. G. Wodehouse, The Art of Fiction No.

60
Interviewed by Gerald Clarke ISSUE 64, WINTER 1975
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When I first went to see him, I telephoned P. G. Wodehouse and asked for
directions from New York to his house on Long Island. He merely chuckled, as
if I had asked him to compare Euclid with Einstein or attempt some other
laughably impossible task. Oh, I cant tell you that, he said. I dont have a
clue. I learned the route anyway, and my arrival for lunch, only ten minutes
late, seemed to astonish him. You had no trouble? Oh, that is good. Thats
wonderful! His face beaming at having in his house such a certified problemsolver, a junior Jeeves almost, he led me without further to-do to a telephone,
which he had been dialing all morning in a futile effort to reach a number in
New York. He had, of course, done everything right but dial the area code, an
addition to the Bell system that had somehow escaped his attention since he
had last attempted long distance. He was intensely pleased when New York
answered, and I sunned myself in the warm glow of his gratitude for the rest
of the day. All of which is by way of saying that Wodehouse, who lived four
months past his ninety-third birthday, had discovered his own secret of long
life: he simply ignored what was worrisome, bothersome, or confusing in the
world around him.
His wife, Ethel, or his sister-in-law, Helen, did the worrying for him. On my
three visits Ethel would hover around him at the beginning of our
conversation to plump his pillow or fill his sherry glass, then discreetly
disappear to tend to an ailing dog or cat. They had about a half-dozen of
each, most of them strays that had come begging to the door. Wodehouse
himself had not found it necessary to carry money in twenty years, and
though he had spent most of his adult life in America, he still reckoned such
things as book prices in pounds and shillings. His accent, like his arithmetic,
remained pure English. Aside from his writing, his two passions were the New
York Mets and a soap opera called The Edge of Night. On those extremely rare
occasions when he had to leave the house for the day, Ethel was assigned to
watch the program and write down exactly what had happened. I
understand that youre going to watch The Edge of Night with me, he said
on one of my visits. Thats splendid!
Wodehouse lived on twelve acres in Remsenburg, a pretty, quiet little town in
eastern Long Island, and from his glass-enclosed study, and most of the rest
of the house, all that he could see was greenery. He was as happily isolated
there as if he were living in Blandings Castle itself. He enjoyed all the hoopla
that surrounded him in his old age, but he also found the attention very

tiring. Everything more or less quiet here now, he wrote me a week after he
had been dubbed Sir Pelham, but it has been hell with all the interviewers.
A month after that he died, as peacefully and as quietly as he had lived,
according to all accounts.

INTERVIEWER
The last time I saw you was at your ninetieth birthday party in 1971.
WODEHOUSE
Oh, yes. All that ninetieth-birthday thing gave me not exactly a heart attack.
But I had to have treatment, you know. Im always taking pills and things.
One good effect of the treatment, however, is that I lost about twenty
pounds. I feel frightfully fit now, except my legs are a bit wobbly.
INTERVIEWER
Youre ninety-one now, arent you?
WODEHOUSE
Ninety-one and a half! Ninety-two in October.
INTERVIEWER
You dont have any trouble reading now, do you?
WODEHOUSE
Oh, no!
INTERVIEWER
How about writing?
WODEHOUSE
Oh, as far as the brain goes, Im fine. Ive just finished another novel, in fact.
Ive got a wonderful title for it, Bachelors Anonymous. Dont you think thats
good? Yes, everybody likes that title. Peter Schwed, my editor at Simon and
Schuster, nearly always alters my titles, but he raved over that one. I think
the book is so much better than my usual stuff that I dont know how I can
top it. It really is funny. Its worked out awfully well. Im rather worried about
the next one. It will be a letdown almost. I dont want to be like Bernard Shaw.
He turned out some awfully bad stuff in his nineties. He said he knew the
stuff was bad but he couldnt stop writing.

INTERVIEWER
What is your working schedule these days?
WODEHOUSE
I still start the day off at seven-thirty. I do my daily dozen exercises, have
breakfast, and then go into my study. When I am between books, as I am
now, I sit in an armchair and think and make notes. Before I start a book Ive
usually got four hundred pages of notes. Most of them are almost incoherent.
But theres always a moment when you feel youve got a novel started. You
can more or less see how its going to work out. After that its just a question
of detail.
INTERVIEWER
You block everything out in advance, then?
WODEHOUSE
Yes. For a humorous novel youve got to have a scenario, and youve got to
test it so that you know where the comedy comes in, where the situations
come in . . . splitting it up into scenes (you can make a scene of almost
anything) and have as little stuff in between as possible.
INTERVIEWER
Is it really possible to know in a scenario where something funny is going to
be?
WODEHOUSE
Yes, you can do that. Still, its curious how a scenario gets lost as you go
along. I dont think Ive ever actually kept completely to one. If Ive got a plot
for a novel worked out and I can really get going on it, I work all the time. I
work in the morning, and then I probably go for a walk or something, and
then I have another go at the novel. I find that from four to seven is a
particularly good time for working. I never work after dinner. Its the plots that
I find so hard to work out. It takes such a long time to work one out. I like to
think of some scene, it doesnt matter how crazy, and work backward and
forward from it until eventually it becomes quite plausible and fits neatly into
the story.
INTERVIEWER
How many words do you usually turn out on a good day?
WODEHOUSE

Well, Ive slowed up a good deal now. I used to write about two thousand
words. Now I suppose I do about one thousand.
INTERVIEWER
Do you work seven days a week?
WODEHOUSE
Oh, yes, rather. Always.
INTERVIEWER
Do you type or do you write in longhand?
WODEHOUSE
I used to work entirely on the typewriter. But this last book I did sitting in a
lawn chair and writing by hand. Then I typed it out. Much slower, of course.
But I think its a pretty good method; it does pretty well.
INTERVIEWER
Do you go back and revise very much?
WODEHOUSE
Yes. And I very often find that Ive got something which ought to come in
another place, a scene which originally I put in chapter two and then when I
get to chapter ten, I feel it would come in much better there. Im sort of
molding the whole time.
INTERVIEWER
How long does it take you to write a novel?
WODEHOUSE
Well, in the old days I used to rely on it being about three months, but now it
might take any length of time. I forget exactly how long Bachelors
Anonymous took, but it must have been six or seven months.
INTERVIEWER
That still seems very fast to me.
WODEHOUSE
Its still good, yes.

INTERVIEWER
If you were asked to give advice to somebody who wanted to write humorous
fiction, what would you tell him?
WODEHOUSE
Id give him practical advice, and that is always get to the dialogue as soon
as possible. I always feel the thing to go for is speed. Nothing puts the reader
off more than a great slab of prose at the start. I think the success of every
novelif its a novel of actiondepends on the high spots. The thing to do is
to say to yourself, Which are my big scenes? and then get every drop of
juice out of them. The principle I always go on in writing a novel is to think of
the characters in terms of actors in a play. I say to myself, if a big name were
playing this part, and if he found that after a strong first act he had
practically nothing to do in the second act, he would walk out. Now, then, can
I twist the story so as to give him plenty to do all the way through? I believe
the only way a writer can keep himself up to the mark is by examining each
story quite coldly before he starts writing it and asking himself if it is all right
as a story. I mean, once you go saying to yourself, This is a pretty weak plot
as it stands, but Im such a hell of a writer that my magic touch will make it
okay, youre sunk. If they arent in interesting situations, characters cant be
major characters, not even if you have the rest of the troop talk their heads
off about them.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think makes a story funny?
WODEHOUSE
I think character mostly. You know instinctively whats funny and what isnt if
youre a humorous writer. I dont think a man can deliberately sit down to
write a funny story unless he has got a sort of slant on life that leads to funny
stories. If you take life fairly easily, then you take a humorous view of things.
Its probably because you were born that way. Lord Emsworth and his pigI
know theyre funny.
INTERVIEWER
Did you ever know anyone who was actually like Lord Emsworth?
WODEHOUSE
No. Psmith is the only one of my characters who is drawn from life. He started
in a boys story, and then I did a grown-up story about him in the Saturday
Evening Post. People sometimes want to know why I didnt go on with Psmith.

But I dont think that the things that made him funny as a very young man
would be funny in an older man. He had a very boring sort of way of
expressing himself. Called everybody comrade and all that sort of thing. I
couldnt go on with him. I dont think hed have worked as a maturer
character. In a way my character Galahad is really Psmith grown up.
INTERVIEWER
But Galahad works very well as a character.
WODEHOUSE
Yes, Galahad is fine.
INTERVIEWER
How old is he supposed to be?
WODEHOUSE
How old all those characters are I dont know. The first short story I wrote
about Lord Emsworth said that he had been to Eton in 1864, which would
make him a hundred-and-something now!
INTERVIEWER
What period are the books set in?
WODEHOUSE
Well, between the wars, rather. I try not to date them at all, but its rather
difficult. Im bad at remembering things, like when flying really became
fashionable. The critics keep saying that the world I write about never
existed. But of course it did. It was going strong between the wars. In a way it
is hard to write the sort of stuff I do now because it really is so out-of-date.
The character of Jeeves is practically unknown in England now, though I
believe someone told me the butler was creeping back. Bertie Wooster and
Oofy Proster have more or less vanished too. I suppose a typical member of
the Drones Club now is someone with a job and very earnest about it. Those
rather hit-or-miss days have passed away. But thank God, that doesnt seem
to matter!
INTERVIEWER
I suppose that the world has gone the way of spats. You were very fond of
spats, werent you? Tell me a little about them.
WODEHOUSE

I dont know why spats went out! The actual name was spatterdashers, and
you fastened them over your ankles, you see, to prevent the spatter dashing
you. They certainly lent tone to your appearance, and they were awfully
comfortable, especially when you wore them in cold weather. Ive written
articles, which were rather funny, about how I used to go about London. I
would borrow my brothers frock coat and my uncles hat, but my spats were
always new and impeccable. The butler would open the door and take in my
old topcoat and hat and sniff as if to say, Hardly the sort of thing we are
accustomed to. And then he would look down at the spats and everything
would be all right. Its a shame when things like spats go out.
INTERVIEWER
Did you ever have a butler like Jeeves?
WODEHOUSE
No, never like Jeeves. My butlers were quite different, though I believe J. M.
Barrie had one just like Jeeves.
INTERVIEWER
How did you create Jeeves, then?
WODEHOUSE
I only intended to use him once. His first entrance was: Mrs. Gregson to see
you, sir, in a story called Extricating Young Gussie. He only had one other
line, Very good, sir. Which suit will you wear? But then I was writing a story,
The Artistic Career of Corky, about two young men, Bertie Wooster and his
friend Corky, getting into a lot of trouble, and neither of them had brains
enough to get out of the trouble. I thought: Well, how can I get them out? And
I thought: Suppose one of them had an omniscient valet? I wrote a short story
about him, then another short story, then several more short stories and
novels. Thats how a character grows. I think Ive written nine Jeeves novels
now and about thirty short stories.
INTERVIEWER
I like Jeeves, but my favorite character of yours is really Lord Emsworth.
WODEHOUSE
Oh, yes. Hes about my favorite character, too. Well, now, he must be entirely
out-of-date. I dont suppose anybody in England is living in a castle like that
anymore.
INTERVIEWER

Maybe not, but I suspect that there are still some woolly-headed English
aristocrats around.
WODEHOUSE
Oh, yes?
INTERVIEWER
Will you write any more Lord Emsworth stories?
WODEHOUSE
I dont know if I shall. Ive got him in such a pleasant position now. Hes free
of both his sisters. Hes got his pig, and hes living alone and loving it. Hes
comfortable by himself. It seems rather unkind to disturb him. . . . I do think
Id like to have a try, though. You see, thats the problem. Id love to do a Lord
Emsworth story, but what could it be about? I mean, what could happen? The
trouble is, you see, that Ive so featured the pig that I couldnt leave her out.
And yet, what could happen to a pig? It is difficult to find plots when you have
written so much. The ideas dont seem to come to me now. I suppose its
temporary. Ive always felt like this in between books. But I have used up
every possible situation. If I do get a good idea, I find it is something I wrote
in the thirties.
INTERVIEWER
I think the closest you have come to sex in your novels is a kiss on the cheek.
Have you ever been tempted to put anything spicier into them?
WODEHOUSE
No. No, I dont think the framework of the novel would stand it. Sex, of
course, can be awfully funny, but you have to know how to handle it. And I
dont think I can handle it properly.
INTERVIEWER
Sex aside, have you ever thought of writing anything more serious?
WODEHOUSE
No. I dont think Im capable of writing anything but the sort of thing I do
write. I couldnt write a serious book.
INTERVIEWER
Did you always know you would be a writer?

WODEHOUSE
Yes, always. I know I was writing stories when I was five. I dont remember
what I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose. I was about twenty when I sold
my first story, and Ive been a full-time writer since 1902. I cant think of
myself as anything but a writer.
INTERVIEWER
Did you ever have another career?
WODEHOUSE
When I left school. I was first working for scholarship at Oxford when my
fathers finances took rather a nasty jar and I wasnt able to go up to Oxford,
and instead was put in the bank, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, which I
hated at first but later got to like. The bank had branches all over the East.
After two years in the London branch youd get your orders to go out there,
which of course appalled me because in my two years I never learned a thing
about banking. The idea of going out to Bombay or somewhere and being a
branch manager and being paid in rupees scared me stiff.
All this time I was writing and getting rejections. Because the trouble is when
you start writing, you write awful stuff. And I was writing on banking hours
too. My second year I got into the cash department and my job was to enter
the deposits on the ledger. After a while a new ledger was provided and I sat
down and suddenly thought of a wonderful ideato write in the new ledger
an account of the Great Opening of the New Ledger, with the King coming
and all that. And I did this and, having done it, repented and thought this was
going to get me into trouble, and I got a knife and I cut the first page of the
ledger out. It so happened that the chief cashier had got a long feud on with
the stationers and hed been trying to catch them out for years and when he
saw this ledger with the front page missing, he thought, Ah, this is my
chance, and he went and cursed them for giving us an imperfect ledger. But I
didnt get the sack for it.
I left the bank after that second year, however, to go to the [London] Globe. I
had been doing occasional day jobs for an old master of mine whod become
a journalist and ran the comic column at the Globe. Id pretend Id sprained
my back lifting a ledger or something, and Id do my work for the Globe. Then
when he went on summer holiday, I took his place and eventually got on the
staff in 1902 when he resigned. In those days the pay was three pounds a
week (about fifteen dollars) and I could live on that very well.
INTERVIEWER
From those days to now, have you continued to read criticism of your own

work?
WODEHOUSE
Yes. I get a lot of reviews sent to me. They are invariably favorable. And
somehow I always read them really carefully. You do get tips from them. Now,
that last Jeeves book of mine, Jeeves and the Tie That Binds, I forget which
critic it was, but he said that the book was dangerously near to self-parody. I
know what he meant. I had exaggerated Jeeves and Bertie. Jeeves always
reciting some poetry or something. Ill correct that in the next one. I do think
one can learn from criticism. In fact, Im a pretty good critic of my own work. I
know when it isnt as good as it ought to be.
INTERVIEWER
Do you ever feel angry at critics? Do you ever feel they are unfair?
WODEHOUSE
No, I dont think so. You always feel that you cant please everybody.
INTERVIEWER
Some critics, going beyond any particular book, think that your short stories
are better than your novels. What do you think?
WODEHOUSE
Yes, I think Id sooner write short stories than novels. I feel really happy with a
short story. I like the sense of completing something. The only trouble is that
if I do get a good idea, I rather want to work it into a novel. I mean, Im rather
wasting a novel if I write a short story.
INTERVIEWER
Who are your own favorite humorists?
WODEHOUSE
The ones I like most are all deadJames Thurber, Robert Benchley, Wolcott
Gibbs, George S. Kaufman.
INTERVIEWER
Do you like S. J. Perelman?
WODEHOUSE
Oh, yes, yes, yes. Hes quite a favorite of mine. But there are very few writers

like that now, just writing funny stuff, not like in the twenties and thirties.
When I first came over here all the evening papers, the evening World and
the others, all had funny poems and columns in them. I liked F.P.A.s column
very much. But I dont think people buy funny books nowadays. I never have
had a big sale over here. Where I get my money is England, Sweden, Italy,
France, and Germany.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think there are more humorous writers in England than America?
WODEHOUSE
They havent got any in England either.
INTERVIEWER
Do you like Peter De Vries?
WODEHOUSE
Im not frightfully keen on him. I havent read very much of his stuff. But Ill
tell you who is awfully good is Jean Kerr. Ooooh, shes wonderful. Mary, Mary
was one of the best plays Ive ever read. Anthony Powell is also a good writer.
Its extraordinary how interesting his stuff is, you know. And it just goes on
and on, with nothing much in the way of scenes or anything. You wouldnt call
it funny stuff, though, would you?
INTERVIEWER
No, I dont suppose so. What have you been reading most recently?
WODEHOUSE
Ive been reading the old books, books that Ive read before. The first time
you read a book, you dont read it at all carefully; you just read it for the
story. You have to keep rereading. Every year or so I read Shakespeare
straight through. But then I go to the latest by Agatha Christie or Rex Stout. I
read every book of theirs. I do like a book with an elaborate plot. But I havent
any definite plan of reading. I read almost everything, and I like anything
thats good. Ive just reread a book of A. A. Milnes called Two People, which I
had read several times before. His novel is simply a novel of character. Its
not the sort of thing I can write myself, but as a reader I enjoy it thoroughly.
INTERVIEWER
Do you read any contemporary novels?
WODEHOUSE

Ive read some of Norman Mailer.

INTERVIEWER
Do you like his writing?
WODEHOUSE
I dont like his novels very much, but he writes very interesting nonfiction
stuff. I liked Advertisements for Myself very much.
INTERVIEWER
How about the Beats? Someone like Jack Kerouac, for instance, who died a
few years ago?
WODEHOUSE
Jack Kerouac died! Did he?
INTERVIEWER
Yes.
WODEHOUSE
Oh . . . Gosh, they do die off, dont they?
INTERVIEWER
Do you ever go back and reread your own books?
WODEHOUSE
Oh, yes.
INTERVIEWER
Are you ever surprised by them?
WODEHOUSE
Im rather surprised that theyre so good.
INTERVIEWER
Of all the books youve written, do you have any favorites?
WODEHOUSE
Oh, Im very fond of a book called Quick Service and another called Sam in

the Suburbs, a very old one. But I really like them all. There are very few
exceptions.
INTERVIEWER
Have you ever been envious of another writer?
WODEHOUSE
No, never. Im really such a voracious reader that Im only too grateful to get
some stuff I can read.
INTERVIEWER
Have any other writers ever been envious of you?
WODEHOUSE
Well, I always thought A. A. Milne was rather. We were supposed to be quite
good friends, but, you know, in a sort of way I think he was a pretty jealous
chap. I think he was probably jealous of all other writers. But I loved his stuff.
Thats one thing Im very grateful for: I dont have to like an awful person to
like his stuff. I like Somerset Maughams stuff tremendously, for example, but
I should think he was unhappy all the time, wouldnt you? He was an
unpleasant man.
INTERVIEWER
Was he unpleasant to you?
WODEHOUSE
No. He was all right to me. We got along on just sort of how do you do
terms. I remember walking back from a cricket match at Lords in London, and
Maugham came along on the other side. He looked at me and I looked at him,
and we were thinking the same thing: Oh, my God, shall we have to stop and
talk? Fortunately, we didnt.
INTERVIEWER
I dont think writers get along very well with one another.
WODEHOUSE
No, I dont think they do, really. I think theyre jealous of each other. I do get
along with them superficially, if everythings all right. But you feel theyre
resenting you, rather. . . What do you imagine the standing of a writer like
Arnold Bennett is now?

INTERVIEWER
I dont think anybody reads him.
WODEHOUSE
Thats what I think, too. But when he was alive, he was very much a sort of
great literary man.
INTERVIEWER
Lets switch to your own life for a minute. You and Ethel were living in France
when the Germans invaded in 1940. You were interned for about a year in
Germany and Ethel had to live in Berlin. Why didnt you escape to England
when you had a chance?
WODEHOUSE
Oh, everything happened so suddenly. Until the Germans arrived there didnt
seem to be any danger at all. I suppose really the whole thing was that we
had two dogs we were very fond of, and because of the English quarantine
laws we couldnt take them into England. We arent very good at organizing a
thing like that.
INTERVIEWER
You later made some broadcasts from Berlin for CBS radio describing your life
in the camp. Those broadcasts caused great controversy in Britain, and for a
time you were rather savagely denounced there. Do you regret making them?
WODEHOUSE
Oh, yes. Oh, rather. I wish I hadnt. It never occurred to me that there was
anything wrong in the broadcasts. They altered my whole life. I suppose I
would have gone back to England and so on if it hadnt been for them. Yet
they were so perfectly harmless, just a comic description of my adventures in
camp. Of course, nobody ever published them.
INTERVIEWER
Do you resent the way you were treated by the English?
WODEHOUSE
Oh, no, no, no. Nothing of that sort. The whole thing seems to have blown
over now.
INTERVIEWER

Would you ever like to go back to England?

WODEHOUSE
Id certainly like to, but at my age its awfully difficult to get a move on. But
Id like to go back for a visit in the spring. They all seem to want me to go
back. The trouble is that Ive never flown. I suppose that would solve
everything.
INTERVIEWER
I imagine most people think that you live in England even now. But you are an
American citizen, and you have spent most of your life here.
WODEHOUSE
Yes, that is true. I have always been awfully fond of America. It always
seemed like my own country. I dont know why. Id much sooner live here than
in England, I think. I cant think of any place in England I prefer to this. I used
to like London, but I dont think Id like it now. I had always wanted to go to
America, and when I got a holiday from the Globe, in 1904, I came over for
about three weeks. Indeed, I saw more of New York then than Ive ever seen
since, and having been in America gave my reputation in London a
tremendous boost. I was suddenly someone who counted to editors who
threw me out before. Then I came back in 1909 for another visit and lived in
Greenwich Village. It was a quiet sort of place, all of us young writers trying to
get on. I was going to return to England when I sold two short stories to
Cosmopolitan and Colliers for a total of $500much more than I had ever
earned before. So I resigned from the Globe and stayed. But the wolf was
always at the door. I used to think I was being followed about by little men
with black beards. If it hadnt been for Frank Crowninshield, the editor of
Vanity Fair, taking all the articles I could do, I should have been in real
trouble. When Ethel and I got married in September 1914, she had $75 and I
had $50.
The Saturday Evening Post gave me my first break. I wrote a novel called
Something New and they bought it for $3,500 and serialized it. They then
bought Uneasy Money, Piccadilly Jim, and A Damsel in Distress and gave me
a raise with each one, $5,000, $7,500, and $10,000.
Just about that time I started writing musical comedieseighteen in allwith
Guy Bolton and Jerry Kern. I did the lyrics to Jerrys melodies. Our terrific
smash was Oh, Boy! So it all came in a rush. Guy is one of the best fellows I
ever met. He lives a mile from here; thats why we came down here. We were
spending the weekend with him, and Ethel went out and came back for lunch
and said, Ive bought a house.

INTERVIEWER
You once told me that when you worked with Ziegfeld, he said that he envied
your happy temperament.
WODEHOUSE
Yes, he always used to say that.
INTERVIEWER
To what do you attribute your good nature? Was it a happy childhood?
WODEHOUSE
I certainly had a very happy childhood. My position was the same as Rudyard
Kiplings. His parents were in India and boarded him out with a family in
England. My parents were in Hong Kong, and I was also boarded out in
England. Yet Kipling had one hell of a time, and I got on marvelously with the
people I was with and I loved them. What can you attribute a good nature to,
I wonder. Do you think youre born with it? I suppose you are.
INTERVIEWER
There must have been some bad times for you, even so.
WODEHOUSE
Do you know, I dont think Ive had any really bad times. I disliked the bank I
had to work in when I was young very much my first month or so. But once I
got used to it, I became very fond of it.
INTERVIEWER
How about the war years, particularly the year in the German internment
camp? That must have been pretty bad.
WODEHOUSE
I dont know. Looking back to it, it wasnt at all unpleasant. Everybody seems
to think a German internment camp must be a sort of torture chamber. It was
really perfectly normal and ordinary. The camp had an extraordinarily nice
commander, and we did all sorts of things, you know. We played cricket, that
sort of thing. Of course, I was writing all the time. Most writers would have
gotten fifty novels out of the experiencethe men they met therebut I have
never written a word about it, except those broadcasts.
INTERVIEWER

It sounds as if youve never had any worries at all.

WODEHOUSE
Im rather blessed in a way. I really dont worry about anything much. I can
adjust myself to things pretty well.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think it is essential for a writer to have a happy home life?
WODEHOUSE
Well, I think its a tremendous help, yes. Ethel has always been wonderful in
that way. Youve got to be alone quite a bit when youre writing. She doesnt
mind that at all. Ive always had great luck with the things that really matter
in life. I should imagine an unhappy marriage would simply kill a man.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think you would have been so happy if you had not been a writer?
WODEHOUSE
No. I think a writers life is the ideal life. I can never understand these fellows
like Evelyn Waugh who did not always have the idea of being a writer. I
always wanted to be a writer.
INTERVIEWER
Do you always enjoy writing?
WODEHOUSE
Oh, yes. I love writing. I never feel really comfortable unless I am either
actually writing or have a story going. I could not stop writing.

George Seferis, The Art of Poetry No. 13

Interviewed by Edmund Keeley ISSUE 50, FALL 1970
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Seferis was nearing the end of his longest visit to the United States at the

time of this interview, which took place in late December of 1968. He had just
completed a three-month term as fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study
in Princeton, and he was in particularly good spirits because he felt that his
visit had served for a kind of rejuvenation: an interlude free from the political
tensions that had been building up for some months in Athens and the
occasion for both reflection and performance. The latter included a series of
readingsat Harvard, Princeton, Rutgers, Pittsburgh, Washington, D.C., and
the YMHA Poetry Center in New YorkSeferis reading in Greek and the
interviewer in English, each appearance with its distinct qualities of
excitement and response. In Pittsburgh, for example, the audience
(composed mostly of local Greek-Americans) seemed bewildered by the
poetry during the reading but responded to the poet during the reception
afterward as they might to Greeces exiled king. The New York reading began
with an introduction by Senator Eugene McCarthy. During the discussion
period several questions from the audience had to do specifically with the
political situation in Greece. Seferis refused to answer them. He was thought
to be evasive by some in the audience, but he held his ground, and during
the dinner following the reading he gave his reasons in private: He didnt
consider it proper to criticize his government while a guest on foreign soil,
safely outside the boundaries of the governments displeasure. He saved his
answers for his return to Greece: an uncompromising statement against the
dictatorship presented to local and foreign correspondents in defiance of
martial law and at obvious personal risk (The New York Times, March 29,
1969).
The combination of diplomatic tact and high conscience that defines the
political character of Seferis also colors his presence and personal style. He is
a heavy man, his voice gentle when disengaged, his movements slow, almost
lethargic at times; yet he has a habit of gripping your arm as he moves, and
the grip, though amiable in the old-fashioned European manner, remains
young and firm enough to give you word of the strength still in him. And the
voice has a second edge that cuts sharply when he senses something
dubious or facile challenging it. Then, on the diplomatic side again, comes a
sense of humor: a love of nonsense, of the risqu joke, of kidding himself and
others with a wry little moon of a smile that appears unexpectedly in his oval
faceespecially after hes trapped his listener with the question: Why are
you laughing? An American poet once referred to him as a Middle-Eastern
troglodyte in a poem about his first reading in New York some years ago.
When the interviewer finally got up the courage to show him the poem,
Seferis fixed him with a sharp, uncompromising look. Middle-Eastern
troglodyte. Ridiculous and inaccurate. I once called myself a Cappadocian
troglodyte, and that is what I plan to remain. Why are you laughing? Then
the smile.

The interview took place in the Seferis temporary home at the Institute for
Advanced Study, an unpretentious second-floor apartment with three rooms,
with a large window overlooking the grounds, the bookcase almost empty,
none of the modern Greek paintings and classical treasures that set the style
of the Seferis home in Athens. Yet the poet was delighted with the place
because it gave him access to a number of exotic things: changing trees, and
squirrels, and children crossing the lawn from school. His wife Marohair still
gold and braided like a girlswas present throughout the interview,
sometimes listening with apparent amusement, sometimes preparing food or
drinks in the background. There were three recording sessions. Seferis would
take a while to warm up with the microphone watching him from the coffee
table, but whenever he began to reminisce about friends from the war years
and beforeHenry Miller, Durrell, Katsimbalisor the years of his childhood,
he would relax into his natural style and talk easily until the tape died out on
him.

INTERVIEWER
Let me start by asking you about the Institute for Advanced Study and how
you feel, only recently retired from the diplomatic service, about beginning a
new career as a student.
GEORGE SEFERIS
My dear, the problem which puzzles me is: What is advanced study? Should
one try to forget, or to learn more, when one is at my stage of advanced
study? Now I must say, on a more prosaic level, that I enjoy very much the
whole situation here because there are very nice people, very good friends,
and I enjoyhow shall I put it?their horizons. There are many horizons
around me: science, history, archaeology, theology, philosophy . . .
INTERVIEWER
But dont you feel out of place among so many scientists? So many
historians?
SEFERIS
No, because I am attracted by people whose interests are not in my own
area.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think theres an advantageas I think Cavafy would probably have
thoughtto being in dialogue with historians? In other words, do you feel that

history has something particular to say to the poet?

SEFERIS
If you remember, Cavafy was proud of having a sense of history. He used to
say: I am a man of historysomething like that, I dont remember the exact
quotation. I am not that way; but still, I feel the pressure of history. In another
way, perhaps: more mythological, more abstract, or more concrete . . . I dont
know.
INTERVIEWER
How about the relation of the Greek poet to his particular historical tradition?
You once said that there is no ancient Greece in Greece. What did you mean
by that exactly?
SEFERIS
I meant Greece is a continuous process. In English the expression ancient
Greece includes the meaning of finished, whereas for us Greece goes on
living, for better or for worse; it is in life, has not expired yet. That is a fact.
One can make the same argument when one discusses the pronunciation of
ancient Greek. Your scholars in America or in England or in France may be
quite right in adopting the Erasmic pronunciation: for them Greek is a dead
language; but for us it is another story. The fact is, you consider that ancient
Greek has terminated its function at a certain point, and this enables you to
pronounce itwith my regretsin an arbitrary way.
INTERVIEWER
Then you obviously see the Greek tradition in language, as well as in other
things, as a continuous process. That is not the belief of some classical and
Byzantine scholars in this countryand, I suppose, elsewhere.
SEFERIS
You know why that happens? Because the subject, the history, of Greece is so
large that each scholar limits himself to a certain period or branch, and
nothing exists outside of it. For example, Gibbon considered that a thousand
years of life were a decline. How can a people be in decline for a thousand
years? After all, between the Homeric poems and the birth of Christ eight
hundred years elapsedor something like thatand then presumably there
were a thousand years of decline.
INTERVIEWER
On the question of the Greek poets relation to his tradition, it has always
seemed to me that the Greek poet has an advantage over his Anglo-Saxon

counterpart who makes use of Greek mythology and sometimes even of

Greek landscape. I remember years ago when I was writing a thesis on what I
thought were English influences in the poetry of Cavafy and Seferis, I asked
you about certain images that crop up in your landscape, for example, the
symbolic meaning of the statues that appear in your work. You turned to me
and said: But those are real statues. They existed in a landscape I had
seen. What I think you were saying is that you always start with the fact of a
living, actual setting and move from there to any universal meaning that
might be contained in it.
SEFERIS
An illustration of that from someone who is a specialist in classical statues
came the other day from an English scholar who was lecturing about the
statuary of the Parthenon. I went up to congratulate him after his lecture, and
he said to me, as I remember: But you have a line which expresses
something of what I meant when you say the statues are not the ruinswe
are the ruins. I mean I was astonished that a scholar of his caliber was using
a line from me to illustrate a point.
INTERVIEWER
The imagery that a poet gets from his childhood is something weve
discussed before. You once distinguished yourself from the average
Englishman by suggesting that donkeys probably did for you what footballs
and cars might do for them. I remember you also talked about the sea and
the sailors of your native village near Smyrna.
SEFERIS
You know, the strange thing about imagery is that a great deal of it is
subconscious, and sometimes it appears in a poem, and nobody knows
wherefrom this emerged. But it is rooted, I am certain, in the poets
subconscious life, often of his childhood, and thats why I think it is decisive
for a poet: the childhood that he has lived.
I think there are two different things functioning: conscious and subconscious
memory. I think the way of poetry is to draw from the subconscious. It is not
the way you write your memoirs, lets say, or the way you try to remember
your past, your early life. I remember many things from my childhood which
did impress me. For instance, when I was a child I discovered somewhere in a
corner of a sort of bungalow we had in my grandmothers gardenat the
place where we used to spend our summersI discovered a compass from a
ship which, as I learned afterwards, belonged to my grandfather. And that
strange instrumentI think I destroyed it in the end by examining and reexamining it, taking it apart and putting it back together and then taking it

apart againbecame something mythical for me. Or again, when autumn

approached, when there would be a rather strong wind, and the fishing
barges would have to sail through rough weather, we would always be glad
when they were at last anchored, and my mother would say to someone
among the fishermen whod gone out: Ah, bravo, youve come through rough
weather; and he would answer: Madam, you know, we always sail with
Charon at our side. Thats moving to me. Perhaps when I wrote about
Ulysses in that early poem youve commented on [Upon a Foreign Verse]
perhaps I had in mind somebody like that fisherman. Those certain old
sailors from my childhood who would recite the Erotokritos. In any case, I
think it is always a bit dangerous to make unconscious images conscious, to
bring them out into the light, because, you know, they dry out immediately.
INTERVIEWER
Have you felt any burden from having spent so many years writing for a tiny
audiencean audience so small in the early years of your career that you
had to publish your work at your own expense and issued something under
three hundred copies of each volume? That is a situation quite unfamiliar to
an established American poet.
SEFERIS
Ill give you an example. When I published my first volume, Strophe [The
Turning Point], I issued 150 copies. That was in 1931. And I remember that in
1939 there were still copies available at the booksellercopies that I
withdrew from circulation so that I could bring out a new edition of the
volume in 1940. But I must say that soon after that things began to change a
bit. When I left for Egypt after the collapse of Greece in the war against
Germany, I left behind me three editions of my workLog Book I,
Mythistorema, and Book of Exercises, besides the earlier volumes Cistern and
Stropheleft them there all brand new, without having sold a single copy
before I sailed for Crete and Cairo with the Greek government in exile, as you
know. During my absence everything was sold out. When I came back, no
copies remained. The foreign occupationenemy occupationhad given the
Greek public the opportunity of concentration and reading. And I reckoned
that when I returned at the end of the occupation I was much better known in
Greece than before.
INTERVIEWER
Its a very strange phenomenon, the revival of interest in poetry during the
period of the occupation in Greece. Ive heard about this from other poets:
Gatsos and Elytis, for example. Poetry became an activity that brought
together the Athenian intellectuals for readings and discussion, so that in a
way it became the richest period for poetry in this century after the period of

the thirties.
SEFERIS
Elytis published his book during the occupation, and Gatsos his: I mean the
famous Amorgos came out during the occupation!
INTERVIEWER
What happened after the occupation? Why was there silence for so long
among the leading poets?
SEFERIS
It wasnt silence. Times had changed, and horizons had widened, and
everybody tried to see more of life outside the country; they were trying to
find new modes of expression.
INTERVIEWER
I wonder if you have felt anything new and interesting through reading to
large public audiences in this country. The evidence of friends of mine who
have no knowledge at all of Greek is that they have captured, from your
reading in Greek, a different sense of the poetrys rhythm from what they get
out of my reading in English.
SEFERIS
That is very important. But I can say something more about this experience
of reading in America. The other day another poet reacted by sending me a
poem about my reading. That is a new kind of response. But still, the
important thing is to see reactions, not to be applauded or not applauded.
INTERVIEWER
After your reading at Rutgers this fall, someone in the audience asked you
what you thought of the English translations of your poetry, and you went on
to make generous gestures towards your English translators, but then you
added: Of course the best translation of my poetry is in Chinese, a language
which I dont understand at all.
SEFERIS
It isnt difficult to elaborate on that because, you know, I feel in languages
that I know, perhaps because I know them too well (not English, but in
French, for example, which I know really well) that there are other possibilities
in the translation. For Chinese there are no other possibilities. But translating
Im changing the question a little bitis interesting always because it is a

means of controlling your own language. Now of course the English language
is a more stable language than ours; we have to create ours, so to speak, all
the time we are writing.
INTERVIEWER
Pound said that translation is a means for a writer to sharpen continually his
awareness of his own language, and he advised young poets to translate
whenever they could.
SEFERIS
Provided you dont overdo it, I think it is always useful.
INTERVIEWER
You are a poet who writes in a language which few people know outside
Greece. I wonder if you feel any resentment of the fact that you are known in
the world of poetry outside your own country largely through translation.
SEFERIS
There are compensations. For example, about a year ago, I received a letter
from an American saying to me: Well, I have learned modern Greek in order
to read Seferis. Thats a great compliment, I think. It is much more personal
than the case of a man who learns a foreign language at school, isnt it? Ive
heard other people say: Well, you know, we learned our Greek from your
poems. A great reward. And then I should add, perhaps, this situation of not
having a very large audience has something good in it, too. I mean, that it
educates you in a certain way: not to consider that great audiences are the
most important reward on this earth. I consider that even if I have three
people who read me, I mean really read me, it is enough. That reminds me of
a conversation I had once upon a time during the only glimpse I ever had of
Henri Michaux. It was when he had a stopover in Athens, coming from Egypt,
I think. He came ashore while his ship was in Piraeus just in order to have a
look at the Acropolis. And he told me on that occasion: You know, my dear, a
man who has only one reader is not a writer. A man who has two readers is
not a writer, either. But a man who has three readersand he pronounced
three readers as though they were three millionthat man is really a
writer.
INTERVIEWER
You said earlier there is a problem in Greek of establishing a language. Thats
something which most American readers naturally dont understand. We have
a language. Our problem is always to stretch the language which we have so
that it somehow shows a new vitality. When you talk about establishing or

creating a language, you mean something quite different.

