Keepers of the Daemon
ROSENTHAL, RAYMOND
Keepers of the Daemon Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. Ed. by Malcolm Cowley. Viking. 309 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by Raymond Rosenthal Contributor, N. Y. "Times Book Review," "Partisan...
...The opposite almost always comes about...
...To speak out and yet not to know, or even wish to know, the true import of what one speaks— this is the perennial mystery and ambiguity of all creativeness...
...Somehow, by some magic, it is hoped that the secret of creation will suddenly be revealed to us...
...This puts me among the large body of authors who are not really novelists, and have to get on as best they can with these three categories...
...As living creatures they get worn out, and they grow feeble...
...As we were saying, it is not our books that survive, but our poor lives that linger in the histories...
...In my opinion it's the perfect milieu for an artist to work in...
...People have worn themselves out writing about the life of Racine without being able to establish anything...
...I was the author of a number of works between the ages of 6 and 10...
...Even the great characters that have survived in novels are found now more in handbooks and histories, as though in a museum...
...The place is quiet during the morning hours, which is the best time of the day to work...
...but the cornered old man is sore, and in response to another "technical question" he snorts: "People will not realize how little conscious one is of these things...
...how one flounders about...
...That is quite rare...
...Of course," Forster says indulgently, to the prod of the interviewer whose eye is on the mystery of his abruptly discontinued creativeness, "I had a very literary childhood...
...it gives him a certain standing in society...
...The writers' only responsibility is to his art," he explains carefully...
...and William Faulkner entangles us in his web of double-edged humor...
...Or, as in E. M. Forster's case, grinning self-consciously, a devilishly expert grin that comes out in polished antitheses, in private jokes worn smooth by years of bland rehearsal within the tight walls of England's snug literary community...
...He is lost in the radiance of creation...
...A fascinating book, of course, as fascinating as the most relevantly irrelevant gossip about a baffling private mystery...
...In our positive age, when sex is boiled down to a row of statistics and personality is a course in school, the artist is expected to turn himself inside out, sneak up on his slumbering or napping daemon, and pin it down for detailed inspection...
...Suddenly, as a kind of bonus for all this politeness, he comes out with it: "In no book have I got down more than the people I like, the person I think I am, and the people who irritate me...
...Low gossip...
...he has a roof over his head and nothing whatever to do except to keep a few simple accounts and to go once every month and pay off the local police...
...Tolstoy was one, wasn't he...
...He submits to the questions, but gets his own back at the very tail-end of the proceedings: "The rarest thing in literature, and the only success, is when the author disappears and his work remains...
...If you mean me, the best job that was ever offered to me was to become a landlord in a brothel...
...he's free of fear and hunger...
...Now let the biographers get to work...
...It gives him perfect economic freedom...
...This is a rarefied atmosphere for even a tape-recorder, so it is with an almost audible sigh of relief that our impervious interviewers turn to the more autobiographical Americans...
...he has nothing to do because the madam keeps the books...
...And then, sadly: "There are almost no writers who disappear into their work...
...In the meantime, we get this gallery of famous writers riding their respective obsessions in public—and an obsession is far from a style—evading the politely pressing indiscretions of the interviewers, doggedly fulfilling their presumed public obligations by sitting still and letting the photographer do his work as they smile broadly for the camera...
...It took a Henry James to catch the bitterness beneath William Dean Howells's placid surfaces...
...We have not the power of observing the variety of life and describing it dispassionately...
...They want us to be so much better informed than we are...
...Dorothy Parker, with a sense of being just the sort of museum piece Mauriac dreads becoming, trots out her line of rueful wisecracks...
...There's enough social life in the evening, if he wishes to participate, to keep him from being bored...
...If critics could only have a course on writers' not thinking things out—a course of lectures (He smiled...
...Rougher treatment than any Frenchman could dream up, but the interviewers kept right, on, and now we have the book, with Malcolm Cowley's anodyne introduction, and the lengthy evasions and stumblings and reiterations of all our best keepers of the daemon...
...All of these did for their fellow artists what, given the very nature of creative work, the artists can rarely do for themselves: they discovered the bold basic stroke, the style, that the artist had labored to achieve, and then, in that sort of merciful forget-fulness that accompanies all creative activity, had left imprinted deep in his work, hoping that the others would find it...
...We don't know who Shakespeare was, or Homer...
...and James Thurber obliges with reminiscenses of the "good old days" on the New Yorker...
...He, too, however, has a pretty cold opinion of the Anglo-Saxon approach to the problem of the writer...
...And then: "Art is not concerned with environment either...
...it doesn't care where it is...
...Or legitimate inquiry into an aged author's private life...
...There are a few who have done this...
...For, since we are confronted by a manuscript page of Forster's unfinished novel, a rather nasty question hovers constantly above this polite colloquy: Why did Forster give up writing novels...
...Madame Bovary seems to me to be in poorer health than she used to be...
...There were 'Ear-rings through the Keyhole' and 'Scuffles in a Wardrobe.' " But his quips drew a blank, and the interviewers go right on prodding...
...It actually never gets itself said, but Forster's ear is too sensitive to miss the mumbled implication...
...all the inmates of the house are females and would defer to him and call him 'sir.' All the bootleggers in the neighborhood would call him "sir.' And he could call the police by their first names...
...Thus these interviews: the young and earnest men deployed in pairs and equipped with tape recorders, diligent advance reading, and a discreet but powerful curiosity...
...Reviewed by Raymond Rosenthal Contributor, N. Y. "Times Book Review," "Partisan Review," "Neiv Republic''' It took a Cezanne to see that Tintoretto's overpowering plastic wish was for a canvas glistening in essential blacks and whites...
...A few crisp words on technique, a neat, back-handed slam at the uprushing younger generation, and then the plangent, carefully phrased philosophical statement designed to add a couple of stout timbers to M. Mauriac's particular literary barricade...
...Is this, in T. S. Eliot's phrase, impertinent curiosity...
...Lawrence to hear the death-song whispering under Walt Whitman's expansive optimism...
...It took a D.H...
...And a final rebuke: "What I fear is not being forgotten after my death, but, rather, not being enough forgotten...
...Across the channel, in Frangois Mauriac's studio, we are in the well-drilled atmosphere of French literature where interviews are old stuff and efficiency assigns all—gossip, indiscretions, and faux pas—to their rightful places in the hierarchy...
Vol. 41 • May 1958 • No. 19
