Josephine Jacobsen

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Interview with Josephine Jacobsen

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SOURCE: Jacobsen, Josephine, Jacqueline Tavernier-Courbin, and R. G. Collins. “Interview with Josephine Jacobsen.” THALIA: Studies in Literary Humor 2, nos. 1 & 2 (spring/fall 1979): 5-15.

[In the following interview, originally conducted on October 12, 1979, Jacobsen and Tavernier-Courbin, with the assistance of R. G. Collins, discuss literary influences and tastes, differences and similarities of verse and prose, and the role of humor in poetry.]

[Tavernier-Courbin]: You have, over a period of time, produced several volumes of poetry, a couple of books on modern French dramatists, and your latest book is, I believe, the collection of short stories, A Walk With Raschid. Does this represent a generally widespread interest or a pattern of change or development?

[Jacobsen]: I don't think it really represents as much a pattern of development as things in which I've always been interested. Years ago I started trying to write some short stories and they were very unsatisfactory. Even I knew that. And I did abandon it at that point, but it was not because I lost interest in writing stories, it was just that I realized I wasn't really doing what I wanted to. The theatre is something in which I've always been extremely interested, but poetry has been and is my main concern. I think of myself as a poet even if I write criticism, even if I write short stories; stories are a major interest but they are not my central interest. So I don't think it's been a sequence as much as it's been something that was always there.

Your critical studies of Beckett and of Ionesco and Genet are distinctive for their poetic insight; that is, in describing the work of these other writers, you seem to be able to analyze without losing sight of the qualitative element. Do you find any difficulty in regarding a writer objectively and at the same time conveying the intrinsic or internal meaning that he has for you? Put another way, can poetry—do you think—be identified logically?

Well, that's a very difficult question and there are many ways of answering it. The simplest thing that I can say would be that one does what one is most interested in, and that is usually what one is most capable of doing. I have never been as interested in the technical analysis of a writer's work as I have been in the quality of the texture and the tone and, above all, what seems to me his intention. There are usually a great many adequate studies of what the writer has actually done. Very often some of them have seemed to me fairly obtuse about what the subject really was saying, what his intent was. That's what I have been most interested in and this, I think, ties in very closely with the idea of poetry; as we all know, you could analyze poetry technically endlessly and still have said nothing about the poem itself.

In your critical studies, you have been quite taken with the Theatre of the Absurd. Do you have any personal definition of the Absurd, not simply in drama but in other literary forms as well?

Of course, the whole business of the absurd became very much of a label and I'm always very nervous with labels and very suspicious of them, particularly definitions which in their turn become labels. I suppose everyone will agree broadly and basically that the Theatre of the Absurd and all the writing which comes under that general heading came about because, perhaps for the first time, the question of whether there was any real significance in human identity, whether there was any real purpose in anyone's life became a central concern. It is, perhaps, in the last 15 or 20 years that for the first time this has become a real preoccupation with writers. What attracted me so much about Beckett was the fact that he is preeminently a poet. He is a very interesting dramatist and certainly a very innovative dramatist, but above all he is a poet. Genet, whom I do not admire and love as I do Beckett, is also a poet, and in his own, somewhat screwy, way I think Ionesco is. It would be very interesting to compare those three from the point of view of poetry. But, certainly, what first attracted me to Beckett was less his philosophy, less his concept of the absurd element in human life than his incredible poetic insight, the fact that he somehow manages, in often the most dismal or grim or scatological language, to produce pure poetry. It's certainly extraordinary. I can go back now and read the novels which are relatively seldom read. People talk a great deal about Beckett and you find they've gone to waiting for Godot or something like that. They haven't read the novels and yet that whole cycle of novels is an extraordinary poetic achievement. So, I think of him less in this rigidly defined school of the absurd than as a poet who is alive with the absurd because of his questioning of certain values, of certain preconceptions. But it's the poetry that, for me, has been the dominant thing.

When you speak of him as a poet, are you thinking of him as a conceiver of scenes, characters, and situations which yield a certain quality of poetic action and vision or as someone who uses language that produces a “poetic” effect?

That's an interesting question because you've defined almost exactly both ways in which I feel he is a poet. His use of language is absolutely magnificent. There is something hypnotizing in Beckett's use of language and also in his use of the opposite, in his concept of silence, and the way he plays those two things against each other. But his entire vision, as you say, his whole approach to the character, the situation, or anything else, obviously, is never realistic. There is nothing you can read in Beckett that you can translate in literal terms. Both his vision and his language label him very much as a poet. An extraordinary thing is that he had so little talent for technical verse—the actual poetry that he's written is basically unintensified. It's curious, James Joyce, who was enormously innovative, wrote very delicate and very conventional lyrics. It's curious how often this happens.

In terms of your own writing, do you find any difficulties with these preconceptions—about how art works, that is, conceptions by which you judge other writers: characteristics or limits of the various genres, that sort of thing?

