Margaret Atwood on Literature’s Women Problem

“No male writer is likely to be asked to sit on a panel addressing itself to the special problems of a male writer.”

The recent sexism cries over Wikipedia’s segregation of American women novelists into a separate category removed from American novelists, and the subsequent debate, reminded me of Margaret Atwood’s remarkably prescient words on the subject in the introduction to the 1998 anthology Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (public library), a gender-ghettoization of The Paris Review’s Writers at Work series.

Atwood recounts an all-too-familiar anecdote:

Some years ago I was on a panel — that polygonal form of discourse so beloved of the democratic twentieth century — consisting entirely of women, including Jan Morris, who used to be James Morris, and Nayantara Sahgal of India. From the audience came the question “How do you feel about being on a panel of women?” We all prevaricated. Some of us protested that we had been on lots of panels that included men; others said that most panels were male, with a woman dotted here and there for decorative effect, like parsley. Jan Morris said that she was in the process of transcending gender and was aiming at becoming a horse, to which Nayantara Sahgal replied that she hoped it was an English horse, since in some other, poorer countries, horses were not treated very well. Which underlined, for all of us, that there are categories other than male or female worth considering.

I suppose all should have said, “Why not?” Still, I was intrigued by our collective uneasiness. No woman writer wants to be overlooked and undervalued for being a woman; but few, it seems, wish to be defined solely by gender, or constrained by loyalties to it alone — an attitude that may puzzle, hurt, or enrage those whose political priorities cause them to view writing as a tool, a means to an end, rather than as a vocation subject to a Muse who will desert you if you break trust with your calling.

Atwood cites the first interview in the collection, in which Dorothy Parker, witty and wise as ever, nails the subject to its cultural cross:

I’m a feminist, and God knows I’m loyal to my sex, and you must remember that from my very early days, when this city was scarcely safe from buffaloes, I was in the struggle for equal rights for women. But when we paraded through the catcalls of men and when we chained ourselves to lampposts to try to get our equality — dear child, we didn’t foresee those female writers.

Impeccable humor aside, Atwood strikes at the heart of the issue:

Male writers may suffer strains on their single-minded dedication to their art for reasons of class or race or nationality, but so far no male writer is likely to be asked to sit on a panel addressing itself to the special problems of a male writer, or be expected to support another writer simply because he happens to be a man. Such things are asked of women writers all the time, and it makes them jumpy.

Joyce Carol Oates, who voiced her indignation over the recent Wikipedia controversy in a tweet and whose interview closes the anthology, quips to the interviewer upon being asked to name “the advantages of being a woman writer”:

Advantages! Too many to enumerate, probably. Since, being a woman, I can’t be taken altogether seriously by the sort of male critics who rank writers 1, 2, 3 in the public press, I am free, I suppose, to do as I like.

Atwood’s solution, seemingly simple, is as poignant today — in part because it’s so simple yet so evidently difficult to indoctrinate — as it was fifteen years ago:

Despite the title of this book, the label should probably read, “WWAWW,” Writers Who Are Also Women.

(But this, I suppose, does’t quite roll off the tongue as a Wikipedia category title.)

Complement with Margaret Atwood’s 10 rules of writing and Caitlin Moran’s How To Be A Woman, then wash down with some timeless wisdom on the craft from some excellent Writers Who Are Also Women: Susan Orlean, Mary Gordon, Susan Sontag, Zadie Smith, Mary Karr, Joan Didion, Helen Dunmore, Isabel Allende, and Joy Williams.

Photograph via Random House

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The Paris Review Origin Story and Their Secret to the Art of the Interview

“Authors are sometimes like tomcats: they distrust all the other toms, but they are kind to kittens.”

Most interviews today tend to fall somewhere on the spectrum between lazy conversation and blatant publicity puffery, the truly exceptional interview a kind of near-lost art. But it wasn’t always so. In the spring of 1953, The Paris Review built from scratch a new paradigm for the art of the interview, which endures as a gold standard sixty years later. In the introductory essay to the 1958 anthology Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, First Series (public library) — which also gave us this fantastic anatomy of the four stages of writing — the inimitable Malcolm Cowley, who edited the collection, recounts the Paris Review origin story and examines the secret of what made their interviews such a timeless echelon of the craft:

Most of the interviewers either have had no serious interest in literature or else have been too serious about themselves. Either they have been reporters with little knowledge of the author’s work and a desire to entrap him into making scandalous remarks about sex, politics, and God, or else they have been ambitious writers trying to display their own sophistication, usually at the expense of the author, and listening chiefly to their own voices.

