More on unconventional tools of creation (was: Re: Motto: live a fast life, die young and be a beautiful corpse)

[Garson O'Toole]

Laurence Horn wrote
> The Renoir story rang a distant bell of a writer who professed the same
> practice (mutatis mutandis), but I couldn't remember whether it tolled
> for Lawrence, Hemingway, Mailer, Miller, or one of the other DWMs of
> whom Kate Millett was notoriously unfond.  A bit of digging produced
> this artifact:
>
> http://atticfox.wordpress.com/2007/09/07/written-with-the-body/
> Written WITH the Body
> Jeanette Winterson, in her novel Written on the Body, recycles the
> narrator's conversation with two different partners.
>
> With Inge, the anarcha-feminist who hates to blow up beautiful things:
>
> She said, "Don't you know that Renoir claimed he painted with his
> penis?"
> "Don't worry," I said. "He did. When he died they found nothing
> between his balls but an old brush."
> "You're making it up."
> Am I? (22)
>
> And again with Catherine, the writer, who feels that writers don't
> make great companions:
>
> "Yes," she said. "Do you know why Henry Miller said "I write
> with my prick?"
> "Because he did. When he died they found nothing between his legs
> but a ball point pen."
> "You're making that up," she said.
> Am I? (60)

Many thanks to LH for the thematically related quotation attributed to
Henry Miller. In a quick search I could not find additional support
for this ascription beyond Jeanette Winterson's novel. Perhaps she
constructed it as a humorous parallel to Renoir's remark.

The search did uncover a comment credited to another prominent writer,
Oe Kenzaburo who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1994. The book
"The Marginal World of Oe Kenzaburo: A Study in Themes and Techniques"
by Michiko N. Wilson contains this passage:

http://books.google.com/books?id=KkT6rgd41f4C&q=fountain#v=snippet&

[Begin excerpt]

A foreign scholar of Japanese literature who was well known for her
quips once said to him: "You look up words in a physiological
dictionary instead of a language dictionary when you write novels,
don't you?" He replied humorously, "That's correct. And I write with
my genitals instead of a fountain pen!" [2]

[Footnote 2] "Eccentricity, Abnormality, and Danger in Sex" (Sei no
kikaisa to ijo to kiken), Tightrope Walking, p. 239.

[End excerpt]

Garson

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