Robert
Penn Warren, The Art of Fiction
Interviewed by Eugene
Walter and Ralph Ellison
This interview takes
place in the apartment of Ralph Ellison at the American Academy in Rome: a
comfortable room filled with books and pictures. Mr. Warren, who might be
described as a sandy man with a twinkle in his eye, is ensconced in an armchair
while the interviewers, manning tape recorder and notebook, are perched on
straight-back chairs. Mrs. Ellison, ice-bowl tinkling, comes into the room
occasionally to replenish the glasses: all drink pastis.
INTERVIEWER
First, if you’re
agreeable, Mr. Warren, a few biographical details just to get you “placed.” I
believe you were a Rhodes Scholar—
ROBERT PENN WARREN
Yes, from Kentucky.
INTERVIEWER
University of
Kentucky?
WARREN
No, I attended
Vanderbilt. But I was a Rhodes Scholar from Kentucky.
INTERVIEWER
Were you writing
then?
WARREN
As I am now, trying
to.
INTERVIEWER
Did you start writing
in college?
WARREN
I had no interest in
writing when I went to college. I was interested in reading—oh, poetry and
standard novels, you know. My ambitions were purely scientific, but I got cured
of that fast by bad instruction in freshman chemistry and good instruction in
freshman english.
INTERVIEWER
What were the works
that were especially meaningful for you? What books were—well, doors opening?
WARREN
Well, several things
come right away to mind. First of all, when I was six years old, “Horatius at
the Bridge” I thought was pretty grand—when they read it to me, to be more
exact.
INTERVIEWER
And others?
WARREN
Yes, “How They
Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix,” at about age nine; I thought it was
pretty nearly the height of human achievement. I didn’t know whether I was
impressed by riding a horse that fast or writing the poem. I couldn’t
distinguish between the two, but I knew there was something pretty fine going
on . . . Then “Lycidas.”
INTERVIEWER
At what age were you
then?
WARREN
Oh, thirteen,
something like that. By that time I knew it wasn’t what was happening in the
poem that was important—it was the poem. I had crossed the line.
INTERVIEWER
What about prose
works?
WARREN
Then I discovered
Buckle’s History of Civilization in
England. Did you ever read Buckle?
INTERVIEWER
Of course, and
Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic.
Most Southern bookshelves contain that.
WARREN
And Prescott . . .
and The Oregon Trail is always
hovering around there somewhere. Thing that interested me about Buckle was that
he had the one big answer to everything: geography.
History is all explained by geography. I read Buckle and then I could explain
everything. It gave me quite a hold over the other kids; they hadn’t read
Buckle. I had the answer to everything. Buckle was my Marx. That is, he gave
you one answer to everything, and the same dead-sure certainty. After I had had
my session with Buckle and the one-answer system at the age of thirteen, or
whatever it was, I was somewhat inoculated against Marx and his one-answer
system when he and the Depression hit me and my work when I was about
twenty-five. I am not being frivolous about Marx. But when I began to hear some
of my friends talk about him in 1930, I thought, “Here we go again, boys.” I
had previously got hold of one key to the universe: Buckle. And somewhere along
the way I had lost the notion that there was ever going to be just one key.
But getting back to
that shelf of books, the Motley and Prescott and Parkman, et cetera, isn’t it
funny how unreadable most history written now is when you compare it with those
writers?
INTERVIEWER
Well, there’s Samuel
Eliot Morison.
WARREN
Yes, a very fine
writer. Another is C. Vann Woodward, he writes very well indeed. And Bruce
Catton. But Catton maybe doesn’t count, he’s not a professional historian. If
he wants to write a book on history that happens to be good history and good
writing at the same time, there isn’t any graduate school to try to stop him.
INTERVIEWER
It’s very interesting
that you were influenced by historical writing so early in life. It has always
caught one’s eye how history is used in your work, for instance, Night Rider.
WARREN
Well, that isn’t a
historical novel. The events belonged to my early childhood. I remember the
troops coming in when martial law was declared in that part of Kentucky. When I
wrote the novel I wasn’t thinking of it as history. For one thing, the world it
treated still, in a way, survived. You could still talk to the old men who had
been involved. In the 1930s I remember going to see a judge down in Kentucky—he
was an elderly man then, a man of the highest integrity and reputation—who had
lived through that period and who by common repute had been mixed up in it—his
father had been a tobacco grower. He got to talking about that period in
Kentucky. He said, “Well, I won’t say who was and who wasn’t mixed up in some
of those things, but I will make one observation: I have noticed that the sons
of those who were opposed to getting a fair price for tobacco ended up as
either bootleggers or brokers.” But he was an old-fashioned kind of guy, for
whom bootlegging and brokerage looked very much alike. Such a man didn’t look
“historical” thirty years ago. Now he looks like the thighbone of a mastodon.
INTERVIEWER
It seems clear that
you don’t write “historical” novels; they are always concerned with urgent
problems, but the awareness of history seems to be central.
