WAYS OF WRITING ABOUT ONESELF 73
very difficult
to
write about how I write, and so on. I am one step back
from that. Second of all, the whole performance, as it were, is based on
a kind of paradox that haunts all writers, because people generally do
not acknowledge the degree to which they are immediately personally
present in their writing.
If
they are going to write, if they are going
to
use language, if they are going to use diction, if they are going
to
have
any sort of grammar at their disposal, they are going
to
reveal them–
selves, because they are not going to use it the way everybody else uses
it. It will be instantly revealing-if not instantly, then ultimately. How
often has it been the case that you've read a book, a story, or what have
you, and you've come away with a very distinct sense of the person who
wrote it, and remember nothing about the story. That has certainly been
my case. Maybe other people have never had that experience.
I think the last point you made had to do with these minimal personal
entries of mine. My feeling was that I was after this thing that I keep
referring
to
as the expressive value of form in relation
to
the personal. [
think that while my book does have a considerable amount of autobio–
graphical matter, you can read it for story value if you like. The achieve–
ment of the book has to do with the achievement of this expressive
form. What comes through in the book is this personal essence; that's
what I was after, and that's what I was interested in. And the reason I
ended my paper with all that autobiographical material, which I'm sure
has a certain kind of human interest-and I am sure was indiscreet–
was used in order to make my point, to establish a contrast between that
and what I say about the trees and the birds and the fact that existence
moves toward a name. Am I making sense?
Susan Suleiman:
Yes, but, and I don't know whether other people feel
the same way, I was very interested in what you were doing in the end.
That is, it seemed
to
have its own very particular kind of poetic rhetoric.
And I was wondering whether your autobiography wasn't based on a
curious denial of the interest of the autobiographical.
Leonard Michaels:
No.
Susan Suleiman:
That is, you were saying that it's the form that mat–
ters, "( write about myself only when I'm not writing about myself."
The personal reveals itself in every sentence, but of course one must
never talk about what actually happened to one's self because that
would be too gross, or too direct. But yet, in a curious way, that's
