Women Writers at Work:
Jr, Robert E Hosmer
BREATHES LIFE OFF THE PAGE WOMEN WRITERS AT WORK The Paris Review Interviews Edited by George Plimpton Introduction by Margaret Atwood Viking Penguin, $18.95, $9.95 paper, 512 pp. Robert E....
...All these writers are united in a conviction of what their art can do, and Katherine Anne Porter speaks for them all when she says, "nothing is pointless, and nothing is meaningless, if the artist will face it...
...Since its founding in 1953, The Paris Review has held a special place in the world of publishing...
...JAMES W. HICKEY has taught writing and film at the State University of New York in Purchase, Marymount College, lona College, and Fordham University...
...set among the short stories, poems, plays, essays, sketches, and photographs in each issue are now-famous interviews on the art of poetry and fiction...
...we are clearly mistaken, she tells us, if we think we can neatly categorize all these women, for "what these writers have in common is not their diverse responses to the category 'woman writer' [and indeed they are diverse], but their shared passion toward the category 'writer.'" Women Writers at Work offers a revealing record not only of that diversity, but of the similarities of these myriad talents...
...And Cynthia Ozick, a writer so unlike Porter, Parker, and O'Brien, says much the same thing, only in secularized terms: "A writer is simply another citizen with a profession...
...as a vocation...
...Now Women Writers at Work joins the ranks...
...and Barbara Kevles's interview with the tormented Anne Sexton is heartbreaking in its delineation of any anguished spirit who knows that "pain engraves a deeper meaning...
...someone born with a gift" and "the inner voice that never, never, never shuts up...
...In a perceptive and judicious introduction Margaret Atwood sets things right...
...With extraordinary generosity, tact, and knowledge, interviewers have probed the very special world of the creative spirit...
...Others, like Joyce Carol Oates (who answered questions by letter) and Cynthia Ozick (who typed most of her responses in the presence of her interviewer) seem too careful, nearly distrustful, in "conversation...
...up until recently eight volumes had appeared, each with a dozen or so interviews...
...As important as these differences may be, what these women share is much more striking...
...Women Writers at Work presents interviews with fifteen women writers-poets, novelists, playwrights, and essayists-of provocative diversity: eleven are American, one is Anglo-Irish, one Danish, one Irish, and one South African...
...Some writers (Welty and Moore spring to mind again), are sweet, generous, forgiving, and humble, both about themselves and their art...
...The result has been a regular feature of such success that a number of the interviews have been published periodically as the Writers at Work series...
...Mary McCarthy, never at a loss for a compliment, labels Simone de Beauvoir "a mind totally bourgeois turned inside out...
...Read it...
...and Rebecca West appraises Somerset Maugham thus: "He couldn't write for toffee, bless his heart...
...When Edna O'Brien praises Chekhov- "Read Chekhov...
...He does not write, he breathes life off the page"-she offers an apt evaluation of this collection: it breathes life off the page...
...Some of the writers, like Eudora Welty and Marianne Moore, are guilelessly forthcoming, answering questions fully and without hesitation...
...Never...
...off the page...
...The interviews in Women Writers at Work are absorbing reading and not just for specialists...
...for Didion it's an image that shimmers on the retina that sends the storytelling impulse to the brain...
...Writers revealed-in paperback Writers Revealed, reviewed by John Breed in in Commonweal July 13, is now available in paperback for $8.95 from Peter Bedrick Books...
...And the first interviews (Parker, Dinesen-1956) took place nearly thirty years before the last (Cynthia Ozick, 1985...
...And the gift brings a compulsion well-described by Welty: "...in the writing, I have to just keep going straight through with only the thing in mind and what it dictates...
...Robert E. Hosmer, Jr...
...While some discern difficulties in being a "woman writer" (Joan Didion: "a woman who wrote novels [in the late 1950s and 1960s] had no particular role...
...ROBERT E. HOSMER, JR., teaches in the department of English language and literature at Smith College...
...Read it...
...She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts...
...Others are rather bad-tempered, hostile, even downright nasty: Dorothy Parker describes Harold Ross as "a professional lunatic...
...Certainly Mary McCarthy's comments and responses seem (much like those of her archenemy Lillian Hellman) disingenuous fictions crafted to fit an image retrospectively fabricated...
...But above, before, and beyond everything else these fifteen women share that passion Atwood mentions, an intense and fervid commitment to writing so strong that Katherine Anne Porter speaks of it REVIEWERS ELIZABETH M. SHANNON is the author of I Am of Ireland (Little, Brown...
...Nearly all believe that a story or poem or play is "given" to them: for Moore, "a felicitous phrase springs to mind...
...while they do constitute a valuable literary and cultural document, they go beyond that to render present the hearts and minds of gifted women...
...The book is edited by Rosemary Hartill...
...Their diversity extends beyond the geographical and artistic, for they nearly span the century in their work: to move from Marianne Moore, Dorothy Parker, and Isak Dinesen to Edna O'Brien and Elizabeth Hardwick is to travel rather a long way indeed...
...for Nadine Gordimer, "four or five pages of very scrappy notes" become a "whole book" in the course of the writing...
...created by a group of young Americans that included Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton, Thomas Guinzburg, and Donald Hall, it has printed generous selections of first-rate, sometimes experimental, "creative writing" in its quarterly issues, often discerning important new writers (both Philip Roth and Samuel Beckett had their first published short stories in The Paris Review) and sustaining established writers (Calvino, Faulkner, Kerouac, Genet, and Brodsky...
...Two interviews have particular poignancy: Barbara Thompson's exchanges with Porter enable the reader to feel as though he or she had been in that Georgetown drawing room on a midsummer's afternoon in 1963...
...Writers at Work" has been a regular feature of the The Paris Review...
...For Edna O'Brien, "writing is a vocation, like being a nun or a priest...
...Edna O'Brien...
...writers have had the rare opportunity to speak at length about their craft, their lives, their colleagues-in sum, about whatever they 'd like...
...This particular collection of interviews reminds us of some writers we have neglected, undervalued, or cast aside (Porter, Sexton) and of others whose full measure we still have time to take while they remain with us (Welty and O'Brien...
...a woman writer has a double dose of masochism: the masochism of the woman and that of the artist"), others would agree with Elizabeth Hardwick that there are "no special difficulties to being a woman writer...
...writing "is an act of faith," she says, and even the wisecracking Dorothy Parker might agree: "I want so much to write well, though I know I don't," she pleads with the anguish of a scrupulous postulant...
Vol. 117 • September 1990 • No. 15