WARREN
That’s so. I don’t
think I do write historical novels. I try to find stories that catch my eye,
stories that seem to have issues in purer form than they come to one ordinarily.
INTERVIEWER
A kind of unblurred
topicality?
WARREN
I wrote two
unpublished novels in the thirties. Night Rider
is the world of my childhood. At Heaven’s
Gate was contemporary. My third published, All the King’s Men, was worlds I
had seen. All the stories were contemporary. The novel I’m writing now, and two
I plan, are all contemporary.
INTERVIEWER
Brother to Dragons was set in the past.
WARREN
It belonged to a
historical setting, but it was not a departure: it was a matter of dealing with
issues in a more mythical form. I hate costume novels, but maybe I’ve written
some and don’t know it. I have a romantic kind of interest in the objects of
American history: saddles, shoes, figures of speech, rifles, et cetera. They’re
worth a lot. Help you focus. There is
a kind of extraordinary romance about American history. That’s the only word
for it—a kind of self-sufficiency. You know, the grandpas and the
great-grandpas carried the assumption that somehow their lives and their
decisions were important; that as they went up, down, here and there, such a
life was important and that it was a man’s responsibility to live it.
INTERVIEWER
In this connection,
do you feel that there are certain themes which are basic to the American
experience, even though a body of writing in a given period might ignore or
evade them?
WARREN
First thing, without
being systematic, what comes to mind without running off a week and praying
about it, would be that America was based on a big promise—a great big one: the
Declaration of Independence. When you have to live with that in the house,
that’s quite a problem—particularly when you’ve got to make money and get
ahead, open world markets, do all the things you have to, raise your children,
and so forth. America is stuck with its self-definition put on paper in 1776,
and that was just like putting a burr under the metaphysical saddle of
America—you see, that saddle’s going to jump now and then and it pricks.
There’s another thing in the American experience that makes for a curious kind
of abstraction. We suddenly had to define ourselves and what we stood for in
one night. No other nation ever had to do that. In fact, one man did it—one man
in an upstairs room, Thomas Jefferson. Sure, you might say that he was the
amanuensis for a million or so people stranded on the edge of the continent and
backed by a wilderness, and there’s some sense in that notion. But somebody had to formulate it—in
fact, just overnight, whatever the complicated background of that
formulation—and we’ve been stuck with it ever since. With the very words it
used. Do you know the Polish writer Adam De Gurowski?* He was of a highly
placed Polish family; he came and worked as a civil servant in Washington, a
clerk, a kind of self-appointed spy on democracy. His book America—of 1857, I think—begins
by saying that America is unique among nations because other nations are
accidents of geography or race, but America is based on an idea. Behind the
comedy of proclaiming that idea from Fourth of July platforms there is the solemn
notion, Believe and ye shall be saved.
That abstraction sometimes does become concrete, is a part of the American
experience—and of the American problem—the lag between idea and fact, between
word and flesh.
INTERVIEWER
What about historical
time? America has had so much happening in such a short time.
WARREN
Awful lot of
foreshortening in it. America lives in two times, chronological time and
history. The last widow drawing a pension from the War of 1812 died just a few
years ago. My father was old enough to vote when the last full-scale battle
against Indians was fought—a couple of regiments, I think, of regulars with
artillery.
INTERVIEWER
From the first your
work is explicitly concerned with moral judgments, even during a period of
history when much American fiction was concerned with moral questions only in
the narrow way of the “proletarian” and “social realism” novels of the 1930s.
WARREN
I think I ought to
say that behind Night Rider and my
next novel, At Heaven’s Gate,
there was a good deal of the shadow not only of the events of that period but
of the fiction of that period. I am more aware of that fact now than I was
then. Of course only an idiot could have not been aware that he was trying to
write a novel about, in one sense, “social justice” in Night Rider or, for that matter, At Heaven’s Gate. But in some
kind of a fumbling way I was aware, I guess, of trying to find the dramatic rub
of the story at some point a little different from and deeper than the point of
dramatic rub in some of the then current novels. But what I want to emphasize
is the fact that I was fumbling rather than working according to plan and
convictions already arrived at. When you start any book you don’t know what,
ultimately, your issues are. You try to write to find them. You’re fiddling
with the stuff, hoping to make sense, whatever kind of sense you can make.
INTERVIEWER
At least you could
say that as a Southerner you were more conscious of what some of the issues
were. You couldn’t, I assume, forget the complexity of American social reality,
no matter what your aesthetic concerns, or other concerns.
WARREN
It never crossed my
mind when I began writing fiction that I could write about anything except life
in the South. It never crossed my mind that I knew about anything else; knew,
that is, well enough to write about. Nothing else ever nagged you enough to
stir the imagination. But I stumbled into fiction rather late. I’ve got to be
autobiographical about this. For years I didn’t have much interest in fiction,
that is, in college. I was reading my head off in poetry, Elizabethan and the
moderns, Yeats, Hardy, Eliot, Hart Crane. I wasn’t seeing the world around
me—that is, in any way that might be thought of as directly related to fiction.
