An unspeakable writer for his talent, for his magnanimous charm placed in the use of the verb, William Faulkner. And here is something that I find very interesting to quote, since in one of the interviews he gave, he referred to profession of being a writer. A very good text for those who want to be writers, and like to take it as a reference, or for those who just like to take it as a reference.
«—Is there any formula that one can follow to be a good novelist?
—99% talent… 99% discipline… 99% work. The novelist should never be satisfied with what he does. What is done is never as good as it could be. You always have to dream and aim higher than one can aim. Don't worry about being better than your contemporaries or your predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. You don't know why they choose you and you're usually too busy to ask. It is completely amoral in the sense that it will be able to steal, borrow, beg or rob anyone and everyone in order to do the work.
"You mean that the artist must be completely ruthless?"
—The artist is responsible only to his work. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good artist. He has a dream, and that dream distresses him so much that he must get rid of it. Until then he has no peace. He throws everything away: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, everything, just to write the book. If an artist has to steal from his mother, he will not hesitate to do so ...
—So the lack of security, happiness, honor, etc., would be an important factor in the creative capacity of the artist?
-Not. Those things are only important for your peace and contentment, and art has nothing to do with peace and contentment.
"So what would be the best environment for a writer?"
—Art has nothing to do with the environment either; it doesn't care where it is. If you mean me, the best job I was ever offered was as a brothel manager. In my opinion, that is the best environment in which an artist can work. He enjoys perfect financial freedom, he is free from fear and hunger, he has a roof over his head and he has nothing to do except keep a few simple bills and go to pay the local police once a month. The place is quiet during the morning, which is the best part of the day for work. At night there is enough social activity so that the artist does not get bored, if he does not mind participating in it; work gives a certain social position; she has nothing to do because the manager keeps the books; all the employees in the house are women, who will treat you with respect and say "sir." All the local liquor smugglers will call you 'sir' too. And he can get acquainted with the police. So, then, the only environment that the artist needs is all the peace, all the solitude and all the pleasure that he can obtain at a price that is not too high. A bad environment will only raise your blood pressure, by spending more time feeling frustrated or outraged. My own experience has taught me that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey.
"You mentioned economic freedom." Does the writer need it?
-Not. The writer does not need financial freedom. All you need is a pencil and some paper. To my knowledge, nothing good has ever been written as a result of accepting free money. The good writer never resorts to a foundation. He is too busy writing something. If he is not really good, he deludes himself that he lacks time or financial freedom. Good art can be produced by thieves, liquor smugglers, or rustlers. People are really afraid to find out exactly how much hardship and poverty they can bear. And everyone is scared to find out how tough they can be. Nothing can destroy a good writer. The only thing that can upset a good writer is death. Those who are good do not worry about being successful or getting rich. Success is feminine and just like a woman: if you humiliate yourself, you go over the top. So the best way to treat it is by showing it your fist. Then maybe the one who humbles herself will be her.
—Working for the cinema is harmful to your own work as a writer?
"Nothing can harm a man's work if he is a first-rate writer, nothing can help him much." The problem does not exist if the writer is not first class, because he will have already sold his soul for a pool.
—You say that the writer must compromise when he works for the cinema. And as for your own work? Do you have any obligation to the reader?
—Your obligation is to do your work to the best of your ability; Whatever obligations you have left after that, you can spend as you please. I, for one, am too busy to care about the public. I don't have time to think who reads me. I am not interested in Juan Lector's opinion on my work or on that of any other writer. The standard that I have to meet is mine, and that is the one that makes me feel the way I feel when I read The Temptation of Saint Antoine or the Old Testament. It makes me feel good, just as watching a bird makes me feel good. If I were to reincarnate, you know, I would like to live again as a buzzard. No one hates it, or envies it, or wants it, or needs it. No one messes with him, he is never in danger and he can eat anything.
- What technique do you use to meet your standard?
"If the writer is interested in technique, he had better go into surgery or laying bricks." To write a work there is no mechanical resource, no shortcut. The young writer who follows a theory is a fool. You have to teach yourself through your own mistakes; people only learn through error. The good artist believes that no one knows enough to give him advice. he has a supreme vanity. No matter how much you admire the old writer, you want to get over him.
"So you deny the validity of the technique?"