The relationship between short stories and poetry is very, very strong for me and I think perhaps that I would find great difficulty if I tried to write a novel. Anyone who writes anything and publishes anything is always urged to write a novel. One is snowed by letters from publishers saying, “We loved your story and have you thought of writing a novel and could we see it?” I know enough to know, unlike many people, that I can't write a novel. I don't have that horizontal vision at all. I don't have the underpinned, horizontal, massive, drawn-out vision that I think is required for a novel. I don't feel that being a poet has been in any way a disadvantage in short fiction. In fact, I think it's been a great help. It's a cliché to assert what a close relationship the story has to poetry, but I think that the impression, the intensity, the brief duration that you have to work with is similar in both, and I find it very refreshing to work first on one and then on the other. As I say, I didn't write stories for years, and then, about ten or eleven years ago, I suddenly thought to myself: “I want to write short stories and I don't care if they ever get published. I'm a poet and I'm not going to bother about that, I'm just going to write them for my own satisfaction.” I must have learned something in the interim or else publishers' standards have declined—I don't know which—because I began to publish immediately and with very little trouble. It's one of those curious things. So that, now, I think they both work together.

Have you ever had a poem yield a short story?

Yes, absolutely. Sometimes I say to myself, now wait a minute, is this a poem or is this a story? And a great many of my poems have very strong elements of the story in them. A great many of them are rather dramatic or deal with people, a great many deal with people in special circumstances. So that the seed could have grown either way.

Have you ever had a story which directly came out of a poem, or vice versa; have you ever written a story—and ever felt that there was a poem embedded there that you had to dig out?

Well, it's interesting that you ask me that because it hasn't worked quite that way for me, but I have written poems that I know I wouldn't otherwise have written if I hadn't previously written stories. They've come out of it in that sense. It's something that I've learned in the story. For instance, I've written a poem which came out not long ago about the experience of a writer finding his characters coming up with signs of independent life, and rather startling him by making him realize that he did not completely control them. I also wrote a poem recently about dreams in which characters in stories come and say that they should have been in poems. So there's been a lot of interchange. Usually, though, I have made up my mind in the beginning, before I've started. Almost always I say: “This is a poem or this is a story.” I can't remember one specifically coming out of the other.

What is there to a story that distinguishes it from a poem in such an instance?

Let me give you an example: One of the cases was quite literally a dream; in the other it was as if the characters had escaped. It was a dream scenario in which characters had wandered out of the story and you got that fragmentary—after all, a story can't be that fragmentary—glimpse of them just walking down a street, or listening to something, or standing in a position turning their heads in which this could be a story but it was a small, almost minute, poem in itself. There was a very strong interchange there, very strong.

So, in the story, the character wants more life, a more intense story.

Yes, or sometimes he wants more latitude and more sort of a sequential development than he can get in the poem and he wants to get into a story. Sometimes the writer himself is confused as to where he wants him.

You were speaking about the dramatic quality of poetry, and suddenly it made me think of Robert Frost who wrote, in an introduction to one of his plays, something like this: “Anything written is as good as it is dramatic. It need not express itself in form, but it is drama or nothing.”

Well, there's a great deal of drama in Frost's work besides his very famous long poems. A tremendous number of Frost's poems are concerned with drama, with the interaction of people and emotions. People think of him as a nature boy but almost always, if you actually read the poems, the nature is very much tied to the human. It's the human element that is played against it, and there's always that consciousness, of course, of the antagonism between nature, that seems impersonal, and the human being. For instance, there is that marvelous poem where he hears a thing crashing through the underbrush, and he thinks perhaps it's going to be an answer to him, and when it comes out it's a great deer that swims across the river and disappears in the woods; it's that and nothing more, and he has a sense of letdown. There's always that antagonism, almost, between impersonal nature and the human being, so that his poems have great drama.

In fact, Frost's poems could really make beautiful one-act plays, couldn't they?

Oh yes, absolutely. He was a very dramatic person himself. In fact, he was a great deal of a ham, Mr. Frost, when he was performing, as anyone who heard him knows. He was a marvelous performer. He had the audience in the palm of his hands. He was very dramatic, he played the audience. He could be coy, he could be dramatic, he was very much an actor. He was a wonderful reader.

Do you feel yourself that it is necessary for poetry to be dramatic?

Only for my own poetry. There's a great deal of poetry that I love, certain kinds of lyric poetry. No, I don't really feel that, in order for a poem to be a beautiful poem or a satisfactory poem, it necessarily has to be dramatic. It is an element that I find in my own work because that's simply the way my mind works, my emotions work, so it is a necessary element in anything I've done. I've done almost no descriptive poetry. Practically none.