Be it to my everlasting shame that when the Scopes trial was going on a few
miles from me I didn’t even bother to go. My head was too full of John Ford and
John Webster and William Blake and T. S. Eliot. If I had been thinking about
writing novels about the South I would have been camping in Dayton,
Tennessee—and would have gone about it like journalism. At least the
Elizabethans saved me from that. As for starting fiction, I simply stumbled on
it. In the spring of 1930 I was at Oxford, doing graduate work. I guess I was
homesick and not knowing it. Paul Rosenfeld, who, with Van Wyck Brooks and
Lewis Mumford, was then editing the old American
Caravan, wrote and asked me why I didn’t try a long story for them.
He had had the patience one evening to listen to me blowing off about
night-rider stories from boyhood. So Oxford and homesickness, or at least
back-homeward-looking, and Paul Rosenfeld made me write Prime Leaf, a novelette that
appeared in the Caravan, and was
later the germ of Night Rider. I
remember playing hooky from academic work to write the thing, and the discovery
that you could really enjoy trying to write fiction. It was a new way of
looking at things, and my head was full of recollections of the way objects
looked in Kentucky and Tennessee. It was like going back to the age of twelve,
going fishing and all that. It was a sense of freedom and excitement.
INTERVIEWER
When you started
writing, what preoccupations, technically and thematically, had you in common
with your crowd?
WARREN
I suppose you mean
the poets called the Fugitive Group in Nashville—Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom,
Donald Davidson, Merrill Moore, et cetera?
INTERVIEWER
Yes.
WARREN
Well, in one sense, I
don’t know what the group had in common. I think there is a great fallacy in
assuming that there was a systematic program behind the Fugitive Group. There
was no such thing, and among the members there were deep differences in
temperament and aesthetic theory. They were held together by geography and
poetry. They all lived in Nashville, and they were all interested in poetry.
Some were professors, some businessmen; one was a banker, several were
students. They met informally to argue philosophy and read each other the poems
they wrote. For some of them these interests were incidental to their main
concerns. For a couple of others, like Tate, it was poetry or death. Their
activity wasn’t any “school” or “program.” Mutual respect and common interests,
that was what held them together—that and the provincial isolation, I guess.
INTERVIEWER
But did you share
with them any technical or thematic preoccupations?
WARREN
The answer can’t, you
see, apply to the group. But in a very important way, that group was my
education. I knew individual writers, poems, and books through them. I was
exposed to the liveliness and range of the talk and the wrangle of argument. I
heard the talk about techniques, but techniques regarded as means of
expression. But most of all I got the feeling that poetry was a vital activity,
that it related to ideas and to life. I came into the group rather late. I was
timid and reverential, I guess. And I damned well should have been. Anyway,
there was little or no talk in those days about fiction. Some of the same
people, a little later, however, did give me in a very concrete way a sense of
how literature can be related to place and history.
INTERVIEWER
It’s very striking
when you consider writing by Southerners before the twenties. Some think that
few writers were then in the South as talented or competent, or as confident as
today. This strikes me as a very American cultural phenomenon in spite of its
specifically regional aspects. Would you say that this was a kind of repetition
of what occurred in New England, say, during the 1830s?
WARREN
Yes, I do see some
parallel between New England before the Civil War and the South after World War
I to the present. The old notion of a shock, a cultural shock, to a more or
less closed and static society—you know, what happened on a bigger scale in the
Italian Renaissance or Elizabethan England. After 1918 the modern industrial
world, with its good and bad, hit the South; all sorts of ferments began. As
for individual writers, almost all of them of that period had had some
important experience outside the South, then returned there—some strange
mixture of continuity and discontinuity in their experience—a jagged quality.
But more than mere general cultural or personal shocks, there was a moral shock
in the South, a tension that grew out of the race situation. That moral tension
had always been there, but it took new and more exacerbated forms after 1920.
For one thing, the growing self-consciousness of the Negroes opened up
possibilities for expanding economic and cultural horizons. A consequence was
that the Southerner’s loyalties and pieties—real values, mind you—were sometimes
staked against his religious and moral sense, equally real values. There isn’t
much vital imagination, it seems to me, that doesn’t come from this sort of
shock, imbalance, need to “relive,” redefine life.
INTERVIEWER
There is, for us, an
exciting spiral of redefinition in your own work from I’ll Take My Stand through the
novels to Segregation. It would
seem that these works mark stages in a combat with the past. In the first, the
point of view seems orthodox and unreconstructed. How can one say it? In recent
years your work has become more intense and has taken on an element of personal
confession which is so definite that one tends to look, for example, on Segregation and Brother to Dragons as two facets
of a single attitude.
