April 22, 2008
New Paris Review: Interview with Leonard Michaels
After dinner last night, I stopped by my favorite newsstand north of Chicago to purchase the new issue of Granta (see my Sunday evening post below). It hadn't arrived yet, however, so instead I bought the spring issue of the Paris Review. The issue contains a "lost" interview with Leonard Michaels, conducted in 1986 and published now for the first time. The magazine's website has a brief excerpt from the beginning of the discussion. I'll pick up where that passage leaves off:
Interviewer: In The Men's Club, did you find it difficult to get people out of the room? To turn from interior decoration, as Hemingway put it, to architecture?
Michaels: As I said, I found it too easy. My problem was less making a novel than in doing what I thought I'd achieved in short stories, so that my novel would have the virtues of a short story, just as a story should have the virtues of a poem. The density, the speed, and the sort of depth you can get in a short story, which I don't believe you see in most novels. The short story is less obligated to tell a great big lie about life.
Interviewer: A book is a big lie?
Michaels: I don't want to say that. I'm trying to get at something very particular. It's the idea that life is never apprehended with such fullness, and such consistency of feeling over a long period of time, as you typically find in novels. Maybe that's because novels want to tell you how to live, but people only live from one day to the next. They don't generally care about this great apprehension of the flow of things. They aren't so acquisitive of sheer being, so devouring. But that is what one tends to take away from a novel, this sort of accumulation, or experience of accumulation, that is not available in life itself. Dickens, for example, is a mighty genius. I'll praise him forever, but I prefer Kafka. He doesn't eat the world. How one lives is a matter of breeding, says Aristotle. Novels arrive too late for most of us.
I like pithy writers—collections of pensées—Kafka's diaries, Valéry's Analecta, La Rochefoucauld's Maxims, the reflections on art and life of Max J. Friedlander, many of Montaigne's essays, Leopardi's Zibaldone. There are two-page stories by Babel that are worth more than the complete works of other writers, just as there are a few poems by George Herbert worth more than all of Swinburne, not that I've read all of Swinburne or could, even with a gun to my head. On the other hand, The Sentimental Education, a long novel, is one of the best books I've ever read, and I'm also crazy about Clarissa and Wuthering Heights.