Let's get back to Ionesco and Genet. In the Ionesco and Genet book [Ionesco and Genet: Playwrights of Silence], you say that “the predominant disposition of our time is toward holocaust. It is this temperament which the theatre of the absurd has engraved with precision tooling.” Am I right in interpreting this to mean that writers such as Beckett and Genet have, through an art of the absurd, made increasingly clear the impulse of our generation towards compulsive destructiveness?

Yes, absolutely. I feel that very strongly. And while we are speaking of those books on Genet, Ionesco and Beckett, I would like to emphasize that both those books were written in collaboration with William Mueller who is a splendid writer and a highly perceptive artist. Whatever we accomplished in those books, we've learned much from the joint situation. It was rather interesting because I'd never collaborated before, and I had always regarded that as an impossible thing. I never could understand how people could collaborate. We had to feel before we started those books that we had an almost totally similar reaction to the work of the writers that we were discussing. We both had this feeling that these people spelled out a tremendous absorption—you know, this absorption with destruction is tremendously widespread. I think suicide, for instance, has an almost compulsive fascination for people. Perhaps it always has had but I have noticed, in the case of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, John Berryman and others, that the fact of suicide seems inextricably entangled in people's minds with the work of those writers, that they seem to feel the work is in some way more valuable or more precious to them or more moving because of the dénouement of those lives. So I think that is part of this whole absorption in the destructive situation. Of course, I suppose, there always has been a very high suicide incidence among artists. There certainly was an enormous absorption with suicide in Berryman's work—well, in all three of them, there was a constant, almost obsessive, feeling of death. It is certainly also true of Hemingway, not with the suicidal intent to the extent that you get it in Plath's and Berryman's work, but certainly this preoccupation with death runs through his work. It isn't just hunting in Africa, it isn't just the bullfights, but it's an absorbing, dominating concern.

What about your own work? Is there also an element of despair in it?

I don't think my work is particularly optimistic. Certainly the fiction is not. I've been accused of writing extremely despairing stories. But I don't feel that they are totally so. In fact, I have an ongoing argument about that now with a critic whom I'm fond of. We've been giving points to the stories on how much is positive and how much is negative. I feel that in almost all the stories something emerges that is valuable that wasn't there in the beginning. So I don't consider them as depressing. But my work doesn't reflect any great optimism. I think probably as a person I feel more optimism than the work shows. But I can't really imagine what my work would be like if my entire orientation was changed by some awful occurrence.

In terms of fiction, do you feel that experience is always of value, a positive thing in itself?

It's hard to say that because you see so many incredible experiences around you that are almost impossible to relate to any value. And yet certainly, speaking from my own work, I would feel very definitely that experience, any experience that I have had, however painful or however destructive, has certainly left some residue of value. I think it's very easy to say that and I draw back from saying it for other people because I think we're being surrounded by such powers. How can you say, for instance, that what people are going through in Cambodia will leave something of value with them? You know that takes a lot of audacity. I couldn't say experience always leaves value but it has for me. I've been very fortunate I haven't been exposed to the horrors that are all around the world today. I'm simply speaking for myself in what has been a relatively sheltered and happy life.

Do you think that poetry is by nature life-affirming? Do you feel that your own poetry is life-affirming?

I think so. One of the hardest things in the world is to be objective about your own work. One of the tremendous problems that I notice in bad poetry, when young people are trying to learn to write poetry, is that, when you have a concept of a poem you want to write, what you put down on the page ultimately is a very thin shadow of your original impulse. But what confuses a writer is that very often in his own mind he feels that what he has put down on the page is what he did have in his mind and heart. He thinks it's there because it's in his brain. It's terribly hard to see your own work objectively. Is my poetry life-affirming? It's like the ancient argument of the Greeks: is it better to have been born or not to have been born? I would say yes, it is better to have been born, and I think that is a pretty daring decision as you look around. In fact, I would hate to have to sustain it in a debate.

Do you feel that the Absurd is of value only as a corrective? Or does its humor represent a separate, positive value in itself?