WARREN
You’ve thrown several
different things at me here. Let me try to sort them out. First you refer to
the Southern Agrarian book I’ll Take My
Stand, of 1930, and then to my recent little book on Segregation. My essay in I’ll Take My Stand was about the
Negro in the South, and it was a defense of segregation. I haven’t read that
piece, as far as I can remember, since 1930, and I’m not sure exactly how
things are put there. But I do recall very distinctly the circumstances of
writing it. I wrote it at Oxford at about the same time I began writing
fiction. The two things were tied together—the look back home from a long
distance. I remember the jangle and wrangle of writing the essay and some kind
of discomfort in it, some sense of evasion, I guess, in writing it, in contrast
with the free feeling of writing the novelette Prime
Leaf, the sense of seeing something fresh, the holiday sense plus
some stirring up of something inside yourself. In the essay, I reckon, I was
trying to prove something, and in the novelette trying to find out something,
see something, feel something—exist. Don’t misunderstand me. On the objective
side of things, there wasn’t a power under heaven that could have changed
segregation in 1929 —the South wasn’t ready for it, the North wasn’t ready for
it, the Negro wasn’t. The Court, if I remember correctly, had just reaffirmed
segregation too. No, I’m not talking about the objective fact, but about the
subjective fact, yours truly, in relation to the objective fact. Well, it
wasn’t being outside the South that made me change my mind. It was coming back
home. In a little while I realized I simply couldn’t have written that essay
again. I guess trying to write fiction made me realize that. If you are
seriously trying to write fiction you can’t allow yourself as much evasion as
in trying to write essays. But some people can’t read fiction. One reviewer—a
professional critic—said that Band of
Angels is an apology for the plantation system. Well, the story of Band wasn’t an apology or an attack. It was simply
trying to say something about something. But God Almighty, you have to spell it
out for some people, especially a certain breed of professional
defender-of-the-good, who makes a career of holding the right thoughts and
admiring his own moral navel. Well, that’s getting off the point. What else was
it you threw at me?
INTERVIEWER
Would you say that
each book marks a redefinition of reality arrived at through a combat with the
past? A development from the traditional to the highly personal reality? A
confession?
WARREN
I never thought of a
combat with the past. I guess I think more of trying to find what there is
valuable to us, the line of continuity to us, and through
us. The specific Southern past, I’m now talking about. As for combat, I guess
the real combat is always with yourself, Southerner or anybody else. You fight
your battles one by one and do the best you can. Whatever patterns there are
develop, aren’t planned—the really basic patterns, I mean, the kind you live
into. As for confession, that wouldn’t have occurred to me, but I do know that
in the last ten years or a little more the personal relation to my writing
changed. I never bothered to define the change. I quit writing poems for
several years; that is, I’d start them, get a lot down, then feel that I wasn’t
connecting somehow. I didn’t finish one for several years; they felt false.
Then I got back at it, and that is the bulk of what I’ve done since Band of Angels—a new book of
poems which will be out in the summer. When you try to write a book—even objective
fiction—you have to write from the inside, not the outside—the inside of
yourself. You have to find what’s there. You can’t predict it—just dredge for
it and hope you have something worth the dredging. That isn’t
“confession”—that’s just trying to use whatever the Lord lets you lay hand to.
And of course you have to have common sense enough and structural sense enough
to know what is relevant. You don’t choose a story, it chooses you. You get
together with that story somehow; you’re stuck with it. There certainly is some
reason it attracted you, and you’re writing it trying to find out that reason;
justify, get at that reason. I can always look back and remember the exact
moment when I encountered the germ of any story I wrote—a clear flash.
INTERVIEWER
What is your period
of incubation? Months? Years?
WARREN
Something I read or
see stays in my head for five or six years. I always remember the date, the
place, the room, the road, when I first was struck. For instance, World Enough and Time. Katherine
Anne Porter and I were both at the Library of Congress as Fellows. We were in
the same pew, had offices next to each other. She came in one day with an old
pamphlet, the trial of Beauchamp for killing Colonel Sharp. She said, “Well,
Red, you better read this.” There it was. I read it in five minutes. But I was
six years making the book. Any book I write starts with a flash but takes a
long time to shape up. All of your first versions are in your head, so by the
time you sit down to write you have some line developed in your head.
INTERVIEWER
What is the relation
of sociological research and other types of research to the forms of fiction?
WARREN
I think it’s purely
accidental. For one writer a big dose of such stuff might be fine, for another
it might be poison. I’ve known a good many people, some of them writers, who
think of literature as material
that you “work up.” You don’t “work up” literature. They point at Zola. But
Zola didn’t do that, nor did Dreiser. They may have thought they did, but they
didn’t. They weren’t “working up” something—in one sense, something was working
them up. You see the world as best you can—with or without the help of
somebody’s research, as the case may be. You see as much as you can, and the
events and books that are interesting to you should be interesting to you
because you’re a human being, not because you’re trying to be a writer. Then
those things may be of some use to you as a writer later on. I don’t believe in
a schematic approach to material. The business of researching for a book
strikes me as a sort of obscenity. What I mean is, researching for a book in
the sense of trying to find a book to write. Once you are engaged by a subject,
are in your book, have your idea, you may or may not want to do some
investigating. But you ought to do it in the same spirit in which you’d take a
walk in the evening air to think things over. You can’t research to get a book.
