The tapes at play

Peter Conrad Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Fourth Series edited by

George Plimpton (Secker and Warburg E6.50)

Writers work rather than labour. Hannah Areridt•s distinction between the curse of labour which is imposed on our bodies, and the freedom we enjoy to work with our hands, is invoked by Auden in his Parts ,i6ielv interview, as he congratulates nonself on never having done jobs which

bored or disgusted him. Isherwood its the __ sailie distinction, though altering

emphasising the ludic quality of IS writing, which seems an extension of his early delight in a toy theatre. Boring writers :le, Calls 'workers'—though he means 'apourers. The writer is privileged to turn the wearisome workaday habits of his craft, covering pages with his scrawls or pounding at a keyboard, into creative play. He is the most self-satisfied case of Arendt's hoino ;Qber. The sixteen writers treated in this iatest collection from the Paris Review are therefore most interesting when descanting on their implements, when speaking as artisans rather than artists. r They admit to the most finicky pret„,erences in types of pen and paper, but their ads disclose the craftsman's superstitious .reverenee for his materials. A writer finds it as difficult to create if he can't obtain his a_ces

Ute , med brands of exercise books or

oured pencils as a painter does to work vsl,thout the necessary pigments. Virginia neurotic essays and letters reveal a positively inieurotic dependence on the stationer, whose quires and reams were sedatives, 12,1111°Lit which she panicked. Writers are all aPer-fetishists at heart, revenging them71veS on the immaculate empty pages they confront by scatalogically staining them. r(cl3rits.°n derided Shakespeare for never nung meddle is papers: this refusal to mess and ilieddle with the text was to Jonson a sign ..,eontteiifitinspired facility but of unprofessional becauY. Shakespeare was no writer, .,,se he disdained to dirty his hands at it. sa'nerwood confesses a similar awe of the yoninarY spotlessness of paper in this ibc,ume: when young he couldn't bear the be-flight of erasures, and 'since this was wi'takre all those wonderful break throughs w„“ Liquid Paper, etc, I used to scratch o:rds out with a razor and then polish the ag',Per With my thumbnail and write it in His manuscripts have to look -r..Lum-Packed, impersonally pure.

the' book's best anecdotes all concern

wis tfloVedimenta of writing. Eudora Welty book remembers 'a little piece of noteel..' Paper' on which Faulkner had pencilled two lines, and regrets having lost it. John Steinbeck insists on using only hexagonal pencils, and Conrad Aiken is partial to yellow paper 'because it's not so responsible looking': the pleasure of the text is, it seems, a reflex of the fear of the page.

Burroughs scissors his

pages and resorts them, while Eudora Welty deploys pins like a frantic milliner. She dislikes paste, 'but with pins you can move things from anywhere to anywhere.' Burroughs dismembers his texts, she impales hers. Nabokov composes on those index cards which are the toolkit of the graduate student, and shuffles them as he proceeds because he doesn't write consecutively. Bookmaking in his case is akin to bookkeeping, since it depends on the ordering of a file.

Punctuation is a problem for Anne Sexton and Jack Kerouac. She dreaded those 'little dots and dashes,'

like blizzards of static electricity, and left the poems to be punctuated by her editors; to Kerouac, however, commas were Pedantic and punctilious, and he objects that Malcolm Cowley corrected his garrulously illiterate 'Cheyenne Wyoming' to 'Cheyenne, Wyoming.'

The working hand suffers as much as the labouring body. Steinbeck exhibits his occupational deformity, a callous on the third finger of his right hand formed by the abrasions of the pencil. The lump is the aesthete's stigmatum : 'sometimes it is very rough and other times, as today, it is as shiny as glass.' Although Robert Graves counsels a worshipful continence, arguing that the poet's contract with his muse forbids promiscuity, his colleagues accept that art must damage the body as it punishes Steinbeck's hand: Anthony Burgess recommends the spirochete as a lyrical stimulant, and believes syphilis to be the modern muse, though he warns against drunkenness as a fatal 'substitute for art'; Kerouac prescribes morphine, and pops Obetrol pills, supplied by his interviewer, while talking; Steinbeck spends his creative juices in a seminal torrent which 'gathers from the four quarters of a man and fights its way into the vesicle.'

The fruit of this physical self-exploitation is ingested by machines. HenryJames's later style was determined by the habit of giving dictation to a typist, and since then writers have settled down into becoming stenographers. Aiken is interesting on the stylistic insinuations of the typewriter which, as he and Eliot decided, promotes 'more periodic sentences, a little shorter, and a rather choppier style.' The stylistic compressions of Aiken's work in the 'twenties introduce poetry to the Machine age: the typewriter has imposed its own manners on the language. However, Aiken revises manually: This reverses the order maintained by some other interviewees, who see in the change from handwriting to mechanical transcription a recurrence of the ancient passage from script to print, and welcome the machine because it objectifies what in their own scribbles is vulnerably subjective. Nabokov's cards are typed in triplicate by his wife. Aiken, on the other hand, has an inexplicable abhorrence of carbon. Eudora Welty finds proofs a shocking second coming: typesetting jolts her from writer to reader, 'and I suddenly see my words with the eyes of the cohd public. It gives me a terrible sense of exposure, as if I'd gotten sunburned.' This inhibits her from ever making changes in galleys. Kerouac on the contrary reports having to pay Viking Press S500 for inspirational revisions to the proofs of The Dharma Bums.

These mechanised creators are questioned by mechanical interviewers. Each of the Paris Review quiz-masters arrives with a tape-recorder. Auden auntyishly refuses to allow its use: 'if anything's worth retaining, the reporter ought to be able to remember it.' He regards it as an impertinent instrument, like the camera which 'creates sorrow.' But Isherwood, happy to call himself a camera, is nonchalant about the recorder: when his interviewer apologises for it, saying 'I have a terrible memory,' Isherwood ventures, `So do I.' John Updike distrusts the machine, and is wary of the false version of himself it uncritically transcribes. He has therefore revised the verbal text to turn his spoken improvisations into literary edicts. The result is pompous in its arch finality. During the session with Seferis, the machine appears to have broken down, and the poet is requested to pronounce a commonplace to test it. He declares, 'Wallace Stevens was in an insurance company,' which startles the recorder back into operation. Kerouac's interviewer, himself billed as a poet, engages in some repellently jocose backchat with his subject about the machine. He commandeers a footstool to place it on, and when Kerouac sneers at his ineptitude replies, 'Well, I'm no tape-recorder man, Jack. I'm just a big talker, like you. OK, we're off.' Kerouac whistles as the spools turn.

The tape-recorder is of course entirely undiscriminating, treasuring every inanity uttered in its presence, immortalising the interviewer's nervous nonsense about the interior decoration of the Roman restaurant in which he is entertaining Isak Dinesen, or the importunity of Borges's secretary who interrupts regularly to announce that 'Senor Campbell is waiting,' or the mockprofound monosyllabic answers given by Auden to fatuous questions about Mickey Mouse or the Devil. The book after all is not so much about writers at work as about typewriters and tape-recorders at play.