What makes the Paris Review interviewers and their ethos different, Cowley observes, can be boiled down to two essentials — homework and humility:

The interviewers belong to a new generation that has been called “silent,” though a better word for it would be “waiting” or “listening” or “inquiring.” They have done their assigned reading, they have asked the right questions, or most of them, and have listened carefully to the answers. The authors, more conscious of their craft than authors used to be, have talked about it with an engaging lack of stiffness.

Even more interesting than the question of interview style is that of motive — what prompted George Plimpton and his co-founders to forever change the face — and economics — of literary writing by redefining the art of the interview when they launched The Paris Review in 1953 in what closely resembles contemporary startup culture? Cowley writes:

The new quarterly had been founded by young men lately out of college who were in Europe working on their first novels or books of poems. Their dream of having a magazine of their very own must have been more luminous than their picture of what it should be, yet they did have a picture of sorts. They didn’t want their magazine to be “little” or opinionated (engagé, in the slang of the year) or academic. Instead of printing what were then the obligatory essays on Moby Dick and Henry James’s major phase, they would print stories and poems by new authors and pay for them too, as long as the magazine kept going. They wanted to keep it going for a long time, even if its capital was only a thousand dollars, with no subventions in sight. They dreamed that energy and ingenuity might take the place of missing resources.

George Plimpton party (The Paris Review)

But The Paris Review differed from other literary magazines in one crucial aspect: Its intricate osmosis of art and commerce.

Like [other magazines] it wanted to present material that was new, uncommercial, “making no compromise with public taste,” in the phrase sanctified by The Little Review, but unlike the others it was willing to use commercial devices in getting the material printed and talked about. “Enterprise in the service of art” might have been its motto. The editors compiled a list, running to thousands of names, of Americans living in Paris and sent volunteer salesmen to ring their doorbells. Posters were printed by hundreds and flying squadrons of three went out by night to paste them in likely and unlikely places all over the city. In June 1957 the frayed remnants of one poster were still legible on the ceiling of the lavatory in the Café du Dôme.

And thus the interviews themselves became at first a kind of merchandizing gimmick designed to build circulation — The Paris Review needed big names to hook readers, but couldn’t afford original writing, so the interview offered a welcome loophole of unpaid name-dropping:

“So let’s talk to them,” somebody ventured — it must have been Peter Matthiessen or Harold Humes, since they laid the earliest plans for the Review — and “print what they say.” The idea was discussed with George Plimpton, late of the Harvard Lampoon, who had agreed to be editor. Plimpton was then at King’s College, Cambridge, and he suggested E. M. Forster, an honorary fellow of King’s, as the first author to be interviewed. It was Forster himself who gave a new direction to the series, making it a more thoughtful discussion of the craft of fiction than had at first been planned.

But soon, it became clear that the interview itself held unique allure as its own genre of literary entertainment and The Paris Review team quickly honed its craft down to a science:

Interviewers usually worked in pairs, like FBI agents. Since no recording equipment was available for the early interviews, they both jotted down the answers to their questions at top speed and matched the two versions afterward. With two men writing, the pace could be kept almost at the level of natural conversation. Some of the later interviews … were done with a tape recorder. After two or three sessions the interviewers typed up their material; then it was cut to length, arranged in logical order, and sent to the author for his approval.

The most obvious question, of course, is why some of the era’s most revered literary legends would agree to discuss, in print, the most intimate and profound details of their craft with a duo of recent college graduates. Here, we once again see the human element — that quintessential blend of empathy, sheer goodwill, and indulgent delight in a tickled ego — come into play:

Some of [the authors] disliked the idea of being interviewed but consented anyway, either out of friendship for someone on the Review or because they wanted to help a struggling magazine of the arts, perhaps in memory of their own early struggles to get published. Others … were interested in the creative process and glad to talk about it. Not one of the interviewers had any professional experience in the field, but perhaps their experience and youth were positive advantages. Authors are sometimes like tomcats: they distrust all the other toms, but they are kind to kittens.

Cumulatively, Cowley argues, the interviews painted a powerful portrait of the writer:

In spite of their diversity, what emerges from the interviews is a composite picture of the fiction writer. He has no face, no nationality, no particular background and I say “he” by grammatical convention, since [some] of the authors are women; they all have something in common, some attitude toward life and art, some fund of common experience.

