34
PARTISAN REVIEW
filled with details of vision , of smell . I am a person who devours
detail .
Christ:
Speaking of vision, I recall that your manuscript pages are
covered with drawings . Did you ever consider painting as a
career?
Donoso:
Yes, very much so . To begin with , I'm a fantastic doodler.
If
you pick up anything in this house, it's covered with drawings and
what have you. I remember we were at Kurt Vonnegut's house
once and we were playing Scrabble. I was doodling on a page like
that. Apparently I left it there. The next day Kurt Vonnegut
shows up with that drawing of mine framed! It's something he's
kept. Some people have kept my drawings because they think–
not because they're particularly good - they're pleasant, they're
amusing, but technically, again, extremely detailed.
Christ:
Have any painters-or moviemakers for that matter-direct–
ly influenced your work?
Donoso:
Painting, more than the cinema, has been a life-long addic–
tion . It must have certainly influenced me, since so much in my
books is "visual," so much can be broken up into
tableaux.
The
breaking up of personality, of the self, the transformation - isn't
much of it to be found, say, in Picasso? Besides that, there were ,
especially in
The Bird,
conscious efforts at evoking certain paint–
ers : the tenebrists, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Georges de la
Tour.
Christ: The Bird
is put together by a kind of narrative doodling , isn't
it?
Donoso:
Yes. In all, there were eighteen manuscripts for the novel.
Writing it was like peeling off my own skin; that novel is my flesh
and blood and it possessed me, it took control of me and my life–
all very painful and very difficult . Flaubert said that he was
Madame Bovary; well, I am my novel.
Christ:
What made you decide not to pursue painting as a career?
Donoso:
The knowledge that I had no talent for it. I didn't kid myself
at any point. Also, it's strange, but one of the books I read with
great relish when I was about seventeen was
Of Human Bondage.
I
loved
it! And I had been a painter up to then . I was always plan–
ning to be a writer, but the painting was what was uppermost.
There's a character in that book, a girl named Fanny Price - I still
remember! - who committed suicide because she was not a great
painter. And I always said : I'm Fanny Price in tha t sense but I
don't want to have to commit suicide - which is a lot of very liter-
