Written Interview: Richard Price
An interview in the Paris Review (Spring 1996) with screenwriter and novelist Richard Price (Sea of Love, Clockers):
INTERVIEWER: You intended to go to law school, but you ended up a writer . . .
PRICE: I always wanted to be a writer, but coming from a working-class background it was hard to feel I had that right. If you’re the first generation of your family to go to college, the pressure on graduation is to go for financial security. The whole point of going to college is to get a job. You have it drilled into your head — job, money, security. Wanting to be an artist doesn’t jibe with any of those three. If you go back to these people who have “slaved and sacrificed” to send you to school, who are the authority figures in your life, and you tell them that you want to be a writer, a dancer, a poet, a singer, an actor, and to do so you’re going to wait tables, drive a cab, sort mail, with your Cornell University degree, they look at you like you’re slitting their throats. They just don’t have it in their life experience to be supportive of a choice like that.
Because I came from that kind of background, it was a scary decision not to go to law school. Maybe one reason The Wanderers got the attention it did was that nobody coming from my background with such an intimate knowledge of white housing-project life was writing about it. The smartest minds of my generation in the projects became doctors, lawyers, engineers, businessmen; they went the route that would fulfill the economic mandate.
INTERVIEWER: Had you ever met a writer before you decided to be one?
PRICE: At Cornell the class of 1958 or 1959 was amazing — with Richard Farina, Ronald Sukenick, Thomas Pynchon, Joanna Russ, Steve Katz, all of whom are working writers now in various degrees of acclaim or obscurity. When I was at Cornell from 1967 to 1971 two or three of them came back to teach. It was the first time I sat in a room with a teacher who wasn’t as old as my father. Here was a guy wearing a vest over a T-shirt. He had boots on, and his hair was longer than mine. A novelist! I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I felt, Ah, to be a writer! I could be like this teacher and have that long, gray hair . . . boots up on the table and cursing in class! It made me dizzy just to look at the guy. I don’t remember a thing he said to me, except that he usually made encouraging noises: You’re good. You’re okay, keep writing, blah, blah . . . He gave us this reading list that ranged from Céline to Walter Abish to Mallarmé and Rimbaud, names I’d never even heard of. The books looked so groovy, so cool, and so hip. I bought every one of them. I walked around with Alfred Jarry and Henri Michaux under my arm, but I didn’t understand what they were trying to do, to say. I had no context for any of them. The only one I could get through on the list was Henry Miller. One writing teacher gave us his own novel and, frankly, I couldn’t understand that either.
For more of the interview, go here.
HT to @SMLochhead for the link.
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