Writers at work: the Paris Review interviews.

THIS VOLUME, like its invaluable predecessors, considers some fascinating questions--How is genius formed? How is art created? These 12 interviews discuss the authors' personal history, attitude toward writing, and literary technique, as well as the genesis of their work, the responsibility of the artist, the reaction of contemporaries and critcis. Many of the authors are professors (skeptical about the value of teaching creative writing), most are respected and successful. I have met Rebecca West, Stephen Spender, and Bernard Malamud, and find the descriptions of their appearance and milieu accurate. This volume is all the more precious since the deaths of five of its subjects: Miss West, Tennesse Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, William Goyen, and John Gardner.

Five of the authors found their vocations while reading during childhood illnesses, and who had madness in their families. Williams's mother "thought the blacks were planning an uprising in St. Louis, and were exchanging signals by rattling the garbage pails.? Six authors are revealing about their sources of inspiration. Spender speaks of a vivid visual memory "that could be realized in concentrated written language"; Williams says "a play just seems to materialize, like an apparition"; Miss Bishop remarks that after great difficulty composing a villanelle, "one day, I couldn't believe it--it was like writing a letter"; Goyen wonders how "a whole lot of it was simply given to me, absolutely put into my mouth"; the Maxican novelist Carlos Fuentes found "there is a long line of characters and shapes demanding words"; Gardner relates how "one plot will just sort of rise above all the others for reasons that you don't fully understand."

When these unconscious impulses fail to flow, a more rational method is required. Malamud, Goyen, and Fuentes state that a good deal of their work has been thought through or felt through for months and years before they actually began to write. Gabriel Garcia Marquez considers the opening the most difficult part: "In the first paragraph you solve most of the problems with your book. The theme is defined, the style, the tone."

Most of the writers have in mind a sympathetic community of intelligent readers, an ideal audience that respects and understands the author's book. Some write primarily for academic colleagues, others for literary friends. Editors are despised by Fuentes; critics are scorned by everyone. Miss West is critical of her own books, Williams defensive about his. Kurt Vonnegut (the only person to benefit from the bombing of Dresden) disarmingly states: "Everybody else weites lousy books, so why shouldn't I?" His boast that "Whatever I write now is set in type without comment by my publisher" helps to explain why writers often decline after they achieve success.

Most authors find writing a painful and destructive process, though Malamud loves "the privilege of form" and Goyen sees art as a compensation for life. Miss Bishop finds being a poet "embarrassing"; Miss West calls writing "a nauseous process"; Williams (who suffered more than most) laments "the terrible indignities, humiliations, privations, shocks that attend the life of an American writer." Garcia Marquez feels the need to defend himself against fame, and Miss West regrets that "they give people prizes too late." The South African novelist Nadine Gordimer believes "the solitude of writing is quite frightening, quite close sometimes to madness," that writers "are very ruthless, and they have to be"--especially in a country that bans some of the best books and forces people "to put everything at risk in their personal life."

Hemingway is mentioned more frequently than any other writer. Though Spender's account of his relations with the novelist during the Spanish Civil War has been discredited by Hemingway's third wife, Martha Gellhorn, in the Paris Review of June 1981, his interview is reprinted without corrections. Williams discusses Hemingway's attitude toward homosexuality, and his own play about Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Clothes for a Summer Hotel; and he uses Hemingway to exemplify the dreadful end of American writers' lives. Miss Gordimer and Garcia Marquez acknowledge the influence of Hemingway's dialogue, compression, and intensity. Malamud emphasizes the need to include personal experience and speculates: "If Hemingway had tried during his last five years to write about his father rather than the bulls once more, or the big fish, he mightn't have committed suicide."

The interviews vary enormously, from James Merrill's pretentious pronouncements about using a Ouija board for poetic composition to Spender's well-worn record of literary reminiscences ("the same anecdote will fit into thirty or forty different pieces"), from the guarded and cautious concessions of Malamud and Miss Bishop to the earnest and solemn dicta of Gardner and Miss Gordimer. The two best colloquies are with Williams and Miss West. The former is a campy barrage of weird stories, including plans for a play about the poet laureate of Three Mile Island, a scandalous anecdote about Christopher Isherwood, and a harrowing account of his own mental breakdown. The latter is a pyrotechnical display of cutting phrases, witty aphorisms, and healthy heterodoxies, balanced by a strong sense of justice and pity. Miss West suspects "God is still trying to work things out and hasn't finished" and condemns Malcolm Muggeridge for alluding to Christ "as if He were a lost cause." She also wonders whether, in Shakespeare, "a third murderer ever became a first murderer by working hard or were they, sort of, hereditary slots?"