SEFERIS
Weve had the calamity of academic intervention. Mark you, I mean from both
the left and the right. In the beginning we had the intervention of professors
who wanted to transform our living language into something abstract in order
to reach some sort of idea of a pure language. On the other side, we had
the fight for demotiki, as we call the popular spoken language. But this
traditionthe professorial traditionwas so strong that there was a sort of
academic mind which fought actively for both the puristic and the vernacular
language. The best way to progress is by forgetting all that academic
intervention. For example, I admire very much the Cretan Renaissance. In
that period you find a whole poemten thousand lines, an enormous poem
where there is no strain at all, no effort at all; the language functions quite
naturally, without any flagrant tendency to be learned.
INTERVIEWER
Its interesting that you take an effortless poem for a model because I
remember that, in another context, you described style as the difficulty one
encounters in expressing himself.
SEFERIS
I said that in lecturing about Makriyannis, who, as you know, never learned
how to write or read until the age of thirty-five. When you see his manuscript,
it is like a walla wall built up out of stones, one placed on top of the other. It
is very strange. For example, he never uses punctuation at all. No
paragraphs. Nothing. It goes on like that. And you see that each word is
added to another word like a stone on top of another stone. I mean, in any
case, that when you really feel something, you face the difficulty of
expressing it. And that, after all, forms your style.
INTERVIEWER
What are the difficulties youve encountered in establishing your own style?
SEFERIS
Thats another story. In my youth I worked very much over the Greek
language. Glossaries, old texts, medieval texts, and things of that kind. But
the difficulty wasnt only in studying them; the difficulty was how to forget
them and be natural. I had the blessing, perhaps, of being natural, I dont
know. Thats for others to say . . .
INTERVIEWER

I know you always considered it the first order of business for a poet to try for
economy in style. This seems to be in contrast to the dominant mode of your
predecessorsat least the mode of Palamas and Sikelianos.
SEFERIS
Thats perhaps a local characteristic. I felt at the time of my early efforts that
in Greece they were too rhetorical, and I reacted against it. That was my
feeling. And I reacted against it in many ways. For example, in the use of
words, of adjectivesespecially compound adjectives, which I avoided. To
avoid certain things is deliberate with me, you know. My interest in
expression was not so much in the color of the language, which Greek has
plenty of, but in precision above all; and in order to be precise, you have to
be spare in the use of your material. You remember that Valery said lyricism
is, after all, the development of an exclamation, of an Ah. For me Ah is
quite enough. I never try to elaborate on the exclamation.
INTERVIEWER
Let me pursue the matter of style as process of using language sparingly. Do
you agree that in your own work there is a development, a further economy
of means, between Strophe and everything that followed it?
SEFERIS
Of course. It is not so much a stylistic development as a sort of evolution.
Everything evolves. I mean, one has to evolveone has to see new things.
One has to see other aspects and express these other aspects. Certainly
there is an evolution, but I dont see it as a development in inverted
commas. If I had years more in front of me, I would perhaps write in another
way, even in another style. I might again use the strict line or rhymed verse,
perhaps. In poetry you change the base of things from time to time in order
to have a fresh expression. The main thing you are looking for in poetry is to
avoid worn-out expressions. Thats the great problem.
INTERVIEWER
What about the problem of developing a prose style? You are one of the very
few poets in Greece who has had almost as strong an impact on the language
of prose criticism as youve had on the language of poetry. Developing a live
yet careful prose style must have been part of your struggle from the
beginning.
SEFERIS
Yes, but, you know, my struggle was always for precision. That is at the base
of it. And of course in prose it appears more obviousI mean the matter of

economy.
INTERVIEWER
This tape machine seems to have stopped recording. Say something and lets
see if its still working properly.
SEFERIS
Wallace Stevens was in an insurance company.
INTERVIEWER
Lets hope it will go on with us for a while. One of your remarks which has
interested me is about the question of the relation between poetry and public
service; I think you said that the important thing was for the poet not to have
a job which was directly connected with that of being a poet.
SEFERIS
I didnt say the important thing. I dont know, really, because I cant speak
for other people; but for me at least, I suppose that it is a help not to be in a
job where I have to write as I write in my notebooks or poetry books. For
example, I am not a professor or a teacher or even a newspaperman. I prefer
to have another occupation.
INTERVIEWER
Was there anything in your professional careerthat is, the experience you
had as a diplomatwhich may have influenced in some way the imagery of
your poetry or affected the particular themes you chose to express?
SEFERIS
I dont believe that any themes or any imagery were created by my job,
though I might mentionhow did you translate it?the lines from Last
Stop: souls shriveled by public sins, each holding office like a bird in its
cage. I mean that is one of the few images I have drawn directly from my
public service. But I could have felt that even if I had not been in the
diplomatic service. But it was important for me that I had a job which was not
related to my creative work. And the other thing is that I was nothow shall I
put it?not obliged to deal with models which belonged to literature. Of
course, there are troubles in that career. The main thing I suffered from was
not having enough time. Although others might tell you that it is better not to
have time because it is the subconscious which is doing the poetical work.
Thats the point of view of Tom Eliot. I remember once, when I was
transferred from London to Beirut (this was after just one and a half years of
service in London), I told him: My dear Mr. Eliot, I think I am fed up with my

career and I shall give up all this. I remember his saying: Be careful, be
careful if you do that, and then he mentioned the subconsciousthe
subconscious working for poetry. And I told him: Yes, but if I have a job, an
official job which is interfering with my subconscious, then I prefer not to
have a job. I mean I would prefer to be a carpenter and to be where my
subconscious is quite free to do whatever it likes, dance or not dance. And I
added: You know, I can tell you when my public life began to interfere with
my subconscious. It was on the eve of the war with the Italiansin
September 40when I started having political dreams. Then I knew quite
well that my subconscious was suffering the onslaught of my official job. In
dreams responsibilities begin.
INTERVIEWER
You once made a comment about the connection between poetry and
politics . . .
SEFERIS
You mean what Ive said about propaganda writing, or engaged writing, or
whatever you call that kind of writing in our times. I believe that something
real, as far as feeling is concerned, should be elaborated as feeling. I dont
consider that Aeschylus was making a propaganda play by putting the
suffering Persians on stage, or desperate Xerxes, or the ghost of Darius, and
so forth. On the contrary, there was human compassion in it. For his enemies.
Not that hes not of course glad that the Greeks won the battle of Salamis.
But even then he showed that Xerxes defeat was a sort of divine retribution:
a punishment for the hubris that Xerxes committed in flagellating the sea.
Since his hubris was to flagellate the sea, he was punished exactly by the sea
in the battle of Salamis.
INTERVIEWER
Is it possible to compare poetry across national lines? Or do we always have
to make qualitative comparisons strictly within a single tradition?
SEFERIS
I feel a sort of reluctance about comparing poets. It is very difficulteven
within the same tradition. Try to compare Dante and Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
for example: What that would lead to, I dont know. Or, in the French
tradition, how can you compare Racine and Victor Hugo? You have to go very
deep, to the bottom of the tradition, in order to find some sort of common
ground where the comparison can fairly take place. On the other hand, for
example, I myself used Yeats in my Stockholm acceptance speech because I
had been reading, just a few months before my trip to Stockholm, The

Bounty of Sweden, where he recounts the whole affair of his election to the
Nobel Prize: his trip to Stockholm, the ceremony, and everything. And there I
felt a sort of relation with him as a human beingnot as a poet but as a
human being; because Yeats belonged to a small country with a great folklore
tradition, a country which, after all, had political turmoil. By the way, theres
another example of a public poet who doesnt write propaganda. He writes,
for example, a poem about an Irish airman which isnt at all propaganda.
Those I fight I do not hate etc. Or he writes The Second Coming. That,
too, is not propaganda: The center cannot hold, etc., which after all starts
somewhere in Irish political life; but it goes deeper, and thats the whole
point, I think.
INTERVIEWER
Youve mentioned at your readings, in talking about The King of Asine, the
fact that it had taken you two years to find a way of writing about that
particular experience, and then, at some point, after having given your notes
for that poem to a friend, you completed the final draft in one long evening.
Eliot has implied that you finished the poem (between ten P.M. and three in
the morning) exactly because you didnt have your notes before you.
SEFERIS
I had no notes. And he may have been right. I dont know. In my home in
Athens, I have all my papers and my books. And I wonder if thats a helpful
thing or not, if its not better to have just a blank writing desk without any
papers or any books at all, where you can sit at regular hours every day.
INTERVIEWER
Do you normally make notes on the experience of a poem before you write it?
SEFERIS
Oh, there are many ways. Sometimes I do. Sometimes I do not. There are
things which you have to remember, and I have to record these somewhere,
so of course I make notes. For example, there is a poem where I have used
the chronographer Makhairas, where it was impossible to avoid referring to
that story about the demon of fornication.
INTERVIEWER
I didnt mean notes once the poem has been composed in your mind, but
notes on the experience which, in effect, becomes the poem.
SEFERIS
No, I dont do that. When I say notes, I mean there are those on the material,

notes which are needed because they are descriptive. And there are notes
that are ideas, poetical ideas. For example, poetical expressions, poetical
utterances, that is the kind of notes I mean. If I were to write a poem about
youI might make a note that Mike has ceased to smoke for many years. I
mean if the things sound well in Greek to my ear, I could write it. Thats all
things which are indifferent to other people. These I call poetical notes.
Sometimes I disregard them altogether, and sometimes I go back to them.
Sometimes, when they are quite forgotten, by having a glimpse at them, I
say: Oh, that poem was rather interesting, although they dont say anything
at all to the ordinary person. Still, they take me back to a certain atmosphere
which, in the meantime, has been working, elaborating, a form in my mind.
INTERVIEWER
Do you keep these notes or do you destroy them?
SEFERIS
Oh, I destroy a lot. Some months ago in Athensthere was somebody, a sort
of Hellenist, who was interested in photographing notes. And I had the
impression that I had kept my notes on The Cistern. I looked for them in all
my files, and it appeared to me then that I had destroyed them. The only
thing that I found was the Notes for a Week which have been published
quite recentlythat is, the two missing poems from that group.
INTERVIEWER
Im sorry about that, in a way, because I think The Cistern is a poem that all
of us have found obscure in places, and the notes might have helpedmight
have helped me, anyway.
SEFERIS
Dont complain about it. They might have made the poem much more
obscure, you know. For example, the general idea about my evolution in
poetry is: Ah, you see, Seferis started with regular lines, rhymes, strict
versification, and then he moved to free verse. When I see my notes, I see
that the main poem of Strophe, the Erotikos Logos, appears to be in very
strict versification; but my notes show me that this poem was also written in
free verse. I have found some of the first drafts.
INTERVIEWER
Would you ever consider publishing them?
SEFERIS
By God, no.

INTERVIEWER
Do you think thats the reason Eliot was so careful about not rediscovering
the lost parts of The Waste Land, which have now been rediscovered?
SEFERIS
When he told me the story about the writing of The Waste Land, he seemed
quite desperate about the manuscripts being lost. On the other hand, he also
told me how usefulhe stressed that pointhow useful the intervention of
Pound had really been.
INTERVIEWER
Do you approve of publishing discarded things?
SEFERIS
I dont know; it depends. It needs a great deal of tact. Not by the poet himself
but by his editors. If they publish them, they tend to stress that they are allimportant discoveries, and I think this is bad. Overplaying it. The editors and
the philologists are always overdoing things, I think.
INTERVIEWER
I know from a section of your diary which my wife and I translated that your
relationship with Eliot was an important one in your life in various ways. I
wonder if any other literary figures who are known in the West have also
been important to you. Im thinking particularly of Henry Miller and Lawrence
Durrell and maybe others I dont know about. Im thinking also of your own
compatriots: Theotokas and Katsimbalis, for example.
SEFERIS
Durrell was much younger than me, you know. He was a very interesting
young man when I met him. He was in his mid-twenties. I met him with Henry
Miller. They came to Athens to see the Colossus of Maroussi, Katsimbalis. It
was on the dayif my memory is correctof the declaration of war.
INTERVIEWER
But of course Katsimbalis wasnt the Colossus at that point.
SEFERIS
No, but Miller was threatening to make him something very colossal.
INTERVIEWER

Well, he did.
SEFERIS
It was nice to meet them; they were, lets say, the firstor if not exactly the
first, then the second or thirdreaders with an understanding of what I was
doing. For example, one of them, Miller or Larry, told me after reading my
poems: You know what I like about you is that you turn things inside out. And
I mean that in the good sense. That was a very nice compliment for me at
that time.
INTERVIEWER
How did they come to know your poetry?
SEFERIS
How. Hm. There were then in English only the translations of Katsimbalis.
Manuscript translations, I mean.
INTERVIEWER
When they came to Athens, why did they go directly to Katsimbalis? Why was
he the man whom they approached? Was he well known as a literary figure
outside Greece?
SEFERIS
I dont know. It was a matter of common friends, perhaps. He became a
bigger literary figure after The Colossus of Maroussi. At that time he was
more in contact than I was with the English and American literary circles.
There was a sort of international bohemia, I might say, by then in Athens. I
mean on the eve of the war. I must add that Katsimbalis has that wonderful
quality of being without evil intention in his heart. He might criticize
somebody, but in a good-hearted way. And he believed that our country, our
little country, was able to do something. He had that sort of belief.
INTERVIEWER
What about Henry Miller? How did you respond to him?
SEFERIS
I like Miller because he is a very good-hearted man, and I thinkexcuse me
for saying so, but this is not a criticism: It is great praise to say about a writer
that he is a good manMiller has a great deal of generosity in him. For
example, when the moment came for him to go back to America (he was
advised to do so by the American consul; as an American national, he had to

go back home because the war was coming near), he said to me one day:
My dear George, youve been so kind to me, and I want to give you
something. And he produced a diary which he had been keeping during his
stay in Greece. I said: Look here, Henry. But after all, I know that you are
going to write a book, and you cant write the bookI mean you might need
your notes. He said: No. All those things are here, pointing to his head. I
offered to make a typescript copy for him to give him. No, he said, a gift
must be whole. Well, thats a splendid way of behaving, I think. And I shall
never forget that. The diary was a sort of first draft of the Colossus. But with
more personal explosions. And more jokes, of course.
INTERVIEWER
There are quite a few jokes in the book, too.
SEFERIS
The trip to Hydra is splendid and the channel of Poros. Remember? My feeling
about Miller is this: Of course its a great thing to have an understanding of
the ancient authors; but the first man I admired for not having any classical
preparation on going to Greece is Miller. There is such a freshness in him.
INTERVIEWER
The freshness of being ready to take it all in for the first time, you mean?
SEFERIS
I suppose I was the first man to give him a text of Aeschylus, when he
decided to go to Mycenae. But of course he doesnt see anything from
Aeschylus; he sees, in the plain of Argos, redskins while he hears a jazz
trumpeter. That is spontaneous behavior. And I admire it.
INTERVIEWER
Jazz trumpeter?
SEFERIS
The jazz trumpeter was inspired, I suppose, by Louis Armstrong. Because he
had heard Armstrong on a small gramophonea quite elementary
gramophonethat I had then in my home in Athens. I myself had discovered
jazz eight or ten years earlier . . .
INTERVIEWER
Before Millers arrival in Greece. So you taught him about jazz?
SEFERIS

I was thirty-two or thirty-three at that time. And I became a jazz addict. I said
to myself, after all, you have discovered at the same time the importance of
Bachthe great Bachand the importance of jazz. I remember once I said to
Mitropoulos: For me, my dear maestro, jazz is one of the few ways left for us
to express feeling without embarrassment. That was in 35. No, 34.
INTERVIEWER
Was there any other writer abroad or in Greece with whom you had a
particularly close relationship?
SEFERIS
Its depends on what period you are referring to. For example, I had very close
relations with Sikelianos once upon a time. I met him first in 1929, though it
did not become a close relationship until after his illness and my return to
Greece in 1944. During his illness, Sikelianos was really remarkable, when he
had all those crises in his health. While I was serving abroad, I would take
advantage of my trips to Athens to go and see him. One time I heard that he
had just been through a sort of cerebral hemorrhage. I found him at the
theater wearing dark glassesa premire at the National Theatre. I said: Oh
Angelo, I am so glad you are here, because I had heard that you were not so
well. My dear, he said, it is such a splendid thing to have a little ruby on
the top of your brain. He meant the hemorrhage. I said to him: It is a
splendid thing that you can talk about it that way. I am so glad. He said:
George, look here. I shall tell you a story during the next intermission. I
approached him during the next intermission. He said: Have you read
Rocambol? Its a sort of French thriller. Sikelianos went on: Once upon a
time a woman had thrown vitriol against the face of Rocambol, and Rocambol
was in danger of losing his eyesight; so he was taken by one of his henchmen
to the best specialist in Paris, and the specialist examined him very carefully
while the friend of Rocambol was sitting in the waiting room overhearing the
conversation of the doctor. And the doctors conclusion was: Sir, you have to
choose between two things: either lose your eyesight or be disfigured. There
was a moment of heavy silence; then the voice from the waiting room, the
voice of the friend of Rocambol, was heard: Rocambol has no need of his
eyesight.
INTERVIEWER
Tell me more about Sikelianos. So little is known about him outside Greece.
SEFERIS
Another thing which I have mentioned in writing, at the time of his death. He
had a great crisis in Athens, and I rushed to see him; I was very anxious; he

had collapsed in the house of a friend. And again, the same splendid reaction.
I said to him: My dear Angelo, are you all right? He said: Im all right. But I
had a splendid experience. I saw the absolute dark. It was so beautiful.
INTERVIEWER
Did you know Palamas? What kind of man was he?
SEFERIS
You know, it is strange the memories I have kept of people. For example,
other people admire Sikelianos for their own special reasons; myself, I was
attracted by those tragic and splendid moments of Sikelianoss last years.
Now Palamas: One of my last memories of him was when I went to tell him
good-bye because I was leaving shortly. During our conversation he referred
to various crazy people mentioned in his poetry and added: You know, we
have many mad people in my family. I wanted once upon a time to write a
book called To Genos ton Loxon. How can we translate that into English?
The breed of . . .
INTERVIEWER
Of madmen.
SEFERIS
Not quite of madmen. Of oblique men.
INTERVIEWER
Oblique men?
SEFERIS
Im trying to get the precise translation of the word.
INTERVIEWER
Unbalanced men, perhaps.
SEFERIS
I said to him: Mr. Palamas, it is a pity you didnt write such a book. Because
I thought it would be a good book. He had an interesting sense of humor.
INTERVIEWER
What do you consider Palamass most significant contribution to Greek
literature?

SEFERIS
Well, I said it in Dokimes, but I would repeat: his very important contribution
to the Greek language. I mean compared to his, Cavafys expression seems
rather faint, although at certain moments more real.
INTERVIEWER
But the minute you say although more real . . .
SEFERIS
Again, what I appreciate very much in Cavafy is his having started with
terrifically unreal poems, and then, by insistence and work, he found at last
his own personal voice. He wrote very bad poems up to his thirty-fourth year.
The failure of those poems cannot be translated or communicated to a
foreign reader because the language of the translation is always bound to
improve them. There is no possibility of translating that sort of thing faithfully.
You know, what I admirelet me put it my own waywhat I admire about
Cavafy was this: He was a man who starts at a certain age with all signs
showing that hes unable to produce anything of importance. And then, by
refusing and refusing things which are offered him, in the end he finds, he
sees, as they say; he becomes certain that hes found his own expression. Its
a splendid example of a man who, through his refusals, finds his way.
INTERVIEWER
What did he refuse precisely?
SEFERIS
Expressions, and the easy things, verbositythat sort of thing. Take his poem
on ancient tragedy, for example. It is very bad. It is something unbelievable.
By putting aside things like that, Cavafy improves his expression up to the
end of his life, even up to the last poem he wrote on the outskirts of Antioch:
the happenings between the Christians and Julian. And I admire him for going
on to the end like that. Hes a great example. He had the courage, up to the
end of his life, not to admit certain things, to reject them. And thats why I
have doubts about all these people who are trying to put into circulation all
the rejected writings of Cavafy, unless one is very careful in reading him. You
know, that needs a great deal of discernment.
INTERVIEWER
To turn now to the other well-known writer of the older generation, what
about Kazantzakis? In the U.S., Cavafy is the poet whos respected by those
who are themselves poetsAuden, for instance, and many of the important

younger American poets; most of them know Cavafy, and most of them have
a sympathetic attitude towards him. But among students and among those
who are just beginning to learn about literature, Kazantzakis is by far the
most popular Greek writer, both as poet and as novelist. Increasingly my job
is to try to discuss Kazantzakiss workwhether poetry or fictionwithout
diminishing him.
SEFERIS
I dont wonder. The thing is that one must have a possibility of being in
contact with a writer, and that I cannot do in the case of Kazantzakisa
terrible thing for me, you know. I must give you a warning as far as
Kazantzakis is concerned. On the one hand, there is his poetrywhat is called
poetryand thats the Odyssey sequel, of course, and his plays in verse; and
on the other hand, there is his prose: the novels. Now, as far as the novels
are concerned, I am not competent to judge. I dont know how to speak about
the novels. I have not read all of them. I hear from people whom I trust that
they are very good, and they may well be very good. But the Odyssey sequel
is another matter. There, although you have interesting passages, Im afraid
there is no poetry in them. I say interesting passagespassages that are
informative about the man Kazantzakis; but I dont believe thats poetry, at
least not the poetry I believe in.
INTERVIEWER
What about as idea, quite aside from poetic considerations? As statement
of a philosophical or religious position.
SEFERIS
I dont know. I have no idea about philosophical positions and worldviews. You
know, whenever worldviews begin interfering with writingI dont know. I
prefer worldviews in the sort of dry, repulsive, and (I dont know how to put it)
prosaic way. I dont like people who try to express worldviews in writing
poetry. I remember once I had a reading in Thessalonike, and a philosopher
stood up and asked: But what, after all, Mr. Seferis, is your worldview? And I
said: My dear friend, Im sorry to say that I have no world view. I have to
make this public confession to you that I am writing without having any
worldview. I dont know, perhaps you find that scandalous, sir, but may I ask
you to tell me what Homers worldview is? And I didnt get an answer.
INTERVIEWER
To move on to a more general subject, you said during one of our
conversations in Athens that a circumstance which is notable about Greek
writers in this century was that so many of them were outside the Kingdom of

Greece proper. You mentioned yourself as an instance, having been brought

up in Smyrna. Could you comment on the ways your Smyrna origin may have
influenced your work or your general role as a man of letters?
SEFERIS
Let me say that I am interested in everything which finds expression in the
Greek language and in Greek landsI mean, taking Greek lands as a whole.
For example, I was terribly interested, as you know, in what happened in
Crete in the seventeenth century. And in another way, people in Romania, for
example, the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, interested me very
mucheven odd minor people like Kaisarios Dapontes, if you know who he is.
I think he was from somewhere in the northern islands, Skopelos of the
Sporades, and he lived a long part of his life in the principalities, then
Constantinople, and finally he retired to Mt. Athos under the name of
Kaisarios. I dont mean that he is a great poet, simply that his way of
expressing himself interests me. I dont say that he writes great poetry, but
after all, one feels that in those countries in the eighteenth century, there
was such a flourishing of Greek letters. Another monk of Mt. AthosIm trying
to remember his nameyes, his name was Pamberis, wrote a poem, not a
very long one because it would be an impossible achievement to write a long
poem under the system he decided to use. He called it Poiema Karkinikon,
so to say, Poem Cancerous. It was devised so that it could be read from left
to right or from right to left, and still attempting to make sensebut a sense
so remote that he had to put notes explaining what each line meant. These
small details amuse me, you know. And I think that they add to the too
professorial image we have of Greek literature. Or again, another text: The
Mass of the Beardless Man. It is a text written in the form of a mock Mass
that parodies the Mass in a rather shocking way. It amuses me especially
because I dont see enough light comic texts in our literature. Either people
refrained from writing such texts, or such texts were eliminated by somberminded academics.
INTERVIEWER
Thats an interesting remark. Youve said on another occasion that one thing
which you find that the Anglo-Saxon tradition has and no other tradition has
is that element of nonsensean element which is fairly continuous in our
literature and which seems always to have existed in some form.
SEFERIS
The Anglo-Saxon tradition is certainly different from ours in that respect; and
I believe that no continental country can claim the same kind of nonsense
that Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll offer.

INTERVIEWER
Youve spent three periods of service in England, spread over the best part of
your literary career. Did you find it an especially congenial climate for work?
SEFERIS
Not really. A very good place for me for writing was when I was in Albania
because I was quite unknown there, and very isolated; at the same time I was
near Greece, I mean, from the language point of view, and I could use my
free time to advantage. There were no exhausting social functions.
INTERVIEWER
What about your acquaintance with English men of letters during your early
years in England? You met Eliot, of course.
SEFERIS
No, I had a letter of introduction to Eliot, and I rang his office, but the
secretary informed me that Eliot was in the United States. It was the time
when he was Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. I never met Eliot nor
any other writer in the beginning. First of all, I was rather shy as a person;
then, it was a period when I was groping to find my own further expression. In
contrast, when I came to England after World War II, my period in the Middle
East had created a great many friends among the English, and when I came
back to England as Counselor at the Embassy, I had no difficulty at all
because by then I was quite well known in England. It was just after the
publication of my first translation into English, The King of Asine and Other
Poems, in 1948.
INTERVIEWER
During the period of your first official visit to England, I wonder whether you
had any contact with English or American literature that you found
particularly exciting along with Eliots work.
SEFERIS
I think a very instructive man for me, as I found out afterwards, was W. B.
Yeats. But Im talking about Yeatss early period. After all, you see, I had
endeavored to exploit folklore much as Yeats did.
INTERVIEWER
What about American literature? Did you have any favorite American authors
in your formative years?

SEFERIS
It is an odd thing for usI suppose that happens to everybody abroadI
mean, one gets into literature and art by chance. For example, I dont
remember on what occasion I came to know Archibald MacLeish. And I
translated him, as a matter of fact. I think I am the first man to have
translated him in Greece. Then there was Marianne Moore. I had translated
Marianne Moore before the war also. The Monkeys, To a Snail.
INTERVIEWER
You say you encountered them by accident. What was the accident?
SEFERIS
Oh, I dont know. Some review where I saw the poems, I dont remember
which one. And again, Ezra Pound. I had already translated three Cantos
before the war.
INTERVIEWER
When I brought up American literature, I was really thinking about the older
American poets: Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, for example.
SEFERIS
I knew Walt Whitman. Because I started with French literature, and Walt
Whitman was translated into French early enough to be available to me. And
then Henry Miller had an admiration for Whitman. He gave me many hints
about him. That was quite near the outbreak of the war, of course. But I keep
reading Whitman, as, in my youth, I was reading Edgar Allan Poe.
INTERVIEWER
Now that youre about to go back to Greece, do you have anything that you
can say about this particular visit to the United Stateswhich is your third
visit, if Im not mistakenanything about your impressions of this country?
SEFERIS
My third visit to America has been the most important of all, this visit; it has
been more substantial than the others. I dont believe that visiting New York
helps you to understand America. Curiously enough, I am now in the middle
of a wood in a remote place, Princeton, yet I have been able to see and
understand more of America from this remote place than if I were in a great
center.
INTERVIEWER

Of course Princetonians dont think Princeton is all that remote.

SEFERIS
Well, I mean for others who are trying, when they are traveling, to see
cosmopolitan centers, it might look remote. And after all, we travelers do not
attend courses at the university.
INTERVIEWER
What have you seen in particular during this visit that has impressed you?
SEFERIS
I dont want to mention things which impress me, you know. Nobody knows
what impresses him on the spot. I mean it takes time to be elaborated
somehow by memory.
INTERVIEWER
Did you get some work done?
SEFERIS
Yes, I think I did. I cant say. I dont know how to speak about work done. I
have the impression that one can speak about work done only when the work
is finished. I am not inclined to speak about my work during the period of
elaboration. But in any case, there is an inner feeling that you have not lost
your time. Which is something. I mean, I want to be honest with you: I cannot
mention anything really done. The only thing I can mention to youand Im
not going to mention the substance of itis that I wrote a poem of two lines.
INTERVIEWER
You just received a volume of Eugene McCarthys poems. I found that rather
moving: to discover that he had in fact written a volume of poems, and
apparently during his campaign last year.
SEFERIS
Yes, why not? I mean I can very well understand that. If there was a period of
euphoria, there is no reason why it shouldnt happen in poetry at the same
time that it happens in a chapter of politics. One of my poems, Thrush, was
written after a terribly active period of my lifeI mean, politically active,
because I was principal private secretary to the Regent of Greece just before
going to Poros. Of course poems do not appear like an eruption by a volcano;
they need preparation. And I think back on Thrush, I can well mark notes,
lines, which I had started writing during the previous year, that most active

year. Nevertheless, I remember days when the job was killing, because I was
not a politician, I was just a servant, a public servant, and I remember days
when I started going to my office at something like eight oclock in the
morning and returned back home the next day at five oclock in the morning
without having had any meal or any sleep. I mention that, of course, not in
order to move you but in order to show you that, after all, time was pressing
then. But I was also writing. Of course, there are other things which
influenced my work at that time, and among other things I might mention the
fact that I returned to my country after a great period of longing, at the end
of the war.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel that, in addition to the lines you wrote, the poem was gestating in
some significant way during this very active period, so that when you went to
Poros it could come out as the coherent work it is in a relatively short period?
A month of vacation, wasnt it?
SEFERIS
Two months. The first long holiday I ever had during my careerthe longest
one.
INTERVIEWER
And you were able to write the poemand it is a long poemin effect during
one sitting: the long sitting of that two-month vacation?
SEFERIS
No. Youll find the story of my writing that poem in the diary of this period,
the period of 46 on Poros. I used to go for a swimno, first I would cut wood
in the garden (which was a huge garden), then go to the sea, and then work
up to night, up to darkness, which started at seven oclock. And it is strange,
you know, howexcuse me for talking like thisI noticed how one is
cleansed progressively by such a life. For example, I noticed that cleansing in
my dreams, as I mentioned in this diary which has been recently published.
INTERVIEWER
I have only one more really general topic to bring up. I wonder if you feel, as
the result of your rather unique position in Greek letters nowI suppose any
poet has a unique position in his country once hes won the Nobel Prizeif
you feel that this in any way has affected your sense of a public role as a man
of letters as distinct from your private role as a poetany responsibility you
may feel towards younger poets, for instance, towards the cultural life around
you, or any position you may sense you have to maintain in relation to your

country.
SEFERIS
I should from the beginning tell you quite bluntlyif I can say it in English
that the Nobel Prize is an accident, no more than an accident. Its not an
appointment. And I have no feeling that I have been appointed to any sort of
function. It is just an accident which one has to try and forget as soon as
possible. Otherwise, if you are overdazzled by that sort of thing, you get lost
and founder. At the time I won the prize, there was a sort ofhow can I put it
in English?a sort of Cassandra-like critic who wrote that Seferis should be
very careful because hes going to be completely dried up as far as his work
is concerned and even die from various illnesses since that sort of thing
happens to people who have that kind of success. He was just exaggerating
the one side of it without considering, after all, what showed in the way I
reacted to the prize. For example, I said in Stockholm to my judges (or
whatever they are): Gentlemen, I thank youthis at the end of a sort of
lecture I gave therefor allowing me, after a long effort, to be nobody, to be
unnoticed, as Homer says of Ulysses. And I was quite sincere. After all, I dont
recognize the right of anybody to take you by the back of your neck and
throw you into a sort of ocean of empty responsibilities. Why, thats
scandalous, after all.
INTERVIEWER
Now lets move away from the issue of the Nobel Prize. Greece, being a small
country, seems to me to have always had, somehow, a tradition (its an
informal tradition, unlike the British one) of an unofficial but generally
recognized poet laureatea feeling among poets and their followers that
there is one spokesman for poetry in each particular generationeven if the
role of spokesman is sometimes self-assumed. Sikelianos, for example,
played that role. And in his day, so did Palamas.
SEFERIS
Well, yes, God bless them, but Im sorry to say that I never felt I was the
spokesman for anything or anybody. There are no credentials which appoint
anybody to be a spokesman for something. Now others consider that a sort of
function which must be performed; but I think that is, after all, why I have
written so little. Ive never felt the obligation; I have to consider only that I
am not dried up as a poet and to write. I mean that has been my feeling from
the very beginning. I remember when I published my first book, there were
lots of people who said: Mr. Seferis, you must now try to show us that you
can do more. I answered them: Gentlemen, you must consider that every
poem published by me is the last one. I never have any feeling about its
continuation. My last poem. And if I write another one, its a great blessing.

Now how much I have worked in order to produce the next poem, or how
much I have not worked, is another mattera private matter. Others think
that they are the voices of the country. All right. God bless them. And
sometimes theyve been very good in that function.
INTERVIEWER
Joyce felt that way a bit. Im thinking of the famous remark by Stephen
Dedalus at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, to forge in the
smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.
SEFERIS
I can give you another example. In my youth there was an enormous amount
of discussion about the problem of knowing, or trying to define, what is Greek
and what is not Greekpraising one thing as Greek and condemning
something else as un-Greek: trying, in short, to establish the real Greek
tradition. So I wrote, Greekness is the sum of the authentic works which are
going to be produced by Greeks. We cannot say that we have some works
creating the conscience of Greece. We see a line, but surrounded by large
margins of darkness. It isnt simple. I dont know what my voice is. If others,
for the time being, consider that it is their conscience, so much the better. Its
up to them to decide. Its not up to me to impose; because you cannot be a
sort of dictator in these matters.
INTERVIEWER
Some would think yours the healthy attitude, but there are other people who
feel that a Nobel Prize winner, especially when he is the only one the country
has ever had, ought to be a spokesman and a public conscience.
SEFERIS
It might be so, but, after all, one takes the attitude which is imposed on him
by his nature, or whatever you call it. At the same time, I have never forced
myself to write anything which I didnt think necessary. When I say
necessary, I mean which I had to express or be smothered.
INTERVIEWER
Well, Ive run out of questions. Since you dont have any grand advice for the
younger generation, Ive nothing more to ask you.
SEFERIS
I have advice.
INTERVIEWER

Oh you do? Good.

SEFERIS
I have the following advice to give to the younger Greek generation: to try to
exercise themselves as much as they can in the modern Greek language. And
not to write it upside down. I have to tell them that in order to write, one
must believe in what one does, not seeming to believe that one is believing
something. They must remember that the only job in which one cannot lie is
poetry. You cant lie in poetry. If you are a liar, youll always be discovered.
Perhaps now, perhaps in five years, in ten years, but you are going to be
discovered eventually if you are lying.
INTERVIEWER
When you speak of lying, youre speaking first of all about lying against your
emotional . . .
SEFERIS
I dont know what I mean. Perhaps it is an emotional thing. In the reality of
ones thoughts. I dont know. I mean, there is a special sound about the solid,
the sound thing. You knock against it, and it renders a sort of sound which
proves that it is genuine.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think every writer always knows himself whether the sound he hears
is genuine or not?
SEFERIS
No. It is difficult to say. But he must somehow have an instincta guiding
instinctwhich says to him: My dear boy, my dear chap, be careful; you are
going to fall. You are exaggerating at this moment. And then, when he hears
that, he should not take a drug in order to say to himself: Why, you are all
right, my dear. You are not all right, my dear, at all.

* Parenthetical dates indicate publication in translation.

Interviewed by Kathleen Wheaton ISSUE 113, WINTER II 1989

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Readers of Argentine writer Manuel Puig have come to expect certain

constants from this highly versatile novelist: innovative narrative techniques,
dark comedy, and a preoccupation with the effects of popular culture,
particularly film, on the human spirit. He was born in 1932 in General
Villegas, a small town on the Argentine pampas, and began studying English
at the age of ten in order to better understand the American movies he saw
every afternoon with his mother. In 1946 he went to Buenos Aires to an
American boarding school and then to the University of Buenos Aires, where
his interests expanded to include literature, psychology, and philosophy. But
his primary ambition was to direct films. In 1955 he went to film school in
Italy on a scholarship. The school proved to be a disappointment; he left Italy
and traveled to Paris and London, working on screenplays and supporting
himself as a language teacher and dishwasher. Puig then returned to the
Americas, going first to Buenos Aires and later to New York, and began
writing fiction. His first novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, an autobiographical
account of his provincial childhood, was published in Buenos Aires in 1968.
Over the next twenty years, Puig lived in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, New York
and Rio de Janeiro and wrote seven more novels: Heartbreak Tango (1969);
The Buenos Aires Affair (1973); The Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976); Pubis
Angelical (1979); Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages (1980); Blood of
Requited Love (1982); and Cae la noche tropical (1988), which has not been
published yet in English. Puig's early passion for the movies is evident both in
his narrative style, which relies heavily on dialogue, and in the lives of his
characters, where the glamorous and idealized world of films serves as a
counterpoint to their own disappointments.
Puig has lived very little of his adult life in Argentina, but all of his novels,
with the exception of Blood of Required Love, are about Argentina or
Argentines coping with exile. When we met in Puig's home in Rio de Janeiro, I
was struck by his very Argentine manner: a grave courtesy and reserve that
set him apart from the more free-wheeling Brazilians. He is slender, with a
handsome, tanned face and expressive dark eyes. He doesn't care much for
interviews, but he did agree to three meetings at six-month intervals. The
first he agreed to on the condition that we confine it to a morning's
conversation. The morning in question was a cool, rainy Saturday in May,
1988. We sat on comfortable sofas at one end of a pleasant living room with a
polished tile floor, many plants, and a poster of Argentine tango idol Carlos
Gardel on one whitewashed wall. The interview began somewhat formally in
Spanish, and loosened up a bit when we switched to English. As we talked, I
saw why it was that interviews exhausted him: he is attentive, thoroughly
engaged, and careful about choosing precisely the word he wants, even in a
foreign language. When he hits upon it, his face lights up.

INTERVIEWER
What is the difference between movie and book material?
MANUEL PUIG
In my experience, an epic story translates very well into film. Realistic novels
the kind made up of small details and constructed using a certain analytical
approachdon't make good films. Films are synthesis. Everyday grayness,
everyday realism is especially tough to translate to the screen. I remember
discussing this once with a filmmaker, who said, Yes, but look at the realistic
films the Italians made, such as De Sica's Umberto D. I disagreed. There's
nothing of everyday grayness in Umberto Dit's about suicide, about
deciding whether to kill yourself or not. It's an epic film disguised as an
everyday realistic one. What I like to do in my novels is to show the
complexity of everyday life; the subtexture of social tensions and the
pressures behind each little act of ours. That's very difficult to put into film. I
feel much more comfortable with films dealing with allegorical, larger-thanlife characters and stylized situations.
INTERVIEWER
Is that why you liked American films of the 1940s?
PUIG
Sure. They were dreams, totally stylizedthe perfect stuff of films because
dreams allow you the possibility of a synthetic approach.
INTERVIEWER
Have you ever found that the dialogue of those 1940s films helped with
fictional dialogue?
PUIG
I learned certain rules of storytelling from the films of that time. Mainly how
to distribute the intrigue. But what interests me more about those films is
examining the effect they had on people.
INTERVIEWER
On the people you grew up with?
PUIG
Well, yeson my characters. My characters have all been affected by those
cinematic dreams. In those days, movies were very important to people. They
were their Mount Olympus. The stars were deities.

INTERVIEWER
Obviously you were intrigued by movies as a child. What about books?
PUIG
One of the very first books I read was Andr Gide's Pastoral Symphony. In
1947 he won the Nobel Prize. At the same time a film had been made of the
novel, so he had come into the territory of my immediate interest, which was,
of course, film. I read the novel and was immensely impressed. Soon after, I
remember being impressed by Faulkner's The Wild Palms. Such contrasting
authorsGide all measure and economy, and Faulkner sprawling all over the
place.
INTERVIEWER
Did you read The Wild Palms in English?
PUIG
No, I read Borges's Spanish translation, which is a beautiful work. I read
Faulkner's other books in English. I never went back to The Wild Palms, but
for me it's always an example of intuitive writing.
INTERVIEWER
So a writer's imagination is either calculated or intuitive?
PUIG
It goes from one extreme to the other. In between you have all these
shadings. I have trouble reading fiction these days. So I've lost that immense
realm of pleasure. Thank God I still enjoy movies and plays.
INTERVIEWER
You mean you don't read any fiction now?
PUIG
Writing has spoiled the pleasure of reading for me, because I can't read
innocently. If you are an innocent reader, you accept the fantasy of others;
you accept their style. These days another writer's problems of style
immediately recall my own stylistic problems. If I read fiction, I'm working; I'm
not relaxing. My only sector of interest now is biographies. Those I read with
great relish, because the facts are real and there is no pretense of style.
INTERVIEWER

Even your later novels are concerned with 1940s films. Do you ever go to
contemporary movies?
PUIG
Rarely. I simply got tired of walking out in the middle. It's a pity, because I
know I may be missing some good things, but the price of viewing hours and
hours of trash is too high. Of course, I receive films from all over the world
very strange films from Barcelona, Rome, Los Angeles, London. I barely have
time to see them.
INTERVIEWER
People send them to you because they know you like old movies?
PUIG
Yes, I've established a network. There are many like me who are interested in
certain periods and nationalities. For instance, I'm extremely interested in
Mexican films from the forties and fifties. The world doesn't know what it's
missing. There is a very silly prejudice against certain movie nationalities, so
many films are simply discarded, though they're gems. In fact, I think the
best Latin American films come from Mexico, at least from that very
particular period. From a sociological point of view, the Argentine films are
also of interest to me.
INTERVIEWER
There isn't much news from Argentina in the Brazilian papers. I wonder if you
feel as remote here, in a neighboring country, as you might in Mexico or New
York.
PUIG
New York is totally removed. Mexico feels closer.
INTERVIEWER
Do you find it easy to adapt yourself to different cultures?
PUIG
I learn languages easily, except German. My experience in Rome, New York,
and Mexico was that you have to either integrate yourself or leave. For me
there's always this desire to belong and become part of the country. Here in
Brazil I had a very bad experience with the literary establishment and at the
same time a very positive one on the human side.
INTERVIEWER

What was the bad experience?

PUIG
I published a book with a Brazilian setting called Blood of Requited Love; the
literary establishment here decided to ignore it, as if it hadn't even been
published.
INTERVIEWER
Wasn't the Josemar character in the novel a carpenter who worked on your
house?
PUIG
There are very few words in the book that are not his. I simply edited our
conversations. Mainly my job was to bring all the material out of him, put him
in a mood to talk and express himself.
INTERVIEWER
Did he ever read the book?
PUIG
He barely reads. It was odd because he received a huge amount of money. He
made more money on that book than I did. I thought it was going to be a big
successhere, especiallyso we made a fifty-fifty arrangement. But then he
preferred to get a fixed amount and with that he bought himself a new house.
It was ironic, because his tale was about the loss of a house; by telling it he
got a new and better house. I felt very good about all this. Not only had I
written a new novel, but I had helped someone. I expected gratitude, at least
to inspire a warm feeling. But it wasn't the case.
INTERVIEWER
He felt burdened by your help?
PUIG
He tried to blackmail me. After the book was published, he said he'd had
threats against his life and had had to give people money. I reminded him of
the contract, which said that he was responsible for any references made to
living persons. I had changed the names of the people and places, there was
no publicity about his identity. That was enough to dissuade him. What he'd
said was all lies. If it had been true, he would have come to me in despair.
Thank God I had a very good contract. I was really appalled. The fact of
telling me the story, of unburdening himself, was already positive for him.

What's more, I paid him per hour while he was talking.

INTERVIEWER
The reverse of psychoanalysis.
PUIG
Yes. And on top of it all he got a house, which was so symbolic of all he had
lost. The book is really about the loss of a father, so similar to my own
Betrayed by Rita Hayworth. I felt terribly identified with him. I always write
about people who somehow reflect my problems. In general they are similar
to me, though I make many changes. In this case, the guy was Brazilian, not
Argentine. He was thirty, not fifty. He was extremely strong and handsome; I
am not. He has fantastic health, which I don't have. He was illiterate; I was
supposed to be a writer. He doesn't question machismo, while machismo for
me is the basic question of my existence. What we shared was this father
problema ghost of a father. By the end there was such a brotherhood
between us. It came to nothing as far as human relations go, but I'm very
glad it happened because the novel has a certain interest; and I'm glad
because I helped him.
INTERVIEWER
Was the process of writing that novel different from that of your other books?
PUIG
Very much so. I'd never worked with a tape recorder. With Eternal Curse on
the Reader of These Pages there was also a real character present, but the
writing process was different. I created a character myselfthe old man
Ramirezso I could establish a dialogue with him. I didn't have much trouble
feeling and imagining myself as Ramirez, because in 1978 and 1979, when I
was working on the book, I was going through a very dark period.
INTERVIEWER
So you wrote the novel from the dialogue that was going on between the two
of you as one between Ramirez and this other person.
PUIG
We practically wrote it together. He was beside me the whole time; it was a
sort of psychodrama typed as it happened.
INTERVIEWER
Using this extraordinary method, how do you control your material?

