Sooner or later...

• Malcolm Gladwell on creativity in The New Yorker.

...When Cézanne was painting a portrait of the critic Gustave Geffroy, he made him endure eighty sittings, over three months, before announcing the project a failure. (The result is one of that string of masterpieces in the Musée d’Orsay.) When Cézanne painted his dealer, Ambrose Vollard, he made Vollard arrive at eight in the morning and sit on a rickety platform until eleven-thirty, without a break, on a hundred and fifty occasions—before abandoning the portrait. He would paint a scene, then repaint it, then paint it again. He was notorious for slashing his canvases to pieces in fits of frustration.

Mark Twain was the same way. Galenson quotes the literary critic Franklin Rogers on Twain’s trial-and-error method: “His routine procedure seems to have been to start a novel with some structural plan which ordinarily soon proved defective, whereupon he would cast about for a new plot which would overcome the difficulty, rewrite what he had already written, and then push on until some new defect forced him to repeat the process once again.” Twain fiddled and despaired and revised and gave up on “Huckleberry Finn” so many times that the book took him nearly a decade to complete. The Cézannes of the world bloom late not as a result of some defect in character, or distraction, or lack of ambition, but because the kind of creativity that proceeds through trial and error necessarily takes a long time to come to fruition.

An interview's treacherous waters

• Bookforum looks at a quartet of writer-interview collections.

Featuring choice soundbites from Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack Kerouac and others:

Interrogating writers for publication is indeed an adversarial experience (Twain thought it a kind of "torture"). Authors, as they are wont to do, wish to control their words—something easily done on the page, not so much so in conversation—while the interviewer strives to elicit something newsworthy or at least fresh. It is this tension between desire for control and the spontaneity integral to the situation that constitutes the literary interview's chief draw. Interviews with filmmakers, composers, and painters may be of great interest, but since their jobs aren't deploying just the right word in just the right place, there's less at stake. The interview is a particularly high-wire act for writers—sentences they might otherwise rewrite a dozen times turn up in print they way they fell from their tongues. And even though writers seek to impose intentionality on their spoken text, to craft their self-presentation as a director might stage a play, nevertheless there's always the possibility of a misstep, maybe even a tumble. Remarks may not be literature, but they are often a prelude to amusement or distress; daily life makes this all too plain to us.