JOLLY DAYS

I.B. Singer

There is a wisdom in the way successful art is created — in the working methods themselves. The wisdom evolves from self understanding and an allowance for adult play — which in one sense is what art means to be — serious play — the game is understanding; understanding our lives; understanding human consciousness; understanding the mystery of being — not done grimly, but with joy and sensuality.

I just found a yellowing 1972 (!) NYT Book Review piece about Isaac Bashevis Singer — written by Herbert R. Lottman, an editor, critic and translator. I'll be quoting from the article in the next few days.

Here is I.B. Singer:

It wasn't hard for me to become a storyteller. Both my mother and my father told stories — he told miracle stories. I was inventing my own at the age of 5 or 6. I became interested in the supernatural, in which my parents were ardent believers. They often told me stories of demons and dybbuks. I still believe in God, that you can pray to Him and He can help you. In my writing I always want to show how the spirit works, influencing not only our own bodies but other bodies.

You write for your newspapers with facts. That's the way I write, too. The reader gets the facts and draws his own conclusions. The words which express emotions are few and poor in individuality. They are miserable generalizations. I use few adjectives and a minimum of verbs, but a lot of nouns. Facts and nouns go together.

I have to write in notebooks with lined paper, but without the vertical red-line margin you find in so many notebooks, because I write from right to left and the margin only confuses me…

Singer's universe, as described in the Nobel Foundation bio:

…the world and life of East European Jewry, such as it was lived in cities and villages, in poverty and persecution, and imbued with sincere piety and rites combined with blind faith and superstition. Its language was Yiddish — the language of the simple people and of the women, the language of the mothers which preserved fairytales and anecdotes, legends and memories for hundreds of years past, through a history which seems to have left nothing untried in the way of agony, passions, aberrations, cruelty and bestiality, but also of heroism, love and self-sacrifice.

The Collected Stories