I think that humor is one of these things that are absolutely undefinable, but humor in the Absurd is an instrument of its very grimness. There is humor in Beckett; and people say that they can't really see that there is any humor in Beckett because it's so appalling. But there certainly is. We have this whole thing now which is very big of black humor, of the humor of the Absurd, which is basically a destructive humor. A case can be made that all humor, though sometimes quite gentle, is destructive. But this black humor is massively destructive. It is trying to destroy shibboleths, it is trying to destroy hypocrisies, it is trying to destroy knee-jerk reactions. It is wielded as a kind of cleaver and there is a tremendous gap between that and the kind of humor that impregnates a lot of poetry. There is a great deal of humor in Frost's work. There is a great deal of humor in most good poetry but it is far gentler. There is such an enormous range in the word humor that, unless you define the kind of humor, it's very hard to discuss. Someone has said that humor is always cruel. I don't think that is necessarily true but I think perhaps it is always destructive in the sense that it is basically deflating. It pricks a pompousness. You may be laughing at yourself, you may be laughing at someone else. It may be in the gentlest kind of way in the world but it's still, to some degree, a cutting down of some pretension or of some pomposity. Take the basic situation: slipping on a banana peel. If just an ordinary person slips, someone may think that's funny. If a Bishop slips, or some judge in robes, it's much funnier from a crude point of view. In other words, it's the deflating of pretensions and ego that you think of as humor. With the Absurdists, humor has been very terrifying. What I love about Ionesco is that a lot of his vision is also very frightening and, in fact, I'm a tremendous admirer of his plays because he has used humor in a marvelous, marvelous way. It remains very funny. Now with Beckett, I defy anyone to laugh. You're aware that something is funny in a horrible way but you're not going to sit down and laugh. Ionesco is funny in the classic sense of making you laugh. There's a ludicrous element that is very funny. Humor has been used in tremendously different ways by these people, even within the Absurd group themselves. Curiously, Genet in a way is quite lacking in humor. He has tremendous wit, enormous wit, but I associate humor itself in general with a certain warmth. In Genet there's not that basically self-depracatory attitude that humor is apt to produce. There's more of a—I think of a cerebral kind of wit. Much colder. It's much less than you would get with a circus clown if you want to get to that kind of humor. Ionesco has a great deal of clown's humor. He loves to maneuver furniture. He loves to make ludicrous effects. He loves to have someone so big, that the body is sticking out of both windows, like Bill the Lizard in Alice in Wonderland. He loves these kinds of effects. Genet is much more poetic. He works through wit and poetry, much more than from the ridiculous.

Do you think that your poetry has been influenced very much by your critical insights?

I really doubt it very much, and yet I'm sure, at one remove, it has been. In other words, when I write a poem or even when I go back and work very, very hard over it, I really don't think of it in terms of any critical theories that I possess. I think of it on a very pragmatic basis, probably a very emotional basis: “This doesn't sound right to me, this is not what I was trying to say. This strikes a jarring note. This is slack or is not.” I never analyze it by saying this is not my concept of what this type of poem should be. I can do that much better with someone else's work than I can with my own.

In writing of Beckett, you take laughter as a very serious thing. Do you think humor in poetry can be equally serious?

Yes, I certainly do. I think this would make a perfectly fascinating article, or even a book. To discuss the humor in a series of poets. As a matter of fact, I don't recall that it has been done specifically in comparing these particular qualities, and I think of Yeats, just from the top of my head, I think of Auden, I think of Frost. Now all of those have a great deal of humor in their work. But the humor in each is just as different as it could possibly be from the others with almost no similarity whatsoever. You could have very, very serious humor. You are much less apt to have the kind of humor that I'm talking about when I talk about clowns' humor, the kind of humor that Ionesco at his least analytical and his most exuberant has. You don't find much of that in poetry. You find it much more on the stage because it is a visual thing and it's easier to have that kind of humor when it's tangible, when you can see it, when it's part of the human anatomy and the human voice and so on. You don't find that type of humor much in poetry. In poetry you find wit—I suppose wit is in general the most predominant kind of humor in poetry—from Pope, on, or really as far back as you want to go. Lyric poetry is almost innocent of humor except in very rare cases. It's a whole different construction of things.

On the other hand, Keats wrote a lot of dramatic poetry. The interesting thing about Keats is that there is really almost no humor that I'm aware of—I may be way off on this—but I'm a great fan of Keats, and I know his poetry pretty well. I can't think of any real element of humor that is significant in his poetry. And, yet, when you read his letters you realize that he had a very, very warm and very spontaneous sense of humor and was often very funny. The letters are wonderful, particularly the letters that he wrote to his young sister. But he was so awestruck by poetry. His relationship with poetry was so intense that, except in the nonsense verses that he wrote just in his letters, his humor doesn't come through in the work at all.

Something which has always puzzled me in Hemingway is that I've never been able to really find any sense of humor in his work.

Oh I don't think he had any. Don't you think that's why you couldn't find it because it wasn't there? I think he is the most humorless of all the good writers that I know. He took himself profoundly seriously, and the only reason he isn't more irritating is that he also took life and every situation and things like honor and courage so deadly seriously.

I suppose it's the reason why he is parodied so often. As you hear an overly serious view dramatically expounded three or four times, it becomes parody without being defined as such; and then someone simply puts on the label, defines it as parody.

For one thing, it was his style at that time. He changed the concept of prose rhythm a great deal. The very short sentences, the very factual things, such as: “She was chewing her steak, she picked up her glass, she put it down. …” This kind of thing was a different rhythm and because of the fact that it was so different, it was easily imitated. There have been some marvelous and quite cruel but very, very funny parodies. Well, people who have very distinctive styles are easy to parody. You can do fifth-rate Henry James very, very easily, or a Faulkner for instance. Of course, that would be exhausting. One would have to go on for two pages without taking a breath, so people don't do it as much.