You stumble on it, or hope to. Maybe you will, if you live right.
INTERVIEWER
Speaking of craft,
how conscious are you of the dramatic structure of your novels when you begin?
I ask because in your work there is quite a variety of sub-forms, folklore, set
pieces like “The Ballad of Billie Potts” or the Cass Mastern episode in All the King’s Men. Are these
planned as part of the dramatic structure, or do they arise while you are being
carried by the flow of invention?
WARREN
I try to think a lot
about the craft of other people—that’s a result of my long years of teaching.
You’ve been explaining things like how the first scene of Hamlet gets off, thinking of how
things have been done . . . I suppose some of this sinks down to your gizzard.
When it comes to your own work you have made some objective decisions, such as
which character is going to tell the story. That’s a prime question, a question
of control. You have to make a judgment. You find one character is more
insistent, he’s more sensitive and more pointed than the others. But as for
other aspects of structure and craft, I guess, in the actual process of
composition or in preliminary thinking, I try to immerse myself in the motive
and feel toward meanings, rather than
plan a structure or plan effects. At some point, you know, you have to try to
get one with God and then take a hard cold
look at what you’re doing and work on it once more, trusting in your viscera
and nervous system and your previous efforts as far as they’ve gone. The hard
thing, the objective thing, has to be done before the book is written. And if
anybody dreams up “Kubla Khan,” it’s going to be Coleridge. If the work is done
the dream will come to the man who’s ready for that particular dream; it’s not
going to come just from dreaming in general. After a thing is done, then I try
to get tough and critical with myself. But damn it, it may sometimes be too
late. But that is the fate of man. What I am trying to say is that I try to
forget the abstractions when I’m actually composing a thing. I don’t understand
other approaches that come up when I talk to other writers. For instance, some
say their sole interest is experimentation. Well, I think that you learn all
you can and try to use it. I don’t know what is meant by the word “experiment”;
you ought to be playing for keeps.
INTERVIEWER
Yes, but there is
still great admiration of the so-called experimental writing of the twenties.
What of Joyce and Eliot?
WARREN
What is “experimental
writing”? James Joyce didn’t do “experimental writing”—he wrote Ulysses. Eliot didn’t do
“experimental writing”—he wrote The Waste
Land. When you fail at something you call it an “experiment,” an
élite word for flop. Just because lines are uneven or capitals missing doesn’t
mean experiment. Literary magazines devoted to experimental writing are usually
filled with works by middle-aged or old people.
INTERVIEWER
Or middle-aged young
people.
WARREN
Young fogeys. In one
way, of course, all writing that is any good is
experimental; that is, it’s a way of seeing what is possible—what poem, what
novel is possible. Experiment—they define it as putting a question to nature,
and that is true of writing undertaken with seriousness. You put the question
to human nature—and especially your own nature—and see what comes out. It is
unpredictable. If it is predictable—not experimental in that sense—then it will
be worthless.
INTERVIEWER
The Southern Review contained much
fine work, but little that was purely “experimental”—isn’t that so?
WARREN
Yes, and there were a
lot of good young, or younger, writers in it. Not all Southern either—about
half, I should say.
INTERVIEWER
I remember that some
of Algren’s first work appeared there.
WARREN
Oh, yes, two early
stories, for example; and a longish poem about baseball.
INTERVIEWER
And the story, “A
Bottle of Milk for Mother.”
WARREN
And the story
“Biceps.” And three or four of Eudora’s first stories were there—Eudora
Welty—and some of Katherine Anne’s novelettes—Katherine Anne Porter.
INTERVIEWER
There were a lot of
critics in it—young ones too.
WARREN
Oh yes, younger then,
anyway. Kenneth Burke, F. O. Matthiessen, Theodore Spencer, R. P. Blackmur,
Delmore Schwartz, L. C. Knights . . .
INTERVIEWER
Speaking of critics
reminds me that you’ve written criticism as well as poetry, drama, and fiction.
It is sometimes said that the practice of criticism is harmful to the rest;
have you found it so?
WARREN
On this matter of
criticism, something that appalls me is the idea going around now that the
practice of criticism is opposed to the literary impulse—is necessarily opposed to it. Sure,
it may be a trap, it may destroy the
creative impulse, but so may drink or money or respectability. But criticism is
a perfectly natural human activity, and somehow the dullest, most technical
criticism may be associated with full creativity. Elizabethan criticism is all,
or nearly all, technical—meter, how to hang a line together—kitchen criticism,
how to make the cake. People deeply interested in an art are interested in the
“how.” Now I don’t mean to say that that is the only kind of valuable
criticism. Any kind is good that gives a deeper insight into the nature of the
thing—a Marxist analysis, a Freudian study, the relation to a literary or
social tradition, the history of a theme. But we have to remember that there is
no one, single, correct kind of
criticism, no complete criticism.