PUIG
If you know a characteras much as it's possible to know anotherand you
put that person into a certain circumstance, you should be able to predict the
reaction, especially the verbal reaction.
INTERVIEWER
Doesn't the book take all sorts of unexpected turns?
PUIG
It should be the opposite. It should be a situation where, well, I know all about
them and I can probably guess what their reactions would be in a given
situation. So it's just a matter of watching. But of course, they are delicate
relationships. You cannot impose anything on characters. They help you, they
give you all, but you have to respect them.
INTERVIEWER
So you get to know your characters and then turn them loose?
PUIG
You should be able to put a character in a situation that never happened in
real life and predict what that character would have done or said.
INTERVIEWER
What if a person you're interviewing says or does something different from
what you had in mind?
PUIG
Both in Blood of Requited Love and Eternal Curse on the Reader of These
Pages I didn't have anything that the characters hadn't said. Of course, I did
my own weaving. The yarn is presented by the characters and I work with
that.
INTERVIEWER
What most writers like about fiction is the idea of making up characters and
having them do whatever they want.
PUIG
Oh, no, no, no, no. I try to respect my characters. If you know them well, you
won't make them do any nonsense.

INTERVIEWER
If you're reproducing real conversation verbatim, what is the difference
between this kind of fiction and . . . well, documenting?
PUIG
My characters' ways of thinking and talking have their musical and pictorial
qualities. I take these qualities and I do my own embroidery. In aesthetic
terms, a writer can use any method he wants. What counts, and what makes
it fiction, is how it's done. The writer who uses the third person in his fiction is
using an orthodox, established method or code. I am interested in the
individual kinds of speech, however flawed and limited, of real people. That
may limit me, but the use the writer makes of whatever method is limited
only by his talent.
INTERVIEWER
What kind of characters do you pick as these collaborators?
PUIG
I can only tell a story about a character who reflects my most burning
problems. I believe in characters as vehicles of exposition. Their voices are
full of hidden clues, and I like to listen to them. That's why I work so much
with dialogue. What they don't say sometimes expresses more than what
they do say. Mine is not the classic third-person voice.
INTERVIEWER
Obviously you have to edit them.
PUIG
In my novels I try to reproduce everyday language. Of course, there's a
certain concern about length. You can't have people expounding on
themselves forever in novels the way they do in real life.
INTERVIEWER
Is it easier to write in the first person?
PUIG
Yes. When I deal with first-person dialogue and I know the character well, it's
just a matter of lending an ear.

INTERVIEWER
You prefer not to have the novelist in the novel?
PUIG
I'm not interested in listening to my voice that much. I have no ego.
INTERVIEWER
But the voice of Manuel Puig is always there.
PUIG
My view of things comes out in the long run, let's hope. I remember at the
beginning of my career a very nasty established writer said, Oh, I know how
Manuel Puig's characters talk but how does he talk? He doesn't have a
persona. I thought the world of movies and acting provided the pure height
of vanity, but I was mistaken.
INTERVIEWER
There's a lot of jealousy among writers.
PUIG
They're supposed to be people with more insight and distance, but it's not
always the case.
INTERVIEWER
In some of your novels, particularly The Buenos Aires Affair, it seems as
though people live in an artistic world because they can't live in the day-today world. Do you ever yearn for a life that has nothing to do with art?
PUIG
It's not a solution. With that book I meant to suggest there are other sources
of energy and strength. But a life totally devoid of the imagination would be
very boring.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think fiction can show people how to live?
PUIG
Direct experience is best, but then you'd need a thousand lifetimes. Books
have that wonderful quality of showing you other lives. They can be a great
nourishment.

INTERVIEWER
What are the easiest and hardest parts of writing for you?
PUIG
The beginning is exciting because I get an idea. Then I start looking for the
shape to use to present it. The content always comes from the form, in my
case. I think it should be like that, but I know other writers work differently.
Then comes the critical moment, when I look for the voices of the narrators.
Sometimes it's easy; sometimes not. If I find the narrator quickly, that's great,
but it doesn't always happen that way. I have to find a voice that convinces
me, and that's very difficult. Only when I believe in the narrator does it fall
into place. Actually, the hardest part of writing for me is the typing and
tidying things up. I don't dare try a word processor. I find it useful to type the
different draftsgoing from the rough draft to the second. As you're typing a
clean copy you make decisions. I have been writing novels for almost thirty
years, and I'm used to a certain technique of polishing. I've been told, Try
that machine, that processor, you'll love it. But not yet. Maybe next time. I
like to keep track of the first draft. I like to see the scratching in ink. I do a lot
of scratching.
INTERVIEWER
Are your revisions very radical?
PUIG
It depends. Kiss of the Spider Woman had almost no corrections. I wrote that
novel with the greatest ease. The Buenos Aires Affair and Pubis Angelical
were the toughest, because there were many changes in narrators. The last
one, Cae la noche tropical, came out quite easily.
INTERVIEWER
How much of the book do you have in mind before you start?
PUIG
Most of it. But with this last novel, something very peculiar happened. I was
shaping it, working on a real characterFerreira in the bookbut then he just
disappeared. I couldn't get all the information I needed from him. So
somehow another interesting personactually someone I was considering for
another storycame into the picture. I thought perhaps I could shift him into
this novel. Absolutely accidental. But then he disappeared. It was very, very
strange. Both were people in the neighborhood whom I could talk to and both
of them disappeared. But that gave the final shape to the novel. The fact that

they would disappear was essential. It was their nature. At a certain point
they couldn't take the responsibility and they would leave. So it was reality,
absolutely dictating the course of the novel. Nothing like that had ever
happened to me before. But it wasn't a problem; it turned out to be an
advantage.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think that people are determined by their circumstances?
PUIG
This is the awful thing: we are all so determined by our culture. Mainly
because we learn to play roles. For me it starts with the very unnatural and
hideous sexual roles. I think that sex is totally banal, devoid of any moral
meaning or weight. It's just fun and games, innocence itself. But at a certain
point somebody decided that sex has a moral weight. A patriarch invented
the concept of sexual sin to distinguish between the saintly woman at home
and the prostitute on the street.
INTERVIEWER
And men have a very different morality applied to them?
PUIG
Men are subject to no morality! A man full of sexual energy is a stallion, a
model of health. A woman with strong sexual needs, up to a certain time ago,
was considered a victim of her glands. She was not trusted, because it was
thought that if she had sex so easily there must be something wrong with
her, physically and mentally. The minute sex becomes of moral importance,
horrible problems are created needlessly. The principle of sex is pleasure,
that's all. I consider sex to be an act of the vegetative life, vegetative in the
sense of eating and sleeping. Sex is as important as eating or sleeping but as
devoid of moral meaning.
INTERVIEWER
At the end of Pubis Angelical, when Ana realizes she's sexless, like an angel,
she begins thinking about the people whom she loves. It seems like you're
saying that once people get over sex they can begin to love each other.
PUIG
Yes, once that problem is settledor you don't imagine it as a problem. Once
you've eliminated sex as a means of superiority or inferiority, sex is of no
meaning.

INTERVIEWER
Do you think eliminating sex roles is possible in this world?
PUIG
At this moment, it's only a utopian ideal. But I see it as the only answer. The
changes since 1968 point to that. You're very young; you don't know what
this world was like in the forties. I remember very intelligent women saying
strange things such as, I cannot enjoy sex unless I fear a little the man who
embraces me. There was all this myth of the macho superiority.
INTERVIEWER
Both sexes accepted it.
PUIG
Since you learned to enjoy sex that way, as an act of possession, it was
something you wouldn't argue with. The general belief is that it was an unfair
situation for women, but a natural one. If you went against it, you were
unnatural. A woman had to be soft and surrender, and that way she would
achieve pleasure. Afterwards, with experience, she would begin to find
something phony in all this. So then she'd try to get even in some other way.
We are so immersed in sexual repression, it's impossible to think of a world
without itbut it will come.
INTERVIEWER
In The Kiss of the Spider Woman, there is a little utopia created under dire
circumstances in the prison cell. Did you feel that Molina and Valentin
transcended their traditional roles?
PUIG
It happens. I'm not just fantasizing; what I know comes from experience.
INTERVIEWER
If you weren't a writer, could you imagine yourself in another occupation?
PUIG
Something I'd enjoy? I'd like to sing, but I have no voice. Or maybe play an
instrument. I'd enjoy anything creative. I wasn't bad at drawing, but I never
developed it.
INTERVIEWER

Why did you become a writer? Do you feel it's something you need to do?
PUIG
For me it was a blessing. At first, I thought films were my thing, but I didn't
like the work on the set and collaborating with lots of people. So I decided to
write film scripts. I never sold them; they were training, preliterary practice.
Later when I finally started writing novels I found them to be the great
solutionbecause what I'd wanted to do all along was to tell stories. With
images, or with words, it didn't matter; I like to recreate reality in order to
understand it better. But writing was something I could do on my own. I could
do all the revisions I wanted and without the pressures of budgets. I could
make a living out of it, and also it was an enjoyable activity. Of course, there
are the secondary aspects which are a little bothersome.
INTERVIEWER
Like being interviewed?
PUIG
Well, more or less. Even worse is the accounting, dealing with the publishers,
all that. But what's really a bore and downright unpleasant is the relationship
with the critics. They can be very irresponsible people. There are exceptions,
but few. I've been rescued in a way by the colleges. There you find a different
attitude. But it comes much later; when you've just published a book, what
you feel immediately is the contact with the press.
INTERVIEWER
Universities don't pick up books for several years.
PUIG
No, and their reaction doesn't have much impact. But it's wonderful to know
that somebody accepts your work. The reviewers from newspapers and
magazines just want to amuse the person who buys the paper. They do it at
the expense of the authors. Many, many times it's dishonest as well, because
the critics belong to groups that don't like youit's a horror. I'm published in
twenty-four different languages, so I know critics. In Spanish I have to deal
with the attitudes of the Mexicans, of the Argentines, of the Chileans. Each
Spanish-speaking country has a special syndrome. I don't find it stimulating
at all.
INTERVIEWER
Do you worry much about this?

PUIG
Well, critics have power, unfortunately. With time the book will outlive
anything. But they have the power to retard it a lot. I've had a very bad
relationship with the critics. I don't have to say thank you to them.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think that writing is something that can be taught?
PUIG
No, but you can discuss it. What I did when I taught at City College and at
Columbia University was to discuss my own experiences and then suggest
exercises. I don't like to go into a classroom and sit and listen to somebody
reading.
INTERVIEWER
Did teaching help your writing at all?
PUIG
It always does, because you're always discussing the questions that plague
you.
INTERVIEWER
What was it like for you to teach Americans?
PUIG
I found it interesting because I could see what their phobias, fears and
problems were. I've found that in both America and Latin America, the young
writer usually doesn't like the System, with a capital S, in his country. But in
Latin America the possibility exists of actually shaking that system, because
Latin American systems are shaky. Young writers who don't like the American
way of life feel impotent, because it's really tough to shake Wall Street. You
may not like Wall Street, but it works somehow. That's also the case in
countries like Germany. Ironically, Latin American countries, in their
instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed. In
Latin America there's the illusion that a writer can change something; of
course, it's not that simple.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have a reader in mind when you write?
PUIG

I could say that each novel has been written for somebody, to convince
somebody in particular. It's almost an act of seduction. If not seduction, at
least an attempt at explaining something to somebody.
INTERVIEWER
Tell me about your schedule as a writer. Do you write every day?
PUIG
I adore routine. I cannot work away from it. It has to be the same thing every
day. It takes a long time for me to wake up, so in the morning I write letters,
revise translationsthings that don't demand too much. At noon, I go to the
beach and swim for twenty minutes. I come back, eat, and take a nap.
Without that nap there is no possibility of creation. From four to eight I really
work. Then I have dinner and that's it. I cannot work after eating. I stop and
see something on the video machine. I hate to interrupt this for weekends.
Then it's very hard to go back to work.
INTERVIEWER
You can't pretend that the weekends are weekdays?
PUIG
Friends take me out of my routine.
INTERVIEWER
Which of your novels do you like best?
PUIG
It's difficult to say. There isn't one I dislike more than the others. They all have
their problems, but I must admit if I published them it's because I believe that
there's something worthwhile in them. That I cannot hide from you.

James Baldwin, The Art of Fiction No. 78

Interviewed by Jordan Elgrably ISSUE 91, SPRING 1984
undefined
JAMES BALDIN TAKEN HYDE PARK, LONDON, PHOTOGRAPH BY ALLAN
WARRENTHE PARIS REVIEW NO. 129.
This interview was conducted in the two places dearest to James Baldwins

struggle as a writer. We met first in Paris, where he spent the first nine years
of a burgeoning career and wrote his first two novels, Go Tell It on the
Mountain and Giovannis Room, along with his best-known collection of
essays, Notes of a Native Son. It was in Paris, he says, that he was first able
to come to grips with his explosive relationship with himself and America. Our
second talks were held at Baldwins poutres-and-stone villa in St. Paul de
Vence, where he has made his home for the past ten years. We lunched on an
August weekend, together with seasonal guests and his secretary. Saturday, a
storm raged amid intolerable heat and humidity, causing Baldwins minor
case of arthritis to pain his writing hand (left) and wrist. Erratic power
shortages caused by the storm interrupted the tape machine by our side.
During the blackouts we would discuss subjects at random or wait in silence
while sipping our drinks.
Returning Sunday at Baldwins invitation, the sun was shining and we were
able to lunch outdoors at a picnic table, shaded by a bower that opened onto
property dotted with fruit trees and a spectacular view of the Mediterranean
littoral. Baldwins mood had brightened considerably since the previous day,
and we entered the office and study he refers to as his torture chamber.
Baldwin writes in longhand (you achieve shorter declarative sentences) on
the standard legal pad, although a large, old Adler electric sits on one end of
his deska rectangular oak plank with rattan chairs on either side. It is piled
with writing utensils and drafts of several works-in-progress: a novel, a play, a
scenario, essays on the Atlanta child murders, these last compiled in The
Evidence of Things Not Seen. His most recent work includes The Devil Finds
Work, an attack on racial bias and fear in the film industry, and a novel, Just
Above My Head, which draws on his experiences as a civil-rights activist in
the 1960s.

INTERVIEWER
Would you tell us how you came to leave the States?
JAMES BALDWIN
I was broke. I got to Paris with forty dollars in my pocket, but I had to get out
of New York. My reflexes were tormented by the plight of other people.
Reading had taken me away for long periods at a time, yet I still had to deal
with the streets and the authorities and the cold. I knew what it meant to be
white and I knew what it meant to be a nigger, and I knew what was going to
happen to me. My luck was running out. I was going to go to jail, I was going
to kill somebody or be killed. My best friend had committed suicide two years
earlier, jumping off the George Washington Bridge.

When I arrived in Paris in 1948 I didnt know a word of French. I didnt know
anyone and I didnt want to know anyone. Later, when Id encountered other
Americans, I began to avoid them because they had more money than I did
and I didnt want to feel like a freeloader. The forty dollars I came with, I
recall, lasted me two or three days. Borrowing money whenever I could
often at the last minuteI moved from one hotel to another, not knowing
what was going to happen to me. Then I got sick. To my surprise I wasnt
thrown out of the hotel. This Corsican family, for reasons Ill never
understand, took care of me. An old, old lady, a great old matriarch, nursed
me back to health after three months; she used old folk remedies. And she
had to climb five flights of stairs every morning to make sure I was kept alive.
I went through this period where I was very much alone, and wanted to be. I
wasnt part of any community until I later became the Angry Young Man in
New York.

INTERVIEWER
Why did you choose France?
BALDWIN
It wasnt so much a matter of choosing Franceit was a matter of getting out
of America. I didnt know what was going to happen to me in France but I
knew what was going to happen to me in New York. If I had stayed there, I
would have gone under, like my friend on the George Washington Bridge.
INTERVIEWER
You say the city beat him to death. You mean that metaphorically.
BALDWIN
Not so metaphorically. Looking for a place to live. Looking for a job. You begin
to doubt your judgment, you begin to doubt everything. You become
imprecise. And thats when youre beginning to go under. Youve been
beaten, and its been deliberate. The whole society has decided to make you
nothing. And they dont even know theyre doing it.
INTERVIEWER
Has writing been a type of salvation?
BALDWIN
Im not so sure! Im not sure Ive escaped anything. One still lives with it, in
many ways. Its happening all around us, every day. Its not happening to me

in the same way, because Im James Baldwin; Im not riding the subways and
Im not looking for a place to live. But its still happening. So salvation is a
difficult word to use in such a context. Ive been compelled in some ways by
describing my circumstances to learn to live with them. Its not the same
thing as accepting them.
INTERVIEWER
Was there an instant you knew you were going to write, to be a writer rather
than anything else?
BALDWIN
Yes. The death of my father. Until my father died I thought I could do
something else. I had wanted to be a musician, thought of being a painter,
thought of being an actor. This was all before I was nineteen. Given the
conditions in this country to be a black writer was impossible. When I was
young, people thought you were not so much wicked as sick, they gave up on
you. My father didnt think it was possiblehe thought Id get killed, get
murdered. He said I was contesting the white mans definitions, which was
quite right. But I had also learned from my father what he thought of the
white mans definitions. He was a pious, very religious and in some ways a
very beautiful man, and in some ways a terrible man. He died when his last
child was born and I realized I had to make a jumpa leap. Id been a
preacher for three years, from age fourteen to seventeen. Those were three
years which probably turned me to writing.
INTERVIEWER
Were the sermons you delivered from the pulpit very carefully prepared, or
were they absolutely off the top of your head?
BALDWIN
I would improvise from the texts, like a jazz musician improvises from a
theme. I never wrote a sermonI studied the texts. Ive never written a
speech. I cant read a speech. Its kind of give-and-take. You have to sense
the people youre talking to. You have to respond to what they hear.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have a reader in your mind when you write?
BALDWIN
No, you cant have that.
INTERVIEWER

So its quite unlike preaching?

BALDWIN
Entirely. The two roles are completely unattached. When you are standing in
the pulpit, you must sound as though you know what youre talking about.
When youre writing, youre trying to find out something which you dont
know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you dont
want to know, what you dont want to find out. But something forces you to
anyway.
INTERVIEWER
Is that one of the reasons you decided to be a writerto find out about
yourself?
BALDWIN
Im not sure I decided. It was that or nothing, since in my own mind I was the
father of my family. Thats not quite the way they saw it, but still I was the
oldest brother, and I took it very seriously, I had to set an example. I couldnt
allow anything to happen to me because what then would happen to them? I
could have become a junkie. On the roads I traveled and the streets I ran,
anything could have happened to a boy like mein New York. Sleeping on
rooftops and in the subways. Until this day Im terrified of the public toilet. In
any case . . . my father died, and I sat down and figured out what I had to do.
INTERVIEWER
When did you find time to write?
BALDWIN
I was very young then. I could write and hold a few jobs. I was for a time a
waiter . . . like George Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London. I couldnt
do it now. I worked on the Lower East Side and in what we now call Soho.
INTERVIEWER
Was there anyone to guide you?
BALDWIN
I remember standing on a street corner with the black painter Beauford
Delaney down in the Village, waiting for the light to change, and he pointed
down and said, Look. I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, Look
again, which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in the
puddle. It was a great revelation to me. I cant explain it. He taught me how

to see, and how to trust what I saw. Painters have often taught writers how to
see. And once youve had that experience, you see differently.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think painters would help a fledgling writer more than another writer
might? Did you read a great deal?
BALDWIN
I read everything. I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the
time I was thirteen. One does learn a great deal about writing this way. First
of all, you learn how little you know. It is true that the more one learns the
less one knows. Im still learning how to write. I dont know what technique is.
All I know is that you have to make the reader see it. This I learned from
Dostoyevsky, from Balzac. Im sure that my life in France would have been
very different had I not met Balzac. Even though I hadnt experienced it yet, I
understood something about the concierge, all the French institutions and
personalities. The way that country and its society works. How to find my way
around in it, not get lost in it, and not feel rejected by it. The French gave me
what I could not get in America, which was a sense of If I can do it, I may do
it. I wont generalize, but in the years I grew up in the U.S., I could not do
that. Id already been defined.
INTERVIEWER
Did what you wanted to write about come easily to you from the start?
BALDWIN
I had to be released from a terrible shynessan illusion that I could hide
anything from anybody.
INTERVIEWER
I would think that anyone who could time after time, and without notes,
address a congregation would never be shy again.
BALDWIN
I was scared then and Im scared now. Communication is a two-way street,
really, its a matter of listening to one another. During the civil-rights
movement I was in the back of a church in Tallahassee and the pastor, who
recognized me, called my name and asked me to say a few words. I was
thirty-four and had left the pulpit seventeen years before. The moment in
which I had to stand up and walk down the aisle and stand in that pulpit was
the strangest moment in my life up to that time. I managed to get through it
and when I walked down from the pulpit and back up the aisle, a little old

black lady in the congregation said to a friend of hers, Hes little, but hes
loud!
INTERVIEWER
What was the process whereby you were able to write?
BALDWIN
I had to go through a time of isolation in order to come to terms with who and
what I was, as distinguished from all the things Id been told I was. Right
around 1950 I remember feeling that Id come through something, shed a
dying skin and was naked again. I wasnt, perhaps, but I certainly felt more at
ease with myself. And then I was able to write. Throughout 1948 and 1949 I
just tore up paper.
INTERVIEWER
Those years were difficult, and yet you received four writing grants between
1945 and 1956. How much encouragement did they afford you?
BALDWIN
Well, the first one was the most important in terms of moralethe Saxton
Fellowship in 1945. I was twenty-one. I was launched into the publishing
world, so to speak. And there was the novel, which became Go Tell It on the
Mountain several years later.
INTERVIEWER
The Saxton was intended to help you finish the novel you were working on?
BALDWIN
It helped me finish the novel, it kept me alive. The novel didnt work, but I
started doing book reviews for the New Leader at ten and twenty dollars a
shot. I had to read everything and had to write all the time, and thats a great
apprenticeship. The people I worked with were left-of-center Trotskyites,
Socialist Trotskyites. I was a young Socialist. That was a very nice atmosphere
for me; in a sense it saved me from despair. But most of the books I reviewed
were Be Kind to Niggers, Be Kind to Jews, while America was going through
one of its liberal convulsions. People suddenly discovered they had a Jewish
problem, with books like Gentlemans Agreement, Earth and High Heaven, or
they discovered they had niggers, with books like Kingsblood Royal and
Quality.
Thousands of such tracts were published during those years and it seems to
me I had to read every single one of them; the color of my skin made me an

expert. And so, when I got to Paris, I had to discharge all that, which was
really the reason for my essay, Everybodys Protest Novel. I was convinced
thenand I still amthat those sort of books do nothing but bolster up an
image. All of this had quite a bit to do with the direction I took as a writer,
because it seemed to me that if I took the role of a victim then I was simply
reassuring the defenders of the status quo; as long as I was a victim they
could pity me and add a few more pennies to my home-relief check. Nothing
would change in that way, I felt, and that essay was a beginning of my finding
a new vocabulary and another point of view.
INTERVIEWER
If you felt that it was a white mans world, what made you think that there
was any point in writing? And why is writing a white mans world?
BALDWIN
Because they own the business. Well, in retrospect, what it came down to
was that I would not allow myself to be defined by other people, white or
black. It was beneath me to blame anybody for what happened to me. What
happened to me was my responsibility. I didnt want any pity. Leave me
alone, Ill figure it out. I was very wounded and I was very dangerous
because you become what you hate. Its what happened to my father and I
didnt want it to happen to me. His hatred was suppressed and turned against
himself. He couldnt let it outhe could only let it out in the house with rage,
and I found it happening to myself as well. And after my best friend jumped
off the bridge, I knew that I was next. SoParis. With forty dollars and a oneway ticket.
INTERVIEWER
Once in Paris, you spent a lot of time upstairs at the Caf de Flore. Is that
where Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovannis Room were written?
BALDWIN
A lot of Go Tell It on the Mountain had to be written there, between there and
the Hotel Verneuil, where I stayed for a lot of the time I was in Paris. After ten
years of carrying that book around, I finally finished it in Switzerland in three
months. I remember playing Bessie Smith all the time while I was in the
mountains, and playing her till I fell asleep. The book was very hard to write
because I was too young when I started, seventeen; it was really about me
and my father. There were things I couldnt deal with technically at first. Most
of all, I couldnt deal with me. This is where reading Henry James helped me,
with his whole idea about the center of consciousness and using a single
intelligence to tell the story. He gave me the idea to make the novel happen

on Johns birthday.
INTERVIEWER
Do you agree with Alberto Moravia, who said that one ought only to write in
the first person, because the third projects a bourgeois point of view?
BALDWIN
I dont know about that. The first person is the most terrifying view of all. I
tend to be in accord with James, who hated the first-person perspective,
which the reader has no reason to trustwhy should you need this I? How is
this person real by dint of that bar blaring across the page?
INTERVIEWER
When did you first conceive of leaving black characters out of Giovannis
Room?
BALDWIN
I suppose the only honest answer to that is that Giovannis Room came out of
something I had to face. I dont quite know when it came, though it broke off
from what later turned into Another Country. Giovanni was at a party and on
his way to the guillotine. He took all the light in the book, and then the book
stopped and nobody in the book would speak to me. I thought I would seal
Giovanni off into a short story, but it turned into Giovannis Room. I certainly
could not possibly havenot at that point in my lifehandled the other great
weight, the Negro problem. The sexual-moral light was a hard thing to deal
with. I could not handle both propositions in the same book. There was no
room for it. I might do it differently today, but then, to have a black presence
in the book at that moment, and in Paris, would have been quite beyond my
powers.
INTERVIEWER
Was it David who first appeared in Giovannis Room?
BALDWIN
It was, yes, but that novel has a curious history. I wrote four novels before I
published one, before Id even left America. I dont know what happened to
them. When I came over they were in a duffel bag, which I lost, and thats
that. But the genesis of Giovannis Room is in America. David is the first
person I thought of, but thats due to a peculiar case involving a boy named
Lucien Carr, who murdered somebody. He was known to some of the people I
knewI didnt know him personally. But I was fascinated by the trial, which
also involved a wealthy playboy and his wife in high-level society. From this

fascination came the first version of Giovannis Room, something called

Ignorant Armies, a novel I never finished. The bones of Giovannis Room and
Another Country were in that.
INTERVIEWER
Wasnt it after your first two novels, which were in many ways extremely
personal, that you introduced more of the political and sociological
counterpoint (evident in your essays) into Another Country?
BALDWIN
From my point of view it does not quite work that way, making attempts to be
merely personal or to bring in a larger scope. No one knows how he writes his
book. Go Tell It on the Mountain was about my relationship to my father and
to the church, which is the same thing really. It was an attempt to exorcise
something, to find out what happened to my father, what happened to all of
us, what had happened to meto Johnand how we were to move from one
place to another. Of course it seems rather personal, but the book is not
about John, the book is not about me.
INTERVIEWER
One writes out of one thing onlyones own experience, youve said.
BALDWIN
Yes, and yet ones own experience is not necessarily ones twenty-four-hour
reality. Everything happens to you, which is what Whitman means when he
says in his poem Heroes, I am the man, I suffered, I was there. It depends
on what you mean by experience.
INTERVIEWER
Nevertheless, it seems that your struggles with social injustices were kept
apart as the material for your essays, while your fiction dealt predominantly
with your own past.
BALDWIN
If I wanted to survive as a writer I would eventually have had to write a book
like Another Country. On the other hand, short stories like Sonnys Blues or
Previous Condition, which appeared before Another Country, were highly
personal and yet went further than the immediate dilemmas of the young
writer struggling in the Village or of Sonny in Sonnys Blues.
INTERVIEWER

Ralph Ellison said in his Paris Review interview that he writes primarily not
concerned with injustice, but with art, whereas one might almost find you a
sort of spokesman for blacks.
BALDWIN
I dont consider myself a spokesmanI have always thought it would be
rather presumptuous.
INTERVIEWER
Although you are aware of the fact that many people read and are moved by
your essays, as well as your speeches and lectures . . .
BALDWIN
Lets go back now. Those essays really date from the time I was in my early
twenties, and were written for the New Leader and The Nation all those years
ago. They were an attempt to get me beyond the chaos I mentioned earlier. I
lived in Paris long enough to finish my first novel, which was very important
for me (or I wouldnt be here at all). What held me in Paris laterfrom 55 to
57was the fact that I was going through a kind of breakup in my private
life, yet I knew I had to go back to America. And I went. Once I was in the
civil-rights milieu, once Id met Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X and
Medgar Evers and all those other people, the role I had to play was
confirmed. I didnt think of myself as a public speaker, or as a spokesman, but
I knew I could get a story past the editors desk. And once you realize that
you can do something, it would be difficult to live with yourself if you didnt
do it.
INTERVIEWER
When you were much younger, what distinctions did you make between art
and protest?
BALDWIN
I thought of them both as literature and still do. I dont see the contradiction
which some people point out as inherent, though I can sense what Ralph,
among others, means by that. The only way I could play it, once indeed I
found myself on that road, was to assume that if I had the talent, and my
talent was important, it would simply have to survive whatever life brought. I
couldnt sit somewhere honing my talent to a fine edge after I had been to all
those places in the South and seen those boys and girls, men and women,
black and white, longing for change. It was impossible for me to drop them a
visit and then leave.

INTERVIEWER
You were in utter despair after the death of Martin Luther King Jr. Did you find
it difficult to write then, or do you work better out of anguish?
BALDWIN
No one works better out of anguish at all; thats an incredible literary conceit.
I didnt think I could write at all. I didnt see any point to it. I was hurt . . . I
cant even talk about it. I didnt know how to continue, didnt see my way
clear.
INTERVIEWER
How did you eventually find your way out of the pain?
BALDWIN
I think really through my brother, David. I was working on No Name in the
Street but hadnt touched it after the assassination. He called me and I told
him I just cant finish this book. I dont know what to do with it. And he
came across the ocean. I was here in St. Paul, living in Le Hameau across the
road. I was sick, went to four or five hospitals. I was very lucky, because I
couldve gone mad. You see, I had left America after the funeral and gone to
Istanbul. Workedor tried tothere. Got sick in Istanbul, went to London, got
sick in London, and I wanted to die. Collapsed. I was shipped down here, out
of the American Hospital in Paris. Id been in the region in 1949, but I had
never dreamt of coming to live in St. Paul. Once I was here, I stayed. I didnt
really have anyplace else to go. Well, I could have gone back to America, and
I did, to do a Rap on Race, which helped me significantly. But principally,
David came and he read No Name in the Street and sent it on to New York.
INTERVIEWER
In an Esquire essay, you once wrote that youve been schooled in adversity
and skilled in compromise. Does that perhaps reflect trying to get your work
published?
BALDWIN
No, though it has been such a stormy career. Its a terrible way to make a
living. I find writing gets harder as time goes on. Im speaking of the working
process, which demands a certain amount of energy and courage (though I
dislike using the word), and a certain amount of recklessness. I dont know, I
doubt whether anyonemyself at leastknows how to talk about writing.
Perhaps Im afraid to.
INTERVIEWER

Do you see it as conception, gestation, accouchement?

BALDWIN
I dont think about it that way, no. The whole process of conceptionone
talks about it after the fact, if one discusses it at all. But you really dont
understand it. After the fact I may discuss a work, yet Im uncertain that what
I do say about it afterwards can be taken as gospel.
INTERVIEWER
One critic suggested that James Baldwins best work was yet to come and
would be an autobiographical novel, which Just Above My Head was in part.
BALDWIN
He may have a point there. I hope, certainly, that my best work is before me.
It depends on what one means by autobiographical. I certainly have not
told my story yet, I know that, though Ive revealed fragments.
INTERVIEWER
Are you, or do you remain, very close to your characters?
BALDWIN
I dont know if I feel close to them, now. After a time you find, however, that
your characters are lost to you, making it quite impossible for you to judge
them. When youve finished a novel it means, The train stops here, you have
to get off here. You never get the book you wanted, you settle for the book
you get. Ive always felt that when a book ended there was something I didnt
see, and usually when I remark the discovery its too late to do anything
about it.
INTERVIEWER
This occurs once it has already been published?
BALDWIN
No, no, it happens when you are right here at the table. The publication date
is something else again. Its out of your hands, then. What happens here is
that you realize if you try to redo something, you may wreck everything else.
But, if a book has brought you from one place to another, so that you see
something you didnt see before, youve arrived at another point. This then is
ones consolation, and you know that you must now proceed elsewhere.
INTERVIEWER

Are there a lot of your characters walking around here?

BALDWIN
No, they begin walking around before you put them on paper. And after you
put them on paper you dont see them anymore. They may be wandering
around here. You might see them.
INTERVIEWER
So once youve captured a character in your work, it is no longer a phantom?
BALDWIN
Actually, what has happened is that the character has tyrannized you for
however long it took, and when the novel is over he or she says Ciao, thanks
a lot. Pointe finale. Before Another Country, Ida talked to me for years. We get
on very well now.
INTERVIEWER
How soon after you conceived of Rufus, in Another Country, did you know he
was going to commit suicide, or was he modeled after your adolescent friend
who jumped off the George Washington Bridge in New York?
BALDWIN
Oh, he was taken directly from that friend, yet, oddly enough, he was the last
person to arrive in the novel. Id written the book more than once and Id felt
Id never get it right. Ida was important, but I wasnt sure I could cope with
her. Ida and Vivaldo were the first people I was dealing with, but I couldnt
find a way to make you understand Ida. Then Rufus came along and the
entire action made sense.
INTERVIEWER
And Richard, the rather idealistic writer?
BALDWIN
This is all far beyond my memory. Well, there was Vivaldo, whose name I
didnt know for some time. He was called Daniel at first, and at one point was
black. Ida, on the other hand, was always Ida. Richard and Cass were part of
the decor. From my point of view, there was nothing in the least idealistic
about Richard. He was modeled on several liberal American careerists from
then and now. In any case, in order to make the reader see Ida, I had to give
her a brother, who turned out to be Rufus. Its fascinating from the point of
view of styles, and of accomodations to human pain, that it took me so long

from 1946 to 1960to accept the fact that my friend was dead. From the
moment Rufus was gone, I knew that if you knew what had happened to Ida,
youd equally understand Rufus, and youd see why Ida throughout the book
was so difficult with Vivaldo and everybody elsewith herself above all,
because she wasnt going to be able to live with the pain. The principal action
in the book, for me, is the journey of Ida and Vivaldo toward some kind of
coherence.
INTERVIEWER
Is there a big shifting of gears between writing fiction and writing nonfiction?
BALDWIN
Shifting gears, you ask. Every form is difficult, no one is easier than another.
They all kick your ass. None of it comes easy.
INTERVIEWER
How many pages do you write in a day?
BALDWIN
I write at night. After the day is over, and supper is over, I begin, and work
until about three or four a.m.
INTERVIEWER
Thats quite rare, isnt it, because most people write when theyre fresh, in
the morning.
BALDWIN
I start working when everyone has gone to bed. Ive had to do that ever since
I was youngI had to wait until the kids were asleep. And then I was working
at various jobs during the day. Ive always had to write at night. But now that
Im established I do it because Im alone at night.
INTERVIEWER
When do you know something is the way you want it?
BALDWIN
I do a lot of rewriting. Its very painful. You know its finished when you cant
do anything more to it, though its never exactly the way you want it. In fact,
the hardest thing I ever wrote was that suicide scene in Another Country. I
always knew that Rufus had to commit suicide very early on, because that
was the key to the book. But I kept putting it off. It had to do, of course, with

reliving the suicide of my friend who jumped off the bridge. Also, it was very
dangerous to do from the technical point of view because this central
character dies in the first hundred pages, with a couple of hundred pages to
go. The point up to the suicide is like a long prologue, and it is the only light
on Ida. You never go into her mind, but I had to make you see what is
happening to this girl by making you feel the blow of her brothers deaththe
key to her relationship with everybody. She tries to make everybody pay for
it. You cannot do that, life is not like that, you only destroy yourself.
INTERVIEWER
Is that the way a book starts for you, though? Something like that?
BALDWIN
Probably that way for everybody: something that irritates you and wont let
you go. Thats the anguish of it. Do this book, or die. You have to go through
that.
INTERVIEWER
Does it purge you in any way?
BALDWIN
Im not so sure about that. For me its like a journey, and the only thing you
know is that if when the book is over, you are prepared to continueyou
havent cheated.
INTERVIEWER
What would cheating be?
BALDWIN
Avoiding. Lying.
INTERVIEWER
So there is a compulsion to get it out?
BALDWIN
Oh yes, to get it out and get it right. The word Im using is compulsion. And it
is true of the essay as well.
INTERVIEWER
But the essay is a little bit simpler, isnt it, because youre angry about

something which you can put your finger on . . .

BALDWIN
An essay is not simpler, though it may seem so. An essay is essentially an
argument. The writers point of view in an essay is always absolutely clear.
The writer is trying to make the readers see something, trying to convince
them of something. In a novel or a play youre trying to show them
something. The risks, in any case, are exactly the same.
INTERVIEWER
What are your first drafts like?
BALDWIN
They are overwritten. Most of the rewrite, then, is cleaning. Dont describe it,
show it. Thats what I try to teach all young writerstake it out! Dont
describe a purple sunset, make me see that it is purple.
INTERVIEWER
As your experience about writing accrues, what would you say increases with
knowledge?
BALDWIN
You learn how little you know. It becomes much more difficult because the
hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too. It
becomes more difficult because you have to strip yourself of all your
disguises, some of which you didnt know you had. You want to write a
sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
INTERVIEWER
Do you mind what people say about your writing?
BALDWIN
Ultimately not. I minded it when I was younger. You care about the people you
care about, what they say. You care about the reviews so that somebody will
read the book. So, those things are important, but not of ultimate importance.
INTERVIEWER
The attitudes you found in America which made you go to Franceare they
still with us, are they exactly the same?
BALDWIN

I always knew I would have to come back. If I were twenty-four now, I dont
know if and where I would go. I dont know if I would go to France, I might go
to Africa. You must remember when I was twenty-four there was really no
Africa to go to, except Liberia. I thought of going to Israel, but I never did, and
I was right about that. Now, though, a kid now . . . well, you see, something
has happened which no one has really noticed, but its very important:
Europe is no longer a frame of reference, a standard-bearer, the classic
model for literature and for civilization. Its not the measuring stick. There are
other standards in the world. Its a fascinating time to be living. Theres a
whole wide world which isnt now as it was when I was younger. When I was a
kid the world was white, for all intents and purposes, and now it is struggling
to remain whitea very different thing.
INTERVIEWER
Its frequently been noted that you are a master of minor characters. How do
you respond to that?
BALDWIN
Well, minor characters are the subtext, illustrations of whatever it is youre
trying to convey. I was always struck by the minor characters in Dostoyevsky
and Dickens. The minor characters have a certain freedom which the major
ones dont. They can make comments, they can move, yet they havent got
the same weight, or intensity.
INTERVIEWER
You mean to say their actions are less accountable?
BALDWIN
Oh no, if you fuck up a minor character you fuck up a major one. They are
more a part of the decora kind of Greek chorus. They carry the tension in a
much more explicit way than the majors.
INTERVIEWER
Excuse me for asking, but might your mother be standing behind you while
youre writing; is she perhaps behind many of your characters?
BALDWIN
I wouldnt think so, but to tell you the truth, I wouldnt know. Ive got five
sisters. And in a funny way, there have been many women in my life, so it
wouldnt be my mother.
INTERVIEWER

Have you been through analysis?

BALDWIN
God no, never got adjusted.
INTERVIEWER
Both you and William Styron (intentionally or not) write about victims and
victimization. Styron has said he has never felt like a victim. Have you?
BALDWIN
Well, I refuse to. Perhaps the turning point in ones life is realizing that to be
treated like a victim is not necessarily to become one.
INTERVIEWER
Do you believe in a community of writers? Is that of any interest to you?
BALDWIN
No. Ive never seen one in any case . . . and I dont think any writer ever has.
INTERVIEWER
But werent William Styron and Richard Wright, say, important to you in
formulating your viewpoints?
BALDWIN
Richard was very important to me. He was much older. He was very nice to
me. He helped me with my first novel, really. That was 194445. I just
knocked on his door out in Brooklyn! I introduced myself, and of course hed
no idea who I was. There were no essays then, no fictionthis was 1944. I
adored him. I loved him. We were very unlike each other, as writers, probably
as people too. And as I grew older, that became more and more apparent.
And after that was Paris.
INTERVIEWER
And Styron?
BALDWIN
Well, as I was saying, Bill is a friend of mine who happens to be a writer.
INTERVIEWER
Did you take a position on his book about Nat Turner?