There were many things that were endearing about Hemingway, and that people have come to laugh at now. He did have certain definitions of courage that do seem very simplistic, very unsophisticated, very lacking in any humor. This courage meant a great deal to him. Who was it who told the story about Hemingway sitting at a table during a Second World War bombardment? He and some other people were in an old farmhouse in France near the fighting line. When the shells began falling, everyone dove under the table groping for helmets and making themselves small, but Hemingway just stayed there, sitting at the table, his broad back to the window, eating. His was basically, from the practical point of view, an extremely silly reaction. There is no virtue in sitting at the table while everybody around you is being shot. The thing is to get under the table and stay firmly there and then get up and do something else. Only someone who has a very unsophisticated sense of priorities could feel otherwise. But as long as he does feel that way, there's something very exhilarating about seeing him sit there because he imposes on this silly action a great deal of dignity because to him it's important.

Back to poetry. Most humorous poetry seems to be second-rate poetry, as poetry, if not as statement. Why is that? Is humor logically prosaic?

As a matter of fact, it's an interesting point. I don't know why. It certainly is true. Absolutely true. But I don't know why it should be. I suppose the only poetry that we can think of where humor is the predominant characteristic that is good would be this rather cold cerebral kind of humor such as Pope's or, not so cold but certainly cerebral, Auden's. I suppose intensity is the one thing humor draws back from. Humor is apt to be slightly debunking and the essence of poetry tends to be intensity; so you have these two characteristics working against each other. As you have more humor you have less intensity, because you're standing off. Isn't it one of the famous differences between comedy and tragedy that, in tragedy, you're involved and, in comedy, you're standing off and looking. And perhaps poetry as we have agreed is basically quite dramatic. It is also, above all things, intense. Don't you think that would probably be the reason?

In a way it's true. And it fits very well with what you were saying earlier that humor is always to a certain extent deflating.

I think so. Exactly.

Do you think that there are certain kinds of humor more suited to poetry than others?

I would think “verbal.” Yes, I would think it very important that humor be basically verbal. It should not get into the emotions and into the concepts because if humor gets into the emotional framework it is going to definitely lower the temperature, it's going to lower the intensity. Whereas verbal humor can find a place because it's only skin deep. It's not going into the actual emotional roots of the poem, and I would think the happiest kind of humor in poetry is always verbal humor. It has to do with words, the play of words.

That reminds me of something. As you said, humor of Ionesco's kind is funny; it makes you laugh. Word sounds can delight you, make you happy; if not laugh, at least smile. Can humor include phonetic play? Hopkins, for instance, plays with sound and delights us. Is there some element here that is parallel to, perhaps even synonymous with, humor?

I think there is, absolutely. And I think that's exactly what I was trying myself to say. When I said it would be primarily verbal it would be largely a matter of tempo and sound rather than of content because, God knows, Hopkins' work is certainly serious. Basically it's enormously serious. But he did play with sounds. He loved the repercussions like a wave coming in and then going out and another wave coming in. That was strong rhythm.

One of the characteristics of poetry is that, as you were saying, the intensity is at odds with humor.

Yes. But you don't have to define, you see. I think that's the beauty of it. Word play and a strong rhythm and that kind of thing will at the broadest scope tie something like the Jabberwocky together with Hopkins. The play of sound and of tempos clashing do not invade the purpose or the meaning of the poem and that's probably just where you have the sort of escape hatch with this question of humor in poetry. As long as it doesn't invade the emotional push of the poem, it seems to me that it adds, but once it gets into the mental and emotional part, rather than into the verbal, you begin to get the deflation. With comedy you get the cut-down and with tragedy you get the build-up; you get the large work. Humor always to some extent minimizes, not in the derogatory sense, but it minimizes in the physical sense. It cuts the enormous and overblown down to size. Whereas tragedy takes an individual thing, it seems to me, and makes it into a great, almost universal sorrow. It's a very interesting relationship. I haven't thought about it much until now.

We use words such as satire, comedy, humor quite indiscriminately at times. How wide a range would you yourself define for humor?

Well, enormous. It could go all the way from the most slapstick comedy, from your clown in a small village circus, all the way up to James Joyce's manipulation of the English language. It would have that wide a range. It has a tremendous range.

Does humor in a literary work presuppose any distinct emotional effect?

