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INTERVIEWER
Where do you think your discipline came from?
BANVILLE
I am essentially a religious type. In my teens I gave up Catholicism, and at the same time I started writing. Writing keeps me at my
desk, constantly trying to write a perfect sentence. It is a great privilege to make one’s living from writing sentences. The sentence is the
greatest invention of civilization. To sit all day long assembling these extraordinary strings of words is a marvelous thing. I couldn’t ask for
anything better. It’s as near to godliness as I can get.
INTERVIEWER
Do you revise?
BANVILLE
When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it’s finished. A certain point comes at which you can’t do any more work on
it because you know it will kill the sentence. The rhythm is set. The meaning is set. Occasionally I will leave behind a sentence that I know is missing a word,
and I’ll go back to it later. I wrote a sentence like that yesterday. A man is talking about his wife, who’s a singer. She has just woken up in the morning,
and he says, “even half asleep like this, she sounded a true, dark note, a thrilling . . .” I put in “cadence,” but I know it’s not
the right word—so the sentence is just sitting there, waiting for me to find the right, the exact, the only word.
INTERVIEWER
Is rhythm as important as word choice to you?
BANVILLE
It all starts with rhythm for me. I love Nabokov’s work, and I love his style. But I always thought there was something odd
about it that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Then I read an interview in which he admitted he was tone deaf. And I thought, that’s
it—there’s no music in Nabokov, it’s all pictorial, it’s all image-based. It’s not any worse for that, but the prose
doesn’t sing. For me, a line has to sing before it does anything else. The great thrill is when a sentence that starts out being completely
plain suddenly begins to sing, rising far above itself and above any expectation I might have had for it. That’s what keeps me going on those
dark December days when I think about how I could be living instead of writing.
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