BALDWIN
I did. My position, though, is that I will not tell another writer what to write. If
you dont like their alternative, write yours. I admired him for confronting it,
and the result. It brought in the whole enormity of the issue of history versus
fiction, fiction versus history, and which is which . . . He writes out of reasons
similar to mine: about something which hurt him and frightened him. When I
was working on Another Country and Bill was working on Nat Turner, I stayed
in his guest house for five months. His hours and mine are very different. I
was going to bed at dawn, Bill was just coming up to his study to go to work;
his hours going on as mine went off. We saw each other at suppertime.
INTERVIEWER
What kind of conversations would you hold?
BALDWIN
We never spoke about our work, or very rarely. It was a wonderful time in my
life, but not at all literary. We sang songs, drank a little too much, and on
occasion chatted with the people who were dropping in to see us. We had a
certain common inheritance in terms of the music.
INTERVIEWER
What sort of music are you hearing while in the immediate process of writing?
Do you experience anything physical or emotional?
BALDWIN
No. Im very coldcold probably isnt the word I want: controlled. Writing for
me must be a very controlled exercise, formed by passions and hopes. That is
the only reason you get through it, otherwise you may as well do something
else. The act of writing itself is cold.
INTERVIEWER
Im going to presage my own question. Most of the novelists Ive spoken to
claim they read exceedingly fewer contemporary novels, but find themselves
drawn to plays, history, memoirs, biographies, and poetry. I believe this is
true for you as well.
BALDWIN
In my case it is due to the fact that Im always doing some kind of research.
And yes, I read many plays and a lot of poetry as a kind of apprenticeship.
You are fascinated, I am fascinated by a certain optica process of seeing
things. Reading Emily Dickinson, for example, and others who are quite far

removed from ones ostensible daily concerns, or obligations. They are freer,
for that moment, than you are partly because they are dead. They may also
be a source of strength. Contemporary novels are part of a universe in which
you have a certain role and a certain responsibility. And, of course, an
unavoidable curiosity.
INTERVIEWER
You read contemporary novels out of a sense of responsibility?
BALDWIN
In a way. At any rate, few novelists interest mewhich has nothing to do with
their values. I find most of them too remote for me. The world of John Updike,
for instance, does not impinge on my world. On the other hand, the world of
John Cheever did engage me. Obviously, Im not making a very significant
judgment about Updike. Its entirely subjective, what Im saying. In the main,
the concerns of most white Americans (to use that phrase) are boring, and
terribly, terribly self-centered. In the worst sense. Everything is contingent, of
course, on what you take yourself to be.
INTERVIEWER
Are you suggesting they are less concerned, somehow, with social injustice?
BALDWIN
No, no, you see, I dont want to make that kind of dichotomy. Im not asking
that anybody get on picket lines or take positions. That is entirely a private
matter. What Im saying has to do with the concept of the self, and the nature
of self-indulgence which seems to me to be terribly strangling, and so limited
it finally becomes sterile.
INTERVIEWER
And yet in your own writing you deal with personal experiences quite often.
BALDWIN
Yes, butand here Im in trouble with the language againit depends upon
how you conceive of yourself. It revolves, surely, around the multiplicity of
your connections. Obviously you can only deal with your life and work from
the vantage point of your self. There isnt any other vantage point, there is no
other point of view. I cant say about any of my characters that they are utter
fictions. I do have a sense of what nagged my attention where and when;
even in the dimmest sense I know how a character impinged on me in reality,
in what we call reality, the daily world. And then, of course, imagination has
something to do with it. But it has got to be triggered by something, it cannot

be triggered by itself.
INTERVIEWER
What is it about Emily Dickinson that moves you?
BALDWIN
Her use of language, certainly. Her solitude, as well, and the style of that
solitude. There is something very moving and in the best sense funny. She
isnt solemn. If you really want to know something about solitude, become
famous. That is the turn of the screw. That solitude is practically
insurmountable. Years ago I thought to be famous would be a kind of ten-day
wonder, and then I could go right back to life as usual. But people treat you
differently before you realize it. You see it in the wonder and the worry of your
intimates. On the other side of that is a great responsibility.
INTERVIEWER
Is ones past cluttered, as a celebrated writer?
BALDWIN
There are many witnesses to my past, people whove disappeared, people
who are dead, whom I loved. But I dont feel there are any ghosts, any
regrets. I dont feel that kind of melancholy at all. No nostalgia. Everything is
always around and before you. Novels that havent worked, loves, struggles.
And yet it all gives you something of immeasurable power.
INTERVIEWER
This brings us to your concern with reality as being history, with seeing the
present shaded by everything which occurred in a persons past. James
Baldwin has always been bound by his past, and his future. At forty, you said
you felt much older than that.
BALDWIN
That is one of those things a person says at forty, at forty especially. It was a
great shock to me, forty. And I did feel much older than that. Responding to
history, I think a person is in sight of his or her death around the age of forty.
You see it coming. You are not in sight of your death at thirty, less so at
twenty-five. You are struck by the fact of your mortality, that it is unlikely
youll live another forty years. So time alters you, actually becoming either an
enemy or a friend.
INTERVIEWER

You seem very troubledbut not by death?

BALDWIN
Yes, true, but not at all by death. Im troubled over getting my work done and
over all the things Ive not learned. Its useless to be troubled by death,
because then, of course, you cant live at all.
INTERVIEWER
Essentially, America has not changed that much, you told the New York
Times when Just Above My Head was being published. Have you?
BALDWIN
In some ways Ive changed precisely because America has not. Ive been
forced to change in some ways. I had a certain expectation for my country
years ago, which I know I dont have now.
INTERVIEWER
Yes, before 1968, you said, I love America.
BALDWIN
Long before then. I still do, though that feeling has changed in the face of it. I
think that it is a spiritual disaster to pretend that one doesnt love ones
country. You may disapprove of it, you may be forced to leave it, you may live
your whole life as a battle, yet I dont think you can escape it. There isnt any
other place to goyou dont pull up your roots and put them down
someplace else. At least not in a single lifetime, or, if you do, youll be aware
of precisely what it means, knowing that your real roots are always
elsewhere. If you try to pretend you dont see the immediate reality that
formed you I think youll go blind.
INTERVIEWER
As a writer, are there any particular battles you feel youve won?
BALDWIN
The battle of becoming a writer at all! Im going to be a great writer when I
grow up, I used to tell my mother when I was a little boy. And Im still going
to be a great writer when I grow up.
INTERVIEWER
What do you tell younger writers who come to you with the usual desperate
question: How do I become a writer?

BALDWIN
Write. Find a way to keep alive and write. There is nothing else to say. If you
are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if youre not
going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at
the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.
INTERVIEWER
Can you discern talent in someone?
BALDWIN
Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the
usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.
INTERVIEWER
Would you suggest that a young writer from a minority consecrate himself to
that minority, or is his first obligation his own self-realization as a writer?
BALDWIN
Your self and your people are indistinguishable from each other, really, in
spite of the quarrels you may have, and your people are all people.
INTERVIEWER
Wasnt Giovannis Room partially an attempt to break down these divisions,
pointing out that David could be white, black, or yellow?
BALDWIN
Certainly, for in terms of what happened to him, none of that mattered at all.
INTERVIEWER
Yet, later on, notably in the case of Rufus and Another Country, ones race
becomes essential to your story.
BALDWIN
Important in that particular novel, yes, but Another Country is called that
because it is trying to convey the reality of that country. The story would be
different if it were in France, or even in England.
INTERVIEWER
What is your present relationship with people like Ralph Ellison, Imamu
Baraka (LeRoi Jones) or Eldridge Cleaver?

BALDWIN
I never had a relationship with Cleaver. I was in difficulties because of
Cleaver, which I didnt want to talk about then, and dont wish to discuss now.
My real difficulty with Cleaver, sadly, was visited on me by the kids who were
following him, while he was calling me a faggot and the rest of it. I would
come to a town to speak, Cleveland, lets say, and he wouldve been standing
on the very same stage a couple of days earlier. I had to try to undo the
damage I considered he was doing. I was handicapped with Soul on Ice,
because what I might have said in those years about Eldridge would have
been taken as an answer to his attack on me. So I never answered it, and Im
not answering it now. Cleaver reminded me of an old Baptist minister I used
to work with when I was in the pulpit. I never trusted him at all. As for Baraka,
he and I have had a stormy time too, but were very good friends now.
INTERVIEWER
Do you read each others work?
BALDWIN
Yesat least I read his. And as for Ralph, I havent seen him in many years.
INTERVIEWER
You havent corresponded at all?
BALDWIN
No. I gather Ralph did not like what he considered I was doing to myself on
the civil-rights road. And so, we havent seen each other.
INTERVIEWER
If you were both to meet over lunch tomorrow, what might you talk about?
BALDWIN
Id love to meet him for lunch tomorrow, and share a bottle of bourbon, and
probably talk about the last twenty years we havent seen each other. I have
nothing against him in any case. And I love his great book. We disagreed
about tactics, I suppose. But I had to go through the civil-rights movement
and I dont regret it at all. And those people trusted me. There was something
very beautiful about that period, something life-giving for me to be there, to
march, to be a part of a sit-in, to see it through my own eyes.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think that now blacks and whites can write about each other, honestly

and convincingly?
BALDWIN
Yes, though I have no overwhelming evidence in hand. But I think of the
impact of spokespersons like Toni Morrison and other younger writers. I
believe what one has to do as a black American is to take white history, or
history as written by whites, and claim it allincluding Shakespeare.
INTERVIEWER
What other people write about me is irrelevant, you once wrote in Essence.
Was that meant to go unqualified; do you not relate to criticism in any way?
BALDWIN
It is never entirely true that you dont give a shit what others say about you,
but you must throw it out of your mind. I went through a very trying period,
after all, where on one side of town I was an Uncle Tom and on the other the
Angry Young Man. It could make ones head spin, the number of labels that
have been attached to me. And it was inevitably painful, and surprising, and
indeed, bewildering. I do care what certain people think about me.
INTERVIEWER
But not literary critics?
BALDWIN
Literary critics cannot be ones concern. Ideally, however, what a critic can do
is indicate where youve been excessive or unclear. As far as any sort of
public opinion is a question, I would say that one cannot possibly react to any
of it. Things may be said which hurt, and you dont like it, but what are you to
do? Write a White Paper, or a Black Paper, defending yourself? You cant do
that.
INTERVIEWER
You have often left your home in St. Paul, returning to America and going on
the road. Do you feel comfortable as a speaker?
BALDWIN
I have never felt comfortable as a speaker, no.
INTERVIEWER
You feel more at ease behind the typewriter?

BALDWIN
Well, certainly, although I used to be a preacher, which helps on the road.
INTERVIEWER
Can you talk a little more about your relationship to Richard Wright, under
whose aegis you received your first writing grant?
BALDWIN
As I said before, I just knocked on his door in New York. I was nineteen. And
he was very nice. The only trouble was I didnt drink in those years. He drank
bourbon. Now, Im going to save you the trouble of asking me about writers
and alcohol: I dont know any writers who dont drink. Everybody Ive been
close to drinks. But you dont drink while youre working. Its funny, because
it is all a reflex, like lighting a cigarette. Your drink is made and then you go
off to another place. When you finally get back to the drink its mainly water.
And the cigarette has gone out. Talking about Richard and our early hostile
period, which I thought was ridiculously blown out of proportion, I should say
that when I thought I was dealing with Richard, I was in fact thinking of
Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Toms Cabin. Richards Native Son was the
only contemporary representation there was of a black person in America.
One of the reasons I wrote what I did about the book is a technical objection,
which I uphold today. I could not accept the performance of the lawyer at the
end of the book. I was very explicit about that. I think it was simply absurd to
talk about this monster created by the American public, and then expect the
public to save it! Altogether, I found it too simpleminded. Insofar as the
American public creates a monster, they are not about to recognize it. You
create a monster and destroy it. It is part of the American way of life, if you
like. I reserve, in any case, the utmost respect for Richard, especially in light
of his posthumous work, which I believe is his greatest novel, Lawd Today.
Look it up.
INTERVIEWER
Is there any resistance today to black writers in publishing houses?
BALDWIN
There is an enormous resistance, though it differs from Wrights time. When I
was young, the joke was How many niggers you got at your plantation? Or,
more snidely, How many niggers you got at your publishing house? And
some had one, most had none. Thats not true now.
INTERVIEWER

How does it strike you that in many circles James Baldwin is known as a
prophetic writer?
BALDWIN
I dont try to be prophetic, as I dont sit down to write literature. It is simply
this: a writer has to take all the risks of putting down what he sees. No one
can tell him about that. No one can control that reality. It reminds me of
something Pablo Picasso was supposed to have said to Gertrude Stein while
he was painting her portrait. Gertrude said, I dont look like that. And
Picasso replied, You will. And he was right.

Elizabeth Hardwick, The Art of Fiction No. 87

Interviewed by Darryl Pinckney ISSUE 96, SUMMER 1985
undefined

Elizabeth Hardwick lives on the west side of Manhattan, on a quiet street near
enough to Central Park to have heard the crowds and speakers at the great
political demonstrations in Sheeps Meadow. Her apartment is light and
spacious. Like modern architecture, she says, it looks much better in
photographs. The building was designed for artists, and the living room is
dominated by a large window. Behind the enormous plants and the
freestanding tiles, one can see a comforting fixture of urban life: a fire
escape.
Her home is clearly that of a writer constantly at work, and strewn throughout
is a lifetimes accumulation of furniture, objects, paintings, posters,
photographs, records, heirlooms, and countless books. On either side of the
living room are more books: ceiling-high shelves of histories, fiction, and
poetry. It is a working library, accumulated with her late husband, the poet
Robert Lowell. The daily effort to keep a large library in order has made
Hardwick favor paperbacks, preferably those lightweight and storable ones
that can be whipped out on a bus or an airplanenonsmoking section
without too much fuss.
Just as there are books everywhere that indicate the life of the mind, so one
frequently comes upon notebooks and notepads on the coffee table, on the
dining room table, things in which she has jotted down lines, questions, ideas.
The typewriter goes from room to room, one day upstairs in her study, the
next morning downstairs. And then there are the manuscripts from former as
well as current students from her various writing classes, which she will read

and comment on extensively.

This interview took place in her home, where she occasionally puttered,
setting stray books in their places as we talked.

INTERVIEWER
I have the feeling you dont like to talk about yourself, at least not in a formal
way.
ELIZABETH HARDWICK
Well, I do a lot of talking and the I is not often absent. In general Id rather
talk about other people. Gossip, or as we gossips like to say, character
analysis.
INTERVIEWER
Sleepless Nights is reticent, perhaps, but it certainly has the tone of lived
experience, of a kind of autobiography.
HARDWICK
I guess so. After all, I wrote it in the first person and used my own name,
Elizabeth. Not very confessional, however. And not entirely taken from life,
rather less than the reader might think.
INTERVIEWER
Many of the essays in Seduction and Betrayal have an oddly personal tone.
The stress on certain parts of the texts shows that you have dug things out in
an unusual, somehow urgent manner, as if you had lived them. Im thinking
of the Jane Carlyle essay and your way of looking at Ibsens Rosmersholm.
HARDWICK
Jane Carlyle was real, but of course I didnt really know her, as the saying
goes. The people in Rosmersholm are figures of Ibsens imagination.
INTERVIEWER
What is the reason for your deep attraction to Ibsen?
HARDWICK
I dont know that I have a deep attraction for Ibsen. Sometimes I think hes an
awful dolt . . . wooden, and in certain plays stolidly grandiose like the

mountains that are such an unfortunate apotheosis in Little Eyolf and When
We Dead Awaken. I dont like the poetic Ibsen, but I have found myself deeply
engaged by the beauty, you might call it, of the old Ibsen domestic misery.
INTERVIEWER
Someone once said to me that he was fascinated by your essay on
Rosmersholm, about the triangle between the man and the two women. But
when he went to the play he couldnt always find your ideas there on the
page. What do you make of that?
HARDWICK
I certainly hope what I said is on Ibsens pages and of course I think it is. Still,
youre not writing an essay to give a rsum of the plots. You choose to write
because you think you have something fresh to say on a topic. That is, if
youre writing from choice and not just as a journeyman doing a job. Perhaps
its true that in reading certain works, not all works, I do sometimes enter a
sort of hallucinatory state and I think I see undercurrents and light in dark
places about the imagined emotions and actions. This often stimulates me to
write, particularly about novels. Of course the text is the object, the given,
and the period is not often ones own and if there is anything detestable it is
the looking at fictional characters as if they were your friends. I have found
that horrible inclination among students, more and more so. They dont know
the difference between calling a character silly and realizing that they are
reading a masterpiece of created, located, visionary silliness. I think every
reader and critic falls into a hallucinatory state and that is as true of the
technocrats, the deconstructionists, as of any others.
INTERVIEWER
When you say hallucinatory state, are you trying to describe how the
creative process works for you?
HARDWICK
Perhaps hallucinatory is too strong or too mysterious a word. What I meant
was that in reading books and planning to write about them, or maybe just in
reading certain books, you begin to see all sorts of not quite expressed
things, to make connections, sometimes to feel you have discovered or felt
certain things the author may not have been entirely conscious of. Its a sort
of creative or possessed reading and that is why I think even the most
technical of critics do the same thing, by their means making quite
mysterious discoveries. But as I said, the text is always the first thing. It has
the real claim on you, of course.
INTERVIEWER

Do you fall into this state when you write fiction?

HARDWICK
I dont fall into a state at all. I just meant to describe something happening in
the brain when it is stimulated by reading imaginative works. As for writing
fiction, well, you dont have any primary text, of course. You have to create
that, and yet the struggle seems to be to uncover things by language, to find
out what you mean and feel by the sheer effort of writing it down. By
expression you discover what you wish to express or what can be expressed,
by you. Things that are vague in the beginning have to be made concrete.
Often, what you thought was the creative idea ahead of you vanishes or
becomes something else.
INTERVIEWER
What comes first in sitting down to writeI guess were talking about fiction.
Is it a concept? Is it a character? Is it a scene?
HARDWICK
It takes many things to make a work of fiction, but I suppose it is true that
there is a kind of starting point in the mind, a point that may be different for
each piece of work. Sometimes I have had the impulse to begin fiction from a
single line I had in my head.
INTERVIEWER
Can you give an example?
HARDWICK
I remember that I started writing Sleepless Nights because of a single line.
The line was: Now I will start my novel, but I dont know whether to call
myself I or she.
INTERVIEWER
Was this a first line, a beginning line?
HARDWICK
No, it was to be the last line of the opening scene. I published the first
chapter in The New York Review of Books and the line was the ending of the
scene. But as I went on to write the book, I did call the narrator I and so I
deleted the line from the final text. Some readers noticed the omission and
asked me about it. I think now that I could have retained the line and just
gone on with the narrative I, as if to say I had made the decision.

INTERVIEWER
What did the line mean to you? That you knew it was going to be an
autobiographical novel?
HARDWICK
Of course that line is not a theme. It is a wondering aloud about structure and
also meant to indicate that sometimes in novels the use of the third person is
really a disguise for the first person. I mean certain fictions have the strong
feeling of autobiography even if they are written in the third person. Its
something a sensitive reader can feel.
INTERVIEWER
When you started Sleepless Nights did you know anything more than that it
would be an autobiographical novel?
HARDWICK
I wrote the first scene, starting with a description of a place and then going
on to the writing of an imaginary letter to Dearest M. The opening scene
dominated the book, set the tone, and then, of course, as I worked on it I had
to write the bookthat is, create scenes, encounters, and so on.
INTERVIEWER
Has the impulse for writing ever started from a last line?
HARDWICK
Maybe not a last line, but a notion of the ending can be a useful stimulus.
INTERVIEWER
Does the opening paragraph mostly concern mood? Or plot? Or character?
HARDWICK
I dont have many plots and perhaps as a justification I sometimes think: If I
want a plot Ill watch Dallas. I think its mood. No, I mean tone. Tone arrived
at by language. I cant write a story or an essay until I can, by revision after
revision, get the opening tone right. Sometimes it seems to take forever, but
when I have it I can usually go on. Its a matter of the voice, how you are
going to approach the task at hand. Its all language and rhythm and the
establishment of the relation to the material, of whos speaking, not speaking
as a person exactly, but as a mind, a sensibility.
INTERVIEWER

Can you always arrive at the tone you want?

HARDWICK
No, I cant, and when that happens I put the work aside. But Ive noticed that
the effort is always useful. I mostly use the things, sometime, somewhere,
that Ive abandoned. Theyve been worked on, exist, if only in a few pages
and the old yellow pages flaking away in a drawer turn out to be useful. I
dont know what Im thinking about a particular thing until I have some kind
of draft. Its the actual execution that tells me what I want to say, what I
always wanted to say when I started.
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean when you say that you dont know what is in your mind
until youve written it?
HARDWICK
Im not sure I understand the process of writing. There is, Im sure, something
strange about imaginative concentration. The brain slowly begins to function
in a different way, to make mysterious connections. Say, it is Monday, and
you write a very bad draft, but if you keep trying, on Friday, words, phrases,
appear almost unexpectedly. I dont know why you cant do it on Monday, or
why I cant. Im the same person, no smarter, I have nothing more at hand.
INTERVIEWER
Do you find that unique with yourself?
HARDWICK
I think its true of a lot of writers. Its one of the things writing students dont
understand. They write a first draft and are quite disappointed, or often
should be disappointed. They dont understand that they have merely begun,
and that they may be merely beginning even in the second or third draft. For
the great expansive prose writers, obviously this isnt the case. Somehow
everything is available to them all the time. Thats the real prose gift.
INTERVIEWER
What writers have had this gift?
HARDWICK
Tolstoy, Dickens, Henry James. All the greatly productive geniuses. I am very
struck by the revisions of Henry James. They seem to me always interesting,
but in the end quite minorchanges in a few words, shiftings. The powers of

concentration the great writers show are extraordinarily moving.

INTERVIEWER
Are there any tricks or devices that seem to help?
HARDWICK
For me, writing has not become easier after all these years. It is harder
perhaps because of the standards you set for your work. I suppose you have,
by effort, a greater command than you imagine. The fact that writing remains
so difficult is what puzzles.
INTERVIEWER
What is it about the writing process that gives you the most pleasure?
HARDWICK
The revision. Thats what I like, working on a page or a scene.
INTERVIEWER
What about help with revision? Did Cal [Robert Lowell] ever help you with the
books or essays?
HARDWICK
Not really. His suggestions were always wonderful, but so general I couldnt
make much use of them. And he was always revising his own work and
showing it to me and to his friends. He was revising something from the
moment he got up until the moment he went to sleep, if only in his head, and
so much of the time with him when you were alone was spent reading and
talking to him about what he had done during the day. And that was very
pleasant to me, it was always very interesting reading it, and it wasnt just to
me that he read his work in progress. I have noticed the same method with
other poets. I can remember having dear old I. A. Richards to dinner, and we
werent sitting there very long before the sheaf came out of the pocket of his
coat, and he read his new poems, and that was wonderful.
INTERVIEWER
You didnt offer your own work in progress in that way?
HARDWICK
Well, it was a little bit different, you know, prose being longer, and its not
quite the same as seeing a quatrain at the end of the day. Cal did read my
work, of course, and he was very encouraging and nice about it, and all of

that, but it wasnt the same as going over each little part.
INTERVIEWER
How about the intellectual content of the essays?
HARDWICK
I must say he often looked discomfited on that score. Sometimes he thought I
was too snippy.
INTERVIEWER
Really? Hed ask you to de-snip?
HARDWICK
I remember in one of the first issues of The New York Review I wrote a piece
about a biographical book on Robert Frost. It was more or less mild, but Cal
was quite annoyedannoyed for a short time. I noticed in Randall Jarrells
letters that he gave a bit of approval to my Frost essay and so I said to
myself, Okay, Cal? On the whole, Cal was encouraging. He liked women
writers and I dont think he ever had a true interest in a woman who wasnt a
writeran odd turn-on indeed, and one Ive noticed not greatly shared.
Women writers dont tend to be passive vessels or wives, saying, Oh, thats
good, dear.
INTERVIEWER
Was it stimulating to your own work to be involved in that sort of
tremendously volatile writers atmosphere?
HARDWICK
What do you mean involved? That would have been my atmosphere no
matter what. Literature was always my passion. I do remember however that
I was once asked if I had felt overpowered by Lowells work, meaning, I guess,
if it overpowered my own. I said, Well, I should hope so. I had great regard
and admiration for it. Learned from him and from it, got pleasure from it.
INTERVIEWER
If you could say what was particularly enriching about your life with Lowell,
what would it be? The spirit of it, or technical literary matters?
HARDWICK
The quality of his mindquite the most thrilling Ive known. Once at dinner
something came up about what people you have known whom you

considered to be geniuses. Mary McCarthy was there. We all thought for a

while and Mary and I came up with the same two names. Cal and Hannah
Arendt.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think is the essential piece of equipment a writer must have?
HARDWICK
Well, you know, there is such a thing as talent, a bit of talent. Ill leave it at
that.
INTERVIEWER
Given the talent, should writers be concerned with the issues of the times . . .
things like that?
HARDWICK
Not necessarily. Of course they usually are concerned with the issues of the
times in some way. The variety and strangeness of literary works is amazing.
You wake up one morning and someones done something a little bit new,
something fresh and genuine, a new accent, quality of experience, way of
composing and structuring. Thats very beautiful to me. I am very happy
when I see an interesting, gifted struggle with fictional form. I know as well as
the next person that many fine things use traditional methods of narration
and there will be, naturally, much that is traditional in those who experiment.
Here I am not talking about a great innovator like Joyce, but about lesser
struggles. When I open a new work of fiction I like to notice the way it is
constructed, to learn something from it. Like Milan Kunderas latest novel,
The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The narrator comes in and out and yet
the form shifts to stories, to feelings, actions the narrator could not have
known. I think it is done successfully there. There is always the problem of
who is seeing, who is thinking. I am excited when I feel the author is trying to
cope with this dilemmaand it is often a compositional dilemma.
INTERVIEWER
Can talent be taught?
HARDWICK
Perhaps not. I try to uncover what talent may be hiding by teaching creative
reading. That turns out to be rather difficultto read as a writer reads. I
guess that is what I meant by reading in a hallucinatory state. Not the
perfect phrase.

INTERVIEWER
What state of mind are you in when the writing seems to be moving along?
HARDWICK
I dont know. I dont know why I am so helplessly led to condensation in both
my fiction and my essays. Some people find it hard to follow my meaning
because I dont spell it out, not entirely. My writing is simple but I like to be
sort of emphatic and then let it go. I remember when I was writing exams in
school Id be the first one finished. All these people writing away. As I look
back on it I think I didnt want to tell the teacher what he already knew, but to
try to get at things from an anglenothing very grand, just a little twist. That
little twist always got me an A minus.
INTERVIEWER
In your first novel, The Ghostly Lover, and in your early short stories that
appeared in various magazines, you seemed to be a Southern writer. And
then you became much more identified with New York. Why is that?
HARDWICK
I dont like to quote myself, but since one doesnt have many ideasor
perhaps just I dont have many ideasI will have to quote what I said in a
Southern literature discussion. That is, that being a Southern writer is a
decision, not a fate. Naturally, I love the best Southern writing and spent my
youth, up through the university, in Lexington, Kentucky, a very beautiful and
interesting place. But I think a critical, defining moment came into my life one
summer. I had received a fellowship to LSU, a magical place then, with the
Southern Review and all sorts of brilliant writers around. And then in August I
suddenly didnt want to go and instead I went to Columbia . . . and without a
fellowship. Im amazed I was accepted.
INTERVIEWER
And then what happened?
HARDWICK
Well, ever trendy, I decided I had to specialize in the seventeenth century
because that was the time of the Metaphysical poets, John Donne and so on.
That was the hot period. After the first seminar I woke up and thought, I dont
even know when the seventeenth century was! Of course I rushed out and
read some books fast, filling in my literary knowledge, which began in 1920.
It was all rather fun. It was New York and even back home I had been reading
Partisan Review and had already been a communist and an ex-communist,

left variety, before I got here.

INTERVIEWER
Is that true?
HARDWICK
Yes, I wouldnt say it otherwise.
INTERVIEWER
I remember you once said that your dream when you were young was to be a
Jewish intellectual.
HARDWICK
I said that as a joke, but it was more or less true. What I meant was the
enlightenment, a certain deracination which I value, an angular vision, love of
learning, cosmopolitanism, a word that practically means Jewish in Soviet
lexicography. Right now, Id say my remark depended upon which Jewish
intellectual. I am not sympathetic with the political attitudes of certain
members of the New Right who happen to be Jewish intellectuals, and less
sympathetic to the Christian Right, most of whom are scarcely to be called
intellectuals at all. I dont like the chauvinism, the militarism, the smugness,
and the Social Darwinism, that jargon term, the support of Ronald Reagan . . .
and all the rest.
INTERVIEWER
How do you feel about the religiosity of the New Right, the fundamentalists,
and Reagans courting of them?
HARDWICK
I think the fundamentalists and Reagans use of religion is an appalling
blasphemy. The idea that God wants a strong America. Many Americans will
naturally want a strong America, but I dont know that God is in agreement. I
hadnt thought of Him as being a patriot . . . I hadnt thought of Him as in a
state of desire except against idolaters, and as we know from the Old
Testament it is very easy to sink into idolatry, which a good deal of the flagwaving is just now. As for evangelizing Christians, their vulgarization of the
Scriptures surpasses belief, their incredible assumption of Jesus as a pal in
the cheering stand.
INTERVIEWER
Are you interested in religion?

HARDWICK
Of course, even though Im a nonbeliever. I was brought up a Presbyterian. I
still feel an attachment to the Presbyterian Church, where I know all the
hymns and where I first felt the beauty and resonance of the Scriptures.
Actually, when I lived in New England I was surprised to find that the
denomination hardly existed therenot that if it had I was ready to put on my
pumps and trot off every Sunday. The Scotch and the Scotch-Irish, which my
mothers family were, mostly migrated to the upper South, especially to
North Carolina, where she grew up. In New England youre supposed to think
that the Presbyterians and the Congregationalists are more or less the same,
but my seventeenth-century studies told me otherwise.
INTERVIEWER
What are you trying to say about religion . . . as a nonbeliever?
HARDWICK
I dont know. It may sound glib but I suppose for me religion is a vast,
valuable museum . . . and, yes, I know the treasures of it are not the same as
going to the Louvre . . . although now that I think of it, theres a good deal of
overlapping, isnt there?
INTERVIEWER
Do you see any literary influence of the New Right, of the neoconservatives?
HARDWICK
I dont know about influence, but I do see that, as always, cultural and
political attitudes swim along in the same bloodstream. Defense of American
values, as these notions are called, can have a wide swing, picking up all
sorts of things like homosexuals or fast women who are not doing their bit for
the preservation of the American family . . . For myself, I like many
homosexuals and many self-absorbed, childless women, and I cant see them
as a menace to the republic, or even to Republicans. Some of my best friends
. . . and so on.
INTERVIEWER
Do you find any conservative attitudes specifically literary?
HARDWICK
I notice the creeping development of what I would call the Conservative
Realism, because it brings to mind the intellectual follies of Socialist Realism.
You get the idea that disaffected, even laid-back, attitudes in fiction, certain

choices of despairing subject matter, are contemptible in a writer residing in

the fullness of the United States. Certain tones of reflection are seen as a
snide assault on the Free World.
INTERVIEWER
For instance?
HARDWICK
Its a rich field, but I happen to remember a particular review of Ann Beatties
stories that said, They seem treacherous to the energy and heroic idealism
that are her countrys saving grace. Now, I ask you! That appeared in
Partisan Review, which is not a neocon magazine, but bore from within, as
we used to say. Also, there is Norman Podhoretzs consignment of Henry
Adams and all his works to the ash heap of history.
INTERVIEWER
You have taught a great deal. Why do you think many writers resent
teaching? Do you agree with them that it interferes in subtle ways with their
own writing?
HARDWICK
Nothing interferes with my own writing except my often irresolute character
and of course the limitations of my talent.
INTERVIEWER
You seem rather accommodating and modest and yet you can be aggressive
in your writing.
HARDWICK
And not only in my writing, alas. I dont like aggressiveness and I detest
anger, a quality some feminists and many psychiatrists think one should
cultivate in order to express the self. I was astonished by the number of
obituaries of Lillian Hellman that spoke with reverence of her anger. I dont
see anger as an emotion to be cultivated and, in any case, it is not in short
supply.
INTERVIEWER
Can you talk a bit about your backgroundschool, childhood.
HARDWICK
Childhood? I came from a large family and many of my brothers and sisters

were older than I, and I learned from them since they were, most of them,
going to college when I was growing up. It was not an intellectual
atmosphere, but a stimulating one. Like all writers I know of, the early days
were dominated by a love of reading, just reading, like eating, anything
around. It was not until I got to the University of Kentucky that the range of
books was quite suddenly and very excitingly extended. I had some
extraordinary teachers, some of the refugees from Europe, and very smart
friends, some clever and know-it-all from New York, which appealed to me,
and some very bright and lovable from just down home. I was not aware of
any intellectual deprivation and there was none in the general sense. But
arent we all self-educated, and of course our self-education never includes all
of the things we would like to know or need to know.
INTERVIEWER
And your career?
HARDWICK
Is it a career? I mean is that the right word for being a writer? Its a strange
life . . . The most peculiar thing about it is that when you write you are
required to think and having once noticed that, you observe how little the
rest of life makes such a demand. It demands something else, many things of
course, but not sitting and thinking the way you must when you write, when
you revise, when you abandon, start over, refine, all of that. About my own
efforts, I sometimes feel I can say, Well, Im doing my best, or have done my
best. That is not the supreme thrill for one who has spent her life reading
superb writings of all kinds. But I am happy to do what I can.
INTERVIEWER
Some young women I know think of you as very fortunate to have your place
in things, your work and so forth.
HARDWICK
As I have grown older I see myself as fortunate in many ways. It is fortunate
to have had all my life this passion for studying and enjoying literature and
for trying to add a bit to it as interestingly as I can. This passion has given me
much joy, it has given me friends who care for the same things, it has given
me employment, escape from boredom, everything. The greatest gift is the
passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you
knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral
illumination.
INTERVIEWER

Do you think there are special difficulties in being a woman writer?

HARDWICK
Woman writer? A bit of a crunch trying to get those two words together . . . I
guess I would say no special difficulty, just the usual difficulties of the arts.
INTERVIEWER
So you feel its the same for men and women?
HARDWICK
Nothing is the same for men and women.
INTERVIEWER
Not the same and . . . what else?
HARDWICK
Actually I have noticed lately a good deal of bitchiness with regard to certain
women writers. Susan Sontag, for instance. The public scourging she was
subjected to from all sides seemed to me disgusting and unworthy.
INTERVIEWER
What public scourging are you referring to?
HARDWICK
A sort of extended flap about a speech she made at a public gathering in
which she spoke of communism as fascism with a human face and other
matters. This was followed by attacks from the Left and the Right that
seemed to go on for months. She was also scorned for writing so much about
Europeans, the French particularly. I think her being a woman, a learned one,
a femme savante, had something to do with it. As an intellectual with very
special gifts and attitudes, it was somehow felt that this made her a proper
object for ridicule of a coarse kind. I believe the tone was different because
she was seen as a very smart, intellectually ambitious woman.
INTERVIEWER
Intellectual woman? Arent you yourself one of them?
HARDWICK
Let me quote from The Land of Ulro, the latest book by the poet Czeslaw
Milosz. The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

INTERVIEWER
But, these days, women writers fare about as well as men, dont they?
HARDWICK
In general, of course. Just as many atrocious women writers are laughing all
the way to the bank as men. But I do feel there is an inclination to punish
women of what you might call presumption of one kind or another.
INTERVIEWER
Which women?
HARDWICK
For instance, Joan Didion and Renata Adler. I havent found two books
recently that have seemed to me more imaginative, intelligent, and original
than Democracy and Pitch Dark. In the reviews, at least in many of them, I
felt a note of contempt and superiority, often expressed in a lame, inept
effort to parody . . . And when you think of what the big guys have been
turning out! And the ponderous, quaking reviews they receive!
INTERVIEWER
You mean theyre getting away with something? What big guys?
HARDWICK
Never mind, never mind.
INTERVIEWER
What about reviewers today?
HARDWICK
I notice that many of them in very important places havent written anything
except their reviews, their quick, short reviews, composed with an air of easy
authority. For the most part, I think the authority should be in some way
earned. Well, they pass the night perhaps . . . When a real writer discusses
literature and culture you will notice a difference in style, in carefulness, and
you will actually find ideas, illuminations, oddities and not merely yes-or-no
opinions.
INTERVIEWER
Are you saying its not entirely fair for a critic to do nothing but practice
criticism?

HARDWICK
No. Let me say that criticism, analysis, reflection is a natural response to the
existence in the world of works of art. It is an honorable and even an exalted
endeavor. Without it, works of art would appear in a vacuum, as if they had
no relation to the minds experiencing them. It would be a dismal, unthinkable
world with these shooting stars arousing no comment, leaving no trace. But it
is the mind of the critic, somehow, the establishment of his own thought and
values, that counts; and that establishment is the authority of the voice,
whether it comes from creative work in the arts or creative work in criticism.
When I read a review, a mere short review, I am more interested at first in
who is doing the reviewing than in the work under discussion. The name,
what is attached to it by previous work, by serious thought, tells me whether
it is likely to have any meaning or value for me. It is not a question of right or
wrong specific opinions, but of the quality of the mind.
INTERVIEWER
You have been criticized for your review of Simone de Beauvoirs The Second
Sex in A View of My Own. Would you still stand on that?
HARDWICK
No, I wouldnt. Its a wonderful, remarkable book. Nothing that has come
since on the matter of women compares to it. When I wrote my comments I
was thinking of existentialism and the idea that one can choose and not be
dominated by the given . . . something like that. And of course thinking back
on my remarks I see how much has changed since the 1950s, especially in
the manner of life for women. You are still weaker than men in muscular
force, but can sleep in the streets if you like, even, alas, if that is the only
place you have to sleep, and go to Arabia in your jeans and knapsack . . . and
much, much more.
INTERVIEWER
I was present a few years ago at a panel discussion where you were asked
who was the greatest American female novelist, and you said Henry James. I
had the feeling you meant something serious about that.
HARDWICK
Such remarks dont bear scrutiny. Did I actually say that? I do remember
saying once that maybe the greatest female novelist in English was
Constance Garnett. Sometimes I try to lighten the gloom of discussions but I
notice that no one laughs. Instead you see a few people writing down the
name.

INTERVIEWER
I have the impression that in your most recent stories about New YorkThe
Bookseller, Back Issues, and On the Eveyou are using the city almost
as a text and the characters you have chosen are instruments of decoding. Or
is that too mechanistic for the way you place these people, catch the start
and stop of their lives?
HARDWICK
I dont know about decoding New York. Its a large place, oh yes. And its a
place, isnt it? Still very much a place, or so I think. Theres not much good
feeling about New York, in spite of the T-shirts and the Big Apple and so on.
INTERVIEWER
You seem to be faithful to it.
HARDWICK
I like cities, big cities and even medium-sized cities. If I were traveling about
America, Id always want to spend the night downtown. If I could still find
downtown. Yes, Im faithful to New York, one might say. Its ours, our
countrys, our great metropolis. Many people no longer like the melting-pot
notion and seem to feel there are too many poor trying to be melted in the
great vat. Of course everybody hates poor people. Theyre a damned
nuisance. Always wanting something. Perhaps they used to be a part of the
scheme of things, a part of nature, always with us and so on. But you might
say they dont fit in anymore, or so I think many people see it.
INTERVIEWER
In a talk at the Columbia School of Architecture, you spoke of the increasing
Bombayism of New York. What did you mean?
HARDWICK
Well, Bombay is called the New York of India, and I guess New York is
becoming the Bombay of the U.S. What I had in mind was the increasing
separation of the classes, the gap, as of another species. The streets filled
with Untouchables. Just look the other way and move on. The intractable,
milling others for whom you have no solution. Roll up the window of the limo.
Step aside and into a cab . . . New York is a city of the rich and the poor. Its a
terrible place for the middle classes, and for what you would call the workers
who run the elevators, build the buildings, clerk in the stores, cook in the
restaurants. Manhattan is not for them. They get on the subway and go to the
other boroughs at night. So the culture of the city, the vitality, the promise is

more and more restricted. Theres not a foot of living space and what there is
is so overpriced as to raise the dead. That is a violation of the contract of the
city as we knew it. When you think of old New York, I, at least, dont think of
the patricians, but of the Lower East Side and Harlemboth are gone, wiped
out as images of promise, change, relief from the old country or from the
South or whatever, as places that created styles like the jazziness of Harlem
that captivated Europe and the experience of generations of immigrants.
INTERVIEWER
Are you trying to express this in the fiction youre working on?
HARDWICK
I know that I cant. I realize how narrow my knowledge of the city is. I cant
take it in as a whole. I feel I know less about it than when I first came here,
but I very much like to think about it and care about it. I am using it as the
landscape of my fiction just now, but whether I can make an image of the city
itself I dont know. Everything in the stories I have done recently is imaginary.
I even had to go to the public library and look around.
INTERVIEWER
You mean in Back Issues where you met the Greek?
HARDWICK
Ive never met a Greek in my life.
INTERVIEWER
The shop in The Bookseller reminded me of every secondhand shop Ive
seen in Manhattan.
HARDWICK
I hardly ever go into a bookstore because, instead of buying, I would like to
give away about five thousand of my seven thousand books, which are
weighing on me like some suffocating plague.
INTERVIEWER
Ill take them.
HARDWICK
Theyre yours. Bring your van. I cant find those I want, thousands have not
been dusted in years. I miss the time when I used to go into the old
secondhand shops, looking for the modern classics. What a pleasure that

was, not having them and finding them. And then to get volumes of history,
all the odd tomes.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think of the state of publishing just now?
HARDWICK
Insofar as making money is concerned it is better now not to be an author
when you write a book. Being a writer just mucks it up. I see that when I look
at the best-seller list of books by movie stars and doctors, although some
literateurs make money, fortunately. But of course the best-seller list, poor
old thrashed dog, is not what things are about. Otherwise I dont think
publishing changes much. Its still sort of a running faucet and words and
pages pour out. I doubt that many worthwhile books dont make it to the
printing presses. I like sometimes to think otherwise.
INTERVIEWER
Why do you like to think otherwise?
HARDWICK
Just the idea that something brilliant and unacceptable, something too quirky
and original is being created. In general I guess I feel that what we have is
what is there.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel that the European novel, the Latin American novel, the African
novel, the dissident writings are superior to what is being done here?
HARDWICK
Superior, who knows? In some ways, I suppose we are left behind in the great
themes that arrive from the feeling of displacement and loss. V. S. Naipaul
said something about English fictionits all tea parties or something like
that. We seem to have divorce and adultery and being young with your
parents and being a bit gay here and there, or quite gaycan I still say
queer?and drinking beer at the truck stop instead of getting ahead. But we
live in a world of displaced, agonized talents who have lost country and
language and family and whose condition represents so much of this century.
The survival of those talents, the imaginative rendering of their experience is
extraordinarily moving and large. Of course its all in the telling. We are a
protected country even though so many of us are whipped to a frenzy about
the dangers around us and feel the best thing we can do for our citizens is to
push them into a siege mentality. But meanwhile . . . meanwhile, you can be

quite happy and make quite a good living crying havoc and getting out the
siege vote. Let me say that I would not want our country overrun in order to
create fiction and poetry. All Im saying is that the introversion of our
literature just now makes it narrower than the exile writing. But everyone
knows that.
INTERVIEWER
Who are the readers?
HARDWICK
I dont know. It is thought that the present young generation doesnt know
much about literature, hasnt read much . . . and yet a lot of the writing of the
last decades is full of parodies, mimicry, learned references of a sort and
readers seem to get it. I always wonder who buys the books. 100,000 in print,
the ads say. Fifty thousand may have come from knowing that the first fifty
thousand bought the book. Thats okay. Especially if its something of value. I
dont think its a good idea for writers to think too much about the publishing
world. I sense in a good many books, even in books by the best writers, an
anxiety about how it will do in the marketplace. You can feel it on the page, a
sort of sweat of calculation. As if to say, well, it will be a few years before the
next one and I had better be sure I dont let this chance to make some money
pass by. But no more about publishing.
INTERVIEWER
Okay, no more about publishing. May I ask you how you feel about growing
older?
HARDWICK
You can always ask. Or perhaps no one need ask. Just another piece of rotten
luck. No, I havent found anything good to say about it. Not a condition that
can be recommended. Its only value is that it spares you the opposite, not
growing older. People do cling to consciousness, and under the most dreadful
circumstances. It shows you that it is all we have, doesnt it? Waking up, the
first and the last privilege, waking up once more.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think it is more painful for women than for men?
HARDWICK
More about women and men? About something so burdensome it doesnt
seem valuable to make distinctions. Oh, the dear grave. I like what Gottfried
Benn wrote, something like, May I die in the spring when the ground is soft

and easy to plough.

