The Paris Review

A Singular Voice – Allan Gurganus is one of America’s great storytellers, a spinner of tales small and large. His Art of Fiction interview in this issue (No. 236) of The Paris Review is packed with wisdom and sound advice.

“People were telling stories eons before they ever figured how to write them down. Some novelists derive major inspiration from Gutenberg’s typography itself. Others, like me, still go to the well of tale-told narrative. We believe that human conversation shapes itself toward legend.”

“One rule of Southern etiquette runs, Silence must never all at dinner … The same thirty stories were offered over and over, with slight variations. The goal, I guess, was to add some one detail that would forever after be repeated by our kin.”

“You wake up slowly to your God-given subject. It arrives with practice.”

“Religion is too important to let just churches have the franchise. They’ve botched their own central ethic – absolution, forgiveness.”

“Early on, I sensed that – in every art – the ultimate shared subject is human consciousness itself. The more comic-tragic notes you can wrest into a single active page, the better. I would later suggest to my students that they put something funny on every page and something beautiful on every other.”

On the differences between Grace Paley’s classroom and John Cheever’s classroom: “If Grace’s class resembled the heated Talmudic arguments of a communist cell, John’s was sort of an educational cocktail party. He was as funny, lively, and irreverent as a much younger man. His conversation was jumbled with famous intimates. When he said Saul, he meant Bellow, when he said Walker, he meant Evans. He would say, “It’s certainly possible to start a story, ‘It was one of those Sundays when people woke saying, “I drank too much last night.” Now, students, ‘It was one of those Sundays when ….’”

“Tennessee Williams swore he’d never created a character to whom he was not sexually attracted. I always urged my students to let their characters have erotic existences on the page. We put the poor things through such tortures, why not let them score a few Fridays and Saturdays per annum?”