My first time: Paris Review video interview series

The Paris Review has commissioned a series of video interviews with authors talking about their first book.  Tom Bean and Luke Poling came up to my cottage in Vermont back in March to talk to me about The Last Samurai; the video is now up here.

loosely based on...

INTERVIEWER

Do people in your books ever come up to you and say, I recognize myself?

AUCHINCLOSS

They certainly do, but they’re usually so far off, it’s ridiculous. I remember a great tax lawyer, Norris Darrell, a very literal man with a marvelous mathematical mind, who accused me of putting him in a story. The story was about a passionate diarist. Eventually, the man comes to live for his diary; his whole life is oriented around seeking items for it. It is the tail wagging the dog. I asked Norris, Why would you assume you were that character? Do you keep a diary? He said, Heavens no! I asked, Then what was it in the story that made you think you were the character? He replied, He was the senior tax partner in his firm. Well, that’s usually the sort of thing a writer runs into.

George Plimpton interviewing Auchincloss for the Paris Review, the rest here

perfective vision

I call it the pederasty of autobiography; the older self actually loves the younger self in a way the younger self never could have felt or accepted at the time. There is a kind of lapse in time in self-approval. One is filled with self-loathing at sixteen but when one is forty one can look back with this kind of retrospective affection at the younger self—which is very curative.

Edmund White interview at the Paris Review (long time ago), the rest here

White goes on to say:

Piaget makes a very good case for the fact that the language, and even the concepts and the thoughts we have as adults, really don’t fit with childhood experience. There is a radical discontinuity between childhood experience and adult experience. We complain of a kind of amnesia, that we don’t recall much of our early childhood, and Freud of course said that this was because we were repressing painful or guilty desires. But Piaget argues this couldn’t be true, because otherwise we would forget only those things that were painful but remember everything else—which is clearly not the case. We have an almost blanket amnesia, and Piaget argues that the terms in which we experienced our childhood are incommensurable with the terms in which we now think as adults. It’s as though it’s an entirely different language we knew and lost. Therefore I feel that any writer who is writing about childhood, as an adult, is bound to falsify experience, but one of the things you try to do is to find poetic approximation; an elusive and impossible task. It is like trying to pick up blobs of mercury with tweezers—you can’t do it. You nevertheless attempt to find various metaphorical ways of surprising that experience. I think you oftentimes feel it’s there, but you can’t get at it, and that’s the archaeology of writing about childhood.

It seems a lot less complicated to me.  I was given a diary for my 8th birthday, and I decided to write in it, because I thought from what grown-ups said that they forgot.  I thought that I would grow up and forget how miserable I was, so I was going to write it down to make sure I never forgot.

I don't think I do now think of my childhood in terms incommensurable with what I felt at the time, because many of my memories are linguistic memories, memories of what people said, what I said, what I felt I could not say.  I can remember adults saying things to me, announcing the death of a relative, say, knowing I was expected to react in a particular way, trying to work out what would be appropriate, sobbing and being comforted and feeling that I had acted in the appropriate way (this at the age of 7).  I can also remember, a bit older, finding books on child development on adult's bookshelves and reading them to find out what the adults thought was going on.  I don't mean that I accepted what I read - I read these books the way a Chinese dissident might read Mao's Red Book.  A friend of mine said a while back that he could never see the point of a diary; I felt that I was embedded in a world of people who were rewriting history, rewriting events at which I was present to construct stories they thought better than what actually happened, and so felt I must have a record, what I had seen must be set down somewhere even if it was absolutely inadmissible. 

metatexts

These are very important for the writer today. For they are probably the way the writer may still be independent. You asked me before whether I ever change anything in one of my novels commercially. I said, “No.” But I would have to do it without the radio, television, and movies.

Simenon (from interview at the Paris Review)

Trevor Butterworth interviews Lorin Stein, editor of the Paris Review, at Lunch with the FT.

I AIN'T PEOPLE

But it’s a fact of life, in your late teens and early twenties, that’s just what people do: they go out.

Taylor Plimpton, at the Paris Review blog

For those who don't follow these things, Lorin Stein, former editor at Farrar, Straus, Giroux, is now editor of the Paris Review, and the Paris Review now has a blog.