-No way. Sometimes technique lashes out and takes hold of the dream before the writer himself can grasp it. That is tour de force and the finished work is simply a matter of putting the bricks together, since the writer probably knows each of the words that he is going to use until the end of the work before writing the first. That happened with While I Dying. It was not easy. No honest work is. It was simple in that all the material was already at hand. The composition of the work took me only about six weeks in the free time that left me a 275-hour-a-day job doing manual labor. I simply imagined a group of people and subjected them to universal natural catastrophes, which are flood and fire, with a simple natural motivation that would give direction to their development. But when technique is not involved, writing is also easier in another way. Because in my case there is always a point in the book where the characters themselves get up and take over and complete the job. That happens, let's say, around page 274. Of course I don't know what would happen if I finished the book on page XNUMX. The quality that an artist must possess is objectivity in judging his work, plus honesty and courage. not to be fooled about it. Since none of my works have met my own standards, I must judge them on the basis of the one that caused me the most distress and anguish in the same way that the mother loves the son who became a thief or murderer more than the one who became priest.
(...)
- What portion of your works are based on personal experience?
"I couldn't say." I've never done the math, because the "portion" doesn't matter. A writer needs three things: experience, observation, and imagination. Any two of them, and sometimes one can make up for the lack of the other two. In my case, a story usually begins with a single idea, a single memory, or a single mental image. The composition of the story is simply a matter of working so far to explain why the story happened or what other things it caused to happen next. A writer tries to create credible people in credible moving situations in the most moving way he can. Obviously, you must use, as one of your instruments, the environment you know. I would say that music is the easiest medium to express oneself, since it was the first that was produced in the experience and in the history of man. But since my talent lies in words, I must awkwardly try to put into words what pure music would have expressed better. In other words, music would express it better and more simply, but I prefer to use words, in the same way that I prefer reading to listening. I prefer silence to sound, and the image produced by words occurs in silence. That is, the thunder and the music of prose take place in silence.
—You said that experience, observation and imagination are important to the writer. Would you include inspiration?
"I don't know anything about inspiration, because I don't know what that is." I've heard of it, but never seen it.
—It is said that you as a writer are obsessed with violence.
"That's like saying the carpenter is obsessed with his hammer." Violence is simply one of the carpenter's tools (sic). The writer, like the carpenter, cannot build with a single tool.
"Can you tell how your writing career started?"
"I lived in New Orleans, working whatever it took to earn a little money from time to time." I met Sherwood Anderson. In the afternoons we used to walk around the city and talk to people. In the evenings we would meet again and have a bottle or two while he talked and I listened. Before noon I never saw him. He was locked up, writing. The next day we did the same thing again. I decided that if that was the life of a writer, then that was my thing and I began to write my first book. I quickly discovered that writing was a fun occupation. I even forgot that I hadn't seen Mr. Anderson for three weeks, until he knocked on my door — it was the first time he'd come to see me — and asked, 'What's wrong? Are you angry with me? I told him I was writing a book. He said, "My God," and he left. When I finished the book, Soldiers' Pay, I ran into Mrs. Anderson on the street. He asked me how the book was going and I told him I had already finished it. She told me, 'Sherwood says he's willing to make a deal with you. If you don't ask him to read the originals. he will tell his publisher to accept the book. " I said "deal done," and that's how I became a writer.
"What kind of work did you do to earn that 'little money now and then'?"
"Whatever is presented." I could do a little bit of almost anything: drive boats, paint houses, fly airplanes. We never needed a lot of money because life was cheap in New Orleans then, and all I wanted was a place to sleep, some food, tobacco, and whiskey. There were many things I could do for two or three days in order to earn enough money to live the rest of the month. I am, by temperament, a wanderer and a gulf. Money doesn't interest me so much that I force myself to work to earn it. In my opinion, it is a shame that there is so much work in the world. One of the saddest things is that the only thing a man can do for eight hours, day after day, is work. You cannot eat for eight hours, or drink for eight hours a day, or make love for eight hours ... the only thing you can do for eight hours is work. And that is why man makes himself and everyone else so miserable and unhappy.
"You must feel indebted to Sherwood Anderson, but what judgment do you deserve as a writer?"