I'm not sure I understand exactly what you're asking. Do you mean a person intend an emotional reaction? In other words, is he trying to humiliate or amuse or what is his purpose, what is his intent? Well, I think it can be used as an ax or used as a rapier. The only purpose I can think of at the moment for which humor has been much used in poetry, is for satire. Wouldn't that be the essential, the basic approach if you're going to have humor in poetry, wouldn't it mostly be satirical? I can't think really of other forms of humor that would be apt to be particularly useful or suitable to the poet. If you think of poetry in which humor has played a great part, wouldn't the great satirists be much more apt to come to your mind than almost any other kind of writer? I would think so. It seems to be one of the natural uses of humor in poetry. And that, of course, again can be benign or can be extremely savage. It can run all the way from someone like Swift, to a much more gentler Ogden Nash. You know, I think that Ogden Nash could have been a very good poet. He had an extraordinary verbal range and capacity. What we were talking about a little earlier about Jabberwocky and so on. … Some of Nash's poems have an almost inspired sense of word play. Of course, he ground out a great deal of stuff. And a great deal of it is very humdrum and very second-rate. But he had a marvelous ability with words and he wrote a couple of serious poems not long before his death that were extremely good. There was one about his experience in the hospital which combined his rather fey quality with grimness. Very effective. I think he had great possibilities. I wrote him a letter—I knew him very pleasantly but not well. I wrote him a letter about that one poem because I liked it so much. He wrote back and said he appreciated it very much. His wife said to me, “You don't know how pleased Ogden was to get letters from poets saying that they liked that poem.” And I thought, well, isn't it extraordinary, that a number of poets might have told him that. It was very good. You know, that's another thing about labels. They're the scariest thing in the world. You pin a label on a man like Ogden Nash which says, well, you know how very clever he is. He had much more scope, much more imagination.

At the end of your Beckett book you say that “he directs his laughter … against that which is not good, against that which is not true, against that which mocks suffering.” Given some of his protagonists, do you feel that Beckett directs all of his laughter against things? Does he ever direct it towards things; that is, is his laughter positive as well as negative, creative instead of moral?

Well, there are two things that I'd like to distinguish between in that question. I feel that very largely his laughter is against. But this is part of his whole system. One of the fascinating things about his work is that he is able to create an image of what he feels should be by the description of its exact opposite. In other words, he will so completely appall you by the opposite of that quality he wishes to express—anything to do with beauty or truth or grace or sensitivity—that he inevitably and immediately makes you think of the quality that he is valuing. He does this over and over again. Take his famous sexual scenes, for instance, with the distortions and the hideousness of the grotesque details. His laughter is negative and is against but I think in the end—so I'm having my cake and eating it too,—it is in some mysterious way creative because I think he is saying, “Look at the way this is instead of,” and he forces you to supply the “instead of.” So that I would say he is negative and creative at the same time.

If the hideous or the horrible creates its opposite, is that opposite defined recognizably in the work?

Well, I suppose it would be the substitution of emotional tenderness—a feeling of love freely given and exchanged—instead of the terrible debility that is no longer able to love or to consumate but that goes through the fumbling, intimate kind of gestures without any of that real ability left that goes with love or goes with the actions of love, except to imitate remotely the gestures.

Wouldn't that wipe out most of his actual protagonists?

Yes, I think it probably would. Well, there are, I think, a few scenes in Beckett, very, very few, that have an almost dreamy quality of beauty, and because they are so contradictory and set in what otherwise is a morass, they are peculiarly beautiful and moving. There are a number of passages that reveal, I think, that he has this feeling for the old. He had a terrible feeling of disfigurement and age and debility. He goes over it again and again and again. But it seems to me he's less concerned with the purely physical fact of this kind of grotesque distortion than he is with the fact that this is the outward and visible sign of an inward debility that people have spiritually to love or feel strongly or, above all, to have trust in their own significance. And you know there is always in Beckett this element of indignation with God, which is very interesting. It's almost a throwback to another age. I remember Mother when she was, well much younger—very young—she wrote an essay about religion and sent it to some magazine and they sent it back with a little note: “La question de Dieu manque d'actualité.” This is the general attitude now. I mean, who's excited? It's like Hemingway getting under the table. Whereas Beckett is in a continual rage because nobody's answering, nobody's listening. He's being fed just enough drops of hope here and there to get him going again. It's a personal vendetta going on between him and a God who either is or is not there, and this is really a very unmodern point of view.

Is Beckett really, through his humor, attacking, generally, things which are negative?

Absolutely. You have your two negatives which notoriously make a positive. How discouraging to hear what you write a whole book about put in one sentence. That's very dismaying.

There are really different types of humor, the humor which attacks the negative and the humor which makes fun of the positive.

Oh absolutely. Completely opposed by their very nature. One is sort of a dog-in-the-manger thing. The idea that if you can't be something or have something or do something, you want to destroy the fact that it has any value in the first place. There's a kind of profound cynicism in that. Skepticism is one of the wonderful things in the world and God knows we could use it. But cynicism is the most debilitating thing in the world. And that is the difference, I think, in Beckett. In fact, I'm working on something now about his definition of the three types of laughter. What you just said is absolutely true. What he attacks is something that he would like to see destroyed because it is the opposite of what he feels should be there.