INTERVIEWER
I notice that you quote poets a lot.
HARDWICK
Well, you dont exactly quote prose I guess, although I often remember prose
lines and sayings.
INTERVIEWER
Has the reading of poetry and the knowing of poets influenced your own
style? Some have thought so.
HARDWICK
I dont know. Certainly Cal had a great influence on every aspect of my life. In
literary matters, his immense learning and love of literature were a constant
magic for me. As an influence on my own writing, that is more difficult to
figure out . . . Let me shift the subject a little. Maybe I was led to this by Cals
library, led to the prose written by poets. The poets prose is one of my
passions. I like the offhand flashes, the absence of the lumber in the usual
prose . . . the quickness, the deftness, confidence, and even the relief from
spelling everything out, plank by plank.
INTERVIEWER
Can you give an example?
HARDWICK
Well, here is a beautiful sentence, just right, inspired, a bit of prose Ive
memorized. It is by Pasternak. It goes: The beginning of April surprised
Moscow in the white stupor of returning winter. On the seventh, it began to
thaw for the second time, and on the fourteenth when Mayakovsky shot
himself, not everyone had yet become accustomed to the novelty of spring. I
love the rhythm of the beginning of April . . . on the seventh . . . on the
fourteenth and the way the subject, Mayakovskys suicide, is honored by the
beauty of this introduction to the account. Its in Safe Conduct, Pasternaks
autobiographical writing.
INTERVIEWER
Perhaps this leads to the subject of biography. You had a review in The New
York Times of a biography of Katherine Anne Porter. There you had some
rough things to say about the present practice.

HARDWICK
Last summer I had a striking experience. On the same day I received two
letters, written by different people, each saying she was writing a biography
of an author recently dead, an author not at all a household word. Two letters
on the same day. I didnt know the author, but perhaps Ill merit a footnote in
the book saying I did not know her. Or be thanked in the preface. Biography is
a scrofulous cottage industry, done mostly by academics who get grants and
have a good time going all over the place interviewing. How seldom it is that
one has ever heard of the person writing the biography. What are the models,
what are the qualifications? And it is not only the full-scale computer printout
that these things are, but the books brought forth by lovers, friends from
youth, cousins, whatever. I remember how horrified Dickens was when he
met, in later life, the model for Dora in David Copperfield. Now Dora would
hire a hack and write about Dickens. I have just read Auden in Love by
Dorothy Farnan, the stepmother of Chester Kallman. I quite disapprove of the
impertinence and the celestial glow around herself and her intimacy. Both
Auden and Chester would be mute, motionless, aghast. Such books diminish
the celebrated object and aggrandize the biographer or memoirist. I
understand from the reviews of a new book about Agee that the swarm and
smarm of little facts degrade the memory most of us have of Agee. Think
how sweet Trelawny now appears; and De Quinceys beautiful memories of
the Lake Poets, candid indeed, are almost a valentine because there is some
equity between the subject and the author. And serious, incomparable
reflection.
INTERVIEWER
How do you feel about Ian Hamiltons biography of Lowell?
HARDWICK
Hamilton is very intelligent and a very fine writer. Still the book is composed
along contemporary lines and there is too little of Hamilton in it since most of
the stage is given to raw documentation. When I finished it, I was reminded of
Sir Walter Raleighs executioner, who said, There is not another such head to
be chopped off!
INTERVIEWER
Are you working on any fiction now? A future novel?
HARDWICK
Oh, yes. What are you working on? When one writer asks another that, he
immediately apologizes, as if for a gaffe . . . I might say Im working on
working on a novel . . . I do hope Ill be writing a novel. I have some of it, but

it is slow, of course, the writing. I hope not the work. Yes, I am writing fiction.

Author photograph by Marion Ettlinger.

Edward Albee, The Art of Theater No. 4
Interviewed by William Flanagan ISSUE 39, FALL 1966
undefined
EDWARD ALBEE. PHOTO BY MONICA SIMOES.

The interview happened on a scalding, soggy-aired Fourth of July in a sunny

room in Albees small, attractive country house in Montauk, Long Island.
Keeping in mind his luxuriously appointed house in New York Citys Greenwich
Village, one finds the country place dramatically modest by comparison. With
the exception of a handsome, newly built tennis court (in which the
playwright takes a disarmingly childlike pleasure and pride) and an
incongruously grand Henry Moore sculpture situated high on a landscaped
terrace that commands a startling view of the sea, the simplicity of the place
leaves one with the curious impression that the news of the personal wealth
his work has brought him has not quite reached the playwright-in-residence
at Montauk. Still, it is in his country house that he generally seems most at
ease, natural, at home.
Albee was dressed with a mildly ungroomed informality. He was as yet
unshaven for the day and his neo-Edwardian haircut was damply askew. He
appeared, as the climate of the afternoon demanded, somewhat
uncomfortable.
The interviewer and subject have been both friends and composer-writer
collaborators for about eighteen years. But Albees barbed, poised, and
elegantly guarded public press style took over after the phrasing of the first
questionthough perhaps it was intermittently penetrated during the course
of the talk.

INTERVIEWER
One of your most recent plays was an adaptation of James Purdys novel
Malcolm. It had as close to one hundred percent bad notices as a play could

get. The resultant commercial catastrophe and quick closing of the play
apart, how does this affect your own feeling about the piece itself?
EDWARD ALBEE
I see youre starting with the hits. Well, I retain for all my plays, I suppose, a
certain amount of enthusiasm. I dont feel intimidated by either the
unanimously bad press that Malcolm got or the unanimously good press that
some of the other plays have received. I havent changed my feeling about
Malcolm. I liked doing the adaptation of Purdys book. I had a number of
quarrels with the production, but then I usually end up with quarrels about all
of my plays. With the possible exception of the little play The Sandbox, which
takes thirteen minutes to perform, I dont think anything Ive done has
worked out to perfection.
INTERVIEWER
While it doesnt necessarily change your feeling, does the unanimously bad
critical response open questions in your mind?
ALBEE
I imagine that if we had a college of criticism in this country whose opinions
more closely approximated the value of the works of art inspected, it might;
but as often as not, I find relatively little relationship between the work of art
and the immediate critical response it gets. Every writers got to pay some
attention, I suppose, to what his critics say because theirs is a reflection of
what the audience feels about his work. And a playwright, especially a
playwright whose work deals very directly with an audience, perhaps he
should pay some attention to the nature of the audience responsenot
necessarily to learn anything about his craft, but as often as not merely to
find out about the temper of the time, what is being tolerated, what is being
permitted.
INTERVIEWER
Regarding adaptations in general, can you think of any by American
playwrights that you admire at all?
ALBEE
No, I cant think of any that I admire. Ive done adaptations for two reasons:
first, to examine the entire problem of adaptationto see what it felt like; and
second, because I admired those two booksThe Ballad of the Sad Caf and
Malcolmvery much and thought they belonged on the stage; I wanted to
see them on the stage, and felt more confident, perhaps incorrectly, in my
own ability to put them on the stage than in most adapters.

INTERVIEWER
One of the local reviewers, after Malcolm came out, referred to it as Edward
Albees play of the year, rather as if to suggest that this is a conscious goal
youve set for yourself, to have a play ready every year.
ALBEE
Do you remember the Thurber cartoon of the man looking at his police dog
and saying, If youre a police dog, wheres your badge? Its the function of a
playwright to write. Some playwrights write a large number of plays, some
write a small number. I dont set out to write a play a year. Sometimes Ive
written two plays a year. There was a period of a year and half when I only
wrote half a play. If it depresses some critics that I seem prolific, well, thats
their problem as much as mine. Theres always the danger that there are so
damn many things that a playwright can examine in this society of ours
things that have less to do with his artistic work than have to do with the
critical and aesthetic environmentthat perhaps he does have to worry
about whether or not he is writing too fast. But then also, perhaps he should
worry about getting as many plays on as possible before the inevitable ax
falls.
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean by the inevitable ax?
ALBEE
If you examine the history of any playwright of the past twenty-five or thirty
yearsIm not talking about the comedy boys, Im talking about the more
serious writersit seems inevitable that almost every one has been
encouraged until the critics feel that they have built them up beyond the
point where they can control them; then its time to knock them down again.
And a rather ugly thing starts happening: the playwright finds himself
knocked down for works that quite often are just as good or better than the
works hes been praised for previously. And a lot of playwrights become
confused by this and they start doing imitations of what theyve done before,
or they try to do something entirely different, in which case they get accused
by the same critics of not doing what they used to do so well.
INTERVIEWER
So, its a matter of not being able to win either way.
ALBEE
Actually, the final evaluation of a play has nothing to do with immediate

audience or critical response. The playwright, along with any writer,

composer, painter in this society, has got to have a terribly private view of his
own value, of his own work. Hes got to listen to his own voice primarily. Hes
got to watch out for fads, for what might be called the critical aesthetics.
INTERVIEWER
Why do you think the reviews were so lacerating against Malcolma play
that might simply have been dismissed as not being very good.
ALBEE
It seemed to me the critics loathed something. Now whether they loathed
something above and beyond the play itself, its rather dangerous for me to
say. I think its for the critics to decide whether or not their loathing of the
play is based on something other than the plays merits or demerits. They
must search their own souls, or whatever.
INTERVIEWER
When you say that the play was badly produced
ALBEE
I didnt like the way it was directed, particularly. It was the one play of mine
of all of themthat got completely out of my hands. I let the director take
over and dictate the way things should be done. I did it as an experiment.
INTERVIEWER
What do you mean as an experiment?
ALBEE
As a playwright, one has to make the experiment finally to see whether
theres anything in this notion that a director can contribute creatively, as
opposed to interpretively.
INTERVIEWER
Do you believe that a director has any creative vitality of his own?
ALBEE
Well, thats a very iffy question, as President Roosevelt used to say. I
imagine as an axiom you could say that the better the play, the less
creativity the director need exert.
INTERVIEWER

Have you ever had the experience of finding out that the directors way was a
certain enlightenment?
ALBEE
I cant answer that honestly, because something very curious happens. In
rehearsals I get so completely wrapped up with the reality thats occurring on
stage that by the time the play has opened Im not usually quite as aware of
the distinctions between what Id intended and the result. There are many
ways of getting the same result.
INTERVIEWER
Well, you talk about keeping complete control of your plays. Lets say that
youd envisioned in your own mind a certain scene being done a certain way.
ALBEE
Im not terribly concerned about which characters are standing on the righthand side of the stage.
INTERVIEWER
Thats not the point Im trying to make. In the preparation of the early KazanWilliams successes, Williams was in constant conflict with Kazan, and yet
Kazan would come up with the one thing that would finally make the play
work.
ALBEE
Do we know that it was better than Williamss original idea?
INTERVIEWER
According to his own alleged view of it, yes.
ALBEE
Some writers view of things depends upon the success of the final result. Id
rather stand or fall on my own concepts. But there is a fine line to be drawn
between pointing up something or distorting it. And one has always got to be
terribly careful, since the theater is made up of a whole bunch of prima
donnas, not to let the distortions occur. Ive seen an awful lot of plays that Id
read before they were put into production and been shocked by whats
happened to them. In the attempt to make them straightforward and
commercially successful, a lot of things go out the window. Im just saying
that in the theater, which is a sort of jungle, one does have to be a little bit
careful. One mustnt be so rigid or egotistical to think that every comma is

sacrosanct. But at the same time there is the danger of losing control and
finding that somebody else has opened a play and not you.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you decide to become a playwright? You wrote poems without
notable success, and then suddenly decided to write a play, The Zoo Story.
ALBEE
Well, when I was six years old I decided, not that I was going to be, but with
my usual modesty, that I was a writer. So I starting writing poetry when I was
six and stopped when I was twenty-six because it was getting a little better,
but not terribly much. When I was fifteen I wrote seven hundred pages of an
incredibly bad novelits a very funny book I still like a lot. Then, when I was
nineteen I wrote a couple hundred pages of another novel, which wasnt very
good either. I was still determined to be a writer. And since I was a writer, and
here I was twenty-nine years old and I wasnt a very good poet and I wasnt a
very good novelist, I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have
worked out a little better.
INTERVIEWER
With regard to Zoo Storywas its skill and power and subsequent success a
surprise and revelation to you?
ALBEE
A lot interests mebut nothing surprises me particularly. Not that I took it for
granted that it was going to be skillful and powerful. Im not making any
judgment about the excellence or lack of it in the play. But it did not come as
a surprise to me that Id written it. You must remember Ive been watching
and listening to a great number of people for a long time. Absorbing things, I
suppose. My only reaction was, Aha! So this is the way its going to be, is it?
That was my reaction.
INTERVIEWER
The biggest news about you at the moment, I expect, would be the success of
the film Virginia Woolf. The Production Code approval came hard, but
apparently you approved of it yourself.
ALBEE
When the play was sold to the movies I was rather apprehensive of what
would happen. I assumed they would put Doris Day in it, and maybe Rock
Hudson. And I was even a little apprehensive about the actual casting.
Especially Elizabeth Taylor. I wasnt apprehensive about the idea of Richard

Burton being in the film, but it did seem to be a little odd that Elizabeth
Taylor, who is in her early thirties, would be playing a fifty-two-year-old
woman.
INTERVIEWER
At one time you were apprehensive about Mike Nichols, the director.
ALBEE
I was curious as to why they chose a man whod never made a film before
and had made his reputation directing farces on Broadway, why they chose
him as a director to turn a serious play into a movie. I think I learned the
answer: being innocent to the medium he doesnt know how to make the
usual mistakes. I had a number of other reasons for apprehension. One
always knows what is done to a script when it goes to Hollywood. When I saw
the film in Hollywood about two or three months before it was released, I was
startled and enormously taken with the picture, partially through relief I
imagine. But more than that, I discovered that no screenplay had been
written, that the play was there almost word for word. A few cuts here and
there. A few oversimplifications.
INTERVIEWER
Oversimplifications?
ALBEE
Yes, Ill go into those in a minute. Ernest Lehman, who is credited with the
screenplay, did write about twenty-five words. I thought they were absolutely
terrible. So really there wasnt a screenplay, and that delighted me. It was a
third of the battle, as far as I was concerned. So that was my first delight
that the play was photographed word for word. Im not saying it was
photographed action for action. The camera didnt stay thirty-five feet from
the actors and it wasnt done in one set, it moved around a good deal. It
behaves and acts very much like a film. In fact, it is a film. There are some
shots, close-ups, lots of things you cant do on the stage. Then my second
delight, after finding that the play was intact, was to appreciate that the
director, Mike Nichols, understood not only the play, my intentions (pretty
much, again with a couple of oversimplifications), but also seemed to
understand the use of the camera and the film medium, all this in his first
time around. Third, I was happy that Elizabeth Taylor was quite capable of
casting off the beautiful-young-woman image and doing something much
more than she usually does in films. And the rest of the cast was more or less
fine too, Dennis and Segal. I have a few quarrels with their interpretations,
but theyre so minor compared to what could have happened. I found that it

made an awfully good picture.

INTERVIEWER
The play as a film seems to be generally better understood by film reviewers
than it was by drama critics. Is it possible that these oversimplifications
youre talking about, that you blame Mike Nichols for, or somebody, are
responsible for the fact that the play comes over more clearly?
ALBEE
I suppose if you simplify things, its going to make it easier to understand. But
without placing blame, Id say there was an oversimplification, which I regret
to a certain extent. For example, whenever something occurs in the play on
both an emotional and intellectual level, I find in the film that only the
emotional aspect shows through. The intellectual underpinning isnt as clear.
In the film I found that in the love-hate games that George and Martha play,
their intellectual enjoyment of each others prowess doesnt show through
anywhere nearly as strongly as it did in the play. Quite often, and I suppose in
most of my plays, people are doing things on two or three levels at the same
time. From time to time in the movie of Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I found
that a level or two had vanished. At the end of the film, for example, with the
revelation about the nonexistent child and its destruction, the intellectual
importance of the fiction isnt made quite as clearly as it could be. In the film
its nowhere near as important as the emotional importance to the
characters. In my view, the two of them have got to go hand in hand. But this
is quibbling, you see. Its a really very good film. There are a few things that I
wish hadnt happenedthat enormous error in accepting somebodys stupid
idea of taking the action away from the house to the roadhouse. Thats the
one area of the film where somebody decided to broaden it out for film terms.
Yet it was the one part of the film, curiously enough, that all the film critics
thought was the most stagy.
INTERVIEWER
Incidentally, when did the title Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? occur to you?
ALBEE
There was a saloonits changed its name nowon Tenth Street, between
Greenwich Avenue and Waverly Place, that was called something at one time,
now called something else, and they had a big mirror on the downstairs bar in
this saloon where people used to scrawl graffiti. At one point back in about
1953 1954, I think it waslong before any of us started doing much of
anythingI was in there having a beer one night, and I saw Whos Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? scrawled in soap, I suppose, on this mirror. When I started to

write the play it cropped up in my mind again. And of course, whos afraid of
Virginia Woolf means whos afraid of the big bad wolf whos afraid of living
life without false illusions. And it did strike me as being a rather typical
university, intellectual joke.
INTERVIEWER
With the filming of Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the oft-repeated evaluation
of it as a play about four homosexuals who are, for the sake of convention,
disguised as heterosexuals recurs. I cannot recall any public statement or
comment being made by you on this interpretation of the play.
ALBEE
Indeed it is true that a number of the movie critics of Whos Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? have repeated the speculation that the play was written about four
homosexuals disguised as heterosexual men and women. This comment first
appeared around the time the play was produced. I was fascinated by it. I
suppose what disturbed me about it was twofold: first, nobody has ever
bothered to ask me whether it was true; second, the critics and columnists
made no attempt to document the assertion from the text of the play. The
facts are simple: Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was written about two
heterosexual couples. If I had wanted to write a play about four homosexuals,
I would have done so. Parenthetically, it is interesting that when the film critic
of Newsweek stated that he understood the play to have been written about
four homosexuals, I had a letter written to him suggesting he check his
information before printing such speculations. He replied, saying, in effect,
two things: first, that we all know that a critic is a far better judge of an
authors intention than the author; second, that seeing the play as being
about four homosexuals was the only way that he could live with the play,
meaning that he could not accept it as a valid examination of heterosexual
life. Well, Im sure that all the actresses from Uta Hagen to Elizabeth Taylor
whove played the role of Martha would be absolutely astonished to learn
theyve been playing men.
I think it is the responsibility of critics to rely less strenuously on, to use a
Hollywood phrase, what they can live with, and more on an examination of
the works of art from an aesthetic and clinical point of view. I would be
fascinated to read an intelligent paper documenting from the text that Whos
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a play written about four homosexuals. It might
instruct me about the deep slag pits of my subconscious.
I believe it was Leslie Fiedler, in an article in Partisan Review, who
commented that if indeed Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? did deal with four
disguised homosexuals, the shock of recognition on the part of the public is
an enormously interesting commentary on the public. To put it most briefly,

Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was not written about four homosexuals. One
might make one more point: had it been a play about four homosexuals
disguised as heterosexuals, the only valid standard of criticism which could
be employed would be whether such license of composite characterization
was destructive to the validity of the work of art. Again we come to the
question of the critics responsibility to discuss the work of art not on
arbitrary Freudian terms but on aesthetic ones. Only the most callow or
insecure or downright stupid critic would fault Prousts work, for example, for
the transposition that he made of characters sexes. It would be rather like
faulting Michelangelos sculptures of the male figure because of that artists
reputed leanings. So, if a play should appear, next year, say, which the critics
in their wisdom see as a disguised homosexual piece, let them remember
that the ultimate judgment of a work of art, whether it be a masterpiece or a
lesser event, must be solely in terms of its artistic success and not on
Freudian guesswork.
INTERVIEWER
Its been said by certain critics that your plays generally contain no theme;
others say that youve begun to wear the same theme thin; and still others
say that with each play you bravely attack a new theme.
ALBEE
I go up to my room about three or four months out of the year and I write. I
dont pay much attention to how the plays relate thematically to each other. I
think thats very dangerous to do, because in the theater one is selfconscious enough without planning ahead or wondering about the thematic
relation from one play to the next. One hopes that one is developing, and
writing interestingly, and thats where it should end, I think.
INTERVIEWER
Youve spoken frequently to the effect that your involvement with music has
influenced your writing for the theater. Can you elaborate on that in any way?
ALBEE
I find it very difficult. Ive been involved in one way or another with serious
music ever since childhood. And I do think, or rather I sense that there is a
relationshipat least in my own workbetween a dramatic structure, the
form and sound and shape of a play, and the equivalent structure in music.
Both deal with sound, of course, and also with idea, theme. I find that when
my plays are going well, they seem to resemble pieces of music. But if I had
to go into specifics about it, I wouldnt be able to. Its merely something that I
feel.

INTERVIEWER
Which contemporary playwrights do you particularly admire? Which do you
think have influenced you especially, and in what ways?
ALBEE
The one living playwright I admire without any reservation whatsoever is
Samuel Beckett. I have funny feelings about almost all the others. There are a
number of contemporary playwrights whom I admire enormously, but thats
not at all the same thing as being influenced. I admire Brechts work very
much. I admire a good deal of Tennessee Williams. I admire some of Genets
works. Harold Pinters work. I admire Cordells plays very much, even though I
dont think theyre very good. But on the matter of influence, that question is
difficult. Ive read and seen hundreds of plays, starting with Sophocles right
up to the present day. As a playwright, I imagine that in one fashion or
another Ive been influenced by every single play Ive ever experienced.
Influence is a matter of selectionboth acceptance and rejection.
INTERVIEWER
In a number of articles, mention is made of the influence on youeither
directly or by osmosisof the theater of cruelty. How do you feel about the
theater of cruelty, or the theories of Artaud generally?
ALBEE
Let me answer it this way. About four years ago I made a list, for my own
amusement, of the playwrights, the contemporary playwrights, by whom
critics said Id been influenced. I listed twenty-five. It included five
playwrights whose work I didnt know, so I read these five playwrights and
indeed now I suppose I can say I have been influenced by them. The problem
is that the people who write these articles find the inevitable similarities of
people writing in the same generation, in the same century, and on the same
planet, and they put them together in a group.
INTERVIEWER
The point was that the influence may not have been directly through Artaud,
but perhaps, as I said, by osmosis.
ALBEE
Ive been influenced by Sophocles and Noel Coward.
INTERVIEWER
Do you aspire to being more than a playwright to being a sort of complete

man of the theater? Youve involved yourself in the production of plays by

other writers; youve toyed with the idea of doing a musical; youve written a
libretto for opera; youve been an articulate interpreter of the American
theater as an institution; and even a public critic of professional drama critics.
In retrospect, do you feel that you may have overextended yourself in any of
these areas?
ALBEE
Ive certainly done myself considerable damage, though not as an artist, by
attacking the critics, because they cant take it. As for involving myself with
the production of other peoples plays, I consider that to be a responsibility.
The playwrights unit weve been running, Playwrights 66, encourages thirty
or thirty-five writers. The plays weve put on in the off-Broadway theater, the
Cherry Lane, and other places, are primarily plays that I wanted to see: other
people werent putting them on, so we did. It seems to me that if one finds
oneself with the cash its ones responsibility to do a thing like that. Theres
certainly no self-aggrandizement. I have done adaptations because I wanted
to. I dont like the climate in which writers have to work in this country and I
think its my responsibility to talk about it.
INTERVIEWER
Do you feel that in your own particular case, on the basis of a single big-time
commercial hit, you have been raised to too high a position? For your own
creative comfort.
ALBEE
I really cant answer that. I have no idea. As a fairly objective judgment, I do
think that my plays as they come out are better than most other things that
are put on the same year. But that doesnt make them very good necessarily.
The act of creation, as you very well know, is a lonely and private matter and
has nothing to do with the public area the performance of the work one
creates. Each time I sit down and write a play I try to dismiss from my mind
as much as I possibly can the implications of what Ive done before, what Im
going to do, what other people think about my work, the failure or success of
the previous play. Im stuck with a new reality that Ive got to create. Im
working on a new play now. I dont believe that Im being affected by the
commercial success of Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to make this one more
commercial; I dont think Im being affected by the critical confusion over Tiny
Alice to make this one simpler. Its a play. Im trying to make it as good a work
of art as I possibly can.
INTERVIEWER

To talk a little about Tiny Alice, which I guess is your most controversial play
during your widely publicized press conference on the stage of the Billy Rose
Theater, you said the critical publicity had misled the audiences into thinking
of the play as a new game of symbol-hunting which was at least to some
degree responsible for the plays limited run. Still, you have also said that if
audiences desert a play, it is either the fault of the playwright or the manner
in which it was presented. With a year to reflect on the matter, how do you
feel about all this now as it pertains to Tiny Alice?
ALBEE
I feel pretty much what I said on the stage. I keep remembering that the
preview audiences, before the critics went to Tiny Alice, didnt have anywhere
near the amount of trouble understanding what the play was about; that
didnt happen until the critics told them that it was too difficult to understand.
I also feel that Tiny Alice would have been a great deal clearer if I hadnt had
to make the cuts I did in the third act.
INTERVIEWER
In view of the experience you had with Tiny Alice, the critical brouhaha and
the different interpretations and the rest of it, if you were to sit down and
write that play again, do you think it would emerge in any terribly different
way?
ALBEE
Its impossible to tell. A curious thing happens. Within a year after I write a
play I forget the experience of having written it. And I couldnt revise or
rewrite it if I wanted to. Up until that point, Im so involved with the
experience of having written the play, and the nature of it, that I cant see
what faults it might have. The only moment of clear objectivity that I can find
is at the moment of critical heatof self-critical heat when Im actually
writing. Sometimes I think the experience of a play is finished for me when I
finish writing it. If it werent for the need to make a living, I dont know
whether Id have the plays produced. In the two or three or four months that
it takes me to write a play, I find that the reality of the play is a great deal
more alive for me than what passes for reality. Im infinitely more involved in
the reality of the characters and their situation than I am in everyday life. The
involvement is terribly intense. I find that in the course of the day when Im
writing, after three or four hours of intense work, I have a splitting headache,
and I have to stop. Because the involvement, which is both creative and selfcritical, is so intense that Ive got to stop doing it.
INTERVIEWER

If one can talk at all about a general reaction to your plays, it is that, as
convincing and brilliant as their beginnings and middles might be, the plays
tend to let down, change course, or simply puzzle at the end. To one degree
or another this complaint has been registered against most of them.
ALBEE
Perhaps because my sense of reality and logic is different from most peoples.
The answer could be as simple as that. Some things that make sense to me
dont make the same degree of sense to other people. Analytically, there
might be other reasonsthat the plays dont hold together intellectually;
thats possible. But then it mustnt be forgotten that when people dont like
the way a play ends, theyre likely to blame the play. Thats a possibility too.
For example, I dont feel that catharsis in a play necessarily takes place
during the course of a play. Often it should take place afterward. If Ive been
accused a number of times of writing plays where the endings are
ambivalent, indeed, thats the way I find life.
INTERVIEWER
Do The Zoo Story and Virginia Woolf both begin and continue through the
longest part of their length on an essentially naturalistic course, and then
somewhere toward the end of the play veer away from the precisely
naturalistic tone?
ALBEE
I think that if people were a little more aware of what actually is beneath the
naturalistic overlay they would be surprised to find how early the
unnaturalistic base had been set. When youre dealing with a symbol in a
realistic play, it is also a realistic fact. You must expect the audiences mind to
work on both levels, symbolically and realistically. But were trained so much
in pure, realistic theater that its difficult for us to handle things on two levels
at the same time.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you pick the names George and Martha? As in Washington? What did
you make of Arthur Schlesingers discovery that with those names youd
obviously written a parallel of the American sociopolitical dilemma?
ALBEE
There are little local and private jokes. Indeed, I did name the two lead
characters of Virginia Woolf George and Martha because there is contained in
the playnot its most important point, but certainly contained within the play
an attempt to examine the success or failure of American revolutionary

principles. Some people who are historically and politically and sociologically
inclined find them. Now in one playVirginia Woolf againI named a very old
Western Union man Little BillyCrazy Billy rather. And I did that because
as you might recall, Mr. Flanagan, you used to deliver telegrams for Western
Union, and you are very old and your name is Billy. Things like thatlots of
them going on in the plays. In Zoo Story, I named two characters Peter and
Jerry. I know two people named Peter and Jerry. But then the learned papers
started coming in, and of course Jerry is supposed to be Jesus which is
much more interesting, I suppose, to the public than the truth.
INTERVIEWER
Going back to those levels of understanding, in Virginia Woolf the audience
questioned the credibility of George and Martha having invented for
themselves an imaginary son.
ALBEE
Indeed. And it always struck me as very odd that an audience would be
unwilling to believe that a highly educated, sensitive, and intelligent couple,
who were terribly good at playing reality and fantasy games, wouldnt have
the education, the sensitivity, and the intelligence to create a realistic symbol
for themselves. To use as they saw fit.
INTERVIEWER
Recognizing the fact that it was a symbol?
ALBEE
Indeed recognizing the fact that it was a symbol. And only occasionally being
confused, when the awful loss and lack that made the creation of the symbol
essential becomes overwhelminglike when theyre drunk, for example. Or
when theyre terribly tired.
INTERVIEWER
What youre saying is something which I guess is not really too commonly
understood. Youre suggesting that George and Martha have at no point
deluded themselves about the fact that theyre playing a game.
ALBEE
Oh, never. Except that its the most serious game in the world. And the
nonexistent son is a symbol and a weapon they use in every one of their
arguments.
INTERVIEWER

A symbolic weapon rather than a real weapon. In the midst of the very real
weapons that they do use.
ALBEE
Indeed, yes. Though theyre much too intelligent to make that confusion. For
me, thats why the loss is doubly poignant. Because they are not deluded
people.
INTERVIEWER
I see. Then what youre trying to suggest now is that the last act of Virginia
Woolf is in no way less naturalistic than the first two acts.
ALBEE
I dont find that the play veers off into a less naturalistic manner at all.
INTERVIEWER
Well, if not into a less naturalistic one, certainly into a more ritualistic,
stylized one. With the requiem masses and all that.
ALBEE
Well, going into Latin, indeed. But thats a conscious choice of Georges to
read the requiem mass which has existed in Latin for quite a number of
years. I like the sound of the two languages working together. I like the
counterpoint of the Latin and the English working together.
Theres one point that youve brought up that annoys me. It really annoys the
hell out of me. Some critics accuse me of having a failure of intellect in the
third act of Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, merely because they didnt have
the ability to understand what was happening. And that annoys the hell out of
me.
INTERVIEWER
I can see that it would. A critic recently wrote the following paragraph: Mr.
Albee complained with Tiny Alice that people asked questions and would not
let the play merely occur to them. He complains of those critics who judge a
plays matter and do not restrict themselves to its manner. Both of these
statements tend to a view much in voguethat art consists principally of
style, an encounter between us and the figurative surface of a work. This
view reduces ideas to decoration, character to pageant, symbol and feeling to
a conveyor belt for effects. It is to shrink art to no more than a sensual
response, one kind or another of happening. To some of us this modish view
is nihilistic, not progressive. Now the critic in question has come fairly close

to defining a theory that might be got out of, say, Susan Sontags Against
Interpretation or her essay on style. I wonder how closely the critics
interpretations of your remarksof the remarks, I guess, that you made most
specifically at the Tiny Alice press conferenceare true to your own
understanding of them.
ALBEE
Well, this critic is a sophist. What hes done is to misinterpret my attitudes,
Miss Sontags attitudes, and the attitudes of most respectable creative
people. What I said is that I thought it was not valid for a critic to criticize a
play for its matter rather than its mannerthat what was constituted then
was a type of censorship. To give an extreme example, I was suggesting that
if a man writes a brilliant enough play in praise of something that is
universally loathed, that the play, if it is good and well enough written, should
not be knocked down because of its approach to its subject. If the work of art
is good enough, it must not be criticized for its theme. I dont think it can be
argued. In the thirties a whole school of criticism bogged down intellectually
in those agitprop, social-realistic days. A play had to be progressive. A
number of plays by playwrights who were thought very highly of thenthey
were very bad playwrightswere highly praised because their themes were
intellectually and politically proper. This intellectual morass is very
dangerous, it seems to me. A form of censorship. You may dislike the
intention enormously but your judgment of the artistic merit of the work must
not be based on your view of what its about. The work of art must be judged
by how well it succeeds in its intention.
INTERVIEWER
In other words, what youre saying is that a critic should separate what he
takes to be the thematic substance of a play from the success or lack of
success that the author brings to its presentation.
ALBEE
Its that simple. And critics who do otherwise are damn fools and dangerous,
even destructive people. I dont think it can be argued.
INTERVIEWER
You have said that it is through the actual process of writing that you
eventually come to know the theme of your play. Sometimes youve admitted
that even when you have finished a play you dont have any specific idea
about its theme. What about that?
ALBEE

Naturally, no writer whos any good at all would sit down and put a sheet of
paper in a typewriter and start typing a play unless he knew what he was
writing about. But at the same time, writing has got to be an act of discovery.
Finding out things about what one is writing about. To a certain extent I
imagine a play is completely finished in my mindin my case, at any rate
without my knowing it, before I sit down to write. So in that sense, I suppose,
writing a play is finding out what the play is. I always find that the better
answer to give. Its a question I despise, and it always seems to me better to
slough off the answer to a question that I consider to be a terrible invasion of
privacythe kind of privacy that a writer must keep for himself. If you
intellectualize and examine the creative process too carefully it can
evaporate and vanish. Its not only terribly difficult to talk about, its also
dangerous. You know the old story about theI think its one of Aesops
fables, or perhaps not, or a Chinese storyabout the very clever animal that
saw a centipede that he didnt like. He said, My god, its amazing and
marvelous how you walk with all those hundreds and hundreds of legs. How
do you do it? How do you get them all moving that way? The centipede
stopped and thought and said, Well, I take the left front leg and then I
and he thought about it for a while, and he couldnt walk.
INTERVIEWER
How long does the process of reflection about a play go on?
ALBEE
I usually think about a play anywhere from six months to a year and a half
before I sit down to write it out.
INTERVIEWER
Think it through, or
ALBEE
Think about it. Though Im often accused of never thinking anything through,
I think about it. True, I dont begin with an idea for a playa thesis, in other
words, to construct the play around. But I know a good deal about the nature
of the characters. I know a great deal about their environment. And I more or
less know what is going to happen in the play. Its only when I sit down to
write it that I find out exactly what the characters are going to say, how they
are going to move from one situation to another. Exactly how they are going
to behave within the situation to produce the predetermined result If I
didnt do it that way, I wouldnt be able to allow the characters the freedom
of expression to make them three-dimensional. Otherwise, Id write a treatise,
not a play. Usually, the way I write is to sit down at a typewriter after that

year or so of what passes for thinking, and I write a first draft quite rapidly.
Read it over. Make a few pencil corrections, where I think Ive got the rhythms
wrong in the speeches, for example, and then retype the whole thing. And in
the retyping I discover that maybe one or two more speeches will come in.
One or two more things will happen, but not much. Usually, what I put down
first is what we go into rehearsal with; the majority of the selections and
decisions have gone on before I sit down at the typewriter.
INTERVIEWER
Could you describe what sort of reflection goes on? Do whole scenes evolve
in your mind, or is the process so deep in your subconscious that youre
hardly aware of whats going on?
ALBEE
I discover that I am thinking about a play, which is the first awareness I have
that a new play is forming. When Im aware of the play forming in my head,
its already at a certain degree in development. Somebody will ask, Well,
what do you plan to write after the next play? And Ill suddenly surprise
myself by finding myself saying, Oh, a play about this, a play about thatI
had never even thought about it before. So, obviously, a good deal of
thinking has been going on; whether subconscious or unconscious is the
proper term here I dont know. But whichever it is, the majority of the work
gets done there. And that period can go on for six months orin the case of
The Substitute Speaker, which is a play that I hope to be able to write this
coming summerits a process that has been going on for three and a half
years. Occasionally, I pop the play up to the surfaceinto the conscious mind
to see how its coming along, to see how it is developing. And if the
characters seem to be becoming three-dimensional, all to the good. After a
certain point, I make experiments to see how well I know the characters. Ill
improvise and try them out in a situation that Im fairly sure wont be in the
play. And if they behave quite naturally, in this improvisatory situation, and
create their own dialogue, and behave according to what I consider to be
their own natures, then I suppose I have the play far enough along to sit
down and write it.
INTERVIEWER
Is that when you know that a play has gone through this subconscious
process and is ready to come out?
ALBEE
Not necessarily. Its when I find myself typing.
INTERVIEWER

Thats not an answer.

ALBEE
It really is. Theres a time to go to the typewriter. Its like a dog: the way a
dog before it craps wanders around in circlesa piece of earth, an area of
grass, circles it for a long time before it squats. Its like that: figuratively
circling the typewriter getting ready to write, and then finally one sits down. I
think I sit down to the typewriter when its time to sit down to the typewriter.
That isnt to suggest that when I do finally sit down at the typewriter, and
write out my plays with a speed that seems to horrify all my detractors and
half of my well-wishers, that theres no work involved. It is hard work, and
one is doing all the work oneself. Still, I know playwrights who like to kid
themselves into saying that their characters are so well formed that they just
take over. They determine the structure of the play. By which is meant, I
suspect, only that the unconscious mind has done its work so thoroughly that
the play just has to be filtered through the conscious mind. But theres work
to be doneand discovery to be made. Which is part of the pleasure of it. Its
a form of pregnancy I suppose, and to carry that idea further, there are very
few people who are pregnant who can recall specifically the moment of
conception of the childbut they discover that they are pregnant, and its
rather that way with discovering that one is thinking about a play.
INTERVIEWER
When you start, do you move steadily from the opening curtain through to
the end, or do you skip around, doing one scene, then another? What about
curtain lines? Is there a conscious building toward the finale of each act?
ALBEE
For better or for worse, I write the play straight throughfrom what I consider
the beginning to what I consider the end. As for curtain lines, well, I suppose
there are playwrights who do build toward curtain lines. I dont think I do that.
In a sense, its the same choice that has to be made when you wonder when
to start a play. And when to end it. The characters lives have gone on before
the moment you chose to have the action of the play begin. And their lives
are going to go on after you have lowered the final curtain on the play, unless
youve killed them off. A play is a parenthesis that contains all the material
you think has to be contained for the action of the play. Where do you end
that? Where the characters seem to come to a pause where they seem to
want to stoprather like, I would think, the construction of a piece of music.
INTERVIEWER
You think of yourself then as an intuitive playwright. What youre saying in

effect now is that superimposing any fixed theme on your work would
somehow impose limitations on your subconscious imaginative faculties.
ALBEE
I suspect that the theme, the nature of the characters, and the method of
getting from the beginning of the play to the end is already established in the
unconscious.
INTERVIEWER
If one worked expressly by intuition, then, doesnt the form get out of control?
ALBEE
When one controls form, one doesnt do it with a stopwatch or a graph. One
does it by sensing, again intuitively.
INTERVIEWER
After writing a play in this sort of intuitive way, do you end by accepting its
overall structure (which must also be something of a revelation to you), or do
you go back and rewrite and revise with the idea of giving it cogent shape?
ALBEE
I more or less trust it to come out with shape. Curiously enough, the only two
plays that Ive done very much revision on were the two adaptationseven
though the shape of them was pretty much determined by the original work.
With my own plays, the only changes, aside from taking a speech out here,
putting one in there (if I thought I dwelled on a point a little too long or didnt
make it explicit enough), are very minor; but even though theyre very minor
having to do with the inability of actors or the unwillingness of the director
to go along with meIve always regretted them.
INTERVIEWER
Your earlier work, from The Zoo Story to Virginia Woolf, brought you very
quick and major international celebrity, even though today at thirty-eight
ALBEE
thirty-seven.
INTERVIEWER
When this is published it will be thirty-eightyou would otherwise be
regarded as a relatively young growing writer. Do you feel this major renown,
for all the doubtless pleasure and financial security it has given you, is any

threat to the growth of the young playwright?

