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| Marguerite Young
A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow. A lawyer I once knew told me of a strange case, a suffragette who had never married. After her death, he opened her trunk and discovered 50 wedding gowns. All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side. I bear a heavy gift. I don't believe there can be a poetic novel without political consciousness. I have a strong political conscience. I had a book, which was stolen, the art of the life of the character, in which you present a whole life in three of four pages. I used that method. I knew Anais Nin, who called me after I had been away for a few years. She was seeking help because at that time no one would give her a decent review. She was made fun of. I never fantasized or invented a thing, not one thing. I knew every single thing I ever wrote about. I never thought of myself as either a woman or a man. I thought of myself as a person who was born to a writer, who was doomed to be a writer. I see myself as traditional even though I know you see my work as experimental. I don't really consider Sterne, Joyce, and Proust experimental either because the tradition of their writing goes back a long way. Traditional. The Grand Tradition. I studied with Robert Morss Lovett, the great professor of epic literature. Another important influence was Ronald S. Crane, a professor of aesthetics at the University of Chicago. I think most people don't like others who, without a voice of their own, emulate the other. I certainly don't want anybody just to pick up my thoughts and hand them back to me. I think that the style is the writing, a beautiful sense of style. And if you don't have it, it doesn't matter what you write, it doesn't really make any difference. I'm not speaking of realistic novels now, but of the pseudo-poetic novel or short story. I think there is a rage against women. I've come to see that now although at the time I did not notice it. I was preoccupied with my teaching and my writing. I was not influenced by Joyce although he's a great writer, and I love his work. I was influenced by Saint Augustine. I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real. If there is no certain reality, the idea of following a leader must be scrutinized. Just as I do not want my students to imitate my style, I admire authors who write differently from me. Lewis and Dreiser didn't try to write in a poetic style. Like Kay Boyle, whose work I'm wild about, I could have married, written a book with every baby, a baby with every book. One day I bumped into a group of coal miners from the Ozarks, wandering coal miners living a gypsy life... I started to speak with these coal miners, and became very interested in them. |
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