You only have different kinds of perspectives, giving, when successful,
different kinds of insights. And at one historical moment one kind of insight
may be more needed than another.
INTERVIEWER
But don’t you think
that in America now a lot of good critical ideas get lost in terminology, in
the gobbledygook style of expression?
WARREN
Every age, every
group, has its jargon. When the jargon runs away with the insight, that’s no
good. Sure, a lot of people think they have the key to truth if they have a
lingo. And a lot of modern criticism has run off into lingo, into
academicism—the wrong kind of academicism, that pretends to be unacademic. The
real academic job is to absorb an idea, to put it into perspective along with
other ideas, not to dilute it to lingo. As for lingo, it’s true that some very
good critics got bit by the bug that you could develop a fixed critical
vocabulary. Well, you can’t, except within narrow limits. That is a trap of
scientism.
INTERVIEWER
Do you see some new
ideas in criticism now emerging?
WARREN
No, I don’t see them
now. We’ve had Mr. Freud and Mr. Marx and—
INTERVIEWER
Mr. Frazer and The Golden Bough.
WARREN
Yes, and Mr.
Coleridge and Mr. Arnold and Mr. Eliot and Mr. Richards and Mr. Leavis and Mr.
Aristotle, et cetera. There have been, or are, many competing kinds of criticism
with us—but I don’t see a new one, or a new development of one of the old kind.
It’s an age groping for its issue.
INTERVIEWER
What about the New
Criticism?
WARREN
Let’s name some of
them—Richards, Eliot, Tate, Blackmur, Winters, Brooks, Leavis (I guess). How in
God’s name can you get that gang into the same bed? There’s no bed big enough
and no blanket would stay tucked. When Ransom wrote his book called The New Criticism, he was
pointing out the vindictive variety among the critics and saying that he didn’t
agree with any of them. The term is, in one sense, a term without any
referent—or with too many referents. It is a term that belongs to the
conspiracy theory of history. A lot of people—chiefly aging, conservative
professors scared of losing prestige, or young instructors afraid of not
getting promoted, middlebrow magazine editors, and the flotsam and jetsam of
semi-Marxist social-significance criticism left stranded by history—they all
had a communal nightmare called the New Criticism to explain their vague
discomfort. I think it was something they ate.
INTERVIEWER
What do you
mean—conspiracy?
WARREN
Those folks all had
the paranoidal nightmare that there was a conspiracy called the New Criticism,
just to do them personal wrong. No, it’s not quite that simple, but there is
some truth in this. One thing that a lot of so-called New Critics had in common
was a willingness to look long and hard at the literary object. But the ways of
looking might be very different. Eliot is a lot closer to Arnold and the Archbishop
of Canterbury than he is to Yvor Winters, and Winters is a lot closer to Irving
Babbitt than to Richards, and the exegeses of Brooks are a lot closer to
Coleridge than to Ransom, and so on. There has been more nonsense talked about
this subject than about any I can think of. And a large part of the nonsense,
on any side of the question, derives from the assumption that any one kind of
criticism is “correct” criticism. There is no correct or complete criticism.
INTERVIEWER
You had a piece in The New Republic once in which
you discuss Faulkner’s technique. One of the things you emphasize is Faulkner’s
technique of the “still moment.” I’ve forgotten what you called it exactly—a
suspension, in which time seems to hang.
WARREN
That’s the frozen
moment. Freeze time. Somewhere, almost in a kind of pun, Faulkner himself uses
the image of a frieze for such a moment of frozen action. It’s an important
quality in his work. Some of these moments harden up an event, give it its
meaning by holding it fixed. Time fluid versus time fixed. In Faulkner’s work
that’s the drama behind the drama. Take a look at Hemingway; there’s no time in
Hemingway, there are only moments in themselves, moments of action. There are
no parents and no children. If there’s a parent he is a grandparent off in
America somewhere who signs the check, like the grandfather in A Farewell to Arms. You never see
a small child in Hemingway. You get death in childbirth but you never see a
child. Everything is outside of the time process. But in Faulkner there are
always the very old and the very young. Time spreads and is the important
thing, the terrible thing. A tremendous flux is there, things flowing away in
all directions. Moments not quite ready to be shaped are already there,
waiting, and we feel their presence. What you most remember about Jason in The Sound and the Fury, say, is
the fact that he was the treasurer when the children made and sold kites, and
kept the money in his pocket. Or you remember Caddy getting her drawers muddy.
Everything is already there, just waiting to happen. You have the sense of the
small becoming large in time, the large becoming small, the sweep of time over
things—that, and the balance of the frozen, abstracted moment against violent
significant action. These frozen moments are Faulkner’s game. Hemingway has a
different game. In Hemingway there’s no time at all. He’s out of history
entirely. In one sense, he tries to deny history, he says history is the bunk,
like Henry Ford.
