Need to know basis

Last night I found myself battling the hair gel mocking winds at Trafalgar Square en route to a talk at the ICA by Zadie Smith and Philip Gourevitch, as you do. Or rather, as you do when at week 3 into your cultural detox, you start to dream yourself a born-again scholar. That is, until you get into a room of 200 Kafka lovers to celebrate the book launch of the Paris Review Interviews (a collection of interviews with the world's great contemporary authors) and realise that your writings are tragically closer to this than that.

And without getting into any feverish displays of jealousy and pseudo-academic posturings, I will say the most interesting part of the evening was hearing about all the writer's little obsessions and jokes, rather than their more prescriptive or portentous moments. Like how Dorothy Parker writes two-fingered on a typewriter. Capote writes prone on a sofa or bed, smoking and drinking coffee, mint tea, then sherry and martinis. Joan Didion goes back to page one and re-types everything ("It gets me into a rhythm"). Hemingway, pompous and fetishistic, writes in the bedroom of his Havana house standing "on the worn skin of the lesser kudu", on onion-skin paper, noting his daily progress on charts.

Thankfully sanity is restored by Bellow, who refuses to discuss his work habits because "for the artist to give such loving attention to his own shoelaces [is] dangerous, even immoral". Which is precisely why you don't need to know exactly how much wine I am drinking right now, or ever. That would be dangerous, even immoral.

Paris Review Interviews, 1.
£9.89 on Amazon