ARTISTS ON ART:

Excerpt from "The Writing of Organic Fiction: A Conversation" by Wright Morris and Wayne C. Booth:

MORRIS: ...But come back to that other kind of fiction, in which the author himself is involved with his works, not merely in writing something for other people but in writing what seems to be necessary to to his conscious existence, to his sense of well-being. For such a writer, when he finished with something he finishes with it; he is not left with continuations that he can go on knitting until he runs out of yarn.

This conceit reflects my own experience as a writer, relying on the sap that keeps rising, the force that drives the flower, as Dylan Thomas put it. It is plantlike. We put it in the sun and when it doesn't grow, we take it and put it in another room. I don't think of repotting the plant. The plant must make its own way.

BOOTH: I like the organic metaphor, but I keep wanting to come back to particular cases to see how you actually work, in literal detail. Even the organic novelist obviously still has the matter of collecting notes, starting a novel, having it fail to go. Let me put a simple question, and move out from there. How many actual novels, whether they ever reach fruition or not, do you have "growing" at a given time?

MORRIS: You don't mean simultaneously?

BOOTH: I mean actual notes that exist in some kind of manuscript form, starts on a novel, something you are actually working on.

MORRIS: It is so unusual for me to have more than one or two things in mind at once that I don't find this a fruitful question.

Wright Morris's work as a novelist, essayist, and photographer is examined by prominent critics in Conversations with Wright Morris; the collection, edited by Robert E. Knoll, was published in the spring of 1977 by the University of Nebraska Press. "The Writing of Organic Fiction" is a chapter in that book. Wayne C. Booth's other contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Kenneth Burke's Way of Knowing" (September 1974),"Irony and Pity Once Again: Thais Revisited" (Winter 1975), "M.H. Abrams: Historian as Critic, Critic as Pluralist" (Spring 1976), "THE LIMITS OF PLURALISM: 'Preserving the Exemplar': Or, How Not to Dig our Own Graves" (Spring 1977), "CRITICAL RESPONSE: Notes and Exchanges" (Autumn 1977), "Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation" (Autumn 1978) ,"Ten Literal 'Theses" (Autumn 1978), and, with Robert E. Streeter, W.J.T. Mitchell: "EDITORS' NOTE: Sheldon Sacks 1930-1979" (Spring 1979).

© 1976 by The University of Chicago. All excerpts appear in Critical Inquiry, Volume 3, Number 2 (Winter 1976). This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of US copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that this entire notice is carried and that the University of Chicago Press is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or reduplication of this text in other terms, in any medium, requires both the consent of the authors and the University of Chicago Press.

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