Though The Paris Review has since released all of the archival interviews online, as well as in an irresistible boxed set, Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, First Series is worth a read even if only for Cowley’s lengthy and insightful introductory essay, which explores in over twenty pages such facets of the writing craft as daily routines, motivations, and work ethic.

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History’s 100 Geniuses of Language and Literature, Visualized

“Genius, in its writings, is our best path for reaching wisdom … the true use of literature for life.”

“Genius is nothing more nor less than doing well what anyone can do badly,” Victorian novelist Amelia E. Barr reflected in her 9 rules for success. But what, exactly, is genius? In their latest project, Italian visualization wizard Giorgia Lupi and her team at Accurat — who have previously given us a timeline of the future based on famous fiction, a visual history of the Nobel Prize, and a visualization of global brain drain inspired by Mondrian — explore the anatomy of genius, based on Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (public library) by literary titan Harold Bloom.

Playing off Bloom’s use of the Sefirot image — the ten emanations of the Kabbalah — to organize the taxonomy of the one hundred geniuses of language he identifies, from Shakespeare to Stendhal to Lewis Carroll to Ralph Ellison, the visualization depicts the geographic origin, time period, and field of each “genius,” correlated with visits to the respective Wikipedia page and connection to related historical figures.

Bloom writes:

All genius, in my judgment, is idiosyncratic and grandly arbitrary, and ultimately stands alone. … My placement of the hundred geniuses is hardly one that fixes them in place, since all the Sefirot are images constantly in motion, and any creative spirit must move through all of them, in many labyrinths and transformations. … Since the ten Sefirot form a system in constant motion, all of my hundred persons could be illuminated almost equally well by the other nine Sefirot, beyond the one where I group them, and I intend this book to be a kind of mosaic-in-perpetual-movement.

Appearing here is an exclusive English-language version of a forthcoming spread in Italian literary supplement La Lettura.

{Click image to enlarge)

At the heart of Bloom’s ambitious taxonomy is a concern with the very nature of genius:

What is the relationship of fresh genius to a founding authority? At this time, starting the twenty-first century, I would say: ‘Why, none, none at all.’ Our confusions about canonical standards for genius are now institutionalized confusions, so that all judgments as to the distinction between talent and genius are at the mercy of the media, and obey cultural politics and its vagaries.

Echoing Virginia Woolf’s counsel on the art of reading, Bloom argues for cultivating an individual sensibility of genius-appreciation:

Literary genius, difficult to define, depends upon deep reading for its verification. The reader learns to identify with what she or he feels is a greatness that can be joined to the self, without violating the self’s integrity…. Genius, in its writings, is our best path for reaching wisdom, which I believe to be the true use of literature for life.

More than a decade after Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, Bloom followed up with The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life, further exploring the interwoven mesh of genius.

See more of Giorgia’s wonderful work on her site and pair it with some visualization lessons from the world’s top information designers and data artists.

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Work Alone: Ernest Hemingway’s 1954 Nobel Acceptance Speech

“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life.”

“One can never be alone enough to write,” Susan Sontag observed. Solitude, in fact, seems central to many great writers’ daily routines — so much so, it appears, that part of the writer’s curse might be the ineffable struggle to submit to the spell of solitude and escape the grip of loneliness at the same time.

In October of 1954, Ernest Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. But he didn’t exactly live every writer’s dream: First, he told the press that Carl Sandburg, Isak Dinesen and Bernard Berenson were far more worthy of the honor, but he could use the prize money; then, depressed and recovering from two consecutive plane crashes that had nearly killed him, he decided against traveling to Sweden altogether. Choosing not to attend the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm on December 10, 1954, Hemingway asked John C. Cabot, the United States Ambassador to Sweden at the time, to read his Nobel acceptance speech, found in the 1972 biography Hemingway: The Writer as Artist (public library). At a later date, Hemingway recorded the speech in his own voice. Hear an excerpt, then read the transcript of the complete speech below:

Having no facility for speech-making and no command of oratory nor any domination of rhetoric, I wish to thank the administrators of the generosity of Alfred Nobel for this Prize.

No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the Prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.

It would be impossible for me to ask the Ambassador of my country to read a speech in which a writer said all of the things which are in his heart. Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

How simple the writing of literature would be if it were only necessary to write in another way what has been well written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past that a writer is driven far out past where he can go, out to where no one can help him.

I have spoken too long for a writer. A writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again I thank you.

Complement with Woz onworking alone as the key to creativity and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on our essential capacity for “fertile solitude.”

Portrait of Hemingway by Yousuf Karsh

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