FACTS AND fiCTIONS IN ALL THREE GENRES
155
their lives is worth achieving. I don't see this as necessari ly or desirably an
ideological issue because it would quickly get into the doubtfu l consider–
ation of whether there are specia l things a man or a woman can see.
T.
S.
Eliot was quite right to say that the only method is to be very intelligent.
Stanley Crouch : I
don't think that the idea of the boys' and gir ls' clubs
of literature, aesthet ics, etc., is very interesting.
In
fact I think it's a du ll
segregationist conception that gets in the way of our seeing the problem
of human commonality while addressing specificity.
What I was wondering though, is whether or not the writer ever
escapes his or her sensibilities? When I wrote a novel about a white
woman from South Dakota com ing to New York and becoming a jazz
musician, I wanted to use the old trick of the outsider coming into some–
thing so that we wou ld come
to
understand the wor ld through her
adventures. But I also wanted to get away from me. I felt that I had a
chance to avo id trying to justify who I am, as sometimes a writer does by
sneaking himself or herself into a character. So I was wondering if, when
you are writing something about another person, or about yourself, you
are ever able
to
become free of yourself. Can one ever escape his or her
sensibility arriving in the material, no matter who the subject is?
Francine du Plessix Gray:
Well, I sti ll think that it's an a lmost episte–
mological prob lem-we read with our whole entire life behind us. We
read with an autobiography behind us, and it's inevitable that all of our
experiences are going
to
influx into the text.
If
I reread Valery's
"Cimeticre Marin" today, which I learned by heart when I was twenty
two, I would read it with a totally different eye because I'm a different
person from what I was half a century ago. I think we can't help but
read-Virginia Woolf intimated this in
A
I~()om
of One's
Own-with
womanly eyes, that we cannot totally avoid this female epistemology,
this female way of looking at th ings. I agree with you that we must
strive to universality, and we must strive
to
a humanness which tran–
scends gender. But I am not totally sure-and I don't want to be ideo–
logical, I have never made an ideology of anything I've written-that I
can escape my status as a woman when I read or write.
Hilary Spurling:
Or as an individual. for me, at any rate, biography is in
the first instance fact-based. It must be historically accurate; at least, one
must be in possession of as much detail as possible-though it doesn't
mean, necessarily, that one's going
to
use it. Indeed, God forbid, because
a book becomes unreadable if you put in too mLlch of this stuff. But
