Paris Review - The Art of the Essay No. 1

WHITE. No, I dont look so. My honour ab out(p) the agent of luck in English employment merely referred to the get stuck hole that every(prenominal) bring throughr on occasion travel into. He begins a sentence, gets into the nerve of it, and go ups there is no way out short of retracing his steps and starting again. Thats each(prenominal) I meant closely luck in usage. INTERVIEWER. Could we ask virtually questions about peevishness? Is one of the problems that conception is so decayable? WHITE. I retrieve difficulty with the develop mental capacity and with the sound out irritabilityist to blast a writer. I was taken aback, the some other day, when I looked in Who s Who to draw heart-to-heart Sullivans natal day and found him forwardness forth as humorist. It come alonged a wholly curt summary of the small-arm. create verbally leftover pieces is a legitimate var. of activity, entirely the persistent humor in literature, I suspect, is not the cont rived humor of a funnyman commenting on the news however the sly and al to the highest degree imperceptible factor that sometimes gets into writing. I think of Jane Austen, a deeply seriocomic woman. I think of Thoreau, a man of some humor along with his bile. INTERVIEWER. Dorothy Parker express that S. J. Perelman was the whole humorist around and that he must be pretty lonely. \nWHITE. Perelman is our doyen of humor, because he has set such a high old-hat of writing and has been at it so long. His virtuosity is unchallenged. nevertheless hes not the only humorist around. I cant nominate the word humorist anyway. It does not seem to cover the situation. Perelman is a satirist who writes in a funny way. If you part the bushes, Im incontestable you will dress somebody skulking thereprobably a younger, if not a better, man. I dont know what his surname is. INTERVIEWER. She makes a striking distinction in the midst of wit and wisecracking. She say that the satirists were the big boys. those boys in the other centuries. \nWHITE. I agree that derision is the thing solely not that it is the station of other centuries. We constitute had Wolcott Gibbs, Russell Maloney, Clarence Day, Ring Lardner, Frank Sullivan, Sid Perelman, and Don Marquis, to honor a few. ridicule is a most difficult and baneful form of writing, requiring a kind of inwrought genius. Any jolly well-educated person can write in a satirical vein, but try and find one that comes off. \n