It seems that the modern novel has, on the whole, been far more inclined to humor than has the modern short story. Writers such as Barth, Pynchon, Vonnegut and others have created comic worlds almost exclusively, while the short story remains essentially climactic and serious. There are, of course, notable exceptions. Is there something inherent, do you think, in the seriousness of short literary works?

That brings us back to some degree to what we were talking about earlier, the relationship between poetry and the short story. Now all those writers you mentioned and particularly Barth and Pynchon of course, go in for tremendously long books and I don't think that's an accident. In other words, they are creating a comic world and then they are exploring it and I think it's no accident that it is related to size. And that brings us back to the poem or short story because I think that when you have an extraordinary limitation of space you've got to make up in intensity what you do not have in space. In other words, you cannot dilute and you cannot go on with ramifications. You are essentially compressed into a rigidly limited form. You don't have 700 pages. And I think it's no accident that poetry and short stories share this. The seriousness is closely related to the form and to the question of intensity. That's a very close relationship.

In a novel, you can create a whole world, and then you show the way in which this world functions, lay out examples of it and then you gradually work this out and you build on it. This is denied to you in a poem or a short story. You haven't got that much space to work with and you've got to have the force to make an impact in that extremely limited climate. You cannot fool around. I think that's why.

Leaving out the unessential and leaving the actual core in is, I think, the way of the short story writer. And that's why this whole business of the enormous created comic world is a very, very tricky one and why I think it's a law of diminishing returns. Take John Barth whom I admire very much. I find him very charming and attractive and I heard him give the most brilliant short talk I think I've heard in twenty years at the Library of Congress. The Sot Weed Factor was perfectly fascinating and I thought “my what an enormous original talent.” But although I read Giles Goat-Boy right through to the last word, it was a constant effort. This is the danger. By doing one of these marvelous comic worlds, you've done it and it isn't meant to be like life and it doesn't have the self-renewing intensity of life. It's a marvelous fabrication and you've done it and I think it's very dangerous when it gets repetitive.

Talking about intensity, would you agree with Edgar Allan Poe that a poem should not be longer than about one hundred lines?

No. That's a rather restrained order on poetry. I am not able to write long poems. There again I simply come back to my own limitations, my own tastes, my own inclination. I have written very, very few poems over one hundred lines. Very, very few. I would say that for every fifty or one hundred good short poems you're lucky if you find one good long one. Because if intensity, real intensity, is one of the essential elements of poetry it obviously is going to be harder and harder to keep that real poetic impact as you expand and expand and expand. In general I would certainly say that a long poem has to be most exceptional. There's something forbidding, to begin with, about a long poem. Actually more and more we have to be conscious of the fact that photography is a very important factor. When you look at a very long poem it's solid on the page. No space between the lines. Remember Alice in Wonderland, when she said that the book had no conversation or pictures and what is the use of the book without conversation or pictures? You feel a little bit this way when you see page after page after page of solid poetry. It's got to be very good. It's got to be the Iliad or the Odyssey or something like that.

Do you consider the idea of a separate female consciousness as very relevant in literature?

Would you accept “differing?” I think I would rather say “differing” than “separate,” for separate implies an almost total lack of communication. I do think they differ. I would jib a little at the word separate but I think differing, yes.

Do you think that artistic projection can be effectively carried out across the sexes? Can a male writer capture and convey a female consciousness and vice versa?

I think it's hard but it certainly has been done. It's funny, I was thinking about Robert Browning—I think he had a marvelous, intuitive understanding of the female mind. (God help me, I don't want to say that.) Let me say that the women he wrote about in his poetry frequently seemed to be very real, very natural, quite an intuitive leap for a man. I don't know why because he certainly was a highly specialized person himself and I wouldn't have really thought that sensitive but he has made that leap. One curious thing: take someone like D. H. Lawrence. So confusing because many people think he's a terrific male chauvinistic pig. And certainly when you get him into the analytical field he just comes apart anyway. I mean, I think you try to make Lawrence stand up on a strictly intellectual, analytical basis and he just goes to pieces. But intuitively I think some of the women he's written about have been remarkably real.

What do you consider the most difficult part of your writing? Aside from getting the first word on paper!

Oh, that's very hard to answer. I suppose the hard thing is coming to terms with the difference between what I feel I have to say and what I've succeeded in saying. That effort to get down on paper what your whole concept is, what Henry James called your “donnée,” without dismembering it or injuring it or having it be but a feeble shadow of what you were trying to say, would be the very hardest part. Any reasonably experienced poet can pull a poem together technically. You can strengthen it and you can make it readable but that isn't what you really care about. I think that would be it. Trying to get everything that you know is possible into that poem said—but then it's a very hard thing to get everything down on paper.

You know, it strikes me that poets, far more than novelists or other writers, are constantly revising their work, in many cases going on with it all through their lifetime, long after its original publication. Yeats did.

