GILBERT SORRENTINO
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to the time of the glorious primitive. You have to take what they give
you and see if you can turn those materials into something valuable.
It's a hard time to be an artist, the whole world is geared against it.
Barone:
O.K. I notice in your reviews that you never tiptoe along the
fence. That's good.
Sorrentino:
I came to the conclusion long ago that it's better to make a
fool of yourself than to waHle.
If
you think you know what you're
talking about, but you're not quite sure, say it anyway. So what? You
turn out five or ten years later to be a dope. On the other hand, it may
turn out that you said something that a later reader will find
valuable for further investigation.
Barone:
Do you ever feel with your own writing that maybe you made a
fool of yourself in that you assimilated-like learning from Robert
Creeley-before you really understood it?
Sorrentino:
Before I knew exactly what Creeley was up to I saw in him
something useful? Well, there was something I wanted to do in my
own work, and I didn't know how to do it. When I first read Creeley,
I said that's the voice I understand. I began, then, to see in Creeley a
way of entering. My work rather quickly branched off-split off–
from Creeley's long ago. I have a lot of difficulty right now trying to
follow Creeley. I don't really know what he's up to. But in his earlier
work it seems to me that he had found a kind of absolute voice for
that odd generation which is my own. One feels a terrific sense of
fidelity to those writers, even though we've gone our separate ways.
The sense of loyalty is there because we all seemed to
be
muddling
through it at the same time. Creeley has an introduction to a book in
which he says the "new" writer had a very hard time in the forties
and fifties-really the understatement of the year.
It
was a ridiculous
time to be a writer with different ideas.
Barone:
A lot of times you've said that the fifties were very boring to
you.
Sorrentino:
Oh, they were desperate years, at least the early fifties.
Creeley was then at Black Mountain, where there was an artistic
community, but it was very different to live in New York, which was
much more enslaved at that time by the literary establishment than it
is now. There is no New York literary establishment now, none, that
is, that is not totally corrupted and fri volous, but in the fifties there
was quite literally no place to publish if you did not either know
those people or write the way they thought you , should write. As
Creeley put it, these men, the arbiters of taste in the late forties and
throughout the fifties, thought of literary form as something "extrin-