ALBEE
Well, there are two things that a playwright can have. Success or failure. I
imagine there are dangers in both. Certainly the danger of being faced with
indifference or hostility is discouraging, and it may be that success
acceptance if its too quick, too lightning-quickcan turn the heads of some
people.
INTERVIEWER
I was thinking less in terms of what the personal effect on you would be. In
terms of what you said before, there seems to be a certain pattern thats
acted out in the American theater, if not exclusively in the American theater,
of elevating new playwrights to enormous prestige, and then after a certain
time lapse, arrived at arbitrarily, the need comes to cut them down to size.
ALBEE
Well, the final determination is made anywhere from twenty-five to one
hundred years after the fact anyway. And if the playwright is strong enough
to hold on to reasonable objectivity in the face of either hostility or praise,
hell do his work the way he was going to anyway.
INTERVIEWER
Since I guess its fairly imbecilic to ask a writer what he considers to be his
best work or his most important work, perhaps I could ask you this question:
which of all of your plays do you feel closest to?
ALBEE
Well, naturally the one Im writing right now.
INTERVIEWER
Well, excepting that.
ALBEE
I dont know.
INTERVIEWER
Theres no one that you feel any special fondness for?
ALBEE

Im terribly fond of The Sandbox. I think its an absolutely beautiful, lovely,

perfect play.
INTERVIEWER
And as for the play youre writing now
ALBEE
A Delicate Balance, which I am writing now. The Substitute Speaker, next,
and then in some order or another, three short plays, plus a play about Attila
the Hun.
INTERVIEWER
You say three short plays. Do you hold forth any prospect of going off
Broadway with anything?
ALBEE
Well, considering the way the critical reaction to my plays has been going in
the past few years, I may well be there shortly.
INTERVIEWER
I was thinking out of choice rather than necessity.
ALBEE
Im talking about that too.

Author photograph by Nancy Crampton.

Simone de Beauvoir, The Art of Fiction No. 35

Interviewed by Madeleine Gobeil ISSUE 34, SPRING-SUMMER 1965
undefined

Simone de Beauvoir had introduced me to Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre,

whom I had interviewed. But she hesitated about being interviewed herself:
Why should we talk about me? Dont you think Ive done enough in my three

books of memoirs? It took several letters and conversations to convince her

otherwise, and then only on the condition that it wouldnt be too long.
The interview took place in Miss de Beauvoirs studio on the rue Scholcher in
Montparnasse, a five-minute walk from Sartres apartment. We worked in a
large, sunny room which serves as her study and sitting room. Shelves are
crammed with surprisingly uninteresting books. The best ones, she told me,
are in the hands of my friends and never come back. The tables are
covered with colorful objects brought back from her travels, but the only
valuable work in the room is a lamp made for her by Giacometti. Scattered
throughout the room are dozens of phonograph records, one of the few
luxuries that Miss de Beauvoir permits herself.
Apart from her classically featured face, what strikes one about Simone de
Beauvoir is her fresh, rosy complexion and her clear blue eyes, extremely
young and lively. One gets the impression that she knows and sees
everything; this inspires a certain timidity. Her speech is rapid, her manner
direct without being brusque, and she is rather smiling and friendly.

INTERVIEWER
For the last seven years youve been writing your memoirs, in which you
frequently wonder about your vocation and your profession. I have the
impression that it was the loss of religious faith that turned you toward
writing.
SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR
Its very hard to review ones past without cheating a little. My desire to write
goes far back. I wrote stories at the age of eight, but lots of children do the
same. That doesnt really mean they have a vocation for writing. It may be
that in my case the vocation was accentuated because I had lost religious
faith; its also true that when I read books that moved me deeply, such as
George Eliots The Mill on the Floss, I wanted terribly much to be, like her,
someone whose books would be read, whose books would move readers.
INTERVIEWER
Have you been influenced by English literature?
DE BEAUVOIR
The study of English has been one of my passions ever since childhood.
Theres a body of childrens literature in English far more charming than what
exists in French. I loved to read Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, George Eliot,

and even Rosamond Lehmann.

INTERVIEWER
Dusty Answer?
DE BEAUVOIR
I had a real passion for that book. And yet it was rather mediocre. The girls of
my generation adored it. The author was very young, and every girl
recognized herself in Judy. The book was rather clever, even rather subtle. As
for me, I envied English university life. I lived at home. I didnt have a room of
my own. In fact, I had nothing at all. And though that life wasnt free, it did
allow for privacy and seemed to me magnificent. The author had known all
the myths of adolescent girlshandsome boys with an air of mystery about
them and so on. Later, of course, I read the Bronts and the books of Virginia
Woolf: Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway. I dont care much for The Waves, but Im very,
very fond of her book on Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
INTERVIEWER
What about her journal?
DE BEAUVOIR
It interests me less. Its too literary. Its fascinating, but its foreign to me.
Shes too concerned with whether shell be published, with what people will
say about her. I liked very much A Room of Ones Own in which she talks
about the situation of women. Its a short essay, but it hits the nail on the
head. She explains very well why women cant write. Virginia Woolf is one of
the women writers who have interested me most. Have you seen any photos
of her? An extraordinarily lonely face . . . In a way, she interests me more
than Colette. Colette is, after all, very involved in her little love affairs, in
household matters, laundry, pets. Virginia Woolf is much broader.
INTERVIEWER
Did you read her books in translation?
DE BEAUVOIR
No, in English. I read English better than I speak it.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think about college and university education for a writer? You
yourself were a brilliant student at the Sorbonne and people expected you to
have a brilliant career as a teacher.

DE BEAUVOIR
My studies gave me only a very superficial knowledge of philosophy but
sharpened my interest in it. I benefited greatly from being a teacherthat is,
from being able to spend a great deal of time reading, writing and educating
myself. In those days, teachers didnt have a very heavy program. My studies
gave me a solid foundation because in order to pass the state exams you
have to explore areas that you wouldnt bother about if you were concerned
only with general culture. They provided me with a certain academic method
that was useful when I wrote The Second Sex and that has been useful, in
general, for all my studies. I mean a way of going through books very quickly,
of seeing which works are important, of classifying them, of being able to
reject those which are unimportant, of being able to summarize, to browse.
INTERVIEWER
Were you a good teacher?
DE BEAUVOIR
I dont think so, because I was interested only in the bright students and not
at all in the others, whereas a good teacher should be interested in everyone.
But if you teach philosophy you cant help it. There were always four or five
students who did all the talking, and the others didnt care to do anything. I
didnt bother about them very much.
INTERVIEWER
You had been writing for ten years before you were published, at the age of
thirty-five. Werent you discouraged?
DE BEAUVOIR
No, because in my time it was unusual to be published when you were very
young. Of course, there were one or two examples, such as Radiguet, who
was a prodigy. Sartre himself wasnt published until he was about thirty-five,
when Nausea and The Wall were brought out. When my first more or less
publishable book was rejected, I was a bit discouraged. And when the first
version of She Came to Stay was rejected, it was very unpleasant. Then I
thought that I ought to take my time. I knew many examples of writers who
were slow in getting started. And people always spoke of the case of
Stendhal, who didnt begin to write until he was forty.
INTERVIEWER
Were you influenced by any American writers when you wrote your early
novels?

DE BEAUVOIR
In writing She Came to Stay, I was certainly influenced by Hemingway insofar
as it was he who taught us a certain simplicity of dialogue and the
importance of the little things in life.
INTERVIEWER
Do you draw up a very precise plan when you write a novel?
DE BEAUVOIR
I havent, you know, written a novel in ten years, during which time Ive been
working on my memoirs. When I wrote The Mandarins, for example, I created
characters and an atmosphere around a given theme, and little by little the
plot took shape. But in general I start writing a novel long before working out
the plot.
INTERVIEWER
People say that you have great self-discipline and that you never let a day go
by without working. At what time do you start?
DE BEAUVOIR
Im always in a hurry to get going, though in general I dislike starting the day.
I first have tea and then, at about ten oclock, I get under way and work until
one. Then I see my friends and after that, at five oclock, I go back to work
and continue until nine. I have no difficulty in picking up the thread in the
afternoon. When you leave, Ill read the paper or perhaps go shopping. Most
often its a pleasure to work.
INTERVIEWER
When do you see Sartre?
DE BEAUVOIR
Every evening and often at lunchtime. I generally work at his place in the
afternoon.
INTERVIEWER
Doesnt it bother you to go from one apartment to another?
DE BEAUVOIR
No. Since I dont write scholarly books, I take all my papers with me and it
works out very well.

INTERVIEWER
Do you plunge in immediately?
DE BEAUVOIR
It depends to some extent on what Im writing. If the work is going well, I
spend a quarter or half an hour reading what I wrote the day before, and I
make a few corrections. Then I continue from there. In order to pick up the
thread I have to read what Ive done.
INTERVIEWER
Do your writer friends have the same habits as you?
DE BEAUVOIR
No, its quite a personal matter. Genet, for example, works quite differently.
He puts in about twelve hours a day for six months when hes working on
something and when he has finished he can let six months go by without
doing anything. As I said, I work every day except for two or three months of
vacation when I travel and generally dont work at all. I read very little during
the year, and when I go away I take a big valise full of books, books that I
didnt have time to read. But if the trip lasts a month or six weeks, I do feel
uncomfortable, particularly if Im between two books. I get bored if I dont
work.
INTERVIEWER
Are your original manuscripts always in longhand? Who deciphers them?
Nelson Algren says that hes one of the few people who can read your
handwriting.
DE BEAUVOIR
I dont know how to type, but I do have two typists who manage to decipher
what I write. When I work on the last version of a book, I copy the manuscript.
Im very careful. I make a great effort. My writing is fairly legible.
INTERVIEWER
In The Blood of Others and All Men Are Mortal you deal with the problem of
time. Were you influenced, in this respect, by Joyce or Faulkner?
DE BEAUVOIR
No, it was a personal preoccupation. Ive always been keenly aware of the
passing of time. Ive always thought that I was old. Even when I was twelve, I
thought it was awful to be thirty. I felt that something was lost. At the same

time, I was aware of what I could gain, and certain periods of my life have
taught me a great deal. But, in spite of everything, Ive always been haunted
by the passing of time and by the fact that death keeps closing in on us. For
me, the problem of time is linked up with that of death, with the thought that
we inevitably draw closer and closer to it, with the horror of decay. Its that,
rather than the fact that things disintegrate, that love peters out. Thats
horrible too, though I personally have never been troubled by it. Theres
always been great continuity in my life. Ive always lived in Paris, more or less
in the same neighborhoods. My relationship with Sartre has lasted a very long
time. I have very old friends whom I continue to see. So its not that Ive felt
that time breaks things up, but rather the fact that I always take my bearings.
I mean the fact that I have so many years behind me, so many ahead of me. I
count them.
INTERVIEWER
In the second part of your memoirs, you draw a portrait of Sartre at the time
he was writing Nausea. You picture him as being obsessed by what he calls
his crabs, by anguish. You seem to have been, at the time, the joyous
member of the couple. Yet, in your novels you reveal a preoccupation with
death that we never find in Sartre.
DE BEAUVOIR
But remember what he says in The Words. That he never felt the imminence
of death, whereas his fellow studentsfor example, Nizan, the author of
Aden, Arabiewere fascinated by it. In a way, Sartre felt he was immortal. He
had staked everything on his literary work and on the hope that his work
would survive, whereas for me, owing to the fact that my personal life will
disappear, Im not the least bit concerned about whether my work is likely to
last. Ive always been deeply aware that the ordinary things of life disappear,
ones day-to-day activities, ones impressions, ones past experiences. Sartre
thought that life could be caught in a trap of words, and Ive always felt that
words werent life itself but a reproduction of life, of something dead, so to
speak.
INTERVIEWER
Thats precisely the point. Some people claim that you havent the power to
transpose life in your novels. They insinuate that your characters are copied
from the people around you.
DE BEAUVOIR
I dont know. What is the imagination? In the long run, its a matter of
attaining a certain degree of generality, of truth about what is, about what

one actually lives. Works which arent based on reality dont interest me
unless theyre out-and-out extravagant, for example the novels of Alexandre
Dumas or of Victor Hugo, which are epics of a kind. But I dont call made-up
stories works of the imagination but rather works of artifice. If I wanted to
defend myself, I could refer to Tolstoys War and Peace, all the characters of
which were taken from real life.
INTERVIEWER
Lets go back to your characters. How do you choose their names?
DE BEAUVOIR
I dont consider that very important. I chose the name Xavire in She Came
to Stay because I had met only one person who had that name. When I look
for names, I use the telephone directory or try to remember the names of
former pupils.
INTERVIEWER
To which of your characters are you most attached?
DE BEAUVOIR
I dont know. I think that Im interested less in the characters themselves than
in their relationships, whether it be a matter of love or friendship. It was the
critic Claude Roy who pointed that out.
INTERVIEWER
In every one of your novels we find a female character who is misled by false
notions and who is threatened by madness.
DE BEAUVOIR
Lots of modern women are like that. Women are obliged to play at being what
they arent, to play, for example, at being great courtesans, to fake their
personalities. Theyre on the brink of neurosis. I feel very sympathetic toward
women of that type. They interest me more than the well-balanced housewife
and mother. There are, of course, women who interest me even more, those
who are both true and independent, who work and create.
INTERVIEWER
None of your female characters are immune from love. You like the romantic
element.
DE BEAUVOIR

Love is a great privilege. Real love, which is very rare, enriches the lives of
the men and women who experience it.
INTERVIEWER
In your novels, it seems to be the womenIm thinking of Franoise in She
Came to Stay and Anne in The Mandarinswho experience it most.
DE BEAUVOIR
The reason is that, despite everything, women give more of themselves in
love because most of them dont have much else to absorb them. Perhaps
theyre also more capable of deep sympathy, which is the basis of love.
Perhaps its also because I can project myself more easily into women than
into men. My female characters are much richer than my male characters.
INTERVIEWER
Youve never created an independent and really free female character who
illustrates in one way or other the thesis of The Second Sex. Why?
DE BEAUVOIR
Ive shown women as they are, as divided human beings, and not as they
ought to be.
INTERVIEWER
After your long novel, The Mandarins, you stopped writing fiction and began
to work on your memoirs. Which of these two literary forms do you prefer?
DE BEAUVOIR
I like both of them. They offer different kinds of satisfaction and
disappointment. In writing my memoirs, its very agreeable to be backed up
by reality. On the other hand, when one follows reality from day to day, as I
have, there are certain depths, certain kinds of myth and meaning that one
disregards. In the novel, however, one can express these horizons, these
overtones of daily life, but theres an element of fabrication that is
nevertheless disturbing. One should aim at inventing without fabricating. I
had been wanting to talk about my childhood and youth for a long time. I had
maintained very deep relationships with them, but there was no sign of them
in any of my books. Even before writing my first novel, I had a desire to have,
as it were, a heart-to-heart talk. It was a very emotional, a very personal
need. After Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter I was unsatisfied, and then I
thought of doing something else. But I was unable to. I said to myself, Ive
fought to be free. What have I done with my freedom, whats become of it? I
wrote the sequel that carried me from the age of twenty-one to the present

time, from The Prime of Life to Force of Circumstance

INTERVIEWER
At the meeting of writers in Formentor a few years ago, Carlo Levi described
The Prime of Life as the great love story of the century. Sartre appeared for
the first time as a human being. You revealed a Sartre who had not been
rightly understood, a man very different from the legendary Sartre.
DE BEAUVOIR
I did it intentionally. He didnt want me to write about him. Finally, when he
saw that I spoke about him the way I did, he gave me a free hand.
INTERVIEWER
In your opinion, why is it that, despite the reputation hes had for twenty
years, Sartre the writer remains misunderstood and is still violently attacked
by critics?
DE BEAUVOIR
For political reasons. Sartre is a man who has violently opposed the class into
which he was born and which therefore regards him as a traitor. But thats the
class which has money, which buys books. Sartres situation is paradoxical.
Hes an antibourgeois writer who is read by the bourgeoisie and admired by it
as one of its products. The bourgeoisie has a monopoly on culture and thinks
that it gave birth to Sartre. At the same time, it hates him because he attacks
it.
INTERVIEWER
In an interview with Hemingway in The Paris Review, he said, All you can be
sure about, in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will
have to skip the politics when you read it. Of course, you dont agree. Do
you still believe in commitment?
DE BEAUVOIR
Hemingway was precisely the type of writer who never wanted to commit
himself. I know that he was involved in the Spanish civil war, but as a
journalist. Hemingway was never deeply committed, so he thinks that what is
eternal in literature is what isnt dated, isnt committed. I dont agree. In the
case of many writers, its also their political stand which makes me like or
dislike them. There arent many writers of former times whose work was
really committed. And although one reads Rousseaus Social Contract as
eagerly as one reads his Confessions, one no longer reads The New Hlose.

INTERVIEWER
The heyday of existentialism seems to have been the period from the end of
the war to 1952. At the present time, the new novel is in fashion; and such
writers as Drieu La Rochelle and Roger Nimier.
DE BEAUVOIR
Theres certainly a return to the right in France. The new novel itself isnt
reactionary, nor are its authors. A sympathizer can say that they want to do
away with certain bourgeois conventions. These writers arent disturbing. In
the long run, Gaullism brings us back to Ptainism, and its only to be
expected that a collaborator like La Rochelle and an extreme reactionary like
Nimier be held in high esteem again. The bourgeoisie is showing itself again
in its true colorsthat is, as a reactionary class. Look at the success of
Sartres The Words. There are several things to note. Its perhapsI wont say
his best book, but one of his best. At any rate, its an excellent book, an
exciting display of virtuosity, an amazingly written work. At the same time,
the reason it has had such success is that its a book that is not committed.
When the critics say that its his best book, along with Nausea, one should
bear in mind that Nausea is an early work, a work that is not committed, and
that it is more readily accepted by the left and right alike than are his plays.
The same thing happened to me with The Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter.
Bourgeois women were delighted to recognize their own youth in it. The
protests began with The Prime of Life and continued with Force of
Circumstance. The break is very clear, very sharp.
INTERVIEWER
The last part of Force of Circumstance is devoted to the Algerian war, to
which you seem to have reacted in a very personal way.
DE BEAUVOIR
I felt and thought about things in a political way, but I never engaged in
political action. The entire last part of Force of Circumstance deals with the
war. And it seems anachronistic in a France that is no longer concerned with
that war.
INTERVIEWER
Didnt you realize that people were bound to forget about it?
DE BEAUVOIR
I deleted lots of pages from that section. I therefore realized that it would be
anachronistic. On the other hand, I absolutely wanted to talk about it, and Im

amazed that people have forgotten it to such a degree. Have you seen the
film La Belle Vie, by the young director Robert Enrico? People are stupefied
because the film shows the Algerian war. Claude Mauriac wrote in Le Figaro
Litteraire: Why is it that were shown parachute troopers on public squares?
Its not true to life. But it is true to life. I used to see them every day from
Sartres window at Saint Germain des Prs. People have forgotten. They
wanted to forget. They wanted to forget their memories. Thats the reason
why, contrary to what I expected, I wasnt attacked for what I said about the
Algerian war but for what I said about old age and death. As regards the
Algerian war, all Frenchmen are now convinced that it never took place, that
nobody was tortured, that insofar as there was torture they were always
against torture.
INTERVIEWER
At the end of Force of Circumstance you say: As I look back with incredulity
at that credulous adolescent, I am astounded to see how I was swindled.
This remark seems to have given rise to all kinds of misunderstandings.
DE BEAUVOIR
Peopleparticularly enemieshave tried to interpret it to mean that my life
has been a failure, either because I recognize the fact that I was mistaken on
a political level or because I recognize that after all a woman should have had
children, etc. Anyone who reads my book carefully can see that I say the very
opposite, that I dont envy anyone, that Im perfectly satisfied with what my
life has been, that Ive kept all my promises and that consequently if I had my
life to live over again I wouldnt live it any differently. Ive never regretted not
having children insofar as what I wanted to do was to write.
Then why swindled? When one has an existentialist view of the world, like
mine, the paradox of human life is precisely that one tries to be and, in the
long run, merely exists. Its because of this discrepancy that when youve laid
your stake on beingand, in a way you always do when you make plans,
even if you actually know that you cant succeed in beingwhen you turn
around and look back on your life, you see that youve simply existed. In
other words, life isnt behind you like a solid thing, like the life of a god (as it
is conceived, that is, as something impossible). Your life is simply a human
life.
So one might say, as Alain did, and Im very fond of that remark, Nothing is
promised us. In one sense, its true. In another, its not. Because a bourgeois
boy or girl who is given a certain culture is actually promised things. I think
that anyone who had a hard life when he was young wont say in later years
that hes been swindled. But when I say that Ive been swindled Im
referring to the seventeen-year-old girl who daydreamed in the country near

the hazel bush about what she was going to do later on. Ive done everything
I wanted to do, writing books, learning about things, but Ive been swindled
all the same because its never anything more. There are also Mallarms
lines about the perfume of sadness that remains in the heart, I forget
exactly how they go. Ive had what I wanted, and, when all is said and done,
what one wanted was always something else. A woman psychoanalyst wrote
me a very intelligent letter in which she said that in the last analysis, desires
always go far beyond the object of desire. The fact is that Ive had
everything I desired, but the far beyond which is included in the desire itself
is not attained when the desire has been fulfilled. When I was young, I had
hopes and a view of life which all cultured people and bourgeois optimists
encourage one to have and which my readers accuse me of not encouraging
in them. Thats what I meant, and I wasnt regretting anything Ive done or
thought.
INTERVIEWER
Some people think that a longing for God underlies your works.
DE BEAUVOIR
No. Sartre and I have always said that its not because theres a desire to be
that this desire corresponds to any reality. Its exactly what Kant said on the
intellectual level. The fact that one believes in causalities is no reason to
believe that there is a supreme cause. The fact that man has a desire to be
does not mean that he can ever attain being or even that being is a possible
notion, at any rate the being that is a reflection and at the same time an
existence. There is a synthesis of existence and being that is impossible.
Sartre and I have always rejected it, and this rejection underlies our thinking.
There is an emptiness in man, and even his achievements have this
emptiness. Thats all. I dont mean that I havent achieved what I wanted to
achieve but rather that the achievement is never what people think it is.
Furthermore, there is a nave or snobbish aspect, because people imagine
that if you have succeeded on a social level you must be perfectly satisfied
with the human condition in general. But thats not the case.
Im swindled also implies something elsenamely, that life has made me
discover the world as it is, that is, a world of suffering and oppression, of
undernourishment for the majority of people, things that I didnt know when I
was young and when I imagined that to discover the world was to discover
something beautiful. In that respect, too, I was swindled by bourgeois culture,
and thats why I dont want to contribute to the swindling of others and why I
say that I was swindled, in short, so that others arent swindled. Its really
also a problem of a social kind. In short, I discovered the unhappiness of the
world little by little, then more and more, and finally, above all, I felt it in

connection with the Algerian war and when I traveled.

INTERVIEWER
Some critics and readers have felt that you spoke about old age in an
unpleasant way.
DE BEAUVOIR
A lot of people didnt like what I said because they want to believe that all
periods of life are delightful, that children are innocent, that all newlyweds
are happy, that all old people are serene. Ive rebelled against such notions
all my life, and theres no doubt about the fact that the moment, which for
me is not old age but the beginning of old age, representseven if one has
all the resources one wants, affection, work to be donerepresents a change
in ones existence, a change that is manifested by the loss of a great number
of things. If one isnt sorry to lose them its because one didnt love them. I
think that people who glorify old age or death too readily are people who
really dont love life. Of course, in present-day France you have to say that
everythings fine, that everythings lovely, including death.
INTERVIEWER
Beckett has keenly felt the swindle of the human condition. Does he interest
you more than the other new novelists?
DE BEAUVOIR
Certainly. All the playing around with time that one finds in the new novel
can be found in Faulkner. It was he who taught them how to do it, and in my
opinion hes the one who does it best. As for Beckett, his way of emphasizing
the dark side of life is very beautiful. However, hes convinced that life is dark
and only that. I too am convinced that life is dark, and at the same time I love
life. But that conviction seems to have spoiled everything for him. When
thats all you can say, there arent fifty ways of saying it, and Ive found that
many of his works are merely repetitions of what he said earlier. Endgame
repeats Waiting for Godot, but in a weaker way.
INTERVIEWER
Are there many contemporary French writers who interest you?
DE BEAUVOIR
Not many. I receive lots of manuscripts, and the annoying thing is that theyre
almost always bad. At the present time, Im very excited about Violette
Leduc. She was first published in 1946 in Collection Espoir, which was edited
by Camus. The critics praised her to the skies. Sartre, Genet, and Jouhandeau

liked her very much. She never sold. She recently published a great
autobiography called The Bastard, the beginning of which was published in
Les Temps Modernes, of which Sartre is editor-in-chief. I wrote a preface to
the book because I thought that she was one of the unappreciated postwar
French writers. Shes having great success in France at the present time.
INTERVIEWER
And how do you rank yourself among contemporary writers?
DE BEAUVOIR
I dont know. What is it that one evaluates? The noise, the silence, posterity,
the number of readers, the absence of readers, the importance at a given
time? I think that people will read me for some time. At least, thats what my
readers tell me. Ive contributed something to the discussion of womens
problems. I know I have from the letters I receive. As for the literary quality of
my work, in the strict sense of the word, I havent the slightest idea.

Translated by Bernard Frechtman

Much of the interview was conducted through an exchange of letters from

June 1971 until the summer of 1972. On December 2, 1972, a portion of the
interview was taped at the Center for Twentieth Century Studies of the
University of Wisconsin. Burgesss schedule during his two-day visit had been
backbreaking; there was scarcely a break in the round of class visits, Joyce
readings, and interviews. Tired as he appeared after that routine, Burgess
showed no tendency to curb the flow of his responses; and his spoken
portions, when spliced with the previous exchanges, seem as polished as a
written draft.

INTERVIEWER
Are you at all bothered by the charges that you are too prolific or that your
novels are too allusive?
ANTHONY BURGESS
It has been a sin to be prolific only since the Bloomsbury groupparticularly
Forstermade it a point of good manners to produce, as it were, costively.
Ive been annoyed less by sneers at my alleged overproduction than by the
imputation that to write much means to write badly. Ive always written with

great care and even some slowness. Ive just put in rather more hours a day
at the task than some writers seem able to. As for allusivenessmeaning, I
suppose, literary allusivenessthats surely in the tradition. Any book has
behind it all the other books that have been written. The authors aware of
them; the reader ought to be aware, too.
INTERVIEWER
At what time of day do you usually work?
BURGESS
I dont think it matters much; I work in the morning, but I think the afternoon
is a good time to work. Most people sleep in the afternoon. Ive always found
it a good time, especially if one doesnt have much lunch. Its a quiet time.
Its a time when ones body is not at its sharpest, not at its most receptive
the body is quiescent, somnolent; but the brain can be quite sharp. I think,
also, at the same time that the unconscious mind has a habit of asserting
itself in the afternoon. The morning is the conscious time, but the afternoon is
a time in which we should deal much more with the hinterland of the
consciousness.
INTERVIEWER
Thats very interesting. Thomas Mann, on the other hand, wrote religiously
virtually every day from nine to one, as though he were punching a time
clock.
BURGESS
Yes. One can work from nine to one, I think its ideal; but I find that the
afternoon must be used. The afternoon has always been a good time for me. I
think it began in Malaya when I was writing. I was working all morning. Most
of us slept in the afternoon; it was very quiet. Even the servants were
sleeping, even the dogs were asleep. One could work quietly away under the
sun until dusk fell, and one was ready for the events of the evening. I do most
of my work in the afternoon.
INTERVIEWER
Do you imagine an ideal reader for your books?
BURGESS
The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, shortsighted, color-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have
read. He should also be about my age.

INTERVIEWER
A very special reader indeed. Are you writing, then, for a limited, highly
educated audience?
BURGESS
Where would Shakespeare have got if he had thought only of a specialized
audience? What he did was to attempt to appeal on all levels, with something
for the most rarefied intellectuals (who had read Montaigne) and very much
more for those who could appreciate only sex and blood. I like to devise a plot
that can have a moderately wide appeal. But take Eliots The Waste Land,
very erudite, which, probably through its more popular elements and its basic
rhetorical appeal, appealed to those who did not at first understand it but
made themselves understand it. The poem, a terminus of Eliots polymathic
travels, became a starting point for other peoples erudition. I think every
author wants to make his audience. But its in his own image, and his primary
audience is a mirror.
INTERVIEWER
Do you care about what the critics think?
BURGESS
I get angry at the stupidity of critics who willfully refuse to see what my books
are really about. Im aware of malevolence, especially in England. A bad
review by a man I admire hurts terribly.
INTERVIEWER
Would you ever change the drift of a bookor any literary projectbecause
of a critics comments?
BURGESS
I dont thinkwith the exception of the excision of that whole final chapter of
A Clockwork OrangeIve ever been asked to make any changes in what Ive
written. I do feel that the author has to know best about what hes writing
from the viewpoint of structure, intention, and so on. The critic has the job of
explaining deep-level elements which the author couldnt know about. As for
saying wheretechnically, in matters of taste and so ona writer is going
wrong, the critic rarely says what the author doesnt know already.
INTERVIEWER
Youve mentioned the possibility of working with Stanley Kubrick on a film
version of Napoleons life. Can you remain completely independent in

devising the novel youre currently writing about Napoleon?

BURGESS
The Napoleon project, which began with Kubrick, has now got beyond
Kubrick. I found myself interested in the subject in a way that didnt suggest a
film adaptation and am now working on something Kubrick couldnt use. Its a
pity about the money and so on, but otherwise Im glad to feel free, nobody
looking over my shoulder.
INTERVIEWER
Has working as a professional reviewer either helped or hindered the writing
of your novels?
BURGESS
It did no harm. It didnt stop me writing novels. It gave facility. It forced me
into areas that I wouldnt have voluntarily entered. It paid the bills, which
novels rarely do.
INTERVIEWER
Did it bring you involuntarily to any new subjects or books that have become
important to you?
BURGESS
Its good for a writer to review books he is not supposed to know anything
about or be interested in. Doing reviewing for magazines like Country Life
(which smells more of horses than of calfskin bindings) means doing a fine
heterogeneous batch, which often does open up areas of some value in ones
creative work. For instance, I had to review books on stable management,
embroidery, car enginesvery useful solid stuff, the very stuff of novels.
Reviewing Lvi-Strausss little lecture on anthropology (which nobody else
wanted to review) was the beginning of the process which led me to write the
novel MF.
INTERVIEWER
Youve stressed the importance of punctuality to a good reviewer. Do you find
that a creative writer need stick to a strict work schedule, too?
BURGESS
The practice of being on time with commissioned work is an aspect of
politeness. I dont like being late for appointments; I dont like craving
indulgence from editors in the matter of missed deadlines. Good journalistic

manners tend to lead to a kind of self-discipline in creative work. Its

important that a novel be approached with some urgency. Spend too long on
it, or have great gaps between writing sessions, and the unity of the work
tends to be lost. This is one of the troubles with Ulysses. The ending is
different from the beginning. Technique changes halfway through. Joyce spent
too long on the book.
INTERVIEWER
Are you suggesting that Molly Blooms soliloquy is an inappropriate ending
because its technically different from the opening three chapters devoted to
Stephen Dedalus?
BURGESS
I dont mean the very end of Ulysses. I mean that from the Cyclops episode
on, Joyce decides to lengthen his chapters to make the reading time
correspond with the imagined time of enactment. In that sense the book is
technically not so much a unity as people like to think. Compare the Aeolus
episode with the Oxen of the Sun and youll see what I mean.
INTERVIEWER
Considering the length of time that Proust spent on his novel and that Mann
devoted to Joseph and His Brothers, is seven years really so long for a work
as great as Ulysses? What, then, about the seventeen years Joyce frittered
away on Finnegans Wake?
BURGESS
Time spent on a book is perhaps no concern of the readers, really. (Madame
Bovary, a comparatively short book, took longer to write, surely, than the
Joseph sequence.) The whole question is whether the writer can be the same
person, with the same aims and approach to technique, over a long stretch of
time. Ulysses, being innovative, had to go on being more and more
innovative as it was written, and this makes it a sort of disunity. Finnegans
Wake, though it took much longer, got its essential technique established
pretty early.
INTERVIEWER
Your new book, Joysprick, is coming out soon, I understand. How does it differ
in emphasis from Re: Joyce?
BURGESS
It covers a little of the same ground but not very much. Its an attempt to
examine the nature of Joyces language, not from a strictly linguistic point of

view but from a point of view which may be said to be exactly halfway
between literary criticism and linguistics; it doesnt use many technical
terms. It makes a phonetic analysis of Joyces language; there arent many
linguists who can do this nowadays. Phonetics is rather old hat. But it does
examine the dialects of Ulysses, the importance of establishing a
pronunciation in Finnegans Wake, an analysis of the way Joyce constructs a
sentence. It is not a profound book; it is meant to be a beginners guide to
the language of Joyce, and the real work of probing into Joyces linguistic
method must be left to a more scholarly person than myself.
INTERVIEWER
You say that you are taking what you call an old-fashioned phonetic approach
to Joyces language; and yet in MF you make use of Lvi-Strausss
structuralism. Are you at all interested in considering Joyce from the point of
view of structural linguistics?
BURGESS
I dont think thats my line; I think this has to be left to a scholar. I think
somebody has to be in a university, has to be not engaged as I am in the
production of books and teaching and lecturing and living a pretty varied
show-biz life; this is a job for a cool scholar. I dont think I qualify to do it.
Im interested in what sounds Joyce is hearing when he is writing down the
speech of Molly Bloom and Leopold Bloom and the minor characters. Its a
matter of great literary import, I would suggest, because the final monologue
of Molly Bloom inclines a particular way of speech which is not consonant
with her declared background. Here in Joyce there is something very
implausible about the fact that Molly Bloom is the daughter of a major,
brought up in the Gibraltar garrison, coming to Dublin speaking and thinking
like any low Dublin fishwife. This seems to be totally inconsistent, and the
point has not even been made before. I know Gibraltar better than Joyce did
and better than most Joyce scholars. Im trying to examine this.
INTERVIEWER
If Mollys monologue is too elegant, isnt it one of Joyces points to have the
poetic emerge from the demotic?
BURGESS
Its not elegant enough. I mean the fact that she uses Irish locutions like
Pshaw. She would not use any such term, she would not.
INTERVIEWER
Theres a geographical thing.

BURGESS
Theres a pattern implied. Theres a social thing. In a very small garrison town
like Gibraltar with this man, Major Tweedy, whose previous wife is Spanish,
his half-Spanish daughter would speak either Spanish as a first language (and
not with the usual grammar) or English as a first languagebut certainly both
languages, in the first instance in an Andalusian way, and in the second
instance in a totally class-conscious, pseudo-patrician way. She would not
come back to Dublin and suddenly start speaking like a Dublin fishwife.
INTERVIEWER
So Mollys language is probably closer in terms of social background to that of
Nora Barnacle.
BURGESS
It is indeed; this final image is an image of Nora Barnacle and not of Molly at
all. And as we know from Noras letters, Joyce must have studied the letters
and learned from them how to set down this warm womanly pattern of
speech. Nora wrote the letters totally without punctuation, and sometimes it
is hard to distinguish between a chunk of one of Noras letters and a chunk of
Mollys final monologue.
INTERVIEWER
Im looking forward to this book. Have you thought of writing a long,
expansive novel?
BURGESS
I have in mind two long novelsone on a theatrical family from the Middle
Ages till today, the other on a great British composer. The projects are so big
that Im scared of starting on them.
INTERVIEWER
Could you begin with a few excerpts in the form of short stories?
BURGESS
I cant write short stories, not easily, anyway, and Id rather keep my novel
dark until its ready for the light. I made the mistake once of publishing a
chapter of an emergent novel in the Transatlantic Review and the sight of the
extract in cold print turned me against the project. This is my one unfinished
novel.
INTERVIEWER

Do you still hope to write a novel about Theseus encounter with the
Minotaur, or has Rawcliffes scenario in Enderby disposed of that project?
BURGESS
As for the Minotaur idea, I have thought of publishing a volume of all
Enderbys poems, and they would include The Pet Beast (which has become,
incidentally, the title of the Italian version of EnderbyLa Dolce Bestia). I can
see the sense of pretending that someone else has written your book for you,
especially your book of poems. It frees you of responsibilityLook, I know
this is bad, but I didnt write itone of my characters wrote it. Don Quixote,
Lolita, Adaits an old and still lively tradition. I dont get writing blocks
except from the stationer, but I do feel so sickened by what I write that I dont
want to go on.
INTERVIEWER
Do you write the big scenes first, as Joyce Cary did?
BURGESS
I start at the beginning, go on to the end, then stop.
INTERVIEWER
Is each book charted completely in advance?
BURGESS
I chart a little firstlist of names, rough synopsis of chapters, and so on. But
one darent overplan; so many things are generated by the sheer act of
writing.
INTERVIEWER
Do you write nonfiction any differently?
BURGESS
The process is the same.
INTERVIEWER
Is the finished product much influenced by the fact that you do the first draft
on the typewriter?
BURGESS
I dont write drafts. I do page one many, many times and move on to page

two. I pile up sheet after sheet, each in its final state, and at length I have a
novel that doesntin my viewneed any revision.
INTERVIEWER
Then you dont revise at all?
BURGESS
Revising, as I said, is done with each page, not with each chapter or the
whole book. Rewriting a whole book would bore me.
INTERVIEWER
Why did you decide to continue Inside Mr. Enderby, the first half of Enderby,
after several years?
BURGESS
I planned the work as the long book that came out in America, butsince I
was approaching the end of the one year that the doctors had given me to
liveI was not able to do more than the first half in 1959-60. Unwillingness of
the publishers to publish Inside Mr. Enderbyas Part I was called in England
made me delay the writing of Part II. But I had it all in my mind right at the
start.
INTERVIEWER
After the doctors had diagnosed a brain tumor following your collapse in a
Brunei classroom, why did you choose to write during that terminal year
rather than travel, say? Were you confined in semi-invalid status?
BURGESS
I was no semi-invalid. I was very fit and active. (This made me doubt the truth
of the diagnosis.) But to travel the world one needs money, and this I didnt
have. Its only in fiction that terminal year men have something tucked
away. The fact is that my wife and I needed to eat and so on, and the only job
I could do (who would employ me?) was writing. I wrote much because I was
paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.
INTERVIEWER
Did your style change at all during that year, possibly as a result of your
feeling under sentence?
BURGESS
I dont think so. I was old enough to have established some kind of narrative

style; but the real business of working on style, of course, came later. The
novels written in this so-called quasi-terminal yearpseudoterminal year
were not written with, you know, excessive speed; it was just a matter of
working hard every day, working very hard every dayand all dayincluding
the evenings. A good deal of care went into the works, and what people look
for in what seems an excessive amount of production is evidence of
carelessness. There may be a little of that; but its not because of the speed
or apparent speed but because of flaws in my own makeup. I dont think it is
possible to say that a particular work is obviously written during the terminal
year. I dont think there is any qualitative difference between the various
novels; and certainly I was not aware of any influence on style, on way of
writing, caused by this knowledge.
INTERVIEWER
Several of your novels contain poetry written by various characters. Have you
thought of writing poetry again seriously?
BURGESS
Ive seen produced my version of Cyrano de Bergerac. This is in rhyme, and it
worked well, as I expected it to. But I dont plan volumes of versetoo naked,
too personal. I plan further stage translationsPeer Gynt, Chekhovs Chaika
and Im working on a musical of Ulysses. Im much more likely to return to
music. Ive been asked to write a clarinet concerto, and my music to Cyrano
has gone down well enough.
INTERVIEWER
Do you ever use musical forms in designing your novels?
BURGESS
Ah yes, one can learn a lot from musical forms, Im planning a novel in the
style of a classical symphonyminuet and all. The motivations will be purely
formal, so that a development section in which sexual fantasies are enacted
can follow a realistic exposition with neither explanation nor transitional
device, returning to it (now as recapitulation) with a similar lack of
psychological justification or formal trickery.
INTERVIEWER
Composers traffic heavily in transitions. Isnt this particular instance of
literary composition by musical analogy an example of formal trickery, best
understood by the reader who is at least an amateur musician?
BURGESS

I think that music does teach practitioners in other arts useful formal devices,
but the reader doesnt have to know their provenance. Heres an example. A
composer modulates from one key to another by the use of the punning
chord, the augmented sixth (punning because it is also a dominant seventh).
You can change, in a novel, from one scene to another by using a phrase or
statement common to boththis is quite common. If the phrase or statement
means different things in the different contexts, so much the more musical.
INTERVIEWER
One notices that the form of A Vision of Battlements is meant to be similar to
that of Enniss passacaglia, but can any but the most tenuously analogous
relation be established between literature and music generally?
BURGESS
I agree that the musico-literary analogies can be pretty tenuous, but in the
widest possible formal sensesonata form, opera, and so onweve hardly
begun to explore the possibilities. The Napoleon novel Im writing apes the
Eroica formallyirritable, quick, swiftly transitional in the first movement (up
to Napoleons coronation); slow, very leisurely, with a binding beat
suggesting a funeral march for the second. This isnt pure fancy: Its an
attempt to unify a mass of historical material in the comparatively brief space
of about 150,000 words. As for the reader having to know about musicit
doesnt really matter much. In one novel I wrote, The orchestra lunged into a
loud chord of twelve notes, all of them different. Musicians hear the discord,
nonmusicians dont, but theres nothing there to baffle them and prevent
them reading on. I dont understand baseball terms, but I can still enjoy
Malamuds The Natural. I dont play bridge, but I find the bridge game in
Flemings Moonraker absorbingits the emotions conveyed that matter, not
what the players are doing with their hands.
INTERVIEWER
What about film technique as an influence on your writing?
BURGESS
Ive been much more influenced by the stage than by the film. I write in
scenes too long for unbroken cinematic representation. But I like to run a
scene through in my mind before writing it down, seeing everything happen,
hearing some of the dialogue. Ive written for both television and cinema, but
not very successfully. Too literary, or something. I get called in by makers of
historical films to revise the dialogue, which they then restore to its original
form.
INTERVIEWER

What happened to the proposed film versions of Enderby and Nothing Like
the Sun?
BURGESS
The filming of Enderby fell through because the producer dropped dead at
the Cannes film festival. The Shakespeare project came almost when Warner
Brothers was being sold, and all existing enterprises were scrapped when the
new regime started. It may, however, yet be fulfilled. Film people are very
conservative about dialogue: They honestly believe that the immediate grasp
of lexical meaning is more important than the impact of rhythm and
emotionally charged sound. Its regarded as cleverer to pretend that the
people of the past would have spoken like us if theyd been lucky enough to
know how to do so, delighted with the opportunity to view themselves and
their times from our angle. The Lion in Winter is thought to be a triumphant
solution of the medieval dialogue problem, but of course its just cheap.
INTERVIEWER
Does your novel in progress pose any special linguistic problems that may
create obstacles for Stanley Kubrick as well?
BURGESS
The Napoleon novel is difficult from the dialogue angle, but my instinct tells
me to use rhythms and vocabulary not much different from our own. After all,
Byrons Don Juan could almost have been written today. I imagine the soldiers
speaking as todays soldiers speak.
Theyre speaking in French, anyway. As for the Napoleon film, Kubrick must
go his own way, and hell find it a difficult way.
INTERVIEWER
Do you expect to write any more historical novels?
BURGESS
Im working on a novel intended to express the feel of England in Edward IIIs
time, using Dos Passos devices. I believe theres great scope in the historical
novel, so long as it isnt by Mary Renault or Georgette Heyer. The fourteenth
century of my novel will be mainly evoked in terms of smell and visceral
feelings, and it will carry an undertone of general disgust rather than heynonny nostalgia.
INTERVIEWER
Which of Dos Passos techniques will you use?

