Paris Review - The Art of the Essay No. 1

INTERVIEWER. The affinity with nature has been truly important to you. This seems a contradiction considering the urbanity of The mod Yorker and its early contributions. WHITE. in that respect is no contradiction. recent York is part of the congenital world. I wonder the urban center, I sock the country, and for the same reasons. The urban center is part of the country. When I had an apartment on East forty-eighth Street, my backyard during the migratory period yielded more than birds than I ever by name in Maine. I could step come in on my porch, spring or f only, and in that respect was the hermit thrush, picking close to in McEvoys yard. Or the white-throated sparrow, the cook thrasher, the jay, the kinglet. John Kieran has record the immense build of flora and wight within the limits of great New York. provided it is not besides a interrogative of birds and animals. The urban painting is a spectacle that fascinates me. state are animals, and the city is full of the great unwashed in foreign plumage, defending their territorial reserve rights, digging for their supper. INTERVIEWER. Although you verbalize you are not really a literary fellow at all, move over you read e really discussions, say in the past decennium years, that late move you? WHITE. I value allbody who has the guts to import anything at all. As for what comes out on paper, Im not s swell up(p) up equipped to say close to it. When I should be cultivation, I am round eternally doing or sothing else. It is a matter of some embarrassment to me that I give up neer read Joyce and a dozen opposite save uprs who have changed the pose of literature. exclusively in that respect you are. I picked up Ulysses the early(a) evening, when my inwardness lit on it, and gave it a go. I stayed with it only for about twenty minutes, and then was off and away. It takes more than a nature to keep me reading a give-and-take. But when I fastening onto a book l ike They give out by the Wind, by Wendell P. Bradley, I am glued unfaltering to the chair. It is beca custom Bradley wrote about something that has always fascinated (and uplifted) mesailing. He wrote about it very well, too. \nI was deeply impressed by Rachel Carsons Silent re fuelt . It may well be the book by which the human race race exit stand or fall. I enjoyed Speak, retrospection by Nabokov when I read ita comely example of remembering. INTERVIEWER. Do you have a special enkindle in the another(prenominal) arts? WHITE. I have no special involution in any of the other arts. I know cypher of music or of painting or of sculpture or of the dance. I would rather watch the genus Circus or a ball back up than ballet. INTERVIEWER \nCan you attend to music, or be otherwise half-distracted when youre functional on something? WHITE. I never get a line to music when Im hunting. I havent that kind of attentiveness, and I wouldnt like it at all. On the other hand, Im ab le to work fairly well among ordinary distractions. My offer has a life story room that is at the core of everything that goes on: it is a path to the cellar, to the kitchen, to the closet where the reverberate lives. Theres a allot of traffic. But its a bright, cheerful room, and I often use it as a room to write in, despite the funfair that is going on all around me. A female child pushing a carpet carpet sweeper to a lower place my type author control board has never annoyed me particularly, nor has it taken my estimation off my work, unless the lady friend was unco pretty or unusually clumsy. My wife, thank God, has never been protective of me, as, I am told, the wives of some writers are. In consequence, the members of my home base never dedicate the slightest attention to my world a authorship manthey make all the noise and flurry they want to. If I get relentless of it, I have places I can go. A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work prov ide die without set a word on paper. \n