74
PARTISAN REVIEW
exactly what you accomplished in a highly effective way, and I was very
interested in what you had
to
say about this love affair.
Leonard Michaels: I
gave you a lot of facts; well, not that many. But if
I were
to
ask you questions about the girl, I bet you could not really say
all that much. I revealed just enough
to
make my point. Maybe I didn't.
Maybe I really said too much. My point was, it establishes contrast, and
justifies my having written the entries the way I wrote them, or pub–
lished them. You live altogether differently from what you put down on
the page, and what you put down is only representative of an aspect of
the life that you have lived . And I tried to go after the formal phenom–
enon that I find enormously interesting. That's where my passion is,
which I try to separate from what I take
to
be the work of a novelist.
For example, after reading
AI/na Karel/ina,
I know that the book will
stay with me for the rest of my life. I know that I feel as if I can walk
around in the rooms in St. Petersburg, even though Tolstoy doesn't
describe them. Andl know that I will remember these characters forever;
I know they exist very much like people. This is the work of a very great
novelist, and [ want to write like that, I want
to
write in that mode.
If
in
a story I can't put some essentia lizing fact about a character down on the
page pretty quickly, I am in trouble. I achieve it not so much by descrip–
tion of the character or not so much by what the character says, but by
several other things, and most particularly by the form that drives the
whole story.
If I
am in touch with that, the characters will live without
me having to impose personality on them, impose life upon them . They
will seem to have freedom the way they have in real life. Now, I am try–
ing to stick close to this one point about expressive form, and I compared
it to a number of things. I compared it to grammar, I talked about the
subjunctive mood, and I talk about this guy bringing me an adze, and all
of a sudden the teacher-student thing was gone. We were friends at that
moment. I don't know how to get closer to this idea.
In
fact, I was asked
not long ago by a good friend who is a molecular biologist: "What do
you mean by form?" I think I keep saying what I mean by form. I think
if the joke works, you've experienced the form. There is a certain
amount of material in a joke, of course, but you know you can take the
same joke and change the material a thousand diffcrent ways, and it
would still be the same joke because the form lives, and that's what's
funny. I think that's how I write, and that's what I am concerned about.
Norman Manea:
You are right, I am still ambiguous about my memoir
project. I didn't really give in for money or for famc. I gave in to this