BURGESS
The novel I have in mind, and for which Ive done a ninety-page plan, is about
the Black Prince. I thought it might be amusing blatantly to steal the Camera
Eye and the Newsreel devices from Dos Passos just to see how they might
work, especially with the Black Death and Crcy and the Spanish campaign.
The effect might be of the fourteenth century going on in another galaxy
where language and literature had somehow got themselves into the
twentieth century. The technique might make the historical characters look
remote and rather comicwhich is what I want.
INTERVIEWER
Are Mary Renaults retellings of Greek myths as bad as all that?
BURGESS
Oh, theyre not unsatisfactory, far from it. Rattling good reads if you like that
sort of thing. They just dont excite me, thats all. Its undoubtedly my fault.
INTERVIEWER
Do you expect to write another novel of the future, like A Clockwork Orange
or The Wanting Seed?
BURGESS
I dont plan a novel about the future except for a mad novella in which
England has become a mere showplace run by America.
INTERVIEWER
Is England going to become simply an oversized tourist boutiqueor the fiftyfirst state?
BURGESS
I used to think that England might become just a place that liked to be visited
like that island in J. M. Barries Mary Rosebut now I see that so many of
the things worth seeingold thingsare disappearing so that England can
become a huge Los Angeles, all motorways, getting about more important
than actually getting anywhere. England is now going into Europe, notas I
had once expected and even hopedAmerica, and I think it will now have
Europes faults without its virtues. The decimal coinage is a monstrosity, and
soon therell be liters of beer, as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and no cheap wine
or caporal tobacco. Absorption, anyway, since England either has to absorb or
be absorbed. Napoleon has won.

INTERVIEWER
You mentioned that A Clockwork Orange has a concluding chapter in the
British edition that isnt available in the American ones. Does this bother you?
BURGESS
Yes, I hate having two different versions of the same book. The U.S. edition
has a chapter short, and hence the arithmological plan is messed up. Also,
the implied view of juvenile violence as something to go through and then
grow out of is missing in the American edition; and this reduces the book to a
mere parable, whereas it was intended to be a novel.
INTERVIEWER
What happens in that twenty-first chapter?
BURGESS
In Chapter 21 Alex grows up and realizes that ultraviolence is a bit of a bore,
and its time he had a wife and a malenky googoogooing malchickiwick to call
him dadada. This was meant to be a mature conclusion, but nobody in
America has ever liked the idea.
INTERVIEWER
Did Stanley Kubrick consider filming the Heinemann version?
BURGESS
Kubrick discovered the existence of this final chapter when he was halfway
through the film, but it was too late to think of altering the concept. Anyway,
he, too, an American, thought it too milk-and-watery. I dont know what to
think now. After all, its twelve years since I wrote the thing.
INTERVIEWER
Did you attempt to get the complete novel published here?
BURGESS
Yeswell, I was very dubious about the book itself. When I wrote the book,
my agent was not willing to present it to a publisher, which is rather unusual;
and the sort of publishers in England were very dubious about the book. So
when the American publisher made this objection to the final chapter, I didnt
feel myself to be in a very strong position. I was a little hesitant to judge the
book; I was a little too close to it. I thought: Well, they may be right. Because
authors do tend to be (especially after the completion of a book) very
uncertain about the value of the book; and perhaps I gave in a little too

weakly, but my concern was partly a financial one. I wanted it to be published

in America, and I wanted some money out of it. So I said, Yes. Whether Id
say Yes now, I dont know; but Ive been persuaded by so many critics that
the book is better in its American form that I say, All right, they know best.
INTERVIEWER
Would it be possible for an American press to put out a limited, hardbound
edition which includes the excluded chapter as a sort of appendix?
BURGESS
I think this should be possible. The best way of doing it is to bring out an
annotated edition of the book with this final chapteran idea which is being
resisted by my publishers for some reason, I dont know why. I would be very
interested in the comments of the average, say, American student on the
differences between the two versions. Because Im not able to judge myself
very clearly now as to whether I was right or wrong. What is your opinion,
what do you feel about that?
INTERVIEWER
I find the last chapter problematical in that while it creates an entirely
different context for the work, it seems anticlimactic after the neat
resurrection of the old Alex in the twentieth chapter.
BURGESS
Yes.
INTERVIEWER
Still it should remain, because your meaning is altered by the cutting off of
the context.
BURGESS
Well, the worst example I know of unjustified translation is to be found in Ford
Madox Fords Parades End, where in the British edition, under the imprint of
Bodley Head, Graham Greene has taken upon himself to present Parades End
as a trilogy, saying he doesnt think the final novel, The Last Post, works, and
he feels perhaps Ford would have agreed with him; and therefore he has
taken the liberty of getting rid of the final book. I think Greene is wrong; I
think that whatever Ford said, the work is a tetralogy, and the thing is
severely maimed with the loss of his final book. An author is not to be trusted
in his judgment of this sort of thing. Authors very frequently try to be
indifferent to their books. Certainly they are so sick of their books that they
dont want to make any serious judgment on them. The problem comes up,

you see, when one reads Evelyn Waughs A Handful of Dust, because this
frightful ending (where Tony Last spends all his time reading Dickens to this
half-breed in the jungle), appeared previously as a short story; and knowing
the short story one has a strange attitude to the book. Which makes us feel
that here is a deliberate pasting together, where this giant figure at the end
that turns up does not spring automatically out of the book but is just taken
arbitrarily from another work. Perhaps one shouldnt know too much about
these things. Of course, one cant avoid it. These two versions of Samuel
Butlers Way of All Fleshthis raises the problem. Which version would we
like better, which is the right version? Its better to know only one thing, to be
fairly ignorant of what was going on. You know, behind the version we know.
INTERVIEWER
Isnt this an argument against publishing a complete A Clockwork Orange,
since a twenty-chapter version is embedded in everyones mind?
BURGESS
I dont know; theyre both relevant. They seem to me to express in a sense
the difference between the British approach to life and the American
approach to life. There may be something very profound to say about this
difference in these different presentations of the novel. I dont know; Im not
able to judge.
INTERVIEWER
In A Clockwork Orange and Enderby especially theres a persistent strain of
mockery toward youth culture and its music. Is there anything good about
them?
BURGESS
I despise whatever is obviously ephemeral and yet is shown as possessing
some kind of ultimate value. The Beatles, for instance. Most youth culture,
especially music, is based on so little knowledge of tradition, and it often
elevates ignorance into a virtue. Think of the musically illiterate who set
themselves up as arrangers. And youth is so conformist, so little concerned
with maverick values, so proud of being rather than making, so bloody sure
that it and it alone knows.
INTERVIEWER
You used to play in a jazz band. Is there any hope that their interest in rock
music may lead youth to jazzor even to classical music?
BURGESS

I still play jazz, chiefly on a four-octave electric organ, and I prefer this to
listening to it. I dont think jazz is for listening but for playing. Id like to write
a novel about a jazz pianist or, better, about a pub pianistwhich I once was,
like my father before me. I dont think rock leads on to a liking for jazz. The
kids are depressingly static in their tastes. They do so want words, and jazz
gets along very nicely without words.
INTERVIEWER
In two of your novels the wordsmiths Shakespeare and Enderby are inspired
by the Muse. But youve said as well that you like to regard your books as
works of craftsmanship for sale.
BURGESS
The Muse in Nothing Like the Sun was not a real museonly syphilis. The girl
in Enderby is really sex, which, like syphilis, has something to do with the
creative process. I mean, you cant be a genius and sexually impotent. I still
think that inspiration comes out of the act of making an artifact, a work of
craft.
INTERVIEWER
Are works of art the products of strong libido?
BURGESS
Yes, I think art is sublimated libido. You cant be a eunuch priest, and you
cant be a eunuch artist. I became interested in syphilis when I worked for a
time at a mental hospital full of GPI cases. I discovered there was a
correlation between the spirochete and mad talent. The tubercle also
produces a lyrical drive. Keats had both.
INTERVIEWER
Has your interest in Manns Doctor Faustus influenced the use of syphilis and
other diseases in your own work?
BURGESS
Ive been much influenced by the thesis of Manns Doctor Faustus, but I
wouldnt want to have syphilis myself in order to be Wagner or Shakespeare
or Henry VIII. Some prices are too high to pay. Oh, youll want examples of
these GPI talents. There was one man whod turned himself into a kind of
Scriabin, another who could give you the day of the week for any date in
history, another who wrote poems like Christopher Smart. Many patients were
orators or grandiose liars. It was like being imprisoned in a history of
European art. Politics as well.

INTERVIEWER
Have you used in your novels any of the GPI cases that you encountered?
BURGESS
I did have the intention at one time of writing a long novela kind of Magic
Mountain, I supposeabout life in a mental hospital; and perhaps I may yet
get down to it. Of course, the trouble is it would take on a kind of political
significance. People might think of works like Cancer Ward; it might be
thought as presenting a clearly marked division between the patients and the
hospital staff. One would be trading in a sort of political allegory; its so easy
to do that. Yet what interests me about a mental hospital that specializes in
General Paralysis of the Insane is this relationship between disease and
talent. Some of the tremendous skills that these patients showthese
tremendous mad abilitiesall stem out of the spirochete. I have pursued this
in a couple of novels (or at least in one novel), but to do it on a larger scale
would require a kind of rationale which I havent yet worked out. I dont think
it should be done purely as a documentary novel, as a naturalistic
presentation of what life is like in such hospitals; but it does suggest to me
that its tied up with symbols of some kindtied up with an interior, deeper
meaning. Of course one never knows what this meaning will be, but The
Magic Mountain has its deeper meanings beneath the naturalistic surface. I
wouldnt want to imitate that. One has to wait, Im afraida long time
sometimesfor the experience ones had to present itself in workable form,
as a form that can be shaped into something like a work of art.
INTERVIEWER
Do you see any contradiction in choosing a craftsman like Joyce as one of
your literary models while classifying yourself as a Grub Street writer at the
same time?
BURGESS
Why contradiction? But Ive never really regarded Joyce as a literary model.
Joyce cant be imitated, and theres no imitation Joyce in my work. All you can
learn from Joyce is the exact use of language. Grub Street writer means Dr.
Johnson as well as our wretched columnists, and Johnson was an exact user of
language.
INTERVIEWER
Youve certainly studied Joyce very thoroughly. Does knowing what he has
done open more doors than it closes?
BURGESS

Joyce opened doors only to his own narrow world; his experiments were for
himself only. But all novels are experimental, and Finnegans Wake is no more
spectacular an experiment than, say, Prancing Nigger or His Monkey Wife. It
looks spectacular because of the language. MF, believe it or not, is a
completely original experiment.
INTERVIEWER
Isnt Joyces attempt to devote virtually an entire novel to the Unconscious
more than a purely linguistic experiment?
BURGESS
Yes, of course. The wakeworld is only narrow in that its asleep, fixed on one
set of impulses only, has too few characters.
INTERVIEWER
Cant contemporary writers use some of Joyces techniques without being
mere imitators?
BURGESS
You cant use Joyces techniques without being Joyce. Technique and material
are one. You cant write like Beethoven without writing Beethoven, unless
youre Beethoven.
INTERVIEWER
Has Nabokov influenced your work at all? Youve praised Lolita highly.
BURGESS
Reading Lolita meant that I enjoyed using lists of things in The Right to an
Answer. Ive not been much influenced by Nabokov, nor do I intend to be. I
was writing the way I write before I knew he existed. But Ive not been
impressed so much by another writer in the last decade or so.
INTERVIEWER
Yet youve been called an English Nabokov, probably because of the
cosmopolitan strain and verbal ingenuity in your writing.
BURGESS
No influence. Hes a Russian, Im English. I meet him halfway in certain
temperamental endowments. Hes very artificial, though.
INTERVIEWER

In what way?
BURGESS
Nabokov is a natural dandy on the grand international scale. Im still a
provincial boy scared of being too nattily dressed. All writing is artificial, and
Nabokovs artifacts are only contrived in the rcit part. His dialogue is always
natural and masterly (when he wants it to be). Pale Fire is only termed a
novel because theres no other term for it. Its a masterly literary artifact
which is poem, commentary, casebook, allegory, sheer structure. But I note
that most people go back to reading the poem, not what surrounds the poem.
Its a fine poem, of course. Where Nabokov goes wrong, I think, is in
sometimes sounding old-fashioneda matter of rhythm, as though Huysmans
is to him a sound and modern writer whose tradition is worthy to be worked
in. John Updike sounds old-fashioned sometimes in the same wayglorious
vocabulary and imagery but a lack of muscle in the rhythm.
INTERVIEWER
Does Nabokov rank at the top with Joyce?
BURGESS
He wont go down in history as one of the greatest names. Hes unworthy to
unlatch Joyces shoe.
INTERVIEWER
Have any new writers appeared of late that you think are destined for
greatness?
BURGESS
I cant think of any in England. The trouble with American writers is that they
die before becoming greatNathanael West, Scott Fitzgerald, etc. Mailer will
become a great autobiographer. Ellison will be great if only hell write more.
Too many homines unius libri like Heller.
INTERVIEWER
American writers certainly tend to burn themselves out early, at least. Do you
think it takes more than one book for a writer to earn the label great?
BURGESS
A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesnt make him a
great writerjust the writer of a great book. Samuel Butlers Way of All Flesh
is a great novel, but nobody calls Butler a great novelist. I think a writer has

to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.

INTERVIEWER
Did Fitzgerald write a great novel?
BURGESS
I dont think Fitzgeralds books greatstyle too derivatively romantic, far less
of that curious freshness of vision than you find in HemingwayHemingway
is a great novelist, I think, but he never wrote a great novel (a great novella,
yes). I think America likes its artists to die young, in atonement for materialist
Americas sins. The English leave the dying young to Celts like Dylan Thomas
and Behan. But I cant understand the American literary blockas in Ellison
or Salingerunless it means that the blocked man isnt forced economically
to write (as the English writer, lacking campuses and grants, usually is) and
hence can afford the luxury of fearing the critics pounce on a new work not
as good as the last (or the first). American writers drink a lot when theyre
blocked, and drunkennessbeing a kind of substitute for artmakes the
block worse. Ive found it best, especially since my first wife, who drank less
than I, died of cirrhosis, to drink little. But I smoke much, and thats probably
worse than five martinis a day.
INTERVIEWER
Youve spoken highly of Defoe as a novelist and practical journalist, and you
also admire Sterne as a writer. What special appeal do these eighteenthcentury writers have for you?
BURGESS
I admire Defoe because he worked hard. I admire Sterne because he did
everything the French are trying so unhandily to do now. Eighteenth-century
prose has a tremendous vitality and scope. Not Fielding, though. Sentimental,
too much given to contrivances. Sterne and Swift (who, Joyce said, should
have exchanged names) are men one can learn technically from all the time.
INTERVIEWER
Speaking of the Frenchyour playful novels of ideas tend to be more in the
French literary tradition, perhaps, than any other. Has this kept them from
becoming better known in England and America?
BURGESS
The novels Ive written are really medieval Catholic in their thinking, and
people dont want that today. God forbid they should be French. If theyre
not read, its because the vocabulary is too big, and people dont like using

dictionaries when theyre reading mere novels. I dont give a damn, anyway.
INTERVIEWER
This Catholic emphasis accounts in part for the frequent comparisons made
between your novels and Evelyn Waughs, and yet youve said you dont find
Waughs aristocratic idea of Catholicism attractive. What do you like about his
work?
BURGESS
Waugh is funny, Waugh is elegant, Waugh is economical. His Catholicism,
which I despise as all cradle Catholics despise converts, is the thing in him
which means least to me. Indeed, it injures his Sword of Honour.
INTERVIEWER
This charge has often been madealong with that of sentimentalityagainst
Brideshead Revisited, but Sword of Honour is often called the best novel in
English about World War II. How does Waughs (or Guy Crouchbacks)
Catholicism weaken it?
BURGESS
Crouchbacks Catholicism weakens Sword of Honour in the sense that it
sectarianizes the bookI mean, we have Crouchbacks moral view of the war,
and this is not enough: We need something that lies beneath religion. In our
age its a weakness to make Catholic theology the basis of a novel since it
means everythings cut and dried and the author doesnt have to rethink
things out. The weakness of Greenes Heart of the Matter is derived from its
authors fascination with theology: the sufferings of the hero are theological
sufferings, invalid outside the narrow field of Catholicism. When I taught
Waugh and Greene to Muslim students in Malaya, they used to laugh. Why
cant this man have two wives if he wants them, they would say. Whats
wrong with eating the bit of bread the priest gives you when youve been
sleeping with a woman not your wife, and so on. They never laughed at the
tragic heroes of the Greeks and Elizabethans.
INTERVIEWER
Does the difference between cradle and convert Catholicism influence an
authors work in such an essential way that you tend to prefer a novelist like
Franois Mauriac to Graham Greene?
BURGESS
English converts to Catholicism tend to be bemused by its glamor and even
look for more glamor in it than is actually therelike Waugh, dreaming of an

old English Catholic aristocracy, or Greene, fascinated by sin in a very coldblooded way. I wished I liked Mauriac more as a writer. The fact is that I prefer
the converted Catholics because they happen to be better novelists. I do try
to forget that Greene is a Catholic when I read him. He, too, is now, I think,
trying to forget. The Comedians was a kind of philosophical turning point.
Travels with My Aunt is deliciously free of morality of any kind, except a very
delightful kind of inverted morality.
INTERVIEWER
In an essay on Waugh you mentioned the Puritan that lurks in every English
Catholic. Do you see this residue of Puritanism lurking in your own writing at
all?
BURGESS
Of course its in me. We English take our Catholicism seriously, which the
Italians and French dont, and that makes us earnest and obsessed about sin.
We really absorbed hellperhaps a very Nordic notionand think about it
when committing adultery. Im so puritanical that I cant describe a kiss
without blushing.
INTERVIEWER
Are there any limits that you think an author should observe in the language
he uses to present controversial subject matter?
BURGESS
My aversion to describing amorous details in my work is probably that I
treasure physical love so highly I dont want to let strangers in on it. For, after
all, when we describe copulation were describing our own experiences. I like
privacy. I think that other writers should do what they can do, and if they can
spendas one of my American girl students didten pages on the act of
fellatio without embarrassing themselves, very good luck to them. But I think
theres more artistic pleasure to be gained from the ingenious circumvention
of a taboo than from what is called total permissiveness. When I wrote my
first Enderby novel, I had to make my hero say For cough, since Fuck off
was not then acceptable. With the second book the climate had changed, and
Enderby was at liberty to say Fuck off. I wasnt happy. It was too easy. He
still said For cough, while others responded with Fuck off. A compromise.
Literature, however, thrives on taboos, just as all art thrives on technical
difficulties.
INTERVIEWER
Several years ago you wrote, I believe the wrong God is temporarily ruling

the world and that the true God has gone under, and added that the
novelists vocation predisposes him to this Manichaean view. Do you still
believe this?
BURGESS
I still hold this belief.
INTERVIEWER
Why do you think that the novelist is predisposed to regard the world in terms
of essential opposition? Unlike the Manichaeans you seem to maintain a
traditional Christian belief in original sin.
BURGESS
Novels are about conflicts. The novelists world is one of essential oppositions
of character, aspiration, and so on. Im only a Manichee in the widest sense of
believing that duality is the ultimate reality; the original-sin bit is not really a
contradiction, though it does lead one on to depressingly French heresies, like
Graham Greenes own Jansenism, as well as Albigensianism (Joan of Arcs
religion), Catharism, and so on. Im entitled to an eclectic theology as a
novelist, if not as a human being.
INTERVIEWER
In planning your novels, have you ever considered separating them, as
Simenon does, into commercial and uncommercial works or, like Greene,
into novels and entertainments?
BURGESS
All my novels belong to the one categoryintended to be, as it were, serious
entertainment, no moral aim, no solemnity. I want to please.
INTERVIEWER
Arent you divorcing morality from aesthetics? This view is certainly
consistent with your dismissal in Shakespeare of the Anglo-Saxon notion that
a great artist must have a great moral sensibility.
BURGESS
I dont divorce morals and aesthetics. I merely believe that a mans literary
greatness is no index of his personal ethics. I dont, true, think that the job of
literature is to teach us how to behave, but I think it can make clearer the
whole business of moral choice by showing what the nature of lifes problems
is. Its after truth, which is not goodness.

INTERVIEWER
Youve said that the novel gets an implied set of values derived from religion
but that other arts, such as music and architecture, are, unlike fiction,
neutral. Does this make them more or less attractive at this point?
BURGESS
I enjoy writing music precisely because one is divorced from human
considerations like belief, conduct. Pure form, nothing more. But then I tend
to despise music just because it is so mindless. Ive been writing a string
quartet based on a musical theme that Shakespeare throws at us, in sol-fa
notation, in Loves Labours Lost (the theme is CDGAEF), and its been pure,
bliss. Ive been thoroughly absorbed by it, on planes, in hotel bedrooms,
anywhere where I had nothing else to do and there was no bloody Muzak
playing. (Dont the Muzak purveyors ever think of the people who actually
have to write music?) Now Im a little ashamed that the music engages
nothing but purely formal problems. So I oscillate between a hankering after
pure form and a realization that literature is probably valuable because it
says things.
INTERVIEWER
How does political neutrality figure in all this? In your novels the neutrals,
such as Mr. Theodorescu in Tremor of Intent, are usually villains.
BURGESS
If art should be neutral, if it can, life should be committed, if it can. Theres no
connection between political and religious neutrality and that blessed
achieved neutrality of, say, music. Art is, so to speak, the church triumphant,
but the rest of life is in the church militant. I believe that good and evil exist,
though they have nothing to do with art, and that evil has to be resisted.
Theres no inconsistency in holding an aesthetic so different from such an
ethic.
INTERVIEWER
Several of your recent novels have exotic foreign settings, even though you
remarked a few years ago that the artist should exhaust the resources of the
here and now as a true test of his art. Have you changed your mind?
BURGESS
Yes, I changed my mind. Im limited by temperament, I now discover, to being
moved or excited by any place in the world so long as its not England. This
means that all my settings must be exotic.

INTERVIEWER
Why do you consider England so dull a subject?
BURGESS
Dull for me if not for others. I like societies where theres a dynamism of
conflict. In other words, I think novels should be about the whole of a society
by implication if nothing elseand not just a little pocket inside. English
fiction tends to be about these pocketslove affairs in Hampstead, Powells
bohemian aristocracy, Snows men of power. Dickens gave you the lot, like
Balzac. Much modern American fiction gives you the lot. You could
reconstruct the whole of modern America from even a little mad fantasy like
Phil Roths The Breast. But I may have a personal thing about Englanda
sense of exclusion, and so on. It may even be so simple a matter as liking
extreme climates, fights in bars, exotic waterfronts, fish soup, a lot of garlic. I
find it easier to imagine a surrealistic version of New Jersey than of old
England, though I could see some American genius making a whole strange
world of Mr. Heaths inheritance. Probably (as Thomas Pynchon never went to
Valletta or Kafka to America) its best to imagine your own foreign country. I
wrote a very good account of Paris before I ever went there. Better than the
real thing.
INTERVIEWER
Was this in The Worm and the Ring?
BURGESS
Yes. Paris was a town I always tried to avoid: But Ive been more and more in
it recently and find that the account of Paris I wrote (although it smells of
maps and tourist guides) is not unlike the reality. This is true also with Joyces
Gibraltar in Ulysses; one has no need to visit the country to write about the
country.
INTERVIEWER
And yet you draw a good picture of Leningrad in Honey for the Bears.
BURGESS
Oh, I knew Leningrad. Yes, thats right. But not too well; for if one gets to
know a town too well, then the sharpness of the impression is blunted, and
one is not interested in writing about it. Anyway, the interesting point is that
one first meets a town through its smells; this is especially true in Europe.
Leningrad has a peculiar smell of its own, and you become habituated to
these smells in time, and you forget what they are; and youre not able to

approach it in those highly sensuous terms when writing about it if you know
a place too well. If youre in a town for about a month somewhere, you cant
retain a sensuous impression. As with Paris, you smell the Gauloise when you
arrive, but you cease to smell the Gauloise in time. You get so used to it.
INTERVIEWER
Youve said that Leningrad resembles Manchester. How are they alike?
BURGESS
I think it was just the sense of the architecture, the rather broken-down
architecture of Leningrad, the sense of large numbers of the working class,
rather shabbily dressed. And I suppose in some ways the smell of Manchester
I always associated Manchester with the smell of tanneries, very pungent
smells, as you know. I got this same smell out of Leningrad. Its a small thing,
but these small things have a curious habit of becoming important. You try to
fix a place in your mind. I dont know what the smell of Milwaukee is, I dont
think the American cities have any smell. Thats probably why they are rather
unmemorable. Smell is most elusive of the senses. To a novelist it is somehow
the most important of the senses.
INTERVIEWER
Youve also said that the serious novelist should be prepared to stay in one
place and really get to know it. Do you hope to do this with Italy now?
BURGESS
Again, I seem to have changed my mind. I think I shall want to invent places
more than merely reproduce them, and dont please put this down to the
influence of Ada. The next four novels will be set, respectively, in medieval
England, modern New Jersey, Italy in the last fifty years, Jane Austens
England.
INTERVIEWER
Have your travels given you a special sense of the variety of human types,
such as Forsters Prof. Godbole?
BURGESS
Fundamentally people are all the same, and Ive lived among enough
different races long enough to be dogmatic about this. Godbole in A Passage
to India is an eccentric mystic of the type that any culture can throw up.
INTERVIEWER

At this point do you regard yourself as an expatriate Englishman or as an

exile?
BURGESS
A verbal quibble. Ive voluntarily exiled myself, but not forever. Nevertheless,
I cant think of any good reason for going back to England except on a
holiday. But one is, as Simone Weil said, faithful to the cuisine one was
brought up on, and that probably constitutes patriotism. I am sometimes
mentally and physically ill for Lancashire foodhot pot, lobscouse, and so on
and I have to have these things. Im loyal to Lancashire, I suppose, but not
strongly enough to wish to go back and live there.
INTERVIEWER
What are hot pot and lobscouse?
BURGESS
Hot pot, or Lancashire hot pot, is made in this way. An earthenware dish, a
layer of trimmed lamb chops, a layer of sliced onions, a layer of sliced
potatoes, then continue the layers till you reach the top. Add seasoned stock.
On top put mushrooms or more potato slices to brown. Add oysters or kidneys
as well if you wish. Bake in a moderate oven for a long time. Eat with pickled
cabbage. Lobscouse is a sailors dish from Liverpool (Liverpudlians are called
scousers or scowsers) and is very simple. Dice potatoes and onions and
cook in a pan of seasoned water. When theyre nearly done, get rid of excess
liquid and add a can or two of cubed (or diced) corned beef. Heat gently. Eat
with mixed pickles. I love cooking these dishes, and, once known, everybody
loves them. Theyre honest and simple. Lancashire has a great cuisine,
including a notable shop cuisinemeaning you can buy great delicacies in
shops. Lancashire women traditionally work in the cotton mills and cook
dinner only at weekends. Hence the things you can get in cooked food shops
fish and chips, Bury puddings, Eccles cakes, tripe, cowheel, meat pies (hot,
with gravy poured into a hole from a jug), and so on. Fish and chips is now, I
think, internationally accepted. Meat and potato pie is perhaps the greatest of
the Lancashire dishesa drier hot pot with a fine flaky crust.
INTERVIEWER
Im tempted to visit Manchester. Lawrence Durrell, another expatriate English
writer, has said that since America and Russia are going to determine our
future, one is obliged to stop traveling and start thinking when one is in either
country. Its different, he says, from going to Italya pure pleasure. Do you
agree?
BURGESS

Durrell has never yet said anything I could agree with. He reminds me of that
TV show woman in America, Virginia Graham. I just dont know what the hell
he can mean by that. In America and Russia I meet people, get drunk, eat,
just as I do in Italy. I see no signs of purely metaphysical import. Those are
left to governments, and governments are what I try to ignore. All
governments are evil, including that of Italy.
INTERVIEWER
That sounds vaguely anarchic, or at least un-American. Did you have an
undergraduate Marxist period, like Victor Crabbe in The Long Day Wanes?
BURGESS
I was never a Marxist, though I was always, even as an undergraduate, ready
to play the Marxist gameanalyzing Shakespeare in Marxist terms, and so
on. I always loved dialectical materialism. But it was a structuralist love from
the start. To take socialism seriously, as opposed to minimal socialization
(what America needs so desperately), is ridiculous.
INTERVIEWER
Doesnt minimal socialization require an increase in the size and power of
central government? Only the American federal government can fund the
equivalent of the English or Scandinavian health plans; the need for
inexpensive medical treatment is acute here.
BURGESS
I loathe the State but concede that socialized medicine is a priority in any
civilized country today. In England it saved me from bankruptcy during my
wifes final illness (though perhaps a private insurance policy might have
taken care of it. You cant opt out of the state scheme, however). Socialized
medicinewhich in England was a liberal idea, anywaydoesnt have to
mean out-and-out socialism with everything nationalized. If America gets it, it
will be only the doctors and dentists who will try not to make it work, but, as
in England, theres no reason why a private practice shouldnt coexist with a
national health one. You go to a dentist in England, and he says Private or
National Health? The difference in treatment is hardly noticeable, but the
State materials (tooth fillings, spectacles, and so on) are inferior to what you
buy as a private patient.
INTERVIEWER
Do these views make you a political conservative, then? Youve said you
would reluctantly vote conservative in England.

BURGESS
I think Im a Jacobite, meaning that Im traditionally Catholic, support the
Stuart monarchy and want to see it restored, and distrust imposed change
even when it seems to be for the better. I honestly believe that America
should become monarchist (preferably Stuart) because with a limited
monarchy you have no president, and a president is one more corruptible
element in government. I hate all republics. I suppose my conservatism, since
the ideal of a Catholic Jacobite imperial monarch isnt practicable, is really a
kind of anarchism.
INTERVIEWER
Many Americans believe their presidency has evolved into a form of
monarchy, with unhappy results. Do you see anarchy as a viable political
alternative?
BURGESS
The U.S. presidency is a Tudor monarchy plus telephones. Your alternative is
either a return to the limited monarchy of the British Commonwealtha
constitutional monarch is at least out of politics and cant get dirty or corrupt
or devolution into unfederated states with a loose cooperative framework
for large development schemes. Anarchy is a mans own thing, and I think its
too late in the day to think of it as a viable system or nonsystem in a country
as large as America. It was all right for Blake or for Thoreau, both of whom I
admire immensely, but well never get it so full-blooded again. All we can do
is keep pricking our government all the time, disobeying all we dare (after all,
we have livings to earn), asking why, maintaining a habit of distrust.
INTERVIEWER
Youve urged fellow artists to seek depth by digging for the mythical. Are
you more interested in creating new myths or in re-examining old ones, as
you did with the Aeneid in A Vision of Battlements?
BURGESS
At present Im interested in what structuralism can teach us about myth. I
dont think I can invent my own myths, and I still think theres a great deal of
fictional revivification possible with regard to such myths as the Jason/Golden
Fleece one (on which I plan a novel, incidentally). Existing myths carry useful
depth, a profundity of meaning which saves the novelist a lot of inventive
trouble.
INTERVIEWER

How does Jasons pursuit of the Golden Fleece apply to our time?
BURGESS
My Jason novel, if I ever write it, will just use the Argonaut story as a
framework for picaresque adventures. No deeper significance.
INTERVIEWER
Have you considered basing a novel on myths associated with Oriental
religions, as Mann did in The Transposed Heads?
BURGESS
Strangely, Ive been contemplating making a musical play out of Manns The
Transposed Headsvery charming, but only a game despite the claims of
psychological profundity sometimes made for it. Ive six years in the East but
am not greatly drawn to Eastern myths, except that of the endless Javanese
shadow play, which is like Finnegans Wake, anyway. But Ive thought of a
novel based on Munshi Abdullahs Hikayat. That German hunger for the East
Hesse as well as Mannis very curious. They might not have seen it as so
romantic if theyd been colonial officers. Perhaps thats what they really
wanted to be.
INTERVIEWER
Structuralism plays a big part in MF. How important is it to you as a novelist of
ideas?
BURGESS
Structuralism is the scientific confirmation of a certain theological conviction
that life is binary, that this is a duoverse and so on. What I mean is that the
notion of essential oppositionnot God/Devil but just x/yis the fundamental
one, and this is a kind of purely structuralist view. We end up with form as
more important than content, with speech and art as phatic processes, with
the big moral imponderables as mere hot air. Marshall McLuhan has been
limping along this track independently of Lvi-Strauss. How marvelous that
the essential bifurcation which is man is expressed in trousers that carry LviStrausss name.
INTERVIEWER
Along with establishing a firm connection between language and myth,
youve also indicated about the future of the novel that only through the
exploration of language can the personality be coaxed into yielding a few
more of its secrets. Would you expand on that?

BURGESS
By extension of vocabulary, by careful distortion of syntax, by exploitation of
various prosodic devices traditionally monopolized by poetry, surely certain
indefinite or complex areas of the mind can more competently be rendered
than in the style of, say, Irving Stone or Wallace.
INTERVIEWER
Are you ever tempted to lavish complex prose on a simple protagonist, as
Flaubert did in A Simple Heart?
BURGESS
Try and make your language fit your concept of the subject more than the
subject itself. Heres this stupid man whos written a most highly wrought
work about a housemaid called Flicit. But Flaubert was concerned, surely,
with the nobility of that heart and lavished his prose riches upon it. Style is
less a preoccupation than a perennial problem. Finding the right style for the
subject, I mean. This must mean that the subject comes first and the style
after.
INTERVIEWER
Youve referred to yourself as a serious novelist who is attempting to extend
the range of subject matter available to fiction. How have you tried to do
this?
BURGESS
Ive written about the dying British empire, lavatories, structuralism, and so
on, but I dont really think that that kind of subject matter is what I had in
mind when I made that statement. I meant the modification of the sensibility
of the British novel, which I may have achieved a little, a very little. The new
areas are more technical than thematic.
INTERVIEWER
In The Novel Now you said that the novel is the only important literary form
we have left. Why do you think this is true?
BURGESS
Yes, the novel is the only big literary form we have left. It is capable of
enclosing the other, lesser, literary forms, from the play to the lyric poem.
Poets are doing well enough, especially in America, but they cant achieve
the architectonic skill which once lay behind the epic (for which the novel is
now a substitute). The short, sharp burstin music as well as poetryis not

enough. The novel has the monopoly of form today.

INTERVIEWER
Granted this limited primacy of the novel, its disturbing that novel sales in
general are declining and that public attention is focused more on nonfiction.
Are you tempted to turn more to biography, for example, in the future?
BURGESS
I shall carry on with novelizing and hope for some little reward on the side.
Biography is very hard work, no room for invention. But if I were a young man
now, I wouldnt dream of trying to become a professional novelist. But some
day, perhaps soon, the old realization will come backthat reading about
imaginary characters and their adventures is the greatest pleasure in the
world. Or the second greatest.
INTERVIEWER
What is the first?
BURGESS
That depends upon your own tastes.
INTERVIEWER
Why do you regret becoming a professional novelist?
BURGESS
I think that the mental strain, the worry, you know, the self-doubt, are hardly
worth the candle; the agonies of creation and the sense of responsibility to
ones museall these various things become more than one can live with.
INTERVIEWER
Are the odds much longer today against anyones sustaining himself by
quality fiction writing?
BURGESS
I dont know. I know that the older I get the more I want to live and the less
opportunity I have. I dont think I wanted to become chained to an art form;
establishing ones identity through an art form, one is a kind of Frankenstein
creating a monster, so to speak. I wish I could live easier; I wish I didnt have
the sense of responsibility to the arts. More than anything, I wish I didnt have
the prospect of having to write certain novels, which must be written because
nobody else will write them. I wish I were freer, I like freedom; and I think I

would have been much happier living as a colonial officer writing the odd
novel in my spare time. Then I would have been happier than as a sort of
professional man of letters, making a living out of words.
INTERVIEWER
Do film versions help or hinder novels?
BURGESS
Films help the novels theyre based on, which I both resent and am grateful
for. My Clockwork Orange paperback has sold over a million in America,
thanks to dear Stanley. But I dont like being beholden to a mere filmmaker. I
want to prevail through pure literature. Impossible, of course.
INTERVIEWER
Youve referred to A Vision of Battlements, your first novel, like all my stories
since, as a slow and cruel stripping off of illusion, yet you are often called a
comic writer. Is comedy by nature so cruel, or do you consider yourself more
as a satirist?
BURGESS
Comedy is concerned with truth quite as much as tragedy; and the two, as
Plato recognized, have something fundamental in common. Theyre both
stripping processes; they both tear off externals and show man as a poor
forked animal. Satire is a particular kind of comedy, limiting itself to particular
areas of behavior, not to the general human condition. I dont think Im a
satirist.
INTERVIEWER
Are you a black humorist as wellor are all these categories too confining?
BURGESS
I think Im a comic writer, malgr moi. My Napoleon is turning out comic, and
I certainly didnt intend that. I dont think I know what black humor is.
Satirist? Satire is a difficult medium, ephemeral unless theres tremendous
vitality in the form itselflike Absalom and Achitophel, Tale of a Tub, Animal
Farm: I mean, the work has to subsist as story or poetry even when the
objects of the satire are forgotten. Satire is now an element in some other
form, not a form in itself. I like to be called just a novelist.
INTERVIEWER
About ten years ago you wrote that you considered yourself a pessimist but

believed that the world has much solace to offerlove, food, music, the
immense variety of race and language, literature, the pleasure of artistic
creation. Would you make up the same list of saving graces today?
BURGESS
Yes, no change.
INTERVIEWER
Georges Simenon, another professional, has said that writing is not a
profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I dont think an artist can ever be
happy. Do you think this is true?
BURGESS
Yes, Simenons right. My eight-year-old son said the other day: Dad, why
dont you write for fun? Even he divined that the process as I practice it is
prone to irritability and despair. I suppose, apart from my marriage, I was
happiest when I was doing a teaching job and had nothing much to think
about in the vacations. The anxiety involved is intolerable. AndI differ here
from Simenonthe financial rewards just dont make up for the expenditure
of energy, the damage to health caused by stimulants and narcotics, the fear
that ones work isnt good enough. I think, if I had enough money, Id give up
writing tomorrow.
Author photograph by Nancy Crampton

William Carlos Williams, The Art of Poetry No. 6

Interviewed by Stanley Koehler ISSUE 32, SUMMER-FALL 1964
undefined
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, 1964.

