I agree that the great books “speak for themselves”…and do so with unique eloquence. However, there is no documentation to suggest that authors such as Homer, Sophocles, Chaucer, Cervantes, and Shakespeare were ever interviewed. Oh, do I wish I could have interviewed them!

Fortunately, The Paris Review has been interviewing great authors since being founded in Paris in 1953 by Harold L. Humes, Peter Matthiessen, and George Plimpton. I have retrieved from its archives an excerpt from an interview of  Isaac Bashevis Singer by Harold Flender in 1968. To read the complete interview, obtain subscription information, and/or check out other resources, please click here.

*     *     *

Isaac Bashevis Singer lives with his second wife in a large, sunny five-room apartment in an Upper Broadway apartment house. In addition to hundreds of books and a large television set, it is furnished with the kind of pseudo-Victorian furniture typical of the comfortable homes of Brooklyn and the Bronx in the 1930s.

Singer works at a small, cluttered desk in the living room. He writes every day, but without special hours—in between interviews, visits, and phone calls. His name is still listed in the Manhattan telephone directory, and hardly a day goes by without his receiving several calls from strangers who have read something he has written and want to talk to him about it. Until recently, he would invite anyone who called for lunch, or at least coffee.

Singer writes his stories and novels in lined notebooks, in longhand, in Yiddish. Most of what he writes still appears first in the Jewish Daily Forward, America’s largest Yiddish-language daily, published in New York City. Getting translators to put his work into English has always been a major problem. He insists on working very closely with his translators, going over each word with them many times.

Singer always wears dark suits, white shirts, and dark ties. His voice is high but pleasant, and never raised. He is of medium height, thin, and has an unnaturally pale complexion. For many years he has followed a strict vegetarian diet.

The first impression Singer gives is that he is a fragile, weak man who would find it an effort to walk a block. Actually, he walks fifty to sixty blocks a day, a trip that invariably includes a stop to feed pigeons from a brown paper bag. He loves birds and has two pet parakeets who fly about his apartment uncaged.

Many writers when they start out have other writers they use as models.

Well, my model was my brother, I. J. Singer, who wrote The Brothers Ashkenaz. I couldn’t have had a better model than my brother. I saw him struggle with my parents and I saw how he began to write and how he slowly developed and began to publish. So naturally he was an influence. Not only this, but in the later years before I began to publish, my brother gave me a number of rules about writing which seem to me sacred. Not that these rules cannot be broken once in a while, but it’s good to remember them. One of his rules was that while facts never become obsolete or stale, commentaries always do. When a writer tries to explain too much, to psychologize, he’s already out of time when he begins. Imagine Homer explaining the deeds of his heroes according to the old Greek philosophy, or the psychology of his time. Why, nobody would read Homer!

Fortunately, Homer just gave us the images and the facts, and because of this the Iliad and the Odyssey are fresh in our time. And I think this is true about all writing. Once a writer tries to explain what the hero’s motives are from a psychological point of view, he has already lost. This doesn’t mean that I am against the psychological novel. There are some masters who have done it well. But I don’t think it is a good thing for a writer, especially a young writer, to imitate them. Dostoyevsky, for example. If you can call him a writer of the psychological school; I’m not sure I do. He had his digressions and he tried to explain things in his own way, but even with him his basic power is in giving the facts.

What do you think of psychoanalysis and writing? Many writers have been psychoanalyzed and feel this has helped them to understand not only themselves but the characters they write about.

If the writer is psychoanalyzed in a doctor’s office, that is his business. But if he tries to put the psychoanalysis into the writing, it’s just terrible. The best example is the one who wrote Point Counter Point. What was his name?

Aldous Huxley.

Aldous Huxley. He tried to write a novel according to Freudian psychoanalysis. And I think he failed in a bad way. This particular novel is now so old and so stale that even in school it cannot be read anymore. So, I think that when a writer sits down and he psychoanalyzes, he’s ruining his work.

You once told me that the first piece of fiction you ever read was The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Well, I read these things when I was a boy of ten or eleven, and to me they looked so sublime, so wonderful, that even today I don’t dare to read Sherlock Holmes again because I am afraid that I may be disappointed.

Do you think A. Conan Doyle influenced you in any way?

Well, I don’t think that the stories of Sherlock Holmes had any real influence on me. But I will say one thing—from my childhood I have always loved tension in a story. I liked that a story should be a story. That there should be a beginning and an end, and there should be some feeling of what will happen at the end. And to this rule I keep today. I think that storytelling has become in this age almost a forgotten art. But I try my best not to suffer from this kind of amnesia. To me a story is still a story where the reader listens and wants to know what happens. If the reader knows everything from the very beginning, even if the description is good, I think the story is not a story.

*     *     *

To read the complete interview, obtain subscription information, and/or check out other resources, please click here.