to get our ideas across to others, but rather to figure out what those ideas are in the first place. The problem with that interpretation, though, is the word “expression.” It implies a projection from the self outward. In fact, you can use the word to mean pressing something out. It is often used that way in medical contexts, but thinking about that is a little gross. So, let’s put it in a more palatable context: cooking. Take a lemon. You can get the juice from it by using a juicer (and gravity) to extract it, or pull it out. You could also squeeze, or express, it. So yes, to self-express is to present your self – your ideas, your passions, your opinions, etc. – to others. So it all comes down to how you perceive the world and how best to portray that perception.

I keep thinking about surrealist artists like Picasso and Dalí. They had ideas about the world that were best expressed, or most naturally expressed, visually, but that did not fit within the confines of realist structures. And so they invented their own styles, rather than trying to confine the expression of their selves to the rules set by the masters that came before them.

Mauriac mentions Proust, Balzac, Faulkner, Kafka, and Hemingway (among others) as writers who “invented a style to express what they wanted to say.” he also lamented the fact that he saw many young writers imitating the styles of these men rather than creating their own. For Mauriac, then, the true calling of art is not imitation, but creation.

Finding out that E.M. Forster was the first interview was the tipping point in making the decision to go forward with this project. A Room With A View is one of my favorite books, although I came to it rather late. I was prompted by the latest adaptation of the book, which aired on PBS in 2008. The story surprised me as it seems progressive for its time. How many romantic heroes from that time utter lines like, “I want you to have your own thoughts even when I hold you in my arms?” Only George Emerson, I think. And that makes him my favorite.

Reading the interview only made me like Forster more. I wish I could have been there, talking with him, listening to him. Instead I will most likely go out and get the rest of his books and devour them. I am especially anxious to read A Passage to India. It’s kind of a travesty that I haven’t already.

The thing I loved most about this interview is Forster’s attitude towards his own work. I can only hope to one day be as open-minded about my own. When the interviewer challenges him, Forster is willing and even quick to concede the point. In one instance, the interviewer makes the argument that, for him, the affair between Leonard Bast and Helen in Howard’s End seemed too sudden and not entirely convincing. Forster’s first response is, “I think you may be right.” He goes on to explain why he wrote it the way he did, but he doesn’t seem defensive or argumentative about it.

During the interview, Forster gives some good writing advice as well. He advises that writers would do well to begin with an idea of what the major event in the story is to be and then work towards it. He also admitted to using real people as models for fictional characters.

A useful trick is to look back upon such a person with half-closed eyes, fully describing certain characteristics. I am left with about two-thirds of a human being and can get to work.

Throughout the interview, Forster comes across as soft-spoken, modest, intelligent, and the consummate professional. The interview ends with him expressing his regret that he hadn’t written more and noting that he had “always found writing pleasant.”

Reading this interview – and I am sure this will happen with most, if not all, the others – I am left with the sense that I am not as well-read as I would like to be. That’s not to say that I am not well-read, I read like a fiend, but rather that I wish that I had more time and patience to devote to some of the older, more classic texts – Plato, Montaigne, Beckett, etc. Forster cites Jane Austen and Proust as the two authors that have taught him the most. I certainly don’t feel inadequate on Austen, I went through quite the Austen phase in high school, but I have never read a word of Proust. It seems to me that I ought to. I  actually happen to have a copy of Swann’s Way sitting on my shelf. Just waiting.

Up next is François Mauriac, who I am going to have to look up. This is one of the writers I haven’t heard of before. Again with the feelings of inadequacy. I suppose, however, that taking on this project is a way of addressing that, though.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was thinking about doing something with the Paris Review interviews. The idea had occurred to me earlier that day and it sounded like a good one, but it also sounded like something that would take a lot of time. Time, as it happens, is not something I have in abundance. To be honest, I’m running a bit of a deficit in that department right now. To be completely honest, I like it that way. God forbid I ever run out of project ideas, I might actually get bored (horror of horrors!).

Back to the interviews. I sat with the idea for a few days, trying to talk myself out of it. I have a full-time job, two kids, a husband, a house, a novel-in-progress, relatives, did I mention the kids? I have to time for a project like this. Except, I have learned that if we wait until we “have time” for all the things we want to do, we’ll die never having done them. It’s not a question of whether or not you have time, but rather whether or not you are willing to make the time. It’s all about priorities. So, the question was, did I want to make this project one of my priorities?

Obviously, since I’m writing about it here, I decided that yes, I did. I could go through a litany of justifications for why this would be a great project, but the truth is simply that the idea wouldn’t let me go. No matter what reasoning I threw at it, it would not dislodge. That and I saw that the first interview was with E.M. Forster, who happens to be a favorite of mine. I’ve decided to take that as a sign. “Yes,” it reads, in giant flashing lights, “you should do this.”

What I will be doing here, then, is reading through the interviews in chronological order – because I’m anal like that – and writing a bit about my reactions to each, what I learned, etc. I am going to try and do one interview per week, but I am not making any promises. It doesn’t sound all that ambitious, but, with my schedule, it’s the equivalent of loading up the Conestoga wagon for the trip out to Oregon.

Of course, this project would not have even been thought of without the current editor Lorin Stein making the interviews available online, free for the browsing. For that, Mr. Stein, I thank you whole-heartedly. I’ve been dipping in and out of them for the last couple of years (they went online in October of 2010) and I find that there are several I like to go back and re-read every so often for the inspiration. To make sure that I support the people who made this possible, I did just order a subscription.

I plan to start this project next week with the interview with E.M. Forster from 1953. I don’t know how this will turn out or if it will be interesting to anyone besides myself, but the only way to find out is to try.

Wish me luck!