I am in no sense
making an invidious comparison between the two writers—or between their special
uses of time. They are both powerfully expressive writers. But it’s almost too
pat, you know, almost too schematic, the polar differences between those two
writers in relation to the question of time. Speaking of pairs of writers, take
Proust and Faulkner. There may be a lot written on the subject, but I haven’t
encountered much of it. They’d make a strange but instructive pair to study—in
relation to time.
INTERVIEWER
Wouldn’t you say that
there seems to be in the early Hemingway a conscious effort not to have a very high center of
consciousness within the form of the novel? His characters may have a highly
moral significance, but they seldom discuss issues; they prefer to hint.
WARREN
Sure, Hemingway
sneaks it in, but he is an intensely conscious and even philosophical writer.
When the snuck-in thing or the gesture works, the effect can be mighty
powerful. By contrast, French fiction usually has a hero who deals very
consciously with the issues. He is his own chorus to the action, as well as the
man who utters the equivalent of the Elizabethan soliloquy. Nineteenth-century
fiction also dealt with the issues. Those novels could discuss them in terms of
a man’s relation to a woman, or in terms of whether you’re going to help a
slave run away, or in terms of what to do about a man obsessed with fighting
evil, nature, what have you, in the form of a white whale.
INTERVIEWER
Your own work seems
to have this explicit character. Jack Burden in All
the King’s Men is a conscious center and he is a highly conscious
man. He’s not there as an omniscient figure, but is urgently trying to discover
something. He is involved.
WARREN
Burden got there by
accident. He was only a sentence or two in the first version—the verse play
from which the novel developed.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you make the
change?
WARREN
I don’t know. He was
an unnamed newspaperman, a childhood friend of the assassin; an excuse for the
young doctor, the assassin of the politician Willie Stark, to say something
before he performed the deed. When after two years I picked up the verse
version and began to fool with a novel, the unnamed newspaperman became the
narrator. It turned out, in a way, that what he thought about the story was
more important than the story itself. I suppose he became the narrator because
he gave me the kind of interest I needed to write the novel. He made it
possible for me to control it. He is an observer, but he is involved.
INTERVIEWER
For ten years or more
it has been said in the United States that problems of race are an obsession of
Negro writers, but that they have no place in literature. But how can a Negro
writer avoid the problem of race?
WARREN
How can you expect a
Southern Negro not to write about race, directly or indirectly, when you can’t
find a Southern white man who can avoid it?
INTERVIEWER
I must say that it’s
usually white Northerners who express a different opinion, though a few Negroes
have been seduced by it. And they usually present their argument on aesthetic grounds.
WARREN
I’d like to add here
something about the historical element which seems to me important for this
general question. The Negro who is now writing protest qua protest strikes me
as anachronistic. Protest qua protest denies the textures of life. The problem
is to permit the fullest range of life into racial awareness. I don’t mean to
imply that there’s nothing to protest about, but aside from the appropriate
political, sociological, and journalistic concerns, the problem is to see the
protest in its relation to other things. Race isn’t an isolated thing—I mean as
it exists in the U.S.—it becomes a total symbolism for every kind of issue.
They all flow into it—and out of it. Well, thank God. It gives a little variety
to life. At the same time it proclaims the unity of life. You know the kind of
person who puts on a certain expression and then talks about “solving” the race
problem. Well, it’s the same kind of person and the same kind of expression you
meet when you hear the phrase “solve the sex problem.” This may be a poor
parallel, but it’s some kind of parallel. Basically the issue isn’t to “solve”
the “race problem” or the “sex problem.” You don’t solve it, you just
experience it. Appreciate it.
INTERVIEWER
Maybe that’s another
version of William James’s “Moral Equivalent of War.” You argue and try to keep
the argument clean, all the human complexities in view.
WARREN
What I’m trying to
say is this. A few years ago I sat in a room with some right-thinking friends,
the kind of people who think you look in the back of the book for every answer—
attitude A for situation A, attitude B for situation B, and so on through the
damned alphabet. It developed that they wanted a world where everything is
exactly alike and everybody is exactly alike. They wanted a production belt of
human faces and human attitudes, and the same books on every parlor table.
INTERVIEWER
Hell, who would want
such a world?
WARREN
“Right-thinkers” want
it, for one thing. I don’t want that kind of world. I want variety and
pluralism—and appreciation.
Appreciation in the context of some sort of justice and decency, and freedom of
choice in conduct and personal life. I’d like a country in which there was a
maximum of opportunity for any individual to discover his talents and develop
his capacities—discover his fullest self and by so doing learn to respect other
selves a little. Man is interesting in his differences. It’s all a question of
what you make of the differences. I’m not for differences per se, but you just
let the world live the differences, live them out, live them up, and see how
things come out. But I feel pretty strongly about attempts to legislate undifference. That is just as
much tyranny as trying to legislate difference. Apply that to any differences
between healthy and unhealthy, criminal and noncriminal. Furthermore, you can’t
legislate the future of anybody, in any direction. It’s not laws that are going
to determine what our great-grandchildren feel or do. The tragedy of a big half
of American liberalism is to try to legislate virtue. You can’t legislate
virtue. You should simply try to establish conditions favorable for the growth
of virtue. But that will never satisfy the bully-boys of virtue, the
plug-uglies of virtue. They are interested in the production-belt stamp of
virtue, attitude A in the back of the book, and not in establishing conditions
of justice and decency in which human appreciation can find play.
