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PARTISAN REVIEW
teresting writer, extremely lively and eloquent. And I like this new
tendency of literature about literature, I really love it. I thought
The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco was awfully good, by the way.
SF: Do you think it's a good or useful thing for readers to want to
know something about writers and what they think, how they com–
pose their novels, whether they use an electric typewriter or a
MacIntosh computer?
MS:
I think it's got very little to do with their work: some live very
stodgy and regular lives, others are very wild. Unless they're writing
purely autobiographically, it really hasn't very much effect on the
quality of their work. Right now there's a big upsurge of writings
about Eliot and his early life. But it doesn't make a bit of difference
to the end result; there's nothing in his life that can explain the
poetry.
If
you were told that he lived an exemplary life, and had
been a bank clerk all his life, instead of just for a time, the poetry
would still be there, and no more explicable in terms of what he was
or did. There's no scientific way in which you can say,
If
a writer
lives this way the end result will be better than if he lives that way.
After the work's done you can say, This was his life , and it shows
here and there in his work . But if it hadn't been that it would have
been something else. For a good writer, anything is reflected.
SF:
Do you think it's dangerous for a writer to get wrapped up in his
public image of himself-what Blaise Cendrars called "falling vic–
tim to his own legend"?
MS:
Yes. But I haven't had the temptation because I'm not quite so
celebrated as all that; I'm not a television star or anything. I do
know a writer who is a television star and it is a great danger to his
work. But I think it's inevitable that television, for instance, should
focus on writers' personal lives , because very few viewers of televi–
sion are interested in much else, since they don't read. Unless the
writer is a name and has a whole interesting life of his own, or mar–
ries interesting people, or becomes political, they're not very
interested . Look at Gore Vidal, he's a politician-he's a
great
televi–
sion star, extremely witty and very funny. He's ajolly good essayist,
but he'd be a better novelist perhaps if he didn't have that myth
always pulling at him. But then he's tempted to go on television
because he
is
political, he's got something to say. And it probably
fulfills some part of his personality that writing alone wouldn't do.
SF:
On the other side of that question, do you think it helps or hurts
a writer to be put into a position where he had to justify his work to
his public?
