The Paris Review Interviews Boxed Set Quiz
By Cara Cannella
Editor's Note: For our previous post about The Paris Review Interviews (Boxed Set), Vols. I—IV, click here.
In George Plimpton’s introduction to The Art of Fiction No. 21, an interview by The Paris Review’s cofounder with literary heavyweight Ernest Hemingway, he touches on a theme that pervades the amazingly rich four-volume boxed set of extended conversations with the most influential writers of the past half-century.
Hemingway finds it difficult to talk about writing, Plimpton intuits, “not because he has few ideas on the subject, but rather because he feels so strongly that such ideas should remain unexpressed, that to be asked questions on them ‘spooks’ him (to use one of his favorite expressions) to the point where he is almost inarticulate.” Hemingway’s widely shared conviction “that writing is a private, lonely occupation with no need for witnesses until the final work is done” makes the revelations in this collection all the more poignant for their intimacy.
Befriend, or at the very least, begin to understand some of your favorite writers as they present themselves in these pages, then take this quiz to find out how well you know them. Read the following biography and memoir-centric excerpts, then click through to page 2 for the answer key with links to the full interviews in The Paris Review's online archives.
1) "Until the whole fatwa thing happened it never occurred to me that my life was interesting enough [to write a memoir]. I’d just write my novels and hopefully those would be interesting, but who cares about the writer’s life? Then this very unusual thing happened to me, and I found myself keeping an occasional journal just to remind myself what was happening. When things went back to normal, it occurred to me that a memoir would be a way of being done with it. Nobody would ever ask me about it again. But then I realized I’d have to spend a year researching it, at least a year writing it, and at least a year talking about it. So I’d be sentencing myself to three or four more years of the thing I’d just got out of. I didn’t think I could bear that."
2) "In Pleasures, I have a piece about first enjoying food and drink. Until I was in my mid-twenties, I didn’t take much interest in them. But when I lunched in Australia at the famous cartoonist George Molnar’s house on the lawn overlooking Sydney Harbor, the meal was something quite simple but delicious: pâté, crusty rolls, a bottle of wine, an apple, this sort of thing. There was something about the way this man presented and served the food. He crunched the bread in sort of a lascivious way. He spread the pâté kind of unguently. He almost slurped the wine. I thought it was so marvelous. When I came to describe it, I could see it all again so clearly: the dancing sea, the clear Australian sky, the green lawn; above us were the wings of the Sydney opera house, like a benediction over this experience. It was only when I finished the chapter that I remembered that the Sydney opera house hadn’t been built yet!"
3) "Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life. There has to be some pleasure in this job, and that’s it. To go around in disguise. To act a character. To pass oneself off as what one is not. To pretend. The sly and cunning masquerade. Think of the ventriloquist. He speaks so that his voice appears to proceed from someone at a distance from himself. But if he weren’t in your line of vision you’d get no pleasure from his art at all. His art consists of being present and absent; he’s most himself by simultaneously being someone else, neither of whom he “is” once the curtain is down. You don’t necessarily, as a writer, have to abandon your biography completely to engage in an act of impersonation. It may be more intriguing when you don’t. You distort it, caricature it, parody it, you torture and subvert it, you exploit it -- all to give the biography that dimension that will excite your verbal life."
4) "But everything we write is, in some way, autobiographical. I'm not in the least bothered by “autobiographical” fiction. To the contrary. On the Road. Céline. Roth. Lawrence Durrell in The Alexandria Quartet. So much of Hemingway in the Nick Adams stories. Updike, too, you bet. Jim McConkey. Clark Blaise is a contemporary writer whose fiction is out-and-out autobiography. Of course, you have to know what you're doing when you turn your life's stories into fiction. You have to be immensely daring, very skilled and imaginative and willing to tell everything on yourself. You're told time and again when you're young to write about what you know, and what do you know better than your own secrets? But unless you're a special kind of writer, and a very talented one, it's dangerous to try and write volume after volume on The Story of My Life. A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best."
5) "There was a certain tendency to read Play It As It Lays as an autobiographical novel, I suppose because I lived out here and looked skinny in photographs and nobody knew anything else about me. Actually, the only thing Maria and I have in common is an occasional inflection, which I picked up from her -- not vice versa -- when I was writing the book. I like Maria a lot. Maria was very strong, very tough."
Click through to page 2 for the answer key!