Listen, I’ll tell you
a story. More than twenty years ago I spent part of a summer in a little town
in Louisiana, and like a good number of the population whiled away the
afternoons by going to the local murder trials. One case involved an old Negro
man who had shot a young Negro woman for talking meanness against his baby-girl
daughter. He had shot the victim with both barrels of a twelve-gauge at a range
of eight feet, while the victim was in a crap game. There were a dozen
witnesses to the execution. Besides that he had sat for half an hour on a stump
outside the door of the building where the crap game was going on, before he
got down to business. He was waiting, because a friend had lost six dollars to
the intended victim and had asked the old man to hold off till he had a chance
to win it back. When the friend got the six dollars back, the old man went to work.
He never denied what he had done. He explained it all very carefully, and why
he had to do it. He loved his baby-girl daughter and there wasn’t anything else
he could do. Then he would plead not guilty. But if he got tried and
convicted—and they couldn’t fail to convict—he would get death. If, however, he
would plead guilty to manslaughter, he could get off light. But he wouldn’t do
it. He said he wasn’t guilty of anything. The whole town got involved in the
thing. Well, they finally cracked him. He pleaded guilty and got off light.
Everybody was glad, sure—they weren’t stuck with something, they could feel
good and pretty virtuous. But they felt bad, too. Something had been lost,
something a lot of them could appreciate. I used to think I’d try to make a
story of this. But I never did. It was too complete, too self-fulfilling, as
fact. But to get back to the old man. It took him three days to crack, and when
he cracked he was nothing. Now we don’t approve of what he did—a status
homicide the sociologists call it, and that is the worst sort of homicide,
worse than homicide for gain, because status homicide is irrational, and you
can’t make sense of it, and it is the mark of a low order of society. But
because status homicide is the mark of a low order of society, what are we to
think about the old man’s three-day struggle to keep his dignity? And are we to
deny value to this dignity because of the way “they” live down there?
INTERVIEWER
You feel, then, that
one of the great blocks in achieving serious fiction out of sad experience is
the assumption that you’re on the right side?
WARREN
Once you start
illustrating virtue as such you had better stop writing fiction. Do something
else, like Y-work. Or join a committee. Your business as a writer is not to
illustrate virtue, but to show how a fellow may move toward it—or away from it.
INTERVIEWER
Malraux says that
“one cannot reveal the mystery of human beings in the form of a plea for the
defense.”
WARREN
Or in the form of an
indictment, either.
INTERVIEWER
What about the
devil’s advocate?
WARREN
He can have a role,
he can be Jonathan Swift or something.
INTERVIEWER
I wonder what these
right-thinkers feel when they confront a Negro, say, the symbol of the
underdog, and he turns out to be a son of a bitch. What do they do—hold a
conference to decide how to treat him?
WARREN
They must sure have a
problem.
INTERVIEWER
The same kind of
people, they have to consult with themselves to determine if they can laugh at
certain situations in which Negroes are involved—like minstrel shows. A whole
world of purely American humor got lost in that shuffle, along with some good
songs.
WARREN
It’s just goddamned
hard, you have to admit, though, to sort out things that are symbolically
charged. Sometimes the symbolic charge is so heavy you have a hard time getting
at the real value really there. You always can, I guess, if the context is
right. But hell, a lot of people can’t read a context.
INTERVIEWER
It’s like the problem
of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice.
WARREN
Yes, suppress the
play because it might offend a Jew. Or Oliver Twist.
Well, such symbolic charges just have to be reckoned with and taken on their
own terms and in their historical perspective. As a matter of fact, such
symbolic charges are present, in one degree or another, in all relationships.
They’re simply stepped up and specialized in certain historical and social
situations. There are mighty few stories you can tell without offending
somebody—without some implicit affront. The comic strip of Li’l Abner, for instance, must
have made certain persons of what is called “Appalachian white” origin feel
inferior and humiliated. There are degrees as well as differences in these
things. Context is all. And a relatively pure heart. Relatively pure—for if you had a
pure heart you wouldn’t be in the book-writing business in the first place.
We’re stuck with it in ourselves—what we can write about, if anything; what you
can make articulate; what voices you have in your insides and in your ear.
*Adam De Gurowski,
1805-1866, author of America and Europe
(1857) and My Diary: Notes on the Civil War
(1866), among other works.
Note: There is an
integral relationship between this interview and the interview with Ralph
Ellison which appeared in issue no. 8 of The Paris
Review.
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