"He was the father of my generation of American writers and of the American literary tradition that our successors will carry on." Anderson has never been valued the way he deserves. Dreiser is his older brother and Mark Twain is their father.
—And what about the European writers of that period?
"The two great men of my time were Mann and Joyce." One must approach Joyce's Ulysses like the illiterate Baptist to the Old Testament: with faith.
"Do you read your contemporaries?"
-Not; the books that I read are the ones that I knew and loved when I was young and to which I return as one returns to old friends: The Old Testament, Dickens, Conrad, Cervantes… I read Don Quixote every year, as some people read the Bible. Flaubert, Balzac - the latter created an intact world of his own, a bloodstream that flows through twenty books - Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Shakespeare. I read Melville occasionally and among the poets Marlowe, Campion, Johnson, Herrik, Donne, Keats, and Shelley. I still read Housman. I've read these books so many times that I don't always start on the first page and keep reading to the end. I only read a scene, or something about a character, in the same way that one meets a friend and talks to him for a few minutes.
"And Freud?"
"Everybody talked about Freud when I lived in New Orleans, but I've never read it." Shakespeare didn't read it either and I doubt Melville did, and I'm sure Moby Dick didn't either.
"Do you read detective novels?"
"I read Simenon because he reminds me of Chekhov."
"And your favorite characters?"
—My favorite characters are Sarah Gamp: a cruel and ruthless woman, an opportunistic drunk, untrustworthy, in most of her character she was bad, but at least she was a character; Mrs. Harris, Falstaf, Prince Hall, Don Quixote and Sancho, of course. I always admire Lady Macbeth. And Bottom, Ophelia and Mercutio. The latter and Mrs. Gamp faced life, did not ask for favors, did not whimper. Huckleberry Finn, of course, and Jim. Tom Sawyer never really liked me: a fool. Oh well, and I like Sut Logingood, from a book written by George Harris in 1840 or 1850 in the mountains of Tennessee. Lovingood had no illusions about himself, he did the best he could; on certain occasions he was a coward and he knew he was and he was not ashamed; he never blamed anyone for his misfortunes and he never cursed God for them.
"What about the role of critics?"
—The artist doesn't have time to listen to critics. Those who want to be writers read the reviews, those who want to write don't have time to read them. The critic is also trying to say, "I passed by here." The purpose of its function is not the artist himself. The artist is one step above the critic, because the artist writes something that will move the critic. The critic writes something that will move everyone except the artist.
"So you never feel the need to discuss your work with someone?"
-Not; I'm too busy writing it. My work has to please me, and if it pleases me then I have no need to talk about it. If I am not pleased, talking about it will not make it better, since the only thing that can improve it is to work more on it. I am not a man of letters; I'm just a writer I don't like talking about the problems of the trade.
—Critics maintain that family relationships are central to your novels.
—That's an opinion and, as I already told you, I don't read the critics. I doubt that a man who is trying to write about people is more interested in their family relationships than in the shape of their noses, unless it is necessary to aid the development of the story. If the writer concentrates on what he does need to be interested in, which is the truth and the human heart, he will not have much time left for other things, such as ideas and facts such as the shape of noses or family relationships, since in my opinion ideas and facts have very little relation to the truth.
Critics also suggest that his characters never consciously choose between good and evil.
"Life is not interested in good and evil." Don Quixote constantly chose between good and evil, but he chose in his dream state. He was mad. He entered reality only when he was so busy dealing with people that he didn't have time to distinguish between right and wrong. Since human beings only exist in life, they have to spend their time simply being alive. Life is movement and movement has to do with what makes man move, which is ambition, power, pleasure. The time that a man can devote to morality, he has to forcibly take away from the movement of which he himself is a part. He is forced to choose between good and evil sooner or later, because his moral conscience demands it so that he can live with himself tomorrow. His moral conscience is the curse that he has to accept from the gods in order to obtain from them the right to dream.
- Could you explain better what you mean by movement in relation to the artist?
—The purpose of every artist is to stop the movement that is life, by artificial means and to keep it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it will move again by virtue of what life is. Since man is mortal, the only immortality that is possible for him is to leave behind something that is immortal because it will always move. That is the artist's way of writing "I was here" on the wall of the final and irrevocable disappearance that one day he will have to suffer. «