WAYS OF WR ITING ABOUT 0 ESELF
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Anne Cherry:
It seems to me that a writer who is writing about any–
thing, really, but in particular himself or herself, is inventing or rein–
venting or rediscovering or being a philosopher through language. But,
if this is the case, isn't it almost beside the point to talk about the philo–
sophical self in reality when that's what writers do?
Stanley Crouch :
I think you are asking whether or not the writing
process itself automatically brings in philosophy, self-recognition,
recognition of the internal world, the interplay between the internal and
external world, all of those things. Is that what you were going after?
Anne Cherry:
Yes.
Stanley Crouch :
A writer is always using everything he or she knows,
which is why we, as readers, are never fully aware of the influence some–
one-intimate or not-has on a writer. All of these people who pass
through or roost in the lives of writers show up. Their mannerisms, sen–
sibilities, figures of speech, facial expressions, tastes in clothes, and so
on are part of the kitchen of the imagination, where different seasonings
and recipes, most invented on the spot or refined in the process of writ–
ing, form the artistic event.
The mind is so enormous. Thomas Mann says at the beginning of
Joseph a/ld His Brothers,
"deep is the well of the past." But he could
have added that the past inside the individual is itself extraordinary.
Even the most attentive writer discovers meaning in his or her older
work that went by even when supposedly knowing interviews were
given out. You can have been interviewed into daffiness about some–
thing and later be surprised to discover that where it really came from
escaped even you. Anyone who has written a great deal can tell you of
reading something and saying, "Oh, now I see, that's from 'The Girl
With the Golden Eyes,' that Balzac story I read a bunch of times when
I was sixteen or seventeen. I guess it never left." It was hiding out in that
deep well of your past and came up hidden in a bucket you drank from.
You might wish you had remembered that when you were being inter–
viewed and made your own inadequate proclamations about intent and
source, but that doesn't really matter. From that well came something
valuable, which is part of the greatness of writing.
But perhaps the greatest aspect of writing is that it is not only itself,
but it seems
to
have set the pace for many of the advances in contem–
porary technology that we do not associate with the experience of read–
ing and the choices it provides. In my novel, where I' m trying to take on
