stone-sober clerics

alongside interviews with authors like faulkner, mailer, delillo, stoppard, and murakami, the paris review has pdf's of manuscript pages that offer an insight into each writer's creative process: (click on page to see larger)

from joan didion's a book of common prayer (i'm 2/3 of the way through this right now - highly recommended so far)


from an unpublished ginsberg poem


from hunter s. thompson's fear and loathing in los vegas


from jonathan lethem's fortress of solitude


while most of the full interview transcripts require a payment to the paris review website, the excerpts are entertaining enough. the feasibility of writing under the influence seems to be a recurring topic:

INTERVIEWER
Did you ever feel that alcohol was in any way an inspiration? I’m thinking of your poem “Vodka,” published in Esquire.

CARVER
My God, no! I hope I’ve made that clear. Cheever remarked that he could always recognize “an alcoholic line” in a writer’s work. I’m not exactly sure what be meant by this but I think I know. When we were teaching in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in the fall semester of 1973, he and I did nothing but drink. I mean we met our classes, in a manner of speaking. But the entire time we were there—we were living in this hotel they have on campus, the Iowa House—I don’t think either of us ever took the covers off our typewriters. We made trips to a liquor store twice a week in my car.

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INTERVIEWER
Almost without exception writers we’ve interviewed over the years admit they cannot write under the influence of booze or drugs—or at the least what they’ve done has to be rewritten in the cool of the day. What’s your comment about this?

THOMPSON
They lie. Or maybe you’ve been interviewing a very narrow spectrum of writers. It’s like saying, “Almost without exception women we’ve interviewed over the years swear that they never indulge in sodomy”—without saying that you did all your interviews in a nunnery. Did you interview Coleridge? Did you interview Poe? Or Scott Fitzgerald? Or Mark Twain? Or Fred Exley? Did Faulkner tell you that what he was drinking all the time was really iced tea, not whiskey? Please. Who the fuck do you think wrote the Book of Revelation? A bunch of stone-sober clerics?