Yes. And Auden kept changing. Dylan Thomas used to, also. I haven't changed any published poems but I would not scruple to do it. I can never understand that terrific brouhaha and uproar about Auden altering his published poems. I don't feel that publishing makes them sacred, and I think that, if you can improve a poem, you have a right to do it. I have never tried to do that because, in a curious way—I won't say I lose interest—but I never care as much about the poem once it is in print and gone. I feel that it's on its own feet. It has to survive or not. I'm interested in what I'm doing now. But I certainly never send a poem out within a month of the time it's written. I've done two or three versions of it, and when I've done the best I know how, I put it away, and usually, if I go back to it two or three weeks later, I can always alter it, see something wrong that I didn't do, that I left out, that I put in, that was wrong. So yes, I do revise quite a great deal, and I hate it, I absolutely loathe it. Some people love to review, and I hate it. But there is that awful feeling that you have in some way again injured the poem. That you've done something to it. And so I do quite a bit of revision up to the point where it goes into print.

How do you feel about The Shade Seller?

It's a collection of four previous books and I think that I have less second thoughts about that book than any book I've ever published for the simple reason that there was such a winnowing process. The other poems were poems that I had been doing for a certain number of years. I have a new collection which I hope will be finished within the next six months which will be poems that I have worked on within the last five years. I'm not a prolific writer. I don't publish a book every couple of years. I don't want to. But in that book, I took only perhaps I think six or eight or nine poems from each book or maybe ten poems from each book. So that I winnowed out so much that it's the best I can do and I'm not exalted by it but, on the other hand, there's nothing in it that I'm ashamed of and there's nothing in it that I feel “oh gosh I wish I had that back so I could change it” because it is already an extremely selected group. But I do feel that the few times I've sent a poem off red-hot, when it seemed simply wonderful to me, I've fallen into that thing that I'm just talking about, that I know I should know better, that I am attributing to the poem on paper all the things that are still in my mind. And that becomes mercilessly clear when it has sat around for two or three weeks. But it isn't clear the first twenty four hours. Far from it. And I think all that school of poetry that I call the “that's what happened to me last night” school of poetry are the prime example of people who are attributing to the poem they've written all their own emotions about how marvelous it was to be with Harry or whatever, and they don't see what's down on the paper at all. They think it's enormously significant. That's the hardest thing when you criticize young people's poetry. You don't have the heart to say, “Look, my dear, what you've got down here is so uninteresting and so unimportant and so trivial that nobody should waste their time reading it. But what happened to you was probably very important and not trivial at all and of great significance but it's not here, you know.” But you can't say that.

Let me ask you a couple of final questions. First one, other modern poets—do you have any observations about them, good or bad, their influence, that sort of thing?

Alive or dead or what? In the sense of writing now. Well, I am a great admirer of Auden, Yeats, Roethke; Archie Ammons is one of my very, very favorites. Whereas I can't really understand someone getting nothing out of Yeats and getting nothing out of Roethke, I can understand someone getting nothing out of Ammons. I think it's a very special kind of poetry. I happen to love it. Elizabeth Bishop who just died I admired very much. A poet whose work I like very much who is not at all well-known—she is highly respected by other poets but she's not really well-known—is Julia Randell. She's very good. She's a metaphysical poet. It's not fashionable poetry but I think it's marvelous. Very, very good. Well, that's quite a few. Probably I'll find I left out some of my very favorites. I think probably of my contemporaries I would say Roethke, Yeats, Auden and Ammons. And possibly Elizabeth Bishop. I wish I knew more of the English poets.

Where do you want to go in your writing at this point?

A poet has a nasty tendency to just keep on writing poetry, instead of having a good project ahead. I would like to write simpler poetry, more script poetry all the time. I would like to move toward further compression, further intensity, eliminating explanations, having the word explain itself. I would like to go on writing stories and perhaps—I'll never write a novel, I know—but I would like to write a selection of stories that would in some way impinge or connect with each other and might possibly form a book. This is not a project because I can't do it unless I happen to want to write those stories. But I'm afraid what I really want to do is just go on writing better stories and better poems. I don't have any major projects. I think I'm going to stay off criticism except for a few critical articles. I just had an article published in the Sewanee Review and have a couple of other articles coming out. Once in a while I do a book review. But I have very limited time. I have two months a year in which to work, actually: two weeks here in the fall, two weeks here in June and a month when my husband and I go to the Caribbean. I work from when I get up at 5:45 in the morning and work out in the garden from 6 to 8. And those two months are the only time I have really for work during the year. The rest of the time I'm doing readings, seminars, and the summer is totally domestic. Criticism is marvelous and interesting and terribly fun. After all, working on someone else's work is fundamental but I don't think I want to do another book of criticism. I don't have the time or the energy. But beyond that I would just like to better what I'm doing.

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