Rutherford, New Jersey: Number nine stands on a terrace at the foot of Ridge
Road, just where it angles into Park Avenue and the stores along the main
street. For fifty years the sign beside the walk read William C. Williams, M. D.
Now it carries the name of his son, with an arrow pointing to the side
entrance and the new office wing. In his last years, Dr. Williams's health
suffered from a series of strokes that made it difficult for him to speak and
impaired his physical vigor, so that there would often be a delay before he
appeared, pushing out the aluminum storm door and retreating a step or two,

extending welcome with a kind of hesitant warmth. On the occasion of the

interview, he moved more deliberately than ever, but his greeting was still at
pains to be personal. A leisurely progress brought us upstairs past a huge,
two-story painting of Williamsburg Bridge filling the stairwell, to the study, a
room at the back of the house, overlooking the yard. An electric typewriter,
which Dr. Williams could no longer use, was at the desk, and, though he could
scarcely read, a copy of The Desert Music and Other Poems, opened to The
Descent, was propped up in the open drawer. In a corner of the room, over a
metal filing cabinet, was an oil painting hung against a wallpaper of
geometric simplicity. We sat a little away from the desk, toward the window,
with the microphone lying on a stack of small magazines between us.
At the time of these talks, in April 1962, William Carlos Williams was in his
seventy-ninth year, author of forty published volumes from Poems, 1909, a
collection so rare that Mrs. Williams has had trouble holding on to a copy,
down through various collected editions and the successive books of Paterson
to The Desert Music and Journey to Love. Both of these last volumes were
written in an unusual recovery of creative power after Dr. Williams's first
serious illness in 1952. Now, with customary impatience, he was fretting to
see his latest collection, Pictures from Brueghel, scheduled for publication in
June. The doorbell never rang but he expected some word from New
Directions, though it was still early in spring.
Because it was so hard for Dr. Williams to talk, there was no question of
discoursing on topics suggested in advance, and the conversation went on
informally, for an hour or two at a time, over several days. The effort it took
the poet to find and pronounce words can hardly be indicated here. Many of
the sentences ended in no more than a wave of the hand when Mrs. Williams
was not present to finish them. But whatever the topic, the poet's mind kept
coming back to the technical matters that interested him in his later years.
One of these was his concern with idiom, the movements of speech that he
felt to be especially American, as opposed to English. A rival interest was the
variable foot, a metrical device that was to resolve the conflict between
form and freedom in verse. The question whether one had not to assume a
fixed element in the foot as the basis for meter drew only a typical Williams
negative, slightly profane, and no effort was made to pursue this much
further. As a result, the notion of some mysterious measure runs through
the interview like an unlaid ghost, promising enough pattern for shapeliness,
enough flexibility for all the subtleties of idiom. No wonder a copy of The
Descent was in evidence as we began; for however much one may argue
over the theory of this verse, it is hard to resist the performance.
On March 4, 1963, William Carlos Williams died in his sleep, at home, of a
cerebral hemorrhage that was not unexpected. Two months later, Pictures
from Brueghel was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and Mrs. Williams

accepted, in his name, the Gold Medal for Poetry from the National Institute
of Arts and Letters. Though he did not see this interview in print, he approved
it in its final stages. Mrs. Williams reports him as having been much
entertained by her part in the second half of it.

WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

Well, what's to be done?
INTERVIEWER
I would like to ask you about this new measure that I see here
WILLIAMS
If I could only talk.
INTERVIEWER
Perhaps we might begin with Rutherford, whether you thought it was a good
environment for you.
WILLIAMS
A very bad environment for poets. We didn't take anything seriouslyin Ruth
in Rutherford. We didn't take poetry very seriously. As far as recording my
voice in RutherfordI read before the ladies, mostly.
INTERVIEWER
You mean the Women's Club? How did they like it?
WILLIAMS
Very much: they applauded. I was quite a hero. [Picking up a volume] I
remember By the Road to the Contagious Hospital was one of the ones I
read. The hospital was up in Clifton. I was always intent on saying what I had
to say in the accents that were native to me. But I didn't know what I was
doing. I knew that the measure was intended to recordsomething. But I
didn't know what the measure was. I stumbled all over the place in these
earlier poems. For instance, in this one here [Queen-Ann's Lace]. I would
divide those lines differently now. It's just like the later line, only not opened
up in the same way.
INTERVIEWER
You were saying that Rutherford was a bad environment for poets.

WILLIAMS
Yes. But except for my casual conversations about the town, I didn't think
anything of it at all. I had a great amount of patience with artisans.
INTERVIEWER
Did you mean it when you said medicine was an interference which you
resented?
WILLIAMS
I didn't resent it at all. I just wanted to go straight ahead.
INTERVIEWER
And medicine was not on the way?
WILLIAMS
I don't know whether it would be. I used to give readings at the high school
and Fairleigh Dickinson. I was sympathetic with these audiences. I was talking
about the same people that I had to do with as patients, and trying to interest
them. I was not pretending: I was speaking to them as if they were interested
in the same sort of thing.
INTERVIEWER
But were they? Perhaps they felt the double nature of your role, as both poet
and doctor, was something of a barrier.
WILLIAMS
No, no. The language itself was what intrigued me. I thought that we were on
common territory there.
INTERVIEWER
Did you write the short stories on a different level than the poemsas a
kind of interlude to them?
WILLIAMS
No, as an alternative. They were written in the form of a conversation which I
was partaking in. We were in it together.
INTERVIEWER
Then the composition of them was just as casual and spontaneous as you
have suggested. You would come home in the evening and write twelve

pages or so without revising?

WILLIAMS
I think so. I was coming home. I was placing myself in continuation of a
common conversation.
INTERVIEWER
You have insisted that there cannot be a seeking for words in literature. Were
you speaking of prose as well as poetry?
WILLIAMS
I think so. Not to choose between words.
INTERVIEWER
Certainly the word does matter though.
WILLIAMS
It does matter, very definitely. Strange that I could say that.
INTERVIEWER
But when you had come home, and were continuing the experience of reality

WILLIAMS
Reality. Reality. My vocabulary was chosen out of the intensity of my concern.
When I was talking in front of a group, I wasn't interested in impressing them
with my power of speech, but only with the seriousness of my intentions
toward them. I had to make them come alive.
INTERVIEWER
You have said you felt trapped in Rutherford, that you couldn't get out, never
had any contact with anyone here. Do you still feel that Rutherford hasn't
provided enough of the contact you managed to find during the twenties, in
New York, with the Others group? Was that a genuine contribution to your
development?
WILLIAMS
That was not a literary thing exactly. But it was about writingintensely so.
We were speaking straight ahead about what concerned us, and if I could
have overheard what I was saying then, that would have given me a hint of

how to phrase myself, to say what I had to say. Not after the establishment,
but speaking straight ahead. I would gladly have traded what I have tried to
say for what came off my tongue, naturally.
INTERVIEWER
Which was not the same?
WILLIAMS
Not free enough. What came off in this writing, finallythis writing [pointing
to The Descent]that was pretty much what I wanted to say, in the way I
wanted to say it, then. I was searching in this congeries. I wanted to say
something in a certain tone of my voice which would be exactly how I wanted
to say it, to measure it in a certain way.
INTERVIEWER
Was this in line with what the others in the group were trying to do?
WILLIAMS
I don't think they knew what they were trying to do; but in effect it was. I
couldn't speak like the academy. It had to be modified by the conversation
about me. As Marianne Moore used to say, a language dogs and cats could
understand. So I think she agrees with me fundamentally. Not the speech of
English country people, which would have something artificial about it; not
that, but language modified by our environment; the American environment.
INTERVIEWER
Your own background is pretty much a mixture of English and Spanish, isn't
it? Do you think the Spanish has had any influence on your work?
WILLIAMS
There might have been a permanent impression on my mind. It was certainly
different from the French. French is too formal; the Spanish language isn't.
They were broad men, as in El Cid, very much broader than the French. My
relation to language was a curious thing. My father was English, but Spanish
was spoken in my home. I didn't speak it, but I was read to in Spanish. My
mother's relatives used to come up and stay two or three months.
INTERVIEWER
You have said you equated Spanish with the romantic. Is that a designation
you would shrink from?
WILLIAMS

No, not shrink from.

INTERVIEWER
What I was getting at is that you have kept the name Carlos.
WILLIAMS
I had no choice but to keep the Carlos.
INTERVIEWER
I understand Solomon Hoheb, your mother's father, was Dutch.
WILLIAMS
Maybe. The Spanish came from the Sephardic Jews. Though the English was
strong indeed, through my grandfather.
INTERVIEWER
You've been more conscious of the Spanish, then, than of the other.
WILLIAMS
Yes! I've insisted on breaking with my brother's memory of the Williamses as
English. All one needs to do is look at my nose. Flossie says, I love your
nose. And the hell with my nose, after all. The thing that concerns me is the
theory of what I was determined to do with measure, what you encounter on
the page. It must be transcribed to the page from the lips of the poet, as it
was with such a master as Sappho. The Descent was very important to me
in that way.
INTERVIEWER
You mean that is where it finally happened?
WILLIAMS
Yes, there it happened; and before that it didn't. I remember writing this
(trying to read):
The descent beckons
as the ascent beckoned.
Memory is a kind . . .
INTERVIEWER

. . . of accomplishment.
WILLIAMS
A sort of renewal
even
an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new places.
You see how I run that line? I was very much excited when I wrote this. I had
to do something. I was sitting there with the typewriter in front of me. I was
attempting to imitate myself (I think I can't even see it at all) but it didn't
come alive to me.
INTERVIEWER
It seems to me you were reading it just now.
WILLIAMS
More or less. But something went wrong with me. I can't make it out any
more. I can't type.
INTERVIEWER
Would a tape recorder or a dictaphone be uncongenial?
WILLIAMS
No, anything that would serve me I'd gladly adopt.
INTERVIEWER
The appearance of this poem on the page suggests you were conscious of it
as a thingsomething for the eye.
WILLIAMS
Yes, very good. I was conscious of making it even. I wanted it to read
regularly.
INTERVIEWER
Not just to please the eye?
WILLIAMS
The total effect is very important.
INTERVIEWER

But the care in placing the wordsdid you ever feel you would be as happy
painting?
WILLIAMS
I'd like to have been a painter, and it would have given me at least as great a
satisfaction as being a poet.
INTERVIEWER
But you say you are a word man.
WILLIAMS
Yes, that took place early in my development. I was early inducted into my
father's habit of readingthat made me a poet, not a painter. My mother was
a painter. Her brother Carlos won the Grand Prixthe Gros Lot it was called
then he financed her to go to Paris, to study painting. Then the money ran
out.
INTERVIEWER
And she met your father through Carlos, whom he knew in
WILLIAMS
Puerto Plata. My father was a businessman, interested in South America. But
he always loved books. He used to read poetry to me. Shakespeare. He had a
group who used to come to our house, a Shakespeare club. They did dramatic
readings. So I was always interested in Shakespeare, and Grandmother was
interested in the stagemy father's mother. Emily Dickinson, her name was.
Isn't that amazing?
INTERVIEWER
Quite a coincidence: I notice a picture of her namesake over the desk.
WILLIAMS
Emily was my patron saint. She was also an American, seeking to divide the
line in some respectable way. We were all of us Americans.
INTERVIEWER
Then you did read a good bit of her at some stage, with your father?
WILLIAMS
My father didn't know anything about Emily Dickinson. He was sold on

Shakespeare. [Doorbell rings. WCW makes his way downstairs to answer it.]
INTERVIEWER [AS HE RETURNS]
You say you were hoping it might be the new volume?
WILLIAMS
Yes. I am keenly disappointed. But that's always the way it is with memy
life's blood dripping away. Laughlin has been a wonderful friend, but it's
always so goddamn slow! I have still the illusion that I will be able to talk
when I make these connections. It's possible, because I am an emotional
creature, and if I could only talk, to you for instance. Here is a person wellintentioned toward me, meaning yourself, and I can't talk to him. It makes me
furious.
INTERVIEWER
It's good of you to put up with this business at all. We were talking about
painting and the theater and poetry. Was that a natural progression for you?
WILLIAMS
More or less; stemming from frustration. I was wonderingI was seeking to
be articulate.
INTERVIEWER
At one point you wanted to be an actor.
WILLIAMS
I had no skill as an actor. But through Dad's reading, the plays of Shakespeare
made an impression on me. He didn't want them to necessarily, just to read
themas words, that came off as speech.
INTERVIEWER
How did this interest in words make you interested in poetry as opposed, say,
to writing novels?
WILLIAMS
That didn't have any connection.
INTERVIEWER
The words weren't sufficiently important in prose?
WILLIAMS

No. I never thought I was a very good prose writer anyway. But when I speak
of Emily Dickinsonshe was an independent spirit. She did her best to get
away from too strict an interpretation. And she didn't want to be confined to
rhyme or reason. (Even in Shakespeare, the speech of the players: it was
annoying to him to have to rhyme, for Gods sake.) And she followed the
American idiom. She didn't know it, but she followed it nonetheless. I was a
better poet.
INTERVIEWER
You are speaking about language now, not form.
WILLIAMS
Yes; her native speech. She was a wild girl. She chafed against restraint. But
she speaks the spoken language, the idiom, which would be deformed by
Oxford English.
INTERVIEWER
This new measure of yours, in the later poems, is meant then to
accommodate the American speech rhythms.
WILLIAMS
Yes. It's a strange phenomenon, my writing. I think what I have been
searching for
INTERVIEWER
You were suggesting that Emily Dickinson had something to do with it; and
her objection to rhyme. But that you were a better poet.
WILLIAMS
Oh, yes [laughing]. She was a real good guy. I thought I was a better poet
because the American idiom was so close to me, and she didn't get what the
poets were doing at that timewriting according to a new method, not the
English method, which wouldn't have made much sense to an American.
Whitman was on the right track, but when he switched to the English
intonation, and followed the English method of recording the feet, he didn't
realize it was a different method, which was not satisfactory to an American.
Everything started with Shakespeare.
INTERVIEWER
Because it was meant to be spoken?
WILLIAMS

Yes. But when the Shakespearean line was recorded, it was meant to be a
formal thing, divided in the English method according to what was written on
the page. The Americans shouldn't tolerate that. An Englishmanan English
rhetorician, an actorwill speak like Shakespeare, but it's only rhetorical. He
can't be true to his own speech. He has to change it in order to conform.
INTERVIEWER
You think it is easier for the English to conform, in poetry, to their kind of
speech pattern than it is for an American? You don't think for example that
Frost is as true to the American idiom as you are trying to be?
WILLIAMS
No, I don't think so. Eliot, on the other hand, was trying to find a way to
record the speech and he didn't find it. He wanted to be regular, to be true to
the American idiom, but he didn't find a way to do it. One has to bow down
finally, either to the English or to the American.
INTERVIEWER
Eliot went to England; you stayed here.
WILLIAMS
To my sorrow.
INTERVIEWER
To your sorrow? What do you mean by that?
WILLIAMS [YIELDING, PERHAPS]
It is always better to stick to something.
INTERVIEWER
It's rare to find someone who has. Eliot says he would not be the same if he
had stayed. You have said there was a great virtue in the kind of isolation you
experienced here.
WILLIAMS
A key question.
INTERVIEWER
And you have been called our most valuable homespun sensitivity.
WILLIAMS

Homespun sensitivity. Very good.

INTERVIEWER
But you still feel it was a bad environment.
WILLIAMS
It was native, but I doubt that it was very satisfactory to me personally.
Though it did provide the accent, which satisfied me.
INTERVIEWER
Do you think you could have picked a better one? Do you think you would
have been happier in Boston, or Hartford, or New York, or Paris?
WILLIAMS
I might have picked a better one, if I had wanted towhich I did. But if I lived
thereif its language was familiar to me, if that was the kind of conversation
which I heard, which I grew up withI could tolerate the vulgarity because it
forced me to speak in a particular manner. Not the English intonation.
INTERVIEWER
Do you still feel that the English influence on Eliot set us back twenty years?
WILLIAMS
Very definitely. He was a conformist. He wanted to go back to the iambic
pentameter; and he did go back to it, very well; but he didn't acknowledge it.
INTERVIEWER
You say that you could never be a calm speaker, so that this unit you use,
which isn't either a foot or a line necessarily, and which works by speech
impulses, this is meant to reflect also your own nervous habit of speechin
which things come more or less in a rush.
WILLIAMS
Common sense would force me to work out some such method.
INTERVIEWER
You do pause, though, in the midst of these lines.
WILLIAMS
Very definitely.

INTERVIEWER
Then what is the integrity of the line?
WILLIAMS
If I was consistent in myself it would be very much more effective than it is
now. I would have followed much closer to the indicated divisions of the line
than I did. It's too haphazard.
INTERVIEWER
The poetry? You admit that in prose, but
WILLIAMS
In poetry also. I think I was too haphazard.
INTERVIEWER
In the later poemslike The Orchestra hereyou think there is still some
work to do?
WILLIAMS
It's not successful. It would be classical if it had the proper division of lines.
Reluctant mood, stretches and yawns. What the devil is that? It isn't
firmly enough stated. It's all very complicatedbut I can't go on.
INTERVIEWER
You mean you can't find a theory to explain what you do naturally.
WILLIAMS
Yes. It's all in the ear. I wanted to be regular. To continue that
INTERVIEWER [PICKING UP A COPY OF PATERSON V, FROM WHICH SOME
CLIPPINGS FALL TO THE FLOOR]
These opening linesthey make an image on the page.
WILLIAMS
Yes, I was imitating the flight of the bird.
INTERVIEWER
Then it's directed
WILLIAMS

To the eyes. Read it.

INTERVIEWER
In old age the mind casts off . . .
WILLIAMS
In old age
the mind
casts off
rebelliously
an eagle
from its crag
INTERVIEWER
Did you ever think of using any other city as subject for a poem?
WILLIAMS
I didn't dare any mention of it in Paterson, but I thought strongly of
Manhattan when I was looking about for a city to celebrate. I thought it was
not particularized enough for me, not American in the sense I wanted. It was
near enough, God knows, and I was familiar enough with it for all my
purposesbut so was Leipzig, where I lived for a year when I was young, or
Paris. Or even Vienna or even Frascati. But Manhattan escaped me.
INTERVIEWER
Someone remarks in one of these clippings that there is no reason the poem
should ever end. Part Four completes the cycle, Five renews it. Then what?
WILLIAMS [LAUGHING]
Go on repeating it. At the endthe last part, the dance
INTERVIEWER
We can know nothing and can know nothing but the dance . . .
WILLIAMS
The dance, to dance to a measure
contrapuntally,

satyrically, the tragic foot.

That has to be interpreted; but how are you going to interpret it?
INTERVIEWER
I don't presume to interpret it; but perhaps the satyrs represent the element
of freedom, of energy within the form.
WILLIAMS
Yes. The satyrs are understood as action, a dance. I always think of the
Indians there.
INTERVIEWER
Is anything implied, in contrapuntally, about the nature of the foot?
WILLIAMS
It means musicallyit's a musical image. The Indians had a beat in their
own music, which they beat with their feet. It isn't an image exactly, a poetic
image. Or perhaps it is. The beat goes according to the image. It should all be
so simple; but with my damaged brain
INTERVIEWER
We probably shouldn't be trying to reduce a poetic statement to prose, when
we have The Desert Music here: Only the poem . . .
WILLIAMS
The counted poem, to an exact measure.
INTERVIEWER
You think it should be more exact then, than you have yet made it.
WILLIAMS
Yes, it should be more exact, in Milton's sense. Milton counted the syllables.
INTERVIEWER
And I could not help thinking of the wonders of the brain that hears that
music.
WILLIAMS
Yes.

INTERVIEWER
And of our skill sometimes to record it. Do you still feel that such modesty is
in order?
WILLIAMS
Modesty is in order, God knowsfacing the universe of sound.
INTERVIEWER
At least you are not talking about painting now.
WILLIAMS
No. I'm more or less committed to poetry.
[Talking with Mrs. Williamsthe Flossie of White Muleis like going on with a
conversation with Dr. Williams: the same honesty, the same warmth, mixed
perhaps with briskness and reserve. The living room of their house reflects
the interests they have had in commonthe paintings, the flowers, the
poetry. For fifty years the daily mail brought letters, books, journals, to
accumulate in corners and cupboards and on tables around the edges of the
room: books from authors and publishers, books with dedications to WCW, or
titles borrowed from his poems; and the whole lot of those almost anonymous
little magazines that he encouraged with contributions: poems, articles, the
inevitable visit with WCW. On the first day of these particular interviews, a
new hi-fi set still in its crate stood in the middle of the room, a gift from the
second son, Paul. Now, while waiting for Dr. Williams to come in, Mrs. Williams
put on a record, and we listened to the poet's voice for a while, recorded in
this same room with occasional sounds of local traffic coming through. It was
an aging voice, unmodulated and didactic, but curiously effective in reading
the late poems. Mrs. Williams talked about the town of Rutherford, and the
poet's brother Edgar, an architect with plans for improving life along the
Passaic. She talked of the house when they first moved into it, and of her
early impressions of Bill Williams as a young man, at a stage of their life when
he was generally off in New York at the clinics, or at various literary
gatherings.]
INTERVIEWER
Did you have to be converted to poetry, in those early days?
MRS. WILLIAMS
No, I was sympathetic. Of course, Bill never paid much attention to me. He
used to come to see my sister, who was quite a bit older. She played the
piano, and Bill played the violinnot very well. And Edgar sang. Bill didn't

read his poetry to me then. He read some to my sister, but she didn't think
much of it. Bill's early verse was pretty bad.
INTERVIEWER
I understand Dr. Williams wrote a sonnet a day for a year, when he was at
Pennsylvania. Edgar says he called it brainwash, or something worse.
MRS. WILLIAMS
Meeting Ezra Pound seemed to make a difference. It was not really a literary
relationship at first. They were too wholly different, but I think that was the
turning point. From that time Bill began seriously to want to write poetry. But
he realized he couldn't make a living at it.
INTERVIEWER
How did he happen to become a doctor?
MRS. WILLIAMS
His father wanted him to be a dentist. Bill was willing to try. But he hated it.
Bill was just too nervous to stand in one spot. But he loved being a doctor,
making house calls, and talking to people.
INTERVIEWER
He didn't care to be a surgeon?
MRS. WILLIAMS
He didn't have the long fingers he thought a surgeon should have. That's why
he was never a good violinist. But he and Edgar both had ability with their
hands. Edgar was a master at drawing, and Bill used to paint. And of course
he loves to garden. Two years ago he turned over that whole garden for me
when he could scarcely use his right arm. Things would really grow for him.
INTERVIEWER
Was there much literary life in Rutherford?
MRS. WILLIAMS
Not until much later. We had no literary contacts in Rutherford at all: except
for Miss Owen, who taught the sixth grade. She knew what Bill was trying to
do.
INTERVIEWER

I had the feeling Dr. Williams felt there was no real response to his poetry,
even when he read to local groups.
MRS. WILLIAMS
They took what they could get, and ignored the restit just wasn't for them. I
think to this day very few people in Rutherford know anything about Bill's
writing.
INTERVIEWER
Is that a comment on the town or the writing?
MRS. WILLIAMS
I think both. It's a lower-middle-class type of mind, and Bill has never
attracted a general audience. My mother used to try to get me to influence
him.
INTERVIEWER
To write more conventionally?
MRS. WILLIAMS
Yes. Some of it I didn't like myself, but I never interfered. And I was never
blamed for not liking it. [Telephone rings] I'll get it, Bill. [Answering] Is it an
emergency? No, there are no office hours on Friday. [Returning from phone] A
patient for young Bill. He left the answering service off. That's what happens.
INTERVIEWER
I suppose you are used to that by now.
MRS. WILLIAMS [GROANING]
Yes, by now, I'm afraid I am.
INTERVIEWER
Is Dr. Williams not writing now?
MRS. WILLIAMS
No, not for over a year; he can't. He just can't find the words.
INTERVIEWER
Was he writing very much when you were first engaged?

MRS. WILLIAMS
No; once in a while he would send me a poem. But he was busy building up
his practice. After we were married he wrote more. I saw to it that he had
time, and I made it pleasant for people who came herebecause I liked them
myself. They were much more interesting than most of the local people.
Everyone you can think of used to be in and out. We were the only ones who
had a permanent address in all that time. For fifty years, this was
headquarters for them all. There was Marsden Hartleythat was his only
pastel, over the divan there. He was broke and wanted to go to Germany, so
he had an auction at Stieglitz's gallery. An American Place. Bill bought
another one at the same time, an unfinished oil up in the study. Maxwell
Bodenheim came and stayed a couple of weeks once. He almost drove us
crazy. (He was supposed to have a broken arm but Bill was never convinced
of it.) He was quite dirty and disagreeable. He couldn't eat carrots, though we
had to have them, for the children's sake. And he stuttered terribly. One day
we received a telegram from him saying: send $200 at once am going to
marry a very beautiful girl. maxwell. He was later found murdered in his
apartment in New York, with his wife, if she was his wife; probably not the one
in the telegram. Then there was Wallace Gould, whom you may not know, a
friend of Hartley's from Maine. His mother was an American Indian. And
Marianne Moore used to come out with her mother. Bill's writing developed
tremendously in that period. There was a group up at Grantwood, near Fort
Lee. Malcolm Cowley was in it; and Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Alfred
Kreymborg. Robert Brown had the one solid house; the others all lived around
in their little shacks. Later on they used to meet in New York, at Lola Ridge's
place. She had a big, barnlike studio. I suppose today you would call her a
communist, though I never heard any talk of that kind. She was older than
most of the young writers. Then there was John Reed, who wrote Ten Days
That Shook the World; and Louise Bryantthey were all in that group. And
there we were. There were arguments; they were all very serious about their
writing. They used to get up and readthey would always read. It used to be
deadly sometimes. But then I wasn't too interested in the group, and after all
I had two small children. And then in the thirties, there were the Friends of
William Carlos WilliamsFord Madox Ford's group. Toward the end we had a
big party for them out here. But that was rather ridiculous. Bill says it was
poor old Ford's last gasp foryou know, a group around him. He was dying on
his feet. And he did die a couple of years later.
INTERVIEWER
How did you get along with Ezra Pound?
MRS. WILLIAMS

Pound was never around. Pound came over in . . . I think, 1938 to get an
honorary degree at Hamilton. And he spent two days with us when he was
released from Saint Elizabeth's in 1958, before he sailed for Italy. I wouldn't
know what to say of this last impression. He was self-centered, as always. You
couldn't talk to him; it was impossible. The only one he ever talked to nicely
was Win Scott. It just happened that Win came out to see us, and they got
along beautifully. Ezra always tried to tell Bill off, but they got along as friends
over the years. Bill wasn't afraid of him; their letters used to be rather
acrimonious, back and forth.
INTERVIEWER [TO WCW LOOKING IN]
Apparently those letters don't represent your final attitude?
WILLIAMS
No; the only thing that I remember was the attitude of Flossie's father
MRS. WILLIAMS
But that has nothing to do with Ezra's last visit here, dear.
WILLIAMS
Just a passing comment. [withdraws]
MRS. WILLIAMS
Bill and Ezra wrote quite a number of letters to each other when the war
started; they were on such opposite sides. Ezra was definitely pro-Fascist,
much as he may deny it, and Bill was just the opposite. Not pro-Semitic but
not anti-Semitic either, by any means.
INTERVIEWER
After the war, wasn't there some local concern about Dr. Williams's so-called
communism?
MRS. WILLIAMS
That was in 1952, when Bill was going down to take the chair of poetry.
Senator McCarthy was in the news then, and they were frightened to death in
Washington. There was a woman who was lobbying for a reform in poetry,
who had no use for free verse. She had a little periodical, I've forgotten the
name of it, and she wrote a letter saying what an outrage it was that a man
like that
INTERVIEWER

Of course, this was all in the aftermath of the Bollingen award to Pound.
MRS. WILLIAMS
Bill had nothing to do with that. But if he had been a member of the Fellows
then, he would certainly have voted for him.
INTERVIEWER
Was Dr. Williams ever asked to testify against Pound?
MRS. WILLIAMS
They questioned him two or three times. They wanted him to listen to some
records and swear it was Pound. Bill couldn't do that, but he said he would tell
them frankly what he knew. And that was all. Every time we went down to
Washington, Bill went to see him.
INTERVIEWER
Going back to the First World War: perhaps this isn't something you want to
go into, but there were some local reactions then, weren't there?
MRS. WILLIAMS
Against Germans. Yes; that would involve Bill because he was married to me.
Bill's mother made my life one hell because I was partly German. Though she
wasn't living with us then.
INTERVIEWER
So with one thing and anotherGreenwich Village, communism, and the
Germans
MRS. WILLIAMS
Bill was always in a controversy. But I think he stood his ground very well
through it all.
WILLIAMS [COMING IN, AND WITH HIS HANDS ON MRS. WILLIAMS'
SHOULDERS]
Maybe you've had enough.
MRS. WILLIAMS
Oh, Bill, it's all right. Don't worry about me. Go out and take a walk.
INTERVIEWER [TO WCW]

Do you have any recollection of writing a play for the P.T.A. years ago? It was
on some local issue, like putting in a school nurse, on which you took a liberal
view.
WILLIAMS
I can't think. I was certainly interested in plays. But the only person I ever
worked with was Kitty Hoagland.
MRS. WILLIAMS
That was Many Loves, much later. Kitty didn't come until the thirties. But Bill
wrote four or five small plays during those early years. One about the Dutch
around this area; and a very nice little play called The Apple Tree that was
going to be done at the Provincetown, but Alfred Kreymborg lost it. And a
Puritan play, Betty Putnam, that was acted over at the Tennis Club. Do you
remember the old tennis courts over on Montross Avenue? There was a very
active young group connected with it.
INTERVIEWER
But the town itself didn't quite get all this, I suppose. [To WCW] Your brother
Edgar says it's a narrow town, and what you have done is in spite of it.
WILLIAMS
Yes. There were some aristocrats back there who would have nothing to do
with budding genius.
INTERVIEWER
Not to mention political matters. Edgar says that in the political club which
your father started, you were always the liberal.
WILLIAMS
Yes, to my sorrow.
INTERVIEWER
To your sorrow?
MRS. WILLIAMS
He doesn't mean it! I don't see why
WILLIAMS
Do I mean it? For Gods sake, my friends have all been pretty disillusioned

friends.
INTERVIEWER
Marianne Moore, who knows you pretty well, says you were always a bit
reckless.
WILLIAMS
I guess she's right. I was a Unitarian. And Unitarians are liberals.
MRS. WILLIAMS
I think Bill has always been willing to be reckless. There was the social credit
business for instance, that Bill got involved in in the thirties. They wanted to
give a kind of dividend to the people to increase purchasing power. There
were large meetings in New York and down at the University of Virginia. But
that was about the end of it. In fact many of those involved withdrew from it
when they saw how things were going, with the war coming on and all. Some
of them were so nervous about that whole episode they wouldn't even speak
to Bill. That's the difference. I don't say Bill was nave; perhaps it was
honesty. Bill isn't a radical or a communist or anything else. He's an honest
man. And if he gets into it with both feet, it's just too bad. That's the way it's
been.
INTERVIEWER [TO WCW]
Right?
WILLIAMS
[Agrees, laughing.]
INTERVIEWER
If we could talk a few more minutes about personal mattershow did you
enjoy Saint Thomas? I understand you have just come back from there.
WILLIAMS
I could stay there forever, with reservations, of course. Saint Thomas is the
place where my father grew up. I remember a photograph of the blizzard area
oh, for Gods sake, I mean the hurricane, in eighty-eight.
MRS. WILLIAMS
Bill, dear, I'm sorry, but it must have been in the seventies. It was when your
father was a boy.

WILLIAMS [WITH A SIGH]

Yes, yes, yes. [Laughs] I remember a story of the hurricane. Thoroughly
documented. How first the water went out of the harbor and left it dry, the
ships lying on their beams' ends, and then another shudder and an
earthquake worse than they ever had in the area. And I have a distinct
memory of some photographs of my father, taken at perhaps twenty-one
years of age. I was very much interested in making contact with his memory.
MRS. WILLIAMS
It was a good trip, but Bill gets restless. And it's too difficult at our age.
WILLIAMS
I think we'll not go again.
INTERVIEWER
To get back for a minute to the troubles of 1952do you think you were
working too hard at that time?
WILLIAMS
I was interested in the process of compositionin the theory of it. And I was
working pretty hard at it. But I couldn't make much of it.
MRS. WILLIAMS
Bill had a contract with Random House for three books. There was no hurry;
but that's the only way Bill can work. And he doesn't want to look things over,
which is his worst fault. The Build-Up was written then. I'm afraid Bill garbled
that one. It was just impatience. And he didn't want me to read the things
either. I wish I had, there were so many errors in the Autobiography. That was
inexcusable. Then, one night in the winter of forty-eight, Bill felt a pain in his
chest, shoveling out the car. He kept going until February. I used to drive
around with him on house calls. But it was too much.

undefined
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, CA. 1920. COURTESY OF THE BEINECKE RARE
BOOK & MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY, YALE UNIVERSITY.
WILLIAMS
I had a heart attack. Perhaps it was a good thing. I thought I was God
almighty, I guess; in general. But I got over that one.

MRS. WILLIAMS
There wasn't any kind of cerebral trouble until 1950 or so. Bill had given up
medicine and we were going down to take the chair of poetry in Washington.
But in 1952, when we were up visiting the Abbotts, in New York, Bill had a
serious stroke.
WILLIAMS
I tried to play it down. I was conscious, and rational; and I could joke about it.
But I was in a strange house, and I needed to get home. I couldn't write
MRS. WILLIAMS
Then suddenly you could hardly understand him.
WILLIAMS
That was the end. I was through with life.
MRS. WILLIAMS
No, it wasn't the end. You had a lot of life left. You had a whole play running
through your mind while you were lying there, The Cure. You thought it out
and dictated the notes to me. You wrote it when we got home.
INTERVIEWER
That was something of a change in approach.
WILLIAMS
Yes, the novels I just did as I went along, at first; though I tried to think them
out as well as I could.
MRS. WILLIAMS
Of course the White Mule was about a baby; Bill's favorite subject. But most
of the later poems were written after the stroke. Bill used to say things like
spelling didn't matter, and he would never correct at all. I think he did much
better work after the stroke slowed him down.
WILLIAMS [PERHAPS GRUDGINGLY]
The evidence is there.
INTERVIEWER
It was when you were at the Abbotts' that someone read Theocritus to you.

WILLIAMS
Yes, Mrs. Gratwick; I asked her to. Theocritus was always strong in my mind.
But I wasn't capable of hearing it in the Greek. I'm in an unfortunate position,
because I don't have the original language. For example, I started to take
Latin at Horace Mann, but the teacher was withdrawn, to my infinite regret.
That was the end of thatall my life, that was the end. And I always regretted
too that I didn't know Greek. I don't know, as far as the Theocritus was
concerned, whether it came first, or the stroke.
MRS. WILLIAMS
You had talked of doing an adaptation.
INTERVIEWER
Why Theocritus?
WILLIAMS
The pastoral nature of it gave me a chance to spread myself. It was Greek,
and it appealed to me; and it was a wonderful chance to record my feeling of
respect for the Greek classics.
INTERVIEWER
There was a change in the verse in the fifties. Was this the first time you tried
the new measure?
WILLIAMS
The Descent was the first. I regard that as an experiment in the variable
foot.
INTERVIEWER
You said earlier that you were almost unconscious when you wrote it.
WILLIAMS
Yes, I was. I was very much excited. I wasn't conscious of doing anything
unusual but I realized that something had occurred to me, which was a very
satisfying conclusion to my poetic process. Something happened to my line
that completed it, completed the rhythm, or at least it was satisfying to me. It
was still an irregular composition; but not too much so; but I couldn't
complete it. I had written that poem to retain the things which would have
been the completion of the poem. But as for picking the thing up and going
on with it, I had to acknowledge I was licked. I didn't dare fool with the poem
so that it would have been more rigid; I wouldn't have wanted that.

INTERVIEWER
You felt there was nothing more you could do with it?
WILLIAMS
Nothing more. I felt all that I could do with it had been done, but it was not
complete. I returned to it; but the irregularity of that poem could not be
repeated by me. It was too . . . I've forgotten.
INTERVIEWER
You feel it wasn't a perfect poem?
WILLIAMS
It was too regular. There were variations of mood which would have led me to
make a different poem out of it.
INTERVIEWER
And you don't think anything after The Descent goes beyond it?
WILLIAMS
No. I always wanted to do something more with it, but I didn't know how.
MRS. WILLIAMS
There was one written quite a long time before: that was the start of it. Then
there was the Daphne and VirginiaVirginia, of course, was Paul's wife, and
Daphne is Bill's. That poem always makes me sad. The Orchestra was
written in 1954 or 1955, I think. Bill wrote quite a lot after he had the stroke.
It's really amazing what he has done; and he gave readings, too, in Saint
Louis, Chicago, Savannah
WILLIAMS
I couldn't break through.
MRS. WILLIAMS
Harvard, Brandeis, Brown. We took two trips to the coast after thatto
U.C.L.A., the University of California, Washington
WILLIAMS
I've been going down hill rapidly.

INTERVIEWER
And the Pictures from Brueghel?
WILLIAMS
Yes, those are late; very late. But they are too regular.
INTERVIEWER
Did you ever grow any fonder of the academic world after your trips around
the campuses?
MRS. WILLIAMS
They liked him, at least. And the girls' colleges all loved him.
WILLIAMS
The high point was the appearance at Wellesley. It was a very successful
impromptu appearance; a reading. I always remember the satisfaction I got
pleasing the ladiesthe kids.
INTERVIEWER
Beginning with the Women's Club in Rutherford.
WILLIAMS
Always. I was always for the ladies.
MRS. WILLIAMS
Bill has always been fond of women, and terribly disappointed not to have
had a sister. And he never had a daughter. But women liked him; they sensed
that he was sympathetic, and they could talk to him.
WILLIAMS
Very sympathetic.
INTERVIEWER
Just one or two more questions. Do you think your medical trainingyour
discipline in sciencehas had any effect on your poetry?
WILLIAMS
The scientist is very important to the poet, because his language is important
to him.

INTERVIEWER
To the scientist?
WILLIAMS
Well, and the poet. I don't pretend to go too far. But I have been taught to be
accurate in my speech.
INTERVIEWER
But not scholastic. Someone has said you would not make so much of the
great American language if you had been judicious about things.
WILLIAMS
It's a point well taken. The writing of English is a great pastime. The only
catch to that is when a man adds the specification English. That is purely
accidental and means nothing. Any language could be inserted in its place.
But the restrictions that are accepted in the classics of a language enclose it
in a corset of mail, which becomes its chief distinction.
MRS. WILLIAMS
Bill has always experimented. He was never satisfied to keep doing the same
thing. And he has been severely criticized. But I think some of the younger
poets are benefiting from it. Like Charles Tomlinson, and Robert Creeley
they've learned a lot from Bill. David Ignatowany number of them. Allen
Ginsberg was a good friend for many years.
WILLIAMS
I am a little concerned about the form. The art of the poem nowadays is
something unstable; but at least the construction of the poem should make
sense; you should know where you stand. Many questions haven't been
answered as yet. Our poets may be wrong; but what can any of us do with his
talent but try to develop his vision, so that through frequent failures we may
learn better what we have missed in the past.
INTERVIEWER
What do you think you yourself have left of special value to the new poets?
WILLIAMS
The variable footthe division of the line according to a new method that
would be satisfactory to an American. It's all right if you are not intent on
being national. But an American is forced to try to give the intonation. Either
it is important or it is not important. It must have occurred to an American

that the question of the line was important. The American idiom has much to
offer us that the English language has never heard of. As for my own elliptic
way of approach, it may be baffling, but it is not unfriendly, and not, I think,
entirely empty.
MRS. WILLIAMS
All the young people come out to see Bill. Charles Olson has been here a lot.
Denise Levertov was out last week. Then there is Robert Wallace, Muriel
Rukeyser, Charles Bell, Tram Combs. Charles Tomlinson stopped in on his way
back to England.
WILLIAMS
Yes. He is writing in my vein. He's even conscious of copying me. I don't think
he is too popular with his contemporaries. But it does look suspiciously like
the beginning of something in England. I defer to you. Butdo you have an
example of his poems there?
INTERVIEWER
He seems to be carrying on the new measure. Do you have any comment?
WILLIAMS
The lines are not as I would have done, not loose enough. Not enough
freedom. He didn't ignore the rules enough to make it really satisfactory.
INTERVIEWER
But you think he shows your influence in England, finally. That must be a
satisfaction.
WILLIAMS
It is.
MRS. WILLIAMS
I think Bill will shortly be published in England.
INTERVIEWER
You would think they might have appreciated the American idiom.
WILLIAMS
Not my American idiom.
MRS. WILLIAMS [LOOKING ABOUT AMONG THE BOOKS]

These are some translations of Bill's poems in Italianthe early poems;

Paterson; The Desert Music.
WILLIAMS
Yes, I was very pleased by those.
MRS. WILLIAMS
Here are some selected poems in German: Gedichte, 1962.
WILLIAMS
I'm alive
MRS. WILLIAMS
There is a selection coming out now in Czechoslovakia. And here is an
anthology of American lyrics in Norwegian
WILLIAMS
I'm still alive!