The Paris Review - Fall 2016

of my priggishness. Nonetheless, it was a task he set himself to abridge these
strange habits I had brought with me from England.
I remember, for example, that there was to be a reading on the campus
by this man called Snodgrass. Corman said we should go. And I said, Why,
is Snodgrass an interesting writer? Corman said no. I said, Why should we
go? And he said, Precisely because he’s not an interesting writer. It will be an
object lesson for you, to see how a boring writer can make extremely boring
headway with potentially interesting material, and to watch the wonderful
language reduced to ashes in the hands of a facile and imitative and uninteresting
writer. This should open your eyes a little bit. It was a cruel idea, but
absolutely appropriate. We went to it and I thought, Save me, save me.
INTERVIEWER
What were the practical effects of that experience? How did it affect your
own writing?
PRYNNE
Gradually I became less cocksure. It made me have strong objections to the
kind of thing I was doing. It didn’t make it any easier. My pencil insisted on
writing this stuff that I was not very impressed by, or interested in. It took
a while to work my way out of it. I would read Melville, and think, Jesus,
this is the way to get free, but look at the cost. It must have completely
destroyed the equanimity of Melville’s mind to project it into the strange
alien violence of the pressures he put it under, the destinations he coerced
it into. It was so different from someone like Stevens, who seemed to be
calmly in control and deliberate in the writing practise. I thought, There
must be some connection between these two. They are using the same language,
they live in the same world. What is this? What’s happening? What
am I doing in this place? It was very disturbing. Being on one’s own made
it even more difficult to assimilate into it. I didn’t have, as I said, any relations
to the Harvard apparatus. I was assigned to some scholars, I had a few
meetings with Douglas Bush, one or two meetings with David Perkins, but
they amounted to nothing. They were not interested in me, very justly. I was
certainly not interested in them, equally justly.
I eventually fell out with Cid Corman because he sent me an issue of
Origin and one of the conditions of doing this was you should have an
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